Social Europe articles on politics

How would leaving the European Union affect the UK’s economy? Iain Begg writes that with pro-EU and anti-EU campaigning groups now officially up and running ahead of the UK’s planned referendum, British voters will undoubtedly be confronted with a series of contradictory claims and counter-claims on the costs and benefits of membership. He argues that it would […]

Turkey will hold elections on 1 November, with the campaign being marred by a bomb attack during a political rally in Ankara on 10 October which killed almost 100 people. Sezin Öney writes that the election, which follows an earlier election in June that failed to produce a majority for any one party, is unlikely to ease […]

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is best known for his critical texts on religion and morality, but how did he view Europe? Simon Glendinning notes that Nietzsche’s thought consistently exhibited a distinctively European orientation, with a conception of his own work as belonging to a European context, and not simply a German one or a more universal […]

Angela Merkel is under pressure. For many years she has been a rock at Brussels’ conference tables dominated by sobering discussions on the economic and social outlook of EU member states, and the German chancellor has become ever stronger both at home and abroad. While many leaders felt the impact of the economic crisis in […]

The AFL-CIO believes, like our German DGB counterpart, that increased trade between the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) has the potential to spur job creation and income growth for workers on both sides of the Atlantic. This can only be accomplished, however, if the negotiating partners break with trade deals of the […]

The economic crisis battering the EU and the EU’s response to it have posed a major challenge to the European social model. Not only have trade unions been highly critical of what the EU has done, but so has Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. In his first speech to the European Parliament he said: The measures […]

The British Labour Party is now the EU’s biggest, unequivocally anti-austerity movement, with a combined membership and supporter base of more than 600,000 people, and a short-term target of half a million full members. In the last few weeks, the British Labour Party has made a decision to offer unconditional support to a ‘Yes’ vote […]

All wings of the Labour party after Corbyn are forced to imagine themselves anew. Any viable social democratic politics for the future will have find a way to bring principles and power back together. Against expectations including their own and the consensus of the polls, the Conservatives won the 2015 election with an overall majority […]

As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems. You will hear much about the importance […]

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains. This maxim – variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli and Victor Hugo, among others – neatly captures the common notion that to be on the left of […]

Until a few weeks ago, Europeans believed they lived in a kind of sanctuary, insulated from the world’s current conflicts. Certainly, the news and images of drowned migrants were dreadful; but the tragedy occurring south of Italy, Greece, and Malta, seemed a long way off. Syria’s brutal civil war, which has been raging for years, […]