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 others before him have observed, the narrow national perspective tends to find its popular expression through a 'progressive competitiveness' approach, which 'seeks to harness labour to a strategy of increased national competitiveness by accepting junior partner status' in a coalition dominated by the social-democratic parties and the business elite (Radice, 2000: 15).
Transnational companies are increasingly organising their activities on a pan-European scale, through cross-border mergers, acquisitions and expansion. This is in addition to the increasingly transnational organisation of production, distribution and finance, transnational competition for markets, capital and labour, the acceleration of global capital circulation and the increased possibility of capital flight, the pressures for deregulation from international credit institutions etc., as well as European neoliberal acquis communautaires (dealing with issues like employment, working time, health and safety, equal opportunities etc.), benchmarking frameworks, and business streams.
Meanwhile, on the level of wage bargaining, a fundamental shift from a productivity-oriented to a competition-oriented wage policy has occurred since around the early 1980s (Schulten, 2001: 17-36). This largely reflected 'the weakened political power of the unions in an environment of mass unemployment' (Schulten, 2002: 178), caused by privatisations, rationalisations and economic restructuring. These pressures also increasingly led to a move from pattern to concession bargaining. Concomitantly, bargaining has been largely decentralised and reestablished at the company level (Bieler, 2006: 6).
The need to avoid downward competition and 'wage-dumping', to take wages out of cross-border competition, has forcefully introduced the question of the Europeanisation of wage-bargaining policies. 'Internationalization leads, not to convergence or homogenization of IR practices and bargaining outcomes, but rather a growth in inter- and intra-sectoral differentiation within countries' (Katz and Darbishire, 1999). The likelihood of employers' engaging in international benchmarking and regime shopping in order to minimise the cost of production and exploit union differences in wage-level preferences is often mentioned, since a unified European wage policy was explicitly excluded from the Maastricht agreement (Freyssinet, 2000: 65-72; Sisson: 1998).
But as I have indicated in previous paragraphs, the scope of this new policy-making environment transcends wage bargaining as an isolated process. Labour's future role in the political and macroeconomic development of the European Union and the global socioeconomic system depends on its ability to creatively adapt to these new circumstances. The growing transnationalisation of capital, of economic and political decisionmaking, has largely shifted the terrain of struggle, intensifying the strategic necessity for transnational regulatory structures and transnational labour intervention across the globe. The EU's convergence of strong integrative economic and political tendencies offers particular opportunities for the strengthening of a trans-European labour movement. In turn, a trans-European labour movement could play a critical role in legitimising--and constructing--the first truly transnational democratic political and social community. One thing is certain: a democratic, united Europe will only come about through the conscious transnational struggle of European citizens.
Transnational labour solidarity
We have established that the borderless neoliberal economy increases the need for cooperation by the forces of labour to break through the confines of traditional national identities and national systems of industrial relations. Labour solidarity is indispensible for the successful development of this project.
As a preliminary step, it is necessary to problematise the application of the Durkheimian notion of 'organic solidarity' based on interdependencies created by the increasingly transnational division of labour. Tommie Shelby's similarly 'objectivist' emphasis on shared experiences of oppression (as a constitutive element of black solidarity in the case of his work) rather than on common identities, while also more optimistic for the prospects of transnational labour movements, oversimplifies the issue (Shelbie, 2002: 231-266). In particular, it fails to provide an adequate explanation for the tragic fact that oppressed sections of society very often act against their best (material and other) interests. The importance of identity formation and the production of shared meanings (a process often described as 'framing'), as well as the simultaneous existence of multiple and often contradictory identities, should receive their proper valorisation. Stuart Hall's notion that class is lived through race for people of colour is a useful example of these complexities (Hall, 1978).
Paradoxically, neoliberalism and the transnationalisation of capitalism tend to create mass insecurity, distrust among workers (especially those of different nations and cultures), new divisions and a nationalist, racist and anti-secular backlash. Capitalist internationalism triggers workers' parochialism and chauvinism. The increase in labour mobility and the decentralisation of regulatory instances from national and sectoral systems to company bargaining are particularly restrictive for the development of solidarity. Another important aspect of capitalist restructuring that impinges on the potential for solidarity is class recomposition, which has introduced a wider and deeper chasm between various sections of the working class (e.g. 'production' vs. 'service' sector workers), and between 'stabilised' (i.e. formal labour on secure contracts) and 'precarious' segments of the work dependent population (Bieler, Lindberg and Pilay: 2008: xxi). Tensions and antagonisms between domestic and …
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