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Inequalities and Social Europe | 53
disintegration of the Union as a potential consequence of rising inequalities.
Some of the speakers even referred directly to Brexit. During the debate,
inequalities as well as possible solutions were presented from different angles,
reflecting the very divergent interpretations and understandings of a problem
that is rightfully regarded as highly complex. In the next sections, we partly
will rely on this debate as a guideline to provide an overview of how welfare,
well-being, and social inequalities in the European Union are perceived, and
of the presumed underlying causal relations between them and the relevant
policy interventions.
WHAT INEQUALITIES?
In the European Parliament debate about rising socio-economic inequalities,
every speaker acknowledged the existence of inequalities, while most MEPs
also referred to their rise. The figures they cited to illustrate their arguments,
however, also showed that these rely on diverging and in most cases pretty
vague definitions of inequalities. Many invoked that a small group of
Europeans control the majority of total wealth (which is a relative measure
of wealth inequalities and is not limited to the nation-state framework).
Others referred to the huge amount of people falling below the poverty
line (a relative and country-specific measure of income distribution, as the
threshold in at-risk-of-poverty statistics is defined as a share of the median
income at a national level).
There were mentions of exclusion and deprivation, which, in turn, are
absolute measures and based on a unified definition for the entire Union. In¬
work poverty, child poverty, and wage inequalities between men and women
were also frequently mentioned in the speeches. Most of the claims referred
to the EU as a whole, addressing inequality/poverty as a social phenomenon
that arises at the level of individual persons, regardless of their country of
residence. However, several MEPs also raised the issue of structural differences
between Member States in terms of the income, wealth, and opportunities
of citizens.
To find a common ground, we must first identify a shared understanding
of the state of welfare. However, to define inequalities meaningfully in an
international arena is far from straightforward, precisely because of the
problem of the comparability of national measures, especially considering
the tremendous heterogeneity of European countries (Dauderstadt and
Keltek 2011). For example, some scholars argue that although it is widely
claimed that inequality in Europe has increased significantly following the
crisis of 2008 (Bubbico and Freytag 2018), based on figures looking at the
entire, that is not in fact the case. Measurement issues are also a concern for
the advocates of a more ‘social’ Europe, that is why the Social Scoreboard for
the European Pillars of Social Rights (which we describe in more detail in