ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a study of the European trade union response to the economic crisis that engulfed the advanced industrial countries in the mid-1970s. This crisis, the most serious since the interwar Great Depression, confronted unions, along with most other economic actors, with new risks and, perhaps, new opportunities. The French and Italian cases were very different from three Northern European ones in which social democratic partisan affiliations were central to unions. In both France and Italy the most important union organizations had strong ties to communist parties. In the post World War II period, which each national case study reviews, each union-party exchange relationship tended to solidify into a succession of definite deals. Liberal optimism asserted an underlying logic in industrialism which led, over time, to a growing similarity in institutions in different societies.
