Politics and Social Visions Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.

Politics and Social Visions explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.

Maurizio Ferrera, Professor of Political Science, University of Milan

Maurizio Ferrera is Professor of Political Science at the University of Milan and President of the Network for the Advancement of Political and Social Sciences (NASP). His research focuses on comparative welfare states, European Integration, and empirical political theory. He is the author of The Boundaries of Welfare (OUP, 2005), and in 2014 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for a project on 'Reconciling Economic and Social Europe'. He is currently one of the three PIs on an ERC Synergy project 'Sovereignty, Identity, and Solidarity in the EU post 2008'. In 2021 he was awarded the Mattei Dogan IPSA prize for High Achievement in Political Science.