Paper short abstract:

This paper critically reflects on the (dis)connections between mobility-related practices and the policy-informing ideologies that normalize them. Ethnographic findings help us to develop a critical anthropological perspective on mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Although the majority of the world's population never travels abroad, border-crossing mobilities are increasingly promoted as normality. This paper critically reflects on the (dis)connections between mobility-related practices and the policy-informing ideologies that normalize them. It is a widespread idea that much of what is experienced as 'freedom' nowadays lies in mobility. Transnational mobile practices have become one of the most salient grounds for delineating middle-class standing, which in itself is an important demarcation of belonging within the 'mainstream' of modern society. This association has been further heightened by discourses that trumpet the importance of 'international experience'. How are the meanings, values and impacts of transnational mobilities imagined and shaped by (supra)state institutions and (both mobile and immobile) people? Like much of the scholarly literature on mobility, EU policy tends to conflate different forms of mobility and promotes the use of the concept as a proxy for internationalization, excellence and competitiveness. Such unfettered neo-liberal notions of mobility are tempered by welfarist, community-based or other forms of socio-cultural closure when mobility threatens social reproduction, identity over time or stable long-term returns. Fuelled by right-wing populism and an increasing disappointment in the European project, the EU enlargement, for instance, has led to restricted rights of movement. Ethnographic findings from Belgium and the EU institutions in Brussels help us to develop a critical perspective on mobility, a social theory that simultaneously addresses the normalization of border-crossing movements and the relations of differential power that are generative of these mobilities as well as their contestation.