Cold war isomorphism: communist regimes and the West European model of worker participation

ABSTRACT

In studies of cultural globalisation, the influence of communist regimes on Western Europe has remained under-theorised and little explored. Addressing this gap in research, this article puts forward the glocalisation grid of world-polity theory as a means for conceptualising and investigating how East European communist regimes helped shape the evolution of West European welfare states during the Cold War. The article re-traces the 1960s struggle over expert discourse within the International Labour Organization (ILO) in which communist regimes, including Yugoslavia and Poland, struggled to win the bureaucratic legitimacy of the ILO for their domestic policies. In focus are vertical, horizontal and temporal dimensions of glocalisation and the ensuing perceived or superficial similarity – so-called isomorphism – of legislation on worker participation in decision-making at the workplace. The article maps the timing of reforms across Europe, showing how East European reforms preceded and were co-constitutive to a pan-European process of policy isomorphism.

KEYWORDS:

• World polity theory
• Cold War
• International Labour Organization
• communist regimes
• welfare states
• worker participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Astrid Hedin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8498-6529

Notes

1. This work was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council and the text was developed during a stay as Anna Lindh fellow at the Stanford University Europe Center. I also wish to thank the participants of the Stanford Comparative Sociology Workshop as well as two anonymous reviewers.

2. Discussions within the EEC on worker participation were initially dominated by the issue of board-level representation, modelled on the West-German example. A substantial suggestion was first brought up on the agenda of the EEC by the German government in the late 1960s, in the process of trying to harmonise European company laws (Knudsen, 1995; Streeck, 1997). The Fifth directive on European Company Law, containing the proposals on worker representation, was blocked in the EEC Council of Ministers for decades. With the 1972 draft Fifth directive, the possible regulation of co-determination policies by the EEC became a question of adopting the specific German model of dual boards, with both a management board and a supervisory board. The draft Fifth directive was revised twice, in 1983 and 1988, adding alternative models of board representation, but never succeeded.

3. The EEC adopted its first directives on the broader issue of worker participation within the area of employee participation in the enterprise (that is, at the level of the workplace) during the late 1970s. These two directives pertained only to specific situations in the enterprise: the 1977 Collective Redundancies Directive and the 1979 Transfer of Undertakings Directive required that workers be informed and consulted in the event of larger cut-backs in staff, or the sale of the company. EEC regulation of employee participation at the workplace made its first meaningful step forward in the case of transnational companies – an area where European Union regulations interfere less than with domestic legislation. In 1994, the European Community adopted the European Works Councils Directive 94/45/EC, calling for permanent works councils or other means for the information and consultation of employees in transnational enterprises (that is, companies or groups of companies with 150 or more employees in each of two member states). In contrast, the 2002 EU directive covers all undertakings that employ at least 50 employees and are located within the territory of member states.

4. EEC interest in the broader issue of worker participation has early roots. Since its founding in 1958, the members of the EEC have made a general pledge to ‘promote joint consultation between workers and employees’. This provision, in both the 1958 Treaty of Rome and the 1961 European Social Charter, protects the general right to collective bargaining (Treaty of Rome 1958, article 153:1e, and European Social Charter 1961, Article 6:1).

5. Today, new archival material from the former USSR suggests that the traditional view of the 1948 Tito-Stalin split should perhaps be revised. Declassified documents suggest that realpolitik preceded and decided the alleged ideological split with Moscow, not vice versa (Kramer, 2009; Niebuhr, 2011; Perovic, 2007; Plestina, 1992, p. 131). Perovic re-traces the West European interpretation of the Stalin-Tito split to a number of official Yugoslav historians (2007, footnote 7). Similarly, in the international deliberations within the ILO, Yugoslav representatives depicted the break with the USSR as the consequence rather than the cause of Yugoslavia's choice to pursue ‘reform communism’ and policies of worker self-management.

6. The ILO Social and Labour Bulletin was not published before 1974. Similarly to the ILO Legislative Bulletin, it mostly contained self-reports by individual countries.

7. Soviet-type labour unions were, in the dictum of Lenin, the ‘conveyor belts’ of the party. Two key tasks were to school the workers politically and to administer social service benefits. Studies of archival materials show that in East Germany, for example, the union had a formal system in place since 1946 for reporting on political sentiments at the workplaces (Hürtgen, 2005, pp. 99–298). From the early 1960s, and again after the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia, this system was extended and formalised, and during the 1970s it came to include six different categories of reports. The reports were similar in character to secret-police reports and included names and activities of individuals who were regarded as being under the ideological influence of the ‘class enemy’ or Western television (Hürtgen, 2005, pp. 249–255). Generally, there is still very little research on trade unions under communist regimes that is recent and based on archival materials.

8. By the early 1970s, the Polish opposition had given up its efforts to influence the state and its organisations from within, and by the late 1970s it had begun to organise independently of the state, founding the ‘anti-political’ Workers Defence Committee (KOR) in 1976, and the first independent ‘Free Trade Union’ committee in 1978 (Ost, 1991, pp. 1–74).

9. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

10. Charles Tilly's writings on social movements focus on how the means by which people protest – their ‘styles of protest’ or ‘repertoires of contention’ – can spread across countries but, in contrast to world-polity theory, he seems to assume that the protest agendas – the contents of demands made by protestors – are determined by the historical-materialist circumstances in each country, rather than any transnational fashion (cf. Tilly & Wood, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swedish Research Council [grant number 2008-1865].