Europeanizing unions: Trade union adaptation to European integration.

摘要

Over the past half-century, a process of political and economic integration has fundamentally changed the face of Europe. This dissertation explores both how trade unions have adapted to the development of the European Union as well as the ways that they seek to influence European-level politics and policies. In particular, the dissertation addresses three questions: (1) why and under what conditions trade unions make use of the European political arena to pursue their interests; (2) why trade unions pursue such different types of goals at the European level; and (3) why trade unions pursue their European-level goals' in such different ways, even in cases where their underlying objectives are similar.; Employing case studies of the British TUC and the French CGT, supplemented with shadow cases of the German DGB and the Italian CGIL, I argue that domestic factors explain this variation in unions' adaptation to European integration. Trade unions define their European objectives based on a calculation of their interests, which stems from the generosity and stability of the national system of social provision. Unions' capacity to pursue their interests in specific ways, however, is constrained at the European level by institutional legacies within the unions themselves, built up over decades of engagement at the national level. As a result, even when unions pursue similar interests at the European level, they often use very different means to do so.; This dissertation is informed by the insights of both neofunctionalist and liberal intergovernmentalist theories of European integration, but works at a lower level of abstraction, building instead on more recent trends in EU studies. It looks at both the effects of European integration on unions as well as at the efficacy of the EU as an arena for trade union activity.