Social Europe articles on politics

One of the political/economic soap operas over the last year has been the UK Labour Party’s agonising over the perception of its economic competence. The story always starts with current polling data: either Miliband’s personal ratings or Labour’s rating for economic competence. It then often seeks to find the answer to these problems in the […]

Central bankers are often proud to be boring. Not Mario Draghi. Two years ago, in July 2012, Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, took everyone by surprise by announcing that he would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. The effect was dramatic. This August, he used the annual gathering of top central bankers […]

The Initiative on Global Markets, based at the University of Chicago, periodically surveys a group of leading academic economists, of varying political persuasions, on the issues of the day. Its latest roundup asked whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan helped to reduce unemployment in the United States. Officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of […]

Should we conceive of Europe as a collection of individual states or as a group of distinct cities and regions which are part of a larger whole? Dimitris Ballas, Danny Dorling and Benjamin Hennig present figures from their new ‘Social Atlas of Europe’, which provides a new way of illustrating the key social and geographic features across European countries. They […]

Are we witnessing a transition toward a post-democratic society? In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Colin Crouch discusses democracy within the EU, the use of direct democracy in states like the UK, and the role of non-political actors in strengthening pluralism and civil society through avenues such as social media. You’ve previously written on the […]

Europeans, and particularly the European elite, find popular attitudes to science among many across the Atlantic both amusing and distressing. In Europe we do not have regular attempts to replace evolution with ‘intelligent design’ on school curriculums. Climate change denial is not mainstream politics in Europe as it is in the US (with the possible […]

I’ll begin with a story. One that dominates the philosopher Jonathan Lear’s brilliant book, ‘Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation’. It is about the Crow Indians. A story about what happens when the economy of a society is destroyed and a people’s way of life comes to an end. It was told by their great chief […]

The social challenges in Europe are clear and will not easily be overcome over the next half decade: 25 million Europeans are unemployed, with unemployment rates at surreal levels in several Mediterranean countries and youth unemployment robbing a generation of their chance to determine their own fate. At the same time several countries see stagnating […]

The triumph of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey’s first direct presidential election is no surprise. Erdoğan is popular, and, as Prime Minister since 2003, he has been riding a wave of economic success. But he is also a populist, who has steadily tightened his grip on the state and the media, demonizing all critics (including […]

What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society. Does anyone seriously believe hedge-fund mogul Steven A. Cohen is worth the $2.3 billion he raked in last year, despite being slapped with a $1.8 billion fine after his firm pleaded guilty to insider trading? On the other hand, what’s the […]

There is no more urgent social task in rich countries than to tackle vital inequality, the inequality of life, health, and death. European welfare states have handled many social issues posed by industrial capitalism. They have been most successful in dealing with old age poverty, much less so with child poverty. Inequalities of child development, of […]

Since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 the UK has led the world in privatisation. The Conservative government sold off state-owned enterprises throughout the 1980s and the 1990s – electricity, oil, gas, rail, airline, airports, telecommunications, water, steel, coal, you name it. In the worldwide fever for selling off state assets that gripped those […]