politics, economy and employment & labour
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher. We use the values of freedom, sustainability and equality as the foundation on which we examine society’s most pressing challenges. We are committed to publishing cutting-edge thinking and new ideas from the most thought-provoking people. This archive page brings together Social Europe articles on political issues.
Taking stock of the results of the recent European elections is not an easy task. Many commentators have described the outcome as an ‘earthquake’, citing the surge in ‘anti-establishment’ parties, with voters supposedly lured by two ‘extremes’: the ultra-right and the extreme left. But this is a gross simplification of reality. As the Greek economist Yanis […]
The European Parliament election revealed the full extent of voters’ frustrations, discontent, and lack of confidence in both the European Union and their national governments. The EU’s institutions will now confront a legislature marked by growing disaffection, while rising Euroskepticism is bound to have a profound impact on national policies. If the EU is to […]
Widening economic inequality is the academic topic du jour, but the trend of growing wealth and income disparity has been underway for several decades. How did mounting inequality succeed in proving culturally and politically attractive for as long as it did? Will Davies writes that rather than speak in terms of generating more inequality, policy-makers have always favoured […]
Probably one of the most popular slogans of the entire European Semester is the catchphrase that wages should be aligned with productivity. The reason for its popularity is that this phrase can be used with a lot of flexibility. On the one hand, the Commission can make use of it to discipline wages and undermine […]
Throughout most of our electronic exchanges we tackle the issue of the “self” as such, and its “production” as such, concentrating on the features all selves and all cases of their production share, and only occasionally mentioning their diversities. But “selves” come in many shapes and colours, and so do the settings, mechanisms, procedures of […]
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. […]
Following the dramatic results of the elections to the European Parliament, the focus now shifts to whether the European Institutions and governments are capable of effective response. They will need to react radically and rapidly even if the election post-mortem EU leaders’ summit in Brussels produces little except hand wringing. It would be fatal if […]
On 18 May 2014, Swiss voters clearly rejected the popular initiative for the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage of CHF 4000 per month respectively CHF 22 (Euro 18) per hour. The initiative was launched by the Swiss Trade Union Confederation (SGB-USS) which collected enough signatures to force the Swiss government and parliament to hold a […]
When travelling across Europe these days, I have noticed how once again the economic policy debate in Germany has completely decoupled from that in the rest of Europe. While the euro periphery is still licking its wounds from the euro crisis, in Germany a new narrative of the crisis management of the past years is […]
Several people and organizations have recently called for a “New Deal for Europe”: the German Trade Union Confederation DGB with its “Marshall Plan for Europe”; the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) with its “New Path for Europe”; many a contributor to the book Shaping a Different Europe, and others. Underlying all such proposals is the […]
The ‘Eastern enlargement’ in May 2004 opened the EU’s doors to ten countries. Of these, the four Visegrád states, the three Baltic countries and a former Yugoslav state had at that time completed their 15-year transition towards a market economy. In the first half of the 1990s these countries’ income, measured in terms of GDP, […]
In September the Scots will vote on secession. For decades, the key slogan of the Scottish Nationalist Party has been ‘Its Scotland’s oil’. Yet this claim has never been subject to serious scrutiny. I will argue that it is spurious: ethically, legally, and practically. The philosopher of justice, John Rawls, grounded justice in those social […]
On May 1st 2004 ten countries joined the EU in the biggest enlargement of the Union to date. Moreover it was a step heavy with symbolism. Eight of the ten – the exceptions being the two Mediterranean island economies Cyprus and Malta – had until just over a decade earlier been part of the Warsaw […]
While the world watches nervously the developments in Ukraine, one cannot but ask oneself what would have happened if the EU (and/or NATO for that matter) had incorporated this country following the events of 2004, the Orange Revolution. Then as now Brussels refused to consider the country a viable candidate for membership. In fact the […]
Sitting in nice wine bars or cosy restaurants in superbly gentrified inner city areas, the chattering liberal middle class expresses its disgust about the xenophobic under-classes turning against migrants and voting for right-wing populist parties. Being a member of the chattering class myself I fully share these feelings. The populist migrant bashing makes me furious. […]
Concerns about state capture are nothing new. Special interests hold undue sway over official decision-makers in many countries, and regulators are always prone to see the world through the eyes of the people whose activities they are supposed to oversee. But the rise of finance in industrialized countries has cast these issues in a new, […]
Gently, slowly one can sense the terms of intellectual trade changing. The long era of individual accumulation with the massive transfer of power from the wage-earning collective to the capital funds and bankers that have caused so much damage is coming to an end. More and more the intellectual argument is shifting ground. The Nobel […]
Unlike the simple anti-EU rhetoric of populist parties, those parties who take a more moderate stance towards the EU face a difficult task in the forthcoming elections for the European Parliament. How to convince the electorate that the good that the EU has brought outweighs the bads, while being critical towards current EU policies in order […]
The issue of privacy and the surveillance of digital communications has been a key topic of concern across Europe, particularly in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the surveillance activities conducted by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA). In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Ulrich Beck discusses his view of digital risk, and […]
Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s finance minister until last November, recently suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have dared to annex Crimea if he had not observed Europe agonizing over a solution to the euro crisis. Is Rostowski right? At first sight, such a connection seems far-fetched. Putin’s show of strength involved military force and […]
Why does the economic policy pursued or proposed by the left in Europe often seem so pathetic? The clearest example of this is France. France is subject to the same fiscal straightjacket as other Eurozone countries, but when a left wing government was elected in April 2012, they proposed staying within this straightjacket by raising […]
Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641