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.
After 1989, all the talk was of the “end of history” in democracy and the market economy and today we are experiencing the emergence of a new phenomenon in the form of an authoritarian/populist leadership – from Putin via Erdogan to Donald Trump. Clearly, a new “authoritarian international” is increasingly succeeding in defining political discourse. […]
Donald Trump’s electoral victory has startled the world. It seems to usher in an era marked by the triumph of fear and anger, brazen disregard for reason and truth, the weakening hold of liberalism, the fracturing of the postwar consensus, and the rolling back of gains made from an integrated world economy. On the horizon, […]
I still vividly remember what fewer and fewer people, as time goes by, can and do: the names that Nikita Khrushchev, having decided to expose and publicly decry and condemn the crimes of the Soviet regime to prevent their repetition, gave to the moral blindness and inhumanity which was until then its mark: he called […]
The UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU is a blow to Central Europe. The region worries that the post-Brexit EU will be, among other things, less resolute in its response to an increasingly assertive Russia. The Central European countries will urge other member-states to maintain close ties with post-Brexit Britain. They will oppose any […]
Barack Obama was right to say that democracy itself was on the ballot in the just-concluded US presidential election. But, with Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton, do we now know for certain that a majority of Americans are anti-democratic? How should Clinton voters relate to Trump’s supporters and to the new administration? Had […]
Visegrad countries are seen as unconstructive when it comes to refugee and asylum policy, being the most vocal opponents of the EU’s mandatory relocation scheme. Their principled stance towards mandatory relocation has several more or less legitimate reasons. These could be either opposition to any quota system in general or an unwillingness to host people […]
Amongst the “liberal left”, in the UK and USA, there’s a major response to the Donald Trump’s electoral success: fear. “This is a moment of great peril”, “Donald Trump’s victory challenges the western democratic model”; he will “carry us into a different political era, a post-neoliberal, post-end-of-history politics, than any other imaginable president…”; “the election […]
What is your analysis of the recent Brexit vote and what do you think were the key drivers behind this decision? On the 23rd June, a narrow majority of the British people decided that their country should leave the European Union. Of course, I respect this democratic decision, but I deeply regret what happened to […]
Donald Trump has been elected the 45th President of the United States. Not many saw this coming. Which is odd, given the wave of middle and working class anger raging against ‘globalism’ around the world for a decade. Some thoughts on the post-liberal age. This election has been a rustbelt race. Trump’s bet on the […]
So much for the end of history. Twenty-seven years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the collapse of communism in Europe, Donald Trump’s election as US president endangers the liberal international order that his wiser, broader-minded predecessors crafted. Trump’s “America First,” anti-“globalist” agenda threatens protectionist trade wars, a worldwide “clash […]
Perhaps the biggest commonplace in Brussels is that the EU always develops through crisis. It is repeated so often and without any proper explanation of why the various crises are occurring that listeners become complacent rather than alarmed. And Brexit is happening at a time of multiple crises. While immigration/asylum is probably rightly seen as […]
How do you analyse the Brexit vote? First of all, the vote is uniquely British, reflecting the country’s difficult history with the European Union and, no doubt, its status as an island nation that has resisted invasion for almost a thousand years. The UK stood apart when the six founding countries created the common market. […]
