A more just union: Euro-dividend or reinsurance?

Abstract

What principles of social justice apply to the European Union? This paper has three parts that together challenge Philippe Van Parijs's most recent proposals for how to think about justice in Europe. For Van Parijs, the EU represents an opportunity to begin globalizing a universal basic income that should, in time, be extended to the whole planet. In the first part of this paper, I recapitulate Van Parijs's main line of argument. In the second, I query the philosophical grounds for Van Parijs's argument that the EU must become a fully-fledged federal transfer union-a union, that is, that aims to attain an egalitarian distribution across all European citizens taken as individuals (rather than as members of nation-states). In the third, I challenge whether a European Basic Income-the euro-dividend-would work, as a policy, in quite the way envisaged by Van Parijs. I then conclude with some implications for how to think about justice for the EU.