The Contentious Politics of Unemployment in Europe: An Introduction

Abstract

There is little doubt that unemployment today is one of the major challenges facing the European democracies. Unemployment rates have grown steadily during the last few decades. In fact, at least since the crisis of the mid-1970s, the dream of full employment has progressively vanished. Although unemployment rates vary strongly from one country to the other, today all the governments in Europe have to deal with large numbers of jobless people. Furthermore, especially since the 1990s, this is increasingly becoming a structural rather than a temporary problem, with larger sectors of the population being excluded from the labor market permanently or at least for longer periods. Also, unemployment more and more affects the younger strata of the population. At the same time, European citizens today consider unemployment as one of the most important problems, if not the most important overall, as constantly witnessed by opinion polls held in different nations at different points in time.