ABSTRACT
After first explaining the significance of intra-EU mobility, the chapter looks closely at Central and Eastern European nationals’ actual experience of mobility, replete with incidents of exploitation and discrimination in western EU states, and at the unequal impact of this mobility on the eastern and western parts of the EU. It then analyses the right to mobility as developed—and diminished, in the case of Central and Eastern European nationals—by various EU institutions and by western states, including through the Citizens’ Rights Directive 2004/38, its transposition, and related policies. The complex web of social benefits rules has intersected with freedom of movement laws to further privilege western states’ interests. Moreover, Central and Eastern European movers’ inequalities and racialisation in western states have been entrenched and naturalised through inadequate ethnicity-based equality protections, and their absence from the broader equality discourse. The chapter then traces inequalities built into the Enlargement process not only to the obvious example of post-accession mobility derogations, but also to how Central and Eastern European nationals not impacted by transitional derogations were disadvantaged in the aftermath of the Enlargement, and how their rights have continued to be diminished through recent EU and western policies.
