The commission is building up a stockpile of medical equipment, which would be distributed where it is most needed through the EU’s RescEU civil protection mechanism. The ‘Brussels bureaucracy’, much derided for its infamous red tape and cumbersome decision-making, is providing the competent, cool and nimble leadership so invaluable in a crisis. [...]
In a yet more uncharacteristic move, the commission has introduced an unemployment reinsurance scheme—Support to Mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE)—which is to be financed through bonds issued by the EU itself. The scheme is to supply aid to areas that have been hit hardest, by providing reinsurance to state-financed income-support programmes for workers affected by the crisis.
In a yet more uncharacteristic move, the commission has introduced an unemployment reinsurance scheme—Support to Mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE)—which is to be financed through bonds issued by the EU itself. The scheme is to supply aid to areas that have been hit hardest, by providing reinsurance to state-financed income-support programmes for workers affected by the crisis.
These developments are uncharacteristic as they go against the reputation that the core EU bodies have acquired as being in thrall to neoliberal globalisation—a reputation developed in the course of at least two decades of ‘structural adjustment’ policies of labour-market deregulation and pressures to cut public expenditure. Such policies had been adopted for the sake of increasing the union’s ‘competitiveness’ in the global economy, since member states vouched, in the Lisbon strategy of 2000 (and its subsequent iterations), to make Europe ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’. [...]
This not only goes beyond the idea of ensuring a level playing-field among the member states, which has long been the raison d’être of the EU governing institutions. It also surpasses the minimalist idea of social justice as a matter of wealth distribution from the wealthy to the poor. It is signalling a move towards something more ambitious—building a robust public sector at the heart of a revived welfare state. This time, a trans-European one.
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This not only goes beyond the idea of ensuring a level playing-field among the member states, which has long been the raison d’être of the EU governing institutions. It also surpasses the minimalist idea of social justice as a matter of wealth distribution from the wealthy to the poor. It is signalling a move towards something more ambitious—building a robust public sector at the heart of a revived welfare state. This time, a trans-European one.
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