Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Global cities
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

What Do Idi Amin, Erich Honecker And Theresa May Have In Common?

James Wickham 7th February 2017

James Wickham

James Wickham

Brexit is about taking away citizenship rights from millions of people: British people, Irish people, Polish people, indeed from anyone currently a citizen of an EU member state.

Brexit is not just about economics and trade, it is fundamentally about politics, indeed about the most fundamental political issue of all. Political boundaries and rules define who can live where and thus who can fully participate in society. By definition, the citizens of a nation-state have the right to live within their national territory. Every now and then, however, nation states decide that certain groups are not ‘really’ national and so are expelled. To take away somebody’s citizenship is thus to remove them from the polity – and from politics.

The free movement of labour is often described as the ‘fourth freedom’ of the Single Market, along with (and subsequent to) the free movement of goods, services and finance. But labour is people. The right to work on the same terms as a national necessarily means access to civil rights and employment rights. Our study of Polish migration to Dublin in the boom documented how newly arrived Poles were fully aware that they had the right to be in Ireland. Crucially this means that EU citizens are not bonded to a specific employer: Polish workers in Ireland, like British workers in Germany, are free to leave their jobs if they wish without being sent ‘home’. By contrast, in almost every country in the world some immigrants’ right to remain is tied to a specific employment. At the most extreme, as for Pakistani building workers in the Gulf, this essentially amounts to bonded labour. Notice, however, that the same applies to expatriate professionals in the Gulf – and can even apply to Irish engineers in Australia.

Although decisions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have extended the scope of free movement from workers to persons, European citizenship is not a complete generalisation of national citizenship. Especially for pensioners, the right to reside in another country remains somewhat conditional – to varying degrees in different countries – on being able to support oneself. Furthermore, European citizens’ political rights are usually limited to voting in local elections and in elections to the European Parliament. Nonetheless, the basic fact remains: the free movement of labour has become the right to work and live in another member state. Since these rights can be enforced by the ECJ, they are not just dependent on the (possibly) temporary goodwill of a particular member state.

All of this highlights one bizarre feature of contemporary British discussion. In Britain it seems that supporting EU citizenship is conflated with support for unrestricted (or at least weakly controlled) immigration in general. Even more so than in other European countries, discussion of ‘immigration’ often takes little account of whether or not migrants are EU citizens. Revealingly there is no British equivalent of the Italian term extracommunitari (people from outside the [European] community). For Brexiteers and Remainers alike, it seems there is only one category of foreigners!

Theresa May has refused to guarantee the rights of EU citizens currently in the UK, on at least one occasion saying that this depends on how other member states treat their UK immigrants. After World War I new national ethnic states were created in Europe (Poland, Ireland etc.) which usually contained minorities of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity. These minorities became bargaining chips between countries – you be nice to ours and we’ll be nice to yours, give you better trade terms or whatever. Worse was to come. During the 1930s the Nazis declared that Jewish German citizens were no longer citizens: they could therefore be expelled and eventually murdered. After the Holocaust and the Nazi mass murders of whole population groups it was the turn of the Germans of the new Soviet empire: between 12 and 14 million Germans were driven West from East Prussia, Sudetenland etc. having lost their citizenship rights.

OK, that all sounds a bit extreme. Unfortunately, states continue to decide that certain population groups are no longer citizens. In 1972 Idi Amin decided that Ugandan Asians were not really Ugandans and expelled them; during the later years of the German ‘Democratic’ Republic the DDR government under Erich Honecker got tired of locking up its disobedient citizens. Instead dissidents like Wolf Biermann were ‘ausgebürgert’ – expelled from their country because their citizenship was removed.


Become a Social Europe Member


Support independent publishing and progressive ideas by becoming a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month. Your support makes all the difference!


Click here to become a member

By 2019 UK citizens entering Germany – or for that matter Ireland – will no longer enter through the EU citizens’ channel at the airport. This will not just be an inconvenience, it indicates that they have lost the right to move within the EU. Brexit means that UK citizens will no longer be European citizens, so all UK citizens, even if they’ve never left the country, have lost their rights. For those UK citizens living elsewhere in the EU, Brexit means that they no longer have the right to live where they do (actually I should say ‘we’ since as a UK citizen living in Ireland this affects me personally).

The fourth freedom changes the Single Market from a trading area into a polity in which citizens have rights. In 2017 many Europeans are going to lose those rights. Like Amin and Honecker before her, May is saying to a category of a people: “No, you may live here but you have no right to be here, we might expel you, you might be ausgebürgert…”

James Wickham

James Wickham was director of TASC (Think-tank for Action on Social Change) in Dublin. He is a fellow emeritus of Trinity College Dublin. His latest book is European Societies: Inequality, Diversity, Divergence (Routledge).

You are here: Home / Politics / What Do Idi Amin, Erich Honecker And Theresa May Have In Common?

Most Popular Posts

new world order,state,citizen A new world order: from warring states to citizensPaul Mason
Tesla,IF Metall,electric car,union US electric-car maker faces Swedish union shockGerman Bender
Israel,Hamas Israel and Hamas: the debasement of discourseRobert Misik
Israel-Palestine,refugee,refugees Israel-Palestine: a comparative perspectiveBo Rothstein
Germany,sick,economic Germany’s true economic diseasePeter Bofinger

Most Recent Posts

human security,Europe,investment,military Investing in human security in EuropeChiara Bonaiuti
citizenship education,European Union,democratic European citizenship education—antidote to hateRéka Heszterényi
healthcare,hospitals,social dialogue,pandemic Healthcare depends on the health of social dialogueJorge Cabrita and Victoria Cojocariu
multi-level,Europe,networks,sovereignty Barking up the wrong European treeJan Zielonka
renewable,fossil-fuel,energy,renewables,inflation,prices The renewable answer to Europe’s fossil-fuel inflationFelix Heilmann and Maximilian Krahé

Other Social Europe Publications

Global cities cover pdf Global cities
strategic autonomy Strategic autonomy
Bildschirmfoto 2023 05 08 um 21.36.25 scaled 1 RE No. 13: Failed Market Approaches to Long-Term Care
front cover Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Transforming capitalism in the Age of AI

Will the EU once again accept Big Tech's power as a fait accompli while belatedly trying to mitigate risks, or can it chart a different course?

Join our conference on the EU approach to the digital transition. On Wednesday, 6 December, FEPS and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Competence Centre on the Future of Work are co-organising an evening of high-level debates on the digital future of Europe. There will be keynotes by the European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights, Nicolas Schmit; Evgeny Morozov, founder of The Syllabus; and Phoebe V Moore, globally recognised expert on digitalisation and the workplace. The event will be moderated by John Thornhill, innovation editor at the Financial Times.


MORE HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI European Collective Bargaining Report 2022 / 2023

With real wages falling by 4 per cent in 2022, workers in the European Union suffered an unprecedented loss in purchasing power. The reason for this was the rapid increase in consumer prices, behind which nominal wage growth fell significantly. Meanwhile, inflation is no longer driven by energy import prices, but by domestic factors. The increased profit margins of companies are a major reason for persistent inflation. In this difficult environment, trade unions are faced with the challenge of securing real wages—and companies have the responsibility of making their contribution to returning to the path of political stability by reducing excess profits.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Response measures to the energy crisis: a missed opportunity to feed the socio-ecological contract

With winter coming and Europe ready to get through it without energy shortages, power cuts and recession, new research conducted by the ETUI in seven EU member states (AT-FR-DE-GR-IT-PL-ES) highlights that, with some 80 per cent of spending being directed to broad-based measures, short-term national government support during the recent energy crisis was poorly targeted. As a result, both social- and climate-policy goals were rather sidelined, with the biggest beneficiaries of public fossil-fuel subsidies being higher income groups and the wealthiest people.


AVAILABLE HERE

Eurofound advertisement

How will Europe’s green transition impact employment?

Climate-change objectives and decarbonisation measures are vital for the future of Europe. But how will these objectives affect employment and the labour market?

In the latest episode of the Eurofound Talks podcast series, Mary McCaughey speaks with the Eurofound senior research manager John Hurley about new research which shows a marginal increase in net employment from EU decarbonisation measures—but also potentially broad shifts in the labour market which could have a profound impact in several areas.


LISTEN HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641