‘Protection or Protectionism?’

Abstract

This article engages critically with an emergent rhetoric suggesting that Member States and trade unions seeking to apply their domestic social standards to foreign service providers, in the context of what EU lawyers refer to as ‘Free movement of Services’, engage in practices amounting to economic protectionism. To countervail this rhetoric, the paper revisits some of the regulatory principles and rationales underpinning the law on ‘Free Movement of Workers’ and draws a number of parallels between them and the principles that regulate, or ought to regulate, other freedoms that de facto involve the free circulation of working persons in Europe, albeit under the guise of ‘Free movement of Services’ or ‘Freedom of Establishment’. It asserts that all market freedoms affecting the free movement rights of working persons in Europe, ought to be regulated by reference to what the paper describes as the ‘Equal treatment Principle’, and should distance themselves from any ‘Country of Origin’ rationale.