Work-life balance: from legal texts to real progress for working people
Taking the EU directive on work-life balance off the page will require determined trade-union efforts, including in challenging prejudices.
Resisting the seductions of populism
References to ‘the people’ are misleading. Populism is no democratic corrective.
Antifragile states
Branko Milanovic explains how globalisation has allowed small states to become major players and big cities to outgrow their nation-states.
Time to ensure climate policy serves the public, not lobbyists
The fossil-fuel industry has been revealed to have invested vast resources in lobbying EU institutions.
Britain’s post-Brexit choices
Assuming the UK does eventually leave the EU, its next government will need to negotiate new relationships with the rest of the world.
The UK election should be about ideas, not polls
With the UK facing one of the most important elections in decades, the focus should be on the clear programmatic differences between the main parties, rather than weekly polling outcomes.
The German impasse
Adam Tooze dissects how the macroeconomic policy discourse is disabling necessary German, and European, steps forward.
Europe: tear down those walls!
It may be three decades since the Berlin wall came down but too many others have recently proliferated.
Between 1945 and 1989: the rise of ‘illiberal democracy’ in post-Communist Europe
The strength of ‘illiberal democracy’ three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall can only be understood by reference to the prior cold-war trajectories of east and west.
After 1989: the battle for democracy
The differing paths of the states which emerged after the fall of the wall show how liberty and the rule of law go hand in hand.
Unpacking supreme courts to restore checks and balances
Democracy is threatened by politicisation of constitutional courts. Unorthodox tactics are required to restore their role.
International tax emergency: a critical time for developing nations to speak up!
An OECD proposal to reduce transnational tax evasion contains flaws which developing countries must challenge before it is set in stone.
A new version of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ for the western Balkans
The decision of the European Council, at French behest, not to begin accession negotiations for North Macedonia and Albania will have region-wide reverberations.
Finally a eurozone budget, probably the wrong one
A eurozone budget is an idea whose time, at last, may have come. But what is on the table contains familiar flaws.
Europe’s Green Deal is turning red
The European Green Deal does not just aim at combating the climate crisis. It’s also an opportunity for social change.