The building/reinforcing of the European Social Model as a concrete way to correct the phenomenon of the increasing social precarity and incertainity

Marco Ricceri (Eurispes, General Secretary; Rome) [BIO]

Email: riccerimarco@hotmail.com

 

ABSTRACT:

On the basis of common principles – social justice, economic progress and environmental substainibility, solidarity, democracy, human dignity- all the European States have built – and they keep to maintain – a precise set of institutions, laws, structures to support the social promotion and the protection of the weakest part of their own communities. In parallel, the civil society, especially in her organized collective bodies, to start from the professional and voluntary associations, participates and continuously strengthens this kind of public initiative. All this it deals with a common feeling, a collective effort – that is also supported by a great financial effort, as it shows the high rate of Gross National Product that every community engage to this aim – which has characterized in the past and still now characterizes the life of the European states, also in the projects and policies for the future. This situation is summed up by the following expression: “European Social Model”.

The European Social Model can be defined as a complex system of values, projects, policies, institutions, experiences that have joined in past, and still join today, all the states of Europe, also in the presence of different national paradigms. For this real sharing, the European Social Model is not only a planning idea, an intellectual construction, a symbolic reference. It is, instead, a concrete, essential, constitutive element of the European identity, of his democracy, his economic development, his civil, human and cultural progress; not a static but a dynamic element, because tied up on the dynamism of the democratic, social, economic, environmental processes. Specifically focused on the building of the social market economy, the ESM is an essential tool to correct the free market economy and its inequalities effects and, more, to affirm the primacy of the politics for the progress of the society.

The commitment to the reinforcement and qualification of the European Social Model, to its reform and modernization, is the best way to find proper solutions even to the increasing phenomena of the social precarity and uncertainty. How to proceed in this direction? First, assuming as reference the rapid and intense structural changes of our societies caused by the globalisation processes and, second, trying to insert in such processes the values and the contitutives elements of the European Social Model, up to produce, as result, the organisation of globalisation processes oriented to the respect of the social and environmental sustainability. Starting from the European experience, the real theoretical and political challenge is to define the terms and the actions of a global social policy, for facing in unitary way the problems of wealth production and distribution as complementary aspects of the development process, for connecting the market regulation with the social regulation.