The EU’s ‘People, Skills, Preparedness’ shift signals a move toward individual responsibility and crisis management in social policy.
The new European Commission will no longer include a commissioner for employment. Instead, if confirmed, Romanian Roxana Mînzatu will be responsible for “people, skills, and preparedness.” Far from being trivial, this strange title suggests a new vision based on the individualisation and securitisation of social issues.
If it is true that words have meaning in politics, the titles of European Commissioners’ portfolios are yardsticks for the European Zeitgeist. In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to call the migration portfolio “Protecting our European Way of Life” sparked controversy. This time, employment and social affairs have been rebranded as “people, skills, and preparedness,” combining previously distinct domains of employment and education. What does that mean?
The title sketches a political vision away from collective responsibilities towards a world of disembedded individuals required to arm themselves in the face of looming threats and multidimensional insecurity. Merging education and employment under one umbrella further subjects society to the supposed needs of a self-steering economy.
Social affairs vs. “people”
The inclusion of the term “people” is undoubtedly the most difficult to decipher because it seems so generic and somewhat naïve. It may suggest expanding the scope from workers to many other potential categories of people, such as children, students, pensioners, freelancers, or individuals in poverty. Forging new categories such as “vulnerable people” in reference to mobility poverty or energy poverty could be fruitful in the face of new challenges.
That said, the disappearance of the term “social” is telling. It further undermines the understanding that individuals are embedded in social relations (with employment being a social relation par excellence), that their constraints and opportunities are shaped by social stratification, and that the ultimate goal of policies is not only to solve problems but also to enhance the cohesion of the social fabric. Contrary to workers – embedded in the labour market – or citizens involved in public life and political cultures, “people” are detached from any institutional or systemic basis. Not only does it sound terribly vague, but it’s also absurd: do other Commissioners not work for the benefit of the “people”?
Employment vs. “skills”
For most Commission mandates, the traditional portfolio term was “employment”. Admittedly dry, employment refers to a policy area and a clear mission for decision-makers, namely the idea that the economy should “employ” workers in a way that can generate prosperity but is also morally acceptable, spelling out rights and responsibilities. In that sense, employment constitutes the nexus of the relations between capital and labour, employers and workers in a social market economy. In contrast, the dominant focus on education and skills tilts the balance towards individual responsibility: “If you want a quality job, get yourself the skills the market requires!” This underpins the shifting conception of unemployment as an individual rather than a collective problem.
Skills are, by no means, a new item on the European agenda. In the aftermath of the financial and sovereign debt crisis, skills emerged as a “crisis exit strategy”, and the first-ever conservative politician to take up the employment portfolio in the past two decades, Marianne Thyssen, already boasted skills in her portfolio title. Ever since, such discourse has become both more omnipresent and more contentious. Over the course of the past year, proclaimed by EU institutions as “the European Year of Skills”, unions insisted the problem wasn’t primarily a lack of skills but a lack of quality employment.
Policy vs. “Preparedness”
“Preparedness” is perhaps the most unexpected addition to the portfolio title. The term typically refers to societies’ ability to anticipate risks and build capacity to face unexpected events and disasters. Recently, the notion became popular in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Like natural disasters, epidemics should be regarded as cross-border threats deserving to be covered, for instance, by civil protection policy. But preparedness also carries an implicit reference to warfare. In US history, the preparedness movement campaigned for strengthening the army after World War I.
Against the backdrop of tectonic shifts in geopolitics, a discourse of securitisation remodels an increasing number of policy areas. This is not benign or purely rhetoric, for it contributes to transforming our understanding of social issues. These are no longer conceived as the result of the unequal distribution of resources and costs, the fruit of collective decisions taken in the past, rooted in largely endogenous historical and social dynamics, but as a question of crisis management, of the ability to respond to ‘external’ shocks that will strike us in ways that are as certain as they are unpredictable.
Crisis management and emergency politics are a political repertoire now well known to European leaders and bureaucrats. Tried and tested over the last fifteen years in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises, the migratory influx of 2015, Brexit, and then the pandemic, European crisis management has been a powerful driving force behind federalisation. In times of crisis, necessity justifies both welcome institutional innovations and dangerous democratic shortcuts.
But how effective, legitimate, and durable are the policies arising from crisis management? In fact, Covid-19 provides a good illustration of the contradiction in the preparedness discourse. None of the new tools deployed by the EU (e.g. short-time work schemes – SURE, or even Next Generation EU) have seriously addressed the deep problems within European healthcare systems in terms of insufficient funding, affordability, unequal territorial coverage, and labour shortages. If a new pandemic were to hit tomorrow, how many EU countries would be well “prepared”?
In a world shaped by climate change and political tensions, the EU should be working towards collective, institutionalised, and durable responses to structural transformations. This requires a deeper debate about values and an engagement with the thorny issue of redistribution and the very meaning of welfare. Fueling moral panic, shifting problems to individual responsibility, and engineering quick fixes will fall short.
Amandine Crespy is Professor for Political Science and European Studies at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Cevipol & Institut d'études européennes) and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges). She specialises in economic governance and social policy in the European Union.
Bastian Kenn is a researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Cevipol & Institut d'études européennes) with a focus on social policy, welfare and skills in the European Union.