Integrating Europe Through Public Spending

Among the founding paradigms of the European Union is that of the so-called "integration through law" has more than anyone captured the essence of the European project. The centrality of law as an object and at the same time agent of the integration process explains the self-representation of the EU as a "new kind of legal order" even before its self-identification as a new political subject. Even in language, after all, the EU was first and foremost a legal experience: many developments in the evolutionary process of the EU have often been presented as a technical necessity rather than as a political choice. At least initially, issues relating to structural disparities between states and inequities within states did not determine the sense of identity of the Union. In other words, the EU was not conceived with an explicit distributive mandate; or rather, it was the market that was supposed to distribute wealth and induce a progressive convergence in the economic and social structures of the member states. With the exception of cohesion policy, the Union's intervention in the economy was traditionally expressed in terms of regulation rather than spending.

Perhaps the most eloquent example of how the regulatory technique has prevailed in all areas of the integration process, including those that are ill-suited to the supposed ideological neutrality of the instrument, is the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The well-known asymmetric nature of the EMU, in which the monetary union is not accompanied by a fiscal union, reflects the hypertrophic production of numerical rules and parameters, on the one hand, and the absence of a central intervention mechanism (fully redistributive and supranational, rather than intergovernmental like the ESM) with macroeconomic stabilization effects, on the other.

Considering the framework outlined, Next Generation EU (NGEU), the European investment plan financed by the issuance of common debt, although temporary, stands as a "critical juncture" capable of generating transformative effects on the European economic constitution because it has complemented the traditional paradigm of "integration through law" with a new model of integration through public spending ("integration through money"). The indebtedness of the Union for purposes of equalization, pursued through the legal instruments of cohesion policy, marks a twist in the organization of the Union's competences which could persist after at the end of NGEU. Social cohesion could therefore become the driving force for a veritable EU economic policy, somehow paying remedy to the genetic incompleteness of the EMU.

Even more significant is the influence that NGEU could exert on European social citizenship, detaching the conceptualization of the latter from the discourse on free circulation within which it has been primarily framed and disassociating it from exclusionary and libertarian traits of which it has often been accused. The spending financed by NGEU could inaugurate a more incisive cohesion policy for the benefit of citizens left on the margins of the European project. Furthermore, contributions to the EU budget, which will indirectly fall on the citizens of the Member States required to repay the debt contracted for NGEU, could give a more robust regulatory foundation to the bland duty of solidarity between European peoples listed in the Treaties.
The innovative scope of NGEU perhaps lies precisely in the new that is yet to be born.