Reclaiming the European Street

the lilliput press

dublin

Preface

This collection of some of my recent speeches covers a five-year period from 2016 to 2020, a tumultuous time that commenced with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States and concludes with the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic with all its personal, social, cultural and economic consequences.

These speeches I gave in that period were to European audiences drawn from the institutional matrix of the European Union. That matrix had, and still has, a specific form of discourse. I was conscious, however, of a more raucous, angry and, at times, disappointed discourse echoing from the European Street. It was from a public bearing not just a memory, but a retained set of experiences that were still being felt as a result of the responses made to the banking-sourced financial and economic disaster of 2008. The name given by so many in the European Street to that response was 'austerity'.

In so many of the speeches that follow, I sought to address the assumptions of the economic model that had brought us to both the crisis of 2008 and the response that had been made to it. The reception I received was encouraging in some settings. In a few places, a particular speech might draw a bad-tempered dismissal of my opinion and the sources I quoted as the words of mavericks who did not understand economics; that their decision or mine to critique or even to speak of 'neo-liberalism' was to use a cliché.

I believe that a new challenge with a global response has changed all that. What was not tolerated in the discourse is now part of the necessary response to COVID-19 - a source of policy for an activist and even entrepreneurial state, social protection and collective responses that now can allow for a discussion of the ecological, social and economic intermix that is unavoidable for policy.

The global loss of life and disruption to our daily lives resulting from COVID-19 is unprecedented in living memory. Indeed, it was only in 2019 that I held a seminar at Áras an Uachtaráin to mark the centenary of the last pandemic of similar magnitude, that of the so-called and misnamed Spanish flu, the address from which is included in this book.

From COVID-19 we have been reminded through tragedy and suffering that we have a shared, globalized vulnerability that is common to all humanity, one that knows no borders. We are learning how we must make urgent changes to improve resilience in a range of essential areas, such as work, healthcare and housing. We have been forced to recognize our dependence on our public-sector frontline workers, and the state's broader role in mitigating this crisis and saving lives.

COVID-19 has magnified the shortcomings of an insufficient, narrow, indeed failed and failing paradigm of economy with all its imbalances, inequities and injustices. Yet, responding to COVID-19 has proved, if ever proof were required, that government is needed, and can act decisively when the will is there. It has reminded us of how so many are only ever one wage payment away from hardship; how the self-employed or workers in the so-called 'gig' economy lack security and basic employment rights; how private tenants in under-regulated housing markets are at the mercy of their landlords; how many designated 'key workers', those providing essential services, are shamefully undervalued and underpaid.

How regrettable it is that it has taken a pandemic of this magnitude to demonstrate these stark facts so vividly. What a tragedy it is that it has required the pandemic's toll, the millions of lives cut short across the world, to establish, or rekindle, widespread appreciation of work in the public sphere and the importance in the economy of the public good - and, in terms of our shared future, the state's benign and transformative capacity. Averting our gaze from these grim truths is no longer an option.

There is now a widespread, recovered recognition across the streets of Europe, and indeed beyond, not only of the state's positive role in managing such crises, but of how it can play a deeper, entrepreneurial, transformative role in our lives for the better. The erosion of the state's role, the weakening of its institutions, and the undermining of its significance for over four decades has left a less just and more precarious society and economy, one ill-prepared for seismic shocks such as COVID-19.

The role of the state, thus, needs to be recovered, understood, accepted and defined anew, as well as the concept of sovereignty, in such a way that sovereignty is shared, can flow for the benefit of citizens beyond borders, can have a comparative and regional character; one that has the capacity to be exemplary for global economic systems.

Better ideas that will generate more inclusive, transformative and transparent policies are now required - ideas based on equality, universal public services, equity of access, sufficiency, sustainability. Better ideas are fortunately available for an alternative paradigm of sustainable social economy within ecological responsibility. We now have a rich contemporary discourse, to which scholars such as Ian Gough,1 Mariana Mazzucato,2 Sylvia Walby,3 Kate Raworth4 and others are contributing; scholars who advance progressive alternatives to our destructive, failed paradigm. The regular contributions to Social Europe from such scholars and so many others offer opportunities for a necessary discourse. Such scholarship indicates that we are neither at the end of history or of ideas, to reference the hubristic construct of Francis Fukuyama.5

Out of respect for those who have suffered greatly, those who have lost their lives, and indeed the bereaved families, we must not drift into some notion that we can recover what we had previously as a sufficient resolution, nor can we revert to the insecurity of where we were before, through mere adjustment of fiscal- and monetary-policy parameters. That would be so wholly insufficient to the task now at hand. A brighter horizon of opportunity must emerge, one which offers hope.

It is not only the case that the COVID-19 pandemic provides us with an opportunity to do things better; it also enables us to realize what is destructive of social cohesion and the environment. We must have the courage to examine critically the assumptions that brought us to this point. This crisis will pass eventually, but there will be other viruses and other crises. We cannot allow ourselves to be in the same vulnerable position again. On the most basic level, we should recover and strengthen instincts of moral courage we may have suppressed, which the lure of individualism may have driven out, displacing a sense of the collective, of shared solidarity, allowing the state's value and contribution to be derided and disregarded, so that a narrow agenda of accumulation could be pursued.

We have to ask, too, if that narrow furrow which we ploughed for our teaching of economics has brought us to sources of policy based on abstract ideological assumptions rather than those transparent or open to empirical verification, and, thus, to a culpable incompetence, inability, and a confused silence, rather than a wide understanding of economics and the policies that might flow from it. We must, from now surely, do things in a different, in a more responsible and integrated way.

As well as highlighting the unequivocal case for a new form of political economy based on ecological and social sustainability, the pandemic has also demonstrated, I suggest, the critical importance of having universal basic services that will protect us in the future, as Anna Coote and Andrew Percy6 have suggested, and of enabling people to have a sufficiency of what they need, as Ian Gough has contended.7

In these speeches, I have sought to place global solidarity at the core of our new paradigm if we are to avoid healthcare collapse in many developing countries, including in sub-Saharan Africa. COVID-19 has all but halted migration as countries across the globe close borders, severely restricting mobility. This has implications for those seeking asylum, fleeing persecution and conflict. Such individuals are particularly at risk to COVID-19 because they often have limited access to water, sanitation systems and health facilities. I have written that we must ensure that people forced to flee are included in preparation and response plans for COVID-19.8

In these pieces, I have felt it necessary to repeat some, as I see it, essential messages. For example, we require enhanced attempts at the global level to build a new international architecture, to reverse the policy of fragmentation and institutional damage that has, in recent years, affected the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.

In all of Europe, transformative actions are now required. Good work is underway. For example, analysis by Ireland's National Economic and Social Council (NESC) published in 2020 provides a framework within which the transition to a new political economy may be a just transition.9 This will require social dialogue and a deliberative process, as NESC suggests, which should be framed in the wider context of discussions on how we embed the...