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 political issues, offering a rich resource for innovative thinking and informed debate.
It’s that Davos time of the year, when a bunch of powerful men gather in a luxurious Swiss ski resort to re-assure the 99% that the global economy is in good hands. But is it? According to IMF head Christine Lagarde “The answer is most likely ‘No’.” A spectre of a nightmarish deflationary spiral of […]
In 2012, the Four Presidents Report mentioned a European unemployment insurance as a possible mechanism to achieve greater fiscal stability at the EU-level. What do you think about that? In his political guidelines, President Juncker stated that he wants a deeper and fairer Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The Commission’s Blueprint for a Deep and Genuine Economic and […]
It is impossible to meaningfully address Europe’s social challenges for the present, medium and longer term without addressing the central challenge of economic growth. We are now in a situation where adverse longer-term trends are nested in a highly unfavourable current and medium-term economic environment. What are the longer-term dynamics? Over the next few decades, economic […]
The objectives of the planned structural reform of EU banking are ambitious: to prevent systemic risk, avoid misallocation of resources, and facilitate an orderly resolution and recovery. The original idea of the reform is to split the deposit taking and lending business of a bank from its investment banking business. However, the proposal contains many […]
A specter is haunting the world economy – the specter of job-killing technology. How this challenge is met will determine the fate of the world’s market economies and democratic polities, in much the same way that Europe’s response to the rise of the socialist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped the […]
There has been much wishful thinking in Europe that populism will vanish once growth rates pick up. Those who have believed in this unlikely miracle tended to assume that the populist upsurge is a natural reaction to economic misery brought about by the crisis. In this, they are only partly right. Populism is as much […]
Technology innovators and CEOs seem positively giddy nowadays about what the future will bring. New manufacturing technologies have generated feverish excitement about what some see as a Third Industrial Revolution. In the years ahead, technological improvements in robotics and automation will boost productivity and efficiency, implying significant economic gains for companies. But, unless the proper […]
You went through the tragedies of the 20th century – two wars, Shoah, Stalinism. What’s the specificity of the islamic extremist threat we’re facing today, in your view? Political assassination is as old as humanity and the chances that it will be dead before humanity dies are dim. Violence is an un-detachable companion of inter-human antagonisms […]
Inequality is back at the centre of the public discourse. Is this good or bad news for the European Union? Most contributions to this Social Europe 2019 series suggest the latter; namely, the observed rise of inequalities in Europe is driven by EU policies to a large extent. Some blame the EU for embracing the […]
At long last, the United States is showing signs of recovery from the crisis that erupted at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration, when the near-implosion of its financial system sent shock waves around the world. But it is not a strong recovery; at best, the gap between where the economy would have been and […]
The recent social democratic playbook is depressingly familiar: first, campaign on a demand stimulus and/or an end to austerity. Second, upon winning (usually by the narrowest of margins), suddenly discover the existence of a series of constraints that make it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out the original programme. Third, muddle through for a […]
Two-and-a-half years ago I wrote a short piece titled “The End of the World as We Know It” which began like this: Consider the following scenario. After a victory by the left-wing Syriza party, Greece’s new government announces that it wants to renegotiate the terms of its agreement with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. […]
After several years of institutional adaptation triggered by the sovereign debt crisis, and a total amount of disbursement of more than 230bn euro, Greece is in the spotlight once again. Compliance with the next debt maturity – 6bn EUR owed to the ECB by summer, which will entirely absorb the primary surplus of 2014 – […]
According to the simple two-party voting model of Anthony Downs, democracy privileges the centre ground: parties compete to attract the median voter. This is no longer working: the centre ground is losing political power to the extremes. Across Europe, new populist-extremist parties have broken in: Greece, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. […]
Imagine the first Ebola outbreak in 1976 had been in a rich part of the world. Somewhere near London, Brussels, Osaka, Sydney or Chicago. No doubt, pharmaceutical companies, building on early research into the disease, would have worked very hard to develop effective remedies and to do the required clinical trials to get them approved […]
The Greek debt crisis that erupted in 2010 is back and again threatens the stability of the Eurozone. That crisis was the result of two factors. First, an unbridled spending drift of both the private and the public sectors in Greece during the boom years of 2000-2010, which led to unsustainable levels of debt. Second, […]
To put it bluntly: Europe, more precisely, the European Union, has not delivered for decades now. The Union safeguards the interests of the employers and the mandarins from Brussels and 27 other capitals. Basically, this kind of integration is not in the interest of workers, trade unions, consumers et cetera. In the current state of affairs, more […]
As 2014 draws to a close, Europe’s economies remain stuck in second gear and feeble growth cannot compensate for the loss of output and jobs during the crisis. The fear of a Eurozone split has been tamed but has not been fully removed. And the ever more realistic prospect of left-wing governments in countries such […]
The current debate about the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States concerns a number of contested areas, but the potential impact of a chapter on investment protection with investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is certainly the most prominent aspect of the discussions. In light of an increasing […]
‘Social Europe’ implies for most experts the development of national welfare states and their protection against the forces of globalization and international competition as most contributions to the present project show. This emphasis has its strong merits as peoples’ welfare depends to a large extent on the growth of their national economies and on the […]
The crisis has had an important impact on hugely complex healthcare systems, interacting with, and sometimes dominated by, other major drivers of change. Maintaining access to healthcare has become a challenge for policymakers and care providers in the wake of the crisis, with reduced supply of services and a rise in demand for some healthcare […]