Breathing life into Europe by addressing citizens’ concerns on jobs and inequality

If our politics and economics in this benighted country can only be revived , as our President in his unique way has been insisting, by the rediscovery of an ethical core, then how much more so is that true of the European project? That, in essence, was President Higgins' message on Wednesday to the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin. In Jacques Delors' words to "rekindle the ideal, breathe life and soul into it, that is the essential imperative if we intend to give shape to the Europe that we so dearly wish for".

“European integration,” Mr Higgins warns, “is now on a fragile path, torn between the requirements of fiscal adjustment and increasing social discontent.”

In discussing the new work of academics Robert and Edward Skidelsky (How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life ), Mr Higgins argues that what is needed is to confront the politically value-laden idea that the economic challenges we face are essentially technocratic challenges for which there is a straightforward non-ideologically based solution. He attacks the portrayal of ethics as "soft", in contrast to the "hard science" of economics. Economics is politics. "It is my conviction that the current disjunction between mainstream economic theory and ethical reasoning is one that undermines our intellectual capacity to adequately address the 'crisis of legitimation'."

“Has growth become an end rather than a means?” he asks. The term of a new commission and parliament provides an opportunity “not just to stimulate economic growth, but also to ground more firmly the strategy for growth in an ethical reflection on the social goods which we want this growth to deliver.”

“From the outside, the ‘European model’ is often identified, not just as an ‘economic model’, but as a way of life”, a way of life that was associated with the idea of a Social Europe. At the heart of that were the cohesion policies that were Delors’ political quid pro quo for the drive to complete the single market – now under threat “both for complex reasons of policy design, and because the current crisis has abruptly called into question the principle of solidarity between the various regions of the EU”.

“The very notion of a common good is one which Western modernity has rendered problematic,” he says.

Mr Higgins’ radical perception that the EU’s legitimacy crisis is rooted in the sidelining of the idea of a social Europe and the domination of discourse “by mainstream economics and its key assumption regarding the sustainability of self-regulating markets” will not sit comfortably with our more conservative politicians. But his essential argument that reconnecting the European project with citizens can only come from showing that the union can address citizens’ concerns like jobs and inequality is largely going unanswered from that quarter.