Social Europe articles on politics

The EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), is due to rule this year on whether German supervisory board co-determination is compatible with EU law. The case was brought by a small shareholder in TUI who claims that statutory co-determination at supervisory board level discriminates against nationals of other EU countries […]

I don’t know what to do. A world that was getting darker suddenly turned pitch black. Zygmunt Bauman is dead. The towering intellectual colossus of our times and yet such a frail, slight and humble human being is gone. He lived an amazing life and was an amazing person. The brilliance of his mind and […]

Outgoing US President Barack Obama has named the reduction of economic inequality as the “defining challenge of our time”. This is true not only for the United States – the richest country and, at the same time, the one with the highest wealth inequality – but also for a large number of countries around the […]

European Works Councils (EWCs) are a living, functioning embodiment of Social Europe and the core EU concept that workers should have rights and, in exchange for accepting cross-border market liberalisation, including movement of workers between different labour markets, employees of Europe-wide firms must be consulted and informed. A little known advantage of being in the […]

The British Labour Party currently teeters on the brink, trapped between following many of its northern supporters in supporting an end to the freedom of movement, and following its voters in most large cities who voted strongly to remain in the EU and are becoming increasingly anxious at the prospect of a ‘hard Brexit.’ As […]

Making work sustainable is not simply a challenge for politicians and policymakers in the European Union: it is a fundamental issue that underpins the future of the world of work in Europe. It goes beyond the mantra of raising employment rates and deals with productivity and innovation – and the everyday lives of workers throughout […]

The new authoritarianism sweeping through liberal democracies increasingly justifies parallels with the 1930s. Now, like then, electorates face multiple insecurities: a lack of decent work, crumbling welfare systems, widening inequalities and rapidly changing migration patterns. And now, like then, there is little faith in the capacity of governments to address those issues, seeing them commonly […]

In his 2004 novel The Plot against America, Philip Roth invoked the spectre of a fascist regime in the United States of America. Squarely in the tradition of counter-factual narrative Roth asks: what if? What if not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but Hitler fan and airflight pioneer Charles Lindbergh, courted by Goebbels, had made it to the […]