Guaranteeing Human Rights? Italian ‘Gastarbeiter:innen’ and Housing Activism in 1960s and 1970s West Germany

In 1968, several hundred workers gathered outside of the factories in Milan to protest astronomical rent prices, high numbers of evictions, and poor housing conditions for blue-collar workers. As part of a large wave of worker activism spreading throughout Italy's industrial triangle, the participants were determined to take the struggle for better living conditions beyond the factory. The meeting resulted in the foundation of the Unione Inquilini (UI – Tenants’ Union), an entity that remained separate from the large trade unions that had previously dominated the workers’ movements. The UI instead coordinated collective action outside of the workplace – such as preventing evictions, handling court cases, and going on rent strikes. To spread awareness about its services and mission, the UI continually distributed informational flyers encouraging low-income tenants to call them for housing assistance. When Giuseppe Zambon answered one of the ringing telephones two years after the UI's formation in 1970, the caller explained that he and a handful of other Italian families refused to leave the apartments they rented and explained that the landlord was trying to evict them to sell the building to speculators. He then asked if the UI could step in and help. When Zambon asked in which neighbourhood in Milan the man was located, the caller responded, ‘No, [we’re] in Frankfurt’. ¹ Several weeks later, Zambon relocated to West Germany and established a branch of the UI in Frankfurt am Main in response to the caller's plea.

In ensuing months, the new West German branch of the UI launched a series of protest actions to highlight inequitable housing conditions for labour migrants throughout the city. In addition to supporting a growing number of housing occupations similar to the one instigated by the tenant who initially called for assistance, the UI also coordinated rent strikes. By 1972, over 1500 ‘guest workers’ – or Gastarbeiter:innen – either refused to pay rent or had reduced their payments to the equivalent of 10 per cent of their wages. ² At the heart of migrants’ claims was the idea that housing was a ‘right’ to which they were entitled as individuals – even though they resided in a country that was not their nation-state of origin. As one UI flyer distributed on 7 April 1973 in Frankfurt declared, ‘Housing is a right. Join us together with other German and foreign tenants in fighting for the right to a home. Join the Unione Inquilini’! ³ The UI's involvement is just one indication of the exceptional level of grassroots migrant protest participation in Frankfurt (outside of the workplace) compared to other cities. Not least because Italian migrants there proved to be trailblazers by launching what the historian-activist amantine labelled the first ever demonstration organised by migrants in West Germany. ⁴

Using the case study of Italian migrant housing activism in Frankfurt, this article illustrates the potency of using the language of universal or ‘human’ rights to make larger claims. ⁵ Migrants’ claim to housing as a right in the 1960s and 1970s West Germany underwent what Sidney Tarrow has described as a ‘scale shift process’ as their claims moved from a transnational social movement to the level of policymaking at federal levels and within the European Parliament. ⁶ As advocacy groups and legislators took up migrants’ housing claims, they moved migrants’ claims to decent housing into a framework of human rights that influenced international relations as well as approaches to social integration within the European Economic Community (EEC). No matter the scale, the multiple meanings of universal or human rights created frameworks of debate over the West German welfare state, the free movement of labour within the EEC, and even visions of European citizenship and integration. ⁷

This article will begin by outlining how Italian migrant Gastarbeiter:innen in Frankfurt pointed to the right to housing to highlight dismal living conditions and housing abuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most often, migrants viewed themselves as entitled to this right on the premise of being ‘human’, even though such a right was not guaranteed by law. In turn, migrants’ perceptions around housing as a right justified their participation in rent strikes and housing occupations as they attempted to make the West German welfare state more inclusive. The second section of the article briefly analyses how migrant housing claims scaled up to the level of international discourse as both West German and Italian officials characterized housing as a human right. In response to increasing migrant housing complaints, state actors thus had to negotiate the gap between the seeming universality of human rights and the concrete administration of such rights across national boundaries. This section dovetails with the final section, namely how Italian migrants’ housing grievances significantly influenced a petition brought to the floor of the European Parliament in the early 1970s. In the subsequent debate over the petition, parliamentary representatives also couched migrant housing conditions in terms of human rights. The framing of human rights thus served as the arena in which members of parliament signalled their support for or resistance to greater European social integration – with some supporters insisting the proposed rights apply to all migrant workers irrespective of EEC status or nationality.

This evaluation of the multi-levelled interventions surrounding migrants’ (human) right to adequate and affordable housing within the EEC – even as residents outside their nation-state of origin – is important because it illuminates two parallel historical phenomena. The first centres on the fact that migrants pushed for an expansion of the West German welfare state to include non-nationals at the cusp of the transition from Fordism to neoliberalism. That West German officials responded rather positively to migrant claims on the ground illustrates Samuel Moyn's argument that human rights became a significant vehicle for advocating for large-scale reform in the 1970s when earlier sociopolitical movements had failed. ⁸ The second sheds light on how the EEC emerged as a supranational actor whose legislation and policymaking helped enshrine certain transnational rights into actual law or policy. In other words, debates in the European parliament over migrant workers demonstrate how a human rights framework not only became institutionalized, but also served as a foundation for the expansion of the regulatory and legislative influence of the EEC on member nation-states.

In the aftermath of the destructive Second World War, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) sought to enshrine many of the rights that had been so brutally violated during the widespread conflict. Article 25 states that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and social services…’. ⁹ Despite the declaration's language of universality, its original intent was very much to rescue the nation-state and bolster welfare state programmes. As such, the UDHR ‘is best understood as canonizing political and social rights as part of a consensus that citizens required new and powerful states at home’. ¹⁰ Moreover, it would take until 1966 for some of the rights listed in the UDHR to begin to be enforceable within countries that signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which ‘stipulate[d] that each state must use “the maximum of its available resources” to achieve the rights in the Covenant’. ¹¹ This framework again emphasized the role of the state in administering the rights and protections outlined in the document.

Given the state-centred focus of such international agreements, Italian migrants relocating to West Germany in search of work during the economic miracle did not have much legal framework within which to claim adequate and affordable housing as a ‘right’ in their new communities. Although Italian trade unions expressed concern that the 1955 bilateral labour agreement between West German and Italian officials contained provisions for adequate housing, for instance, these guarantees only applied to workers vetted by official labour recruitment centres in Milan and Verona. For those who instead entered the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on travel visas or following EEC regulations on the free movement of labour in member states in 1961 and again in 1964, housing on the private market soon became one of the most pressing problems for them. ¹² As the largest group of ‘guest’ workers in the FRG until 1970 when they numbered over half a million residents, Italian migrants often faced higher rent prices for cramped and substandard living situations. ¹³ In a study commissioned by the city of Frankfurt, for instance, researchers found that 66 per cent of migrant workers in Frankfurt paid over DM200 German Mark in rent (the national median rent) for small flats that frequently lacked running or hot water, electricity, or an indoor toilet. In contrast, only 41 per cent of West German tenants paid more than the median rent, generally for newer, larger, and more comfortable apartments. ¹⁴ These disparities stemmed from an already tight housing market, urban redevelopment plans that sparked widespread speculation, and social discrimination. When pushing back at these inequitable housing conditions, Italian migrant workers in 1970s West Germany often claimed decent housing to be a ‘right’. By analysing Italian migrants’ language of rights in Frankfurt, it is clear that they believed adequate and affordable housing to be a right to which they were entitled predicated simply on the fact that they were human beings, with employment an implied or secondary factor.

The widespread perception of housing as a right among Italian immigrants in West Germany may have been imported, in part, from their home country. Though the right to sufficient housing was not codified in the Italian Republic's constitution, many Italians understood it to be a prerequisite for parallel civil rights that were expressly stated. ¹⁵ If one takes film media in the postwar decades as a barometer, one can see that the right to a home became widely embraced both by the Italian state and by its citizens. In 1956, for instance, the federal government sponsored the production of a propaganda film entitled Le case degli Italiani (The Homes of the Italians). The film followed a young, engaged couple that was searching for a flat to live in after their marriage, a situation that had inspired other cinematic plots, such as Il tetto (The Roof, 1956). In the state-sponsored film, the woman, Liliana, was employed in a film laboratory and had the responsibility of checking the quality of films prior to their release. In the case featured in the state-produced film, she was assigned to evaluate a short film called A House for Everyone. The film within the film outlined how one could apply and qualify for social housing. The message that repeated throughout the film was that one must simply be informed about one's ‘rights’ in order to obtain one of the 340,000 social housing apartments recently built. ¹⁶

Not all film producers bought into the happy picture painted by the Italian state, however. In 1964, the public television channel RAI broadcast a four-episode documentary entitled La casa in Italia (Housing in Italy). Marshalled as a defence of the right to affordable housing and levied at the sluggishness and inefficiencies of public housing institutions, the documentary sparked intense debate in the public sphere to the point that 4.4 million viewers tuned into the final episode. ¹⁷ The journalist and film critic Mino Doletti, for instance, wrote the following response to the televised series in the newspaper Il Tempo: ‘At a time when the right to…a home is clouded by gloomy and threatening prospects, it is comforting that television comes to reaffirm it as a legitimate and inviolable right’. ¹⁸ Though it would take until the 1980s for official legislation to protect the right to housing, this brief glimpse into preceding decades illuminates how housing loomed large as a right in the Italian public imaginary. What each of these films took for granted, though, was that the right to housing was inextricably tied to one's ability to work due to a point system tied to employment – thereby limiting who could qualify and how one could access said right.

It was through a similar paradigm – that of labour and housing – that Italian migrants in West Germany used universalising rights’ languages to highlight inequitable living conditions once they crossed national borders. This was especially true in Frankfurt, where 107,289 migrants had arrived to take on work in the factories within the city and surrounding areas by 1972. ¹⁹ For most immigrants, affordable and adequate housing was highly problematic. In 1972, a group of Italian migrant women distributed a flyer to their neighbours in the Westend neighbourhood in Frankfurt to explain why they engaged in actions such as rent strikes and housing occupations. They explained that they did not want to ‘just work here like crazy; we have the right to live decently like all human beings’. ²⁰ Insisting that they needed ‘clean, proper housing’, they refused to continue living with their entire families in one or two rooms. As evidenced by the contents of their flyer, the Italian migrant women associated the right to ‘clean, proper housing’ with being ‘human beings’ as well as their socioeconomic contributions as workers. Although they did not specify housing as being a human right, they mobilized the language of universal rights tied to their humanity to defend their protest actions and ‘confront a specific claim of injustice’. ²¹

The UI echoed such language when coordinating migrant housing protest movements throughout Frankfurt. When reporting on one of the apartment buildings on rent strike that the UI supported in Eschersheimer Landstraße in 1973, journalists from the Frankfurter Rundschau detailed the contents of what they referred to as the ‘Immigrants’ Fight Song’. According to their account, the chorus of the Italian tenants’ song proclaimed, ‘Housing is a right for everyone – if it is not given to us, then we will take it’. ²² The slogan became so popular that it was even recorded on vinyl and made available to the public. Beyond a catchy tune, the rent strikers’ claim to housing as a right for everyone – even those who were not West German citizens – did strike a chord. After two years of collective protest, the city administration procured social housing for all migrant tenants in the building. A representative from the UI told reporters that we are happy we could help the families while pointing out that German tenants frequently paid less in rent than non-German tenants. ²³ A partial victory, this case illuminated how rights languages challenged local authority, leading to a limited resolution between social protests and administrative institutions.

The perception of housing as a right was not strictly an Italian one. Italian migrant housing activism took place within and alongside a larger protest movement within Frankfurt – the Häuserkampf, or housing fight. Participants in the struggle were multi-faceted, ranging from citizens’ initiatives opposed to widespread speculation to radicalized students and Spontis who viewed housing protests as a ‘germ cell of militant organization’. ²⁴ The latter group formed the Häuserrat (a council for squatted buildings and those on rent strike) which actively supported migrant tenants, repeating the claim that housing was a ‘right’ that transcended national identity. However, the radical political aims of the Häuserrat led to a split between them and the UI, with many migrants preferring less politically threatening advocates to elicit more sympathy from city officials and other community members. ²⁵

One such group with whom migrants frequently collaborated was Frankfurt's Social Democratic Party (SPD) – especially the Jusos which consisted of young members of the party aged 35 years and below. Although the SPD had continuously headed Frankfurt's city administration since 1946, various factions within the party became involved in housing activism movements in the city, marshalling the language of rights to push for legislative change in opposition to what they saw as a calcified approach to government. When supporting a tenant campaign taking place in the Bockenheim neighbourhood – an area particularly impacted by speculation and gentrification – SPD representatives directly tied housing to basic rights. In a flyer they distributed in 1971, they posited, ‘The right to a home does not safeguard a consumer need, rather it is a basic right that is absolutely necessary for life. No one can make do without housing’. ²⁶ The advocates then defended housing occupations as an act of ‘self-defense’. ²⁷ They argued that although housing occupations violated trespassing laws, land speculation breached more fundamental rights guaranteed in West German Basic Constitutional Law, thereby making occupations necessary in the first place. Their association between housing as a ‘basic’ right and a necessity for life is a demonstrative example of how housing became entrenched as a crucial indicator of a sufficient standard of living. Furthermore, the SPD representatives’ defence of collective protest action on the premise of rights also illuminates how grassroots movements mobilized such universalizing language to ‘invoke international human rights as a standard by which to measure domestic civil liberties’, though they applied said liberties to both citizens and non-citizen resident workers. ²⁸

Despite the implicit universality of rights languages, work remained the parameter that determined whether the West German welfare state would even consider migrants’ claims to housing, thus demonstrating the disparity between economic and social rights. When several Italian families occupied two buildings in Friesengasse in September 1973 to protest their previous living conditions, the police posted an eviction notice. The purpose of the notice was to remind the migrant occupiers that their ability to remain in West Germany was directly tied to their ability to ‘earn a living for himself and his family members from his own means, which also includes suitable housing’. ²⁹ Some of the migrant occupiers’ advocates pointed out the injustice in having work and housing linked to qualify for basic rights – stipulations that did not equally apply to West German citizens. In a flyer they distributed in response, the sympathisers stated:

This is the situation of foreign working families in the human city of Frankfurt,

in the highly modern, progressive Federal Republic:

they work in the factories and in the city

they do the heaviest dirty work

they pay taxes but hardly have any schools

they are good for one thing: THEY BRING A LOT OF PROFIT

…

they are stuck in hovels and asked to kindly take care of decorous apartments.

If they do not have a job, they will not get a flat,

if they do not have an apartment, they will not receive a residence permit. ³⁰

After emphasising migrants’ contribution to West Germany's economic miracle, the authors underscored the precarity migrants faced in having housing tied to their ability to earn enough as workers. For instance, the final lines gestured to FRG migration regulations that required non-nationals to have suitable housing to keep their residence permits – housing that depended entirely on being able to overcome social discrimination and/or pay the astronomical rents that many landlords required of ‘foreign’ tenants.

Additional criticism attacked the SPD administration's efforts to paint Frankfurt as a ‘humane’ city which was the centrepiece of their 1973 reelection campaign. SPD candidates promised an ‘unconditional fight against exorbitant rents’ and eviction, and ‘being able to stay where you live at a reasonable price’ as part of creating a ‘humane’ city. ³¹ In response, the student union (AStA) of Goethe University Frankfurt and other groups argued that it was clear that the right to housing the SPD candidates espoused did not equally apply to all residents. Common among advocates’ commentary was the theme of dehumanization or the criticism that West German policies about labour and housing valued migrants only for their economic contributions while ensuring the ‘guest’ workers would not overly burden the welfare state. ³² The UI echoed these themes, writing in their 1973 newsletter ‘we are not men and women who emigrate. They just want our labour. For this reason, there no houses for immigrants, no schools for our children’. ³³

As evidenced by discourses surrounding migrants’ participation in rent strikes or housing occupations in Frankfurt, the language of rights loomed large in the public sphere. Italian migrants often referred to housing as a right based on their humanity, irrespective of the fact that they were residing in communities outside of the geopolitical boundaries of their nation-state. Both they themselves and some of their West German advocates prioritized migrants’ identity as human beings over their economic value as workers. Referencing both premises frequently served as a bridge across national identities to elicit sympathy or solidarity among other community members. Notwithstanding the potency of using the language of universal rights, however, migrants’ actions often confronted questions of whether and how the West German welfare state should guarantee social rights for transitory populations within its borders.

Italian migrants’ use of universalising rights languages to make their housing claims also trickled up into higher levels of government and administration. More specifically, officials, representatives, and legislators couched housing as a ‘human right’ to either criticise or defend the West German welfare state for its housing policies. Using the language of human rights attached social rights to migrants as individuals, even when residing outside of their own nation-state. In this vein, human rights created an arena for political debate and diplomacy, especially in regard to the West German administration of state housing aid and rent protections. As a whole, human rights dialogues between officials of the two nation-states underscore the challenges of creating and implementing trans-border social policies, even for rights portrayed as universal in nature.

By the mid-1960s, Italian migrant complaints about rent prices and housing conditions in the FRG had already reached the highest levels of politics. According to an internal memo circulated among West German federal representatives in 1964, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised their concerns about excessive rents for flats that did not meet minimum standards of living for Italian residents in the FRG. This critique sparked a West German conversation about how ‘normal rent prices could be achieved’ and resulted in an external commission sent to Rome the following year to discuss housing issues. ³⁴ At the 1965 meeting in Rome, the West German delegation reaffirmed that ‘appropriate living space at an affordable rent’ was essential ‘to protect the basic human right to housing’. ³⁵ To guarantee said rights, the West German government passed a Housing Benefit Act to more stringently regulate rent prices and widen access to subsidies. The West German delegates assured Italian representatives that ‘German housing legislation does not distinguish between foreigners and residents’. ³⁶ By this, they meant that Italian migrants had access to state housing assistance and protection on paper – or that they theoretically qualified for the guarantee of said ‘basic human right’ via the West German social state. In this high-profile international exchange, then, West German officials also turned to the language of rights to defend their housing policies by arguing that Italian migrants had equal access to the welfare state.

It is one thing to guarantee a right on paper and another for it to be administratively implemented. By the end of the decade, Italian religious representatives also criticized the West German government for its supposed failings in remedying the migrant housing situation. In 1969, the Council of Directors of Italian Pastoral Services in Germany (with its head based in Frankfurt) released a statement that posited that Italian migrants in the FRG were being subjected to ‘shameful exploitation’. ³⁷ The statement highlighted the ‘impossibility’ of finding affordable housing due to exorbitant prices or the refusal of landlords to rent to non-German tenants. Its authors argued for a ‘proportional right to social housing’ since ‘guest workers also pay taxes to the state and the church’. ³⁸ This was a reference to the practice of the West German state collecting a proportion of each worker's paycheck to distribute to either the Catholic or Protestant churches – a nineteenth-century custom that was codified in the Weimar constitution and reincorporated into the Grundgesetz in 1949 (German Basic Law). ³⁹ Here again, the right to housing was linked with one's ability to work, since employment resulted in monetary contributions to both church and state. Beyond a ‘proportional right’ based on taxes, though, the religious authorities also labelled adequate housing ‘as a sign of respect for the human dignity of the worker’, reinforcing the connection between dignity and humanity in the title of their statement – ‘Housing is the first condition for a humane existence’. ⁴⁰

West German reactions to the Italian religious leaders’ criticism at the federal level were rather dismissive, despite the attention the accusations gained in the press. In a response on 10 November 1969, a representative for the Federal Labour Office related: ‘I would appreciate it if someone could give me concrete evidence of abuses in housing for foreign workers, so that the facts can be clarified and any deficiencies rectified as soon as possible’. ⁴¹ Moreover, some government representatives asserted that existing regulations within the EEC already ensured proper housing conditions for Italian migrants. In November 1970, the Federal Minister for Urban Development and Housing related to the minister in charge of Labour and Social Affairs that ‘the complex problem of housing for foreign workers’ had ‘been solved in purely legal terms’. ⁴² He clarified that ‘from the point of view of the right to freedom of movement within the EEC, there are no difficulties, since foreign employees can only bring their families with them if suitable living space is available’. He then postulated that although many EEC workers did not report their new residences to the authorities, the ‘Italians’ frequently did so, thus ‘invoking the equal treatment that they are owed’. ⁴³ Rather than pointing out ‘equal treatment’ in terms of housing access, however, the minister's comments highlighted West German policy aimed at preventing migrant family reunification. Relying on housing stipulations incorporated into the EEC free movement of labour regulations, FRG officials put the onus on migrants to provide proof of ‘adequate housing’ before allowing family members to come to West Germany. This strategy theoretically allowed for labourers to enter while limiting family members who would make more demands on the welfare state. ⁴⁴

In contrast to this viewpoint, other officials within the Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs did take the disparity between legal parity and actual practice into account when discussing housing as a right for migrants. In a 1971 report on migrant housing conditions compiled by the ministry, the first section outlined the legal status of non-West German employees and how it related to housing access and state aid. The report stated that Gastarbeiter:innen

Have the same right to acquire social housing subsidized with public funds, but are naturally in competition with the housing claims of local residents who have often been waiting for an apartment for many years due to the housing shortage. ⁴⁵

According to this logic, national identity was irrelevant to accessing state housing aid. However, national residents held an advantage when it came to housing administration due to a longer waiting period.

As evidenced by the above examples, the universalizing language of human or basic rights often conflicted with the practicality of administering housing rights and access to the West German welfare state on the ground. Common among many of the discussions was the perception of housing as a human right linked to the individual irrespective of national identity. International discussions reveal the complexity of recruiting and housing employees from beyond the territory of the nation-state. Even if legislators created or pointed to legal parity of this ‘basic human right’ on paper, the reality was that the guarantee of the right to adequate housing for migrants was frequently dismissed or the responsibility was placed on migrants to provide, rather than the state to assist. Due to the deaf ears that their claims often fell upon, Italian migrants and advocacy groups elevated their claims to housing as a human right to the supranational level – that of the European Parliament.

Throughout the late 1960s, many Italian migrants in West Germany filed their housing grievances with representatives from an umbrella labour organization – the Italian Federation of Emigrant Workers and their Families (FILEF – Federazione italiana lavoratori emigranti e famiglie). Founded in Rome in 1967, the FILEF embodied the overlapping labour interests of socialist, communist, and liberal-democratic forces. Two of its founders – Carlo Levi and Paolo Cinanni – conceptualized southern Italian migration as a ‘forced exodus’ and thus envisioned the federation as an organ for advancing international worker solidarity in the ever-changing face of capitalism and imperialism. ⁴⁶ Some of the FILEF's priorities included assisting emigrant families with schooling, trade training, welfare assistance, and political representation in their new communities. ⁴⁷

In 1970, the FILEF filed a petition with the European Parliament addressing the living and working conditions of migrant workers. The impetus for the petition was the 1968 EEC regulations that stipulated the free movement of labour among EEC member states. Though the FILEF supported the regulations, the organization stressed that the EEC failed to ‘provide the necessary legislative instruments that could remove the obstacles to the effective improvement of workers’ conditions’. ⁴⁸ To provide evidence, FILEF leaders attached a white paper that detailed migrant conditions, with Italian migrants’ claims of housing inequalities and mistreatment within EEC member states taking up substantial space. ⁴⁹ After summarizing what they considered deplorable discrimination, the petition called for the creation of a European Statute for Migrant Worker Rights. The purpose of the statute was to ‘protect the civil, political, social and human rights of migrant workers’. ⁵⁰ It was the FILEF's hope that the parliament would adopt the proposed statute and create the necessary frameworks and institutions for an improvement in migrant living and working conditions. An analysis of statute drafts and ensuing deliberations by Members of European Parliament (MEPs) shows the centrality of ‘human rights' languages in the debate over transnational rights. Beyond the actual claims levied by FILEF, MEPs used human rights to support (or resist) greater social integration and even advance visions of a future European ‘citizenship’.

FILEF representatives denounced conditions for Italian migrant labourers throughout the EEC in their initial petition in 1970. Living conditions in West Germany constituted one of the most robust parts of the white paper, with Frankfurt being named as one of the six cities with the greatest housing shortages for migrant workers. ⁵¹ Added to this, migrant lack of access to adequate and affordable housing emerged as one of a handful of rights FILEF deemed most consequential. In the conclusion of the white paper, the authors asserted:

The above findings highlight the serious problems facing the implementation of Community regulations. If we want to ensure real equality between the citizens of the European Community, it is above all necessary to guarantee the right to housing, which would consist of the immediate removal of barracks, hovels, and unsafe housing that is overcrowded or without sanitary facilities. ⁵²

Though FILEF representatives certainly raised other concerns, such as the right to freedom of assembly and greater representation within labour unions, housing dominated their analysis of infringements on individual rights.

The 1970 petition achieved mixed results. A number of EEC representatives expressed reservations about the verifiability of some of the claims in FILEF's white paper. In June 1971, for instance, the EEC Committee on Social Affairs and Public Health released a report that raised their misgivings. Though they agreed that the issues FILEF brought to their attention merited further investigation, they ‘correct[ed] some erroneous claims’. ⁵³ They also ‘warn[ed] the signatories of the petition of the dangers of over-hasty general conclusions based on individual cases, the credibility of which have, moreover, been disputed on a number of occasions’. ⁵⁴ As a result of this report, the parliament decided that the grievances raised by the white paper did warrant further consideration, but in tandem with additional investigation.

Given the parliament's decision, FILEF combined its efforts with those of the European Assembly for Italian Emigrants to draft a proposed International Statute on Migrant Worker Rights in May of 1973. In previous versions they had named the statute a ‘European’ statute. This shift to an ‘international’ statute acknowledged migrant workers who had arrived in the EEC from non-EEC states. Though the authors acknowledged the differing legal rights currently held by EEC and non-EEC members, FILEF representatives consistently underscored that the rights and protections they proposed should be extended to all workers, irrespective of nationality. To further erase the differentiation between EEC and third-country labourers, the preamble indicated that the statute was built on the 1948 UDHR, illustrating the authors’ conviction that human rights were attached to the individual, no matter their nationality. At the same time, the specification of ‘worker’ within their title signalled that employment still served as the qualifier for the rights they raised.

Most important to this discussion, housing was the lengthiest section within the article that outlined migrant workers’ rights. Among the nine stipulations on housing access, cost, and conditions were four that addressed individual or systemic discrimination, namely:

The immigrant has the same housing rights as nationals of the host country, including access to home ownership.

Like citizens of the host country, they can be included on social housing lists and enjoy the advantages and priorities that this entails.

Nationality, race, language, political or religious affiliation and reasons related to the number of family members must not be a reason for housing restrictions and degrading conditions.

Like citizens of the host country, the immigrant is entitled to a statutory housing allowance if they are not assigned public housing and must pay a rent that is disproportionately high in relation to the family income. ⁵⁵

When concluding their proposed statute, the Italian delegates challenged the highly prevalent idea that housing rights were directly tied to profitable employment. They contended, ‘The migrant worker must not be regarded as a mere worker or a simple unit of production, but as a citizen entitled to universally recognised rights’. ⁵⁶ Combined with the shift to an ‘international’ statute of migrant worker rights, this assertion further diminished the importance of national identity in the guarantee of human or universal rights, opening the doors for political debate.

The year after FILEF submitted the draft proposal, it arrived on the floor of the European Parliament for deliberation. MEP Feruccio Pisoni – the speaker for the parliament's Christian democratic faction – was one of the first representatives to enter the 1974 debate. It is important to note that Christian democratic governments had been at the head of all six states that set up the European Coal and Steel Community (later joined by the EEC), and thus Christian democrats remained invested in European integration. ⁵⁷ Moreover, as a representative of the Italian political party that had concluded numerous international labour agreements, Pisoni likely wished to ensure equitable treatment for Italians abroad – as evidenced by his future parliamentary service on the Committee on Social Affairs and Employment. Pisoni asserted in his speech that ‘…the aim of the migrant worker statute proposed in the petition is a new, genuine European citizenship’. ⁵⁸ Pisoni's comments went beyond living and working conditions for migrants as he signalled a shift in conceptions of citizenship. Rather than being tied to individual nation-states, he tied citizenship to the EEC through a framework of universal human rights. He stated that ‘The statute […] provides a legal framework, it affirms the rights of the worker and human rights in general; it is a very important instrument for the protection of human dignity and the exercise of human rights’. ⁵⁹ Using the same paradigm as the Italian religious representatives in West Germany, Pisoni drew tight connections between employment, dignity, and human rights, while elevating the last category above all others. In this manner, he utilized universal claims to advocate for a concrete legal framework for human rights within the Community.

Other representatives were not so convinced that the rights and protections of citizenship should be freed from the bounds of one's nation-state of origin. One of the few female representatives who spoke in the debate was MEP Lady Diana Elles, a British Baroness and spokesperson for the conservative faction. She used international conventions on human rights to make an entirely different case. After pointing out that the proposed statute did indeed use the 1948 UDHR for its premise, she claimed ‘It is not always clear that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes a distinction between [whether its rights/protections apply to] nationals of the country concerned and “foreigners”’. ⁶⁰ To clarify her point, she asserted that ‘every government has a duty to protect its nationals, whether they are at home or abroad’. ⁶¹ In essence, it was her faction's opinion that the guarantee of human rights was still intrinsically tied to the nation-state of origin, not to an individual who crossed national borders.

Elles's point was also taken up by her colleague, MEP Hector Rivierez, who was especially opposed to any consideration of transnational civil rights, particularly for non-EEC workers. The speaker for the faction of progressive democrats, which consisted of a coalition between French Gaullists and Irish nationalists, he defended nation-states’ ‘sacred area of sovereignty’. ⁶² He then stated rather pointedly, ‘Political rights are tied to nationality. That is an inviolable principle and really remarkable progress would have to be made to breach [this foundation]’. ⁶³ By taking up the question of sovereignty, he joined with other MEPs who linked political, social, and even human rights to the boundaries of the nation-state.

These viewpoints on national sovereignty did not go unchallenged. The speaker for the Communist faction placed the emphasis on migrants’ status as workers to comment on questions of migrant origins. When several other MEPs raised questions about third-country workers entering the EEC ‘illegally’, the Communist-affiliated MEP Francescopaolo D’Angelosante intervened. D’Angelosante disagreed with the distinction, positing that ‘the reality…is that workers, whether legal or illegal immigrant, perform their job’ and stood in need of a ‘minimum of equal rights’. ⁶⁴ Given his political orientation, it is perhaps unsurprising that D’Angelosante used the framework of workers’ rights rather than human rights to overcome questions of borders. Ultimately, though, concerns over legal jurisdiction and who was to guarantee the rights outlined in the statute proved insurmountable and the proposed statute faded from the limelight for several years.

When the European Parliament revisited the proposed statute in 1977, it met a similar fate. When opening the floor, the president of the parliament asked the MEPs if they were prepared to ‘present a statute compatible with…fundamental rights’, especially the ‘legal, social, and cultural’ rights linked to migrant workers, whom he labelled the ‘tenth European nation’ due to their population within the community. ⁶⁵ The answer appeared to be a resounding ‘no’. In the face of mounting apathy or opposition, MEP Luigi Granelli lamented that the statute would suffer the same fate as the 1948 UDHR. He described the latter as a legal order that ‘seems very solemn, very important, but which, alas, receives little attention when it comes to moving from declarations of principles to practical implementation’. ⁶⁶ He urged his peers to reconsider the statute and ‘discuss migrant workers and their rights so that they no longer remain “second-class” citizens but become full citizens of the democratic Europe that we want to build’. ⁶⁷ His colleague and speaker for the Christian democratic faction Alfred Betrand agreed, emphasising that migrants ‘should also have certain political rights in the countries in which they are staying’. ⁶⁸ He claimed that he expected his fellow representatives to act ‘in the framework of human rights and in the development of basic principles for European citizenship’. ⁶⁹ In both MEPs’ comments, the representatives tied human rights to a broader categorization of European citizenship.

Despite their urging to advance the statute, most representatives voted along other lines of thinking. MEP Henk Vredeling, for instance, emphasized that the fact that it had taken so long for the statute to come to fruition indicated that it was unnecessary. Still, other MEPs asserted that piecemeal community social assistance programmes in formation or already in place covered many of the issues previously raised by FILEF's white paper. ⁷⁰ In the end, the proposals contained in the statute were absorbed or passed off to other entities, such as the EEC's Social Affairs Committee. The fizzling out of the petition is illustrative of the challenge of institutionalising human rights through EEC regulations. However, these debates and certainly similar political discussions may have influenced decisions from the European Court of Justice that constitutionalized said rights into European law as it asserted primacy over national constitutions beginning in the 1970s. ⁷¹

Regardless of the outcome, the debate over the proposed statute thus raised several important points. The framing of Italian migrant housing and other conditions as a question of human rights amplified FILEF's petition in the early 1970s, entering an important supranational legislative sphere. In addition, MEPs both echoed and modified references to human rights to use migrants’ claims of inequality as a springboard for larger discussions surrounding social integration. For many representatives, the guarantee of human rights became synonymous with longer-term political aims. Though the effect was not immediate, migrants’ claims to housing rights served as one of the brushstrokes that painted visions of a European citizenship detached from single nation-states – visions that did not go unchallenged at the time. This is an important snapshot into the history of European integration because it shows how concerns at the level of everyday individuals did influence ‘high’ politics, despite the seeming ‘remoteness’ or tension displayed between European citizens and the EEC. ⁷²

This multi-layered analysis of Italian migrants’ claims to housing rights in West Germany is an attempt to answer the call of historians Lora Wildenthal and Jean Quatert to bring ‘ordinary people's voices’ into the history of human rights. ⁷³ Often, Italian migrants’ protest actions in the FRG over inequitable housing conditions stemmed from the perception that housing was a universal right based on being ‘human’. As migrants marshalled the language of rights to draw attention to the perceived injustice of their housing situation, they influenced similar discourses between officials at federal levels. When ‘scaled up’ to this arena, West German and Italian diplomatic exchanges couched housing as a ‘human right’ to either defend or criticise the West German welfare state, as well as debate migrants’ rights of access as workers and ‘humans’.

Moreover, members of the European Parliament drew connections between migrant rights and human rights to debate ideas about citizenship and greater social integration. The influence of Italian migrant workers in West Germany was indispensable to these debates at a time when the FRG accounted for three-quarters of labour migration within the EEC. ⁷⁴ Although Parliament eventually dismissed the petition, the fact that EEC representatives – along with the European Court of Justice – began ‘anchoring and protecting rights in the course of the 1970s’ took the Community into new territory. ⁷⁵ Doing so had the effect of consolidating the sociopolitical reach of the EEC while lending greater legitimacy to further integration. Put in other words, the ‘Europe of goods’ was gradually transformed into ‘a people's Europe’. ⁷⁶ As a result, the EEC entered a realm ‘untrodden by normal international organizations’ even as this realm was and remains contested up to the present. ⁷⁷

At an even broader scale, the localized context of Italian migrant housing activism in West Germany illustrates how human or universalising rights became a significant tool for groups to make claims and push for reform in the 1970s – at least in terms of ‘a minimum provision of the good things in life’. ⁷⁸ Although the neoliberal maelstrom that followed this historic moment would signal the end of the ‘golden age’ of the welfare state and an abandonment of ‘globally egalitarian distribution’, widespread perceptions about basic needs and ‘sufficient’ standards of living solidified in the 1970s. ⁷⁹ So even as advocates and lawmakers began to associate rights with individuals rather than national citizenship at the level of the EEC, Italian migrants and others pressured the West German welfare state to guarantee sufficient provision in more concrete terms on the ground. In doing so, they reinforced the boundaries of the nation-state just as much as they tried to blur the boundaries of who constituted a ‘citizen’ entitled to the safety net of the welfare state.

Since the 1970s, the crisis of liberalism has only deepened. Widespread shocks such as the 2008 financial quagmire and the recent global pandemic exacerbated the worldwide housing shortage. Populist political parties within the European Union – including the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD – Alternative for Germany) – often incorporate housing concerns into anti-immigrant platforms. These trends make the issue of housing one of the most prevalent and enduring – especially for those who cross geographic borders in search of a new place to call home. They also give new urgency to questions Italian migrants and their advocates asked over five decades ago, namely who is responsible for guaranteeing supposedly universal ‘human’ rights across geopolitical boundaries?