Social Europe articles on politics

Where there’s a will there’s a way, Chancellor Merkel reminds us. Now that the IMF has revisited the numbers and (again) come up with the unsurprising conclusion that Greek debt is hugely unsustainable, it’s time to revisit the proposal for a Greek asset fund. Like the debt sustainability figures based on growth and budget projections […]

When I was a correspondent in Germany two decades ago, in the run-up to unification and thereafter, interviews with Helmut Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and other senior politicians – such as Wolfgang Schäuble, who negotiated the two Germanys into one – would always end with the mantra: “We want a European Germany, not a German Europe.” […]

A few years ago, I heard an after-dinner speech from a European statesman, a person who has played a leading role not only in the political life of his own country but in the councils of the EU. The speaker that evening lauded, to general agreement, Europe’s values — its culture, its solidarity — and […]

The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum summed up her study of ways to overcome the politics of fear (The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, 2013) as follows: Our time is genuinely dangerous. As we have seen, many fears are rational, and appeals to fear have a role to play […]

The agreement reached in Brussels yesterday between EU governments and Greece came only with a huge loss of mutual trust. It remains to be seen whether the deal in these circumstances will win majority political support. Economically, it would at least offer a small opportunity for a recovery in the Greek economy. But this would […]

Fifteen years ago, in an official European Commission (EC) publication, Klaus-Dieter Borchardt (at that time Chief Administrator at the Commission’s Legal Service) drew attention to the European Union’s striking character as a twofold legal construct: simultaneously a creation of law and a community governed by law, the EU’s most innovative feature, he asserted, is that it seeks […]

Whatever one thinks about the tactics of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government in negotiations with the country’s creditors, the Greek people deserve better than what they are being offered. Germany wants Greece to choose between economic collapse and leaving the eurozone. Both options would mean economic disaster; the first, if not both, would be […]

The latest economic crisis has shown that the claims of the early 2000s that the EU’s common monetary policy would act as a stabilising force for the overall economic cycle has proved unrealistic. Meanwhile, national welfare systems have been tremendously weakened. The recession has thus unveiled the “original sin” of the Economic and Monetary Union […]

Time presses. Given the acute emergency in Greece, the threat of the banking sector’s collapse and the Greek government’s request for a new aid programme, rapid and sustainable economic policy decisions are vital. So the key thing is to concentrate on the core of the matter. A defining perspective is the extremely urgent time sequence. […]

NG/FH: In some sense the diagnosis of a »crisis of democracy« has been in the air for a long time. But in recent years the issue has become more urgent, to the point where people are asking whether even the core countries of the OECD still have »genuine« democracies. Those concerns culminate in the observation […]

Numerous Europeans view Europe as a one-way street: they appreciate its advantages but are little inclined to accept common rules. An increasing number throughout the Union are handing their vote to populist parties – Front National, Syriza, Podemos – that surf on this Eurosceptic wave and rise up against “foreign”- imported constraints. Embroiled with the […]