debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Dear readers, the Social Europe Journal team would like to thank you for your support in 2010. It has been our best year so far! We added a lot more high profile authors and as a result rapidly increased our readership. Thanks to Paul Krugman, who linked to our survey result yesterday, December 2010 will see [...]
When Russian President Dmitri Medvedev delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly I was struck by the fact that his speech seemed to be meant for an advanced, prosperous country, not the real Russia of today. Russia will hold a presidential election in 2012. What happens in 2011 will, in my opinion, be even [...]
The central insight of macroeconomics is a fact that was known to John Stuart Mill in the first third of the nineteenth century: there can be a large gap between supply and demand for pretty much all currently produced goods and services and types of labor if there is an equally large excess demand for [...]
Upon resigning as leader, Mona Sahlin has frankly stated that the Social Democrats are way out of step with public sentiment. Will this pave the way for a new generation’s voice? The Swedish left is in turmoil. Just weeks after September’s disastrous election, the red-green party coalition quietly dissolved. Mrs. Sahlin’s response to the situation [...]
Finland will have parliamentary elections next April. With this blog I will be presenting some of the election debates and political issues that are topical in Finland. Along with me director Ville Kopra and coordinator Elisa Lipponen from the Kalevi Sorsa Foundation will contribute to this debate. In my first blog contribution I will focus [...]
Oscar Wilde said that experience is the name we give to our mistakes. Last year, we tried to analyze the errors that led the world into economic crisis. Now it is time to analyze the mistakes we made when trying to get out of it. When the scale of the crisis became clear last year, [...]
Reading The Economist – which I confess to doing regularly – tends to arouse various emotions. Anger at a particularly galling misrepresentation of what I see as reality (e.g. trade unions, government, Europe). Resentment at the ability to change positions without confessing to past mistakes (e.g. Iraq, climate change, financial liberalisation). Powerlessness when I think [...]
Two important victories for President Obama this week — the New Start anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia to reduce weapons and re-start inspections, and the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell after a 17-year ban on gays in the military. Why have Senate Republicans been willing to break ranks on these two, while not a [...]
2010 has been an annus horriblis for the euro area. In the spring, just when it appeared that it was emerging from the worst of the financial and economic crisis, panic returned in the form of a sovereign debt crisis. Despite frantic activity by European policymakers – the involvement of the IMF on European soil [...]
It is said that Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenka never misses an opportunity to surprise partners and foes alike. But the outcome of the last weekend’s presidential elections in Belarus may have taken by surprise even the country’s long-standing ruler. For most of his political career, Lukashenka had essentially only one foreign partner, Russia. Belarus was [...]
The European Commission is the most important body that Americans – and far too many Europeans – have never heard of. As the executive branch of the European Union, it is on a peer level with President Barack Obama and his Cabinet, yet the public hardly knows it exists or what it does. As I [...]
The dominant tradition in popular politics is infused with the values of republican liberalism. The contemporary centre-left, influenced by a mix of residual Marxism and technocratic progressivism, has ceded this ground to conservatives and libertarians, losing elections and popular appeal in the process. A twenty-first century centre-left needs to reclaim the tradition of republican liberty [...]
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