Political and economic centre formation at the cost of the periphery? The EU discourse on emigration and the freedom to stay

Population movements are key variables in state formation processes. EU centre formation follows a similar pattern. EU internal migration secures labour demand of the EU’s economic centres while it also supports the EU’s legitimacy by EU institutions guaranteeing migrant rights in the form of EU citizenship (Recchi 2015). The other side of EU mobility, emigration, may be a negative externality of centre formation for peripheral EU member states. The question posed for the conference contribution is: How does the EU level deal with the negative externalities of its centre formation? Based on a document analysis (N=255) and interviews (N=14), the presentation traces 20 years of discourse on EU emigration (2004-2023). EU actors connect the topic to demographic decline and brain drain from critical sectors such as health, education, and science in the EU's southern and eastern periphery. The documents also discussed the broader effects of the people drain on potential GDP growth, the sustainability of pension systems, and the rising costs of underused infrastructure in emigration countries. EU emigration received most attention in the aftermath of the economic and financial crises of the 2010s. The EU builds and feeds on the promise of cross-border freedom of movement as an opportunity for EU citizens (Art. 20, 21, 45). At the same time, its member states do not benefit equally from mobility. The analysis showed that large-scale one-way movements could not be ignored at the EU level. Therefore, the EU's commitment to territorial cohesion (Art. 174) is the instrument to demand and effectively provide for more equitable living conditions in all EU member states. The analysis revealed that the Commission emphasised national reform. Other actors, MEPs, CoR, and EESC pointed to the EU and its ability to leverage funding or even change the Treaty. A latent territorial cleavage defines these positions on emigration: actors representing the centre (European Commission) view the responsibility for emigration as a domestic matter, where the EU can only intervene marginally in crucial policy areas driving emigration, such as education, social policy, and the economy. By contrast, actors that represented the periphery (CoR, EESC, MEPs) explicitly called on the EU to promote more equitable living conditions through its structural funds to tackle their grave concern for demographic decline, depopulation and brain drain. Counterintuitively, this response to EU emigration, demanding a ‘freedom to stay’ (Letta 2024) primarily came from actors of the periphery and included a call for more EU integration rather than less EU integration.