Albena Azmanova, author at Social Europe

About Albena Azmanova

Albena Azmanova is associate professor in political and social thought at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. Her most recent book is Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity can Achieve Radical Change without Crisis or Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2020).

The nascent paradigm shift in the EU

by Albena Azmanova on 28th April 2020

Emergency action to enhance healthcare and unemployment insurance might signal a paradigm shift for the union from market integration to providing public goods.

Whose is the European Green Deal?

by Albena Azmanova on 11th March 2020

The challenges of social and environmental injustice are as intense as ever. But which social forces can act as the agents of change?

The big Green New Deal and its little red social question

by Albena Azmanova on 30th October 2019

Why does environmental promise always fall short in practice? A new answer to the social question can bridge the gap.

Syriza And The 21st Century Left

by Albena Azmanova on 4th May 2018

Costas Douzinas’ Syriza in Power (Polity, 2017) carries a wondrous resemblance to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). The latter is penned by a state official turned humanist philosopher; the former by a humanist philosopher turned an accidental state official. Both works scrutinise without moralization the world of politics at a critical historical juncture – the experimentation with republican rule […]

Abuse Of The Rule Of Law In The EU

by Albena Azmanova on 24th October 2017

Spanish Premier Mariano Rajoy is about to suspend Catalonia’s autonomy, and EU leaders have ruled out involvement in the crisis, with the justification that the Spanish government is acting to “restore the constitutional order”. There seems to be a consensus among the European leadership that Madrid’s handling of the 1 October Catalan referendum is completely […]

Ensuring fair Short-Time Work: a European overview

Torsten Müller and Thorsten Schulten

At the end of April 2020, in the EU27 there were more than 42 million applications for support for workers on short-time work or similar schemes, which corresponds to about one quarter of the overall EU workforce. With its proposed SURE programme to provide financial support to national short-time work and similar systems, the European Commission has recognized the importance of short-time work for avoiding unemployment and supporting employees’ wages while at the same time allowing companies to adapt working hours to the drop in demand. Based on a comparison of the different short-time work schemes in Europe, this policy brief identifies some criteria for fair short-time work which enables workers not only to retain their job, but also to live a decent life.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Living, working and COVID-19: First findings—April 2020

In the space of just a few weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has radically transformed the lives of people around the globe. Apart from the devastating health consequences on people directly affected by the virus, the COVID-19 pandemic has had major implications for the way people live and work, affecting their physical and mental well-being in a profound way. To capture the immediate economic and social effects of this crisis, Eurofound launched a large-scale online survey across the European Union and beyond on 9 April. Entitled Living, working and COVID-19, the aim of the survey is to investigate the impact on well-being, work and telework and on the financial situation of people living in Europe.

CLICK FOR MORE INFO

Social Europe Volume Two

This book brings to you some of the best contributions published on Social Europe over the second half of 2019 in easily accessible ebook and paperback formats. The collection is newly edited with a thematic focus on the rise of populism and also includes in text-form previously unpublished material from Social Europe Podcast. This second volume brings together contributions by Cas Mudde, Dani Rodrik, Peter Verovsek, Branko Milanovic, Sheri Berman, Paul Mason, Bela Galgoczi, Mariana Mazzucato and Ngaire Woods.

MORE INFO

Zygmunt Bauman was a towering intellectual who saw and analysed – right up to his death in early 2017 – the great socio-political changes, often convulsive, in modern western society long before his peers. Here we highlight his prescient insights into what he dubbed ‘liquid modernity’ with 24 chapters on topics ranging from online loneliness via precarity/poverty/inequality to migration, fear of the ‘Other’ and the decline of the nation state. Chronicle of Crisis, 2011-16, written by one of the great chroniclers of our times, will be read and re-read for decades and more to come.

MORE INFO

For a Sound Fiscal Policy

The public sector in Germany has massively neglected its investments in the past two decades. The result is a public capital stock that does not meet the requirements of a modern economy and is inadequate to meet the challenges posed by the imminent demographic change and the international commitments for decarbonisation. If the requirements in the areas of education, transport, communication networks and decarbonisation are added together, the additional public investment or public investment promotion required over the next 10 years is around €450 billion, i.e. around €45 billion per year. From a macroeconomic perspective, this amount can be shouldered well, but it is unrealistic to finance these investments solely by redeploying funds in existing budgets. For this reason, the debt rules in the Germen constitution should be extended to include a golden rule allowing borrowing to the extent of net investment. Until such a rule is implemented, room for manoeuvre should be used, for example through extra-budgetary entities. It is also important to provide sustainable debt relief for municipalities, which play a central role in public investment, especially in transport infrastructure.

FREE DOWNLOAD