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.
Obama is Leaving Economic Inequality for his Successors to Fix President Obama is emulating former President James Buchanan. His economic agenda is to kick the can down the road, leaving his successors an America of widening economic inequality without prospect of remediation. The Obama Presidency is facing the most toxic, polarized environment since the antebellum […]
For generations, Europe was a project of hope. To my parents’ generation, after a time of war and hostility, Europe represented the hope of achieving economic progress together in an atmosphere of peace and friendship. To my generation, Europe symbolised a place of hope and freedom following the Cold War. We criss-crossed fading borders and […]
The very rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “are different from you and me.” Their wealth makes them “cynical where we are trustful,” and makes them think “they are better than we are.” If these words ring true today, perhaps it is because when they were written, in 1926, inequality in the United States had reached heights comparable […]
The new European Parliament has to turn its attention to numerous pressing issues. I shall refer here to three of them: the socio-ecological transition, growing inequality, and EMU. The socio-ecological transition will require policy action geared simultaneously to the short, the medium and the long term. This means devising an appropriate policy mix deriving from […]
The European welfare state and the European Union (EU) find themselves caught up in a double bind in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. On the one hand, domestically, EU members are politically bound by widely cherished national social contracts on welfare provision, which in hard economic times are especially difficult to renege upon. […]
In 1914, as he was leading his men at the Battle of the Marne General Foch, the best of all the French fighting generals told his chiefs in Paris: ‘My centre is giving way. My right is retreating. The situation is excellent. I am attacking.’ And indeed in one of the greatest manoeuvres ever seen […]
After the European elections, the World Cup became the new hot topic. Only insiders were interested enough to follow closely the selection process of the new Commission President. Nevertheless, there were some quite interesting developments which are worth noting: the European elections were the most European in the history of the directly elected European Parliament […]
When Franklin Roosevelt outlined his essential four freedoms in 1941 he was convinced democracy could only be defended and advanced beyond the remaining 11 democracies by replacing classical liberalism with a comprehensive concept based on freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom of want and freedom from fear. Real freedom cannot exist if one of these […]
Led by the IMF, the main body of mainstream economists is now aware of the danger that debt deflation is raising for several Euro Area member states. This awareness is surely a good thing. However, what is conspicuously absent in this discussion is the link with wages. It is as if ‘lowflation’ (as the IMF […]
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 […]