Coming to Terms with Globalisation: British Trade Unions the European Union and ‘Negotiated Openness’.

This paper is concerned with the political economy of British trade union policy towards the European Union from the 1960s to the current period. It aims to evaluate trade union policy through the theoretical lens of World Order analysis in International Political Economy (Cox 1981; Lipietz 1992; Gamble and Payne 1996; Payne 2005). The paper seeks to develop three related arguments. First, focusing on the TUC and abstracting from important political and sectoral divisions within the British union movement, while assuming unions to be informed, rational agents in the pursuit of labour interests, it is argued that union assessments of the EC (later the European Union (EU)) have been fundamentally determined by the broader political economy environment or structure in which they have acted to promote these interests. Teague and Grahl have argued that British trade union policy towards the EC has been largely determined by an underlying attachment to a model of national political economy. This, they claim has underscored a pervasive and enduring scepticism towards the European project. Second, in line with world order analysis, it is contended that there has been a fundamental shift in the political economy environment associated with neoliberal globalisation. This shift can be dated from the early 1970s and was marked, not least, by the ending of the thirty-year post-war boom, itself structured around the so-called ‘Keynesian Golden Age’. While his analysis has been strongly contested (Teague and Grahl 1992; Rosamond 1993), Dorfman (1977) suggests the broad parameters of this shift, particularly in so far as it was identified as a source of national economic instability and crisis, was recognised by trade union leaders and key policy actors at the time. This paper seeks to affirm Dorfman’s analysis, claiming that the 1970s marked the beginning of a fundamental (and positive) re-evaluation within the union movement of the efficacy, from a general labour interests viewpoint, of Britain’s integration with Europe. It therefore challenges Teague and Grahl’s insistence on an enduring commitment to national political economy by British trade union policy makers.Third, changing union attitudes and policy towards the EC/EU reflect the structural shift in the political economy. This shift has centred on neoliberal globalisation and the internationalisation of the (competition) state (Cox 1981; Lipietz 1992; Cerny 1997). Under such conditions, national-level demand-led social democratic projects have been largely undermined by the pervasive imperatives of international competitiveness imposed by globalising structures and agents. Against this structural backdrop, British union attitudes to the EC/EU â€" at least in so far as the EC/EU represents forms of governance through which the wider political economy can be regulated â€" fundamentally altered, becoming consistently positive despite the vicissitudes of the European project itself. During the Keynesian ‘golden age’, British unions analysed Europe from a default position of pragmatic scepticism, a position informed by the assumptions of ‘naïve’ national Keynesianism and its efficacy (Teague and Grahl 1992). By contrast, since the mid 1970s the British unions have increasingly evaluated engagement and integration with the EC/EU from a position predicated on and informed by the crisis of Keynesianism as a national political economy. In view of national Keynesianism’s crisis under globalisation, positive engagement with the EC/EU became the new default policy position of the union movement especially at TUC level around which on-going division caused by political and sectoral factors oscillated... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]