University of Strathclyde.
Picture by John Young © www.youngmedia.co.uk 2016
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A new blog by our President, Dr Laura Polverari, examines the content and promise of the new European Pillar of Social Rights. It argues that, while there are no doubts that the Pillar represents an important opportunity for the strengthening of Social Rights in Europe and that it should be seen in itself as an achievement, there is also a need for a debate on the scope for more significant, systemic and territorialised EU investments in this area, and that the ongoing debates on the post-2020 MFF and Cohesion policy represent an opportunity for such debate. The full text of the blog can be accessed from this link: http://www.cohesify.eu/2017/06/22/european-social-pillar/.
Italian elites’ traditional esterofilia – the tendency to compare Italy unfavourably with other polities and to look to foreign models for solutions to the country’s political problems – looks very interesting in the aftermath of Brexit. Always held up as a model of political stability, home to a civic culture of which Italians could supposedly only dream, British politics must look very different now, in light of the referendum outcome – as must the quality of British and Italian democracy in relative terms. It seems ironic, considering what has happened, that Anglo-Saxon authors could once write books and articles with such snobbish titles as ‘Republic without government’, ‘Sick man of Europe’, to name just a few, and that these titles could be largely accepted by Italian elites as embodying appropriate judgments of the relative quality of Italy as a democracy. For what the referendum outcome has shown is that British democracy shares all of the problems traditionally seen as supposedly distinguishing features of the Italian case, if anything to a far greater degree. Thereby, it has revealed a number of stark warnings for Italy’s political elites, as well as having had several unwelcome impacts. 