ABSTRACT
Old certainties about the traditions and prospects of teacher unions have eroded in the last decades leaving traces on a fast altering landscape. The confident histories of their past, full of dramatic struggle or quietly successful negotiations, detailing the victory of the teachers over recalcitrant employers and the steady success of this or that campaign, appear now to be a stage in their development, a finished period in their history. The unions were closely attached in Europe to the rise of the modernist and social democratic state and owed more to the parallel rise of the labour movements than many of their members recognized. Questions about their future in the world of the market will also raise questions about their past.
