The (New) Moral Politics of Post-Crisis European Policy?

‘Crisis’ has become an almost permanent feature of policymaking, either as the context in which policy is made, or as a direct influence on policymakers. Crises of different scales overlap and influence one another, despite the causal relationships between them being unclear meaning that this current conjuncture can be considered one of ‘polycrisis’. Financial crises, pandemics, political crises and so on receive more and more attention. Do crises have contagion effects? How resilient are political structures in the face of crisis? How can policy, political actors and societies address crises? Crucially, even the biggest crises are framed ambiguously; simultaneously as epoch-changing, yet many of the responses to them are relatively small technocratic fixes, despite grand rhetoric. These crises have exposed numerous states’ fragile positions in terms of providing for their citizens’ wellbeing, whether through trade, effective welfare policy, the maintenance of territorial integrity, climate security, and the provision of basic necessities. Given the major challenges of the twenty first century, these crises will likely become more frequent and severe (Flyvbjerg, 2020). Policy is struggling to keep up with ever more urgent calls for ‘transformative social change’ (IPCC, 2018). The Covid-19 pandemic and its associated economic and social crises provided a sharp reminder that the rules of policymaking and economic stability are social constructions; in a crisis not of ‘our own’ making, rules of fiscal responsibility were ignored in favour of massive stimulus programmes and welfare spending that would not have been politically possible in normal times. As Aneurin Bevan, the 20thC Labour politician remarked: ‘Discontent arises from the knowledge of the possible as contrasted with the actual’. If so, why have we not seen this discontent more acutely, but instead a striking resilience of policymaking paradigms and political norms? We argue that one answer is to consider the moral politics of crisis and the policy responses to them; examining how moral discourses legitimise and facilitate such policy responses provides an insight into the longevity of political and policy strategies that may in fact exacerbate crises in the long-term, despite some success in the short term. We demonstrate this by drawing on case studies of moral politics in action. We conclude by considering how moral critique could be use to facilitate larger scale change in the face of multiple crises.