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.
James Downes and Edward Chan (Social Europe, 29 June) have written of the debacle of the social democratic Left in Europe and echoed others such as Sheri Berman who has claimed that this is because it has run out of ideas (see here) while Dani Rodrik of Harvard, even more sweepingly, has claimed that, since […]
With the repeal of the 8th amendment Irish women and their partners will have a choice if and when to have children later this year. This choice will have major implications for social policy and the development of a family-friendly welfare state in Ireland. From my own experience Irish people are extremely child-friendly but Ireland […]
The declared objectives of the proposed Directive on transparent and predictable working conditions published by the European Commission are praiseworthy but the measures envisaged are far from satisfactory. Faults of the new Directive The Directive aims to give meaning to the European pillar of social rights (EPSR) but this should not, however, be at the […]
Work is not what it used to be. Change is accelerating on all sides. And whether it is robots replacing people; digitalisation; freelance, short-term and zero-hours contracts or decarbonisation targeting traditional industries, few workers in Europe remain untouched. How do trade unions respond to all that? One message that emerged from a ‘big conference’ on […]
In 2011, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was forced from office by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and replaced by Mario Monti, an able technocrat who looked like he had been designed in a laboratory by the European Commission and Goldman Sachs. But now the boot is on the other foot. […]
The crisis of political debate within contemporary democracies Exactly sixty years ago, in 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition. In her philosophical masterpiece, Arendt indicated that the “Vita Activa”, a life actively encompassing public political debate and political action, is the only place of real freedom for citizens and sole remedy for totalitarian regimes […]
Political and economic cooperation across borders is experiencing mounting levels of popular resistance. The outcome of the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, and the electoral success of nationalist forces across the globe seem indicative of a growing backlash against international cooperation. While many thought the process of greater cross-border cooperation to be irreversible, […]
Nowadays, Britain’s words and actions on the world stage are so at odds with its values that one must wonder what has happened to the country. Since the June 2016 Brexit referendum, British foreign policy seems to have all but collapsed – and even to have disowned its past and its governing ideas. Worse, this has […]
The crisis of contemporary democracy has become a major subject of political commentary. But the symptoms of this crisis, the vote for Brexit and Trump, among other things, were not foreseen. Nor were the underlying causes of this new constellation of politics. Focussing on the internal development of national polities alone does not help us […]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fourth election has turned into a heavily qualified victory. She is facing criticism over how she has handled the refugee crisis and some say that she should not have let in over one million refugees into the country. That sentiment is more widely felt in Germany than the public debate that […]
In the pre-9/11 period, there was a Development Aid System (DAS) of transferring capital from rich to poor countries to encourage economic and social transformation. It was designed to take capital to labour. Its effect was to retain labour in its own environment. Now, it is a system that has broken down. A very fragile […]
Last year was a harrowing one for social democratic parties, underlined by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffering their worst electoral result in the postwar period, and the once powerful Socialist Party (PS) in France coming fifth in the French presidential election. Traditionally, social democratic parties have been the bedrock of party politics across Europe and […]
