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.
Sequencing is emerging as a key question as politicians, civil servants and lawyers try to establish a framework for the negotiation of the UK’s withdrawal from and its subsequent relationship with the EU and the rest of the world. To what extent is it possible – legally as well as politically – to conduct these […]
The UK’s Brexit referendum is the latest and most eminent manifestation of the European Union’s severe crisis of legitimacy. An ever-increasing number of Europeans fundamentally question European integration. Without legitimacy – i.e. the acceptance and support of the Europeans – the EU has no future. The right lesson to draw is that it is high […]
The horrendous attack by a French-Tunisian man on a crowd in Nice celebrating Bastille Day, which killed 84 and injured hundreds more, will give National Front leader Marine Le Pen a massive boost in next spring’s presidential election. It doesn’t matter whether the murderer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had any links to radical Islamism. Throughout the […]
I was asked by a German friend to explain what is happening inside the British Labour Party. This is what I sent him. In 2011 I organised a conference in northern England bringing together top Labour historians and senior MPs from the 1980s like David Owen and Gerald Kaufman. It was called “Labour 1931, 1951, […]
How should life be after Brexit? Even though the academic and intellectual communities, just like the public, got highly emotional after the Brexit referendum, we assume that it can serve as the start of something new and functioning both for the UK and the EU. Here are some pointers for the future already visible. So […]
Until the time of writing the chaos wreaked on the United Kingdom by the disruptive and unexpected outcome of Mr. Cameron’s referendum on 23rd June has been more obviously political than economic. The personal ambitions and resentments of the leading personalities in the “Leave” campaign have spilled over into a Jacobean drama of revenge and treachery […]
Brexit is treated as exceptional when it is symptomatic of a far larger trend. The First World is breaking down, and this is prompting a dangerous backlash. The First World refers to both a place (the wealthy, industrial democracies), and a set of ideals that legitimated the system against the Communist alternative: robust capitalism, a […]
What is surprising about the result of the referendum is that so many of us were surprised – astonished may be closer to the truth. If we had thought a bit more deeply about the state of Britain and placed the referendum within a framework of the country’s policy history over the past 4 decades […]
The technological revolution is one of today’s most hotly debated topics in politics, economics and business. It makes politicians wary about which preparatory policies to pursue, economists ponder vast productivity increases and the future of labor and business leaders think about how to make use of the new possibilities in their organisational environments. We are […]
True believers in globalisation can be recognised by the following simple characteristic: They are convinced that it benefits all. This credo is being queried since Brexit, and some intelligent authors now recognise that the UK vote may well be linked to the fact that many people see themselves as losers of globalisation who are now […]
Poland, along with other central European countries, has been dealing with several problems concerning integration of immigrants and refugees: their invisibility, reluctance of governments to tackle migration and implement integration policies, ceding responsibility for supporting migrants to the third sector and cutting funds for measures to help them integrate. Opportunities, however, seem to rise at […]
Mr Habermas, did you ever think Brexit would be possible? What did you feel when you heard of the Leave campaign’s victory? It never entered my mind that populism would defeat capitalism in its country of origin. Given the existential importance of the banking sector for Great Britain and the media power and political clout […]
