The Coronavirus pandemic has resulted in more than 400,000 deaths in Europe in 2020, has led to a major economic crisis and has tragically exposed the serious flaws of the predominant economic model of neoliberal capitalism, both in the European Union and beyond. As a consequence of the Corona pandemic, the nation state has returned as the economic agent of last resort. This has produced ambivalent results. At least initially, EU member states and the Commission imposed temporary export restrictions for medical products. Thereafter, more coordinated responses emerged. Member States across the EU introduced large fiscal programmes to mitigate the economic and social impact of the deep economic contraction due to Covid-19. The Commission suspended the extremely restrictive fiscal and state aid rules, and the European Central Bank introduced sizeable liquidity injections to stabilize the banking system. What is more, the markedly asymmetrical economic impact of Covid-19 across EU member states led to the decision to finally introduce mutualised forms of European debt with the Next Generation EU Programme. While this is a significant development, it remains doubtful whether the size of this initiative and the speed of its implementation will be enough to make a significant contribution to the recovery of the European economy.
Meanwhile, other important policy initiatives, and in particular the European Green Deal (EGD) as the lighthouse project of the new Commission, have come under pressure. It is all too obvious that powerful interests are using the current economic crisis as a pretext for pushing back against more ambitious policies to combat climate change. It must be clear that, given the EU’s climate targets, the economic policy decisions taken in the course of the next few years will largely determine the trajectory of the European economy until the end of this decade. They will thus be decisive as to whether we move towards replacing our current socially and environmentally unsustainable modes of production and consumption, or become exposed to an ever more intensifying social and environmental crisis dynamics.
As already emphasized in last year’s EuroMemorandum, the Euromemo Group firmly believes that a comprehensive and radical programme for socio-ecological transformation (SET) is required to achieve the necessary transition to a sustainable future. In this year’s report, we focus on a number of dimensions that have too often remained sidelined in Green Deal discussions, but which merit particular attention.
The EuroMemorandum 2021 can be downloaded here.
More than 200 economists and social scientists from all over Europe and beyond have declared their support for the new EuroMemorandum (click here for the list of signatories).
As in previous years the full version and the summary will soon be available in other languages too.
If you wish to support the EuroMemorandum 2020 please fill in the declaration for support below and send it to:info@euromemo.eu.
This EuroMemorandum draws on discussions and papers presented at the 26th Workshop on Alternative Economic Policy in Europe, organised by the EuroMemo Group, from 08-25 September 2020 online.
