The obsession to 'complete the single market'

[Celerity]

Multinationals are pushing to open new frontiers in the single market with a deregulatory agenda.

https://socialeurope.eu/completing-the-single-market-a-dangerous-obsession


Smog over Naples—the European Round Table opposes municipal initiatives for zero-emissions zones

The pandemic has shown just how important public institutions are for societal wellbeing—particularly properly-funded healthcare and a welfare state that protects against economic shocks and hardship. It is no longer accepted, as over the last three decades in Europe, that social and environmental challenges should be left to markets and giant corporations; rather, governments must take a powerful leadership role in securing social and environmental outcomes.

Yet announcing the ‘death of neoliberalism’ would be premature: more than just a set of ideas born among ‘Chicago school’ economists it has become deeply embedded in Europe’s political establishment, firmly anchored in European Union treaties and key legislation. Powerful forces, notably the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) corporate lobby, not only continue to defend neoliberal doctrines but seek to tighten their stranglehold on European societies.

A key instance is the obsession with ‘completing the single market’, launched in 1993 and allowing the unrestricted movement of goods and services across the EU member states. The European Commission (notably its DG GROW department) constantly seeks to expand single-market rules to all areas of society while tightening their enforcement. The logical endpoint would be a Europe where even water, healthcare and education would be opened up for privatisation and corporate expansion, while public authorities enjoyed ever-decreasing room to regulate the economy in the public interest.

Services directive

Exemplary is the ‘reform of services notification procedure’ which the commission proposed in 2017. Its innocuous-sounding name belied major potential social impacts. It would have enforced much more strongly the 2006 directive on services in the internal market (the ‘Bolkestein directive’), which had aimed at big-bang marketisation, outlawing obstacles to ‘freedom of establishment’ and to the ‘freedom to provide services’ across the EU.

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