Robert Morrea the president of Transform! Europe, makes the point that the dismantling of welfare policies that made the idea of Europe are being dismantled and this is leading to the decline of Europe as both a power and a social model for progress. This is a presentation from Our Common Social Future: Towards a Social Commons, Social Justice Cluster, Barcelona (June 2018).

What is happening to-day is that Europe is increasingly giving up its ambitions for all the people who live on the continent. What we are facing now is the transformation of our societies.

Globalisation has acted as if we all lived in the same country (same policies for all). We do indeed share with the Asian countries a lot of similar problems, because of globalisation. There are rich people that get richer and richer and there are poor people, everywhere.

In that sense we need to have a discussion on what the solution is. We have to ask ourselves if the European Union can be a solution. We have a long history with a unique political space. What is clear now is that the economic and political power also has a possibility to enlarge this space. Europe was in a sense a good example of capitalist expansion.

We built welfare states which served as a model for many countries outside Europe, and now what we are facing is the destruction of this social model. And at the same time companies are entering in spaces that we thought were our spaces, such as health care and other sectors. We now have to fight privatisations because we are losing our public services. They are made into profit sectors, with less concerns for people.

That is why in this global scenario we are also losing. The way we react in Europe is also showing that we as Western Europe, as such, are losing power. We are losing potential for transformation of the system.

My organisation, Transform! Europe, works with 32 organisations and foundations all over Europe, from 21 countries, in order to establish contacts among all the left parties in Europe and connect them into one single party. This is not easy, because we are very different in different countries. I come from a country in the South of Europe, with different systems of public services compared to what exists in Sweden or Denmark. Bringing together people and parties from different countries is a real challenge for us. That is why I think that what we share is that social justice is the core of our mission. I also think that the commons strategy can be a way to unify different perspectives. That is also why we have to open up and share with other countries and other people, social justice and commons strategies. This is the way we can put together our different perspectives. We have to try to give to the people the strength to change the rules. I think what we are trying to do at the European level, to unify people, we also have to try and do it on the global level.

*Robert Morea is an activist and president of Transform! Italy, the Italian node of the network transform! Europe, of which he is a member of the board. Facilitator of the ‘Common Goods working group’. Morea was a councillor for social services in the 1st municipality of Rome, promoter and part of the City of the other economy in Rome.