The State of the European Union. The European Parliament faces its most important elections yet

SOCIAL EUROPE – NAMING THE MYTH, PRESERVING THE MODEL AND TAKING CONCRETE ACTION 89 capital requirements for the banks, limited bo- nuses for bankers and greater transparency. Taxpayers should never again have to pick up the tab for an investment banking gamble gone wrong. Meanwhile, however, actual regulatory initiatives ran aground. A Europe-wide tax on financial transactions, for instance, was agreed in theory in 2013. It would have made particu- larly risky transactions unattractive by increasing their costs without putting too much pressure on real-world investment. However, the tax has been simply watered down more and more. Another idea that was not implemented was the separation of speculative investment bank- ing from the operations of commercial institu- tions. The investment banks could have been allowed to go bust if they had overstretched themselves, without risking customer deposits or disrupting the supply of credit. The EU has talked about a banking union for years, but not with the aim of making the financial markets more stable and more capable of handling risk. Instead, it has become a vehicle for the large banks in the euro economies to unload collective liability onto the eurozone countries and their taxpayers. As such, it has no preventive effect. Essentially, we ended up with tranquilisers and sticking plasters. Experts now assume that financial stability has actually declined compared to 2008. Regulation of the financial sector; the involvement of multinationals; an environmen- tally friendly, modernised infrastructure; and European harmonisation of tax rates must be put back onto a progressive European agenda. For the foreseeable future, the EU will re- main a construct that is not a nation, not a fed- eration but also not a Europe of native countries but rather a network of interlacing mechanisms of cooperation and compromise at multiple lev- els. The periodic admission of increasing num- bers of new members is part of the European success story, and has contributed both to eco- nomic catch-up development and to the politi- cal stability of the continent. In the face of the challenges outlined above, new rounds of ex- pansion threaten to render the community inca- pable of making decisions or taking control. Finally, forms of deepened cooperation have been developing since the Treaty of Rome, with the result that the EU now has a dense network of various degrees of cooperation. Other differ- entiated integration concepts for individual so- cial policy areas with widely differing member- ships and a different legal basis are possible. Three concrete social policy steps that can be implemented First step – European minimum standards, especially a poverty-proof minimum wage European minimum standards for unemploy- ment, basic social security, pensions and mini- mum wages would be one possible way of not losing sight of the goal of long-term conver- gence in the social area. Again, additional EU funding would be needed to support the pro- cess. While the structural difficulties inherent in European social policy must be overcome to establish minimum social standards, the pros- pects for success in achieving this would be greater than for full harmonisation of social policy, which may never happen. A first step could be to formulate European legislation on minimum wages. Different regu- lations already govern the minimum wage in 22 out of the 28 Member States 12 . Finland, Italy, Sweden, Cyprus, Denmark and Austria are the 12   https://www.boeckler.de/wsi-tarifarchiv_44064.htm