An egalitarian fortress? Global distributive justice and the EU

Harb, Siba [Tilburg University] Vandamme, Pierre-Etienne [UCL]

This article offers an original political theory perspective on debates about EU integration and EU justice by discussing possible tensions with the demands of global justice. In particular, it asks whether global egalitarians can consistently argue for further European integration and for an egalitarian EU while maintaining that the scope of egalitarian justice should be global. After highlighting several tensions between EU equality and EU integration on the one hand, and global justice, on the other hand, it explores strategies available to global egalitarians to defend the focus on the EU. It concludes that global egalitarians can only have instrumental reasons to value the EU, and not any EU, nor merely a just EU; only the most instrumental to the realization of global justice, which can lead to different conclusions on EU integration or EU justice from the standardly assumed ones.