During the early process of integration in the European Economic Community (EEC), the 'free movement of workers' drew national labour markets together to an unprecedented degree. Crucially, the EEC member states agreed to lower barriers to migration during a period when they were expanding national social welfare behind their borders. The InternalFortress project will analyse how national, European, and international actors worked to bridge the goals of broad regional mobility and deep social protection from the 1950s to the 1970s. Thus, the project is focused on the process of local implementation, tracing how free movement reconfigured existing social and economic systems. 

Within the EEC, mobility came with many new social rights, such as access to pensions,  professional development, and family support. These broad-based programs could only be carried out with support from non-state actors on the ground: NGOs, trade unions, employers, and migrants’ mutual aid associations. These organizations assumed a central role in European migration policy, but in doing so, they often pursued their own ambitions which diverged in important ways from official priorities. Thus, the project explores how free movement helped to introduce a more decentralized - and often more conflictual - mode of migration politics that transformed European nation-states.