debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
I do not regard today’s event as firing the starting pistol for a referendum campaign because there is a lot of water to flow under the bridge – including the holding of a general election – before any point of decision is reached on that. But the point is, for far too long, those who want [...]
I have taken a rather active part in the first fifty years of Britain’s somewhat eccentric debate about our role in the world and our role in Europe. The debate now is not the same as it was when I began my political career. We face a much more complex world, a more complex Union. It is obvious [...]
So, tomorrow we will finally hear David Cameron’s big speech on Britain’s future in the European Union. So much has already been trailed and leaked that it will be difficult for Cameron to come up with something substantially new, but rumour has it that he is at least trying. In the meantime there is an [...]
This month, the United States National Intelligence Council released a sobering report entitled Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Most important, according to the authors, if current trends continue, Asia could soon surpass North America and Europe in global power. It will have a higher GDP, larger population, higher military spending, and more technological investment. In this [...]
In April 2010, when the global economy was beginning to recover from the shock of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook predicted that global GDP growth would exceed 4% in 2010, with a steady annual growth rate of 4.5% maintained through 2015. But the forecast proved to be far too optimistic. In [...]
The sharp debate over the ongoing crisis of the euro zone has to a great extent driven protagonists into two camps. In what might be called the “official camp”, we find those who support the common currency project and with it policies of fiscal austerity. In the other, the “camp of the critics”, are those [...]
English is the dominant language of the Internet, business, and world trade. Do we need another? This column applies an economist’s rationale to the question. “I don’t speak English. Kurdish I speak, and Turkish, and gypsy language. But I don’t speak barbarian languages.” “Barbarian languages?” “English! German! Ya! French! All the barbarian”. —Yasar Kemal, a [...]
Europe’s current troubles with the Euro should not detract from its success in liberating intra-regional trade: this is a model worth Africa emulating. The issue is timely since the African Union has a summit on trade and regional integration later this month. Regional integration is the ideal topic for the European Commission in its relations [...]
A central—and largely ignored—aspect of future federal Euro governance will be a Euro Area (EA) wages and productivity policy. Only such a policy, backed by European trade unions, can avoid trade imbalances spilling into national sovereign debt crises. At the heart of the Euro Area (EA) crisis is the problem of trade imbalance. Just as [...]
Is Germany a normal country? For years, historians have debated whether Germany’s development has followed a political, economic, and social ‘Sonderweg’.[1] It has been argued that this special development path has led to two World Wars and one of the most brutal dictatorships in the history of mankind. Yet, with the creation of the Federal [...]
We live in a world where, in theory, global economic and political governance is in the hands of the G-20. In practice, however, there is no global leadership and severe disarray and disagreement among G-20 members about monetary and fiscal policy, exchange rates and global imbalances, climate change, trade, financial stability, the international monetary system, [...]
When Obama sat down with Hu this week, he faced the quandary raised last year, according to WikiLeaks, by Hillary Clinton: how a nation talks tough with its banker. The euro crisis and resultant Chinese investment in European sovereign debt, partly in a bid to help shore up the single currency, means that several EU [...]
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