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.
Eight years after the eruption of the public debt crisis and having meanwhile implemented three consecutive economic adjustment programs, Greece is at a crossroads. Despite the Greek authorities’ statements about a ‘clean exit from the Memoranda’, public debate inside and outside the country and especially creditors’ views about Greece’s post-program period create serious concerns and […]
We now have a glimpse into the hard Tory vision of how a fully Brexited Britain will treat Europeans who want to work here. All during the 20th century after 1945, Britain had to import workers to do the jobs the sturdy white Englishman didn’t want to do. 200,000 Polish ex-soldiers after 1945 were sent […]
The new European Commission company mobility package is unbalanced. It aims at establishing European rules for business mobility in three areas: company conversions, mergers and divisions (corporate break-ups). On one side, there is a threefold delivery to the business community in terms of replacing national by European rules to facilitate cross-border company activities. But, on the […]
The dynamics of the capitalist world economy have been mystified as globalisation. In its technical sense, globalisation refers to the possibility that social relations can be maintained with increasing ease and intensity across time and space. As a political project, however, globalisation is based on a conviction that competitive, self-regulating markets, or their administrative simulation […]
The critiques Many commentators have argued that President Sergio Mattarella’s decisions of May 28 wounded Italy’s democracy and were damaging or counterproductive (e.g., most interestingly Jan Zielonka, on this site, and, more radically, Yanis Varoufakis; and, on Twitter, in alphabetic order, Paul Krugman, Branko Milanovic, Ann Pettifor, Helen Thompson). I disagree with the first argument […]
On May 25th, the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour of repealing the 8th amendment of the Irish Constitution – the article that had hitherto made it effectively impossible to legislate for abortion even in the most extreme of circumstances. This attests to a deep transformation within Irish society that has taken place over […]
Politics, unlike theatre, rarely gets pacing right. Either one spends months waiting for some seemingly inevitable drama, or all hell breaks loose in the space of a few days. The late spring of 2018 falls into the latter category. On 31 May, Italy commissioned a new government; the next day, so did Spain. The Spanish […]
Discussions surrounding the European Union’s 2021-2027 budget are intensifying, owing to many European policymakers’ insistence that regional development funds be disbursed only to member states that are in compliance with EU rules. Under the Copenhagen Criteria, all member states are required to uphold the institutions of liberal democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights, […]
On Sunday, the Italian President, unhappy with the finance minister that the almost new Italian government proposed, decided to blow up the democratic process rather than accept the outcome of the March election. Just to be absolutely clear: President Mattarella was well within his rights to do what he did – it is the constitutional duty of […]
Since the populist Five Star Movement and the right-wing League captured a combined parliamentary majority in Italy’s March 4th election, Italian politics has been at an impasse, with the two parties struggling to form a government. But now, with President Sergio Mattarella having rejected a M5S/League proposal to appoint the staunchly Euroskeptic economist Paolo Savona […]
The French journalist Alphonse Karr once observed that we can either complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses. Karr was writing in the mid nineteenth century against a backdrop of industrialisation, revolution and cultural change in Europe, when human progress was both terrifying and exciting in equal measures. The […]
When my father and his parents returned to Orosháza in Hungary, having been held as slave labourers in Vienna during the latter stages of World War Two together with thousands of Hungarian Jews, my father, then aged seventeen, embraced Zionism. Joining the secular, left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement, which advocated Jewish emigration to Palestine, communal life […]
