Already two years! Two years of going from “the biggest crisis,” with its resonance of ‘the war to end all wars’, to our current, more ambivalent situation. Despite predictions that nothing would ever be the same, the past is now still present and the aftermath is hardly a recipe for imagination and debate. European institutions are certainly still continuing (and prolonging) discussions on necessary regulation and its implementation. The European Commission’s “European Semester” would oversee each Member State’s economy and finances but, if enacted, threatens to seriously disrupt members’ and European equilibriums. The initiative, however, is not even in its experimental phase.

Do we therefore risk a complete upheaval? No, because the financial, economic, and especially social crises are far from over. Regrettably, the current period of highly relative calm is not conducive to implementing the decisions announced in the Fall of 2008 intended to subordinate the financial sector to the economy and to, if only modestly, to place people—social issues–at the center of societal projects.

2010: what comes next? It is the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion.

The phantom programs designed to “eliminate” misery have produced no noteworthy effect aside from the plans in many European cities to eliminate public benches that will prevent the homeless from lying down. Meanwhile, charitable organizations—which too often work alone with only the support of mutual benefit societies (in Portugal and Belgium, for example)—do what they can to fight this false progress that insults the tens of millions of Europeans living below the poverty line .

Paritarian organizations, mutuals, and cooperatives must all rise to the challenge during this year of combating poverty in Europe. Even if many participants in the world of not-for-profit complementary social protection are rivals, they must learn to work together so that both their identities and their goal of solidarity are recognized.

The 36th IPSE Meeting in Liege, “Cooperating for the advancement of not-for-profit social protection,” will be the ideal opportunity to create favorable dynamics for actions between different types of social protection in Europe.