The Green Deal is the EU’s most ambitious policy package since the Maastricht treaty. Internally, it deeply reshapes the EU’s main policies, making Europe the pioneer of the ongoing energy and technology transition. Externally, it gives the EU the opportunity to strengthen its « civilian power » capacity by asserting itself as the spearhead of this transition and promoting its own standards in the development of a multilateral climate regime.
The Green Deal is, however, affected by two major flaws. First, in terms of outputs, it underestimates the distributional impacts of the transition towards a carbon-free economy and society. While the 50% poorest part of the European population are responsible for much less greeenhouse gas emissions than the 10% richest, those same vulnerable social groups are those who suffer most from the consequences of global warming, and they have less access to a safe environment and the benefits it provides. The European policy instruments designed to deepen and fasten this transition, from standards and subsidies to market mechanisms, rarely address those distributional issues. The least-favoured social groups might turn to think of themselves as the « losers » of climate transition, and fuel climate-sceptic political forces. Second, in terms of inputs, the global targets, norms and mechanisms which constitute the global and European climate regimes are more often drawn from diplomatic, technocratic and corporatist negotiations than from democratic deliberations. While those norms and institutions have so far benefited from a wide « permissive consensus », the history of European and global trade negotiations shows that a long-lasting passive consensus can rapidly collapse when social groups define themselves as the « losers » of those transformations and dispersed resistances start to coalesce.
The EU’s Green Deal requires an urgent « social and democratic turn » to address those issues. Building on the EU’s own experience in dealing with the former energy transition at the time of the European Steel and Coal Community on the one hand, and drawing inspiration from recent experiences of democratic innovation on the other hand, this paper outlines the foundations of such a revised Green Deal, and suggests to make it the key issue of the EU’s 2024 election campaign.
Paul Magnette is Professor of political theory at the Université libre de Bruxelles and member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of a dozen books and more than 100 contributions, mainly dedicated to the EU’s constitutional development and democratic legitimacy. A former Belgian federal minister for climate and energy (2007-2012) and Minister-President of Wallonia (2014-2017), he is currently Mayor of Charleroi and chairman of the Belgian Socialist Party.