Skip navigation

• Home
• Contact Us
• Recent Reviews
• Archive
• Books
• Guide for Reviewers

Samantha Currie. Migration, Work and Citizenship in the Enlarged European Union, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 238 + xxviii. ₤60.00. ISBN 9780754673514.

Reviewed by Dimitry Kochenov, University of Groningen.

 

Michael Gazzaniga’s brilliant study of neuropsychology of split-brain patients was based on the analysis of the condition of a tiny sample of subjects. Some aphasia studies produce convincing result working with two or three subjects: more is simply difficult to find. It is generally accepted, however that in order to reach sound conclusions a representative sample of subjects is usually needed. Samantha Currie’s book, claiming to be ‘of a socio-legal nature’ (at 4) uses a sample of 44 Poles working in the UK (at 211) to back ‘socio-legal research’ on the condition of half a billion European citizens, should one judge the book by what is on the cover. Constant references to the ‘empirical data generated for the research which forms the basis of this book’ (at 38), i.e. references to the 44 interviews conducted, sound like misplaced irony, when used to agree with the findings based on infinitely more substantial samples, like UK Government statistics including 715.000 registrations (at 69).

 

In the introduction of Samantha Currie’s book we are asked not to worry about methodology, which is ‘genuinely interdisciplinary’ (at 7). Instead, we are promised a theory ‘“grounded” in the data collected’ (at 6). Unfortunately, having read the book until the end the present reviewer failed to uncover the promised theoretical findings, which certainly did not add to the clarification of the methodological basis of the book either. Although important, the hidden theory is only a minor drop in the sea of drawbacks the book under review suffers from; there are more promises out there which Dr. Currie does not keep. Some of the conclusions are amusing however: ‘The trailing wife’, writes Dr. Currie building on the material of her 44 interviews, ‘therefore does seem to be a relevant label for some of the Polish migrant families that took part in the study’ (at 118); or, ‘[p]hysical separation, nevertheless, even for short periods can be a painful and stressful experience both for the migrant and the family who remain at home’ (at 145). The reviewer would have preferred a sound explanation of methodology to such ‘socio-legal’ findings.

 

(Non-)representative samples put aside (the book is not engaged with quantitative, but with ‘qualitative’ research (at 5) after all), the title of Dr. Currie’s book is entirely misleading, and constitutes the second and the most important promise she does not keep. Entitled ‘Migration, Work and Citizenship in the Enlarged European Union’ the book in fact only covers the derogations from two articles of the EC Treaty dealing with the free movement of economically active citizens of 10 new EU Member States which concern a fraction of EU citizens from the ‘new’ Member States and focuses on the situation of those new Member States’ citizens willing to work in the UK. In fact, the book does not even intend to live up to its title, which seems to have been chosen at random, since, in the words of Dr. Currie, ‘while adopting EU law as a wider frame of reference, [the research] focused on the specific context of the UK legal framework put in place to regulate EU8 migration following enlargement’ (at 4).

 

So, quite stunningly, such a general title notwithstanding, virtually nothing is said about the implications of European Citizenship as such on the development of Community  law, absolutely nothing is said about any migration flows which do not concern new Member States’ citizens going to workin the UK, nothing about the migration from/to the candidate countries, nothing about migration from the EuroMed area, nothing of the Eastern Partnership migration initiatives, nothing about the BlueCard story, nothing about migration of EU citizens between/from the old Member States, nothing about political rights of EU citizens.

 

What is much more alarming in the context of the ‘enlargement focus’ of the study, is that all the analysis of East-West migration in the European Union contained in the book is largely confined to the UK regulatory model of dealing with the 7-year derogation period, nothing more. The practical employment of Accession Treaty derogations outside the UK is merely mentioned en passant, as if it were not as important for ‘Migration, Work and Citizenship in the Enlarged European Union’.

 

Even more stunningly, analysing the way how derogations from two EC Treaty articles work in the UK based on ‘human experiences’, Dr. Currie focuses uniquely on Polish labourers, apparently assuming that any conclusions she would come up with based on a tiny set of interviews with the nationals of the biggest and the most conservative new Member State with one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU-27 would automatically apply to any other group of new EU Citizens. This assumption, which is nowhere justified, weakens the book even further. In such a setting the conclusion that the transitional periods which Dr. Currie aspires to analyse were ‘as a whole, a success’ (at 21) sounds far-fetched and does not follow from the analysis.

 

Ultimately, this ambitiously titled volume which is confined to describing the temporary derogations introduced by the recent Acts of Accession and their practical application in the UK with occasional references to the personal experiences of several Polish workers, entirely ignores not only French, German or, for that matter, any other non-English language literature on migration and citizenship from the old Member States (which could be deemed irrelevant, once Dr. Currie decided to speak only about the UK experience, instead of the EU); but also all the Eastern European literature on these issues. Not a single Slovak, Romanian, Lithuanian or Slovenian source is cited in the literature. The same applies even to Polish sources. Apparently, the book, which is entirely UK-centred, does not feel the need to rely on the academic sources (either legal, or sociological) even from the country which has provided its main case-study.

 

The sources which Dr. Currie does rely on are scattered around the book in the most confusing way, as the work uses both in-text citations and footnotes, hesitant to choose one of the two. The text itself also brings surprises: so pages 71 and 30 contain virtually identical paragraphs, showing a strange exercise of self-quotation.

 

While the Workers Registration Scheme (WRS) of dubious functionality (at 36) and unclear legality (at 191) employed by the UK is described in the book quite well, generally, given the book’s ambition reflected in the title; its missing ‘theory’; and the sample of its 44 interviewees, the work is astonishingly disappointing.