Spotlight report on sustainability in Europe - Who is paying the bill? (Negative) impacts of EU policies and practices in the world
Studying EU policies thoroughly means studying policies of externalization.
The thirteen chapters assembled in this publication by SDG Watch Europe constitutes an impressive – impressively gloomy though – evidence for this assertion. Wherever you turn your eyes, whatever policy domain you may be concerned with: what at first glance may seem to be part of the European Union’s internal policies immediately turns out to be a story of externalities, a matter of spill-over effects transcending the borders of the European polity. And more often than not it is negative externalities that come into sight. Negative externalities that we should be talking about instead of obsessively trying to ignore them.
This publication contributes to unsettle the double standard of EU policies, consisting in protecting our own industries, corporations, workers, and consumers by confining the opportunities and threatening the well-being of economies and populations in other parts of the world. Every
single of the following thirteen chapters is a strong and profound case for ending this double standard of European policy-making. They point to the pressing political need for taking responsibility, to acknowledge that it is others who pay the cost for ‘our’ success – and that this is a moral burden we, the European citizens, should not be willing to bear any longer.