Julia Mourao Permoser, a Visiting Scholar at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, will give a Guest Lecture on Redefining Membership: European Union Policy on the Rights of Third-Country Nationals to BSIS on Fri 22 Mar at 11h.
Since the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999 the European Union has been actively seeking to develop a common migration policy. Among the stated goals of this common migration policy should be to grant legally resident third-country nationals a common set of rights as close as possible to those of EU citizens.
In the lecture, Dr Permoser will present the findings from her PhD research on the policies adopted at the supranational level within between 1999 and 2009 with the aim of fulfilling this political commitment. The analysis of the policy-making process and of the directives adopted show that a mixture of political, ideational, and institutional factors contributed to the creation of an ambiguous policy framework characterized by the predominance of two phenomena that she calls “restrictive rights” and “politics of categorization”. “Restrictive rights” refers to how the interaction between liberal and restrictive dynamics during the policy-making process led to a situation where membership rights are granted to third-country nationals in principle, but subject to very restrictive conditions. “The politics of categorization” refers to how politics and the law ‘construct’ a multiplicity of categories of immigrants, and subject each category to a different rights-regime. Both of these phenomena have the ambiguous effect of enabling the expansion of membership rights to non-citizens while at the same time creating new lines of division and mechanisms of exclusion.
Dr Permoser is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre d’Etude de la Vie Politique (CEVIPOL) at Université Libre de Bruxelles and a member of the INEX-Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion Research Group at the University of Vienna. http://inex.univie.ac.at/members/julia-mourao-permoser/
The lecture will take place on Fri 22 March 11h-13h at the Brussels School of International Studies. If you wish to attend you must register by emailing Maria Schiller at M.Schiller@kent.ac.uk