Conclusions from Prof Marija Bartl’s presentation at the ISEL City Law School about her new book “Reimagining Prosperity – Toward a new Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU”
By Laura Vialon
On the 20th of March Marija Bartl, Professor of Law at the University of Amsterdam, came to City Law School to present her new book on prosperity in the EU which came out in November last year as open access, available on Cambridge Core. The book argues that a clear imaginary for a shared prosperity in the EU is needed (again), while at the same some efforts in that regard have been already made, attempting to leave neoliberalism behind. For showing that EU policy is becoming “thicker” again, Professor Bartl analysed a variety of important policy fields – consumption, technology, industrial policy and corporate policy.
Professor Bartl passionately and eloquently guided the audience through her three main theses that (1) democracies need prosperity. Prosperity for Bartl means neither economic growth or mass consumption, but a “credible route to material and social basis of a good life” for the current and future generations. We need to have trust in this better future, this is what holds societies together and this trust has been eroded from the 1990’s onwards and heavily crushed after the 2008 financial crisis. Prosperity has become more concentrated in the hands of the few and trust in democracy and its institutions dwindled.
(2) We see a turn to integration through identity as shared prosperity has been lost along the years; people and states are turning inwards, taking refuge in enemy imaginaries of in- and out-groups. Many lose focus of the actual policies and their outcomes, putting blame for crisis on out-groups or being content with only doing better than a perceived enemy.
(3) The EU has a special relation to prosperity – a shared path of improvement, this was always the driver of the whole European project. Social integration was the EU’s motor. While from Bartl’s view it is impossible for the EU to develop a tribal identity, it can only find back to its vision of shared prosperity and political economy.
The discussant, Prof. Nina Boeger and other staff members commenting on the book, viewed Bartl’s analysis with more nuance – the EU coming from a social market economy falling into neoliberalism and now finding slowly back to its roots. They thought that there had been more continuity in the EU’s approach over the years – neoliberalism did not bloom so much in the EU as that it grew around it and the EU had to react to it. With this reading, the “new” slow path back to shared prosperity as proposed by Bartl would not be as new, but a soothing continuation. Bartl however rebutted this evaluation masterfully, pointing to the difference in the prescriptive rules the EU enacted in the high times of neoliberalism. She named one powerful example [to be found in Chapter 3 in Bartl’s book]: The Unfair Terms Act from the 1970’s which created a real level playing field for consumers. This, she said, was not comparable to the regulation in the 1990’s with the Consumer Credit Directive where “thin” information only obligations were enacted and the actual underlying structural issues unaddressed.
Unfortunately, not all is achieved yet: The analysis in the chapters of Bartl’s book show a subtle turn to more systemic solutions. Sometimes however projects like the transformation of the corporation which started out as being about directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance’ got watered down considerably to ‘corporate sustainability due diligence’, also because the neoliberal paradigm was actually still strong enough within the European institutions [Chapter 6 in Bartl’s book]. There is also the Draghi Report of September 2024 which would point into the very wrong direction from Bartl’s point of view with more privatisation and a competitiveness focus. However, Bartl does not stop at analysing the current policies, but provides also concrete proposals to furthering or accompanying them. When it comes to the transformation of the corporation, she proposes to publicly support alternative forms of business enterprises – the ‘social economy’ – with tax benefits, privileged access to public procurement and the like.
To summarise, Bartl’s book presentation led to lively discussions and much agreement on her main points from all present. Her book is a timely reckoning with past mistakes by the EU and an encouragement to a joint return to old values in a new garment – because time has not stopped. Bartl urges the EU to actively create that vision of shared prosperity again. This means today investment in and democratic control of a broad range of technology is necessary, while making private law institutions more distributive to knit a thick and robust social net.
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