Actividad

In this panel, Marcella Corsi, Judith Dellheim and Laura Horn will discuss the EuroMemorandum 2021 - we invite participants to join us for the discussion and bring in their own critiques and alternatives for a socio-ecological transformation in Europe.

The Coronavirus pandemic has led to more than 400,000 death in Europe in 2020, has opened up 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, we have witnessed the return of the state 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 were forthcoming. 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 as well as 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 a significant development, it remains doubtful whether the size of this initiative and the speed of its implementation will suffice to make a significant contribution to the recovery of the European economy.
Other important policy initiatives, and in particular the European Green Deal (EGD) as the lighthouse project of the new Commission, have meanwhile 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 for whether we will 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.