European Union Citizenship and the Sorting of Europe

Free movement is intended to bring Europeans together. This article suggests it may have the opposite effect: it may drive them apart. The mechanism involved is sorting. This happens when people are free to choose where to live, and choose a community which matches their preferences. This match can come about in different ways, but the result of them all is that people of particular preferences are clustered together, leading to society being structured as a series of adjacent mono-cultures. It is not a large step to suggest that this arrangement is likely to cause alienation between the communities. The fact of sorting means that they have less in common than they did before. For Europe, if sorting happens, this would imply that polarization between states would increase and the governability of the EU would be threatened. Free movement may be less a mechanism of integration than one of disintegration.