Social Europe articles on politics

Immigration has always been a prominent issue in American politics. It has become even more salient with the presidency of Donald Trump. A major debate at the moment concerns the economic impact of immigration—low-skilled immigration, in particular. It is argued that immigration has suppressed wages, discouraged unions, and exerted fiscal pressure on the welfare state. […]

The era after WWII was mostly devoid of populist party influence. Instead, Europe was on the mend, and integration at the forefront of European if not global policy agendas. Integration ensured peace. The postwar-prosperity was phenomenal, productivity and social welfare programmes expanded rapidly. Given the changes in the past decades, in particular after the latest European expansion […]

During my latest stay in the UK, I met some of my friends, who, surprisingly, told me that they felt the pro-Brexit campaign was very similar to the anti-semitic campaigns of the 1930s in Europe, and especially in Nazi Germany. The scapegoated EU was to blame for everything bad in the country. The argument struck […]

Every day, when workers enter their companies and organizations, they experience a significant decrease in their rights. From being citizens with fundamental rights like freedom of speech and voting, they become employees in a company ruled by authority rather than democracy. The capitalist organization of the firm fits uneasily with democracy. To smooth this daily […]

On March 1 2017, the European Commission set out a White Paper on the Future of Europe. There was none of the fierce debate that might have been expected after the UK’s Brexit vote and application to leave: the European Union simply remained trapped in its daily routine. Brexit negotiations, the row about refugee quotas […]

The European Union’s fundamental goal, projected in the Lisbon Treaty, was to create a “social market economy” with a clear commitment to full employment, social protection, and effective anti-poverty policy. Although principles such as non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality are referred to in Article 1a (Treaty on European Union), the EU’s social status has […]

It is easy to dismiss Davos as nothing more than a talkfest among greedy CEOs, cheerful philanthropists and photogenic celebrity activists. Yet this narrative – which is annually recited by mainstream media – fails to do justice to what the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is really about. The coverage of Davos […]

“In a constitutional state, the true ruler is the voter”, go the words of Ferdinand Lassalle, the champion of workers and intellectual force behind European social democracy. But in the meantime, the voter has – more than 150 years later – clearly lost faith in Lassalle’s political idea. Almost everywhere in Europe, social democratic and […]

The European Union has gone a long way since the Lisbon Strategy of 2000 with its “more and better jobs” objective. In parallel with the Decent Work agenda of the ILO, job quality gained a firm ground in the EU policy debate. But 17 years after the Lisbon Strategy was adopted, it has hardly moved […]

Soon after the newly elected Austrian government was formed as a coalition of the conservatives and the far right in December 2017, an appeal to boycott the far right Austrian ministers was published in Le Monde in France, while the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, received the new Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz most […]

Critiques of EU democracy are currently high on the public agenda, and are by no means only the prerogative of extreme nationalists. Yanis Varoufakis has called the EU a ‘democracy-free zone’ while Nigel Farage believes the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are ‘anti-democratic zealots’. These are only two provocative examples of the widely-held Eurosceptic perception that the […]