THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. Reforming Europe in a time of war

Social Europe: Retaining the status quo during the pandemic, avoiding new disparities 27 opment. The famous wealth gap between east and west was joined by a divergence between northern and south- ern European States, which was believed to already have been overcome.The European goal of cohesion therefore does not apply to the Member States as a whole. Even at an early stage of its existence, the European Economic Community (EEC) had set itself the goal of eliminating regional inequality. The aim of the six founding states is outlined in the preamble of the 1957 Treaty establishing the EEC in which they vowed to: ‘strengthen the unity of their economies and to ensure their harmonious de- velopment by reducing the differences existing between the various regions and the backwardness of the less favoured regions’. The regional socioeconomic situation is thus to the fore, yet shows major disparities across the continent and also within many Member States. Per capita income is considered to be a key indicator in measuring social inequality from a territorial perspec- tive.A case study that examined eight EU Member States (see Hacker, 2021: 12ff.) established the following in the year before the start of the pandemic: in terms of per capita income in purchasing power parities (PPP), the wealthiest regions in Europe in 2019 (with over 90 per- cent of EU GDP per capita) included the whole of Swe- den and Finland; all of southern and western Germany except for the administrative district of Lüneburg and the metropolitan regions of Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden in eastern Germany; northern and central Italy, except for Umbria; northeastern Spain, Madrid and the Balearic islands; southwestern and southeastern France, Île de France, Pays de la Loire and Alsace; and the capital re- gion of Bucharest. They all score above the European average, in some cases far above the average, such as Hamburg (195 percent), Upper Bavaria (173 percent), Île de France (177 percent), Stockholm (166 percent) or Bucharest (160 percent). The areas with below-average per capita income, albeit with widely varying fluctuations, are: the whole of Estonia; large swathes of eastern Germany; all of central France and many areas in northern France as well as Corsica; northwestern and southern Spain, the Canary Islands and the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla; all of southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily; and all regions outside the capital in Romania. Particlarly far from the European average are the Italian regions of Sicily (58 percent), Calabria (56 percent), Campania (61 percent) and Puglia (62 percent) and the three southern regions and two northern regions in Romania (between 44 and 64 percent). It is striking that the regions around the national capitals perform better than many regions in small towns and rural areas; also worth noting is the very distinct unequal distribution of wealth in Germany (east-west), Italy and Spain (north-south) and France (centre-pe- riphery). If the data on per capita income is considered over time and filtered for significant changes (+/- 10 percentage points), we see a sharp decline compared with the pre-crisis level of 2008 (see Table 1 ) in all but three regions in Spain and Italy but also in all but one region in Sweden and in more than half of all Finnish regions. The situation improved considerably in the years following the end of the euro crisis in 2015 for the two Scandinavian countries and for Italy and Spain, as the downward trend could be halted in most regions (see column 3). The remaining regions with declining GDP per capita between 2015 and 2019 are all regions that maintained high income levels even after the most recent decline: Bremen (144 percent), Hamburg (195 percent), Rheinhessen-Pfalz (110 percent), the Åland islands (116 percent), Stockholm (166 percent) and western Swe- den (115 percent). However, there were no significant improvements in the income situation of most of the regions considered here over these four years: except for the administrative district of Braunschweig (2019: 146 percent), this remains the case for six out of eight regions in Romania, which is catching up economically (see col- umn 1). Instead, stability prevails.A prime example of this stability can be seen in the 22 French regions, none of which display either striking upward or downward mo- bility in recent times. In both the longer and shorter term, Germany stands out: here also very few regions show drastic changes in per capita income (see column 2).