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Eyes wide open: Europe’s choices

Social contract

On the other hand, given the apparent success of hard-security state choices in other places, Europe also risks sinking if it fails to preserve the very values it claims are its heritage (even if it does occasionally neglect them). The values of democracy, liberality, and solidarity may appear a meek response to the enormity of the threat, and there is no shortage of news on the preventive virtues of the digital biopolitics implemented in China.

But it is rather the opposite: the exercise of authority whose legitimacy resides in the consent of the citizens, that is the brave, encompassing response – one that does not disconnect the means of combat against the pandemic from the means of future subsistence as a free and solidary community; even though it is a slower, more strenuous response.

More than ever, democracy must prevail over other forms of political power. We should fear the police state, governmentalised cybersurveillance and big data. We should double down on efforts towards a social contract that is of all and for all, of protection and solidarity, of community and of the common good, but without antagonism against fundamental individual liberties and guarantees.

The welfare state that is – rightly – called upon to rescue us in moments of crisis, must not then be subjected to further dilapidation and greater pressures on its diverse public services. On the contrary, welfare should be reinforced both in terms of material and human resources, as well as of the range and efficacy of their intervention. As such, we cannot stifle the need to provide adequate humanitarian support to all those refugees these days stranded, in helpless agony, along many European borders.

Welfare governance

We are living a historical moment and if the Covid-19 threat summons the history of Europe, it must be so that we today reject anachronistic choices all too fresh in the memory and persevere in past choices all too easily forgotten.

But to reject and to persevere is not enough. It is necessary still to enter the future and the change it will bring with feet firm on the ground. First of all, to deepen the common project of Europe. We cannot continue to accept the idea that social policies must remain circumscribed to the national sphere, as if a monetary union could survive without the existence of a common budget from which part of those expenses are shared.

To enter into the future, a Europe with a future, with something to give to the future, means to choose integrated policies, both national and European, of protection of employment rights, of income, of the reduction of inequalities among citizens and countries. In short, a welfare governance, with adequate budget provision to complement national budgets.

And this must mean an economic governance firmly committing not only to debt mutualisation, but also to terminating the ongoing protection provided by tax havens. These are a threat to confidence in the European project, depleting the national budgets. Tax competition between States enables the use of such tax-evading mechanisms by the wealthiest, which widens social and economic inequalities.

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Andre Barata Renato Miguel do Carmo | Radio Free (2020-04-06T09:40:56+00:00) Eyes wide open: Europe’s choices. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/04/06/eyes-wide-open-europes-choices/

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