debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
That the disease which brought the European Union into the intensive-care ward and has kept it there since, for quite a few years, is best diagnosed as a ‘democratic deficit’ is fast turning into a commonplace. Indeed, it is taken increasingly for granted and is hardly ever seriously questioned. Some observers and analysts ascribe the [...]
For the past decades of economic globalisation, unions around the world have been on the defensive; their role as voices of the political and economic interests of working people has been marginalised. In a climate of outsourcing, offshoring, flexibilisation and casualisation of work, the loss of union power and the deregulation of labour markets has [...]
What will the world look like two decades from now? Obviously, nobody knows, but some things are more likely than others. Companies and governments have to make informed guesses, because some of their investments today will last longer than 20 years. In December, the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC) published its guess: Global Trends 2030: [...]
This month, the United States National Intelligence Council released a sobering report entitled Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Most important, according to the authors, if current trends continue, Asia could soon surpass North America and Europe in global power. It will have a higher GDP, larger population, higher military spending, and more technological investment. In this [...]
The main argument in The Globalization Paradox is that we can’t simultaneously pursue economic globalization, democracy and national determination, but at most have two out of three. You also write that the EU was the exception that tests the rule. Well, hasn’t the on-going crisis shown that this trilemma definitely also holds true for the [...]
The upswing in global equity markets that started in July is now running out of steam, which comes as no surprise: with no significant improvement in growth prospects in either the advanced or major emerging economies, the rally always seemed to lack legs. If anything, the correction might have come sooner, given disappointing macroeconomic data [...]
What kind of directions and roles do you see transnational governance as playing in relation to some key issues: climate change and regional conflicts and nuclear non-proliferation? David Held: I think that multilateral organisations in the conventional form of international governmental organisations suffer from two deficits which pervade them; one is they don’t meet the [...]
This piece reports on recent research around the relationship between trade unions and internationalisation in the context of globalisation. It argues for a more open, less pessimistic view than the dominant one. This view builds on the experiences of the 1970s and is cognisant of the depth of the current crisis. Transnationalism Unions and the [...]
As evidence mounts that income inequality is increasing in many parts of the world, the problem has received growing attention from academics and policymakers. In the United States, for example, the income share of the top 1% of the population has more than doubled since the late 1970’s, from about 8% of annual GDP to [...]
The supposedly universal decline in the power of trade unions is often ascribed to unavoidable or desirable trends such as technological progress or globalisation. In a short, clear and well-argued paper John Schmitt and Alexandra Mitukiewicz from the CEPR in Washington DC point out, first, that (de)unionisation trends have been very different across the OECD [...]
The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: [...]
The protest movements that have flared up across the West, from Chile to Germany, have remained curiously undefined and under-analyzed. Some speak of them as the greatest global mobilization since 1968 – when enragés in very different countries coalesced around similar concerns. But others insist that there is nothing new here. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, [...]
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