EXPRESS 2 SPECIFY AND PROTECT THE EU SOCIAL CONTRACT (EXPRESS2)

EXPRESS2 is a project that addresses from a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-sectional perspective, the growing demand for a new, more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable social contract in the EU. To achieve this, the project will work to create a more appealing and legitimate EU social contract draft that will be submitted to inhabitants, Member States and EU institutions that will have the possibility to participate and decide upon the conditions, rights, and obligations to be binding. The goal is to strengthen the EU agreement of association by promoting social dialogue, civic engagement, and integration. An express draft shall be achieved by means of policy dialogue, campaign implementation, collaborative workshops, advocacy planning, and innovative offline and online formats and tools to create spaces for dialogue. To this end, EXPRESS2 will involve EU policymakers and institutions throughout the project to obtain a more appealing and legitimate EU social contract draft. The project will also focus on identifying and analyzing disruptive elements of the social contract, such as insecurity, populism, climate change, mistrust in institutions, gender discrimination, digitalisation and pandemics. The analysis of these stressors includes both individualised and cross-sectional approaches to cover the plausible relation of multiple disruptors, their concatenation or the “trigger” effect of a disruptive phenomenon to another. By understanding these disruptive elements and their effects on the social contract, the project will propose concrete measures to ironclad the social contract and it will provide relevant information to protect it from actual and potential disruptions thus we conceive social contracts as incomplete theorised agreements and living documents. In addition to academic, policy, and socio-economic outcomes, EXPRESS2 will propose recommendations to strengthen the social contract's resilience and capacity for further development.