Eurostars and Eurocities

The European Union is founded on the idea of free movement. A generation of West European citizens - referred to by the author as 'Eurostars' - have pioneered a new kind of highly skilled and educated migration. In an integrating Europe built on economic theories, they appeared to face none of the discrimination and limitations on work and settlement that still restrict other migrants in Europe. And nowhere was the cosmopolitan promise of European free movement more in evidence than in Amsterdam, London, and Brussels - three classic 'Eurocities'. Yet there is a human dimension to European integration. Even with all formal legal barriers down, things are not always so simple. 60 in-depth interviews and more than five years of ethnographic and documentary research unearth some startling revelations - and contradictions - about life in a Europe supposedly without frontiers. A book about real people and real places, Eurostars and Eurocities is a rare combination of literary style and scholarly analysis. At its core lie the intimate stories of some remarkable individuals and families, who left their comfortable local career paths and family lives to embark on an uncertain European future.