European Adult and Lifelong Education in Times of Crisis: Where is Social Justice when the Social Dimension turns into Social Cohesion?

Four years on from the 2010 debt crisis, economists claim that Europe has still not recovered from the recession that worsened social inequality. This raises the important question of whether social inequality can be tackled by social justice. The concept of social justice emphasises the idea that all individuals, regardless of their age, gender, religion, cultural background and economic status, have equal rights. Such a perspective assigns governments the task of facilitating the redistribution of economic means and privileges to guarantee equal opportunities among the less prosperous members of society; for example, in terms of access to, benefit from and success in education and employment. In this contribution, I adopt a social justice perspective to examine the redistributive function of the European Union and the role it attributes to adult and lifelong education in alleviating social inequality. In doing so, I highlight not only how member states represent the primary source of revenue for the Union but also how they benefit in return from the redistribution of economic means through several financial tools and programmes. This also applies to areas such as education and vocational training. I will then investigate the role of joint Europe-wide strategies, such as the Lisbon Agenda or Europe 2020, which also frame regional priorities on how to best invest these funds. By examining adult and lifelong education policies created both before and after these strategies, I question their social justice underpinnings and argue that, in the aftermath of the 2010 debt crisis (and with the subsequent concern with social cohesion), economics prevailed over social justice within the social dimension in European integration.