Mobile Welfare in a Transnational Europe

Approaching EU enlargements as transnational events, this collaborative project examines transnational European welfare. lt focuses on the portability of social security rights in the enlarged European Union; that is, the rights to health insurance and to unemployment, retirement and familyrelated benefits. The project involves a comparative analysis, which traces the migrations of regularly and irregularly employed migrants and their family members and the portability of their social security rights between four pairs of countries: Hungary-Austria, Bulgaria-Germany, Poland-United Kingdom and Estonia-Sweden. The main outcome will be a typology of transnational portability regimes derived from the comparative analysis of four research objectives for the respective pairs of countries. First, the project examines legal regulations on the portability of social security rights (WP 1: Document Analysis and Expert lnterviews). Second, it analyses a variety of mobile EU citizens` practices of portability, including limitations to portability they may involve (WP 2: Quantitative Survey). Third, the project reconstructs discourses of belonging incorporated into portability regulations to determine how they shape individuals` access to social security (WP 3: Discourse Analysis). Fourth, it provides insights into individuals` inequality experiences resulting from limitations to portability (WP 4: Qualitative ln-Depth lnterviews). Building on a transnational comparison of the four pairs of countries, the project then reconstructs variations in the portability of social security rights.

The aim of the TRANSWEL project was to disentangle the nexus between intra-EU migration/mobility and welfare in the enlarged European Union. Focusing on transnational labour movements within four pairs of countries (HungaryAustria, BulgariaGermany, EstoniaSweden and PolandUnited Kingdom), it provided a comparative analysis of the formal organization and individuals use of European social coordination, which involves mobile Europeans access to social security rights and the portability of these rights from the sending to the receiving countries (and back) in the areas of unemployment, family benefits, health insurance and pensions. The project contributes to the study of intra-EU mobility, welfare and European social citizenship through a comparative examination of regulations, discourses and mobile Europeans experiences of cross-border social security and social rights portability. It offers insights into the selectivity criteria of welfare provision in the four above-mentioned social security areas that lie at the heart of European cross-border social security governance showing that those so-called mobile Europeans are disadvantaged who are moving more than once and/or stay for shorter periods within another EU member state. Also those with transnational life styles and transnational family compositions often encounter troubles when trying to access their social rights. In addition, the project identified specific discourses of welfare belonging (gendered, ethnicized/racialized, class-related images of Us and Them) that frame institutional selectivity by constructing images of mobile EU-citizens who either do or do not deserve social membership. The project also provides a detailed examination of inequalities that mobile EU citizens from the new EU countries experience when trying to access and port social security rights across borders and reveals how these experiences are linked to the institutional selectivity criteria of European cross-border social security governance. We could show that migrants are confronted with labyrinths (Austrian part of the study: responsibility for qualitative interviews in all four country pairs mentioned above) of legal procedures and bureaucratic exigencies they need to overcome successfully in order to access social security in the four areas mentioned above. Mobile EU citizens thus experience free movement as a vicious cycle of losses of welfare opportunities that result from individual decisions not to claim rights because of the barriers experienced and from perceptions of not being treated the same way as immobile welfare claimants. The projects main outcome is that the institutional requirements of formal employment and long-term residence are the main selectivity criteria of European social security governance that generate the unequal welfare opportunities among mobile EU citizens. Additionally, many EU citizens from so-called new EU member states experienced discrimination and racism when trying to access their social rights. Welfare inequalities are framed by powerful discourses of welfare belonging with regard to largely non-desired Eastern European movers from the peripheries of the EU, only the self-sufficient of whom are regarded in a positive light.