Former Italian Prime minister Enrico Letta visted Malta recently as part of a mission launched by the European Commission to review how the single European market could be strengthened and expanded. The idea is to promote new projects that would really enable commercial and economic exchanges across the European continent to happen in just one space where uniform rules are in force.
The measures required would have to be economically doable and applicable to all concerned. At the same time they would need to be acceptable to communities which would have over centuries gotten used to the workings of different economic and social mechanisms.
On the basis of such measures, Europe would be able to remain successfully competitive in economic terms with the US and China. But such measures would need to be implemented with speed for the rate of technological globalisation is acellerating.
As of now, unless a crisis loomed, European economic unification has been carried out step by step. Doubts have arisen as to whether the process has become way too slow for Europe to be able to cope with emerging challenges.
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MEPS
Long ago it became the fashion for people who know practically nothing about the subject to rubbish what MEPs do because in their view, they have opted for an easy and comfortable run after money which they get paid in buckets with skimpy results.
Now I am one of those who in the past have criticised the work of the European Parliament, and still do. I consider its role to be too inflated -- in the sense that too much of the Parliament’s time is taken up with discussions that have little bearing on the real competences of the Parliament and which easily classify as “academic”. I believe that debates should be held in a manner that is much better related to the Parliament’s terms of reference attached.
However this has nothing to do with how MEPs (to be sure, I’m referring here to the assiduous members) spend their time. Weekly travel, the assignmnts one has to cover, the communications that need to be maintained between Brussels, Strasbourg and the country that MEPs represent all lead up to tremendous personal pressures on those who take up this line of activity.
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SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
A “Marxist” concept that I always found fascinating discusses so-called economic and social reproduction. In the activities carried out in every human community that exists as a union between people living together, an essential aim is that of sustaining and renewing the material prosperity and the social relations on which collective human life depends. In this way, the society is carried forward along decades and centuries.
It is a biological model, resembling how organic life is transmitted from generation to generation. Similarly, in the way by which social classes in a community contest each other in order to benefit from greater access to power and to material wealth, there is a clear resemblance to how animal species acquire and lose their dominance on the environment and other species.
At present I still see this “biological” model as extremely useful but I disagree that it can lead to some forecast regarding how the ongoing economic and social competition in human dealings could come to a climax.