debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
There is no social dimension if the regime of economic governance does not change. Nor will the idea of placing social benchmarking alongside the existing system of economic governance be sufficient to change things in a fundamental way (see here). In order to really control economic governance and its instruments of economic torture, clear limits [...]
Will a reinvigorated European Employment Strategy Be Up To The Job? Through the so called roadmap for a ‘genuine’ Economic Union, Europe is in the process of strengthening its power to intervene in Euro Area member states and to impose flexible labour markets and flexible wages. As described in a previous contribution, this roadmap therefore constitutes a serious [...]
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos has lost some of its pre-crisis panache. After all, before the meltdown in 2008, the captains of finance and industry could trumpet the virtues of globalization, technology, and financial liberalization, which supposedly heralded a new era of relentless growth. The benefits would be shared by all, if [...]
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 [...]
Listening to the European debate in Germany, the keywords have been the need for a Treaty change, political union, a European Convention and the lack of loopholes in the current democratic procedures … Now these keywords have been transposed to the European level by Barroso’s State of the Union Address: federation of Member States, treaty [...]
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 [...]
Europeans, whether they realize it or not, have passed only the first few bends in the road of a years-long journey to overhaul their key economic and political institutions. This redesign will be more profound than the one experienced by Communist member states after the breakup of the Soviet Union; that one was a tumultuous [...]
The roots of current controversy around the current Euro crisis can be traced to the 1992 Maastricht negotiations that led to the common currency’s creation. Kevin Featherstone argues that the rejection of neo-Keynesian ideas was fundamental then, and finds echoes today in policy attitudes that make a return to growth even more unlikely. ‘The past is another [...]
It is now clear that the eurozone crisis will continue well into 2012, despite early February’s recovery in stock markets. Negotiations between Greece and the banks over Greek sovereign debt may yet be concluded, but sufficiently wide participation by banks in the deal remains very much in doubt. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has raised [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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