ABSTRACT
Portugal and Spain joined the European club of democracies only in the mid-1970s. Since then both countries have been engaged in a process of restructuring their political systems from authoritarian to democratic governance. This process of redesigning achieved a degree of stability in the 1990s within the European Union. Close cooperation with other western European trade unions transformed the strategy of Iberian trade union confederations from a mere national one to a multilevel one. Europeanization and globalization have highlighted how important it is to preserve an active and dynamic trade unionism interested in protecting and/or improving towards a higher quality of living. This is naturally the model envisaged by the European Commission, which shaped the discussion on European capitalism differently than the American or Japanese. The overall design is that of the need to change the present dominant American model of capitalism to the European one, in which slow movement towards sustainable growth would be the main goal.
