British Trade Unions and European Union Integration in the 1990s: Politics versus Political Economy
| Date | 01 June 2002 |
| Author | Gerard Strange |
| Published date | 01 June 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00373 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
British Trade Unions and European
Union Integration in the 1990s:
Politics versus Political Economy
Gerard Strange
University of Lincoln
This article evaluates the changing assessments within the British trade union movement of the
efficacy of European Union integration from the viewpoint of labour interests. It argues that there
has been a marked further ‘Europeanisation’ of British trade unionism during the 1990s, consoli-
dating an on-going process which previous research shows began in earnest in the mid 1980s.
A shift in trade union economic policy assessments has seen the decisive abandonment of the pre-
viously dominant ‘naive’ or national Keynesianism. While there remain important differences
in economic perspective between unions, these are not such as would create significant divisions
over the question of European integration per se, the net benefits of which are now generally,
though perhaps not universally, accepted. The absence of fundamental divisions is evident from a
careful assessment of the debates about economic and monetary union at TUC Congress. The
Europeanisation of British trade unionism needs to be seen within the context of an emergent
regionalism, in Europe and elsewhere. It can best be understood as a rational response by an
important corporate actor (albeit one whose national influence has been considerably diminished
in recent decades) to globalisation and a significantly changing political economy environment.
Introduction and Orientations
Paul Teague has noted that from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s the official policy
of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) towards British membership of the European
Community (EC) changed on no less than five occasions (Teague, 1989). From
1967 to 1987 policy zigzagged, initially being indecisive (1967–70), then officially
opposing membership (1971–74), then accepting the political reality of member-
ship (1975–79), then once again officially opposing membership (1980–1982) and
finally again accepting membership (1983 onwards). From the mid 1980s and
throughout the 1990s the TUC’s assessment of the European Union (EU) and the
efficacy of European integration became much more positive and stable. At the
TUC’s annual conference in 1998 the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) called
on Congress to oppose the Maastricht treaty and monetary union and to support
an amendment calling for British withdrawal from the EU, the first time that such
a call had been successfully put to Congress since the mid 1980s. However, there
was never any serious doubt that the NUM’s submission, dismissed by one leading
delegate as ‘the amendment from Fantasy Productions’, would be roundly
defeated.1 Indeed, there has been no serious challenge to the TUC’s progressive
agenda on the EU since 1987.
Previous research has been reluctant to draw firm conclusions about the
Europeanisation of British trade unionism. As Ben Rosamond has noted, the
accounts of the apparent transformation of union attitudes to Europe following
© Political Studies Association, 2002.
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B R I T I S H T R A D E U N I O N S A N D E U I N T E G R AT I O N
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the TUC’s so-called Delors Conference of 1988 were almost universally sceptical.
Europeanisation was generally discussed in terms of pragmatism and opportunism
or in one case simply dismissed as a ‘knee-jerk response to the Tories’ (Sterling,
1991 cited in Rosamond, 1993). Behind this scepticism was the widely held view
that British trade unionism was firmly nationalistic. Rosamond was rightly critical
of such sceptical accounts, arguing that the TUC’s positive approach to ‘1992’ had
deeper roots in earlier policy changes from the mid 1980s. Equally, however, his
focus on the politics of elite power and in particular leadership agenda manage-
ment made him reluctant to advance the Europeanisation thesis too confidently
(Rosamond, 1993).
This article seeks to advance the Europeanisation thesis rather more confidently.
The empirical evidence presented here has drawn largely on official trade union
publications and research documents. A particularly important source was the
Annual Congress Agenda published each year in the weeks prior to the TUC’s
September Congress. The Agenda has the advantage of clearly presenting the offi-
cial policy input of the TUC’s individual union affiliates prior to compositing. In
this sense the Agenda offers an empirical base from which a comparative evalua-
tion of the different policy positions of separate unions can be readily made. It also,
through comparison with the Annual Congress Report published after Congress,
provides a basis from which to judge the impact of the TUC’s leadership in man-
aging policy through the compositing process. Most of the official documents used
for this research were available from the TUC’s library collection at Congress House,
a resource that succumbed to the necessity of financial rationalisation in 1997.
I argue that underlying what has become a clear and deepening consensus in
favour of the EU among British unions has been fundamental shifts in the eco-
nomic perspectives of the TUC and its main affiliates. This has lead to a general
acceptance of the efficacy of European integration. The crucial aspect of this policy
shift has been the abandonment of the perspective of national (or, to use Teague’s
term, ‘naive’) Keynesianism which, as Teague has noted, dominated the economic
thinking of the unions to a remarkable degree for well over three decades after the
Second World War (Teague, 1989).
The ‘Europeanisation’ of British trade unions also reflects the fact that unions are
essentially rational actors. This view departs from the common assumption, evident
also in much of the academic literature, that British unionism has been dominated
by a nationalistic or ‘little Englander’ mentality (Teague and Grahl, 1992, p. 208).
This view has, as in the case of Tom Nairn’s classic and much quoted work, por-
trayed the unions, as well as the British labour movement more generally, as any-
thing but rational in relation to European policy. Thus, writing in the early 1970s,
Nairn’s main concern was to try and explain what, for him, appeared to be a per-
sistent and irrational trade union opposition to British membership of the EC. Nairn
concluded that this opposition reflected the union movement’s integration within
a more generally prevailing chauvinistic and isolationist British political and social
culture (Nairn, 1972; Teague and Grahl, 1992, pp. 201–2). More recently, Lewis
Minkin has maintained that the scope for rationality in trade union policy-making
has been limited in many areas – including macro-economic and European policy
– by a lack of competence and resources as well as a lack of interest (Minkin, 1992,
334
G E R A R D S T R A N G E
p. 426). According to Minkin British unions have tended to concentrate their
efforts and resources on maintaining influence over industrial and sectoral-level
issues, leaving broader questions of ‘big’ policy, such as economic management, to
the Labour Party and TUC leaderships (Minkin, 1992, p. 457). This reluctance to
engage in policy making was underlined by a wider anti-academic culture evident,
Minkin has claimed, in an ‘age-old union antipathy towards intellectuals and
theorists’ (p. 407).
These anti-rationalistic assumptions are not accepted here. Instead it is maintained
that unions have acted rationally in developing a positive and proactive policy
approach to Europe in at least two fundamental senses: first, that their actions and
objectives have been determined to a substantial degree by instrumental impera-
tives and by the constraints of economy; second, that the unions have responded
rationally to the changed institutional and policy context represented by the on-
going process of EU integration. The unions’ rational approach was well sum-
marised in the subtitle of the TUC’s 1988 special report on Europe – ‘maximising
the benefits, minimising the costs’ (TUC, 1988d).
In emphasising trade unions as rational actors, this article follows the assumption
made by Gerald Dorfman that British unions looked towards Europe as the effi-
cacy and effectiveness of national demand management diminished and unem-
ployment rose (Dorfman, 1977). As was noted above, the logic of this instrumental
agency has been reinforced by the institutional development of the EU since the
1970s and the new opportunities thus created for further activity at the European
level by British trade unionism. But this article also follows Teague in maintaining
that union economic policy assessments have played a decisive role in determin-
ing how unions have evaluated the EU. In seeking to account for the predominant
trade union opposition to the European Economic Community (EEC) during the
post-war period, Teague emphasised its rationality in terms of the defining policy
context of the then prevailing national Keynesian economic vision (Teague, 1985,
1989). By the same token, British trade union support for the EU can be seen as
rational, now, in what I argue is the changed context of more sophisticated eco-
nomic assessments, including regionally orientated Euro-Keynesian perspectives,
reflecting the changed structural circumstances (including globalisation) of the
contemporary political economy.
Europeanisation,...
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