Stefan Collignon
Stefan Collignon Professor of Political Economy at St. Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa and President of the Scientific Committee of Centro Europa Ricerche (CER), Rome. He was also Centennial Professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Apart from his column for Social Europe Journal, Stefan publishes regularly in newspapers such as The Financial Times and The Financial Times Germany.
What Conservatives do not understand about the Euro
Conservative economists triumphantly expect that the end of the euro is nigh. They take the Greek budget troubles as proof: one size cannot fit all. But they are wrong. The euro has contributed to the largest job creation in Europe’s history: 15.1 million new jobs in the first decade compared to 3.9 million in the [...]
The Greek Drama and the Social Justice of Responsible Fiscal Policies
I do not envy our Greek socialist friends. They got elected because the previous conservative government was catastrophically incompetent, but the mess they now have to sort out is worse than the wildest imaginations could have predicted. This is not just a local problem. The fate of the euro, and therefore of Europe, hangs in [...]
Does Europe need a Strategy for China?
The European Union is the second largest economy in the world, but does it have a global economic strategy? 10 years after the creation of the euro, there is little evidence for it. Policymakers are more concerned with protecting narrow domestic advantages than with improving opportunities for the European economy as a whole. The Lisbon [...]
The Winner is: Democracy!
Habemus Presidentem. With the Lisbon Treaty ratified, the European Council appointed the Belgian Prime Minister Van Rompuy as its President, and Lady Ashton as Vice-President of the European Commission. The echo has been devastating. The Financial Times has called it ‘a colossal failure of ambition’. However, the decisions by the heads of states and governments [...]
Does Europe’s Social Democracy still have a Future?
Social democracy will only be able to sustain a social Europe through strengthening European democratic institutions.
German Social Democrats are lucky. Although in September they received their lowest vote in a federal election since the war– 23 per cent – things could have been worse. The result was still three percentage points more than they received [...]
Taking Democracy in Europe seriously
Emanuel Barroso has been re-elected President of the European Commission. How strange! Why has the politician, who bears the largest individual responsibility for the steady decline in the efficiency and popular approval of European policies, been endorsed by all EU governments and obtained 382 votes of the 718 MEPs who participated in the election? This [...]
Testing the European Parliament
Europe returns from the summer vacation and a busy schedule starts in Brussels. The most important issue is the election of the President of the next Commission: who will it be and how will he be appointed?
The two questions are, of course, related. For the moment only the incumbent José Manuel Barroso is an official [...]
The Dawn of a New Era: Social Democracy after the Financial Crisis
A new era is dawning. The financial crisis of 2008 is not the end of capitalism. Capitalism dates back to the Medici revolution, which invented modern banking, but since then it has gone through many different regimes and articulations. The 2008 crisis marks the end of the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution. Neoliberalism and monetarism are dead. Even [...]