The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.
The
year began dramatically for Social Europe. On 14 January, Nicholas Emiliou, one
of the European Union’s Advocates General, advised the Court of Justice of the
European Union (CJEU) to annul the Adequate
Minimum Wages Directive (AMWD). His opinion supported an
action for annulment brought by the Kingdom of Denmark against the European
Parliament and the Council, arguing that the AMWD would undermine the rights of
national social partners and breach the principle of conferral of powers. In
this guest post, Roland Erne discusses these
developments.
When
the betrayal came, it was swift and brutal. Donald Trump, having barely started
his second presidency, phoned up Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, on
Wednesday 12 February and paved the way towards negotiations to end the war
without consulting Ukraine itself (BBC, 13 February 2025). When only a
week later, high-ranking delegations of both countries including Russia’s
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met in Riyadh/Saudi
Arabia for extensive discussions, no Ukrainian representative was at the table
(BBC, 18 February
2025).
At the same time, ‘White House officials told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald
Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to
the US’ (The Guardian, 20
February 2025).
This was presented as a way to pay back all the assistance the US had provided
over the course of the war.
The
public humiliation of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyduring a meeting in the White
House was the final confirmation that the US had dropped its support for
Ukraine. Denounced by many European leaders and commentators for what it is, a
betrayal, this was not, however, the first betrayal of Ukraine. The country has
been betrayed by the West on several occasions before, leaving it now in a
perilous situation. In this blog post, I will discuss previous moments of
betrayal taking a much longer historical perspective.
Germany
prides itself for the way the country has owned up to past atrocities of the
Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 and here in particular the Holocaust, in which
six million Jews but also Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and disabled people were
murdered. The Holocaust represents ultimate evil, and its teaching became
mandatory from the 1970s, 1980s onwards. In this blog post, I will reflect on
Germany’s and the Germans’ attempts to atone for the Holocaust in particular in
relation to the country’s support for Israel, drawing also on my own
experiences in the German school system.
In
my latest open access article Confronting Multiple Global Crises:
a political economy approach for the 21st century, published in the
journal Globalizations, I discuss the essential features of a political
economy approach, which facilitates the conceptualisation of the internal
relations between the current, multiple global crises including a crisis of
global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global
gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global
ecology.
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