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This volume explores and analyses the formation, functioning, and performance of minority governments. It presents thirteen in-depth case studies by leading country experts that provide rich, contextualized analyses of minority governments in different settings.
Historian Kjell stberg presents the first comprehensive study of one of the most influential political movements of our time. Swedish Social Democracy was an inspiration to young socialists around the world for generations. But little remains of the Swedish model today. For almost a century, Social Democracy prevailed in Sweden, which for many appeared to be on the verge of becoming a truly socialist country. What followed instead was a jarring adaptation to a rising neoliberal world order. Large parts of the public sector have now been privatised, social inequality is rapidly worsening, and right-wing populists have come to represent much of the working class. stberg discusses the reformist strategy, class organizations and social mobilisation, women's struggle, and the creation of the Swedish welfare society. It is a history emblematic of the transformations in global politics of the last half century.
This book considers a central issue of our time: the relationship between the macroeconomic objectives of political parties in democratic countries and the legal framework of market economies. The impressive panel of contributors examines social-democratic policies on cartels, market concentration and competition in different European countries, spanning a hundred-year period (specifically the interwar period, the initial postwar period, the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000s). This thought-provoking volume challenges the dominant belief that the EU’s economic system and competition policy were mainly influenced by neoliberal economic thinking, instead showing that Keynesian and social-democratic positions played a major role in the emergence of this system. It will be valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers interested in modern economic history, industrial organization, political economy, European legal history and political science.
This edited volume promotes a comparative and transnational approach to the complex and ambiguous relationship between West European socialism and the contemporary state over the longue durée. It encourages a better understanding of socialism while also casting an original light on the history of the contemporary state in Europe. Socialists have been a prime political force since the late nineteenth century through to the present. Through their strength, their presence at the heart of societies, their dynamism, inventiveness, and influence, they have left their mark on the European physiognomy and helped to forge part of its identity. This is particularly true where the welfare state is con...
Why centrist politics in France is bound to fail This book analyses the French political crisis, which has entered its most acute phase in more than thirty years with the break-up of traditional left and right social blocs. Governing parties have distanced themselves from the working classes, leaving behind on the one hand, craftsmen, shop owners and small entrepreneurs disappointed by the timidity of the reforms of the neoliberal right and, on the other hand, workers and employees hostile to the neoliberal and pro-European integration orientation of the Socialist Party. The Presidency of François Hollande was less an anomaly than the definitive failure of attempts to reconcile the social base of the left with the so-called "modernisation" of the French model. The project, based on the pursuit of neoliberal reforms, did not die with Hollande's failure; it was taken up and radicalised by his successor, Emmanuel Macron. This project needs a social base, the 'bourgeois bloc", designed to overcome the right/left divide by a new alliance between the middle and upper classes. But this, as we have seen recently on the streets of Paris and elsewhere, is a precarious process.
This volume offers a new perspective on the political history of the socialist, communist and alternative political Lefts, focusing on the role of networks and transnational connections. Embedding the history of left-wing internationalism into a new political history approach, it accounts for global and transnational turns in the study of left-wing politics. The essays in this collection study a range of examples of international engagement and transnational cooperation in which left-wing actors were involved, and explore how these interactions shaped the globalization of politics throughout the 20th century. In taking a multi-archival and methodological approach, this book challenges two co...
With a combined focus on social democrats in Northern and Southern Europe, this book crucially broadens our understanding of the transformation of European social democracy from the mid-1970s to the early-1990s. In doing so, it revisits the transformation of this ideological family at the end of the Cold War, and before the launch of Third Way politics, and examines the dynamics and power relations at play among European social democratic parties in a context of nascent globalisation. The chronological, methodological and geographical approaches adopted allow for a more nuanced narrative of change for European social democracy than the hitherto dominant centric perspective. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of social democracy, the European Centre-left, political parties, ideologies and more broadly to comparative politics and European politics and history.
The untold story of the role of humanitarian NGOs in building the neoliberal order after empire After India gained independence in 1947, Britain reinvented its role in the global economy through nongovernmental aid organizations. Utilizing existing imperial networks and colonial bureaucracy, the nonprofit sector sought an ethical capitalism, one that would equalize relationships between British consumers and Third World producers as the age of empire was ending. The Solidarity Economy examines the role of nonstate actors in the major transformations of the world economy in the postwar era, showing how British NGOs charted a path to neoliberalism in their pursuit of ethical markets. Between t...
This book examines and explains the Center-Left’s political decline since 2008, whilst analyzing the factors that account for its sagging electoral and popular support, losing voters both to the Far-Left, the Far-Right, and abstentions. Focusing on the era since the 2008 financial crisis in particular, while also charting the historical genealogy that led to the current impasse, the book examines how, when and why the collapse of Europe’s Center-Left occurred. Moving beyond existing and slightly dated accounts, the contributors explore why Social Democrats lack compelling answers to pressing current policy challenges. Faced with a decline in its core clientele, namely blue-collar workers...
Offering a fresh take on a crucial phase of European history, this book explores the years between the 1980s and 1990s when the European Union took shape. Whilst contributing to existing literature on the Maastricht Treaty and European integration at the end of the twentieth century, the book also brings those debates into the twenty-first century and makes connections with longer-term issues. The transformation of the European political climate in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, and the watershed Brexit vote in 2016, has made it all the more urgent to reconsider the way scholars and opinion-makers have looked at European integration in the past. Drawing from recently releas...