The construction of a trans-European labour movement.

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The construction of a trans-European labour movement.

Introduction

At a time when progressive forces have generally been suffering defeat, a major new advancement has been sadly disregarded. For the first time in history, a relatively robust, closely-knit continental community of labour is beginning to unfold. Workers and labour movement organisations across Europe have been increasingly engaging in various forms of trans-border cooperation. Beyond the traditional narratives of symbolic internationalism, its origins instead lie in the tangible, material new conditions that have emerged. Beyond the nation-based, narrowly functionalist analyses to which they have been confined, parts of the labour movement are asserting their role as a transnational, counter-hegemonic force of democratisation and class struggle. This path does not negate the continued relevance of the state: just as the role of contemporary European states is not simply undermined, but reconceptualised around the interests of neoliberal capitalism, a progressive anti-neoliberal approach seeks to reconceptualise the role of the state according to a new transnational counter-hegemonic project. It is through this broader, progressive internationalist, historical materialist perspective that the subject of this paper will be approached.

'Brave New Europe'

The processes of European integration have deeply transformed the landscape of European labour-capital relations. The liberalisation of the international economic system 'fundamentally and permanently restricted the options of a national macroeconomic policy' (Scharpf, 1987:317), undermining national forms of Keynesian economic regulation. The creation of a single European market further limited national regulatory practices, while the 'disciplinary neo-liberalism' of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) led to a loss of member states' sovereignty over monetary policy as well as to a commitment to restrictive fiscal policy, as legislated by the Maastricht convergence criteria and the European Stability Pact (Gill, 2001: 47-69). Economic, monetary and political policies are increasingly being determined at the European level. The attack on the welfare state was furthered by the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty's Employment Chapter, which 'enshrined the neo-liberal notion of "employability"' (Taylor & Mathers, 2002), as well as by the neoliberal budget policies secured through the Stability and Growth Pact in the same year (Bieler, Lindberg and Pillay, 233). The Lisbon Agenda, adopted in 2000, fortified these neoliberal tendencies, as has the Lisbon Agreement. Administrative gains of the working class achieved at the national level have been steadily reversed through capital restructuring at the European level. The EU concept of 'subsidiarity' has often been invoked in this process, with the application of EU-level directives being imposed in nationally specific ways, thus promoting the practices of corporate regime shopping. As Radice and other...

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