Recommendations of the EU Parliament against the economic crisis

Immediately after the collapse of the US bank Lehman Brothers in 2009, when the financial crisis started spreading across the globe and gained the real economy, the European Parliament decided to set up a special committee to analyse the causes of the crisis.

It also aimed at protecting the EU better against future crises.

The committee was mandated to show how European legislation could be improved to increase employment, stabilise the financial markets and boost social cohesion.

The Greens were in favour of such a committee being established and insisted, right from the outset, that its scope should include environmental and developmental dimensions.

For we believe that strict financial regulation, social cohesion and fair taxation, are strong safeguards against economic crises, and that decoupling growth from the consumption of resources is probably the best way out of the crisis.

The Greens succeeded in garnering majority support for a European Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) without a global legal framework, convincing most MEPs that the crisis had been aggravated by unsustainable production and unbridled consumption.

Parliament also agreed that protecting biodiversity and fighting climate change were essential preconditions for future economic growth.

The Greens did not succeed in introducing a clearer text pinpointing social inequality as one of the main causes of the crisis.

Other political groups, including the EPP and the S&D, imposed their view of economic growth as being of inherent value, free of any conditions regarding social or environmental sustainability.

The broad diversity of claims in the final text did not exactly help its political impact.