ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the under-researched aspect of discursive conditions that specify who should be entitled to welfare benefits within the European social security coordination system. The chapter moves beyond mainstream discourse studies by identifying the assumptions and norms that underpin the discourses of belonging, which in turn generate conditions of inclusion and exclusion of mobile EU citizens into European social citizenship. Four studies based on in-depth interviews with 48 senior policy stakeholders in the eight investigated countries are analysed and compared. Two main types of discursive articulations on belonging in the context of EU enlargement and intra EU mobility are identified: (1) discourses on EU belonging, voicing assumptions on the country’s position inside EU, (2) discourses on welfare belonging, voicing assumptions on who should be entitled to welfare and should belong to the country and its welfare system. It is shown how the discourses are built by various and conflicting assumptions and norms and further how they interplay in differentiating between national citizens respectively mobile EU citizens as well as between categories of mobile EU citizens.