Introduction

This introduction covers some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to elaborate on and historicise both internal and external mobility, reconstructing the stages and analysing how it was and still is closely connected to the formation and refoundation of Europe after the Second World War. It retraces the way the notions of ‘migration’ and ‘mobility’ have been articulated and historicised, by highlighting the different meanings they have assumed and the different people they have addressed in Europe since 1945: workers, postcolonial returnees, postcolonial migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. The debates and policies about such different cases are analysed in order to provide a complex picture of the reasons why and the ways in which migrants have been included in or excluded from national and European communities over time.