Free Movement in the EU: Harmonisation of Mobile Citizens’ Social Rights

The author focuses on the current stagnation in negotiating process on the further improvement of supranational regulation on coordination of social security systems in the European Union. The article examines the basic principles of the free movement of workers in the EU and notes that the 2004/2007 EU enlargement has had a significant impact on the scale and direction of labour mobility within the Community. The analysis of the main indicators and characteristics of workers' mobility reveals the existing disparities between the Member States. The author points out that the divergence of national social security regimes, as well as diverging interests of individual EU Member States, such as protecting the rights of their own mobile citizens, or combating “social dumping”, play a key role in hindering the harmonization of social security rules in the context of freedom of movement. The concept of “failing forward” used for the study allowed to comprehend how social integration can be promoted when challenged by contradictions. The need to comply with the rules of the common internal market, on the one hand, and the interests of individual EU member states and their citizens, on the other, in a situation where the current legislation does not meet the challenges of the time, and the development of new legislation is constantly blocked, leads the EU institutions to intensify intergovernmental cooperation and resort to complementary mechanisms. The author concludes that the use of nonbinding regulatory instruments such as electronic data exchange serves as an intermediate link in the process of deepening integration in the area and may become an impetus for restarting negotiations and help finalise the text of the new legislation.