Mamma Europa. Una nuova unione dopo crisi e scandali Edited by Elisabetta Gualmini. Bologna, Società editrice il Mulino, 2023, 224 pp., 18 € paper.

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the most disruptive events of recent times and its impact has been significant across the world, including in European countries. In the latter, the pandemic generated relevant changes in the social and political culture of Europe, leading the EU to embrace new strategies, paradigms and courses of action. Unfortunately, the literature dedicated to the more recent developments of European integration could not sufficiently address the challenges related to such an unexpected event. The effects of the pandemic on the evolution of the integration process have often been analysed isolating single cases or subjects from the broader context of this topic, without seizing the complexity of these phenomena. This makes the audience unaware of the magnitude of the recent dynamics underpinning the evolution of the EU. Elisabetta Gualmini has provided the audience with a big picture of the latest developments of the EU through the publication of a volume entitled ‘Mamma Europa. Una nuova unione dopo crisi e scandali’. The multidisciplinary approach adopted by the author is what distinguishes this work from the existing literature. Gualmini, starting from a brief historical analysis of the main guidelines that have characterised the integration process since its early stages, scrutinises the recent developments of the EU combining elements belonging to various disciplines, including sociology, economics and political science. The argument put forward by Gualmini is that the pandemic has generated a clear departure of the EU from its original precepts, which were mainly based on market integration regulated by a rigidly conservative logic and devoid of solid social grounding; the dramatic social impact of the pandemic made the conservative approach to integration largely unpopular, leading the EU to provide the European project with a new social architecture (p. 13). The EU placed citizens’ social protection at the top of its agenda, determining a paradigmatic shift from a conservative to a New Keynesian approach to economy. The five chapters of the book can be divided into three parts. In the first (Ch. 1), the author tries to identify the causes of the Euroscepticism that has invested the EU over the last decade. While most of the literature focuses on political and cultural factors, as the ideological rejection of cosmopolitanism and the idea of transnational governance, Gualmini considers the economic factor as crucial. The European sovereign debt crisis showed the preference of the EU for rigid programmes of austerity that made the quick restoration of the public finances a priority, heedless of the negative social effects on many people. The cases of Greece and Italy, two countries that were forced to adopt very restrictive fiscal policies in order to improve their financial stability have been emblematic of a conservatism that paid little attention to the needs of the citizens