The COVID-19 pandemic is considered one of the major global crises of our times. It is both an epidemiological and a social phenomenon. The effects of the crisis are unevenly distributed among countries and regions as well as among social collectives. The pandemic crisis may be exacerbating social inequalities and disproportionately affect those already in vulnerable positions. It may have also important consequences for lifestyle and social arrangements emerging from the crisis, including work, education, leisure, personal relations, and freedom. The current social impact, together with the social and policy reactions in the years to come, may impact on society as we known it to date.
Southern European countries may be particularly affected for several reasons. They share some socioeconomic sectors which were heavily impacted by the crisis, while both SMEs and informal work are prevalent in their economies. They also face social problems relating to vulnerable collectives and to migration. The impact of the crisis on Southern Europe may have been shaped by its states’ historical background and institutional capacities, the specific characteristics of their welfare states and their social resilience in terms of reacting to the pandemic and developing effective counter-measures.
The social sciences, and sociology in particular, have an important responsibility in providing rigorous analysis with which to document, explain, re-construct and foresee how the effects of the crisis are affecting different aspects of our societies. This special issue is dedicated to investigating the wide range of social effects in Southern Europe. It is a result of a joint effort by the European Sociological Association’s “Southern European Societies” Research Network (ESA RN27) and the Spanish Journal of Sociology (RES).
The aim of the special issue is to contribute to the diagnosis of the pandemic’s social effects in countries and regions of Southern Europe across a range of strategic areas that afford insights into the specific situations in the area at both the empirical and theoretical level. In this editorial, we frame the specific social configuration of southern European societies within a conceptual framework that helps us to understand the implications of the pandemic crisis in the light of the contributions included in the special issue. The five articles in the special issue include comparative research from several countries and case studies of countries and regions that have analytical and practical implications for the research area as a whole. The articles study in detail: 1) the hidden unemployment in vulnerable collectives; 2) the reactions expressed on digital social networks: Twitter; 3) the effects on and collective action of less formalized groups of workers: cultural workers and artists, 4) health perceptions during confinement; and 5) social innovation related to caring for childhood.
The editorial is organized into five sections. After the introduction, section 2 provides an interpretation of the COVID-19 pandemic inspired by some recent discussions in the international literature. Section 3 highlights the specific developments related to the pandemic in southern European societies. It includes an introduction to the socio-economic characteristics of the region and an overview of the pandemic’s main effects. Section 4 presents a summary of the articles. For each article, we highlight the topic of the study, the approach taken, and the contributions made to both the fundamental issue under study and the situation in Southern Europe.
2. Reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic
When the pandemic broke out, most academics and social scientists suddenly realized that the coronavirus would have a global reach. There were many early attempts to think about the coronavirus pandemic and, in particular, its multiple impacts and far-reaching influence on human societies around the world. Much of the developed world was caught unprepared for the challenges of a pandemic, even though epidemiologists had been warning us about the possibility for many years. This had much to do with the lack of a truly international public health infrastructure (Davis, 2020). One of the first official reactions was to initiate the precautionary measure noli me tangere (do not touch me), while it became clear that 'we are all in the same boat' (Žižek, 2020).
One of the thinkers who took a clear position on the pandemic is Giorgio Agamben, who in his article 'The invention of an epidemic' (il manifesto, 26 February 2020) described the measures taken in Italy to contain the spread of the virus as 'frenetic, irrational and completely unfounded'. As he understood them, these measures would severely restrict freedom and were therefore designed to justify the "state of exception" (Van den Berge, 2020). Regardless of whether Agamben was right or not, it seems that the pandemic provided an opportunity to impose state measures that would have provoked outrage in normal times (D’Eramo, 2020, p. 27 ). The pandemic thus implicitly provided the space for large-scale experimentation in public policy. According to the prevailing government discourse, the state must protect the 'bare life' of its citizens against an "invisible enemy" because society was "caught in a war" (Van den Berge, 2020; Lehtinen & Brunila, 2021).
From a liberal perspective, Harari argues that the pandemic means humanity is facing a global crisis, the biggest of the current era, and that the choices people and governments make are likely to shape the world for years to come (Harari, 2020). Societies and politicians are thus faced with a dilemma: balancing totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment on the one hand with nationalist isolation and global solidarity on the other. In the meantime, it has become accepted that scientific achievements and advances, no matter how efficient they prove to be in practice, cannot replace politics (Harari, 2020).
Numerous radical thinkers considered the pandemic to be a catalyst that could produce possible solutions to the impasses in which the capitalist economy and political system finds itself. Chomsky, for example, referred to the coronavirus pandemic as a crisis representing the massive failure of neoliberalism (Jipson & Jitheesh, 2020), Harvey assumes that the ging social and economic inequalities exacerbated by failed state policies will create larger spaces in which "anti-capitalist politics" can spread (Harvey, 2020), while Messandra understands the coronavirus pandemic as an expression of the fragility of the current economic and political order, which provides new spaces for solidarity and political struggle (Messandra, 2020).
In this context, considerable intellectual and scientific effort is needed to understand, reflect on, and theorise the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on contemporary societies. The need for more social theory, and in particular a broad range of theories that can shed light on the variability, dynamics, and entanglements of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has been widely acknowledged in the relevant literature (Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020; Zinn, 2021a; Lupton, 2022). Important theoretical discussions that address the micro- and macro-sociological aspects of COVID-19 include: the political economy perspective, technological progress and digitalisation, biopolitics, risk society and cultures, social interactions, institutional strength, gender issues and the need for a more-than-human approach. In addition, in the pandemic period, the scientific vocabulary features some older terms including social distance, risk, social inequalities, fear, uncertainty, stigma, isolation, blame, vulnerability, surveillance, freedom, justice, crisis and neoliberalism, but also some new terms either freshly coined or bored from other sciences (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC], 2020) including physical distancing, lockdown, quarantine, herd immunity, flattening the curve, super-spreader, contact tracing, zoom, coronaskeptics, covidiots, quarantinis, coronallusional, locktail hour, drivecation, and apocaloptimist.
Addressing the condition of the COVID-19 pandemic was a major challenge for social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular who experienced a tidal surge of social mechanics jargon along with behaviourist analyses based on epidemiological theories, health/hygiene assumptions, practical measures, psychological interpretations and empirical evidence from various sources during this period. This delay is acknowledged by the publication of articles under titles like: 'a sociology of pandemics', 'a sociology of COVID-19', 'towards a post-COVID-19 sociology' and/or 'a research agenda for COVID-19 and society'. Similar to the call for a 'public sociology' (Burawoy, 2005), which aimed to sensitise and mobilise sociologists to make social science more relevant to 'the public', there is a much needed '(post-)COVID-19 sociology' that brings together social theory, methodology and empirical social research in terms of new ways of understanding society and reclaiming social justice and humanity (Hanafi, 2020; Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020; Zinn, 2021a; Zinn, 2021b; Lupton, 2022). The condition of the pandemic is excellently illustrated by the metaphor of the 'portal' so aptly articulated by Roy (2020) :
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
In contrast to Mauss's concept of the 'total social fact', which has been used to define the various phenomena associated with the COVID-19 pandemic (Wendling, 2010), the metaphor of the pandemic 'as a portal', acting as a gateway to the new world, allows for a closer examination of and reflection on the changes triggered by the facts associated with COVID-19 per se and its management.
Latour (2021) has recently used the word ‘metamorphosis’ to describe the vast changes and transformations that occurred overnight with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related lockdown(s). Using Kafka's novel Metamorphosis 1 as an approximating and empowering reality, Latour decodes many of his themes regarding the need for human societies to embrace the Earth, reconnect with nature, acknowledge climate change and act immediately to make peace with nature.
The world is turning, once more, today, but this time on and by itself, and we find ourselves again in the middle of it, slotted in, confined in it, stuck in the critical zone, without being in any way able to make the same great gesture of liberation. (…). We need to reinvent everything all over again-the law, the politics, the arts, architecture, the cities. But-and this is stranger still-we also need even to reinvent movement, the vector of our actions. We need to not forge ahead into the infinite, but to learn to step back, to unplug, in the face of the finite. That’s another way of liberating yourself. A form of feeling your way, and curiously, of becoming capable again of reacting (Latour, 2021, pp. 119-120 , emphasis in the original).
For Latour, lockdown experiences are tragically interesting and empowering for people, while at the same time triggering a metamorphosis. However, this transformation does not only take place on an individual level; it requires a broader transformation based on the lessons learned during the lockdowns. It seems that "COVID could serve as a preparation, as a dress rehearsal, for when we will once again be locked-down by some other panic in the face of some other threat" (Latour, 2021, p. 109). Indeed, Latour's commitment to the need for transformation in dealing with climate change seems consistent with Beck's (2016) "theory of metamorphosis which goes beyond theory of world risk society" (p. 4). In Beck's understanding, the agent of the metamorphosis of the world is the endless story of failure, as it helps to awaken people's consciousness. According to his thinking, metamorphosis is something that happens and does not follow a programme; it includes the new in the present reality, it expresses neither optimism nor pessimism, it signifies the era of side effects, and it is mostly unknown terrain that needs to be deciphered (cf. Beck, 2016, pp. 16-21).
The problematic of metamorphosis informs social science in the sense that it assigns a new meaning to human agency, contrary to the fundamental belief that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic that people cannot control their destiny (Lupton, 2022). As a result of state control and management of the COVID-19 crisis, many people's freedoms were suspended and/or reconsidered. Authoritarian states appeared to be more efficient than more liberal states in managing the immediate effects of COVID-19 (Žižek, 2020; Taggart Murphy, 2020; Zinn, 2021b). During the crisis management of COVID-19, it became increasingly clear that the weakest and oldest were in most cases the main victims of the pandemic (Žižek, 2020). It has been argued that the governments’ behavioural and social interventions against the COVID-19 crisis were more easily absorbed and digested by societies than their structural and macro-social measures (Orrell, 2021, pp. 150-153).
In this context, the sociological concepts of social inequality, social class, gender, age group, vulnerability, insecurity, and surveillance are still relevant for understanding and analyzing (post-)COVID-19 societies. COVID-19 exacerbated existing social inequalities and vulnerabilities, as well as power asymmetries, immensely. In the pandemic period, the role of "essential workers" was emphasized, the concept of social distance was problematized, and various types of "tribalism" (communities/politics) were activated. However, further research is needed to uncover the lasting impact of the pandemic, prioritize key social issues, and examine the particular effects of COVID-19 on southern European societies.
3. The effects in southern European societies: are they different?
3.1. A basic socioeconomic background of Southern Europe
Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, along with large parts of France, share certain economic, political, and social features that set them apart from the rest of Europe. In addition to sharing a historic past and a number of cultural and identifying features, southern European societies have, through the 20th and 21st centuries, undertaken parallel processes of political, economic and social change that include the transition from dictatorship to democracy, integration into the European Union, far-reaching economic and labour market reforms, changes in population and family trends, and the enactment of specific institutions (Jenson & Mérand, 2010).
A few variants on European capitalism can be identified in Southern Europe (Esping-Andersen, 1990): late industrialization, the relative importance of traditional manufacturing and agri-businesses, the emergence of a service economy based on tourism, construction and personal services, and a lag in high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive services. Also, the firm structure in Southern Europe is characterized by the presence of many small family businesses and micro firms, and a relative scarcity of middle-sized and large firms with a professional corporate organization (Katrougalos & Lazaridis, 2003).
The region is characterized by a dual labour market, with employment in both advanced businesses and the public sector as well as in companies in traditional sectors that lag behind in the knowledge economy (Bazillier et al, 2016; Garofalo et al, 2018). There is a significant weight of the underground economy, unskilled labour, and unemployment. Working conditions are usually weaker in terms of wages and social protection than they are in central and northern Europe. As a result of all these common features, the financial crisis that started in 2008 had a similar effect on countries within the region (Barroso, 2017). The impact of the recession was particularly severe here, resulting in a loss of activity and rising levels of unemployment, followed by a reduction in public investment.
Southern European societies also share a welfare state model with specific features (Moreno, 2006). The so-called “Mediterranean rim” includes a weaker system of social protection and a more influential role for the family as a welfare provider. The southern European welfare state is shaped not only by governmental social policies, but also by a gender-imbalanced labour market, home ownership and family values (Castles & Ferrera, 1996; Flaquer, 2004). Therefore, specific factors of a social nature have acted as mechanisms of cohesion and modernization in southern European societies, including networks of solidarity, the informal economy, and the state’s key role in certain basic services-primarily, health and education.
Likewise, southern European societies also have rapid processes of social change and convergence with other European societies in common. Over the last 50 years, women’s access to higher education and regular employment has contributed to a gender shift. There has also been a progressive rescheduling of women’s family life, although important inequalities remain between older and younger generations and urban and rural areas, especially when compared to other European countries. In addition, Southern Europe’s youth have several social problems in common. Young people are challenged by high unemployment rates, remain in the family home for longer, and are less likely to have children outside of wedlock than young people living in other parts of Europe. These specific characteristics are also determined by the nature of the labour market in the region, coupled with social policies and relations between family models and education (Entrena-Durán et al., 2020; Gaitán et al., 2020).
Migration research associates a particular migratory model with Southern Europe (King, 2000; Calavita, 2005). After decades of migration from rural to urban areas within national borders and of emigration to Europe and America, new waves of incoming migrants have impacted on local labour markets and social relations (Kasimis & Papadopoulos, 2005). Several areas in Southern Europe are characterized by the presence of irregular immigrants working in the informal economy and in economic sectors with unregulated labour market such as agriculture, tourism, and construction (Consoli, 2015; Papadopoulos et al., 2018). In the period of the economic crisis, Southern Europe experienced a revival in outgoing migration flows to neighbouring countries in central and northern Europe, principally among the young, while the influx of refugees and economic migrants have consolidated the region’s position as Europe’s southern border (Papadopoulos & Fratsea, 2019). In the aftermath of the economic recession, the role of immigrants and refugees is still important for sustaining productivity in less regulated sectors and regions with a high demand for labour.
Finally, there are important policy and social mechanisms that also contribute to the current state of social affairs in Southern Europe, compared with other countries and regions in Europe and beyond. Some of the main issues at stake are the specific configuration of the institutions that shape the distinctive characteristics of southern European societies, including the welfare system, state organisation, the fiscal system, the provision of infrastructures, and key institutions related inter alia to education, health, science and technology, industrial development, and economic policy.
The modern states of southern European countries, as is already well known, share some characteristics with the central European administrative model, but have always revealed a tendency towards a more interventionist and protectionist approach (Esping-Andersen, 1990). During the pandemic, this institutional model led to a slow reaction in the initial phase of the spread of COVID-19, but showed itself to be more effective in the long run (Salido & Massó, 2021). As a matter of fact, Italy and Spain were the first to be hit by the virus and had the highest number of victims in the first wave; however, their rates were actually the lowest in Europe. Nonetheless, the “state of alarm/emergency” policies adopted were strongly contested and produced different effects on the national and international political equilibrium.
The above issues make the south of Europe a challenging area for sociological analysis. However, the COVID-19 pandemic did result in a series of common effects and social reactions, as well as differences, that are worth investigating.
3.2. The social effects of the pandemic in the countries of Southern Europe
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will, in essence, only be observed in the long term, given that it shook humanity and our social and economic expressions in the year 2020 and has reframed the conditions of daily life for millions of individuals. As many researchers now affirm, it is more appropriate to define the situation as a syndemia, rather than the pandemic spread of a virus which infects everyone everywhere evenly. Social and biological elements interact to produce different and mainly negative effects on people and on society in particular, due to their strategic interactions.
Is it not possible to observe the effect of COVID-19 without considering the interface between health and society. Major issues here are the acceptance of the vaccination campaign and reactions against institutions which imposed social distancing or specific health measures in public spaces. Epidemic control was seriously hindered by public opposition which itself reflected a low confidence in government advice as well as low health literacy (The Lancet Commission, 2022). How COVID-19 interacts with other diseases and different socio-economic conditions to create different effects is an area that needs to be considered in depth. To counter the spread of COVID-19, many European, and especially southern European, countries responded with lockdown measures that had a direct impact on both their economies and societies (Moreira et al., 2021). Strategies aimed at suppressing human mobility in public spaces--and southern European countries imposed the most stringent measures here--were generally effective in containing infection rates, but they also had serious economic impacts (Chantzaras & Yfantopoulos, 2022, p. 37 ).
What can be widely observed so far is how the virus has highlighted social and economic weaknesses along with pre-existing inequalities (Borgna, 2022). In this section, the situation of Southern Europe in the global context and COVID-19’s effects on health and mortality rates, its socio-economic consequences, and the impacts on some vulnerable collectives are considered.
First of all, the impact of COVID-19 differs significantly in the Global North and the Global South. It should be noted that the countries of Southern Europe are mostly on the semi-periphery of the Global North, and have not felt the devastating effects of COVID-19 to the same extent as the Global South. In the latter, for example, the first national lockdown initiated in response to COVID-19 had a detrimental impact on poor rural migrants who had previously worked in the cities and lost their jobs (Lupton, 2022). In the case of India, thousands of internal migrants were displaced from their temporary shelters and had to walk back home en masse, travelling very long distances and having to deal with lockdown controls and other harsh measures introduced by the government (Samadar, 2020, p. 15 ).
In the European context, and based on the findings of the recent Cohesion Report (European Commision, 2022a), the impact of COVID-19 in terms of mortality was particularly large, with an excess mortality of 872,000 deaths across the EU between March 2020 and July 2021. During the first wave, excess mortality mainly affected regions in Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In the second wave, excess mortality was highest in parts of Eastern Europe, in the main: Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Romania and Hungary. Overall, the less developed regions had the highest excess mortality rate (17% higher) compared to transition regions (11%) and more developed regions (12%). More specifically, during the first wave, the excess mortality rate was highest in urban regions, peaking at 80% in April 2020, while it was below 40% in intermediate regions and only 20% in rural regions. During the second wave, the excess rate was highest in rural regions, at 55%, while it was slightly lower in urban and suburban regions (48%) and cities (43%). 2
Overall, mortality rates registered over the last two years of the pandemic led to a decrease in life expectancy in almost all European countries, and most of all in Italy and Spain, which were strongly hit by the first wave of COVID-19, experiencing the heaviest losses and a significant decrease in life expectancy at birth. Public interventions, vaccinating campaign and the digitalisation of health services made it possible to reduce the effect of the second wave more effectively in Southern Europe than in the Eastern European countries. The statistics in every southern country reflect a spike in mortality for people over 80, though the distribution differs by gender; for example, men experienced greater excess mortality than women, except in Spain. 3 (ISTAT, 2022).
Secondly, with regard to the socio-economic impact, some commercial sectors and working groups within the southern European populations have paid a heavy tribute to COVID-19, which provoked an unprecedented economic crisis and resulted in the most severe recession since 1945. The decline in GDP in the EU-27 due to the COVID-19 crisis was 11.4%. The European south was hit hard with 17% in Spain, 14% in Greece and Portugal, and 13% in Italy. The northern, Scandinavian countries were less affected, with a decline in GDP in the region of 5% (Chantzaras & Yfantopoulos, 2022, p. 32 ). At the same time, the share of teleworkers increased threefold between 2019 and 2020 in Greece (from 1.9% to 7%) and Italy (from 3.6% to 12.3%) and doubled in Portugal (from 6.6% to 14%) and Spain (from 4.8% to 11%) (Casquilho-Martins & Belchior-Rocha, 2022).
Within this general scenario, the economically vulnerable include those employed in jobs that do not allow for remote working (e.g. agriculture, retail and warehouse workers), while often living in overcded accommodation with poor housing conditions and in run-down neighbourhoods (Chantzaras & Yfantopoulos, 2022). Within the available data on economic recession and unemployment, the Southern European countries comprise a special case, since the official statistics do not capture the conditions of the many “invisible” cases of workers who moved from being underemployed to being inactive, or of the collectives within these groups who are more vulnerable than others and suffered more during the pandemic (Coco-Prieto et al., 2022).
In southern European countries, the burdened groups are therefore concentrated in the aforementioned economic sectors of the southern economies, but also the precarious workers and working poor together with the most weak and vulnerable groups, specifically, women, children and youth, old people and migrants.
Concerning women, the specific role attributed in these countries to the family as a pillar of welfare, and the burden of care work, which falls almost exclusively on women, has shown all its weaknesses since the highest cost was paid by female employment, which decreased by 4% on average across the EU. Women remain at home today, unemployed post-pandemic, and the minor gains made by the southern economies in recent years have been almost completely reversed (Alon et al. 2020; Blaskó et al., 2020; ISTAT, 2022). The article by Maestripieri and Gallego in this issue, while focusing on the strengths of community-based innovative childcare services, also testifies to the unequal gender distribution of childcare and housework during the pandemic, as well as the risks faced by female workers involved in welfare services (Maestripieri & Gallego, 2022).
Children and youth populations show disadvantages stemming from the differentiated access to educational resources and social services during the pandemic, but also from the pre-existing digital divide and territorial differences. Some of the social effects will be observed in the long run and over the next generations, but unequal access to social needs should be fully thematised according to emerging and structured trends in the different populations. In what ways, for example, will the practice of confinement, which has already generated an increase in health problems among young populations in particular, affect southern communities in which late youth independency was already a social phenomenon? Furthermore, young people were among the hardest hit by job losses during the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The recovery was slower for them than for other age groups (European Commision, 2022b).
The elderly and people with disabilities are far more vulnerable to infection, disease and death from COVID-19 than other social groups, and this vulnerability is exacerbated when multiple social and economic inequalities--such as living in poverty, mobility difficulties, isolation from the community/neighbourhood and limited access to digital technologies to support online work and sociability--combine (Lupton, 2022, p. 52 ). Ageism is seen to be prevalent in the public sphere, with older people considered more vulnerable and expendable than other age groups (Meisner, 2021). Vulnerability has many facets and includes all those who are isolated and insecure and feel anxiety, fear and/or despair about their future, and in the face of poverty, illness, and death.
Recent research on differentiated personality changes during the initial and later stages of the pandemic has revealed that these changes need to be studied in the long term, as the pandemic may have cumulative effects that were not apparent in the first few months. However, this research still highlights the differential impact on personality change across young adults, who show change in some personality traits, unlike middle-aged and older people, whose personality traits seem to be relatively unchanged (Sutin et al., 2022). In relation to this study, which was carried out in the US, the joint paper by Manuel Torrado, Duque-Calvache and Mesa-Pedrazas analyses the initial self-reports of Spanish people about their health and seeks to gain insights into people’s understanding of the pandemic and its impact on their health. Again, according to the three authors, the longitudinal study of people’s perceptions and behaviour, in both the pandemic and post-pandemic periods, remains an important objective which needs to be systematically addressed (Torrado et al., 2022).
Evidence also suggests that the socio-economic shock to the lower strata of society, and among migrants and refugees, was significantly higher in countries that adopted stringent measures to contain the epidemic without providing appropriate financial or other assistance to mitigate the combined socio-economic impact of these measures and the pandemic.
Additionally, every European state has enhanced their national border and immigration control systems, but the Mediterranean region more than others. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic was cited as the main reason for introducing extensive automated surveillance systems to prevent the entry of migrants and refugees. The impact of COVID-19 was significant throughout the migration cycle, with mobility and border control restrictions making it near impossible for migrants (including refugees and asylum seekers) to enter transit and/or destination countries. This had a severe impact on certain sectors, such as agriculture during the harvest season, and global food supply chains were disrupted. In addition, the border closures announced by some countries led to migrants returning to their countries of origin en masse, for fear of being stranded without income or access to social protection. The impossibility of return has left large numbers of migrants stranded around the world. In many cases, those who were unable to organize their repatriation remained, vulnerable, in their host countries (see McAuliffe & Triandafyllidou, 2021). In this context, there are still significant political and economic challenges to be met before immigrants and refugees can be emplaced and included in local and/or rural areas which, in southern regions in particular, are suffering from depopulation, land abandonment, and the underutilization of their productive resources (Papadopoulos & Fratsea, 2021).
Finally, the economic recession, which had a disproportionate impact on southern European countries, had already exacerbated socio-economic inequalities prior to the onset of COVID-19. The vulnerability created during the economic crisis was reproduced during the pandemic. In particular, labour force precarity, which increased during the economic recession as a result of the deregulation of the labour market, intensified further during the pandemic due to the lockdown(s) and shutting down of economic activities, especially during the first months of the COVID-19 crisis. On this point, the article by Karakioulafi addresses the conditions that led to the precaritisation of Greek art workers (actors/ actresses) during the first phase of the pandemic, and their mobilisation(s) aimed at improving their situation and reacting to their marginalization and impoverishment (Karakioulafi, 2022).
As a tentative conclusion, it is worth underscoring that the world economy grew by 5.8 percent during 2021, going some way to recovering the gth lost to the health crisis, but the war in Ukraine is now undermining these minor achievements. The request to bring the state “back in” to assume public responsibility for the new social risks is now being debated in the political arena. Also, the study included in this volume on the representation of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media reveals widespread awareness of the economic costs among southern European communities, but also high expectations of public institutions, national governments, and European organizations (La Rocca & Greco, 2022). At the level of European politics, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that southern European countries can act as a group to reverse the EU approach to fiscal control; it was their efforts, and the early mobilization of Italy and Spain, that paved the way for approval of the NEXT Generation EU (NGEU) investment package. The southern European countries are currently the main beneficiaries of these EU resources, and their recovery plans need to be implemented and strictly monitored by the national administrations. Will the Southern European states manage to use the Resilience Plan and NEXT Generation EU as an accelerator and confront the pre-existing inequalities and other critical issues that COVID-19 tabled so forcefully?
4. The articles in the special issue
The article by Coco-Prieto, Simó-Solsona and Suárez-Grimalt (Double Invisibility: The Effects of Hidden Unemployment on Vulnerable Populations in Southern European Countries During the COVID-19 Pandemic) focuses on the effects of the pandemic crisis on vulnerable groups. In particular, they observe the labour performance of three collectives--youth, women and migrants--in three countries--Portugal, Italy and Spain--between 2007 and 2020. Special attention is paid to changes in unemployment during the first year of the pandemic, compared with the previous crisis.
The article is grounded on two main assumptions: First, the socioeconomic characteristics of southern European countries exacerbate the social impact of the crisis, especially among vulnerable collectives. Second, official indicators do not fully capture the real effects because of bias present in the categories of “employment” and “unemployment”. The authors argue that the above lead to a ‘double invisibility’ effect when observing the impact of the pandemic on labour market.
For their analysis, the authors relied on the Union-Labour Force Survey. They provide an alternative measure of unemployment by reinterpreting and reallocating the categories of “involuntary underemployed workers” and several groups of “inactive workers” (discouraged workers, jobseekers who are unavailable due to family responsibilities, etc.). They construct the “extended unemployment rate”, which is compared with the “standard unemployment rate” used by official statistics during the pandemic and previously. The results show that the impact on unemployment was higher within the three vulnerable collectives, with some differences between categories and countries. This effect is especially evident when an extended unemployment rate is used.
The article makes several important contributions. The first is a methodological innovation in the measurement of unemployment; it provides a theoretical explanation of the categories that should be considered in order to overcome the restricted interpretations that exclude people who are unemployed “against the person’s free will”.
The second contribution provides empirical confirmation that the crisis impacted harder on the employment situation of young people, women, and migrants-the groups who occupy the lowest tiers in the labour market, are concentrated in the informal economy, and experience situations that are considered to be hidden unemployment. The unequal distribution of the pandemic’s negative social consequences, and its longer-term effects on vulnerable collectives, can only be captured if the labour market is understood in a more comprehensive fashion that transcends the rigid division between labour and its absence. A further contribution of the article is that it reveals important aspects of the specific social structure of southern European countries that should be taken into account in social research, official statistics, and policies.
The paper written by Gevisa La Rocca and Francesca Greco (#COVID-19: A Hashtag for examining reactions towards Europe in times of crisis: an analysis of tweets in Italian, Spanish and French) on reactions to covid seeks to reconstruct the emerging set of emotions and behaviours towards Europe through the analysis of tweets containing the hashtag #Covid19 in three different southern European languages. The analysis refers to tweets in Italian, Spanish and French made during the same period, focusing specifically on the period in which the lockdown measures were first introduced (4-11 March 2020). It therefore provides an analysis of how different linguistic communities, not necessarily defined by state borders, dealt with the arrival of the pandemic. That initial phase was emotionally dense in the different states as the lockdown measures affected first the Italians, then the Spaniards, and finally the French.
The two scholars interrogate the representation of the pandemic in these communities and, more interestingly, focus on how Europe and the European public sphere took shape on Twitter during that period. As a good deal of research now affirms, Twitter can be considered an interesting sentinel tool for monitoring public debate through discursive analytical strategies based around hashtags, and the article testifies to the power of this analysis with a focus on the European public sphere and its analytical forms. The #COVID-19 was analyzed using Emotional Text Mining Methods (ETM) which proved useful for focusing on people’s attitude and interpreting their “sentiment” after a deep analysis of the three corpora using lemmatization, clusterisation, and labelling.
The result produced, given the differences between the three southern European countries, which were affected by the pandemic and lockdowns at different time, return a different way of approaching Europe during the pandemic and evidently reveal different expectations of and attitudes to Europe in the linguistic communities examined. From a political perspective, these differences could be used by European organizations to reinforce and better define the commitment to Europe in the countries in question. The article stresses the relevance of different kinds of linguistic analysis, even in the case of a serious international event like the pandemic, and underlines the role of social media (and specifically of Twitter) in creating and influencing national and global concerns and defining a European public sphere.
Christina Karakioulafi’s paper, The COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for art workers’ mobilisation and unionisation: the case of Greek actors, interconnects artists, precarious livelihoods, and unionism during the pandemic crisis. The paper focuses on the artists’ labour market which may be considered as advantageous, but is notable for its extended labour precarity, especially among younger people, and low levels of unionisation. It seems that the pandemic crisis, and the lockdowns in particular, triggered the mobilisation and activation of artists, both within their union and through a bottom-up initiative.
The paper sets out to highlight and explore the impact of the pandemic crisis on the employment and livelihoods of actors in Greece, a country that has experienced a series of consecutive crises since 2009. Despite its Southern European and Greek context, the paper discusses similar developments across Europe which uphold its finding that artist workers--and cultural workers in general--face the risk of precariousness in both the labour market and their lives, and that this risk was further exacerbated by the pandemic crises.
The paper explores two facets of actors’ experiences and viewpoints empirically: first, their labour market pursuits and lived experiences before and during the pandemic and second, the actions and engagements connected to their mobilisation and unionisation in the same period. The findings reveal that, by and large, COVID-19 can be considered to have been a catalyst for the mobilisation and activation of actors both within their union, the Hellenic Actors’ Union (HAU), and through the Support Art Workers (SAW) initiative. The fact that the labour market for actors in Greece is highly unregulated, due to a previous breakdown in the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) procedure during the financial crisis, and the low levels of unionisation were recognized as the main structural problems. Conversely, the pandemic crisis offered an unforeseen opportunity for the mobilisation and activation of young art workers to challenge the dominant narratives and make reasonable demands with a view to strengthening their employment position and improving the material and non-material conditions in their labour market.
Despite the study being hard to generalize, which is a problem acknowledged by the author, the main findings, which are based on the interviewees’ accounts, provide an significant basis for considering the impact of COVID-19 on the employment and life opportunities of art workers in Greece and Europe in general.
The paper authored by José Manuel Torrado, Ricardo Duque-Calvache and Ángela Mesa-Pedrazas (The COVID-19 lockdown: effects of material conditions and social context on self-reported health during confinement) makes use of the quantitative data collected in the context of the “2020 Social Survey. Habits and Living Conditions of the Andalusian Population during the State of Alarm” to study how the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic affected self-reported health. There are important constraints on this data, which was collected in the period April-May 2020: first, the effects of the lockdown were not yet fully known as the disease continued to evolve and spread; second, the consequences of the lockdown were profoundly divergent; and, third, some effects of the lockdown may well have a longer time frame.
The paper addresses three main aspects: (a) how the lockdown affected the general health perception of the population, plus its differential impacts by social group; (b) how demographic, socioeconomic, and residential conditions influence health self-perception and whether these conditions changed because of the pandemic; and (3) whether any specific situations during the lockdown affected the self-perception of health.
Data analysis was carried out in three main stages. In the first stage, the study compared overall self-perceived health scores in the 2019 EU-SILC and 2020 Social Survey to assess the impact of the lockdown measures on health perceptions. In the second stage, socio-demographic, socioeconomic and residential determinants of perceived health were analysed, both before and during lockdown. And in the third stage, the goal was to understand how different social changes directly caused by the lockdown have affected people’s overall health self-perception, and the specific effect on self-reported mental health. The data analysis was mostly conducted through statistical analysis and the use of stepwise logit models.
The findings were important, but are also subject to future (re)evaluations and other surveys. One major finding is that there has been a general improvement in perceived health among the Andalusian population, as compared with pre-pandemic data. Moreover, the pandemic created a context in which subjects could relativise their own conditions. Still another finding is the need to separate mental health from the overall indicators, as the general model does not explain mental states adequately. Overall, the quantitative findings need confirmation, and the specific data analysis needs to be enriched.
Finally, the paper on the impact of COVID-19 on socially innovative services (The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on society in southern Europe: the case of social innovation in the care of early childhood in Barcelona) by Lara Maestripieri and Raquel Gallego offers an interesting perspective on changes that occurred in services introduced before and during the pandemic for families with children under three years old.
It is an interesting comparison between the services provided to these families in Barcelona, whose community structure was strongly affected by the spread of COVID-19, both before and during the pandemic.
The issue of the welfare model in southern European countries and the role of families should be analysed additionally and more deeply after the pandemic, as much of the burden was borne, by women and precarious young workers-- exactly the categories who were not protected for a long time by welfare systems in southern European countries.
The article presents a follow-up investigation of an innovative community service. It employs a mixed method design in which the qualitative preceded the qualitative data collection. However, since the wave of qualitative data collection was conducted just before the outbreak and the second step after it, the latter process, which relates to the online survey, had to be profoundly restructured, with the questions reoriented to whether the communities around innovative service constitute a resource for coping with the social isolation imposed by the pandemic.
After a reconstruction of the pre-school services (0-3 years) provided before the pandemic in the city of Barcelona, and a mapping of socially innovative projects in the same area, the questions posed by the scholars related to the effect of the pandemic on families, and in particular on the mothers and educators involved in the selected innovative projects.
The families involved in these socially innovative projects mainly belong to the middle class and were therefore less affected by the economic insecurity brought about by the pandemic, but the weaknesses of the southern European model of child care and gender relations were evidently exacerbated during this period. The results bear witness to the strong relationship between class and gender inequality, but also underscore the impact on the female workers involved in the innovative projects who had precarious and also informal contracts, and therefore faced a serious risk of falling into poverty and extreme insecurity. Notwithstanding the strengthening of southern European welfare traits, the assets of socially innovative projects, which are usually community-based, emerge as one of the most interesting areas of change brought about by the pandemic-one that clearly warrants further investigation.