debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
One of our era’s foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, [...]
European citizens today are confronted with increasingly histrionic specters of disaster: financial ruin, xenophobic regression, a catastrophic reversal of the pax Europaea achieved over the past half century. In response to this approaching threat, Europeans are offered two distinct—yet misleading—choices: either (a) embrace a strengthened European Union with broader authority to regulate the internal policies [...]
Yet again historians, sociologists, cultural studies academics, and political scientists betray their academic duty. Previously they’ve shied away, in numbers far too big for comfort, from the problems of immigration, integration and Islam. They became traitors to their own expert knowledge on human society by failing to, in a timely and loud fashion, single out [...]
The world economy is entering a new phase, in which achieving global cooperation will become increasingly difficult. The United States and the European Union, now burdened by high debt and low growth – and therefore preoccupied with domestic concerns – are no longer able to set global rules and expect others to fall into line. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The euro member states and the European institutions have not yet managed to come up with a convincing plan to surmount the crisis afflicting the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This is due both to a false analysis of the causes and a reluctance to take decisive political measures. A review of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung publications on [...]
Writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beginning to get mind numbing. 18 years have passed since the signing of the Oslo Accords in the White House Rose Garden, and still no Palestinian state has been recognised. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this epic drama is the fact that the intellectual groundwork for a political [...]
Yet again banks have to be rescued because financial markets have gone wild. And because still no effective rules and regulations have been introduced to make banks pay for the high risks they are taking. It feels like “Groundhog Day”: Everything starts all over again, nobody seems to remember anything. Has anybody learned anything? After [...]
We live in an era in which the most important forces affecting every economy are global, not local. What happens “abroad” – in China, India, and elsewhere – powerfully affects even an economy as large as the United States. Economic globalization has, of course, produced some large benefits for the world, including the rapid spread [...]
Introduction: The political context To understand the situation in the countries at the periphery of the European Union, four countries within the Eurozone, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, we have to understand the political context they have in common. All of them were governed by fascist or fascist-like dictatorships (Spain, Portugal, and Greece) or by [...]
Like it or not, Britain is in Europe. It is not merely that over half its exports go to the rest of the EU and that the City is Europe’s main financial centre—Britain is culturally and geographically part of Europe, and no growth strategy is sustainable which ignores the EU. But where is the EU [...]
All Content