The European Union is considering abandoning a key global banking reform rule, a decision aimed at helping its lenders compete with Wall Street. This move, which a former head of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision warned would be a "disaster" for the financial system, highlights the EU's consistent prioritisation of capital's free movement. This stands in stark contrast to the EU's systematic efforts to restrict and criminalise the movement of people across its borders, a regime that routinely violates human rights and international law.
The proposed abandonment of this rule is described as a linchpin of global capital reforms. The recently departed head of the Basel Committee expressed concern that weakening the rule would undermine the international framework for bank regulation. Such concerns about systemic stability for financial institutions rarely translate into similar urgency for the human lives lost and imperiled by the EU's border policies.
Capital's Unfettered Movement
The EU's consideration to ditch this global banking reform rule is explicitly to "help its lenders compete with Wall Street." This objective reveals a core tenet of the European project: the facilitation of financial capital's dominance. While capital is encouraged to flow freely, seeking profit and competitive advantage, the same freedom is denied to human beings seeking safety, opportunity, or survival. The EU's economic policies, including those governing its powerful banking sector, are inextricably linked to its border regime.
The warning from the former head of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision underscores the potential for significant disruption within the financial sector. He called the potential decision a "disaster." This language of crisis is readily applied to financial markets, yet the ongoing human disaster at Europe's borders, where thousands die annually, is often framed as a necessary consequence of "managing migration."
The EU's Double Standard
The international framework for bank regulation is deemed crucial for stability. Yet, the EU's own border practices, including pushbacks in the Mediterranean and the outsourcing of asylum screening to unstable third countries under the new Migration Pact, systematically violate international human rights and asylum law. The concern for undermining global frameworks appears selective, applied rigorously to financial capital but disregarded when it comes to human dignity and legal rights.
The EU's focus on ensuring its "lenders compete" reflects a neoliberal agenda that prioritises corporate profits over social welfare and human solidarity. This economic order fuels the very conditions that drive migration, particularly from the Global South, which then faces the violent enforcement of Fortress Europe. The thousands who perish attempting to cross these borders are not a malfunction of the system; they are the intended deterrent effect of policies designed to protect capital and exclude the working class along ethnic lines.