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.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Young voters, in particular, seem to have less interest in working for traditional parties, which they view as overly bureaucratic, and thus boring. (Jan-Werner Müller)” quote=”Young voters, in particular, seem to have less interest in working for traditional parties, which they view as overly bureaucratic, and thus boring.”] Many people expected the big political […]
Addressing the changes and the fracture in the relationship between the citizen and society has been a matter of great importance for me throughout my Presidency. It is a relationship that was fraying long before the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, but it has markedly lost cohesion in these last ten years, aggravated by […]
Robots, machine learning, and artificial intelligence promise to change fundamentally the nature of work. Everyone knows this. Or at least they think they do. Specifically, they think they know two things. First, more jobs than ever are threatened. “Forrester Predicts that AI-enabled Automation will Eliminate 9% of US Jobs in 2018,” declares one headline. “McKinsey: […]
What, in your opinion, is the historic position of the SPD in the German political system, and where does it stand now? It’s certainly an interesting inflection point. If we talk about the historical position of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) it depends how far we want to go back. If we take a […]
Now the European Council has given permission for the second phase of Brexit negotiations to proceed, the moment of truth has arrived. The British position on the final status of its future relationship with the European Union must be clarified in the coming weeks. If possible, this should be before the end of January, when the EU-27 will give Michel […]
In our family, Christmas means sending and receiving wish lists. This year, my cousin took a very honest approach and wished for (among other things) somebody to come and paint her house, a jacuzzi, a pony, and more free time. It didn’t help me much in my Christmas shopping, but it does highlight the fact […]
The European Commission continues to talk about robust recovery, but with wages falling or stagnating, many people in Europe are worse off than they were a decade ago. The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions has recently reported that more than half the population in 11 EU Member States has difficulty […]
Should I stay or should I go? sang the Clash, a sentiment that comes readily to mind when one considers the dilemma Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) is facing. After the exploratory coalition talks between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), the Greens and the Liberals (FDP) surprisingly collapsed in November, the Social Democrats are now […]
The document agreed by the EU and UK in the early hours of 8 December 2017 is not a contract or treaty, merely a ‘joint report‘ on progress made in phase one of the Brexit negotiations. However, its contents are likely to be incorporated into the withdrawal agreement envisaged by Article 50 TEU and, in […]
On October 1, 2017, the police of the Spanish State (known as the National Police) endeavored to take the polling boxes where Catalan people were voting in a referendum with two choices: for or against Catalonian independence from the Spanish State. The voting took place in barricaded buildings (most of them state schools) to protect […]
When thinking about the state of affairs in Europe, including post-crisis developments and Brexit, Albert Hirschman’s classic book Exit, Voice and Loyalty comes to mind. Hirschman noted two ways in which customers can respond to a firm´s deteriorating performance: switch to another product, or complain to management. Thus, they can exit or they can exercise […]
The snake-oil salesmen There are many similarities between Brexit and Trump. They are both authoritarian movements, where authority either lies with a single individual or a single vote: the vote that binds them all. This authority expresses the movement’s identity. They are irrational movements, by which I mean that they cast aside expertise where that […]
