European Union beyond TINA: Bringing Democratic Choice Back In

The starting point is that the era of 'policies without politics' at the EU level is over. The challenge is to create a union that survives and responds to the economic, societal and political turmoil that has resulted from the 2008 crisis of neoliberal order. This could be done by overcoming the post-democracy (Crouch 2004), namely by re-coupling the economic model with democratic politics (Streeck 2016, 22). Thus the analysis revolves not around the much discussed institutional reforms, but focuses on underlying socio-economic dynamics and their political consequences, namely remaking the EU as an arena of distributional conflict and thus of democratic politics, as opposed to a depoliticized repressive regime that the EU has become. The idea is to put the EU back on track of socio-economic right - left cleavage and away from the identity-based cleavage that pushes towards the disastrous pro-EU/ anti-EU conflict. The distributional question has been depoliticized at the nation-state level (the 'TINA' of consolidation state) and never transferred to the EU level, thus replaced in the political competition by the cosmpolitanism - nationalism cleavage (Kriesi 2012) that is thriving on the multiple crises of the EU and exacerbating them at the same time. In the paper I propose to discuss two radically different solutions that can be empirically observed in some of the proposals for EU reform, coming from France on one hand, and Poland on the other. Whereas France's Emmanuel Macron - with the ideas of corporate transaction and environmental taxes as well as some kind of EU budget and convergence towards common minimal salary - advocates redistribution at the European level, Polish decision-makers push for reinstating redistribution from capital to labour at the nation-state level (increased public spending, state and market-induced wage pressure, less insecure and low-paid jobs).