politics, economy and employment & labour
Towards the end of 2018, Henning Meyer, editor-in-chief of Social Europe, spoke to the expert on international political economy Mark Blyth, about the crisis of globalisation, populism, Brexit and other political disasters waiting to happen. This is an abridged version of their exchange. Henning Meyer: Mark Blyth, thank you very much for joining me today to discuss the […]
Social democratic parties across Europe are now paying the electoral price for their uncritical embrace of globalisation in the 1990s. Then, responsible politics was equated with adaptation to the demands of global markets. As Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder put it in their much-quoted The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte pamphlet: ‘Social Democrats must accommodate the […]
Jair Bolsonaro will be President of Brazil. A homophobic soldier with authoritarian excesses, who has scorned democratic mechanisms and threatened his political rivals, will lead the greatest regional power in Latin America that is now a global giant. In fact, his profile, a caricature of a third-rate dictator, would be comical if it weren’t for […]
Salvini, Orbán, Kaczyński, Trump, Putin, May… the European Union has so many enemies one wonders more and more frequently if it’ll survive. Yet these challenges may turn out to be opportunities instead. Donald Trump, in truth, represents a great stroke of luck for Europe. His repeated casting of doubt over the American military protection granted […]
For a number of years now the left has been disappearing fast from the electoral scene while the far and populist right has been gaining ground. Social democratic parties have been reduced to single-digit vote shares in France, Netherlands and Greece and face the risk of a similar demise in Germany. Within countries and centre-left […]
Reversing the backlash against globalization requires active politics in two opposite directions: the strengthening of democracy beyond the level of the nation state; and strenuous efforts at local economic development. In The Globalization Paradox Dani Rodrik argued that we have a choice among democracy, national sovereignty and hyper-globalization, a trilemma, and that we could have […]
I am invited to talk about New Perspectives on Europe, but new ones fail me, and the Trumpian decay afflicting even the core of Europe makes me seriously question my old perspectives. Certainly, the risks associated with a significantly changed state of the world have penetrated public awareness and have altered perspectives on Europe. They […]
The rise of right-wing populism is probably the most pressing problem facing Europe today. Many analysts, including myself, have linked the rise of populism to the decline of the social democratic or centre left. Many traditional social democratic voters now vote populist; social democracy’s embrace of a “kinder, gentler” neoliberalism opened a policy “space” populists filled with […]
How would you characterise the migration issue today? How has it become such a hot topic, and how do you think it’s likely to develop in the future? At the moment, obviously, public policy on migration and refugees is a complete mess. It’s a broken system. In fact, it doesn’t really deserve the word ‘system’. […]
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about globalisation being pushed back. How would you characterise the situation? I think there was always a deal that permitted globalisation to go ahead. If you think about the 1950s and ‘60s, governments promised their citizens that they would open up the borders but they would protect their […]
Political and economic cooperation across borders is experiencing mounting levels of popular resistance. The outcome of the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, and the electoral success of nationalist forces across the globe seem indicative of a growing backlash against international cooperation. While many thought the process of greater cross-border cooperation to be irreversible, […]
The crisis of contemporary democracy has become a major subject of political commentary. But the symptoms of this crisis, the vote for Brexit and Trump, among other things, were not foreseen. Nor were the underlying causes of this new constellation of politics. Focussing on the internal development of national polities alone does not help us […]
