Transnational solidarity or conflict? Trade unions and neo-liberal restructuring in Europe.

It is frequently argued that European trade unions have been co-opted into the neo-liberal restructuring of the European social relations of production. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it will be assessed whether this allegation is actually justified. Second, the paper will review concrete examples of trade union cooperation opposed to neo-liberal restructuring on the one hand, as well as outline several areas of tensions within the European labour movement, which undermine potential transnational solidarity on the other. It will be argued that while trade unions are not automatically progressive actors vis-à-vis neo-liberal restructuring, they have the potential to play an important role in a wider resistance movement

Fighting for public water: the first successful European Citizens’ Initiative, “Water and Sanitation are a Human Right”

Between May 2012 and September 2013 the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Water and Sanitation are a Human Right’ successfully collected close to 1.9 million signatures across the European Union (EU), forcing the Commission into an official position on the role of water in the EU and wider world. Based on a historical materialist approach to social movement struggles, the purpose of this article is threefold. First it will analyse the reasons for why the ECI, initiated and co-ordinated by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), was so successful. Second, the article will assess the impact of the ECI on EU policy-making. Finally, the article will reflect on the wider lessons to be learned for the struggle against neo-liberal restructuring. It will be argued that a combined focus on the commons as well as new forms of participatory democracy may provide the basis for a broader transformative project

Transnational labour solidarity in (the) crisis

The global financial crisis as part of globalisation has put labour movements under pressure around the world. This poses yet again the question of transnational solidarity. As a result of uneven and combined development, individual labour movements find themselves in rather different positions with contradictory interests. The purpose of this article is to assess conceptually possible labour strategies towards transnational solidarity against the background of the structuring conditions within the global economy. The article is organised into two parts. First, the structuring conditions of capitalism will be charted including processes of uneven and combined development. This will provide the basis for the second step of conceptualising the potential agency of labour and its possibilities to establish relationships of transnational solidarity despite the unevenness of global development. In this discussion the definition of ‘labour’ itself will be problematized and concepts of ‘labour aristocracy’ and ‘false consciousness’ critically examined

Austria's and Sweden's accession to the European Community : a comparative neo-Gramscian case study of European integration

Since the 1 January 1995, Austria and Sweden have been members of the European Community (EC). This thesis analyses why the two countries joined the EC at a moment, when the latter's development towards a neo-liberal economic policy embodied in the Internal Market and the convergence criteria of the Economic and Monetary Union endangered their traditional Keynesian economic policy making and when the steps towards a Common Foreign and Security Policy threatened Austria's and Sweden's policies of neutrality. It is argued that the process leading to application and then the struggle around the referenda on membership in Austria and Sweden have to analysed against the background of globalisation, a structural change experienced since the early 1970s and characterised by the transnationalisation of production and finance and a shift from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism. Established theories of integration, which take existing power structures as given, are unable to explain instances of structural change. Consequently, a critical theory derived from neo-Gramscianism is developed as an alternative for the investigation of Austria's and Sweden's accession to the EC. Most importantly, its focus on social forces, engendered by the production process, allows the approach to conceptualise globalisation. Applied to the Austrian and Swedish case, it is established that alliances of internationally-oriented and transnational social forces of capital and labour respectively, supported by those institutions linked to the global economy such as the Finance Ministries, were behind the drive towards membership in the neo-liberal EC. While they succeeded in their undertaking, the forces opposed to the EC and neoliberalism should not be underestimated. Nationally-oriented labour and capital in Austria and labour mainly from the public sector in Sweden together with the Green Parties in both countries may well mount a successful challenge in the future. Changes in the international structure, although not of primary importance, implied that neutrality was no big obstacle to EC membership in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Gorbachev's liberal foreign policy and a general decline in the power of the Soviet Union in the case of Austria and the end of the Cold War in the case of Sweden allowed the pro-EC forces in both countries to redefine neutrality in a way that made it compatible with membership

Historical materialism and European integration

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