Articles about:
Citizens
With its ‘New Pact on Migration and Asylum’, the European Commission has taken on one of the most divisive and controversial issues within the bloc. And one that puts its own human rights record most prominently on the spot. The outcome are elaborate proposals, heavy on procedure but weak on...
The time for adjustments and tinkering is over. Well before the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, inequalities and social injustice had mounted in most Western countries to a point where they produced widespread resentment and triggered an ‘authoritarian dynamic’: a rejection of diversity, a call for sanctioning outlying behaviour and for building...
From today’s perspective, the 1990s may seem like ancient history. The images of the Polish Solidarność trade union rising and the fall of the Berlin Wall remind us of the transition, during which the populations of Central and Eastern Europe chose a democratic path and reunification with the West. Soon...
Involving citizens in choosing policy priorities has proven able to increase their quality of life. When the discussion between institutions and citizens focuses on resources, spaces to discuss different scenarios for increasing wealth and rationalising the expenditures of the places where we live emerge. Participatory Budgeting is a democratic innovation...
For almost two decades EU institutions have paid lip-service to capacitating welfare provision. With the new legislature, it’s time to ratchet up domestic social investment. A ‘golden rule’ of exempting certain types of social spending from the Eurozone fiscal rule book for about a decade would allow to invest in...
Geert Mak has investigated social change during the 20th century and various levels: a village in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands, a big city: Amsterdam, but most notably in his Opus Magnus ‘In Europe’ for which he has travelled the continent criss-cross, during the whole last year of the last...
Big Tech and governments are creating a powerful system of surveillance capitalism. But Vincent Mosco sees alternatives: citizens’ mobilisation, applying anti-monopoly legislation, breaking the likes of Google and Facebook and European alternatives are amongst them. Progressive Post: In your book ‘Becoming Digital’, you analyse the convergence of different technologies (Internet...
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ explores a new step in the history of capitalism, where big tech, and increasingly other branches of the economy, are making profits with data, extracted from citizens without their consent, and transformed into raw material for behaviour predictions – with destructive effects on the...
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ explores a new step in the history of capitalism, where big tech, and increasingly other branches of the economy, are making profits with data, extracted from citizens without their consent, and transformed into raw material for behaviour predictions – with destructive effects on the...
Bringing all forces of society together – individuals as well as groups – is the best way to deal with those who want to create a battleground between economic and financial interests or between ideologies of closure and exclusion. Who owns Europe ? The first question we must ask ourselves...