In this Issue

• Author: Agustín José Menéndez
• Date: 01 July 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12256
• Published date: 01 July 2017

EDITORIAL

IN THIS ISSUE

Freedom of movement, very particularly freedom to travel and cross (what once were) national borders, tends to be

regarded as a key pillar of the legitimacy of the European Union. Paraphrasing the old saying, free movement is said

to broaden the mind of European citizens. Indeed, at a time when European integration is severely contested, and

the promise of better social standards is part of the past, a good number of Europeans find that free movement is

the one tangible benefit they derive from the Union. Still, the financial and fiscal crises, on the one hand, and the

refugee crises, on the other hand, have revealed the limits of free movement, European style. From the false uni-

versalism of paeans to a borderless Europe (as if the external borders of the Schengen area were not borders) to

the very different meanings that free movement has depending on income, wealth, social class and level of studies,

it is hard to make it fit into one single concept, representing very different realities.

Medland focuses our attention on the growing asymmetry between the status of ‘highly valuable’migrants and

low‐skilled non‐nationals. While the article is rich in theoretical insights, it is the result of an empirical study of the

socio‐economic context in which so‐called seasonal workers find themselves in El Ejido, a relatively small region in

the south of Spain, where a disproportionate number of the fresh vegetables sold in European supermarkets are

produced. Medland shows that not only does European law offer seasonal workers a much weaker level of

protection than it does to other migrants (the comparison being especially relevant with ‘blue card’migrants), but

also that the Directive is grounded on several false premises, including the seasonal character of agricultural

production (which no longer corresponds to actual facts). The anthropological study of El Ejido thus throws very

interesting light on the fabric of European law, and raises questions regarding the distributive and redistributive

impact of European legislation, ill‐fitted to steer society.

Kramer, in his article, asks what conception or ‘image’of the person has underpinned European Union law since

its inception. On the basis of a systematic reconstruction of the legislation and the case law, the author notes that a

marked shift can be observed. The Community law of the ‘first European transformation’focused on the worker as the

relatively passive beneficiary of rights and institutional structures that enabled him to engage in mobility. From the

single market big bang and the creation of the existing monetary infrastructure, Kramer argues that the worker has

been replaced by the image of the individual as active bearer of economic capabilities, depositary (and nurturer) of

human capital—in brief, by the self‐entrepreneur, the ‘active’economic citizen. In such a light, the Dano,Alimovic

and García Nieto rulings are not exceptions to the rule, but rather the core decisions in which the new persona of

European law comes to the fore.

It is hard to contest that courts are a central player in the process of European integration. If the pioneering

‘continentals’that engaged with Community law were still inclined to expect the European legislator to pull all the

punches (originally, the duo made up of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers), by the 1970s the

case law of the European Court of Justice had become the crucial source of Community law in the eyes of most

European jurists, and not of interdisciplinarians from the other side of the Atlantic. A further signal of the

judicialisation of politics in Europe is the rise of (some) national constitutional courts as the most effective counter-

weight to the Luxembourg judges. Dani and Wilkinson revisit this special relationship, which only some years ago

was fashionable to characterise as “cross‐fertilising dialogue”, but which the ongoing crises have reminded us can

indeed be extremely conflict‐prone.

DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12256

154 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Eur Law J. 2017;23:154–156.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj