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The EU, Global Europe, and processes of uneven and combined development: the problem of transnational labour solidarity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2012
Abstract
In 2006, the European Union launched its new free trade strategy Global Europe with the explicit goal of increasing European competitiveness. This article explores the positions of trade unions and other social movements on Global Europe. Importantly, while Northern social movements and trade unions from the Global South reject Global Europe due to its impact of deindustrialisation on developing countries, European trade unions support it in so far as it opens up new markets for the export of European manufactured goods. It will be argued that this has to be understood against the background of the dynamics underlying the global economy and here in particular uneven and combined development. Due to the uneven integration of different parts of the world into the global economy, workers in developed countries may actually benefit from free trade, while workers in the Global South are more likely to lose out. It will, however, also be argued that while these different positions within the social relations of production are shaping the position of trade unions, they do not determine them. Over time, through direct engagement, trade unions in the North and South may be able to establish relations of transnational solidarity.
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References
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27 The ETUC consists of a whole range of national confederations as well as European Industry Federations organising workers according to industrial sectors. Unsurprisingly, not all trade unions share the qualified support for Global Europe by the ETUC (see Andreas Bieler, Bruno Ciccaglione and John Hilary, ‘Transnational solidarity, labour movements and the problem of international free trade’, paper presented on the panel ‘Structures and Strategies in the Emerging Global Labor Movement’ at the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Gothenburg, Sweden (11–17 July 2010). At the same time, without the agreement by a vast majority of its affiliate unions, the ETUC would not have been able to develop its official position on Global Europe and free trade policies more generally. Discussing its position is, therefore, to a considerable extent representative of European trade unions more widely.
28 ETUC, ‘On the Communication Global Europe: competing in the world’ (2006), available at: {http://www.etuc.org/a/3390} accessed 4 Nov. 2008.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
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107 See here also the critique of Frank by Mandel (Late Capitalism, pp. 366–7).
108 Smith, Uneven Development, p. 189.
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114 War on Want, Trading Away Our Jobs, p. 20.
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120 Ibid., p. 11.
121 In his analysis of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, Trotsky discussed how combined development in Russia, the fusion of advanced and backward social forms, as a result of international unevenness led to a situation of potential permanent revolution. In turn, however, combined development also maintains and potentially increases international unevenness as a consequence of missing developmental catch-up. It is the empirical focus of this article on potential transnational solidarity between various national labour movements, different from Trotsky's focus on one specific national labour movement, which shifts the emphasis on the second moment, the increasing unevenness, in this analysis.
122 Mandel, ‘The Laws of Uneven Development’, p. 25.
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131 Davidson, ‘From deflected permanent revolution’, pp. 13, 17–18; Selwyn, ‘Trotsky, Gerschenkron’, p. 432.
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