Social Europe: Belarus: toughness towards the regime, solidarity with the people

 As long as Russia, in particular, but also Ukraine, Kazakhstan, China, India and/or Brazil do not join, it cannot be assumed that the sanctions will lead to changes in Lukashenka’s behaviour. They represent a punishment for the regime and a signal of moral support for the opposition. They are right and important in view of the escalation Lukashenka is pursuing: his provocations require a firm response. But a continuous tightening of the sanctions screw will not change the balance of power, at least in the short term.[...]

The sanctions also have some undesirable side-effects. The disruption of air links makes it more difficult for ordinary people, including opposition members, to have contacts with foreign countries. Land routes to Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine were already largely closed for private citizens, under the pretext of Covid-19.[...]

As long as Lukashenka denies Belarusians the right to vote, Europe should give them the opportunity to vote with their feet. Nothing delegitimises a government more than when it loses its people. The exodus of specialists and skilled workers is also likely to have a greater and more lasting impact on the Belarusian economy than any other economic sanctions. At the same time, such an opportunity would offer protection to those living in constant fear of the security forces persecuting everybody who protests against Lukashenka.

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Social Europe: Tourism in Europe: a new model

Many skilled workers are leaving the industry, which risks emerging from the shutdown only to face the challenge of inadequate staffing. In France alone, nearly 100,000 employees are expected to be missing when business reopens. In the United Kingdom, one in ten hospitality workers are believed to have left in the last year. In countries, such as Spain, which rely extensively on tourism, temporary employment schemes have helped avert massive job destruction. [...]

EFFAT has asked EU member states to place hospitality tourism at the heart of their National Recovery and Resilience Programmes—to secure maximum jobs, support the sector and strive for swift, co-ordinated and safe travel. We call on the European Commission to assess these plans not just with an administrative mindset but with a strategic, 360-degree view, which recognises the recovery of tourism as functional to the revival of other sectors (including agriculture, food and beverages) and the economy at large.[...]

We must strive for a new model based on decent and secure employment, investment in human resources and reinvestment of profits, to ensure sustainable growth, visitor loyalty, diversification of the offer and a reduction of seasonality. We should promote proximity-based and domestic tourism—especially in countries, regions and cities where the sector upholds many jobs and businesses, offering a principal avenue for recovery, allied to lower environmental impact and support for communities and workers.

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Social Europe: The Catalan pardons: what do they mean?

 The talk of the town across Spanish media for the past week has been the pardoning of the Catalan political prisoners jailed following the unofficial referendum on independence in October 2017. Despite heavy opposition from Spain’s Supreme Court and the conservative opposition party, the Partido Popular (PP), the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, confirmed the pardons at Barcelona’s Liceu Theatre, striving to promote concord rather than revenge.[...]

Opposition to the pardons has come from two very different standpoints. The PP, the far-right Vox and the Spanish-nationalist Ciudadanos—as well as the Spanish Supreme Court— claim that the political prisoners should not have been pardoned: their actions were unconstitutional, they included ‘sedition’ and misuse of public funds, and the prisoners showed no signs of remorse.[....]

The exiled Junts leader and 130th president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, criticised the Spanish state for releasing the prisoners over three years late and said no one should be ‘sold’ that the pardon would solve the political problem. The party vice-president, Elsa Artadi, also affirmed this would not be a ‘turning point’ in the Catalan conflict, claiming the Spanish government was seeking to mask its own violations of rights against the independence movement. [...]

On Monday of last week, a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged that the prisoners be released and that Spain ‘consider dropping extradition proceedings against Catalan politicians living abroad’. An aggressive response followed from the judiciary in Spain, leading some to ask: are the pardons a step towards peace, or a red herring in the face of increasing international condemnation of the Spanish judiciary?

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Social Europe: Catalonia: a fraught dialogue begins

 The date for the dialogue between the president of the Generalitat and the prime minister of Spain was organised in June, following the pardons issued by Sánchez to former political prisoners. It symbolised the start of what both sides describe as a transition towards progressive deliberation between Spain and Catalonia. [...]

Aragonès has consistently championed two main objectives for the dialogue: amnesty for exiles and former political prisoners and another referendum for Catalan independence. Sánchez, referencing the Spanish constitution (a clause about Spain’s ‘indivisibility’) and consistent with his dialogue throughout this year, said ‘neither amnesty nor a referendum are possible’ and suggested the two sides need to talk about ‘closer issues’. [...]

Controversy was sparked the day before the dialogue when the Catalan president rejected proposed attendees for the meeting from Junts—the other half of the ruling Catalan coalition. Aragonès justified his decision by saying that the attendees should only consist of members of the government.

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Social Europe: Covid-19 in India—profits before people

 The incomprehensible decision to allow a major Hindu religious festival—the Mahakumbh Mela, held every 12 years—to be brought forward by a full year, on the advice of some astrologers, brought millions from across India to one small area along the Ganges River and contributed to ‘super-spreading’ the disease. Unbelievably, the last major ‘ritual bathing’ goes ahead today! [...]

India is home to the largest vaccine producer in the world and has several other companies capable of producing vaccines. Before the pandemic, 60 per cent of the vaccines used in the developing world for child immunisation were manufactured in India. [...]

Low uptake even among this vulnerable group could have resulted from concerns about the rapid regulatory approval granted to Covaxin, which had not completed Phase III trials. The Indian government also encouraged exports, partly to fulfil commitments by the Serum Institute of India to AstraZeneca and the global COVAX facility—partly to enhance its own standing among developing countries. [...]

The latest sign of this active encouragement of disaster capitalism by the Indian state is even more egregious. In the proposed opening up of vaccination to the 18-45 age group from May 1st, access is to be limited to private hospitals and clinics, and only on payment—with prices ranging from ₹1,200 to ₹2,400 (€13.25-€26.5) per dose! Obviously, the poor will be unable to afford the vaccines, and so the pandemic will rage on, the massive human suffering will continue and countless lives will be lost.

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Social Europe: The climate verdict of the German Constitutional Court

Legislators must therefore organise the path to zero emissions—which the court sees as required under constitutional and international law—in a way that is as forward-looking and freedom-friendly as possible. In doing so, each generation must do its fair share if there is to be a timely shift to zero fossil fuels—in sectors such as electricity, buildings, transport, cement, plastics and agriculture—and to greatly-reduced animal husbandry. In any event, following the ruling the Paris-agreement goal of keeping global heating within 1.5C above preindustrial times is on the way to becoming a constitutionally binding norm. 

The Federal Constitutional Court made it clear that legislators must not allow the entire remaining budget for greenhouse-gas emissions, as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be used up in the next few years as the German government planned more or less to do. Formally, the government has been obliged by the court to define the emissions-reduction targets for the period after 2030 more precisely. [...]

The Court of Justice of the European Union recently rejected a similar complaint. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), on the other hand—an institution of the Council of Europe—has relevant lawsuits pending. And it may also be that the complainants in our first climate lawsuit, just decided in Karlsruhe, will continue to the ECHR. Although we are very pleased with the ruling, it does not actually go far enough in terms of climate protection, given the above-mentioned criticism of the IPCC budget approach.

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Social Europe: Dealing with the right-wing populist challenge

 The 2018 Swedish election was a watershed. The incumbent left-wing government, led by the Social Democrats (SAP) in alliance with the Green party (MP) and supported by the left-socialists (V), won one more seat than the alliance of the traditional parties of the right—conservative Moderates (M), Liberals (L), Centre party (C) and Christian Democrats (KD)—but fell far short of a majority. The largest parties of the left and right, the SAP and M, had terrible elections, with the former receiving less than 30 per cent of the vote, its lowest vote share since 1911, and the latter less than 20 per cent. [...]

Scholars generally find that convergence between mainstream parties is associated with the rise of radical parties, because it waters down the profile of the former and gives voters looking for alternatives nowhere to turn. This dynamic is particularly pronounced when mainstream parties converge on positions far from that of a significant number of voters. This, of course, is precisely what happened in Sweden and elsewhere. [...]

By 2018 the failure of the dismissive strategy in Sweden was evident. After the election the conservative and Christian-democrat parties began openly shifting towards what might be called an ‘accommodative’ strategy, indicating they would consider co-operating with the SD to make possible the formation of a right-wing government in 2022. Perhaps more surprising, the Liberal party—which has a more ‘centrist’ profile than the M and KD and took, as noted above, the unprecedented step of breaking with its traditional allies after the 2018 election precisely to shut the SD out of power—recently voted to shift course too. Can an accommodative strategy succeed? [...]

Undercutting support for these parties over the long-term requires, accordingly, diminishing the salience of immigration. Over the past years in-migration in Sweden and other European countries has dropped but concerns about labour-market inclusion, integration, crime and ‘terrorism’ remain. Dealing forthrightly and effectively with these concerns would diminish their importance or salience to voters, enabling them to turn their attention to issues on which the SD, as with other populist parties, lack distinctive positions.

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Social Europe: Fewer Italians than Swedes hold anti-feminist views

Of the eight European countries included in the survey, which had 12,000 respondents, people in Italy were the least likely to blame feminism for men’s feelings of marginalisation and demonisation.

Meanwhile, in Sweden—long seen as a bastion of progressive gender-equality politics—more people (41 per cent) than anywhere else surveyed said they at least somewhat agreed with the statement: ‘It is feminism’s fault that some men feel at the margins of society and demonised.’

After Sweden, about 30 per cent of participants in Poland expressed anti-feminist views, followed by the United Kingdom (28 per cent), France (26 per cent), Hungary (22 per cent), Germany (19 per cent) and the Netherlands (15 per cent). Only 13 per cent of Italian respondents, however, expressed such views and 65 per cent said they either strongly or somewhat disagreed with them. [...]

According to the survey, the majority of respondents in Hungary hold negative views towards immigrants (60 per cent) and Muslim people (54 per cent). These numbers are about twice as high as they are in the UK, where 30 per cent hold such views of immigrants and 26 per cent of Muslims.

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Social Europe: A rail renaissance for Europe

 The momentum for a European rail renaissance is growing. A recent survey by the European Investment Bank revealed that 74 per cent of respondents intended to fly less frequently for environmental reasons, once restrictions were lifted, and 71 per cent planned to choose trains over planes for short-haul trips.

The rail system is not yet in shape, though. On average, rail accounts for only 8 per cent of passenger transport. The Achilles heel is cross-border rail: the European system is only a patchwork of national systems. Ask anyone who has ever tried to cross several European countries by train.[...]

EU funding makes up an important share of overall transport infrastructure funding and can be a lever for other sources. Yet too much goes into roads and airports, too little into rail. Much even of that is spent on mega-projects with exploding costs, long delays and sometimes only limited European value. The European Court of Auditors cautioned in 2018 that projects were often chosen on a political basis—not sound cost-benefit analysis—and lacked co-ordination across borders.

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Social Europe: Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty

 From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic centrality of fishing—which makes up less than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic, English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived. [...]

Even within global politics sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’, while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and interests of the population, not control.

The key feature of the ‘Westminster model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law. Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote; Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.[...]

Given all this, the European public can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central- and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous environment, in Europe and around the world.

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Social Europe: The rule of law: a simple phrase with exacting demands

 How is it then that two EU governments venture to prolong the anguish of some half a billion Europeans, harming their own populations, by refusing to subject themselves to rule-of-law requirements? This cannot be dismissed as the position of two unhinged autocrats, since their veto has significant popular support in these countries, including 57 per cent approval in Poland. [...]

This has been evident in several instances—from lack of concern with the Silvio Berlusconi media monopoly in Italy to France’s semi-permanent state of emergency, Malta’s and Slovakia’s complacency with political murder and the Spanish government’s response to the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Often, the EU is content with narrowly reducing the remit of the rule of law to a simple matter of legality—ignoring routine violations of core values, such as the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech or even the right to liberty and life itself.

Has the EU not thereby set itself up for the current crisis, supplying the ammunition for autocrats to try to absolve themselves from compliance with the rule of law? In turning a blind eye, the European Commission has harmed the union’s very normative foundation, endorsing the blatant abuse of power by the leaders of several of its member states.

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Social Europe: Not part of Europe anyway?

 The comparative study of welfare states has long stressed British distinctiveness. While the continued collective provision of goods, especially health (the NHS), certainly differentiates the United Kingdom from the United States, the UK (sometimes with the addition of Ireland) stands alone within Europe as representing a liberal world of welfare, distinct from both social-democratic and conservative worlds. Today, in terms of the extent of income inequality and poverty, the UK is mostly an outlier within western Europe, while the movement from passive to active labour-market policies has taken a particularly punitive form. [...]

While the self-image of the US is that it is classless compared to Europe, in fact no country of old Europe matches its class divide—not even Britain. Yet in many ways the British social structure is now less European than before. This is not only a question of poverty and inequality. The degradation (and denigration) of its traditional working class has gone furthest and its management has become the most Americanised.

In the past Italy, with its north-south divide, was the European country with the greatest regional differences. Now the growing gap between London and the south on the one hand and the northern cities on the other means that Britain resembles a US slash-and-burn pattern of economic growth. [...]

As some social historians have noticed, the origins of this divergence lie in the de-industrialisation of the 1980s. While deindustrialisation was a common process across the democratic welfare states of western Europe, in the UK it was interwoven with the Thatcherite political onslaught on the trade union movement. Far more so than elsewhere, in the UK deindustrialisation constituted an explicit undermining of social citizenship.

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Social Europe: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi

Applebaum is appalled by the ‘extreme left’ which does not wholeheartedly trust such well-known forces for good as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Every movement or actor critical of the status quo contributes to ‘polarisation’ and is an enemy of democracy; to not believe in American ideals is to be a ‘cynic’. In Applebaum’s idealised narrative of the US there are no illegal wars, poverty or corruption or flaws in its increasingly distorted capitalism. [...]

Applebaum’s only material explanation for the weakening of democracy is ‘social media’, where propaganda spreads and people are radicalised. True, such mechanisms are powerful and often underestimated. But the logic of Twitter and Facebook confirms Applebaum’s own way of seeing the world: the moral and emotional stories of our time are reinforced and these platforms become the perfect scapegoat to avoid thinking about other, underlying factors. [...]

Democracy is not just the right to vote. What matters in the long run is justice, and justice can only be achieved through changes in the material conditions of people’s lives. The real dividing line in politics cannot be between ‘evil’ and ‘good’, moral and immoral. What is needed to save democracy is to create new counterweights to today’s capitalism—which undermines it.

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Social Europe: Tax havens: patience is running out

 That’s no surprise. The OECD had certainly sought to legitimise its claim to speak for all by creating an ‘inclusive framework’ involving developing countries. However, of the 137 nations sitting around the negotiating table, only the G7—those home to the major multinationals and their lobbying teams—had a voice. As a result, the solutions advocated by the OECD would hardly limit financial flows to tax havens and the scarce resources recovered would mainly benefit rich countries. [...]

Estimating the loss of resources caused by corporate and individual tax abuse country by country, and the consequences for healthcare spending, this research is chilling. Globally, these diversions correspond to 9.2 per cent of health budgets, equivalent to the salaries of 34 million nurses. The impact is even more devastating in developing countries, where the shortfall represents 52.4 per cent of health spending. [...]

Of course, there is strong opposition within the EU itself, for one simple reason: if we readily point the finger at the small islands of the Caribbean, it is to make people forget that Europe has its own tax havens. The departing UK, together with its network of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies—often referred to as its ‘spider’s web’—is responsible for 29 per cent of the $245 billion the world loses to corporate tax abuse every year, according to The State of Tax Justice. And we have further examples inside the EU. Every year, for example, the Netherlands steals the equivalent of $10 billion from its EU neighbours. And it is not alone: Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta do the same.

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Social Europe: An effective corporation-tax system for the EU

The European social contract is broken. The largest companies are no longer contributing adequately to the provision of the public services and infrastructure they use. If the European project and single market are to survive and thrive, there has to be an effective EU taxation system. The small amounts paid in tax by some of the most profitable companies in the world are undermining citizens’ belief in government, in politicians and in Europe. [...]

The European Union has made feasible tax-reform proposals and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has developed corporate-tax reforms for the world, through its ‘base-erosion and profit-shifting’ process. Both are making progress but this is far too slow in terms of agreement among states. Europe needs fair taxation of companies now, when revenue is so urgently needed. [...]

It is not the rate of tax which is the issue but the actual tax paid. The EU should move from seeking ‘harmonised’ tax rates to co-ordinated rates within bands—say between 15 and 25 per cent. This would allow peripheral and poorer countries to set lower nominal rates if they wished. What is needed is to close gaps between nominal and effective rates and eliminate tax breaks. [...]

Europe should establish a well-funded European tax agency, ‘Eurotax’, with wide powers of investigation into tax evasion and avoidance by wealthy individuals, companies and criminals. Eurotax would implement tax policy, including the co-ordination of tax assessments and collection. With a single market, the EU needs one tax body to oversee taxation in this globalised world.

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Social Europe: China takes the climate stage

The online exchanges were, by all accounts, meatier than expected. But that was no preparation for what happened next. On September 22nd, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, made a surprise announcement: China would aim for carbon neutrality ahead of 2060. 

Xi has done big climate policy before. In November 2014 he appeared alongside the then US president, Barack Obama, to declare that China—despite its status as a developing country and although the climate problem was the historical responsibility of the west—would make commitments to curb its emissions from 2030. That declaration opened the door to the Paris Agreement. [...]

For the mass of the Chinese population, the threat of catastrophic flooding this summer was a far greater concern than fear of Islamism in Xinjiang or troublesome student protests in Hong Kong. Authoritarian environmentalism under the banner of ‘ecological civilisation’ is one of the watchwords of Xi’s regime.

Increasingly, climate is being inserted into a vision of great-power rivalry, rather than co-operation. In the US there are already voices calling for the establishment of green energy policies on the basis of a bipartisan national-security front against China.

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Social Europe: Poland’s abortion protests—democratic standards at stake

 The PiS has been in power for five years now. From the outset, these have been turbulent times, marked by diverse protests—by doctors, teachers, farmers, miners and parents of disabled children. The pandemic has only aggravated the public mood, adding to the frustration of the most affected groups, such as micro- and small entrepreneurs, as well as coronavirus-deniers, a movement also germinating in Poland.

Nevertheless, it’s the ideological war which seems to have agitated the society and petrified the political polarisation. The presidential election during the summer was won by Andrzej Duda, candidate of the United Right, by the skin of his teeth. The PiS retains a majority in the Sejm, the lower chamber, thanks only to its two junior coalition partners, while the Senat was lost to the opposition after the parliamentary elections in October 2019. Local governments and cities remain independent and very often in opposition to the central government. [...]

It was in this context that over the summer the LGBT community in Poland became the target of a defamation campaign, which sadly mobilised many and mainstreamed homophobic narratives. It seems the PiS wanted to deliver a pointed response, to prove its ideological ‘purity’—and completely overdid it, putting its own government at existential risk. In so doing, it again tested the boundaries of what remains a young Polish democracy.

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Social Europe: Minimum-wage directive: yes, but …

 On October 28th, the European Commission published its proposal for a directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union. It’s a watershed in the history of European social and economic integration: for the first time, the commission is initiating legislative action not only to ensure fair minimum wages but also to strengthen collective bargaining in Europe. [...]

Without a clear and common definition of wage adequacy at EU level, there is a clear danger that some member states will apply a very restrictive definition, which will fail to foster real improvement of minimum-wage levels. In its impact-assessment report, the commission has calculated that an increase of national minimum wages according to the double decency threshold—60 per cent of the median and 50 per cent of the average wage—would improve the wages of around 25 million workers in Europe. This estimate should be the decisive benchmark to measure whether or not the directive is a success: either it will genuinely contribute to the improvement of wages or it will remain a political symbol with no discernible impact. The inclusion of a more precise definition of adequate minimum wages in the legal provisions of the directive will thus be a core issue in the debates on its adoption. [...]

The proposed directive certainly has the potential to improve the wages of millions of Europe’s low-wage workers and strengthen their collective-bargaining position. To ensure its effectiveness however requires recognising there is much room for improvement, especially on more precise and binding criteria for adequate minimum wages and more practical tools for the promotion of collective bargaining.

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Social Europe: Covid-19 and a new social Europe

 Initially, there was a prudent consent towards stronger government involvement in policy responses to the rapid spread of the virus, albeit with reticence from the social partners, whose participation depends on the different traditions of social dialogue across Europe. But lockdown exit strategies have been marked by the absence of involvement by social partners and the wider civil society. [...]

The European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker attempted to rekindle Social Europe with the European Pillar of Social Rights agreed in 2017. These latter included, for example, fair working conditions and prevention of atypical and non-permanent work relationships. [...]

In the current ‘rebuilding’ dash, however, the commission has taken on a role of ‘funding entrepreneur’, implementing instruments such as Next Generation EU rather than acting as the guardian of common social and employment standards. This shift risks relegating the promising pillar of rights to a non-vital, dependent component of a larger economic-recovery project, led by market forces.

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Social Europe: Intersectionality: time for a rethink

 The term intersectionality was first used by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. But the intersectional approach is rooted in the social movements of the US in the 70s and 80s, as a critique of feminist and anti-racist struggles. The general experience of black women was that in feminist activism the interests of white women were at the forefront, whereas in anti-racist struggles men predominated.[...]

First, the current practice of the intersectional idea presumes that those who experience the most oppressions will understand best the nature of the oppressive system and pursue the least particularistic politics. But one cannot simply add (or multiply) such positions in the manner of an oppression Olympics—who has more points in the oppression race, in how many dimensions one is standing on the losing side of the Excel sheet. [...]

If the main issue becomes recognition of individual uniqueness or an identity mix, then not only is it an ad absurdum extension of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’—to only the personal is political. This also renders particular identities inscrutable—which means that groups so constituted can neither show solidarity with each other nor formulate a common goal. They can then fit in with the individualistic neoliberal spirit of the era, which delegitimises all systemic critique, for instance concerning its categories of class and gender. [...]

The focus should not be on ahistorical intersections of differences and repressed groups of identities, but on examining how distinctions and hierarchies are established between them. Identities should not be interpreted as some kind of inner, intimate, unquestionable substance, but as a personal experience of a relative position in a system of social relations.

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