ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore the partially diverging strategic choices by European trade unions and their impact on the development of industrial relations. It argues that these choices were determined not only by the nature of disposable power resources but also by the broader socio-economic, institutional and cultural context, inclusive of the political self-understanding or identity of unions, also in relation to other social forces. The chapter deals with conceptualising the transformation of industrial relations from a neo-Gramscian perspective, which – beyond all transnational tendencies – is also open to complementary concepts, more sensitive to the particular national economic and institutional arrangements as well as to the discursive struggles within civil societies. It discusses the changing nature of European integration since its re-launch in the late 1980s, that is, the structurally asymmetrical regulation and the unleashed processes of uneven and combined capitalist development, which also implies more far-reaching consequences for given systems of industrial relations.
