Social Europe articles on politics

Climate change is one of the most salient issues facing governments across Europe, but does it have the potential to alter the political and social order of the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s Managing Editor Stuart Brown, Ulrich Beck discusses the transformations brought about by climate change, the role of global cities in generating innovation, and […]

Spain, under pressure from the Troika (International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank) has gone through three major labor market reforms, presented to the public as necessary in order to reduce the scandalous high level of unemployment: 25% in general and 52% among the young. Spain (and Greece) are on the top of […]

More than three years have passed since Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid and inadvertently lit the spark of regional upheaval. The resulting conflagration caught regimes by surprise and led to the rapid toppling of ‘Presidents-for-life’ in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and the grisly demise of Libya’s dictator of […]

Of course, it is not easy to strike a fair balance when qualifying the Swiss referendum of 9 February 2014: Is it all about xenophobia of rather rich Swiss people? Or are there “real problems” to be faced? It is all too obvious that the true political motivation of the right wing parties across Europe […]

Germany is on the dock, big time. In its 2013 ‘Alert Mechanism Report’ the European Commission announced that Germany jointly with Luxembourg would have to undergo a thorough review of its potentially disturbing high current account surplus. The procedure is a legal necessity given that over the last three years Germany’s surplus has been above […]

Recently I was asked to speak somewhere in The Netherlands about Croatia and the European democracy debate. Of course I did not get very far with writing my speech. What to say? The country has other priorities than discussing the balance between the community method and the intergovernmental approach or the fine tuning of the […]

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, textile workers in the Midlands and the North of England, mainly weavers, staged a spontaneous revolt, smashing machinery and burning factories. Their complaint was that the newfangled machines were robbing them of their wages and jobs. The rebels took their name, and inspiration, from the apocryphal Ned Ludd, […]

While France and Britain cooperate on multiple fronts, the Cameron government is not above using its neighbor as a political foil. Grant Shapps, conservative party chairman opined in January 2014 that French President Hollande had “led his countrymen back into the dust” which is “exactly what [Labour leader] Miliband wants to do with the British […]

David Cameron has committed the UK to renegotiating its membership of the European Union if he wins a majority at the next British general election. As Andrew Duff writes, one of the key elements of this reform package will likely be to elevate the role of national parliaments in the EU’s legislative process. He argues that such […]

There are a lot of good ideas being generated among social-democratic thinkers these days and, although this article is going to be critical in many respects, of the current state of social-democracy in Europe, it is absolutely worth acknowledging the excellent work being done by progressive intellectuals on constructing a new European political economy. The […]

The European Union can only be understood against the backdrop of the catastrophic history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The two World Wars, and the Great Depression between them, shattered any assumptions of certainty and stability that Europeans might have once had. The rise of Nazism, fascism and Stalinism, in […]

This year marks the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, which is reason enough to reflect on what this seminal European catastrophe teaches us today. Indeed, the Great War’s consequences for international relations and the global system of states continue to be felt. So, have we learned anything from the policy failures of […]