debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, the threat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give a political voice to the powerless. In your view, [...]
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 [...]
Commentators all over the world have been watching the Arab Spring with great interest but more and more people are wondering what will happen next. The recent developments in Egypt, where President Mohammed Morsi has grabbed a significant amount of power, are a cause for real concern. Watch The Real News report below for the [...]
Yong June, the creator and editor-in-chief of Indigo, one of the most ambitious, iconoclastic and lively periodicals dedicated to the critical scrutiny of the present-day realities and in particular to the issue of regaining the lost control over human condition, pressed me to sum up my view of the reasons for which such control has [...]
The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but [...]
“The Arab Spring triggers popular rebellions against autocrats across the Arab world. The Israeli Summer brings 250,000 Israelis into the streets, protesting the lack of affordable housing and the way their country is now dominated by an oligopoly of crony capitalists. From Athens to Barcelona, European town squares are being taken over by young people [...]
The social conflict in Europe has intensified strongly over the past couple of years, in the wake of the financial crisis. The labour and trade union movement has been on the defensive ever since the neoliberal offensive started around 1980. The balance of power in our societies has thus shifted enormously over the past 30 [...]
The latest twist in the eternal debate over equality is the position currently adopted by neo-liberal politicians and expressed particularly clearly by the British Labour Party’s former prime minister, Tony Blair. In a rich society, it is argued, the great majority (say the top 80-85% of the income and wealth distribution) is materially so well [...]
A few months before the last presidential elections, I said the following in a conversation with Giuliano Battiston in response to his query “Could his election be interpreted as a sign that the American political system has definitively broken the link between demos and ethnos and that America is going toward a more conscious post-ethnic [...]
In Wars Guns and Votes I argued that without effective checks and balances elections do not resolve problems but rather intensify them. I chose Cote d’Ivoire as the book’s case study. Current events there are confirming my worst fears. Gbagbo looks set to cling to power through his army despite losing the election. Fake elections [...]
I have just come across the lecture of Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen talking about Power, Justice and Capabilities at the annual lecture of the Demos think tank a few days ago. This is the Demos blurb of it: For the Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen, a good society is one populated by individuals with the [...]
Social democrats need to reassert the protective power of the state – this time through global institutions. Ten years ago Gerhard Schröder declared that: ‘economic policy is neither left not right. It is either good or bad’. Today we can conclude that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, eleven out of fifteen governments of the [...]
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