The politics of unemployment in Europe

Abstract

In outlining the priorities for the EU at the Florence Summit in June 1996 the President of the Commission Jacques Santer echoed the view of the late Froncois Mitterand and suggested that reducing unemployment had to become the major policy objective for the Union. Mitterand believed that enthusiasm for the principles of the EU was in decline and had to be regained. Reducing unemployment was therefore essential if the EU was to be of direct relevance to the people of the EU. However, there are major disagreements between the EU strategy for reducing unemployment and that being preferred by nation states. Even at the conference in Florence for example the President of the Commission failed to get agreement to use the projected underspend from agriculture for infrastructure projects, instead nation states preferred to use the funds to reduce their own national public sector deficits. The UK Prime Minister John Major, speaking to The Turning Back Group Conservatives on 3 February 1995 echoed the objectives the Governor of the Bank England. The latter ahd suggested that the EMU criteria which tended to concentrate on monetary policy had also to include unemployment as a condition for economic convergence. Whilst the levels of unemployment do represent a major policy challenge to Europe the central concern of this chapter is whether unemployment as an issue is likely to become a major political priority for Europe in the 1990s. It the unemployed are not to become a major social excluded category from European citizenship the objective of reducing unemployment must become a major policy objective for Europe.