SOCIAL EUROPE: Time to get political, time to get fiscal Time to talk politics, time to talk tax.

The current economic meltdown should give a new momentum to the fading dream of a Social Europe. Growing demand for state protection and the obvious need to coordinate national responses to the crisis should bring grist to the mill of the proponents of a genuine Social Europe, if the EU and EMU are to survive the current crisis. This should be sweet music to the ears of the French Left, who have long believed that the only way to achieve a truly Social Europe was through a more political Europe. At the launch of the euro, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin had hoped that the single currency could protect and promote the European Social Model by making it easier to “regulate global capitalism…through common European action, in a Europe fired by social-democratic ideals”[1].

Many however expressed doubts about European countries’ willingness or ability to impose a common political will on the markets, as Social and Labour legislation as well as taxation remain under control of national states, in the name of the subsidiarity principle. It remained to be seen whether in these fields “European Governments could choose to cooperate rather than compete with a view to agreeing on a social model worth defending”[2]. It is quite clear now that political and economic events put paid to that ambition. The fall from grace of most European social-democratic governments and their replacement by liberal or social-liberal administrations, in combination with EU enlargement, changed the socio-economic aim of the European Union.

Led by Tony Blair, most EU governments were no longer concerned with shaping globalisation, but with adapting their national Social models to its relentless force. Their business-driven agenda sought to “modernise” national social welfare systems through a mixture of competition, bench-marking, peer pressure and