Social Europe articles on politics

In his magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism, Donald Sassoon described how, under the influence of the 19th century German leader Karl Kautsky, the European social democrat movement embraced a mechanistic scheme by which the immanent crisis of capitalism would somehow issue in a transition to socialism. This conveniently offered a reassuring fatalism about the […]

Is social democracy already dead and like the proverbial headless chicken are we simply running round the yard on instinct before we topple over for good? If social democracy is still alive, it’s hard to know how or why. Let’s look at the evidence. No social democratic party anywhere in the world is on the […]

During the euro’s sovereign debt crisis, European leaders have been obsessed with rules, numbers, and pacts, including the so-called ‘Six-Pack,’ the ‘Two-Pack,’ and the ‘Fiscal Compact,’ each more stringent on the nature of the rules, more restrictive with regard to the numbers, and more punitive for member-states that failed to meet the requirements. In the […]

Europe is falling into a stagnation trap. With growth barely visible, and dangerously low inflation causing real interest rates to rise, the weight of public and private debt has grown very heavy, and many fear that another lost decade is at hand. And, though the threat of eurozone fragmentation has receded, it has not disappeared. […]

This afterword by David Held and Kyle McNally is the final chapter of Global Policy’s e-book, ‘Lessons from Intervention in the 21st Century: Legality, Legitimacy and Feasibility’, edited by David Held and Kyle McNally. This piece was originally featured on the Global Policy website on 19 November 2014 and the complete e-book will be released […]

Stagnant wages have robbed the American middle class of opportunity. Wage compression is why fewer Americans now believe they are middle class; remarkably, the share of Americans who self-identify as below-middle class has risen 60 percent since 2008 to near equivalence in size with those identifying as middle class. Horatio Alger has emigrated to Australia […]

The project of European integration is going to run into walls. In political terms, it has become evident that its active as well as its passive support is decreasing. To some degree this loss in faith is tied to the social implications of years of austerity policies that were imposed to many nation-states in the […]

The latest Bank of England forecast has inflation returning to the 2% target by the end of 2017, which is in three years time. That is an unusually long time to be away from target. So what is the MPC proposing to do about this long lapse from target? Absolutely nothing. Tony Yates goes through all the detail, but remains mildly […]

Unpredictable events often induce the most radical change. For Bangladesh and its garments industry it could well be that the improvements in standards, as a result of the Rana Plaza tragedy, end up being just the stimulus to help the country’s manufacturing sector evolve; from the huge and perhaps burdensome focus solely on low end […]

Social Europe Journal has just published its latest Research Essay “Public Capital in the 21st Century” by Giacomo Corneo. The main argument of the paper is that the state should become a kind of investment state in order to make sure that high returns on capital do not further increase inequality but benefit the wider public. […]

Social Europe is caught between a rock and a hard place. It is supposed to restore confidence in democracy – which since the bailout of the failing banks and the ensuing politics of austerity can hardly be regarded as a plausible promise anymore and which, anyway, at EU-level is known primarily for its absence. But […]

Cosmopolitanism is a requisite to become citizens of the world, albeit a globalised world, with no borders or, at least, with permeable borders. Crossing over borders to look for a job or a better life, forces you to exit from a limited perspective, one defined by a community and a culture, and deal with new […]