debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The social dimension of Europe is not restricted to social protection: what will be the place of labour and of workers in an economy dominated by the market forces? What new foundation of the relations between capital and labour can we consider? Social democracy is currently one of the favourite topics of seminars, colloquiums and [...]
Every time we analyse European social democracy the challenge is both more daunting and more exciting. From the publication of Building the Good Society by Andrea Nahles and Jon Cruddas to Europe & the Good Society: After the Crash by Thorben Albrecht and myself everything has changed. But things have now changed again. Events in Cyprus and the struggles [...]
A giant mental disconnect has opened up between the core of Europe and its periphery. A mundane existence in one part now coexists alongside a situation of disaster in the other, meaning that a sense of urgency is not shared across the Union when it comes to the euro crisis. According to one vision of [...]
Over the course of Arab Spring, the Socialist International (SI) hastily removed first the RCD (the party of Ben Ali in Tunisia) and then New Democracy (the party of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt) from its ranks. The slow response in North Africa typified the glacial pace of the organization. When it comes to being unable to [...]
Watch a panel of experts debate the future of social democracy. The discussion was recorded at the conference ‘The Future of the Left in Central Europe’, organised by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and CESTA in Prague on 21st November 2012. Unfortunately only the original audio was recorded so we only put the English speakers into the video, [...]
We are living through not one but two crises of capitalism. The first one – the economic crisis which has followed the financial crash of 2008 – everyone knows about. The second is less familiar. This is the crisis of the global environment. Of course environmentalists have been warning of ‘environmental crisis’ for over 50 [...]
Watch Hungarian MP Tibor Szanyi discuss the future of social democracy in Hungary. The talk was recorded at the conference ‘The Future of the Left in Central Europe’, organised by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and CESTA in Prague on 21st November 2012.
Spain has recently passed its five-year anniversary of job destruction, and yet there are more job losses still to come. Spaniards are getting poorer, and it will get worse before it gets better.[1] Old-age pensions have just been cut for the first time, which is just the latest in a long line of broken electoral promises on the [...]
The Labour Party was congratulating itself yesterday on having joined with Tory rebels to defeat the Tory-led government by voting to cut the EU budget. In truth, this was sheer opportunism. While the two Eds (Miliband and Balls) may believe that supporting belt-tightening in Europe is good populist politics, in truth, Labour has shot itself [...]
Recently in an interview with the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt, the Greek PM Antonis Samaras warned the European public that if his government fails, then Greece would plunge into chaos [1]. As a potential or actual source of danger the PM pointed to the rise of “Golden Dawn”, the neo-nazi party. Evidently, the purpose of Mr. [...]
Political parties on the European centre-left need to avoid been caught between instrumentalism (the practice of ‘spin’ politics and tactical manipulation); and utopianism (seeking to rediscover lost dreams and visions) The debate following the publication of Policy Network’s programmatic statement, A Centre-Left Project for New Times, has been rich and inspiring. Nonetheless, the conclusions drawn about the state of social democracy have [...]
In 2009 Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles published a short pamphlet, Building the Good Society and with the support of Compass and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation it has been debated across Europe. A study by Goettingen University cites this Good Society debate as the most influential current in European Social Democracy. Three years later we [...]
All Content