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.
Two pieces of recent Brexit news are that a majority of the ‘war cabinet’ outvoted May on the choice between two unworkable, and therefore unacceptable to the EU, proposals to keep the Irish border infrastructure free, and Labour plans not to support a Lords amendment to keep the UK in the Single Market (SM). I […]
Italy’s Democratic Party (PD), the exact equivalent of Labour in Britain, is in total disarray. It came second in the 4 March general election, way behind first-time winners Five Star: scoring 19 percent against 33 percent. Skewered. Utterly embarrassing; yet hardly surprising. PD got an astounding 40 percent in the 2014 EU elections. Now we […]
On a day-to-day basis, it is hard to break free of a mindset dominated in the UK by the details of the Brexit negotiations or in the United States by the tweeting of an emotionally volatile president. But in both political systems, the normal rhythm of elections fortunately persists – and because it does, mid-term […]
Costas Douzinas’ Syriza in Power (Polity, 2017) carries a wondrous resemblance to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). The latter is penned by a state official turned humanist philosopher; the former by a humanist philosopher turned an accidental state official. Both works scrutinise without moralization the world of politics at a critical historical juncture – the experimentation with republican rule […]
For most of the post-1989 period, the most powerful political and electoral force on the Polish left was the communist successor Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), which governed the country from 1993-97 and 2001-5. However, the Alliance has been in the doldrums since its support collapsed in the 2005 parliamentary election following a series of spectacular […]
According to the latest figures of Italy’s National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT), 184,638 non-EU citizens acquired Italian citizenship in 2016. Of these 5,799 were Brazilians, placing this nationality seventh in the ranking, behind Albanians (36,920), Moroccans (35,212), Indians (9,527), Bangladeshis (8,442), Pakistanis (7,678) and Macedonians (6,771). A couple of weeks ago I moved to Italy, […]
Two months after the Italian general election on March 4, amid continuing uncertainty about what kind of government will emerge, a strange complacency seems to have set in. Yet it would be foolish to believe that a country where anti-system parties won 55% of the popular vote will continue to behave as if nothing had […]
For people like myself, working as a social science researcher, these are very strange times. Almost any colleague, in whatever discipline you talk with, will quickly turn the conversation onto one and only one question – the election and politics of Donald Trump. Since his election as US President, the academic community appears to have […]
What makes Europe different from many other parts of the world? One answer is social protection: the principle of assisting the most vulnerable in society and guaranteeing a minimum standard of wellbeing – a social safety net. In the nineteenth century, writers like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens highlighted the horrors of extreme destitution, helping […]
Far right European politicians have apparently ‘fallen in love’ with a particular aspect of Australian immigration policy, namely, the government’s abysmal treatment of asylum seekers. The current regime of dealing with illegal arrivals seeking asylum in Australia is built on two very contentious elements: turning back ‘boat people’ who seek to reach its shores by […]
There are several different social groups known as Roma which share common historical and cultural elements, formerly called Gypsies, Tzigane, Zingari, Gitanes, Zigeuner, Bohemians and Gitanos. According to the prevailing approach, based mainly on linguistic – rather than historical – data, Roma groups left India approximately a thousand years ago and dispersed throughout Europe and […]
Once, postmodernism and its protagonists identified themselves as freedom fighters – and probably still do. Their argument goes like this: The universalism of modernity and the logic of the general in industrialized societies, as the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz calls it, would have led to normalization, standardization, and leveling. So, the Other would not just […]
