- From collective responsibilities towards a world of individuals: Roxana Mînzatu’s employment and social affairs portfolio has been rebranded.
The new European Commission will no longer include a commissioner for employment. Instead, if confirmed, Romanian Roxana Mînzatu will be responsible for “people, skills, and preparedness”. Far from being trivial, this strange title suggests a new vision based on the individualization and securitization of social issues.
If it is true that words have meaning in politics, the titles of European Commissioners’ portfolios are yardsticks for the European Zeitgeist. In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to call the migration portfolio „Protecting our European Way of Life” sparked controversy. This time around, employment and social affairs has been rebranded “people, skills, and preparedness” combining previously distinct domains of employment and education. What does that mean?
The title sketches a political vision away from collective responsibilities towards a world of disembedded individuals required to arm themselves in the face of looming threats and multidimensional insecurity. Merging education and employment under one umbrella further subjects society to the supposed needs of a self-steering economy.
Social Affairs vs. “people”
The inclusion of the term “people” is undoubtedly the most difficult to decipher because it seems so generic and seemingly naïve. It may suggest expanding the scope from workers to many other potential categories of people, such as children, students, pensioners, freelancers or people in poverty. Forging new categories such as “vulnerable people” in reference to mobility poverty or energy poverty could be fruitful in the face of new challenges may be fruitful.
That said, the disappearance of the “social” is telling. It further undermines the understanding that individuals are embedded in social relations (with employment being a social relation par excellence), that their constraints and opportunities are shaped by social stratification, and that the ultimate goal of policies is not only to solve problems, but to enhance the cohesion of the social fabric. Contrary to workers – embedded in the labour market – or citizens, involved in public life and political cultures, “people” are detached from any institutional or systemic basis. Not only does it sound terribly vague, it’s also absurd: do other Commissioners not work for the benefit of the “people”?
Employment vs. “skills”
For most Commission mandates, the traditional term of the portfolio was “employment”. Admittedly dry, employment refers to a policy area and a clear mission for decision makers, namely the idea that the economy should “employ” workers in a way that can generate prosperity but that is also morally acceptable, spelling out rights and responsibilities. In that sense, employment constitutes the nexus of the relations between capital and labour, employers and workers in a social market economy. In contrast, the dominant focus on education and skills tilts the balance towards individual the responsibility, “if you want a quality job, get yourself the skills the market requires!” This underpins the shifting conception of unemployment as an individual rather than collective problem.
Skills are, by no means, a new item on the European agenda. In the aftermath of the financial and sovereign debt crisis, skills emerged as a “crisis exit strategy”, and one of the few conservative politicians ever to take up the employment portfolio, Marianne Thyssen, already boasted skills in her portfolio title in 2014. Ever since, such discourse has become both more omnipresent and more contentious. Over the course of the past year, proclaimed by EU institutions as “the European Year of Skills”, unions insisted the problem wasn’t primarily a lack of skills but a lack of quality employment.
Policy vs. “preparedness”
“Preparedness” is perhaps the most unexpected addition to the portfolio title. The term typically refers to societies’ ability to anticipate risks and build capacity to face unexpected events and disasters. Recently, the notion became popular in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Like natural disasters, epidemics should be regarded as cross-border threats deserving to be covered, for instance, by civil protection policy. But preparedness also carries an implicit reference to warfare. In US history, the preparedness movement campaigned for strengthening the army after World War I.
Against the backdrop of tectonic shifts in geopolitics, a discourse of securitization remodels an increasing number of policy areas. This is not benign or purely rhetoric for it contributes to transform our understanding of social issues. These are no longer conceived as the result of the unequal distribution of resources and costs, the fruit of collective decisions taken in the past, rooted in largely endogenous historical and social dynamics, but as a question of crisis management, of the ability to respond to ‘external’ shocks that will strike us in ways that are as certain as they are unpredictable.
Crisis management and emergency politics is a political repertoire by now well known to European leaders and bureaucrats. Tried and tested over the last fifteen years in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises, the migratory influx of 2015, Brexit and then the pandemic, European crisis management has been a powerful driving force behind federalization. In times of crisis, necessity justifies both welcome institutional innovations and dangerous democratic shortcuts.
Shifting problems to individual responsibility will fall short
But how effective, legitimate and durable are the policies arising from crisis management? As a matter of fact, Covid-19 provides a good illustration for the contradiction of the preparedness discourse. None of the new tools deployed by the EU (e.g. the short-time work scheme SURE or even Next Generation EU) have seriously addressed European healthcare systems’ deep problems in terms of insufficient funding, affordability, unequal territorial coverage, and labour shortages. If a new pandemic hit tomorrow, how many EU countries would be well “prepared”?
In a world shaped by climate change and political tensions, the EU should be working towards collective, institutionalized, and durable responses to structural transformations. This requires a deeper debate about values, and an engagement with the thorny issue of redistribution and the very meaning of welfare. Fuelling moral panic, shifting problems to individual responsibility, and engineering quick fixes will fall short.
Amandine Crespy is Professor for Political Science and European Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. |
Bastian Kenn is a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles with a focus on EU social policy. |
This article is a slightly revised version of a blog post that first appeared on Social Europe. |
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