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 [...]
As shown by Professor Martin Seeleib-Kaiser from Oxford University, Europe is a social model and it is time that the European Union understands this. As historically welfare states have been used for nation building, if the EU wants to become a strong entity it needs a European welfare state including solidarity and certain minimum welfare [...]
Wages are not the cause of the crisis, nor a tool to overcome it. But wage coordination is needed as an essential element of a Social Europe. Wages as a problem ? According to the mainstream analysis, excessive wage growth is the cause of imbalances within the Euro area. Yet there was a fall in [...]
In the Global Wage Report issued at the end of last year, the ILO observed that real wages in developed economies had suffered a double dip by falling in 2008 and again in 2011. In the Euro Area, real wage trends are different but at the same time also more problematic. According to the Commission’s [...]
In my previous column, I have argued that prolonged negative output gaps in the Euro Area will reduce potential GDP, long-term growth and employment, because the lack of demand will disincentivize investment. What Europe needs, especially the south, is closing the output gap not by reducing supply but by increasing demand. The question is then, [...]
The current crisis of legitimacy of the EU can be traced in a path-dependent fashion to its roots in the aftermath of World War II. Subsequent historical distance has elided together the anti-fascist popular consensus across the continent after the defeat and delegitimisation of Nazism with the elite integration ‘project’ which came to fruition in [...]
Since last week, a sizeable number of commentators have been arguing that UKIP’s surge just made Britain a more European place. The reasoning? Farage and Co are part of a phenomenon that exists EU-wide, apparently. You can almost hear the thought-process of the euro-enthusiasts writing this stuff. What better way to discredit the anti-EU party [...]
France and Germany held largely contradicting hopes and aspirations for Europe’s common currency. To France the key issue in establishing a European monetary union was to end monetary dependence, both from the vagaries of the U.S. dollar and from regional deutschmark hegemony, and to establish a global reserve currency that could actually stand up to [...]
The Euro area is suffering from substantial internal trade imbalances. These are widely recognised as important contributing factors to the crisis of the Euro system because persistent current account deficits come with increasing external liabilities. The present economic policy regime essentially aims at rebalancing the Euro area by means of internal devaluation and/or by fiscal [...]
My objective in coming here today is to discuss the euro crisis. I think you will all agree that the crisis is far from resolved. It has already caused tremendous damage both financially and politically and taken an extensive human toll as well. It has transformed the European Union into something radically different from what [...]
The Cyprus crisis is likely to generate a number of political and economic problems for the country in the short term. Charles Goodhart assesses the impact on Cyprus’s economy and the fallout from the bank levy imposed on large depositors at Cypriot banks. He argues that although the potential for contagion to spread to other Eurozone countries [...]
As the economic slump across the European Union deepens and social distress grows, a terrible sense of political impotence grips those desperate to see recovery. There is a blunt reality to be faced: if progressives cannot respond to the crisis in the Euro-area with an effective alternative, there is a growing danger not only that the [...]
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