I will not comment on the result of the European elections, the press has already stepped in and repeated the matter. My “next day” is different, my observation post has a broader horizon, despite being very concerned about the political-party fragmentation and the growth of the radical right.
We are individuals who have been on board for a long time. We have already passed through slaves, serfs, subjects and citizens, on a long path that will take us to the universal republic and cosmopolitan citizenship.
We know that the European Union is not an immediate consumer good, that globalization exposes the weaknesses of European construction, that the community utopia seems to be an anachronism in a time of international terrorism, in short, that no one is willing to die for the European homeland.
And yet, between the traditional domesticity of the national state and the cosmopolitanism of the global society, we urgently need a secure anchorage to help us overcome the limitations of the nation-state and the constraints imposed by the world market.
It only makes sense to think of the European project on a global scale. This is the space of the “European utopia”, the common good that we need to reinvent at all costs. The “easiest” is apparently left behind, that is, the single market and the single currency. Now that we are approaching political union, we see national and regional differences growing and historical and cultural singularities becoming, at times, almost threatening.
This is the real challenge of the European project. On the one hand, the sovereign and patriotic threat, almost always opportunistic and always on the ride to the most recent difficulties. On the other hand, Europe's vulnerabilities in a multipolar world in the making. The paradox is evident: we are the largest democratic space in the world, the most advanced social model, the second economic power with 7% of the population and 22% of the GDP, and yet, in the multipolar world in formation, European geostrategy and geopolitics they are still “rudimentary”.
This paradox or duality of European interests and the inability to resolve it will continue to fuel the radical right in multiple forms. This is the Union's real dilemma for the time being and time is playing against it.
We are clearly sailing in sight. Nevertheless, there is an idea or “European spirit” that is slowly making its way in search of a new general interest, which is already contained in concepts such as “European citizenship”, “European social model”, “economic, social and territorial", "digital single market", "climate emergency", "services of general economic interest", "trans-European networks", "cross-border cooperation", "the protection of the common goods of humanity", "the prevention of global risks", “multilateral regulation”, among others.
Basically, we are looking for a new argument for a new general interest, a metalanguage and another political communication that are the foundation and cement of the political project implicitly contained in the republican ideals of the global commons.
At the precise moment when the multipolar world is trying to reconfigure around the USA, China and Russia, the European problem is called “West”, the end of the West, that is, a geopolitical change that subverts the rules of the liberal and international order calls into question the Atlantic alliance. The reason is known, current American policy rejects the multilateralism that is the foundation of European foreign policy.
What is needed, therefore, is more self-determination and an end to the feeling of European orphanhood and the imminence of an inevitable and resounding failure, as a result of growing anxiety about the future of the European Union, as promoted, in multiple forms, by that trilateral .
Having arrived here, between the immanence of the national framework and the transcendence of the European framework, we can then ask: is it possible to structure “a law without a State” that creates the minimum conditions for the emergence of a European civil society and, correlatively, the conditions of a society European policy?
It is true that in the Union we all adhere to the same principles of representative democracy, the rule of law and human rights, but this adhesion, which only very vaguely traces the contours of institutional patriotism, only founds a weak consensus without great practical value. Even more prosaically, we need to find, at all costs, a “fast track” to link, in a sustainable way, economic growth, employment and the European social model.
However, with such high abstention rates, we must ask: what about the affective and effective adherence by European citizens to European ideals, when will it happen?
In the current context, everything suggests, the principle of legality serves itself cold. Indeed, Europe cannot claim to legislate on everything, to invade all areas of action, under penalty of its omnipresence becoming stifling and demobilizing. The Union has an obsessive presence that is aggravated by the relevance given to it by the public media space. Your obsessive presence is counterproductive.
The Union must choose what is essential, opt for mutual recognition, reference harmonization or minimum harmonisation, never uniform regulation. Well, public spaces, institutional and media, because of their vertigo, their artificiality, are context and vehicle, they are more imposture than culture, more imposition than acculturation.
The European political society and a European public space would have much to gain from organizing, initially, not so much through the mass media, but through the establishment of a communication network between national and even regional parliaments, crowned by the Parliament. European as a body of synthesis (a parliamentary network).
At a second level, procedures would be put in place to associate sectoral interests with decision-making processes, through a parliamentaryization of interest groups, in accordance with the principle of publicity (this can be done through the Economic and Social Council or a 2nd parliamentary chamber) .
On a third level, other actors could organize information and interaction platforms: universities, churches, unions, NGOs, local development associations, schools, etc. From here, new accredited mediators would emerge and the role of the press would then be totally reinvented.
Well, this is precisely where we are. Globalization and the most radical sovereign movements are putting pressure, up and down, on the Nation and the Nation-State. The founding social pact says little to the Nation. We are witnessing the weakening of the State, the dualization of societies, the increase in social exclusion, the social and cultural disintegration of regions, territories that are left unoccupied and abandoned populations.
The return of popular nationalism hostile to globalism looms large in all these territories. The nation, deprived of transcendence and unifying discourse, lends itself to being appropriated by particular social groups and degrades itself into soft ideology. At the same time, the lack of leaders deprives the Nation and the State of collective historical action in the right direction.
It is May 2019. The European project is sailing in sight, perhaps in the right direction, but still far from offering a new synthesis, a reference image for a new beginning. You don't believe in and don't provide enough symbolic capital. The individual bond of citizenship is degraded, the old quasi-tribal community ties based on identity, patriotism and nationalism return. The beginning of the XNUMXst century marks the refusal of the language of history, now everything is much less predictable.
The national synthesis is no longer made by reference to time, progress is no longer measured on the axis of time. The new generations, infiltrated by cyberculture, put everything or almost everything back to zero. The ideology of Europe must be all this: an idea of the future, a new beginning, a symbolic ballast, a bond of citizenship, an image of reference, all times at the same time. That is how political legitimation is.
Final Notes
The concept of Social Europe and the “European social model”, with all the historical-political burden that it represents and encompasses, not only sums up well all the “everyday wars” already underway, but will also be the ultimate litmus test of future democracy European Union within the framework of a Europe of nation-states.
We are facing an open struggle between the old social order, contained within the limits of the former welfare state, and the new social order, of a transnational nature and scope, which has not yet been able to take care of its social policy model. Therefore, the pertinent question in the framework of a Social Europe of Nation-States is the following:
How to make the transition from the old order, based on job security and work for others, to the new social order, based on the enhancement of employability conditions, on active social protection oriented towards labor markets and initiative, on innovation social and new forms of collective action, as well as in the development of individual
In other words, we are moving the essentials of social policy upstream of the “social problem”, reducing its downstream opportunity cost in dubious labor market management measures and investing more in market structuring measures, companies and of the enterprises.
In social matters, and in terms of economic integration, what could be called the "paradox of the integration of the labor factor" occurs: the further the process of economic integration progresses, the greater the burden of adjustment effort that falls on the labor factor and all the public policies that revolve around it; as a result, the intensity of social harmonization policies is highly variable, as is the effectiveness of a social convergence policy.
The paradox of the integration of the labor factor mentioned above is a good illustration of why the European institutions are themselves reticent to a social regulation made at the European level, fearing that this economic space will be victim of “an excess of European social space ”, that is, that social diversity can be funneled into the European social space, jeopardizing European competitiveness vis-à-vis external competition.
In fact, if we reduce the labor factor to a simple endogenous variable of economic adjustment, that is, if social policy is converted into a cyclical macroeconomic policy instrument, it will be very difficult for the conditions for social stability and the formation of a social space to be met. common, as it is to be expected the cross-rebound of external effects, positive and negative, of adjustment measures on areas that are already socially consolidated, and even some social regression or setback is not surprising.
The austerity regimes of the Troika's time are proof of what we are saying. In a national and regional context marked by numerous vulnerable socio-business situations, European social policy options are very sensitive, as a high social gauge can harm, in the short term, the most fragile small and medium enterprises and a minimum gauge can do to stagnate social policy itself and the positive discrimination that it already registers. It is now better to understand the “suspicious territory” in which social policy and the social model of our near future move.
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