debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The Euro crisis and the remedies the European institutions and member states have been attempting to administer for nearly four years have been subject to repeated scrutiny, in terms of both the diagnosis and the policies implemented. However, has sufficient consideration been given to the institutional questions this crisis raises, particularly with regard to economic [...]
The Doha round of trade negotiations is deadlocked, despite eight successful multilateral trade rounds before it. Climate negotiators have met for two decades without finding a way to stem global emissions. The UN is paralyzed in the face of growing insecurities across the world, the latest dramatic example being Syria. Each of these phenomena could [...]
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 [...]
In recent years, the European Union – or, more accurately, the powerful countries of northern Europe – has been subjecting its weaker members to social and political “stress tests” in the name of fiscal rectitude. As a result, southern Europe and parts of Eastern Europe have become a kind of public-policy laboratory, with experiments producing [...]
Nothing endangers globalization more than the yawning governance gap – the dangerous disparity between the national scope of political accountability and the global nature of markets for goods, capital, and many services – that has opened up in recent decades. When markets transcend national regulation, as with today’s globalization of finance, market failure, instability, and [...]
In recent years, the EU has moved its focus away from enlargement towards greater integration, especially in fiscal matters. This also comes at a time when the UK is seeking to renegotiate its relationship with the EU, and as the likelihood of Turkey joining the EU as a full member is increasingly remote. In light [...]
Before we delve into the reasons for the crisis of the state it is necessary to clarify the meaning of ‘nation’. Nation has a cultural connotation and its distant origins are historically much older than state: it is still recognisable as a nation even when its borders have not been marked out and, at least [...]
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 [...]
The weakening of democratic structures and the rise of technocratic governance are regularly cited as some of the most troubling consequences of the Eurozone crisis. Cathrine Holst assesses whether modern society’s dependence on expertise ensures that we must now redefine what democracy means. Presenting arguments in favour of a democratically tempered form of ‘epistocracy’, or expert rule, [...]
The most widely held theory of politics is also the simplest: the powerful get what they want. Financial regulation is driven by the interests of banks, health policy by the interests of insurance companies, and tax policy by the interests of the rich. Those who can influence government the most – through their control of [...]
The annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have provided a window onto two fundamental trends driving global politics and the world economy. Geopolitics is moving decisively away from a world dominated by Europe and the United States to one with many regional powers but no global leader. And a [...]
US President Barack Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim for the presidency of the World Bank has been well received – and rightly so, especially given some of the other names that were bandied about. In Kim, a public-health professor who is now President of Dartmouth University and previously led the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS [...]
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