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.
The Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has recently been making headlines in the European and international press for his anti-austerity stance. ‘If Europe does not change course there will be no growth’, Renzi recently said in a speech to parliament, warning the ‘high priests and prophets of austerity’ that ‘there can be no stability if […]
Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his work on how markets work inefficiently was once asked about his opinion on austerity measures. “It reminds me of medieval medicine,” he said. “It is like blood-letting, where you took blood out of a patient because the theory was that there were bad tumours. And very often, […]
The EU is slowly recovering from a long period of financial instability and economic sacrifice that has pushed up unemployment to record-high levels and also resulted in a dramatic rise of poverty in the more ‘peripheral’ EU countries and regions. Exiting the social crisis and making the European social model more resilient will remain a […]
Many of those interpreting the results of the European elections claim to discern a fundamental disenchantment with Europe among its citizens. On this basis the considerable success achieved by Euro-sceptic parties in some countries is only the harbinger of a broad repudiation of the EU and the excessive expansion of its competences. But is that […]
Germany’s first post-war Chancellor Konrad Adenauer is usually held to be the origin of an often-quoted phrase „Was kümmert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?“. Roughly: why should I be concerned about the rubbish I talked yesterday? Whatever the rights and wrongs of this attribution, the phrase – used to draw attention to someone who places […]
Globalization makes international collaboration more urgent; but it also makes it less likely to happen. Marketization requires social policy, not only to combat the negative effects of markets, but also to support the market with things it cannot provide for itself; but marketization and social policy are usually seen as opposed projects. For Europeans, confronting […]
The recent European Parliament election results revealed a reality that is uncomfortable and challenging both politically and socioeconomically. At the political level, we are witnessing in practice the rise of euroscepticism, nationalism and anti-Europeanism. At the socio-economic level, inequalities among and within Member States are evident, demonstrable and rising. Considerable institutional deficiencies, high rates of […]
Economists at DG ECFIN are starting to notice something we have pointed out already some time ago: Despite an enormous cut in wage costs, Greek exports have firmly stayed put in recessionary territory and hopes for an export-led recovery have proven to be illusive. Troubled by this failure of Greek exports to lift off, DG ECFIN […]
Today Europe is boredom… it is submerged by numbers and without soul. As long as Europe cares more about fishing rights than human beings swimming in our sea’s Europe has no soul (Renzi 2014). The same Prime Minister of Italy states rightly “Europe is the answer, not the problem”. So what has to be done to […]
Italy’s new PM Matteo Renzi has pledged to slash the country’s record unemployment with his American-branded ‘Jobs Act’. But his labour reforms, which will see short term job contracts extended for up to 3 years, are more of the same medicine applied since the turn of the 1990s that have been such bad news for […]
David Cameron has pledged that, if he wins the 2015 election, he will spend the next two years renegotiating the UK’s terms of membership, and then hold a referendum by the end of 2017. The Labour opposition has declined to match this pledge. The UK business community, particularly those involved in trade, is broadly against UK exit […]
In one of the many memorable moments from “Yes, Prime Minister”, mandarin-in-chief Sir Humphrey Appleby suggests some “masterly inactivity” to a premier who is determined to show there is a “firm hand” at the top of government. If in the past weeks a similar suggestion has been made by a real mandarin to the current occupier […]
The fall in productivity in the UK following the Great Recession was particularly bad, whereas the hit to jobs was less severe. This column discusses recent research exploring this puzzle. Although the mystery has not been fully solved, an important part of the explanation lies in the flexibility of wages combined with very low investment. […]
Membership of the European Union has shackled Britain’s economy to a corpse. The United Kingdom has been bound by swaths of costly red tape to a bunch of moribund economies with no growth prospects. As a result, UK exporters have been held back from the fast-growing markets of the Commonwealth and the developing world. That, […]
Around 300 officers in the Turkish military were jailed in 2010-2011 over an alleged coup to overthrow the Turkish government. The controversy over the arrests is still on-going, with all officers still in jail released earlier this month pending a retrial. In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Dani Rodrik discusses the case, the impact it […]
The structural problems within the UK and other mature economies were brought to the surface during and after the financial crisis of 2007-9. In my new paper, State and finance in financialised capitalism, for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class) I argue that these problems are inherent to contemporary mature capitalism and have […]
In its Working for the Few briefing paper, Oxfam has called attention to a worrying trend: the wealth of 1% of the world’s richest people is equivalent to a total of US$ 110 trillion – 65 times the total wealth of the poorer half of the world’s population. In the last 25 years, wealth has been increasingly […]
The Need For Social Dialogue To Improve Distribution Eurofound stands for Improvement of Living and Working Conditions through social dialogue. Currently, in the midst of high unemployment and increasing inequality, living and working conditions for ordinary people are worse than in 2007. But recession is not the only problem. Even when countries are recovering, the […]
Jonathan Portes and I have an article in Prospect, which is a short summary of our discussion paper on fiscal rules (see here or here). In this post I want to use that paper to make two observations on the interaction of politics and economics. Jonathan and I are frequently accused of being against fiscal […]
In the first part of this article I looked at the mounting evidence against austerity by organisations as varied as Caritas, the ILO, the Council of Europe and the IMF. So why is the European establishment pushing for more of the same? Social and economic misery and despair, growing inequality, dwindling public services, loss of hope and […]
Athanasios Orphanides, leading academic macroeconomist and from 2007-12 Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, does not hold back in a recent paper. Here is just one quote: “During the crisis, key decision makers exhibited neither political leadership nor political courage. Rather than work towards containing total losses, politics led governments to focus on shifting losses […]