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

Introduction

It is widely held that after the Second World War, international organisations helped spread liberal, Western cultural norms and organisational scripts across the globe (Meyer, 2009).¹ Studies of cultural globalisation in the form of global organisational isomorphism (the tendency of countries to adopt at least superficially similar organisational models, as legitimised by the international organisations of the world polity) have commonly focused on how developed, Northern countries have influenced each other, as well as affecting the less-developed global South. Meanwhile, the impact of communist regimes on the international organisations of the world polity, and on the cultural scripts and norms promulgated by them, has received very little academic attention (for exceptions, see Hwang, 2006; cf. Strang & Chang, 1993). Furthermore, world-polity studies (also termed global neo-institutionalism, or the Stanford school of globalisation) have tended to bypass questions of conflict in the world polity (Albert, 2008; Koenig & Dierkes, 2011). Marxist-inspired world-systems theory, on the other hand, does focus on conflict, but has emphasised the core/periphery dimension, a North/South fracture within the world polity, and subsumed communist regimes into a Huntingtonian category of ‘Western civilisations’ (Beckfield, 2003, 2008, 2010). This is curious, since during the entire Cold War era, the East–West division was arguably the most prominent and consistent political cleavage inside the world polity, within the United Nations and its specialised agencies (Ball, 1951; Holloway & Tomlinson, 1995; Lijphart, 1963).

Addressing this gap in research, the article presents a case study of a policy issue where, during the Cold War, East and West European countries competed for the role of international role model or paragon of virtue: worker participation in management decision-making at the level of the workplace. In the terminology of the International Labour Organization (ILO), this policy issue was addressed as ‘consultation and cooperation between employers and workers at the level of the undertaking’ and within the European Economic Community (EEC) as ‘worker participation in enterprise’. For clarity, this article will use the shorthand term ‘workplace participation’. The issue will be further presented and defined in the next section, on worker participation in Europe.

This article is a historical institutionalist account of European workplace participation policies through the lens of the ILO. It addresses the following questions: How did the ILO policy discourse on workplace participation evolve after the Second World War? Did the ILO come to lend legitimacy and authority to socialist models of worker participation? And were the ILO recommendations and policy norms, over time, mirrored in European national-level legislation?

I demonstrate how the European communist regimes, in general, and Yugoslavia as a norm entrepreneur, in particular, had a co-formative, co-constitutive influence on world-polity discourse on the issue of workplace participation. The article shows how a wave of legislation in the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, led by the worker participation reforms in Yugoslavia, was presented and promoted by communist regimes within the ILO during the 1960s, and how these discussions preceded West European efforts during the 1970s to extend and enhance existing traditions of worker participation with new pieces of legislation. These new West European laws, in turn, laid the groundwork for the contemporary European model of worker participation, as confirmed by the European Union (EU) in a binding directive in 2002 (2002/14/EC). In effect, this historical institutionalist case study re-traces a core element of the European Social Model of the EU, namely workplace participation policies, to the 1970s nation-level reforms among those 15 EU members which came to be part of the 2002 EU decision.

Centrally, on the basis of the case study, this article introduces and conceptualises a theoretical model of Cold War isomorphism. During the Cold War era, within the international organisations under the United Nations’ umbrella, communist regimes were actively vying for political legitimacy and international sympathies for their own domestic policies (Dallin, 1962; Gehlen, 1967). Arguably, this quest for international approval of domestic policies was a characteristic feature of the cultural Cold War as a battle for hearts and minds (cf. Nye, 2008; Risse, 2000). One important audience and arena for this struggle were the many new members who joined the UN system during the 1960s as a result of de-colonlisation (Rubinstein, 1955, 1964/2015, 1972/2015, 1988). But in this article, our focus lies on the intra-European process. The present study suggests that in Cold War Europe, East–West competition within intergovernmental organisations over political legitimacy may have helped create or strengthen processes of East–West policy isomorphism in Europe. During the 1960s, East European communist regimes adopted new legislation that, within the policy dialogue of the ILO, came to be regarded as comparable, belonging to the same category of policy or organisational field as the laws in West European liberal democratic countries (cf. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).

Of course, as we now know, actual worker participation was very different under liberal-democratic political systems compared to communist regimes (cf. Hürtgen, 2005). Using the terminology of world-polity theory, we can speak of East–West policy isomorphism on worker participation as de-coupled, that is, similarities were superficial or occurred at the level of myth and ceremony surrounding formal legislation, and not in the form of actual policy transfers (cf. Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Arguably, the non-democratic character of communist regimes allowed the myth and ceremony of legislation to remain de-coupled from actual policies to a degree not possible in countries with a democratic public sphere (cf. Habermas, 1992). Furthermore, in historical hindsight, the function of participatory policies under political systems lacking freedom of expression and freedom of association can of course be questioned. In the conclusions, we return to the question of why the ILO bureaucracy agreed to treat communist workplace-participation as legitimate and relevant to the West European experience despite the dismal record of the communist regimes on these counts. Nevertheless, from the mid-1960s until the end of the Cold War, it became commonplace for labour studies to compare workplace participation policies in West and East Europe side by side, not as democratic versus authoritarian models, but as parallel progressive endeavours under market-based versus plan-based societies (cf. Comisso, 1979; Sturmthal, 1964; Tsiganou, 1991). This discursive development is captured by the world-polity theory concept the construction of equivalence (that is, how legislation on worker participation under communist regimes was constructed as comparable and relevant to the West European experience). The case study re-traces how such a construction of equivalence occurred within the policy dialogue of the ILO and how it was legitimised and authorised by ILO procedures and publications.

How could such a discourse have mattered for the welfare states in Western Europe? To conceptualise and disaggregate the process of Cold War isomorphism, I apply the world-polity analytical grid of glocalisation introduced by Drori, Höllerer, and Walgenbach (2014) and complement it with a discussion of the role of international organisations (IOs) as bureaucracies, as developed by Barnett and Finnemore (2004). According to world-polity theory, states are socialised by the cultural norms and policy discourses that emerge within international organisations (Krücken & Drori, 2009; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). Hence, I argue, investigations and analyses of Cold War isomorphism should centre on communist-regime efforts to influence the process by which IOs and their bureaucracies authorised certain classifications of the world, fixed certain meanings and diffused certain norms. The theoretical model of Cold War isomorphism proposed here can be summarised as follows: To the extent that communist regimes were successful in having international organisations and their bureaucracies lend legitimacy and authority to positive interpretations of specific communist reforms as signs of progress and modernity, I argue, policy isomorphism with Western countries should also have become stronger on these policy issues. This is a new, different and non-Marxist conceptualisation of the old idea that East European communism helped shape the development of West European welfare states (cf. Carr, 1946; Hobsbawm, 1995).

Data, methods and argument

The data for the study consist of the proceedings, reports and publications produced by the ILO during the post-Second World War era, as well as existing research on workplace participation legislation in Europe. In focus are not the actual contents of policies, or how they were put into practice by nation-states, but the timing of formal legislation, and how the formal legislation was described and categorised in ILO discourse. In terms of methodology, simple counts, summarised in two figures, are juxtaposed with descriptions of the policy discussions within the ILO, with examples providing a thick description. Missing from the data are verbal deliberations that were not recorded in formal protocols. These may potentially have contained more political conflict and contestation than is visible in the written records. Furthermore, the present study does not include data on the motivations or thinking of the ILO bureaucracy or national representatives. However, the topic of diplomatic interests and foreign-policy strategies of Cold War competition inside international organisations is an important area for future studies.

The article is structured as follows: the first section offers a brief historical background to worker participation policies in Europe. Then the overall theoretical perspective is presented, namely world-polity studies and historical new institutionalism. The main body of the text consists of the case study, which proceeds in three ‘cuts’ (cf. Allison, 1969) that apply the three analytical operationalisations for the study of glocalisation drawn up by Drori et al. (2014). The term ‘glocalisation’ connotes the multidimensional interplay between global and nation-level scripts for policy. In the final section, I present the theoretical conclusions of the case study by developing and elaborating on the proposed model of Cold War isomorphism, and relating it to current debates within world-polity theory on questions of conflict, power, and human rights in the world polity, state socialisation by world society, and the role of international organisations as bureaucracies. In sum, the present study suggests that the evolution of the contemporary Social Model of the EU was, in part, a product of competition in the cultural Cold War over political legitimacy, as it took place within the universal international organisations of the UN system.

Worker participation in Europe

The right of employees to be informed and consulted on matters that affect their workplace and local working conditions is considered a core component of the contemporary European Social Model (Weiss, 2006). It was codified in the 2002 EU directive 2002/14/EC, and as a basic right in paragraph 27 of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, which counts as the constitutional document of the EU. In ILO terminology, this policy area is called ‘consultation and cooperation between employers and workers at the level of the undertaking’. For clarity, this article uses the term ‘workplace’, rather than the ILO expression ‘undertaking’ or the EU term ‘enterprise’.

Policies for the workplace consultation of workers by management include, for example, the West German law on works councils (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, 1972) and the Swedish law on workplace democracy procedures (Medbestämmandelagen, 1976). Workplace participation should not be confused, however, with board-level representation, which in English is termed co-determination or joint consultation and in German Mitbestimmung. The two policy areas have a parallel and at times intertwined history.² For reasons of clarity, I shall confine this article to worker participation at the level of the workplace, which has been a separate policy-making area within both the ILO and the EU.

The starting point of the historical case study is the contemporary European model of workplace participation, as codified by the 2002 EU directive (2002/EC/14).³ The 2002 EU directive laid down a set of minimum requirements establishing how management must inform and consult their employees at all types of workplaces, be they part of public administration or private enterprise. The communication of information and consultation can take place either directly or via trade-union representatives, but must be ‘ongoing, regular and effective’ and must include issues concerning the enterprise’s activities and economic situation and, in particular, any decisions affecting the organisation of work. Research on labour relations suggests that this European model of worker participation is now a defining feature of the European Social Model and an outlier among the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries (Arrigo & Casale, 2010, pp. 195–197; Weiss, 2006).⁴

Would the contemporary European model of workplace participation have been as strong without Cold War competition over political legitimacy from the European communist regimes? The idea of workers’ participation in the management of the workplace has a long history. The first legislation on works councils dates to 1891, when Germany’s Industrial Code allowed for the organisation of workers’ committees. This means that the institution of works councils in Western Europe precedes both the advent of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and the Cold War (cf. Sirianni, 1980; Sturmthal, 1964). Furthermore, after the Second World War, works councils were instituted in many West European countries, building on the experiences of joint efforts by workers and management during the war. In Eastern Europe, workers’ councils briefly emerged directly after the war, but perished with Stalinisation.

The contemporary EU model of workplace participation rests on a wave of West European legislative reforms that were adopted in the 1970s. Due to this wave of reforms, when the EU directive 2002/14/EC was adopted in 2002 – which was just before the first Eastern enlargement of the EU – all of the fifteen EU members at the time, with the partial exception of Ireland and the UK, already had nation-level legislation in place that satisfied the minimum requirements of the directive (Arrigo & Casale, 2010, pp. 188–193; European Parliament, 2006, pp. 31ff; cf. Guest, 1986). In other words, the 2002 directive confirmed nation-level legislation already in place. Shortly after, with the first (2004) enlargement of the EU, the EU model of worker participation was introduced in post-communist states (Skorupínska, 2009; Tóth, 1997; Tóth & Ghellab, 2003). If political competition from communist regimes was indeed part of the fuel that drove many West European states to legislate on worker participation in the 1970s – as the present study argues – then history, in a sense, came full circle, ‘inventing works councils in Hungary’ (Tóth, 1997).

The focus of the case study at hand is the world-polity discourse on workplace participation that preceded the 1970s wave of West European reforms. Obviously, communication between Eastern and Western Europe took place in many fora, including the many individual and transnational exchanges involving West European leftist activists, academics, organisations, and think tanks. However, for several reasons, the discourse generated within and by the ILO should be of special interest. Since it is a universal organisation and part of the United Nations system, the ILO enjoys strong international moral, expert and bureaucratic authority and legitimacy (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004). This is also true of the EEC (today the EU) and the OECD, but these organisations are not universal and did not include the European communist regimes in their membership. The expert discourse of these organisations was generally confined to the policies of member countries (cf. Commission of the European Communities, 1975; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1975). Even in the rare instance that policies of non-member states were featured in comparative reports issued within these epistemic communities, it seems that East European worker-participation policies were simply ignored (cf. Kolvenbach, 1978).

Demands for worker participation at the level of the workplace reach more than a century back into European history and have broad and varied ideological roots. During the 1960s and 1970s too, calls for increased worker participation had many sources: Catholic ideas on solidarity and the common good, as recommended by the Pope John XXIII (Joblin, 1961); social-liberal ideas on ‘human relations’ in working life, which was the dominant approach of the ILO bureaucracy (Givry, 1969); employees as stakeholders in the enterprise, as put forward by economists and by employers’ unions (Rhenman, 1968); social-democratic traditions of works councils; as well as socialist ideas of worker self-management in the form of workers’ councils (Singleton & Topham, 1963). Nevertheless, despite the varied sources of ideological support for worker participation reforms in Western Europe during the 1970s, I suggest that an important impetus may have come from the symbolic competition with Eastern Europe over political legitimacy, where Yugoslavia played an important role.

Historical global neo-institutionalism

Historical institutionalist theory argues that institutions emerge from concrete critical junctures and processes located in time, and that research should focus on this formative moment (Thelen, 1999). Traditionally, historical institutionalist analysis has been coupled with a rational-choice framework, weighing the rational self-interests and power resources of particular actors at the formative moment when a specific piece of legislation was enacted (cf. Korpi, 2006). In contrast, world-polity studies have shown how countries often adopt legislation at adjacent points in time that is similar, at least superficially, or that has similar labels (Meyer, Ramirez, Rubinson, & Boli-Bennett, 1977; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The world-polity theory paradigm, as laid down in a seminal article by John W. Meyer and colleagues in 1997, has steadily gained interest and influence within the social sciences (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Gilardi, 2012; Krücken & Drori, 2009; McNeely, 2012; Meyer et al., 1997).

In the world-polity theory account, reforms spread in waves through the world, which implies that cultural globalisation also plays a role, alongside (or intertwined with) nation-level politics. Since countries are different, the finding of international organisational isomorphism implies that policy and organisational reform does not mirror nation-level functional demands or political power constellations alone, but seems to spread like fashion (Meyer, 2004). The phenomenon of organisational isomorphism suggests that states are ‘socialised’ by world culture and the organisational models to which world culture has granted legitimacy and authority. World culture, in turn, takes shape in and around, and is communicated via, the international organisations of the world polity (Boli & Thomas, 1997).

According to world-polity theory, the core mechanism of this cultural globalisation is the structuring and legitimation of actor identities, role expectations and perspectives (Meyer, 2000, 2010; Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). The rationalist assumption that successful organisational models are and should be universal, and that they represent some sort of scientific truth, leads reformers to search for admired examples and to try to emulate them.

A common denominator for many reforms that show an isomorphic pattern of diffusion is that they model social progress and individual development, embodying modern ideals of Western rationalised culture (Meyer, 2009). World-polity studies have demonstrated extensively how, via international organisations as teachers of norms and organisational models, post-war cultural globalisation socialised states into embracing liberal models of human rights and the participatory role of the individual in organisations (Drori, Meyer, & Hwang, 2006; Finnemore, 1993; Risse, Ropp, & Sikkink, 1999, 2013). The present study, of East–West policy isomorphism in Europe during the Cold War, highlights the complex role of communist regimes as competing, illiberal modernities in this process (cf. Hedin, 2004).

Organisation of the case study

The case study is organised along the three analytical axes of glocalisation drawn up by Drori et al. (2014): The vertical axis of glocalisation looks at top-down recommendations and directives issued by international organisations and their recursive ‘boomerang’ impact. In the case of worker participation, the 1952 and 1967 ILO recommendations on worker participation invited continued and intensified international communication on the policy issue, which opened up an opportunity for communist regimes to depict their domestic policies in a positive light. The horizontal axis maps both the content and the amount of international and policy-expert dialogue generated by the ILO, which during the 1960s came to treat East European models of worker participation as comparable, legitimate and relevant to the West European experience. Last, the temporal axis maps the sequencing of legislative reforms in the prospective EU-15, in relation to those Eastern European workplace participation reforms that were featured in ILO discourse.

The vertical axis: reacting to recommendations

Along the vertical axis of glocalisation, what we are looking for is not only top-down, global-to-local imprints but also the reactions of nation-level entities to global recommendations and, in turn, their efforts to win influence over them: what Finnemore terms ‘the relationship of international organisations with the governed’ (Drori et al., 2014, pp. 88–89; cf. Finnemore, 2014, p. 224).

Throughout its history, the ILO has adopted two recommendations on workplace participation: the 1952 Recommendation concerning Consultation and Co-operation between Employers and Workers at the Level of the Undertaking (R94) and the 1967 Recommendation concerning Communication between Management and Workers within the Undertaking (R129). In contrast, the EEC put out its first directives on worker participation in enterprise (that is, at the workplace) only in the late 1970s, and these pertained only to specific situations (see footnote 2). As mentioned in the introduction, not until 2002 did the EU issue a directive that mirrored West European nation-level legislation from the 1970s, as well as early ILO recommendations. Hence, this study centres on the ILO.

Generally, the ILO bureaucracy viewed worker participation from a human-relations perspective, with an emphasis on individual freedom (Givry, 1969, quoting the ILO Director-General at the 1954 general conference of the ILO). In contrast, West European council communism saw liberal parliamentary democracy as a ‘foe’ of the workers’ councils (Pannekoek, 1950/2003, pp. 132–137). According to this line of argument, the reigning West European ‘deceitful middle-class democracy of formal rights’ was but an ‘illusion of the masses that they have to decide their own fate’ (Pannekoek, 1950/2003, pp. 134, 137).

The 1952 ILO Recommendation on Co-operation at the Level of the Undertaking (R94) was introduced partly as a means for the ILO governing body to conclude the ‘endless’ debates within the ILO’s Industrial Relations Committee (International Labour Conference [ILC], 1952a, p. 2; US Government Delegation to the ILO, 1952, pp. 14, 24). Recommendation R94 limited the broad and unwieldy debate on industrial democracy to questions of workplace participation. The recommendation mirrored and confirmed an already-existing basic consensus, which even included a US delegation. Nevertheless, the recommendation made room for further policy dialogue on the issue within the ILO, which, I argue, opened a window of opportunity for Yugoslavia as a norm entrepreneur.

Yugoslavia as norm entrepreneur

Björkdahl (2007) suggests that norm entrepreneurship and norm advocacy within international organisations is a foreign-policy strategy that may allow small states to ‘punch above their weight’ in international politics, provided that they are credible and that they target the appropriate forum.

After the Second World War, the new Socialist People’s Republic of Yugoslavia initially left the ILO in 1949; however, it soon resumed its membership, just in time to participate in the 1951 general session, where the draft of the eventual 1952 ILO Recommendation R94 was on the agenda. Yugoslavia actively used this topic at the general session to promote its own model of worker participation, which it claimed constituted a separate path to socialism.⁵

After the 1951 general session of the ILO, the member states were sent a questionnaire inviting comment on the draft recommendation on workplace participation. Here, Yugoslavia represented its own model as a paragon of virtue, where the participation of workers in management was provided for in the 1950 ‘Basic Law’ of the country. Yugoslavia argued that workplace cooperation between workers and management should be ‘much more extensive’ than provided for in the ILO draft recommendation (ILC, 1952b, p. 15). The Yugoslavian position was seconded by Poland, whose government delegate argued that the ILO recommendation should be adopted, but as a binding convention. Compared to Poland, Yugoslavian rhetoric was more forgiving towards West European efforts at worker participation. The Yugoslavian government recognised several West European countries as positive examples where worker participation was already ‘more comprehensive’ than demanded by the draft recommendation. Named by Yugoslavia were ‘the Federal Republic of Germany, Norway and other Scandinavian countries, Austria, France, etc.’ (ILC, 1952b, p. 15). This is interesting because it shows that Yugoslavia sought to depict its own model as comparable and relevant to the West European experience. In effect, Yugoslavia identified itself as a political role model for the West, while distancing itself from the Soviet Union.

Two verbatim quotations from the 1952 ILO general session, when the ILO Recommendation R94 was adopted, provide a thick description of Yugoslavian norm entrepreneurship and its political context (ILC, 1952b). With typical Cold War rhetoric, the Polish government delegate, Mr Chajjn, threw down the gauntlet to West European governments, claiming that they were trying to rob the workers of their rights. In particular, Mr Chajjn attacked the French government’s recent legal repression of the communist trade union CGT, and questioned the intentions of the new West German works council reform, the 1952 Betriebsverfassungsgesetz (which replaced and extended the internationally pioneering law, the 1920 Betriebsrätegesetz). The Polish delegate said (ILC, 1952b, p. 65):

In Western Germany the so-called Adenauer Government, on the basis of the proposed law concerning the structure of factories (Betriebsverfassungs Gesetz), strives to deprive works councils of all their importance, submitting them to the wishes and whims of the employers. In France the Government tries to intimidate the working class, and the police brutally, under a provocative pretext of alleged espionage, breaks into the headquarters of the Confédération Générale du Travail, which counts in its ranks the overwhelming majority of the French workers. These examples, of course, do not exhaust a long list of attempts to rob the workers in the capitalist countries of their achievements and rights.

In comparison, the tone of the Yugoslav government delegate, Mr Potec, was more conciliatory towards the West. His speech tried to elicit international sympathies by describing Yugoslavia as a peaceful, less-developed country, a victim of the Soviet Union, with a historical mission to provide an alternative model to the latter’s ‘terrible example’ of bureaucratic repression. The speech heralded the principle of economic democracy and made an appeal to developed countries to follow the Yugoslav example and create new forms of economic management. The Yugoslav delegate said (ILC, 1952b, p. 46):

In Yugoslavia undertakings are genuinely held in common and the workers themselves elect their workers’ councils and their managing committees which manage the factory and have the right to insist on the removal of the managing director (who is appointed by the Government) if the results of his work are not favourable to the undertaking. In putting into effect decentralisation, in establishing works’ councils, and by other measures, our Government has enabled the trade unions progressively to promote the education of the working class in our country, which must be included among the insufficiently developed countries, and to undertake a number of very hard tasks, of which the most important of all, and the one with the greatest historic significance, is the one I have just mentioned, the introduction of factory management and direction of economic policy in the interests of the workers, that is to say the whole nation, and also of economic co-operation on an international basis, in peace. [ … ] We are firmly convinced that there can be no development of cultural and political democracy without economic democracy based on the rights of the direct producers – that is to say, in the developed countries, the enormous majority of the citizens – to a part at least in the management of industry. This will also be the best guarantee against any threat that a bureaucratic class may become despotic and strangle democracy. The terrible example of the Soviet Union has shown us how one must struggle for democratic rights and achievements, and for national liberty. [ … ] I hope and think that our struggle for social progress, for the development of democracy, against bureaucratisation and for sincere international collaboration inspire confidence in a better future among all insufficiently developed peoples, among all peoples who aspire to peace and to progress, and will induce the highly developed countries, which have immense possibilities in their industries and in their trade union movements, to create new forms of production, and new forms of management in their economies, both in their own interest and in that of the less developed countries, in order to prevent an economic crisis, unemployment and war.

During the ensuing two decades, Yugoslavia was very active as a norm entrepreneur within the ILO, promoting the virtues of its own model of worker participation. During the latter years of the 1950s, Yugoslavian experts, ambassadors and ministers were important contributors on the topic in the ILO scholarly journal, the International Labour Review (Gerskovic, 1955; Markovic, 1959; Uvalic, 1954; Vuckovic, 1957). In 1958, Yugoslavia took the initiative and succeeded in having the ILO call a special seminar specifically on the Yugoslav model of worker participation – the second in an annual series of informal discussions on the theme of worker–management relations, where the 1957 theme had been the Canadian Approach (International Labour Organization, 1958). This evening of discussions took place during the 42nd ILO General Session in 1958 and was introduced by a US delegate to the ILO. It featured presentations by the three Yugoslav delegates, followed by two hours of question time. The seminar proceedings were published by the ILO, together with a ten-page bibliography on the Yugoslav model, dominated by Yugoslavian publications (1958). At this time, in 1958, there seem to have existed only a handful of foreign language publications on the Yugoslav model that were penned by non-Yugoslav authors.

Around the same time, in 1957, Yugoslavia persuaded the ILO’s secretariat, the International Labour Office, to make a special single-country report on the Yugoslavian model of workers’ management – the first ILO study of its kind on the theme of worker participation in any country (International Labour Organization, 1962, pp. iii–v). For the report, ILO officials visited Yugoslavia three times and spoke to relevant ministries and agencies, as well as management at twenty workplaces (International Labour Organization, 1962, pp. iii–v). However, beyond the interviews, the 320-page report relied heavily on Yugoslav publications, laws, policy documents, and the above-mentioned Yugoslav contributions to the ILO journal International Labour Review. Nevertheless, compared to the 1958 seminar proceedings, the number of non-Yugoslavian foreign language texts referenced in the 1962 report had increased significantly, mostly due to articles published in socialist journals in France.

During the following decades, the 1962 ILO report became a recurrent standard reference in Western social-scientific writings on worker participation in Yugoslavia. For example, Carole Pateman’s 1970 classic Participation and Democratic Theory, in which Yugoslavia was a key role model, referred to the 1962 ILO report as one of two sources in support of the claim that the ‘principle of publicity’ in Yugoslav enterprises was ‘unique’ in international comparison, in terms of the large amount of information provided by enterprises to employees (Pateman, 1970, pp. 97–98).

By the late 1960s, the Yugoslav system of worker participation had received wide attention and broad recognition among Western social scientists – especially US political scientists – as a viable political alternative. For example, in his presidential address to the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1967, Robert Dahl argued that the Yugoslav system of democratising the workplace was ‘an alternative with a very great appeal’ (Dahl, 1967, p. 962). In the same vein, in 1970, Carole Pateman, a future president of APSA, questioned the ‘existing Anglo-American political system’ as a democratic ideal, and suggested that the Yugoslav experience ‘may offer some useful guidance’ (Pateman, 1970, pp. 104, 108). In sum, by the 1970s, the Yugoslav model had become a beacon for the idea of participatory democracy within American political science (Dahl, 1967; Lindblom, 1977; Pateman, 1970; Verba, Nie, & Kim, 1979; Verba & Shabad, 1978).

The positive image of the Yugoslav model of worker participation that emerged in world society during the 1960s can be put into contrast with later empirical research, which has concluded that this system of self-management was a mere facade for one-party rule and that both employees’ participation and their actual influence on decision-making was actually very low (Comisso, 1979, 1981; Liotta, 2001). Again, as mentioned in the introduction, world-polity theory does not posit that actual policy practices necessarily transfer between countries. The crucial impact of world society on the nation state comes instead from the myth and ceremony of policies, which may be more or less de-coupled from practices (cf. Meyer & Rowan, 1977).

What role did Yugoslavian norm entrepreneurship play in achieving its model’s global popularity? Of course, active Yugoslav efforts at gaining international popularity for its policies were facilitated by the interest that both Western publics and expert opinion took in the Yugoslavian model, as well as the West’s general enthusiasm for leftist ideas during the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, Yugoslavia made great efforts to meet this demand, investing heavily in embassies and diplomatic missions around the world, and in active participation within the UN system (Rubinstein, 1972/2015, pp. 174ff). In his study of Yugoslav foreign policy, Alvin Rubinstein argues that after the 1948 rift with the Soviet Union, the international organisations of the UN system became the most important channel for Yugoslav efforts to gain international acceptance and influence, not least among developing countries (Rubinstein, 1972/2015). Other channels of active Yugoslavian public diplomacy included, for example, national pavilions at international architectural exhibitions (Kulic, 2012) and tourism (Tchoukarine, 2015) (cf. Nye, 2008). Bi-lateral political contacts included, for instance, an early speech by the Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito to the West German parliament in Bonn in 1948 (Tito, 1948). (Nonetheless, West Germany later severed diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia during the 1957–1968 period.)

In sum, I contend that Yugoslavia’s own foreign-policy efforts, as well as the ILO as a forum and an actor, were probable contributing factors for the international legitimacy and power of attraction that the Yugoslavian model of worker participation came to enjoy. In addition, a preliminary overview suggests that the idea of Yugoslavia as a positive example in terms of political participation may, perhaps, have been amplified by American political science, but this hypothesis lies beyond the focus of the present study.

The horizontal axis: dialogue and comparison

The second axis of analysis of glocalisation is horizontal, focusing on communication between countries. How does the perception evolve that other countries are legitimate and relevant bases of comparison for a nation’s own policy-making in particular issues (Drori et al., 2014; cf. Finnemore, 2014, p. 223)? The legal-rational authority of international organisations relies on academic procedures in expert discussion to abstract, theorise and assist in creating typologies of organisational reforms. In the terminology of world-polity theory, this is called the construction of equivalence. How are cognitive maps constructed to define policies as sharing some common features and belonging to the same category (Drori et al., 2014, p. 89; Strang & Meyer, 1993, pp. 490–491)?

Why is this important? Sociological institutionalism, including world-polity theory, argues that organisations that perceive themselves as belonging to the same organisational field tend to develop in a similar direction, resulting in organisational isomorphism (with policies that appear the same, at least superficially, or that have similar names) (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Strang & Meyer, 1993). The horizontal axis of glocalisation describes the creation and strengthening of such organisational fields. In the next section, on the temporal axis of glocalisation, we shall return to the question of whether such isomorphism did indeed occur.

This section, on horizontal glocalisation, looks at two types of evidence. First, the contents of ILO discourse are analysed. On the basis of representative quotations from ILO publications, the study claims that within the discourse generated by the ILO, East European reforms were constructed as belonging to the same organisational field as West European policies on workplace participation. Second, the amount of this type of discourse on worker participation that was generated by the ILO is measured, similarly to the study by Ramirez et al. on the globalisation of educational policy (Ramirez, Meyer, & Lerch, 2016). This measurement gives a timeline of how communications within the ILO on the topic of workplace participation intensified over time, culminating in the late 1970s.

Meeting to talk

When the ILO passes a recommendation – as it did with the 1952 Recommendation R94 – member states can be asked to report their state of compliance with the recommendation to the International Labour Office at intervals decided by the ILO Governing Body. The first such reports on R94 were collected in 1958 and presented to the ILO General Session in 1959. During the following decade, several thematic conferences and ILO publications compiled information on workplace-participation policies in the ILO member states.

During this same era (the mid- to late 1950s), Soviet foreign policy strategy towards the United Nations and its specialised agencies shifted to active interest and participation (Dallin, 1962). The suspicious and autarchic stance of the Stalin era changed to Krushchev’s ‘co-existence’ tactic of vocal participation in the UN and his systematic efforts to discredit ‘capitalism’ and create a positive image of the Soviet bloc, not least in the eyes of the new UN members from the post-colonial global South (Jacobson, 1957, 1960; Rubinstein, 1964/2015, 1985, pp. 271–293). Following the re-entry of Yugoslavia into the ILO in 1951, the USSR applied for membership in 1953 and was allowed to join in 1954, together with its republics the Ukraine and Byelorussia (Rubinstein, 1955). Romania was then re-admitted in 1956, and Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary paid up their membership dues and resumed active ILO membership. As a result, from the late 1950s, the legislative reforms of worker participation under the communist regimes in Yugoslavia and the USSR and its satellite states in Eastern Europe were reported in ILO publications, at special conferences and at general sessions.

Figure 1 visualises how, in the decades before the 1970s wave of West European legislation, the ILO produced an increasing amount of ‘talk’ about the workplace participation policies of ILO member states. The amount of ‘talk’, or discourse, is measured by counting three types of items: ILO recommendations; the technical and thematic conferences devoted specifically to these recommendations; and publications from the conferences, including comparative reports issued by the ILO on nation-level reforms regarding the ILO policy recommendations. The figure only includes publications catalogued in public libraries. Furthermore, monographs and reports are included only if words in the title refer to the ILO recommendations (R94 and R129). Finally, shorter texts in edited publications are excluded from the count, since they seldom compare or categorise nation-level reforms, but instead focus on reforms in a specific country. Hence the figure does not include news items published in the ILO bulletins or expert articles published in the ILO scholarly journal, the International Labour Review. ⁶ However, developments in the International Labour Review (ILR) are briefly summarised in the text, and the next section includes a quotation from a comparative article in the journal written by an ILO bureaucrat. Due to the stronger traditions relating to the issue in Europe, European examples of worker participation – both East and West – predominate in ILO publications.

Figure 1. Number of ILO recommendations, technical meetings and subject conferences, and comparative reports on policies of workplace participation, by five-year interval.

As mentioned, the ILO issued two recommendations on workplace participation, in 1952 and in 1967. Technical meetings with country experts were held in Geneva in 1964 and 1967, followed by three full thematic conferences assembled in Yugoslavia in 1969, in Norway in 1974 and in the Netherlands in 1981 – but this last conference lies outside the timespan in the focus of the present study.

Constructing equivalence

We now proceed to take a closer look at the contents of the communications generated by the ILO and how these were shaped by the ILO bureaucracy. In their work on IOs as bureaucracies, Barnett & Finnemore argue that bureaucratic principles of universality and rationality, along with specialisation and compartmentalisation, can cause organisational pathology or dysfunction, which they define as an IO straying from its own publicly proclaimed mission to the point where it loses its way during the course of its work (2004, pp. 16–44). However, as we shall note in the concluding section, whether a specific bureaucratic behaviour should be deemed dysfunctional or not may be a question of perspective (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004, pp. 35ff).

In analysing how the ILO shaped discourse, apart from providing a forum for nations to meet, I would like to emphasise three points: the compartmentalisation of discussions on civil rights in the work of the ILO; the universalist logic in the choice of sources and treatment of the information on worker participation that the ILO was publishing; and how the ILO lent a certain amount of positive legitimacy and authority to socialist models of worker participation in general, particularly to the Yugoslavian model.

First, and centrally, in discussions of workplace participation policies, the ILO did not set the communist regimes apart on the basis of their lack of democratic credentials or civil rights, such as the lack of freedom of expression and association, or the right of workers and employers to organise freely. These rights belong to the founding principles of the ILO, but were compartmentalised and addressed only in separate ILO fora, including the ILO credentials committee and the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association (International Labour Organization, 1948). In ILO publications on worker participation, the dividing-line between communist regimes and democracies was typically conceptualised instead as a difference in how their economies were organised. Second, also notably, in accordance with the universal bureaucratic procedures of the ILO, for information on worker participation under communist regimes, just as with all other countries, the ILO and its publications relied on domestic-country experts and representatives – who, as we now know, were under a degree of political control that could not be paralleled by a democratic regime (Wolle, 1999). Moreover, the written laws and constitutions of communist regimes were, as a rule, interpreted literally, not according to their meaning for communist theory or praxis.⁷ Third, the ILO lent a certain degree of legitimacy to the Yugoslav government’s presentation of the Yugoslav model of worker participation, in particular by letting Yugoslavia be the first country to feature in a special ILO monograph on worker participation (1962) and by allowing Yugoslavia to host the very first ILO conference on the topic in 1969.

In 1964 and 1967, ILO technical-expert meetings were held in Geneva on the topic of workplace participation. The goal was to exchange information on different national methods and practices used throughout the world. At the 1967 meeting, the two policy role-models that took centre stage in the discussions were the West German and the Yugoslav models of workplace participation (Givry, 1969, p. 9; International Labour Office, 1969, p. 158). However, the meeting of experts from various countries did not decide in favour of either one. According to the official ILC report, ‘The meeting noted these developments with interest, but did not feel in a position to draw from them any conclusions of a more general character’ (International Labour Office, 1969, p. 158). In the account of Jean de Givry, the long-time chief of the Social Institutions Development Department of the International Labour Office, the meeting concluded that ‘it would not be appropriate to attempt to make a comparative evaluation of different national systems’ (Givry, 1969, p. 27, emphasis added). This comment is interesting since it highlights the role of bureaucratic culture and universalist ideals for work inside IOs (cf. Barnett & Finnemore, 2004, pp. 16–20).

Furthermore, the report from the 1967 technical meeting, which is typical for how ILO publications reported on nation-level policies of workplace participation, eschewed any mention of discussions of civil rights, such as freedom of association or freedom of conscience and expression. The report mentioned that at the meeting, there had been some discussion concerning ‘the general context of participation of organisations in the economic and social policy of the country as a whole’ (International Labour Office, 1969, pp. 160–161). However, if this theme had included any criticism of the non-democratic conditions under European socialist regimes, it was not included in the report. This (non-)treatment of the issue of civil rights for workers is characteristic for ILO publications, reports and proceedings on the topic of worker participation. Possibly, this absence may in part have mirrored principles of neutrality and universality, which guide the bureaucracies of many international organisations, including the ILO (cf. Barnett & Finnemore, 1999).

For a thick description of the construction of equivalence within the ILO between East European and West European workplace-participation reforms, I provide three verbatim quotations from ILO publications and proceedings. The first comes from a 1969 report on the 1967 technical meeting, published in the ILO scholarly journal, the ILR; it was written by Jean de Givry, mentioned above, who was a centrally placed bureaucrat and specialist within the ILO in relation to the issue of workplace participation. In his journal article, de Givry differentiated between two different international trends in workplace participation: one focused on human relations and management techniques, and the other, embodied by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, built on the re-structuring of the economy as a whole. The focus lay on emerging differences among planned economies and current communist efforts to de-centralise the management of their economies and enlist workers’ active participation (Givry, 1969, pp. 6–7):

A first series of examples of this trend are provided by the measures taken in the U.S.S.R. and the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe to abolish private ownership of the means of production and replace it by a new type of undertaking under a socialist system based on a centrally planned economy, a single party and a single trade union movement. [ … ] At present, there are marked differences between several of these countries as regards systems of industrial management. In the U.S.S.R., for example, the manager of an undertaking bears sole responsibility, although important powers of co-decision are granted to the trade union committees on most personnel matters and joint machinery has been set up to enable workers to take part in the preparation and execution of the plans for the undertaking. In Yugoslavia, under the system of workers’ self-management that has been in force since 1950, any gainfully employed citizen has the right to take part in the management of the undertaking through elected delegates; this is a fundamental right embodied in the 1963 Constitution.

Notably, in ILO discourse on workplace participation, Eastern European reforms were taken as indications that other systems were replacing the original Soviet-type, centrally planned economies (Givry, 1969, pp. 6–7). This line of thinking mirrored the so-called convergence hypothesis that was gaining credence among Western social scientists during this time (cf. Ost, 1991). Convergence theories, in their various versions, built on the assumption that communist regimes were not unique and impossible to reform, as totalitarian theory would have it, but shared many similar traits with Western democracies (Meyer, 1970). Hence, convergence theories argued that both the East and the West were developing in a progressive and democratic direction, and would eventually converge in a common system of democratic socialism (Meyer, 1970; for a critical overview, see Meyer, Boli-Bennett, & Chase-Dunn, 1975). Examples of communist regime workplace-participation reforms that received this type of positive attention from the International Labour Office, as signs of democratic reform, included not only the Yugoslav model but also the reforms in Poland after 1956, as well as the 1968 changes in Romania, and even the 1958 legal reforms in the USSR itself (Givry, 1969).

The idea that Eastern European workplace-participation reforms were a sign of political progress was in tune with the nation report summaries in ILO publications, which typically rested exclusively on domestic publications. Thus, for example, in an important and often-cited comparative report published by the ILO in 1969 and re-issued in an updated version in 1981, Polish and Yugoslavian worker reforms were described exclusively on the basis of academic reports published in Poland and Yugoslavia respectively, with the exception of the ILO’s own 1962 monograph on Yugoslavia (International Labour Office, 1969, 1981). In the 1969 and 1981 comparative reports, the systems of self-management, based on the Yugoslavian example, were categorised as ‘the most far-reaching attempt’ in the policy genre of workplace participation (International Labour Office, 1969, p. 30, 1981, pp. 49–50):

Systems based on workers’ self-management within undertakings represent no doubt the most far-reaching attempt at directly involving the workers in the decision-making process and in the responsibilities of management. While Yugoslavia offers at present a typical example of a nation-wide system of workers’ management which has been in operation for a number of years in all undertakings throughout the country, similar methods of management covering major sectors of the economy have been introduced more recently in several countries, including Poland and Algeria.

In the comparative reports, one example of omitting criticism of the lack of civil rights under socialist regimes concerns the portrayal of events in Poland during the summer of 1956, when the Polish army deployed 400 tanks to suppress a large worker rebellion in Poznan and more than 50 demonstrators were killed (cf. Garton Ash, 2002, pp. 11–12; Machcewicz, 2009; Laba, 2014, p. 103). In the 1967 and 1981 ILO reports, the armed crackdown simply had not happened. Likewise, in the ILO reports, Polish workers’ demands for independent workers’ councils had actually been met. In reality, however, the spontaneous Polish workers’ councils that were formally recognised by law in November 1956 had already been put back under Party control by 1958 (Garton Ash, 2002, pp. 11–12).⁸ Describing events in Poland, the ILO report wrote (International Labour Organization, 1967, p. 40, repeated in 1981, p. 62):

The workers’ council movement was rapidly recognised by the highest political authorities (October 1956) and the councils were granted full legal status under an act of 19 November 1956.

The gradual construction of equivalence of Eastern European systems of workers’ participation is also visible in the academic journal of the ILO, the ILR. During the 1940s, all the ILR articles on worker participation featured Western countries. In focus were the war-time joint worker-management councils in the USA, and also joint committees in Canada, Norway, Sweden, the UK and France. In the ILR, the first two journal articles on worker participation in an Eastern European country appear in 1954, with an entry by the Yugoslav ambassador to Norway (Uvalic, 1954), and in 1957, with a text called ‘Management by the workers’ in Poland, written by the deputy director of the Polish Ministry of Labour (Rosner, 1957).

In sum, this section on the horizontal dimension of glocalisation has put forward the argument that the ILO’s production of world-polity discourse helped join Western and Eastern Europe in a common organisational field on the topic of workplace-participation reforms. Was the joint discussion between Eastern and Western Europe in terms of workplace participation followed by actual policy isomorphism? The next section, on the temporal axis of globalisation, argues that, over time, it was.

The temporal axis: waves of legislative reforms

The third axis of analysis, the temporal dimension, looks at how legislative isomorphism played out over time (that is, the temporal order in which European states adopted new workplace legislation for employees’ participation in decision-making within the organisation). Why would West European countries adopt workplace-participation reforms at roughly the same time? And why would it matter if Eastern European countries adopted reforms before them? According to sociological institutionalism, including world-polity theory, when a discourse has been established whereby reforms are regarded as relevant and comparable, as competitors and/or role models, isomorphic tendencies gain in strength – fashion takes hold. In other words, world-polity theory would posit that when, at the world-polity level, workplace-participation reforms in Eastern and Western Europe had been constructed as equivalent or comparable, an isomorphic process would occur.

Why would this be? One debate surrounding world-polity theory concerns the micro-processes by which isomorphism occurs. Martha Finnemore was the first to call for a further specification of the exact processes, causes, and mechanisms of change that bring about global organisational isomorphism (Finnemore, 1996). However, the most interesting aspect of world-polity theory may be that it captures a phenomenon that goes beyond single actors, causes, or mechanisms. In other words, an analytical approach using methodological individualism may lead us astray (Jepperson & Meyer, 2011). Looking for micro-foundations at the level of the individual actor or organisation cannot capture an essentially collective, complex, and multi-layered process of how a fashion emerges and spreads or how, in an open polity, a discourse is established and expands. Possibly, Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration could be of help in describing the role of actors and organisations in an isomorphic process (Giddens, 1984). When we examine the role of individual actors or organisations, we are looking simultaneously at cause and effect, actor, and structure (Giddens, 1984).

Nevertheless, the three types of isomorphism suggested by DiMaggio & Powell may help us consider various hypothetical dynamics behind isomorphism in terms of European workplace participation policies (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). However, DiMaggio and Powell’s three types of isomorphism – coercive, normative and mimetic – are analytical rather than empirical categories (1983, footnote 5 and pp. 150 ff). All three forms address problems of legitimacy and authority in the Weberian sense.⁹ Coercive isomorphism is the result of goal-oriented adjustments to meet cultural expectations, as well as formal demands from the surrounding society (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Here, we can imagine, for example, West European politicians responding to radical societal demands for stronger legislation on worker participation. Normative isomorphism, on the other hand, can be driven by the professions, who recommend the latest trends in organisational development, based on organisational scripts promulgated by professional and trade associations and in academic publications (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). From this angle, we can envisage that discursive developments within the ILO may have had an effect on how country-level experts thought, wrote and advised their governments about the issue of worker participation, validating Eastern European reforms as a point of reference or consideration, inspiring and lending legitimacy to social-movement agendas (cf. Tilly & Wood, 2012).¹⁰ Lastly, mimetic isomorphism (from ‘to mimic’ or imitate) is a standard response to ambiguous goals and uncertain technologies. Incidentally, DiMaggio and Powell cite company efforts to improve working conditions as an example of mimetic isomorphism: for example, American corporations in the 1970s organised ‘quality circles’, modelled on their own perception of the inner organisation of Japanese companies, which in the USA at that time were regarded as successful (1983, p. 151).

Importantly, sociologists argue that the various types of isomorphic adjustments are not necessarily based on conscious, rational decisions; rather, they tend to proceed regardless of the absence of any proof that they are efficient (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). In sum, sociological new institutionalism suggests that isomorphic processes are complex, involve many different types of actors and logics of action, and take multiple roads simultaneously.

Traditionally, world-polity studies have solved this methodological challenge by concentrating on the result of hypothesised isomorphic pressures, mapping actual isomorphism of nation-level legislation through time series (cf. Schneiberg & Clemens, 2006). If country-level legislation occurs in waves grouped in time, the argument goes, then one important driving mechanism must be located at the international rather than the national level.

Figure 2 demonstrates how a wave of workplace-participation legislation in the 1970s (among the Western European countries that would later come to constitute the EU-15, which adopted the 2002 EU directive on workplace participation in the enterprise) was preceded by a long wave of East European reforms during the 1950s and 1960s. Since our focus is on West European perceptions of Eastern Europe and on the role of the ILO in shaping these perceptions, the figure does not show all Eastern European workplace-participation reforms, but only those laws that were described by name and year in the ILR. This operationalisation means that the figure does not feature the workers’ councils set up in several Eastern European countries during the immediate post-war period, before full Stalinisation, since these received little or no attention in ILO discourse. Moreover, both the short-lasting reform experiments in the GDR in the late 1950s and the Romanian reforms in 1971 and 1978 have been left out, since these were never reported in the ILR, despite the fact that Romania had re-joined the ILO in 1956 (cf. Kleßmann, 2007).

Figure 2. Workplace participation laws in Eastern Europe, as rendered in ILO publications and in the subsequent EU-15 countries, by year of enactment.

As described above, the first Eastern European worker-participation reform to gain an inroad into the ILO discourse on worker participation was the 1950 Yugoslavian Basic Law on the Management of State Economic Enterprises by Workers’ Councils, which received sustained attention in the ILR during the 1950s and 1960s. Next was the decree on worker councils in Poland, issued in late November 1956. As we now know, the decree was issued only after worker-council revolts had been put down by Soviet armed force, as an attempt to soften the blow to the legitimacy of Soviet rule and contain de-Stalinisation (cf. Machcewicz, 2009). However, in the International Labour Review, the Polish decree, as well as its confirmation by a Polish act of parliament in 1958, was presented in a very positive light by the deputy-director of the Polish Ministry of Labour and the chief of the Research Section of the Polish Central Councils of Trade Unions, respectively; however, both were positions from which we could expect political loyalty to the non-democratic regime and the party line on foreign policy (Marek, 1970; Rosner, 1957). In 1958 came the Soviet decree on the rights of trade unions in the factory, confirmed by the 1965 Soviet Law on Socialist Enterprises and the 1959 Czechoslovak act on works committees, confirmed by the new Czechoslovak Labour Code adopted in 1965 (Piatakov, 1962). Missing from the pages of the IRL at this time was the crucial 1956 Hungarian decree on workers’ councils, which – as in Poland – was part of the non-democratic regime’s efforts to quell worker rebelliousness inspired by the reform movement in Yugoslavia (Király, 1961). However, by 1968 the IRL editors did report briefly on the New Hungarian Labour Code, which confirmed the 1956 decree on workers’ councils.

The West European line in Figure 2 shows the timing of nation-level legislation in the prospective EU-15 countries, which in 2002 came to adopt the EU directive 2002/14/EC. France was first, in 1966, to amend and strengthen its post-war legal provisions for information to and consultation of workers. The first half of the 1970s saw workplace democracy reforms in Italy, the Benelux countries and the UK, as well as West Germany and Austria, two countries where the tradition of works councils dated back to the mid-nineteenth century. The Nordic countries Sweden and Finland legislated on cooperation between workers and management at the workplace in 1976 and 1979, respectively. Spain and Portugal adopted laws on workers’ committees and workers’ councils in 1976 and 1977, as part of their transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, and Greece eventually followed suit, in 1988. France finished the West European wave in 1982 with yet another reform that further strengthened workplace-participation procedures.

In effect, Figure 2 shows a case of East–West policy isomorphism. However, as one reviewer has objected, Figure 2 shows only a correlation, and not necessarily a causal link. And, yes, it could of course be argued that similar nation-level developments, such as rising standards of living and education, together with stronger organisation and collective bargaining by the workers, or demands from New Left social movements, may have caused similar developments at roughly the same time, rendering the time series spurious. Still, I suggest the interpretation that the 1970s West European wave of workplace participation reforms may have gained in impetus from East European competition over political legitimacy. This interpretation finds support in the study of the horizontal process of glocalisation within the ILO (cf. Schneiberg & Clemens, 2006, p. 198).

We should also note that if Eastern Europe did indeed influence Western Europe, this influence surely did not take only one unique route, via the ILO. However, as the constructivist turn in International Relations has duly noted, ideas do not float freely but must be communicated somewhere (Risse-Kappen, 1994). And world-polity theory argues that international organisations and their bureaucracies are important as arenas and authoritative actors in this regard.

Conclusions

This article contributes to the growing literature on cultural globalisation and world-polity theory by highlighting the efforts of European non-democratic, communist regimes to win influence within a UN specialised agency during the Cold War. Traditionally, studies of European communist regimes in the world polity have focused on how they were socialised by the West, starting with the 1975 inclusion in the Helsinki accords of a ‘third basket’ of human and civil rights (Snyder, 2011; Thomas, 1999, 2001). The example of the Helsinki process, and how it contributed to the erosion of the political legitimacy of communist regimes both at home and abroad – and, as some claim, to the end of the Cold War itself – has become the paradigmatic case of how the liberal world polity can socialise recalcitrant illiberal states by calling on their domestic audiences to ally with the outside world and protest against their own regimes (Risse, 2000; Risse-Kappen, 1994; Risse et al., 1999, 2013).

The present study suggests that we should look in the opposite direction as well, to a counter-process where the open societies of the West may have been influenced by interactions with their communist neighbours. During the post-Stalin era, European communist regimes made strong efforts to influence Western public and expert opinion in general and communications within UN organisations in particular. Indeed, if the effect of international norms varies with domestic state structure, as scholars such as Checkel and Linos suggest, the open societies of the West should have been particularly receptive to world-polity discourse (Checkel, 1999; Linos, 2011). Meanwhile, communist regimes made great efforts to insulate their own societies from foreign influence by screening for political loyalty those professionals who were allowed to travel to the West, controlling the inflow of information from the West and limiting domestic freedom of expression and association.

The present case study has shown how, within the ILO of the 1960s and 1970s, in the first place Yugoslavia, but also other East European communist regimes, tried to gain legitimacy for their own domestic models of worker participation. The article has described how the ILO responded by helping construct East European reforms as relevant, and – in the case of Yugoslavia – even exemplary, in relation to ILO recommendations on workplace participation. In the concluding section, I shall briefly relate these empirical findings, first, to discussions of the potential effects of ILO discourse; second, to the question of why the ILO behaved as it did; and third, to current debates on the conceptualisation of power and conflict in the world polity.

Causes, consequences and the Zeitgeist

First, does the sequencing in time of Eastern and Western European waves of workplace participation reforms point towards a causal connection? Here, the most important counter-argument is of course that other background variables, such as rising levels of education and material wealth in the workforce, stronger collective bargaining, and new trends in management, might have caused both waves of reforms independently, leaving us with a spurious correlation. Furthermore, Western Europe had its own almost century-old tradition of workplace-participation legislation, preceding the advent of communism in the Soviet Union. The new Western European reforms generally did not break with existing national frameworks for employee participation; instead they largely strengthened and extended existing nation-level traditions. Here, Streeck and Thelen’s concept of institutional ‘layering’ may help describe how the 1970s wave of Western European legislation related to the earlier two waves of Western European reforms, after the two World Wars, respectively (Streeck & Thelen, 2005). Furthermore, the impact of the communist models on Western Europe may also have occurred at the level of myth and ceremony, where the 1970s reforms of existing practices of workplace participation came to be interpreted in a new light, as similar or comparable endeavours to the reforms carried out under communist regimes (Hedin, 2015).

Which effects, then, if any, can the discursive developments within international organisations possibly have had on Western European welfare states and the European social model as we know it today? I suggest three types of potential effects. First, to the extent that IO discourse helped legitimise communist regime policies, communist regimes may have gained in so-called soft power towards the West (Nye, 2005). Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power centres on how countries can attract foreign audiences by winning legitimacy and credibility for their own domestic policies and for the norms that they are perceived to represent (2005). This concept is similar to what early studies of communist regimes termed ‘influence-building’ (Rubinstein, 1985). The prospect of gaining in global soft power or influence, especially with regard to the new UN members in the former third world, was plausibly the primary motivation behind active communist foreign policy towards the UN system (Dallin, 1962, p. 39; Petro & Rubinstein, 1997; Rubinstein, 1964/2015, 1972/2015, 1985).

A second, related point concerns so-called productive power in world politics (i.e. how historically contingent discourses shape the subjectivity of other actors) (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). From this perspective, we see how Eastern European communist regimes were co-producers of discourses related to the issue of workplace participation, which may have shaped the subjectivity of non-state actors in the West, including their societal ideas and social demands on their states (cf. Moravscik, 1997). The discussions within the ILO may, for example, have lent support to the convergence theories prevalent at the time, which claimed that historical developmental trends in both the East and the West pointed towards ‘the meeting of East and West in a happy synthesis of socialist democracy’, in the words of Alfred Meyer (Meyer, 1970, p. 325).

Third, and perhaps more to the point for the present study, the construction of communist policies as legitimate and relevant may potentially have helped push worker-participation reforms further up the West European agenda. The present study has argued that, in the terminology of organisational theory, the ILO helped construct a pan-European organisational field for nation-level legislation on workplace participation, which, according to neo-institutional theory, is the precondition for the various types of isomorphism: normative, coercive and mimetic. When one country reforms, if other countries are aware that it is doing so, others often mimic and follow suit. ILO discourse may have contributed to normative isomorphism by supporting the perception among Western European and US scholars, experts, and activists that, in terms of worker-participation reforms, communist regimes were models of social progress. On the other hand, the idea that communist regimes had invented a novel and superior type of representative system goes back at least to the 1930s (cf. Hedin, 2004; Webb & Webb, 1936, pp. 13–15). In this sense, ILO discourse on East European worker participation was only re-affirming an older idea.

A second type of counter-argument to any claim that the ILO policy discourse had an effect on the development of the Western European model of worker participation is that the developments within the ILO only mirrored the thinking and beliefs of the times; that communist regimes were reforming and the political systems on both sides of the iron curtain were converging. On this point, however, I contend that the early timing, and the authority of the ILO as a universal international organisation, gives us reason to believe that the ILO’s acknowledgment of communist regime workplace-participation policies made it more of a fan than a turbine in relation to the leftist Zeitgeist blowing through the West at the time. Nevertheless, the point that discourse has many carriers and can have many sources is, of course, valid (Schmidt, 2008).

The ILO as a bureaucracy

Why, then, did ILO publications treat communist worker-participation policies as benevolently as they did? Considering that the fundamental mission of the ILO includes protecting and defending freedom of association and the rights of workers to freely organise, the ILO’s apologetic stance towards worker-participation policies under East European communist regimes may perhaps merit the label of organisational pathology (that is, when an international organisation acts against or undermines its own fundamental purpose or mission) (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999, 2004). Below, I use Barnett & Finnemore’s typology of sources of pathological organisational behaviour to discuss potential interpretations of ILO behaviour (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004, pp. 36ff). In focus is the fourth category of explanations: bureaucratic culture.

First, in line with realist theories of international relations, we may expect that the external, material power relations between states decide interactions within an international organisation. In line with this thinking, if the ILO had been less conciliatory towards the communist regimes, they might simply have left the table and refused to meet. Conversely, in the spirit of détente, Western democracies may have wished to keep communist regimes talking in the hope of splitting the communist camp or supporting long-term reform. In the détente view, communication was the Achilles’ heel of communist regimes (Brandt, 1962). From this perspective, the benevolent treatment of communist regime worker-participation policies might not have been a malfunction or organisational pathology at all, but, rather, ‘change through contact’ at its best. On the other hand, in 1977, US President Carter – who, during the same time period, put human rights and the Helsinki process at the core of US foreign policy towards Eastern Europe – decided that the USA should leave the ILO (Galenson, 1981; Snyder, 2011). Seemingly, at this point, the USA did not gauge ILO membership as conducive to its foreign-policy interests (cf. Carter, 1980). (In February 1980, after re-negotiating the circumstances of its involvement, the USA re-joined the ILO.)

A second line of explanation, the bureaucratic-politics hypothesis, is that the ILO bureaucracy was marred by an internal political power struggle and had become politicised. On this issue, existing studies of ILO history are inconclusive (cf. Carter, 1980; Galenson, 1981, pp. 106–107; Ghébali, Ago, & Valticos, 1989, pp. 113ff; Imber, 1989, p. 54). A third possibility, in line with the world-polity theory perspective, would be that the stance of the ILO secretariat simply mirrored the external cultural environment, the political sentiments prevalent in the Western world at the time, as discussed above. In this view, international organisations are embedded in and follow the cultural rules of the larger world society (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000).

However, the work of Barnett and Finnemore emphasises a fourth model of explanation: that the internal bureaucratic logic of international organisations can cause malfunction or pathology. They argue that in order to maintain their bureaucratic, rational-legal authority, universal international organisations must maintain a broad credibility for their aspirations to universality, neutrality and objectivity, which can explain how IOs behave. This hypothesis rhymes well with the stated intentions behind, for example, the ILO scholarly journal, the International Labour Review. In the ILR, ever since the 1920s, national representatives had been called on to describe the domestic policies of their own countries and been given great liberty to do so (Bollé, 2013). In effect, the aim of the journal was that it should ‘perform the same functions’ as the ‘official national publications’ of each country (Bollé, 2013, pp. 4–5). Following the interpretative framework of Barnett and Finnemore, we see how the aims of the ILO to remain objective and neutral may have prevented the organisation from passing judgment on nation-level policies. As noted in the section above on the horizontal process of communication within the ILO, the ILO bureaucracy may have perceived it as ‘appropriate’ to avoid the role of arbiter.

Cold war isomorphism

In effect, the present study suggests that the evolution of the current European Social Model was, in part, a product of the cultural Cold War over hearts and minds, a very long and protracted ideological clash – which the West eventually ‘won’, in the sense that authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe were replaced, but which also shaped the West in the process (cf. Nye, 2008; Osgood, 2002). In contrast, in traditional studies of welfare states, welfare reforms have been analysed as the result of the balance of power resources among self-interested, rational political actors within countries (Esping-Andersen, 1985; Korpi, 1974, 1985, 2006; Mares, 2003; Swenson, 1991, 2002, 2004). In the same vein, from a policy-diffusion perspective, policies spread because domestic actors find that the policies further their interests and because the reforms are functional for solving domestic problems (cf. Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Rose, 1991). However, these two perspectives cannot explain why multiple countries with varied socio-economic and political conditions adopt similarly labelled reforms at roughly the same time, as in the case analysed here.

The proposed idea of Cold War isomorphism implicates a working hypothesis: that the rhetorical efforts of communist regimes within UN organisations during the Cold War, in combination with the bureaucratic logics of neutrality and compartmentalisation prevalent in universal international organisations, may have helped shape the international policy discourse by giving credibility and legitimacy to communist reforms and, in effect, increasing both their legitimacy and Western European awareness of them – which in turn may have affected Western European developments in certain policy areas (cf. Carr, 1946).

Possible issues for future inquiry, in which ILO documents imply that Eastern European communist regimes may have been competing with Western Europe for the role of leading light, include, for example, working hours, holidays with pay, protection of women workers, occupational safety and health, investigation of workers’ complaints, protection against dismissal, maternity protection, and various social-security provisions, such as pensions, family allowances, and state funding for alimony payments. Other candidates for further study of the potential dynamics of Cold War isomorphism, where current archival research is now documenting the aspirations of communist regimes to gain acceptance as international paragons of virtue, include, for instance, various types of welfare services, state organisation of cultural activities (von Richthofen, 2009), moral and political education of youth by public schools (Schneider, 1995), pedagogical trends within higher education and state efforts to broaden recruitment to higher education (Rohrmann, 2014), public housing programmes, job security, and laws protecting workers at the workplace (Weinhold, 2014), the rights of working women (Buchholz, 2015) and maternal and child-care services. If the proposed model of Cold War isomorphism is accurate, then international verbal competition within IOs over policy legitimacy should, ceteris paribus, have enhanced the propensity of West European welfare states to legislate on such issues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

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

Additional information

Funding

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

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).