Social Europe Journal and Soundings Journal, supported by Compass and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung are running a pan-European online debate on the future of European social democracy. Entitled "The Good Society Debate" this is the first time ever such a wide-ranging discussion has been organised.

Starting on Monday 2 November and running for seven weeks, 70 leading thinkers, politicians and activists from all over Europe will publish their views and debate the ideas in the document 'Building the Good Society' written by Jon Cruddas, Labour Party MP and the German social democratic MP Andrea Nahles.

"Adaptation to the political mainstream over the last one and a half decades was a strategy that gave short-term electoral success at the price of the long-term viability of social democratic politics. Recent national and European election results prove that this short-term success is over and that the crisis of social democratic politics has reached worrying levels indeed. It is therefore vital to reenergise European social democracy with a new politics and a new identity. We need a new epoch of novel social democratic thinking.'

Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles

You can read articles here: http://www.goodsociety.social-europe.eu

RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/goodsociety

For further information contact: goodsociety@social-europe.eu

Contributors include:

Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (President of the PES)
Dr Erhard Eppler (Leading German social democratic thinker)
Professor Stefan Collignon (Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa)
Professor Colin Crouch (Warwick University)
Professor Mary Kaldor (London School of Economics)
Dr Denis McShane MP
Martin Schulz MEP (Leader of PES in the European Parliament)
Professor Zygmunt Baumann (Emeritus Professor University of Leeds)
Professor Richard Sennett (LSE, New York University)
Dr Philippe Marliere (University College London)
Caroline Lucas MEP (Leader British Green Party)
Dr Gero Maass (Friedrich Ebert Foundation)
Dr Henning Meyer (The Global Policy Institute London)
Professor Jonathan Rutherford (Middlesex University)
Neal Lawson (Chair of Compass)
Matt Browne (Centre for American Progress)
Dr Paolo Borioni (Gramsci Foundation)
Dr Andrew Scott (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
Dr Jenny Andersson (Sorbonne, Paris)
Dr Ernst Stetter (Foundation for European Progressive Studies)
Rene Cuperus (Wiardi Beckman Stichting, Amsterdam)
Professor William Patterson (Aston University)
John Monks (President ETUC)