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Uncertainty and unease surround both Europe’s current predicament and future prospects. Be it national governments devoid of European solidarity, the self-contained Brussels bureaucracy or fear of another economic recession, the status quo in Europe contains much to be concerned about. In particular, the rise of the far right casts a shadow over contemporary Europe from Poland and Hungary to France and Italy. The leitmotif of this article is social Europe, i.e. Europe with commitment to “good society”, conducive to human well-being. I seek to envision a reconstruction to the current maladies. Before taking up the main task of the article, I write about the two key developments that have lead to the decline of social Europe. I begin with the Maastricht Treaty which had a profound impact on the rules of economic governance in Europe, as well as contained a vision of competitive and individualistic social life. Thereafter, I probe into the divisive consequences that austerity has had in Europe in the 2010s. Lastly, I focus on a path forward and inquire into social thought that aims at a reconstruction of European politics and economy in order to arrive at a social Europe. I shall do this by engaging with the recent ‘Manifesto for the democratization of Europe’ (Boujou et al., 2019), an initiative led by prominent French intellectuals that seeks to save Europe from its current troubled state.

Europe's treatment of refugees provides growing evidence that the continent is losing its moral compass, and that Europe is increasingly callous – so-called Fortress Europe. Brute force, deterrence, including pushbacks and barbed wire fences have become the instruments with which European governments have responded to irregular migration and refugees. This article seeks to bring to the fore the contradiction between the EU's self-proclaimed values — human dignity and human rights — and the callous policies of nation states and the EU's migration regime. My main focus lies on the calamitous conditions of refugees and the thousands of deaths that have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea since 2015, the year that refugees fleeing Syria's civil war started making their way to Europe. Importantly, the Mediterranean is the deadliest border in the world; it is the veritable global epicenter of lethal border crossings. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, I undertake a humanist critique of the European status quo. The EU, as a force for a better, more livable world, is on its way to becoming irrelevant, something that was evident well before the Covid-19 pandemic. This is what is principally at stake today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe, the old world, was the epicentre of Covid-19 after its initial emergence and incubation in China. Having resulted in vast human misery, the pandemic raises necessary questions about the future direction of Europe - what kind of Europe will emerge from the devastation - and, moreover, will the eruption of the European societies be used as an opportunity for changing, i.e. recalibrating Europe? The overarching concern of this article is social Europe, i.e. Europe with a commitment to 'good society', conducive to human wellbeing. The article analyses the response to the virus in Europe and by the European Union. It contextualizes the response within the framework laid by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and the handling of the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. Thereafter, I turn to the 'Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe' by leading French social thinkers from 2018, in order to discuss the reconstruction of the eurozone governance. I envision an alternative role for the European Central Bank: instead of continuing with the unsuccessful Quantitative Easing (QE) strategy, the ECB should use its capacity to pay people of Europe a temporal universal basic income, which could later be made permanent. Both the manifesto and universal basic income stand in tension to the status quo, yet remain firmly on the horizon of the possible - and necessary to restore human well-being to the guiding principles of the European political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]