Green is in. The European Commission, that infamously undemocratic executive arm of the European Union has made the European Green Deal its flagship policy, which comes at the back of a renewed commitment to ‘social Europe’ with the inauguration of the European Pillar of Social Rights in 2017.
Most recently, Chantal Mouffe has urged the Left to rally around a Green democratic transformation, along the lines of the Green New Deal policy project advanced by the radical wing of the US Democratic party. This indicates the emergence of a broad societal consensus for an epochal paradigm shift, akin to the shifts that enabled the post-WWII welfare state and that of neoliberal capitalism in the late twentieth century.
Undoing neoliberal hegemony
The anti-establishment insurgencies (aka ‘populism’) in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis did not uproot neoliberal capitalism, but they dealt a blow to its hegemony by lifting the veil of apparent inevitability that had covered policy commitments to free markets and open economies over the past four decades. Efforts to cope with the coronavirus pandemic brought significant reversals to the ‘profits over people’ policy logic. This has opened what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have called a “space of indeterminacy” – the possibility for change without a preset direction.
