Maurizio Ferrera, "Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Apr 24, 2025
01:22:50
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Quick takeaways
The ideological struggle between national welfare states and supranational EU constructs reveals deep-rooted tensions impacting contemporary policymaking and integration within the EU.
Emerging crises like the Euro crisis and the pandemic prompted a transformative vision of the EU as a collective risk-sharing community, uniting member states towards common social objectives.
Deep dives
The Intersection of Ideology and European Integration
The relationship between ideology and European integration is foundational to understanding contemporary challenges within the EU. Ideologies have historically driven political developments, yet the clash between national welfare states and supranational EU constructs creates friction in policy formation. The struggle between opening up for European integration and the closing off of national interests highlights competing visions, where the welfare state promotes solidarity within nations while the EU fosters broader integration. This ideological conflict shifted dramatically with events such as the Euro crisis and Brexit, prompting a need for recalibrating political strategies within the EU to reconcile national and supranational objectives.
Challenges from Neoliberalism and Euroscepticism
The rise of neoliberalism in the aftermath of the 1970s economic crisis redefined the landscape of EU politics, introducing a frugal vision among Northern member states. This approach led to a conflict between Northern and Southern European nations, where Northern leaders favored austerity while Southern nations called for solidarity and support. The ideological battles intensified, manifesting through anti-European sentiments that questioned the legitimacy of EU authority and the role of national welfare systems. Ultimately, this environment of conflict generated a strong Eurosceptic movement that threatened the cohesion and future of the EU as a political entity.
Shifts in Political Visions During Crises
Emerging crises, such as the Euro crisis and the pandemic, catalyzed a critical rethinking of the EU's role regarding social protection and solidarity. Responding to these crises prompted political leaders to advocate for a vision of the EU as a collective risk-sharing community instead of merely a market-driven entity. The introduction of measures like the SURE initiative demonstrated a pivotal shift, reflecting an acknowledgement that the EU could support national welfare systems during emergencies. This transformative approach helped foster a new sense of unity among the member states, aligning diverse political groups towards common social objectives.
A Red-Green Vision for a Sustainable Future
The discourse surrounding climate change and social justice has given rise to the emergence of a red-green vision for Europe, integrating environmental sustainability with social solidarity. The urgency brought by the pandemic highlighted the necessity for a coordinated response to both economic and ecological challenges, leading to calls for a comprehensive strategy that links socio-economic recovery with climate action. New proposals reflect a desire to revive historical ideals of a cohesive welfare state while addressing contemporary issues of environmental degradation. This vision aspires not only to preserve social welfare systems but also to ensure a sustainable future by aligning the goals of social prosperity and ecological responsibility.
The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.
Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.
