Tackling Populism: the 89ers and the battle for the future

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 caught economists by surprise – but not historians, writes Michael Cottakis. As many rushed to convey throughout the 2000s, the excessive risk-taking by banks in key sectors bore worrying resemblance to trends exhibited in the build-up to the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The information was available for those willing to listen. Yet bankers and chief economists chose to ignore any warnings and plough blindly on. A similar trip down memory lane would have been useful to policy-makers, in order to avert the far more serious political crisis that followed. Europe’s ‘89ers’ cannot make the same mistake: they must look to the past in order to understand, and ultimately address, today’s populist flare-up

On the borderlands of humanity

The current crisis in the Mediterranean reminds us of what should be an obvious truth, but is too frequently forgotten: the European Union (EU) is a humanitarian space or it is nothing. If there are any criteria according to which Europe as a political project deserves to succeed or fail, they surely lie in upholding the centrality of notions of humanity within politics, not least because the need for the EU stemmed from the ultimate example of inhumane politics three-quarters of a century ago. As such, the EU can congratulate itself on its ability to function today as a humanitarian space for most of its citizens, most of the time, but recognise that a persistent failure of humanity on its borders calls into question that achievement

How to tackle populism: Macron vs Kurz

This time last year, things did not look pretty for the EU, writes Michael Cottakis. Marine Le Pen topped the polls in France spreading fears over Frexit, Geert Wilders had crept clear of his challengers in the Netherlands, and EU officials glanced worriedly at an Austria dealing with its own far-right challenge. In all three cases, the populist challenge fell short, but with more key elections on the calendar for 2018, what lessons can be drawn by those seeking to tackle populism

Calling all millennials: share your ideas and help to shape Brexit

Generation Brexit is a crowdsourced project aimed at inspiring millennials in Britain and the EU to help shape Brexit negotiations and the future of UK-EU relations. As Michael Cottakis and Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz explain, it draws on the success of the 1989 Generation Initiative in order to catalyse millennials’ political engagement

Xavier University Newswire

https://www.exhibit.xavier.edu/student_newspaper/3476/thumbnail.jp

Crisis discourses in Europe: Media EU-phemisms and alternative narratives

It would be catastrophising to claim that euroscepticism won the European elections earlier this year – but it certainly staked a claim. Two years ago, we predicted the capturing of Europe by populist parties in our study of progressive activists in Europe, The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe (Kaldor and Selchow 2012). What that report found was that Europe, as a political space, was invisible to the majority of these activists; at worst, it was considered part of the problem in the current moment of crisis

Chronicles of Oklahoma

Notes and Documents section for Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 1952. It includes documents about a protest by Dr. Angie Debo, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine Books Abroad, a report of the research conducted by E. H. Kelley about the opening of Citizens Bank in Oklahoma City, a history of Ingersoll, Oklahoma, and an introduction to folklore of Oklahoma