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 [...]
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 [...]
France is at a crossroads. It has numerous valuable assets, but it cannot postpone long-overdue reforms, or else it will become increasingly irrelevant in a fiercely competitive global economy. This is the economic challenge that President François Hollande, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and all of us in the French government must confront. We face a [...]
Crisis is a word that occurs frequently in newspapers, on television, in everyday conversation, which is sufficient to justify, from time to time, financial difficulties, increases in prices, the decrease in demand, the lack of liquidity, the imposition of new taxes or all these things taken together. “Economic crisis” is – according to dictionaries – [...]
After a hard-fought election campaign, costing well in excess of $2 billion, it seems to many observers that not much has changed in American politics: Barack Obama is still President, the Republicans still control the House of Representatives, and the Democrats still have a majority in the Senate. With America facing a “fiscal cliff” – [...]
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 [...]
We have entered an age of fear. Insecurity is once again an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Insecurity born of terrorism, but also, and more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this historical period is that in spite of an amazing spate of social progress in many areas, that we seem to be backtracking in the crucial area of equality. It would have been both difficult and disappointing to anticipate in the 70s and 80s that a few decades later we [...]
Globalisation expert David Held on the future of social justice DIE ZEIT: Professor Held, since the economic crisis it could hardly be said that social justice has enjoyed a political resurgence. In Germany, the parties have not been able to agree on Hartz IV; in the UK, the government is cutting welfare like never before; [...]
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