Reifying mobility through the EU budget: between charity and reward

Legal scholarship has extensively explored who enjoys freedom of movement and on what basis, as developed in the case law of the European Court of Justice. However, the EU also advances its own view of individual mobility through its spending policies, incentivising some forms of mobility while dissuading others. This contribution traces the articulation of mobility in legal and official documents across key budget areas such as research, education, and social funding, from 1999 to the present day. It shows a process of “reification” in which the practice of mobility is progressively disconnected from the human social relations that sustain it. In this process, mobility is viewed both as a favour extended to those in need and as a factor of production awarded to the sectors that earned it.