The politics of European integration: a European labour movement in the making?

During the last decade the process of European integration has deepened and intensified. The creation of the single market has been completed and strengthened with the introduction of a single currency and an independent European Central Bank. Powerful and undemocratic forms of regulation have developed at the European level that have both facilitated and legitimated a massive programme of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation within member states and have constrained levels of public spending and public debt. The neo-liberal restructuring associated with European integration has resulted in mass unemployment, job insecurity and a sustained attack on Keynesian forms of working class incorporation and collective forms of welfare. These developments have also resulted in a political and intellectual crisis within the labour movement. Social democratic politicians and trade union hierarchies have learned to chant the neo-liberal mantra of globalization and have sought refuge in defensive social pacts an d productivity agreements. There remain however significant pockets of resistance both within established trade unions and political parties and between new groups and activists that increasingly link issues and campaigns across national borders. Indeed, the institutional development of Europe has been forged through struggle and has opened up a new terrain of struggle that links the national, European and global levels in new and exciting ways. The focus of this paper is to explore whether it is possible to isolate an alternative (proto)European labour movement emerging from the struggles on this new terrain.

Recent contributions to the debate on European integration within Capital & Class have tended to downplay the importance of class struggle in the process of European integration. While Carchedi & Carchedi (1999) argue for the development of a 'class analysis' of European integration, in their analysis the working class appears as little more than a passive victim of capitalist restructuring. This is also evident in Carchedi (1997) in which Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is presented as a neo-imperialist strategy developed by German capital to subordinate the European working class to the emerging global power of the Deutsche mark. There has also been an important focus on the enduring importance of class relations at the level of the nation state and the essentially symbiotic relationship between nationally-based class struggle and the global restructuring of capital (Moran, 1998). Recent analyses of labour movement politics in the UK ignore the European dimension (Fairbrother, 2000; McIlroy, 2000) and ris k overstating the specificity of the UK in the European context. There is a danger that analyses that focus on the national level fail to grasp the ways in which political relations are currently being recomposed within Europe. There is a danger of reifying the state into a fixed set of institutional relations rather than a political form of the capital relation subject to contestation and struggle (Holloway & Picciotto, 1991, Clarke, 1991a). The process of European integration involves a spatial recomposition of the global capital relation: a recomposition that can only be grasped by a rigorous empirical investigation of the changing forms of regulation and resistance within Europe.

In this paper we explore the logical and historical determinants of European integration and reflect on the potential and dangers this presents for labour movement renewal. We begin by exploring the logical form that European integration has taken and the way that through the principle of 'subsidiarity' a regulatory gap has been established between political mobilisation at the national level and new forms of neo-liberal regulation at the European level. We then trace the historical determination of this form through an exploration of the social struggles that have developed within EU member states in the context of neo-liberal restructuring. We contrast the new forms of corporatism that have developed at the national and European level to mediate and facilitate neo-liberal restructuring with the grass roots opposition and mobilization against neo-liberalism that developed initially at the national level but have subsequently taken an increasing transnational form over the past decade. In the final section we highlight the possibilities and dangers that face the emergent European labour movement: the dangers of containment through 'social partnership' and European Keynesianism and the possibility of a new and revitalised internationalist labour movement that transcends the narrow labourism and economism of nationally based movements.

European integration and global capital: the crisis and rescue of the liberal state

The process of European integration represents a spatial realignment of the political forms taken by the 'reorganisation of the social conditions of production and relations of exploitation (Schonfield, 1969: 405). European integration developed through the crisis of national forms of Keynesian regulation and has in turn resulted in a fundamental transformation of national political processes (Holloway & Picciotto, 1980: 143). Whilst this process is often presented in terms of a globalization process that has marginalised the nation state, it is a process that has been articulated through and that involves the restructuring of nation states according to the logic of global capital (Panitch, 1994). The development of the EU does not mark a crisis or marginalisation of the nation state but a strengthening of the liberal state and its consolidation at an increasingly transnational level. The development of the EU is ultimately a 'rescue' of the liberal state (Milward, 1994): a transnational structure that has al lowed the reimposition of the law of money and the rule of law at the national level. It involves the pooling, recomposition and strengthening of sovereignty at the transnational level in a way that has allowed the nation state to escape nationally organised forms of political mobilisation and the destabilising impact of administrative forms of social welfare. European integration is thus the form taken by the neo-liberal restructuring of the capital relation in Europe.

The process of restructuring involves the structural and ideological (re)separation of economics and politics and the channelling of conflict into the fetished forms of bourgeois political processes (Holloway & Picciotto, 1991: 122). It assumes the dual form of a technical restructuring of capital in order to lower the organic composition of capital and an attempt to increase the rate of relative surplus value through an intensification of the social relations of capital (ibid: 1345). The power and intensity of European integration is premised on the way in which the (re)separation of economics and politics and the mobilization of counter-tendencies to the technical and social limits to accumulation have taken on a spatial and geo-political dimension in ways that seriously undermine the ability of labour to resist the restructuring process. The logic of European integration is an attempt to institutionally separate the regulatory and administrative moments of the state form: to shift the technical and economi c restructuring of the capital relation to the European level in order to undermine the administrative gains of the working class at the national level. This is manifested politically through the concept of 'subsidiarity' through which neo-liberal policies and directives are developed at the European level but applied in nationally specific ways by EU member states.

The process of European integration requires both logical and historical analysis. The initial impetus to European integration developed out of the technical limits of restructuring within national states. This was manifested in the 'functionalism' of the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the subsequent development of the EEC. The impact of the EEC in overcoming technical barriers to growth was marked. Between 1957 and 1969 EEC internal trade increased by 630% and import penetration of manufactured goods increased by 300%; resulting in inter-EEC trade accounting for approximately 60% of national trade (Moss & Michie, 1998; II; Moravcsik, 1998: 40). The ability of Keynesian forms of corporate concertation to contain political mobilisation within historically and culturally specific national arrangements obviated the need for further integration and the transfer of regulatory powers to the European level (Ross, 1992). The context for further integration was the crisis of global Keynesianism. The corporatist integration of labour within European welfare states constituted a serious obstacle to the further technical and social restructuring of capital. The Thatcherite offensive that developed in the UK was not a serious proposition in the more corporatist societies of mainland Europe and an alternative path to neo-liberal regulation and flexibility was required. This path was constituted by the further integration of Europe and a fundamental reconstitution of the political relationship between the EU and the nation state. The UK was however to provide a discursive hegemony and institutional examples of restructuring premised on flexibility, deregulation and the institutional exclusion of labour that were to become the central planks of further European integration (Ross, ibid.: 57).

This reconstitution is contained within the institutional and legislative development of the EU. The Single European Act of 1986 involved member states ceding a degree of national sovereignty in order to hasten the process of EMU and the completion of the single market by 1992. The Treaty of European Union of 1992 was the logical progression from the completion of the single market. The Act established powerful regulatory mechanisms at the European level to ensure the operation of the newly created market according to neo-liberal principles. The centrality of 'subsidiarity' to the 1992 Act demonstrated the attempt to develop an institutional distance between the neo-liberal regulatory institutions at the European level and the modes of national administration through which EU laws and directives were being implemented. This was achieved through both the enhancement of EU competency in the areas of industrial and competition policy and perhaps most importantly of all by the dynamic of EMU. The importance of th e 1997 Treaty on European Union or Amsterdam Treaty was that for the first time to any significant degree the EU developed a competence in the social reproduction of labour. The Employment Chapter enshrined the notion of 'employability' as the touchstone of social development and economic growth within the EU. This recomposition of political relations was determined by the intense struggles around the application of the EMU convergence criteria and the failure to contain struggle within national forms of concession bargaining: a process that we trace in the following section.

EMU and the politics of social pacts

The EMU convergence criteria linked the process of European integration directly with cuts in welfare and public spending and intensified national struggles in a way that threatened the entire European project. EMU provided both the economic discipline and the ideological legitimation for the neo-liberal restructuring of labour markets and welfare states (Verdun, 1996: So), but this process of legitimation was constantly ruptured by intense national resistance to the neo-liberal restructuring of employment and welfare. The result of these pressures was a fundamental restructuring of the state form across Europe. Essentially, established forms of corporatism were transformed into mechanisms for facilitating neo-liberal restructuring and new forms of partnership were introduced wherever the labour movement posed a substantial obstacle to the neo-liberal project. New social partnership arrangements were introduced in every EU member state, except the UK and France, and involved a trade off in which the unions ag reed to wage moderation, reduced public expenditure and flexible working arrangements in return for a commitment by employers and the state to prioritise the problem of unemployment (Pochet & Fajertag, 1997; Pochet, 1998). However, the EMU process itself set structural limits on the extent to which nation states could engage in employment creation, and in the context of high unemployment, both employers and governments were not compelled to offer any significant concessions in order to achieve pay restraint (Martin, 1997). As the pressure to meet the convergence criteria intensified many pacts came under severe pressure, but the extent to which social conflict accompanied EMU was dependent upon the particular national situation, the degree of restructuring and the balance of social forces (Kaupinnen, 1998: 14).

In some member states social pacts were successful in achieving the reforms necessary for EMU convergence with the minimum of social unrest. In Finland public spending was reduced by 8% of GDP (Kaupinnen, 1998) and the Irish Partnership 2000 achieved a 30% reduction in public debt provoking the opposition of a large minority of unions and public sector pay disputes (Wallace et al., 1998; Pochet, 1998: 267). In Spain, Portugal and Italy the principal means of achieving the convergence criteria was through the privatisation of state assets and industries. Opposition to privatisation was stifled by the 'critical pragmatism' of trade union hierarchies which resulted in a consensual reduction of jobs. There were important grassroots mobilisations against the neo-liberal impact of EMU. In Spain, despite the main unions being pro-EMU, there was an important mobilisation of public sector workers, including a day of action during 1996 that involved over 650,000 people (Labour Research, 1996); although this mobilisatio n was effectively contained by Comisiones Obreras (Spanish public sector union) signing up to a national pact for the first time since 1981 (Pochet, 1998). In Portugal, the introduction of the 1996 social pact led to inter union conflict with the Uniao Geral de Trabaihadores (General Workers Union) in favour and the Confederacao Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses (General Confederation of Portuguese Workers) opposed to both the pact and to EMU. The main concern of the CGTP was the way in which the statutory introduction of a 40 hour week was being used to increase labour flexibility, and this issue led to a number of protests and strikes (Da Paz Ventura Campos Lima & Naumann, 1997). In Italy, an attempt to reform pensions led to widespread trade union action and social protest. This made unilateral reform problematic and EMU induced austerity was largely introduced with union consent. Through a series of social pacts the unions negotiated agreements on an end to index linked earnings, privatisation, pension reform and the reform of industrial relations in return for employment creation measures. The commitments made to Italian workers on employment creation were increasingly sacrificed to meeting targets on reduced public expenditure. The main union federations supported EMU (Pochet, 1998: 269) and this resulted in discontent within the unions and increased support for the Comitati di Base (COBAS) rank and file committees which were particularly prominent in public sector industrial militancy (Gall, 1995).

Within other EU member states the progress towards EMU was less consensual. The attempt to negotiate a social pact in Belgium was abandoned in 1995 when the unions rejected the idea that job creation measures were to be dependent on reduced social charges. Subsequent measures towards achieving the EMU convergence criteria were imposed through legislation (Pochet, 1998). During 1996 there was a tide of public sector industrial action in Belgium and a planned general strike was only cancelled following concessions on privatisation and pensions. The reform of social security precipitated a rise in activity by unemployed associations. In Greece widespread and persistent action against public spending cuts contributed to the initial failure to meet the convergence criteria. Attempts to introduce austerity measures through social pacts were met with action including one day general strikes and strikes by farmers, teachers and public servants. There were also wide scale protests against the EMU-related government au sterity measures in Germany. In June 1996 the Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) organised a 350,000 strong demonstration in opposition to EMU. The union hierarchy was in fact deeply implicated in the process of neo-liberal restructuring. The initial idea for the Bundnis fur Arbeit (Alliance for Jobs), which was a de facto social pact that traded pay restraint in return for job creation, was developed by the leadership of IG Metall, and was enthusiastically taken up by the DGB (Bispinck, 1997: 72). The Alliance resulted in a series of welfare reforms and in October 1996 several hundred thousand metalworkers successfully struck in defence of sick pay agreements (Munchau, 1996). The following spring saw further strikes by miners and building workers that reflected a growing scepticism towards EMU within the unions (Staunton & Traynor, 1997). The pact ultimately failed as unions withdrew their co-operation and it was creative accounting rather than welfare cuts that allowed Germany to enter the Euro. The most mili tant action against neo-liberal restructuring was in France where budget stringency was enforced without an attempt to negotiate a social pact. As a consequence widespread industrial action, protests and welfare cuts became synonymous with the EMU project. During 1995 the Juppe plan to reform social security and a public sector pay freeze resulted in a wave of one day public sector strikes involving up to million workers and indefinite strikes concentrated in the transport, communication and energy sectors. These were accompanied by massive participation in street demonstrations that reached two million in December (Jefferys, 1996).

There are four aspects to the struggles in France that most visibly illustrate common elements of contemporary struggles against neo-liberalism in Europe. Firstly, there was a strengthening of the critical wing of trade unions and increasing tensions within unions and the wider labour movement. In France the strikes exacerbated internal problems in Force Ouvriere (FO) and more serious problems in the CFDT (Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail) where the emergence of the critical current 'CFDT en lutte' threatened a potential split. New radical splinter unions such as SUD (Solidaires, Unitaires, Democratiques and the Group of Ten also gained support (Mouriaux, 1996). Rank and file control was also increased by the reformation of the Coordinations that had originally mobilized against the Chirac Government in the 1980s (Wolfreys, 1999). This was also the case in Italy with the COBAS gaining support (Gall, 1995). Secondly, there was an increased incidence of direct forms of struggle. The French strike s, for example, resulted in the occupation of electricity distribution centres, motorway blockades by lorry drivers and even the high-tech sabotage of signal boxes. In Germany the mineworkers blocked motorways and in Greece farmers adopted the same tactic. Thirdly, there was the development of direct links between strikers and activists involved in other sectors of resistance with examples of links between workers and almost every other group involved in struggle, from students and the unemployed to immigrants and gays (Wolfreys, 1999). Finally, there was a tendency for struggles to develop across national borders. Solidarity rallies with the French strikers were organised in Rome, Athens and Berlin. These struggles emerged in response to the spatial reorganization of political relations in Europe: namely, defensive struggles to maintain administrative forms of social welfare and collective bargaining at the national level. Subsequently, new forms of transnational mobilization have attempted to engage with po werful new regulatory institutions at the European level. The limited ability of national political forms to contain the political mobilisation and struggle associated with European integration has resulted in the re-channelling of struggle into new fetished forms of interest mediation at the European level premised on notions of 'social partnership'. This has involved the development of new representative mechanisms at the European level which maintain the regulatory gap through the enduring dominance of subsidiarity. The next section explores the development and limits of this new 'politics of containment'.

Social partnership in Europe: the politics of containment

The logic of European integration is the spatial separation of the regulatory and administrative moments of the state form and the mobilization of counter-tendencies at distinctive institutional levels. This separation entered popular discourse as an increasingly serious 'democratic deficit' and the increasing unpopularity of European institutions. As national struggles have spilled over to the European level new fetished forms of representation or 'social partnership' have developed at the European level. These are constituted by a series of directives on social and employment issues and a range of consultation mechanisms that have become known as 'Social Europe' (Kowalsky, 2000; Bosco & Hutsebaut, 1997). Within European institutions social partnership attempts to incorporate labour within a set of institutions that reproduce the regulatory gap associated with subsidiarity. The logic of these institutions is social dialogue and consultation that reproduce abstract forms of citizenship. The limits of these ar rangements are becoming apparent as oppositional groups have increasingly mobilized for substantive citizenship rights at the European level. There is thus an emerging division between labour movement activists in Europe and the role and activities of the trade union movement acting as a 'social partner'. These divisions are becoming increasingly apparent with respect to both the 'political' role of unions within the institutions of the EU and the 'economic' role of the unions within European enterprises.

Within the EU the main actors are the 'social partners': the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) Union of Industrial and Employers Confederation (UNICE) and European Centre of Public Enterprises (CEEP). The MaastrichtTreaty established the right for the social partners to be consulted on social issues and the procedures through which the social partners are able to establish 'framework agreements' on relevant issues; although only two agreements on part time employment and parental leave have so far been concluded. The social partners are also involved in European level consultations involving the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the Council Troika. Despite several small scale European days of action in sectors such as transport and shipbuilding the labour movement has generally been unable to translate disputes to the European level. The weakness of the labour movement at the European level is partly determined by the organizational form of the ETUC. The development of the ETUC has fo llowed the 'intergovernmental' logic of European integration rather than being determined by a bottom-up demand for representation at the European level by its constituent confederations (Martin & Ross, 1999). The ETUC Secretariat parallels the European Commission and pursues a strategy that involves expanding its own authority and functions at the expense of the national confederations who are generally resistant to such a development (Dolvic, 1997). This has resulted in an increasing tension within the ETUC between national confederations and European industry federations. The ETUC has increasingly moved towards an accommodation with neo-liberalism and through its support and involvement in 'social partnership' has promoted monetary stability, market flexibility and employability at both European and enterprise level (Coldrick, 1998).

The weakness of the ETUC is replicated in forms of transnational representation within European corporations. The European Works Council Directive (1994) requires companies employing 150 workers or more in at least two EU countries and at least 1000 employees overall to establish works councils to facilitate employee consultation. The context for the development of EWCs has been a fundamental restructuring of European capital following the industrial and competition policies of the EU. While the stated aim of the European Commission has been the promotion of 'Euro Champions' or 'Euro-companies' the pattern of capital restructuring has been more complex. Mergers and takeovers have created Euro-companies in a limited number of sectors (retailing, insurance, publishing), whilst the predominant impact of restructuring has been an increasing flow of 'foreign direct investment' (FDI) into and out of the EU and an array of 'internal' restructuring that has significantly increased unemployment and insecurity within t he EU (Ramsey, 1995). This process of restructuring has severely weakened the position of labour within the workplace and there is a complex articulation between what Burawoy (1985: 122-55) has termed the 'politics of production' and the 'politics of politics'. The principle of subsidiarity within the EU is the 'political' manifestation of the abstract citizenship and centralised-decentralization associated with Human Resource Management (HRM). This emptying out of nationally determined forms of citizenship is a dialectical reflex of the 'hegemonic despotism' associated with HRM in the sphere of production.

The logic of EWCs articulates a form of economic subsidiarity and they have been used as a vehicle for the introduction of HRM. This has enabled the consolidation of micro-corporatism and enterprise unionism that has placed established national and sectoral agreements under severe strain (Schulten, 1996). Detailed case studies have highlighted the limited and management controlled agenda of EWCs and their isolation from established national forms of employee representation (Wills, 2000). In the motor industry, for example, EWCs have been used by management to intensify competition between plants. The unions have used these arrangements not to build up international trade union strength but to obtain information that can be used in competition for production capacity in other plants (Hancke, 2000; Whittall, 2000). In non-union companies such as McDonalds, EWCs have clearly been developed as a mechanism of management communication with no meaningful consultation between management and workforce (Royle, 1999). T here is further evidence that EWCs articulate the 'dual system' of worker representation prevalent in France and Germany that poses a serious threat to the power and influence of the labour movement in societies such as Italy and the UK where trade unions have dominated workplace representation (Lecher & Rub, 1999). There was also a two year transition period following the directive in which companies were able to conclude 'voluntary agreements' with no concrete arrangements in respect of bargaining procedures. In this context companies were able to interpret the directive flexibly and in line with the preservation of management prerogative (Marginson et al., 1998). There is however contrary evidence that EWCs enable union activists to subvert information flows within companies and to develop networks engaged in subverting management benchmarking and performance indicators (Martinez Lucio & Weston, 2000). The existence and potential of these subterranean networks however becomes apparent when considering the wider networks of resistance that have developed in opposition to the neo-liberal policies of the EU.

Networks of resistance

As European leaders signed the Amsterdam Treaty they were confronted with the first evidence of transnational mobilization targeted against the Eu's neo-liberal policies and practices. The attempt to demobilize labour had been least successful in France and it was French workers that increasingly realised the limits of national struggle and began to mobilize against the EU'S neo-liberal agenda. Agir Ensemble Contre le Chomage (Act Together Against Unemployment) proposed the original idea for the European Marches against unemployment, job insecurity, and social exclusion and this was taken up both by unemployed associations across the Continent and by trade unionists in organizations such as SUD and Sin Cobas. As they crossed the continent the European Marches mobilized support for their demand for a 'Social Europe' and culminated in a 50,000 strong demonstration at the EU summit in Amsterdam in June 1997. Following the Amsterdam Treaty and the 1997 'Jobs Summit' in Luxembourg, the European Marches increasingl y mobilized against the existing form of social Europe: 'workfare' style social policies and the flexibilization of labour markets. The European Marches have also developed an alternative European agenda which has addressed the regulatory gap between the EU and nation state. The Brussels declaration, agreed at a continental meeting of 600 activists in 1998, was a charter of substantive social rights that was counterpoised to the empty substantive content and repressive character of EU policies (Mathers, 1999).

In contrast to the bureaucratic structures of the official European labour movement, the European Marches is a network of grass roots activists that operates by consensus decision making and with no formal membership. The network's most prominent and numerous activists are drawn from independent unemployed organisations but it also draws support from workers and the unemployed in unions affiliated to the ETUC and from non-affiliates. The political perspectives of activists in the network varies from left-wing social democrats, socialists, greens, communists, Trotskyists, anarchists and non-aligned. A range of social movement campaigns have also been involved including organisations representing women, black people, migrants, asylum seekers, pensioners, the homeless and students as well as environmental and anti-fascist campaigners. The network's strategy is to mobilise supporters through the marches and mass demonstrations and by so doing place pressure on the EU to respond to its agenda. There have been impo rtant examples of direct action such as the occupation of Milan railway station leading to free train travel to the Amsterdam countersummit and occupations of job centres and employment agencies. These actions have displayed a new form of internationalism with activists sharing knowledge and tactics which have provided a further impetus to ongoing nationally based struggles.

There are also important parallels between the European Marches network and ATTAC (Action for a Tobin Tax for the Assistance of Citizens). ATTAC was launched in June 1998 following an article in Le Monde Diplomatique entitled Disarm the Markets. Constituent supporters included unions such as SUD, associations such as AC! and Droit au Logement (Right to Housing), Confederation Paysanne (Small Farmers Federation) and intellectual networks such as Raisons d'Agir established by Pierre Bourdieu. In its first year of existence the movement claimed 70,000 members and in December 1998 an international ATTAC movement was launched with the expanded aim to be 'an international movement for democratic control of financial markets and their institutions' and against 'neo-liberal policies and their consequences'. There are currently ATTAC groups in 23 countries. ATTAC has declared its opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and has assisted in organizing counter-conferences at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the United Nations in Geneva. The movement was also prominent in the counter-mobilization at the EU summit in Nice. The group has also established a 'Scientific Council' and has task forces working on money laundering and tax havens, the taxation of currency markets and pension funds. The purpose of these groups is to produce detailed legislative proposals that can be adopted by parliaments.

These networks have thus mobilized around a political engagement with transnational institutions and the demand for concrete, substantive rights at the European level. These struggles are an important counterweight to the official labour movement that has capitulated to the neo-liberal agenda and form the basis of a radical renewal of labour movement politics in Europe. The further development of this renewal is likely to be dependent on the maintenance of an oppositional agenda and a wide ranging democratization of the wider labour movement. These objectives are both threatened by the increasing popularity of 'Euro-Keynesianism' as the basis for labour movement renewal and democratic reform in Europe. In Europe there are two important areas of struggle where the potential of this approach is starting to become clear: resistance to employability and 'workfare' and demands for a guaranteed income. The struggle against 'workfare' calls into question the official labour movement's continued attachment to full em ployment that is increasingly being used as the ideological justification for the expansion of insecure employment. However, grassroots opposition to work intensification has united employed and unemployed around demands for a shorter working week (Went, 2000) and the critique of full employment has the potential to develop alliances with environmental activists concerned with sustainable growth and opposition to large-scale job creation projects such as the trans-European transport network (TEN-T). The struggle for a basic income has demonstrated the possibility of linking issues of low pay and insecure employment with struggles around welfare entitlement, old age pensions and immigration. The potential of these struggles is to both build on a defence of the progressive elements of the Keynesian Welfare State, such as the de-commodification and collectivisation of basic human needs, while overcoming its exclusionary limits in respect of gender, race and marginalised and excluded groups.

Euro-Keynesianism: the dangers of compromise

The development of transnational networks of struggle provides both possibilities and dangers in respect of the future of labour movement politics in Europe. The networks provide a new focus of mobiisation that link levels and spheres of domination and resistance and provide the basis for new alliances and new forms of international solidarity. There is for the first time the possibility of a European labour movement that is inherently transnational in orientation and which overcomes the sectionalism and economism of nation labour movements. The decline of many traditional forms of trade unionism alongside the emergence of social movements that are avowedly 'anti-capitalist' in orientation make this an opportune moment for rethinking a class strategy for the labour movement (Panitch, 2001). There are two main elements to this re-evaluation of labour strategy: firstly, the way in which labour engages with the state and capital and secondly, the way in which the labour movement itself is organized as a social m ovement. The process of European integration has highlighted both the possibility of exciting new forms of class politics and the dangers inherent to applying past and failed strategies in the context of neo-liberal globalization.

The process of European integration has confirmed the weakness of corporatism as a strategy for the labour movement. In the context of Keynesianism, national corporatism involved an unequal exchange in which trade union leaders imposed rank-and-file discipline and bargained wage restraint in return for concessions on employment policy (Panitch, 1981). The outcome for the labour movement was a loss of autonomy and a strategy that confirmed the logic of state power and capital accumulation. In the context of neo-liberalism, corporatism is an even more dangerous strategy for the labour movement. The neo-liberal restructuring of the state has involved a fundamental shift in the mode of economic governance away from the maintenance of full employment and towards the control of inflation through monetary policies that impose labour discipline through unemployment and insecurity (Panitch, 2001: 370). In this context, the 'social partnership' approach that dominates the thinking of leading members of the European lab our movement amounts to a strategy that not only further abandons the autonomy of the labour movement but confirms the logic of neo-liberalism through 'supply side corporatism' or 'progressive competitiveness'. In this context social democracy has mutated into the 'Third Way' that confirms the marginality of the labour movement to neo-liberal economic governance. The Third Way is thus an ex post legitimation for the spatial reconfiguration of the state outlined earlier: globalization and European integration are presented as an objective economic process and the labour movement must respond to the 'reality' that it imposes. There is however a more radical reformulation of social democracy around the notion of 'European Keynesianism' that plays a more seductive tune, even though it has political consequences that are equally damaging for the labour movement.

The supporters of European Keynesianism argue that the development of 'Social Europe' constitutes an emergent new space for class compromise at the regional level, at a time when globalization seems to be restricting the scope for reformist policies at the national level (See Grahl & Teague, I994; Teague, 1994). European integration provides the basis for a progressive form of neo-liberal globalization in Europe: a development that was blocked by the deflationary monetary regime associated with EMU and the dominance of neo-liberal ideology (Aglietta, 1986). The new optimism is founded on the election of left of centre governments in most EU member states. The combination of a 'soft EURO' and the further development of 'Social Europe' provide the basis of a renewed 'regime of accumulation' and 'mode of regulation'. In the context of the financial stability facilitated by EMU and the subsequent stability pact, a new long wave of growth is possible facilitated by the incorporation of labour into revitalised mech anisms of corporate governance and the development of new forms of social cohesion premised on income redistribution and a minimum income (Aglietta, 1998).

The dangers of this approach are effectively highlighted by critics of Aglietta's earlier work on national regulation (Aglietta, 1979). The state cannot resolve the contradictions of capital accumulation but articulates them in a political form. In this sense political institutions are not neutral mechanisms capable of articulating class compromise but institutional forms of class domination which express a particular configuration of class struggle (Clarke, 1991b: 127-8). The failure to recognise the nature of state power threatens to dilute the potency of the new oppositional networks. Incisive critiques of neo-liberal restructuring in Europe fall back into an essentially Keynesian analysis when searching for alternatives. Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1999), for example, argued for the mobilisation of a European social movement against neoliberalism but its goal of attaining a universal European state to further the dimensions of 'Social Europe' is underpinned by an essentially Keynesian formulation (Callinic os, 1999: 92-3). In order to avoid the dangers of a reinvigorated corporatism at the European level and in the context of the recent revival in global anti-capitalist struggle it is important to rethink the form and nature of labour movement politics.

A European labour movement in the making?

There are grounds for optimism in respect of the possibilities of labour movement renewal in Europe and beyond. The development of oppositional networks in Europe highlights the possibility of transcending the limited and exclusionary trade unionism associated with national labourism: indeed, labour is changing in a way that makes it a more inclusive agent and old labour movements are being changed by the recomposition of the working class (Panitch, 2001: 369). Moreover, neo-liberalism has not marginalized the state but intensified the liberal state and made the class basis of state power increasingly transparent (Meiksins Wood, 1997: 15). In the context of neo-liberal globalization capital needs the state more than ever and the locus of class struggle in contemporary society remains focused on a struggle over the form of the state. The socio-spatial restructuring of the state form associated with European integration was an attempt to demobilize the labour movement by shifting the terrain of struggle beyond the nation state and thus beyond the geographical unit in which labour has traditionally been organized. The struggle over the form of Social Europe highlights the extent to which the labour movement has developed forms of renewal that challenge state power and the multiple levels of European governance. While this is indeed still marginal to the mainstream approach of 'social partnership' the networks of resistance articulate forms of consciousness and organization that provide the basis for a wider reappraisal of labour movement strategy.

The new networks and alliances articulate forms of consciousness that go beyond single issue campaigns and narrow trade union economism on the one hand and reified and alienated forms of social democratic universalism on the other. The campaigns grasp, albeit in a partial and incomplete way, the totality of the global capital relation and the importance of struggle and resistance taking the form of a universalism of particulars (Browne, 1990; Taylor, 2001). This is reflected in new forms of 'concrete internationalism' that are linking instances of struggles within and outside the EU and national and local state forms and linking workplace struggle with the wider social and political struggles of the 'new social movements'. The new networks offer more than a 'social movement unionism' premised on an associationalism in civil society (Waterman, 1999). The new networks presage a pluralistic, class-based associationalism based on a material opposition to neo-liberal globalization. A social Europe premised on bas ic human needs is incompatible with the valorization imperatives of neo-liberal capitalism and provides the basis for an autonomous, oppositional labour movement. This involves (re)linking the 'politics of production' with wider forms of political mobilization that recognise the recomposition of state power in Europe and overcome the economism and instrumentalism that still predominates in the mainstream labour movement. The tensions and splits in European trade unions highlight the extent to which there is a question mark over traditional forms of organization. The oppositional networks that have developed both around EWCs and wider political campaigns can be seen as an alternative European labour movement in the making albeit as yet in an embryonic form. Further progress in this project may depend upon the extent to which these networks can themselves become linked. Bringing together the 'politics of production' with the 'politics of politics' can strengthen the grass roots challenge to the politics of soci al partnership entrenched within official labour movement organisations. This will involve a process of fundamentally reorientating and democratising national labour movements across Europe and beyond.

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Graham Taylor is Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England.

Andy Mathers is nearing completion of a PhD in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol.