Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Global cities
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

Building A Europe For The People

Philippe van Parijs 24th May 2017

PhilippeVanParijs

Philippe Van Parijs

‘For the people, not just for the elites!’: this is the rallying cry of all brands of populism. The triumph of populism is a calamity, but the threat of populism is a crucial quality of any democracy. It is what makes a democratic regime better than a technocratic, bureaucratic or autocratic regime. It is what keeps reminding the rulers that they should not look only or mainly after their own interests and concerns and those of people like themselves.

Regarding specifically today’s European Union, it is the threat of populism that must impress on European decision-makers that they should not just be looking after the interests of the ‘movers’, of people like you — and me — in this room, of people who are able and keen to seize the opportunities created by the four freedoms of the single market and fully realize how much they owe to them. It is what will force them to pay more attention to the interests and concerns of the ‘stay-at-homes’, of the people who perceive above all the threat to their jobs from enhanced international competition and the threat to their familiar environments from what they see as an invasion by people with whom they have great difficulty in communicating and even greater difficulty in identifying.

It is hardly surprising today that these stay-at-homes — the ‘peoples’ of Europe — should see the European Union as a faceless machine, out of popular control, that keeps dismantling the protective fences to which they were used, an anonymous machine that keeps disciplining the nation states when they try to protect their citizens. It is hardly surprising that they should see European rulers as a clique whose chief preoccupation is to preserve for themselves and their likes their many privileges. It is hardly surprising that they should now ask to get their country back from Brussels and regain full national sovereignty.

The elite’s standard complacent response to such Europhobic demands is: ‘You cannot unscramble a scrambled egg’. After the Brexit vote, this response has lost quite a bit of its persuasiveness. Admittedly, the unscrambling of one of the least scrambled portions of the scrambled egg will be laborious, time-consuming, at times unavoidably nasty. But unscrambling there will be. Nonetheless, I do believe in a less metaphorical, less categorical, more circumscribed variant of this response, one that applies only to the Eurozone – in Claus Offe’s words: ‘The euro is a mistake the undoing of which would be an even greater mistake’.

But then, what should we do? Muddle through and wait for the populist revolt to gain ground, swelling and spreading from election to election, from country to country, from party to party? No. If the European Union is to escape from the trap in which it is currently stuck, if it is avoid a fate made of chaos and self-inflicted agony, it needs to become and be perceived as having become a caring Union. This it will not achieve by multiplying directives and regulations that further interfere with the autonomy of national governments and parliaments. It will achieve it by doing something unprecedented in the history of mankind: setting up a scheme of transnational and interpersonal redistribution.


Become part of our Community of Thought Leaders


Get fresh perspectives delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter to receive thought-provoking opinion articles and expert analysis on the most pressing political, economic and social issues of our time. Join our community of engaged readers and be a part of the conversation.

Sign up here

Such a Transfer Union is needed in order to provide a macroeconomic stabilizer essential to the survival of the euro. It is needed to provide a demographic stabilizer essential to the political survival of Schengen. It is needed to provide a firm common floor essential to protect the generosity and diversity of our national welfare states against tax and social competition. It is needed to make tangible to the stay-at-homes that the EU cares for them too, and not only for the movers. Is this a radical proposal? Of course it is. But it is no more radical than what Bismarck did when he created, under the pressure of violent protests, the world’s first national social security scheme. And do you really think that the EU will be able to survive without radical changes?

This is not the place to discuss the various forms such a scheme could take, some of which would be counterproductive, or to discuss the conditions that would need to be fulfilled in order to make institutionally and politically possible what is absolutely necessary (see here). Let me close instead by spelling out briefly the implications of what I have just said for the Brexit negotiations.

Brexit and after

If there is one thing that would sabotage any serious attempt to do what the European Union urgently needs to do to address in depth the source of the populist revolt, it is to give full access to the single market to a state that would not only be able (1) to keep using beggar-thy-neighbour competitive devaluation, as it has been doing since the creation of the euro, losing 25% of its value since 2001, but would in addition be enabled (2) to free ride at no charge on the various public goods generated by the very existence of the European Union, such as its contribution to the (largely self-)taming of German supremacy or to the (quite often) laborious consolidation of democracy and the rule of law in some member states and in candidate countries; (3) to go for all-out tax competition by lowering its effective tax rates on corporations, on financial transactions, on intellectual property and on valuable talents;  and (4) to use selective immigration rules in order to keep sucking thousands of brains from the rest of Europe and beyond, while leaving to the European Union the thankless job of absorbing millions of ‘less desirable’ migrants driven inside its borders by the fear of starvation and civil war.

Whether the withdrawal settlement must involve a payment of €20, 60 or 100 billion, this is peanuts relative to the lasting and irreversible damage that would be inflicted on the people of the European Union — and ultimately of the United Kingdom too — if the final Brexit deal, in its generous softness pushed for by exporters’ lobbies from both sides, left the EU and its member states at the mercy of a pirate state across the Channel, if the treaty sealing the future relations between the UK and the EU irreversibly deprived the EU of the capacity to do what it would need to do in order to stem an endless succession of understandable, indeed often legitimate populist revolts from both the left and the right, if it deprived the EU of the capacity to regain and deserve the allegiance and the trust, not only of the ‘movers’, but also of the ‘stay-at-homes’, in brief if it deprived it of the capacity to build at last a genuine ‘people’s Europe’.

Based on a speech at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, 5 May 2017, within the framework of the European University Institute’s State of the Union 2017: ‘Building a People’s Europe’

Philippe van Parijs

Philippe van Parijs, a fellow of the British Academy, is a professor at the Universities of Louvain and Leuven and a Robert Schuman fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

You are here: Home / Politics / Building A Europe For The People

Most Popular Posts

Ukraine,fatigue Ukraine’s cause: momentum is diminishingStefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko
Russia,information war Russia is winning the information warAiste Merfeldaite
Nanterre,police Nanterre and the suburbs: the lid comes offJoseph Downing
Russia,nuclear Russia’s dangerous nuclear consensusAna Palacio
Belarus,Lithuania A tale of two countries: Belarus and LithuaniaThorvaldur Gylfason and Eduard Hochreiter

Most Recent Posts

G7,BRICS,China,Russia G7 versus the BRICS: taking stock in 12 figuresThorvaldur Gylfason
solar energy,photovoltaic,Europe,EU,PV Powering up: the EU and solar energyFrancesco Crespi, Dario Guarascio, Serenella Caravella and Giacomo Cucignatto
Nagorno-Karabakh Nagorno-Karabakh: it’s not over yetSvante Lundgren
Sweden,climate,green Sweden’s climate policy—off the railsLisa Pelling
Biden,Detroit,UAW,strike Detroit, Joe Biden and a union renaissancePaul Knott

Other Social Europe Publications

strategic autonomy Strategic autonomy
Bildschirmfoto 2023 05 08 um 21.36.25 scaled 1 RE No. 13: Failed Market Approaches to Long-Term Care
front cover Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound Talks: does Europe have the skills it needs for a changing economy?

In this episode of the Eurofound Talks podcast, Mary McCaughey speaks with Eurofound’s research manager, Tina Weber, its senior research manager, Gijs van Houten, and Giovanni Russo, senior expert at CEDEFOP (The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training), about Europe’s skills challenges and what can be done to help workers and businesses adapt to future skills demands.

Listen where you get your podcasts, or for free, by clicking on the link below


LISTEN HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The summer issue of the Progressive Post magazine by FEPS is out!

The Special Coverage of this new edition is dedicated to the importance of biodiversity, not only as a good in itself but also for the very existence of humankind. We need a paradigm change in the mostly utilitarian relation humans have with nature.

In this issue, we also look at the hazards of unregulated artificial intelligence, explore the shortcomings of the EU's approach to migration and asylum management, and analyse the social downside of the EU's current ethnically-focused Roma policy.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI European Collective Bargaining Report 2022 / 2023

With real wages falling by 4 per cent in 2022, workers in the European Union suffered an unprecedented loss in purchasing power. The reason for this was the rapid increase in consumer prices, behind which nominal wage growth fell significantly. Meanwhile, inflation is no longer driven by energy import prices, but by domestic factors. The increased profit margins of companies are a major reason for persistent inflation. In this difficult environment, trade unions are faced with the challenge of securing real wages—and companies have the responsibility of making their contribution to returning to the path of political stability by reducing excess profits.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The future of remote work

The 12 chapters collected in this volume provide a multidisciplinary perspective on the impact and the future trajectories of remote work, from the nexus between the location from where work is performed and how it is performed to how remote locations may affect the way work is managed and organised, as well as the applicability of existing legislation. Additional questions concern remote work’s environmental and social impact and the rapidly changing nature of the relationship between work and life.


AVAILABLE HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube