What Europe can learn from living-wage campaigns
The UK’s Living Wage Campaign is a successful experiment in broad-based social advocacy.
Politics
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher driven by the core values of freedom, sustainability, and equality. These principles guide our exploration of society’s most pressing challenges. This archive page curates Social Europe articles focused on political issues, offering a rich resource for innovative thinking and informed debate.
The coronavirus and the ‘quarantining’ of Hungarian democracy
Many aspects of normal life have been suspended in Hungary due to the coronavirus, including parliamentary democracy.
The future of work in the post-Covid-19 digital era
The coronavirus crisis has spurred the growth of online work. The genie is not going back in the bottle and we must plan for a future of ‘decent digiwork’.
Democracy, authoritarianism and crises
The coronavirus crisis may be a natural disaster but, Sheri Berman writes, how governments are responding is a product of their politics.
Europe’s failure to address Covid-19 shows the need for a European ‘health citizenship’
A Europe-wide public-health authority should be a priority to counteract collective-action problems among EU member states.
Has the coronavirus brought back the nation-state?
The coronavirus crisis has remade the case for public authority—but that can only work in a complex network of multi-level governance.
Social protection pays off
Governments must use the momentum created by the COVID-19 pandemic to make rapid progress toward collectively financed, comprehensive social-protection systems.
The EU responds to the coronavirus: déjà vu all over again?
The European Union must manifest real solidarity in response to the coronavirus crisis. Muddling through will not do.
Europe’s refugee policy: walking headlong into disaster
The EU failed to learn from the crisis of 2015—and is now paying the price. Its refugee policy is even worse than back then.
The corona crisis will define our era
Karin Pettersson writes that the pandemic has highlighted the frailties of a short-sighted and hyper-individualistic social system.
Plagued by Trumpism
For 40 years, US Republicans have been insisting that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. The bankruptcy of this has been laid bare.
Whose is the European Green Deal?
The challenges of social and environmental injustice are as intense as ever. But which social forces can act as the agents of change?
Advancing gender equality requires a new fiscal pact
Women’s strikes today draw attention to the need for global tax reform, so that investment in services can ease the burden of women’s domestic labour.
A great equaliser
Branko Milanovic writes that the coronavirus is reminding some of the world’s privileged what it is like to experience its daily stigmas.
Making globalisation fair
Enterprises must address—and government more actively demand of them—their observance of human rights.
‘A worker is a worker’: the trade unions organising migrants across Europe
Migrant workers are by nature more diverse than the indigenous workers among whom they find themselves. Organising strategies need to be diverse too.
The party of discontent
The US Republican Party has made an accommodation to Donald Trump its leaders may come to regret.