Social Europe articles on politics

“Pro-Europeans” in Brussels and elsewhere tend to think about European integration in a somewhat linear way. They intuitively see integration as good and “disintegration” as bad. Thus, the European Commission proposal to deepen integration of the eurozone by creating a eurozone finance minister and budget and turning the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) into a European […]

With the advent of new technologies, the healthcare sector is confronted with an unprecedented wave of change. What will the sector look like in a few years time? How can healthcare workers navigate an environment that is increasingly digital, data-dependent and interconnected? For the general public, access to medical “knowledge” has skyrocketed these past years. […]

Let’s face it: today’s left is in a terrible muddle, caught between a world that once was and a world that still isn’t. Most of the time, it just seems to be playing defence. And not doing that terribly well. The basic reason for this is simple. Capitalism is in a long transition from an […]

We are divergent… A new opening in the debate on the EU’s future initiated by Emmanuel Macron’s proposals for greater integration has brought into sharp relief rifts within the community along traditional fault lines. These conflicting visions reflect the structural and developmental imbalances that divide the Member States. Hardly any pan-EU systemic reforms can be […]

The high quality democracies of northern Europe are an unnatural construct, history teaching us that the universal default setting of human society is authoritarianism. There are many key elements in crafting and sustaining such high quality democracies, including engendering a common body of trusted information, a communitarian spirit, the rule of law and the like. […]

The economic situation and employment rates in Europe are improving. But it is much too early for complacency. Unemployment is still too high, most of the new jobs being created are precarious and poorly protected, and recent election results prove that social exclusion and inequalities in the labour market and society continue to undermine people’s […]

This post is inspired by another, by Jan-Werner Müller. I have talked about Müller’s ideas on populism before. This particular post is a plea to focus less on the voters who elect populist politicians, and more on the politicians themselves. He writes: In 2010, Viktor Orbán did not campaign on a promise to draft a […]

The first step to an effective response by progressives to the rising tide of right-wing populism in Italy and elsewhere is to realise that ever more open borders are the problem. It was predominantly opposition to inadequately controlled immigration that brought the Italian election result, the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election. The other contributing […]

Regulatory standards and their enforcement, particularly of labour standards, are especially vulnerable under the auspices of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules in a context of weak overall global governance. A Brexit in which Britain trades with the EU under WTO rules would provide incentives for a Conservative government to dismantle already weak UK labour rights […]

One possible reading of the March 4 vote in Italy is it follows the same as the UK’s Brexit, Trump’s victory in the last US presidential election and any recent election in the EU, including Germany. It passes along the national-supranational nexus, to put it in Gramscian terms. For us, as for everyone in the […]

Against a backdrop of ageing societies and the associated increase in long-term conditions such as dementia, long-term care is growing in importance in all European countries. Socio-demographic changes, including family formation patterns, the geographical location of family members and changes in employment are challenging the sustainability of informal unpaid care and increasing demands on formal […]