Latest posts
Post-Democracy in Italy and Europe
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I have a gloomy article on the parlous state of social democracy in Italy and elsewhere in Europe up at Aeon. The draft was completed two weeks ago; if anything the events in the interim have given even more cause for depression. The Italian Democrat...
Greece’s trap
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Greece is at the hard end of another European policy problem, related to austerity, but this time to do with immigration, and it’s turning into a serious human rights and humanitarian crisis. According to Europe’s border control agency Fr...
Du kan gå nu.
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The celebrated Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri has written a powerful open letter to the Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask (original in Swedish, English translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles). Following an interview in which Ask allegedly said tha...
Post-Democracy in Italy and Europe
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Mark Mazower has a good piece on Italy in today’s Financial Times. The turmoil produced by the Italian elections has directed attention back to where it should have been all along – to the politics of the eurozone crisis. We have had six...
Italian voters are revolting
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In yesterday’s elections in Italy, ‘voters defied a failing policy and a clapped-out political establishment‘, resulting in an indecisive outcome. Here is more evidence in the Eurozone of what the late Peter Mair called the con...
Austerity measures in crisis countries – updates from the Eurozone periphery
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The current issue of the online journal Intereconomics features stories about the politics of adjustment in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Aidan Regan and I contributed the article about Ireland. Each paper outlines the measur...
BReakout?
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I thought I would follow up on Chris’ post, from a position of even less expertise, but focusing more on the consequences of a referendum vote in favor of a British exit (BReakout?) from the EU. I’ll start by thinking about two polar case...
Cameron’s gamble
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Most readers will know by now that the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, yesterday pledged an in-out referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union, to be held in the event that the Conservatives win the next general ele...
The ECB’s New Role
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I’ve a review in the new issue of The Nation of Harold James’ history of the euro (Powells, Amazon) which does the usual annoying-reviewer-trick of taking a book and using it to talk about things that the reviewer rather than the bookR...
Elections in the Netherlands
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Today general elections (for parliament) are held in the Netherlands. These are politically exciting/nervous times, since the electorate has polarized quite significantly. Until a few weeks back, the polls showed two main contenders to win the electi...
Master Werenfrid’s Challenge
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I don’t have much to say about the politics of the new ECB proposal that I haven’t said at greater length already. Matt Yglesias is right to see this as a power shift, but it’s one that’s been in the making for quite a while.
Hayek v. Polanyi in the European Union
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A somewhat different take on matters Hayekian – Martin Höpner and Armin Schäfer’s article on Hayek and the EU has just come out in International Organization. It’s been in gestation for a while (an earlier working paper ve...
Once more up to the brink, or should that be over the precipice?
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It’s getting pretty exhausting living inside the Eurozone. We screw up our nerves for the next moment of crisis, which is narrowly averted, only to find that the same old problems lie in wait just around the corner; but worse this time, because...
The nasty party just got even nastier
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I’ve blogged about this before, but the UK Coalition government’s proposals to restrict the immigration of spouses of British nationals just came a step closer to being enacted. Though packaged as a measure against forced marriage, this i...
The Economist fails the Turing Test again
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Five years ago I linked to a Bill Emmott column on the impending election of Nicholas Sarkozy thusly: This unashamed mash note from Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist presents a class of a triple-distilled tincture of the prevailing globollo...
David Brady on the Welfare State, Unions, and Poverty
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Here’s a nice profile in the Guardian of my colleague Dave Brady, who was in London recently talking about poverty and social policy: Brady’s response is that we need to rebuild trust in a welfare state that everyone feels they benefit fr...
Golden Fetters
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From David Marsh’s book on the origins of the euro, some indication that the last few years of gold standard lunacy were baked into the cake from quite early on. The two leaders [Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt] professed the common...
The Dog Ate My Homework
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Subtitle: Frank McNally is a Genius This is too good to just post a link to on FB or Twitter or even that Tumblr I started with such earnest hopes for the unleashing of my strangely bounded creativity. In a column worthy of the Irish Times’ old...
Clive Crook Changes His Mind
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This column by Clive Crook today: Democrats therefore find themselves having to deny the obvious. Obama wants to make the country more like Europe? Ridiculous. A straw man. But it isn’t ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is the idea that Repub...
The ECB Method
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Two months ago, I wrote a post which argued, among other things, that the European Union used to be run according to the ‘Community Method’ (according to which member states often used to defer to each other on matters of vital interest,...
