Andrea Mensi and Pietro Violante's Social Europe

Two PhD students, in their second year of PhD in Legal Studies, are the authors of one of the winning essays of the of the Raffaele Barletta Myllennium Award's MyBook section, an initiative aimed at enhancing the potential of young people.

Andrea Mensi and Pietro Violante received the award at Villa Medici in Rome, thanks to their Europa sociale, Europa dei territori. Rimettere i cittadini e le istituzioni di prossimità al centro del progetto europeo (in Italian). «We chose a theme that would allow us to make use of Pietro's competencies in labor law and social rights and my own specialization in international and European Union law», says Mensi.

The essay begins with the results of the Brexit referendum, its social causes and its effects on the rest of Europe in terms of resurgent localism and perception of a distant Europe that pays little attention to social rights. The essay makes three proposals to respond to the crisis of confidence: to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights defined by the Rome Declaration of 2017; to better involve local institutions in the European decision-making process; to enhance the role of national parliaments, along the lines of what has recently been proposed by Thomas Piketty and others.

A Law graduate from the Università Cattolica, Mensi worked for the European External Action Service, the European Union's diplomatic service. Pietro Violante has a degree in History from Scuola Normale di Pisa and one in Law from Università Statale di Milano.