Taming the Big Tech tiger
New EU digital rules need to tackle the business model of surveillance capitalism.
Society
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher driven by the core values of freedom, sustainability, and equality. These principles guide our exploration of society’s most pressing challenges. This archive page curates Social Europe articles focused on societal issues, offering a rich resource for innovative thinking and informed debate.
White, rich, safe: Covid-19 exposes health inequality
The distribution of coronavirus vaccine around the world is glaringly unjust. But many wealthy countries have an equity problem of their own.
A small step towards gender equality in pay
The European Commission’s proposal to reduce the stubborn gender pay gap pulls some punches, apparently anticipating employer resistance.
Work-life conflict in Europe
Work and life are often thought of as a zero-sum of hours in conflict but work-life balance also depends on investment in care and men’s full participation in the home.
Green markets won’t save us
Markets are an unreliable guide for navigating a problem as large and complex as climate change.
Europe’s decarbonisation challenge? ‘Wir schaffen das’
Adam Tooze writes on the roadmaps to net-zero by 2050. Is a just transition for Europe realistic?
Venturing the green transformation?
Under the European Green Deal, venture-capital firms are expected to play a vital investment role—one for which they are singularly ill-suited.
‘Migrants’ moral panic still leading to lost lives
The pandemic has overshadowed, but not reduced, refugee flows to Europe. Damaging misconceptions of asylum-seekers haven’t softened either.
Social pillar Action Plan—longer on aspiration
The Action Plan shows ambition on poverty, employment and training. But the concrete measures are not (yet) up to the task.
Taxing better to create more caring—and feminist—societies
International Women’s Day falls in the shadow of a pandemic which has hit women hard around the world.
Fissures that tear us apart and pressures that weigh us all down
Kate Pickett contends in a new Social Europe column that inequalities go together—and so their opponents shouldn’t get drawn into rivalry.
Don’t defund the BBC
Rather than public institutions being limited to fixing market failures, organisations such as the BBC are also market shapers.
Leaving behind the EU’s deadly addiction to deregulation
Better regulation is benevolent and participatory, cognisant of complexity and future-oriented. Deregulation it is not.
Making EU regulation better for all
The stigma attached to democratic EU regulation by the ‘one in, one out’ approach must be replaced by a positive commitment to the common good.
Aligning the social pillar with human rights
The Action Plan of the European Pillar of Social Rights could lead to a profound shift in the enjoyment of human rights in the EU.
EU credibility as a people’s union rests on the social pillar
Buffeted by the pandemic and by populism, the EU needs the European Pillar of Social Rights to become a solid anchor of security for all.
Vaccine nationalism won’t defeat the pandemic
International co-operation is vital to make vaccination, as a public good, available to all.