The euro crisis has left no EU member state unaffected. European cooperation and solidarity has for many years been put to the test in a way which has no parallel in the post-war period.

Sexual orientation and gender identity have been more and more identified as grounds of discrimination in European as well as in national legislation. Today, the situation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer persons in the EU is considered a human rights concern.

EU enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe intensifies debates mired in the past.  A forgotten source is the earlier stability strategy by Western powers:  the shift to homogeneous nation-states and ethnic unmixing.

This paper argues that the resurgence of the Greek crisis is not surprising and can be explained both with a macroeconomic approach – lack of debt relief – and a microeconomic approach – lack of structural reforms. The lack of progress along both dimensions can be explained both by political economy arguments within Greece and the eurozone as well as deeper institutional deficiencies in Greece and the lack of a proper governance framework within the eurozone.

The Greek parliamentary election in January resulted in a coalition government with the radical left-wing party Syriza obtaining the most votes. What does this new constellation mean for Greece’s EU relations and the ongoing negotiations over the financial assistance to the country? In this paper, Dionyssis Dimitrakopoulos describes the changes to the political landscape and its implications for the country’s role in the EU and the eurozone.

With the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament increased its power of scrutiny over the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). But what role does the European Parliament, and more specifically, the political groups of the European Parliament play in that policy area? In this policy analysis, the author Daniel Fiott argues that the political groups of the European Parliament indeed do play a diplomatic role in the European Union’s foreign policy.

The austerity policy introduced in response to the financial and economic crisis in the EU was developed in a quick and emergency driven process.  As a consequence, it was not based on any explicit social policy considerations.

The broad and multifaceted notion of solidarity has always been at the heart of trade unions formation and activity. Although the same is true for transnational trade unions, the plethora of conflicts and necessary trade-offs is significantly broader, which affects the very meaning of the concept.

Housing market has proven to have contributed to the instability in the entire eurozone. Its structure and financing has also changed during the crisis.

The European Semester of policy coordination, which is the core of EU’s new institutional architecture for economic and social governance, introduced since the beginning of the Euro crisis, has prompted questions about the nature and dynamics of the EU’s emerging socio-economic governance architecture. In this report, Jonathan Zeitlin and Bart Vanhercke argue that since 2011, there has been a partial but progressive ‘socialization’ of the European Semester.