We must make the most of the opportunities that are presented by the European Year of Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion.

European institutions nominate each year as the ‘European Year of …’. The most recent examples are the ‘European Year of Intercultural Dialogue’ (2008) and the ‘European Year of Creativity and Innovation’ (2009). The extent to which such European years serve a purpose is questionable – they typically involve no new funding for initiatives, and often have very low public visibility. Unlike those of previous years, however, the theme chosen for 2010 is extremely topical given recent events: it will be the ‘European Year of Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion’. At the moment 79 million people inside the EU are estimated to be living in poverty, despite being within the world’s richest economic area; while outside the EU almost half the world population lives on less than €2 a day.

Moreover, there will be concrete opportunities to influence European Union policy in the area over the coming months – one of the first tasks of the newly selected European Commission will be to propose the new budget and objectives of the European Union for the coming period. Now that the Lisbon Treaty has come into force, the elected European Parliament will be co-decider with the European Council (of the member states) about the short- and long-term budgets of the Union, so if the opportunity is taken there could be greater democratic discussion over its budgetary priorities.

Of critical interest in the name of the year is the conjunction of ‘Combating Poverty’ and ‘Social Exclusion’. This to some extent allows for the two things to be understood together – that poverty should be seen as a form of social exclusion. This makes poverty into a question of democracy: to be poor is not only to be materially poor and thereby, to a greater or lesser extent, to lack the basic means for living, but also to lack the ability to participate in society as an equal member. Economic living standards and the means of participating in society have to be thought of together. This immediately poses the questions ‘what society?’ and ‘what means of participation?’

Within the European space the situation here is fractured, rendered incoherent by the intransigence of nation states in certain overlapping domains. Although the ‘economic’ community of the European Union is unified to a certain extent – through the possibility of largely unrestricted capital flows, a common market and the existence of a common currency in some member states – the free movement of peoples between these countries is much more restricted than the movement of capital, and the ability to participate in society changes dramatically for people as they move through member states. As long as the nation state is seen as the primary locus of democratic legitimacy it will be difficult to say that there is a common European society.

Policy decisions regarding combating unemployment and economic inequalities are still largely made at nation state level, with the exception of decisions over European Structural Funds and Cohesion, which remain sensitive political tools. Yet the situation inside the EU is becoming sufficiently dramatic that the case for greater community solidarity in the area would be irresistible if only the arguments were made. At the moment it is the governments that have some of the most difficult problems with poverty that are cutting back most on social spending. The Latvian government, for example, is spending less than 10 per cent of its annual budget on social issues, as a result of the recent IMF bailout that forced it to cut its government spending; whilst the Swedish government spends more than 30 per cent of its annual budget on social issues. Other ‘rich’ member states seem to be failing in their obligations: the UK and Ireland, for example, have the highest levels of child poverty in the EU. Over the coming months transnational campaigns that highlight the inequalities that exist within the EU area are sorely needed.

This poses the question of what groups and organisations exist to run such campaigns, to which the depressing answer is that political parties, which should be the means of participation and representation for all sectors of society, are in large part still handcuffed by their national structures. For the moment there are no organisations but those of civil society to make these arguments. Such campaigns are more likely to be successful if they deploy arguments of democracy, autonomy and equality: we must rediscover and reinvent these vocabularies.

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