debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Christmas retailing collapsed in Greece this holiday season. This is a superficial indicator of the plight of eleven million of our fellow European citizens. Other symptoms of the crisis are more serious: Hospitals turning away expectant mothers A spike in childhood malnourishment Parents abandoning their children on account of poverty A huge jump in the suicide rate A sharp increase in HIV transmission amongst intravenous drug users [...]
My political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State — a position he’s apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President. So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton. Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the [...]
There is some likelihood that the year about to end will be recorded in history as a “year of people on the move”. When people move, two questions are in order. The first is: where from are they moving? The second is: where to? There has been no shortage of answers to the first question; [...]
2011 was supposed to be the year that saw the back of the Global Crisis. Alas, the crisis is still with us as the North Atlantic banking part of the crisis morphed into the Eurozone crisis, and slow growth in advanced countries once again threatens emerging economies. In this column, IMF chief economist Oliver Blanchard [...]
In a year of revolution, causes have been easier to identify than consequences. In 1989, following the end of the Cold War, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History? of the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”, marking “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of [...]
The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for. Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government. But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that [...]
When the economic crisis broke following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the global banking system seized up, workers began to be laid off, families saw their houses repossessed and banks teetered on the brink of collapse. Financial panic knew no frontiers. It was clear that a coordinated global response by governments [...]
The world’s greatest shortage is not of oil, clean water, or food, but of moral leadership. With a commitment to truth – scientific, ethical, and personal – a society can overcome the many crises of poverty, disease, hunger, and instability that confront us. Yet power abhors truth, and battles it relentlessly. So let us pause [...]
As 2011 draws to a close, it is fair to say that this year has been one of the most disastrous for the European Union in its history. The eurozone crisis has spread from the periphery to the core and all political and financial rescue packages were too little, too late. Towards the end of the year [...]
A United States of Europe takes a giant step forward… yet the Euroskeptics still see the glass as half empty. I was surprised at the chorus of carping that greeted the recent European agreement to launch greater fiscal integration and union. Predictably, the usual gloom and doomers – Wolfgang Munchau, Paul Krugman and just about [...]
In the aftermath of the most recent European Council, there was an avalanche of public statements which, in effect, put the Council’s policy package into serious doubt. One statement in particular deserves further analysis. In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on the 11th of December, Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann expressed the view that the [...]
And again, historians, sociologists, cultural studies academics and political scientists betray their academic duty. Earlier, they shied away from the problems of immigration, integration and Islam en masse. They turned traitor to their expert knowledge of human society by failing to signal the shadow sides of multicultural integration in a loud and timely manner. They [...]
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