The 2014-2015 lecture was the first in a cycle devoted to international social justice. This is an immense field that could not be studied exhaustively, but which it is useful to revisit because it presents itself today in a paradoxical light.
On the one hand, the issue of social justice is back in the international spotlight, with the declining capacity of governments to ensure the well-being of their populations and the explosion of income inequalities. Thus INSEE, in its latest social portrait of France (September 2014), observes that in 11 years the number of homeless people has risen by 44%. In the UK, the latest government food report reveals that the poorest 10% of the population, or 6.4 million people, suffer from undernourishment. On a European scale, poverty rates are reaching considerable proportions, particularly in southern countries affected by economic austerity measures. As for the considerable widening of inequalities, they can be observed in every country in the world. Inequalities in income, but also in the distribution of wealth, as highlighted in Thomas Piketty's excellent book Le Capital au XXIe siècle. The worldwide success of this austere book is in itself indicative of an uneasy awareness of the dangers that rising inequality poses to peace and prosperity.
Yet, at the same time, the issue of social justice has disappeared from the political agenda of governments, the European Union and international institutions. None of the eight goals set out in the Millennium Development Declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000 addresses social justice. Ambitions in this area are confined to the fight against extreme poverty, the subject of plans conducted notably under the aegis of the World Bank in the wake of the economic and social disasters caused by the structural adjustment plans imposed by the IMF or the Troika. The European Union's Agenda 2020 takes the form of "objective indicators", i.e. quantified targets, none of which are concerned with reducing inequalities. On a more strictly legal level, the Treaty on European Monetary Governance sets exclusively budgetary targets for Member States, and tolerances for deviations are made conditional by the Commission on "courageous" reforms, which essentially consist of reducing protection for salaried workers, privatizing public services and liberalizing the services sector. All reference to the "European social model" has disappeared from these priorities. The social disasters in which the countries of southern Europe find themselves plunged, and the nationalist tensions resurfacing everywhere, should nevertheless lead us to question the conception of this European currency and its rules of governance, in the light of the social objective of "equalization in progress" set by the Treaties. According to the IMF, Greece's rescue plans have essentially served to shift risk exposure from the private to the public sector.