Legitimating intra-European movement discourses: understanding mobility and migration

Free movement of people can be considered as a contested issue. While the European Commission stimulates a further ‘harmonization’ of citizen ‘mobility’, some member-states question the ‘burdens’ of ‘EU migration’. To understand these differences, it contains a multi-level focus on the meaning-making practices of policy actors at the European Commission and in the Netherlands. The analysis reveals a European legal discourse legitimated by expert authorization which differs with a Dutch national discourse legitimated by mythopoesis. As such, it displays the significance of a discursive approach since it shows the contested meaning-making practices and its policy consequences around intra-European movement.