politics, economy and employment & labour
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher that publishes content examining issues in politics, economy and employment & labour. This archive brings together Social Europe articles on political issues.
Our generation has a unique opportunity. If we set our minds to it, we could be the first in human history to leave our children nothing: no greenhouse-gas emissions, no poverty, and no biodiversity loss. That is the course that world leaders set when they met at the United Nations in New York on September […]
You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive. There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines. But this common explanation overlooks a […]
The European Union needs to accept responsibility for the lack of a common asylum policy, which has transformed this year’s growing influx of refugees from a manageable problem into yet another political crisis. Each member state has selfishly focused on its own interests, often acting against the interests of others. This precipitated panic among asylum […]
There is a simple truth beneath the growing human tragedy of Europe’s refugee crisis, and the European Union cannot address the massive influx of exhausted, desperate people in a manner compatible with its values unless governments and citizens acknowledge it. Simply put, the historic challenge confronting Europe also offers historic opportunities. The question is whether […]
In Central Europe, and Slovakia in particular, the current refugee crisis reveals an awful lot about the prevailing public mind-set and the nature of our political elites. Few of these revelations are in any way pleasing. Positions held, and openly articulated, by politicians like Prime Ministers (Robert) Fico (Slovakia) and (Viktor) Orban (Hungary) shocked many […]
The ‘non-paper’ which Wolfgang Schäuble presented to his fellow finance ministers at a recent ECOFIN council in Luxemburg (leaked by the Handelsblatt newspaper) represents something of a paradox. One of its main ideas is that the euro area lacks a procedure that could declare member states bankrupt when having lost access to financial markets. This […]
The tragic exodus of people from war-torn Syria and surrounding countries challenges the world’s reason and sympathy. Since 2011, some four million people have fled Syria, with millions more internally displaced. Syria’s neighbors – Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey – currently house the vast majority of the externally displaced. But, as the crisis has progressed, hundreds […]
The death toll resulting from Europe’s paralysis in responding to the influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa continues to rise. Hundreds of thousands of others have suffered unnecessarily. The European Union’s reputation has been battered, despite bold leadership from Germany, Sweden, and the European Commission. Bitter divisions among member states have jeopardized […]
The European Union’s economic crises of the last half-decade have fueled the emergence of a deep divide between the northern creditor countries and the southern debtors. Now Europe’s migrant crisis is creating an east-west divide between the countries that are welcoming toward the ongoing influx of refugees, and those who want to do little, or […]
We’re sitting on the roof terrace of a restaurant at the foot of the Acropolis, with the brightly lit temple above us. But the mood among the company this evening is far from good. “I’ll never forgive those Syriza guys to the point that, thanks to them, I almost want the Conservatives to win the […]
EU member states agreed on 14 September to strengthen actions against people smugglers in the Mediterranean as part of their response to the ongoing migration crisis. Mollie Gerver writes that instead of scaling up actions against smugglers, a better option may be to decriminalise the practice. She argues that criminal sanctions against people smuggling are counter-productive on […]
In the early 1990s, when I was Prime Minister of Norway, I once found myself debating sustainable development with an opposition leader who insisted that I tell him the government’s single most important priority in that field. Frustrated, I replied that what he was asking was impossible to answer. I concluded our exchange by explaining […]
