Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Transnational Capital and the Struggle over European Integration, Routledge, 2002.
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RATING: 90
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Buy this book?
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Yes, if you can
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When significant small others ask you in the future, 'Responsible adult, what happened to social Europe?', give them this book. Not that Bastiaan van Apeldoorn quite accepted at the time (or since, for that matter, to judge by van Apeldoorn, 2013) that it was dead - like many more, he was reluctant to face up to it. Rather, in retrospect, his classic account of the adoption by the European Union of the politics of competitiveness urged upon it by the European Roundtable of Industrialists has the double value of pin-pointing the end of social Europe, and displaying various of the discursive strategies and consolatory arguments still brought out to ward off acknowledgement of its passing.
The decade leading up to the publication of Transnational Capital and the Struggle over European Integration was a momentous one for the European Union. It had its pre-history, of course, notably in the 1985 White Paper from what was then the Commission of the European Communities, Completing the Internal Market (COM(85)310) - with its ominous insistence that: 'The new strategy must be coherent in that it will not merely need to take into account the objective of realizing a common market per se, but also to serve the further objectives of building an expanding market and a flexible market. It must aim not simply to remove technical barriers to trade, but to do so in a manner which will contribute to increasing industrial efficiency and competitiveness, tending to greater wealth and job creation' (#62, p. 18). Nobody can say that they were not warned. 'As the physical and technical barriers inside the Community are removed,' it bluntly announced, 'the Commission will see to it that a rigorous policy is pursued in regard to state aids so that public resources are not used to confer artificial advantage to some firms over others. An effective Community discipline will make it possible to ensure that available resources are directed away from non-viable activities towards competitive and job creating industries of the future' (#158, pp. 39-40). The architect of the document, (Francis) Arthur (Lord) Cockfield, had been banished to Brussels by Margaret Thatcher in the first place for the sin of knowing the Treaty of Rome better than she did, and insisting so to her face; he was to be followed in due course by Leon (Lord) Brittan, who became a driving force behind the development of European competition policy throughout the 1990s. Between the Maastricht Treaty (1992), and the adoption in 1999 of the euro, and in 2001 of the 'Lisbon Agenda', intended to turn Europe into 'the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world', it was the adoption of the 'European Employment Strategy' in the mid-1990s that was the true core of the transformation of social relations across the Union. The thirty-plus years' war that unfolded from 1985, concluding in 2017 with the mis-named European Pillar of Social Rights (in truth, the Constitution of the Capital Relation), was every bit as significant as its earlier counterpart that ran from 1618 to 1648.
All this was clear at the time. Stephen Gill, drawing in part on an early presentation by van Apeldoorn of his as then unpublished research, argued in 1998 that Maastricht and Economic and Monetary Union were intended to lock in political commitments to orthodox market-monetarist fiscal and monetary policies, and emphasised that the intention was to expand state activity in order to increase the scope for free enterprise and 'de-socialise risk provision': this was a strategic intervention, involving 'actively remaking state apparatuses and governmental practices and the institutions of civil society' (Gill 1998: 5, 8, 9). It is a salutary reminder of how old some 'recent' issues are that he itemised austerity, precarious work, and an impending crisis of social reproduction as aspects of the bid to permeate state and civil society with 'market practices, values, discipline, transparency and accountability' (ibid: 9, 21-3). A year later, recounting the genesis and development of the Employment Strategy from Maastricht and numerous other successive summits through to the Employment Guidelines of 1999, Janine Goetschy listed the core recommendations (Essen 1994) as 'improving employment opportunities by promoting investment in vocational training (especially for the young) and encouraging life-long learning; increasing the employment intensity of growth, particularly through a more flexible organization of work and working time, wage restraint, job creation in local environmental and social services; reducing non-wage labour costs to encourage employers to hire low-skilled workers; developing active labour market policies through the reform of employment services, encouraging occupational and geographical labour mobility and developing incentives for the unemployed to return to work; and targeting measures to help groups particularly affected by long term unemployment' (1999: 121-2). In short order, out went 'full employment', replaced by a 'high level of employment', to be achieved by promoting 'a skilled, trained and adaptable workforce and labour markets responsive to economic change' (Amsterdam Treaty, cited ibid: 125). In came the Broad Economic Guidelines, the Stability and Growth Pact, and their attendant practices of discipline and surveillance. Goetschy noted the emphasis on active measures, changes in the behaviour of the workforce, the anticipation and evaluation of policies, and the reduction of direct and especially indirect labour costs, and concluded that the development of precarious forms of employment and a more fragmented workforce were 'integral to the EU strategy of job creation': 'The demand for a disposable workforce and flexible labour markets is taken for granted; its ideological content is no longer perceived. Hence the EU employment guidelines are not an innocent vehicle; they imply a new productive and working order within the EU, which should be open to serious political debate' (ibid: 135-6). In the same year, Catherine Barnard and Simon Deakin offered a shrewd commentary on the 'constitutionalisation of employment policy', introduced by the comment that following the signature of the Maastricht Treaty, 'concern shifted from social rights to continuing high levels of employment' (1999: 355). They found 'an unresolved tension between social policy and the growing clamour for flexibility through regulation' (ibid: 359), not least because the virtues of social dialogue were strongly signalled while under conditions of economic and monetary union the goal of keeping wage increases lower than increases in productivity could only be met through giving social partners 'a role in suppressing wage growth which could be regarded in a highly negative light by some' (ibid: 364). Precisely for that reason, the European Council's 1997 resolution on growth and employment (Amsterdam, 6 June) called upon 'all the social and economic agents, including the national, regional and local authorities and the social partners, to face fully their responsibilities within their respective sphere of activity' (COM 97/C 236/02). The Commission and Council were by no means alone in their crusade - this was the period of the OECD's 1994 Jobs Study, and its proposal, in The World in 2020: Towards a New Global Age for the reform of social protection so that the degree of security it offered would ‘encourage individuals to take risks and be flexible in responding to changes in their economic circumstances’ (OECD, 1997: 19), the World Bank's 1995 World Development Report, Workers in an Integrating World, and Anthony Giddens' thoroughly duplicitous The Third Way (1998), all of which insisted on the need for the dismantling of welfare and job protection in favour of labour market flexibility (Cammack, 2004, 2012). It would culminate at the turn of the century in the re-engineering of 'social protection' at the World Bank, to convert it from a safety net into a springboard into productive employment (World Bank, 2001). The notion of 'social Europe' as a source of protection from competitive markets aiming to generate economic efficiency and greater productivity was under concerted attack.
This was the context from which Transnational Capital and the Struggle over European Integration emerged. Its focus was on a period in which 'the relaunching of Europe went hand in hand with the reconstruction of the post-war order of European capitalism along predominantly neo-liberal lines'; it was grounded in 'neo-Gramscian transnationalism' (5, 17-46), 'a (Gramscian) historical materialist perspective that focuses upon the role of transnational social forces as engendered by the transnationalisation of capitalist production associated with the global expansion and deepening of capitalism as a social system'. It conceived of the European integration process as 'a struggle between transnational social forces’, in which rival projects gave rise to broad transnational coalitions and were ‘consciously articulated and propagated by certain elite groups at the apex of (fractions of) transnational social forces', with 'a particularly critical role ... played by the agency of an emergent transnational capitalist class’ (1-2). Importantly, it looked beyond lobbying and formal interest representation to 'class agency': ‘a “higher” form of political agency', transcending the level of narrow corporate interests, and 'oriented towards the articulation of a more “general capitalist interest”, expressing a longer-term and comprehensive view of how the interests of transnational capital, and of private enterprise in general, can be best secured in terms of the general institutional and policy framework in which capital operates' (3). And it found such class agency in the European Round Table of Industrialists founded in 1983, ‘a group of about 45 leaders of Europe’s biggest and most transnational industrial corporations, the members of which transcend their role as business executives by adopting a rather political role: meeting with fellow transnational capitalists to reflect upon and discuss their (often medium to long-term) interests vis-à-vis other groups (such as labour) in society and, subsequently, to work out a common political strategy on the basis of which they then seek to influence European governance’ (4).
After this succinct introduction, the first chapter outlined the theoretical perspective of the book, oriented towards examining the social purpose of European order and the struggles through which it changed over time. Crucially, it drew on the distinction made by Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1957) between embedded and disembedded market economies, with the former organised around the principle of social protection, and the latter around the principle of economic liberalism, and the tendency for a 'double movement' to recur: when states retreat from social protection, the resulting social disruption engenders 'a counter-movement in which social forces ... organise themselves around the principle of social protection, and the liberal economy becomes "re-embedded"' (12-13). In the particular case of the EU, the Commission was a key ally: 'In the emergent transnational and multi-level state-society complex of the EU we may, I suggest, start to discern the contours of a transnational power bloc, at the apex of which we find a transnational capitalist class elite allying with the more outward-looking elements of “EU government”, the European Commission in particular’ (48). This identification of a "partnership" between big business and the Commission in the form of 'a strategic alliance between the corporate executives of Europe's leading TNCs and the political executives of the Commission' is central to the analysis.
The second chapter, 'Global restructuring, transnational capitalism and rival projects for European order' then identified three rival projects for European integration: neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and supranational social democracy (50). Drawing particularly on Kees van der Pijl's seminal Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class (Verso, 1984), it noted the double crisis of the Fordist growth model and the Keynesian welfare state in the final quarter of the twentieth century, alongside the 'globalisation of production', and rising competition from Japan and East Asia more generally, and linked it to calls for labour market reform and the abandonment of the pursuit of 'full employment', and the neo-liberal critique of 'Euroscelerosis' (63-7): ‘Flexibility is here equated with the freedom of capital (in the name of higher profits, or “shareholder value”) to shed “excess” labour; to differentiate wages (and lower them at the bottom end); to weaken the influence of national trade unions, etc.’ (67). The ensuing debate took place, Apeldoorn argued, in the context of a 'political economy of conflicting capitalisms', one aspect being the differences between British, French and German 'models' of capitalism, and another the emergence of competing strategies for advancing the internal market based respectively on embedding social democracy in a strong supranational political framework (supranational social democracy), strengthening European 'champions' through active industrial policy and a degree of protectionism (neo-mercantilism), and pursuing global competitiveness (neo-liberalism).
This is the background to three chapters that discuss the role and influence of the ERT, which is seen not as a 'lobby' group, but as a business forum that 'synthesises and organises ideas into a coherent political strategy that, while effectively representing the perceived material interests of European big business, ideologically transcends those interests as well by appealing to a wider set of interests and identities' (83). Its members were exclusively large transnational companies with their headquarters in Europe, represented either by the chairman or the chief executive officer. Dominated at first by companies keen to boost the competitiveness of European firms in a stronger and better integrated European market, it came in the 1990s to be controlled by groups that favoured the pursuit of competitiveness on a global level, and from the first it had strong links with the European Commission: 'The two most important men behind the formation of the ERT were Pehr Gyllenhammar, the then chief executive officer (CEO) of Volvo, and Viscount Etienne Davignon, at the time one of the vice-presidents of the European Commission and charged with industrial affairs' (84-5). 'The most urgent need,' in short, 'was for the creation of a unified European home market, to serve as a springboard for the world market' (86). Thereafter, van Apeldoorn reports later, rather formal meetings took place about twice a year between the Commission president and the ERT Steering Committee or a similar representative group, and similar groups or individual members often had ad hoc meetings with individual commissioners, while three former commissioners were among its membership, and former ERT vice-chair David Simon went on to become Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in the UK Labour government in 1997 (114; and cf. 155).
Following a detailed analysis of ERT membership (primarily but not exclusively industrial, practically all entirely in the private sector, dominated by French, German and British companies, and by agro-alimentary, chemical, oil and pharmaceutical sectors, but with electronics and telecommunications firms starting to appear by the millennium), van Apeldoorn characterises the organisation as follows:
‘First, compared to big cross-sectoral associations representing several “constituencies”, the Roundtable has – lacking any formal responsibility to represent the whole or indeed even a particular part of European industry – less diverging interests to balance, and can act with relative speed and flexibility’. ... Second, ... the fact that the members themselves are the Roundtable, and that these members control Europe's biggest companies, gives the ERT a power that cannot be matched by any interest group in which that power is mediated through a bureaucracy of representation. ... Third, the ERT’s elite character allows it to play a more strategic role, one that transcends lobbying or interest representation in a more restricted sense. The ERT does more than defending relatively clear-cut (narrow) corporate interests. In their role as leaders of Europe’s corporate elite, ERT members come to the table with a wider vision, in which they seek to express what they think is good not so much for their company, or for their sector (for these they have other channels), but for European business in general. These general business interests are also formulated from within a relatively long-term and forward-looking perspective oriented towards the shaping of Europe’s socio-economic order. … It is the Roundtable’s longer-term and more strategic orientation – as enabled by the elite character of the organisation – that is here taken as an expression of the “general” capitalist class interest as formulated from the vantage point of transnational (industrial) capital. ... The general capitalist class interest is in fact something that has to be constructed through an organisation like the ERT, where leading capitalists come together to reflect on what their common interests might be - vis-à-vis labour and vis-à-vis the state - and how they can articulate them into ‘a coherent and comprehensive strategy that can then be represented as serving the general public interest’ (104-6).
The political agency of the ERT is then summarised (112-4) in terms of three 'levels': the first and least strategic is lobbying, in which it engages only marginally, and generally on issues such as internal market programme, and Trans-European Infrastructure Networks. The second, agenda setting, 'does not necessarily involve ideas that the Roundtable itself has "invented"; rather, it involves ideas that are reformulated and presented in such a way (and within an overall "vision") that policy-makers and politicians pick up on them and carry them forward', the internal market again being the prime example. The third level ‘may best be described as the level of discourse production, or the level of ideological power’, and the best example is the concept of competitiveness (113).
The penultimate chapter, 'The Roundtable’s changing strategic project and the transnational struggle over European order', tracks the three competing projects identified earlier through to 1992. The final chapter then takes the story forward to the turn of the century. In summary, there was a gradual shift, within the ERT and Europe's emerging transnational capitalist class more widely, from a more neo-mercantilist to a more neo-liberal orientation, albeit one that retained elements of the former in a modified form; the 'third project, that of supranational social democracy, and the underlying socio-economic structures of continental Europe, also necessitated some accommodation on the part of neo-liberal social forces, but was never able to realise its ambitions', so that: 'In the end ... the outcome of these struggles was one in which a new comprehensive concept of control was articulated, one that I will denote with the term "embedded neo-liberalism". Embedded neo-liberalism will be interpreted ... as the emerging hegemonic project of the European capitalist class, and argued to underpin the current socio-economic European order' (115).
The significance of the book hinges on this argument. The claim that the neo-liberal project entailed some accommodation to 'social Europe', and that the 'supranational social democratic project' was not altogether dead, was more justifiable then that it is now, but is still widely held today. I argue that it is wrong, and that while this perspective was once a basis, however weak, for opposition and resistance to the neo-liberal project, it is now an obstacle to it. So from this point I first summarise van Apeldoorn's careful, detailed and convincing empirical account through the two chapters of the turn of the ERT towards a project for global competitiveness and its direct influence on the European Commission, then set out and critique his argument that it retained an element of accommodation with the idea of social Europe.
In brief outline, then, the neo-mercantilist project (described as 'protective regionalism', p. 123) lost momentum as the sections of European capital that favoured industrial policy and protectionism had to adapt to broader changes in the global economy: '"Fortress Europe" was no longer an option, and globalisation became an increasingly dominant strategy'. The period 1988-92 was a transitional one, with 'strong elements both of a neo-mercantilist discourse still enduring in some areas, and of a rising neo-liberal discourse, above all in the area of labour market and social policies'; and with regard to this latter area, 'the Europeanist and globalist fractions within the ERT's ranks were increasingly united in their opposition to the "Social Europe" agenda that in the years leading up to Maastricht was promoted by socio-democratic forces' (116). The case for building European champions and a strong home market, first made by the ERT from its founding in 1983, directly influenced Delors and the content of Cockfield's 1985 White Paper (129-30), but by 1988 the composition of ERT membership was changing, and globalist forces were in the ascendant. And whereas initially there was limited appetite to address high social security costs and labour market inflexibility, ‘a neo-liberal offensive against labour market “rigidity”’ (142-3) came to the fore from 1988, as the transnational capitalists in the ERT called for the 'dismantling of the welfare state', and 'advocated a much more fundamental restructuring of the so-called European social model' (144), as reflected in the marked shift of tone between two ERT publications, Making Europe Work (1986) and European Labour Markets (1990). I couldn't access either (or any other ERT documents), I'm afraid, but van Apeldoorn reports an emerging focus on institutional rigidities (including social protection, and 'too high and downward rigid wages'), and inappropriate attitudes and behaviour, unwillingness to work, and unrealistic expectations regarding job quality (145): European Labour Markets called for deregulation to end job security and provide 'necessary labour market flexibility' (43, cited p. 145). Reshaping Europe (1991), a 'blueprint and action plan for Europe in the 1990s' described here (150) as one of the ERT's most ambitious reports, still reflected a compromise between neo-mercantilism and neo-liberalism, calling for an industrial strategy and stronger links with Europe outside the community, but also a single market and a single currency. It was 'vehemently opposed' to positive policies or harmonised standards in the area of labour market and social policies: 'An over-centralised, over-regulated, and over-harmonised Europe is the last thing we want' (16, cited p. 152).
Two years later, in the midst of a sharp recession, the ERT's Beating the Crisis (1993) described Europe as 'a high-cost, low-growth economy that is not adapting fast enough and is therefore losing its competitive advantage to more dynamic parts of the world' (5, cited p. 161). Its discourse was now 'explicitly neo-liberal', focusing on deregulation, labour market flexibility, and downsizing the public sector, while unequivocally supporting global free trade: 'the industrialists of the Roundtable now seem[ed] to give more priority to deregulation and flexibilisation as instruments to enhance competitiveness than to industrial policy proper' (162). Van Apeldoorn documented this shift in industrial policy (towards the creation of an environment that promotes competitiveness), trade policy (towards complete and unequivocal support for free trade), monetary union (supported by all, with a strong emphasis on the benefits of convergence and financial discipline), and labour market and social policies, where he found 'the clearest manifestation of the rising hegemony of neo-liberal ideas within the ERT': it called for action to 'flexibilise and upgrade the supply of labour, along with wage moderation and flexibility, with 'lower wages where necessary', in order to bring about 'durable employment and European competitiveness'. 'A very large amount of the effort to adjust European labour markets,' it concluded, 'will rely on labour' (169). These proposals came together in what he describes as the 'new competitiveness discourse' (170). In European Labour Markets (1993), it called for a new social consensus that would make possible 'a change of our economic and social structures': 'We need a consensus on the European level that only a healthy, efficient and competitive private sector is able to provide sufficient jobs, and that markets should be left to allocate labour efficiently’ (9, cited 171, emphasis original). Such a consensus would need to be created at an elite level, then disseminated to the population at large. For the ERT, it should focus on a neo-liberal understanding of competitiveness, understood to mean 'complying with the logic of a globalising world economy’ (172). As van Apeldoorn documents (173-5), Beating the Crisis directly influenced and shaped Delors' 1993 White Paper Growth, Competitiveness, Employment, and prompted the setting up in 1995 of the EU's Competitiveness Advisory Group, reporting to the European Council. A subsequent ERT report, Benchmarking for Policy Makers (1996), focused on labour costs, flexibility, working and factory hours and termination costs, conceived of benchmarking as not just an analytical device, but a means of influencing social change, and fed into initiatives such as the DG for Industry's Benchmarking the Competitiveness of European Industry (1996), which called for 'a radical rethink of all relevant labour market systems - employment protection, working time, social protection, and health and safety - to adapt them to a world of work which will be organised differently' (11, cited p. 177) From this point van Apeldoorn turns briefly from the ERT to the development of the European Employment Strategy reviewed above, describing it as 'embedded neo-liberalism in practice' (178-80).
As van Apeldoorn saw it, then, 'Maastricht represented a kind of compromise between the three rival projects, a compromise in which the neo-liberal ideology was clearly dominant though, and that as such prefigured the emerging synthesis of embedded neo-realism' (116, 146-9). Delors' insistence that the single market should have a social dimension was reflected in the Single European Act of 1986 and Social Charter of 1989, though van Apeldoorn says of the first that its social content was disappointing, as the call for a social dialogue (Article 118b) 'remained at the level of symbolic politics and was acceptable to UNICE [the employers' Union des Industries de la Communauté Européenne] because of its 'voluntariness'; and of the second, described by Martin Rhodes (1991: 263) as a "highly diluted compromise", that it 'only constituted a mere declaration of broad principles and carried no legal obligations'. Most of the directives that came from the Social Action Programme that followed it 'never went beyond the drafting stage as they were blocked in the Council of Ministers', and the three that emerged later under the European Social Dialogue, on parental leave, part-time work and fixed-term work, had been criticised 'for setting very general standards that are below those that are already in place in most EU countries' (147-8). So here van Apeldoorn accepts that the social dimension failed: 'Generally, European "social partnership" not only remains restricted to a very limited area but in practice seems more a mechanism through which neo-liberal flexibility is implemented, with the support of both "social partners" (i.e., in a way that ensures the maintenance of the social consensus), than an instrument for the creation of an organised space for European industrial relations as envisaged by Delors' (148). In short, the Maastricht 'social chapter' represented 'the high point of the efforts of the Commission to create a "social dimension"' (148), and at the same time the ERT and other representatives of transnational capital saw to it that 'this minimal programme would only be minimally implemented' (155). A short summary at the end of Chapter 4 says that 'Maastricht was ... a project not just of big business but also of social-democratic political and social forces', but that the social-democratic interpretation 'failed to materialise'. It 'contained elements of all three of our rival projects, even though it was biased in favour of the neo-liberal project, as the central part of the treaty, monetary union, came to reflect what Gill (1998) has called disciplinary neo-liberalism'. But 'the albeit rather weak "social chapter" nevertheless constituted an important ideological interpellation of Europe's social-democratic forces and trade union movement, and at the same time (in a longer-term perspective) still offers them an albeit weak legal-institutional base from which to pursue their project further' (156).
When van Apeldoorn turns to the post-Maastricht period and addresses the rise of embedded neo-liberalism as a new concept for European socio-economic order (158), shaped in part by the agency of the ERT, his wording is precise, and cautious:
'What was required was a hegemonic articulation of the now dominant neo-liberal perspective with remaining elements of the neo-mercantilist discourse. It is this articulation, then, that I will call embedded neoliberalism. The embedded neoliberalism of the ERT is hence also at the same time formulated in response to the agency of other social forces, and in particular those bound up with the socio-democratic project' (158-9). As such, it had 'increasingly come to define the socio-economic content of the current European integration process'. And further, it was 'ideologically under-pinned by what I will identify as a neo-liberal competitiveness discourse':
'Competitiveness, I claim, has become the key concept in EU policy making, constituting a master policy discourse to which other policy discourses are subordinated. The meaning of the word “competitiveness” is not fixed, however, but has to be actively articulated through the agency of groups that perceive themselves to have a particular interest in defining the term in certain ways. Here I claim that the agency of the ERT has played a significant role in giving an increasingly neo-liberal content to the concept of competitiveness’ (159).
Embedded neo-liberalism does not constitute a return to the embedded liberalism of the post-war period. But 'within (continental) Europe, there are so far stronger limits to this process of disembedding than for instance in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and inasmuch as these limits are acknowledged, the neo-liberal project tends to be reformulated by incorporating elements of other ideological orientations into its discourse as well, albeit at a subordinate level' (159).
At this point van Apeldoorn returns to Polanyi's idea that labour and other social forces will organise to demand social protection as the disembedded market continues to disrupt their lives: ‘Thus, precisely because of the double movement, a class or class fraction that aspires to hegemony must in the longer run articulate its interests both ideologically and materially with those of the “population" at large: that is, it cannot afford to fully ignore the principle of social protection’ (160, emphasis mine). The passage that follows is crucial:
'Given its relative distance towards (sic) any single domestic society, the ideological perspective of the globalist fraction has tended towards neo-liberalism or the principle of economic liberalism. However, pure laissez-faire would both hurt its own direct economic interests (as it still needs the state to educate the workforce, to maintain social and political stability, to provide the infrastructure, to pursue macro-economic policies that favour growth and investment, etc.) and, more abstractly, would undermine capitalist class hegemony as it might provoke a counter-hegemonic movement seeking to re-establish political and societal control over capital and the free market' (160).
The greater preponderance of industrial capital (as opposed to financial capital) in continental Europe meant that 'neo-liberalism needed to be modified in order not to harm the interests of industrial capital' (160); and 'the position of organised labour, and the traditions of corporatist labour relations and of social consensus (particularly in the Rhineland countries) have proven so strong as to make it impossible for neo-liberal forces to adopt the same antagonistic stance (vis-à-vis labour) as again, for instance, the Thatcher regime did' (161). For these reasons, van Apeldoorn argues, the neo-liberal discourse the ERT developed around the idea of competitiveness had to incorporate elements of both the neo-mercantilist and the social democratic projects in order to achieve hegemony. The first of these involved 'being able to compete in the global market place by first shielding oneself from the forces of globalisation, in order to then enter the fray on the basis of increased strength achieved through non-market means'; the second, in the 'new social democracy' promoted by Delors, was to be achieved 'not by negating the market, but by "organising" it in such a way that its productive capacities are developed. This translates into an employment strategy that does not focus on deregulation but rather on investment in education, training, high technology, infrastructure, etc., as productivity-enhancing policies aimed at improving the capacity of labour (rather than just capital) to adapt to the exigencies of the global economy, thus avoiding unemployment and protecting workers' income' (172). In articulating with these elements, the ERT's discourse went beyond orthodox neo-liberalism, contradicting the principles of pure laissez-faire by stressing that the state should be an 'enabling force', creating the 'conditions of competitiveness' through attention to innovation and new technology, education and training, and trans-European infrastructure.
Reflecting on this, and the subsequent development of the European Employment Strategy, Apeldoorn comments that although its agenda might be seen as adapting the European social model in order to preserve it, 'it in fact fits in very well within the framework of embedded neoliberalism, which, although distinct from Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, does have as its primary objective the fundamental restructuring of the European political economy in such a way as to prioritise the principle of economic liberalism over that of social protection' (178): 'Not redistribution, but creating the opportunity to participate in the market, is the objective of these policies' (179). So: 'As long as the policy responses to European unemployment are tied to a neoliberal competitiveness discourse that serves the interests of the most transnationalised segments of European capital, prospects for any alternative policy response remain bleak' (180).
This being so, van Apeldoorn suggests that 'the real "test" of embedded neo-liberalism will probably come at the next serious economic downturn’, as in such a crisis the project 'is bound to face serious challenges in terms of its legitimacy among the European populations' (185). Such a crisis of legitimacy might too be rendered more acute by the consequences of enlargement to the east, and the project of monetary union with ongoing liberalisation, as support for both projects was already low. In a recession made worse by the disciplinary pressure of monetary union and the Stability Pact, 'social forces bound up with labour may ... start to question this core element of the European project, and demand more social protection again' (187). Alternatively, too great a focus on money capital and shareholder value might prompt a renewed alliance between capital and labour (188-9). And he concludes:
‘The struggle over European order will thus continue. Whether the social purpose of this order may yet be re-organised around the principle of social protection will in the end depend primarily on the extent to which those groups that lose out in the neo-liberal globalisation and Europeanisation process will be able to form a stronger countervailing power at both the national and European levels. ... At the moment the prospects appear to look bleak. ... It will above all have to be an ideological struggle, in which social forces rallying around the principle of social protection will have to, if one wants to come to a true counter-hegemony, radically disassociate themselves from the currently hegemonic neo-liberal competitiveness discourse' (189).
What shall we say, then, near enough two decades on, about Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration? First, it is an indispensable point of reference for the analysis of the neo-liberal turn in Europe, establishing as it does the significance of the role played by the ERT. Second, by showing that the ERT went beyond the specific short-term interests of its members to promote competitiveness on a global scale, it both avoids a crude instrumentalism, and makes an important contribution as an early study of the emerging politics of global competitiveness. Third, it shows that the central issue, both in the European context and in relation to the broader politics of competitiveness, was the relationship between capital, labour and the state, and specifically the issue of the reform of labour markets, welfare and 'social protection'. These aspects secure its classic status, and make it a book to which it rewarding to return periodically, and especially at the present moment. As the discussion above of the initiatives from the OECD and the World Bank in the same period illustrate, it is not a comprehensive study of the politics of reform in the period, but it tells very well the story of a very significant aspect of it.
What is more, it is clear throughout in emphasising the subordinate character of the supranational social democratic project which advanced the cause of 'social Europe', and its fragility in the face of pressure for reform. Van Apeldoorn notes that the social dimension was rarely more than symbolic, unable to secure binding Europe-wide commitments as social policy remained in national hands, and compromised from the start by Delors' 'basic acceptance of the primacy of market integration' and of 'much of the neoliberal agenda' (146-7). As noted above, he went so far as to say that in practice social partnership seemed more a mechanism through which neo-liberal flexibility was implemented with the support of both social partners than an instrument for the creation of an organised space for European industrial relations. The analysis in the text thoroughly justifies these conclusions, and overall it cannot be said that van Apeldoorn was over-optimistic about a renewal of social democracy at the supranational level.
It is all the more surprising, then, that he held out any hope at all for the resurgence of the social-democratic project, and here my interest is in the basis on which such hope as he held out was advanced. In summary, as expressed at the end, if the neo-liberal project entered into a legitimacy crisis as a result of a serious economic downturn, a counter-hegemonic movement might bring about a return to a new social democratic project based on social protection, once again prised away from the grip of hegemonic neo-liberal competitiveness. Underlying this is an unreconstructed commitment to an alternative analytical framework that preceded the neo-liberal turn, and runs as a sub-current throughout the book: a composite model which puts together democracy, legitimacy and social consent on the one hand, and Polanyi's double movement on the other. On this model, no project can survive for long without legitimacy and social consent, while the faltering of a regime based upon economic liberalism will in time evoke a counter-move back to social protection. Such hopes were indeed widely voiced when the neo-liberal project was 'tested' by the 'global financial crisis' a few years later, but the Commission and Council proved able to reinforce the machinery of disciplinary neo-liberalism through austerity, enforced 'adjustment', and the various packages and strengthened forms of surveillance leading to the European Semester. At the same time, the adoption of the European Pillar of Social Rights and the debate that has gathered pace over the potential for a European Social Union seemed to suggest that the battle for a 'social Europe' capable of achieving hegemony and placing limits on the politics of competitiveness was not yet lost (Vanhercke et al, eds, 2020). Following this line of argument, one might point out, as Gill, van Apeldoorn and others did twenty years ago, that the attempt to introduce the single market was partial, that the disciplines envisaged have never entirely worked, that the Lisbon Agenda and the Europe 2020 initiatives both failed to achieve their objectives, that there is still a strong 'social' element to the governance of the Union, that significant social groups still offer resistance, that social protection has been modernised, but not abolished, and so on. And this fits well with a method of analysis that centres on the pursuit of hegemony as a battle between competing sets of ideas, in which the social meaning of key signifiers is always up for grabs, to which van Apeldoorn is not entirely immune.
To the extent that van Apeldoorn bought into the Polanyian framework, and continued to see economic liberalism and social protection as competing poles in a recurrent movement back and forth, he was led astray. If we take instead his fundamentally important proposition that the ERT reflected 'the general capitalist interest', and use it as a lens to reflect on the trajectory of reform since the late 1980s, a different perspective emerges. Put simply, the general capital interest is that capital should be able to accumulate surplus value, by exploiting populations who have no option other than to offer themselves for work, and if possible to increase the rate and character of accumulation by investing in and increasing the productivity of worker. So the first requirement is that propertyless individuals should have no option but to offer themselves for work, and the second that employers should be free to organise the work to achieve maximum productivity. This was what the reforms of the 1990s were about, as was reflected in Gill's reference to the objective of de-socialising risk (so the individual would have to bear it and behave accordingly), Goetschy's references to the need for a disposable workforce and flexible labour markets, and the objective of a new productive and working order within the EU, and Barnard and Deakin's observation that the focus had shifted from social rights to continuing high levels of employment. It was also reflected, as van Apeldoorn makes clear, in the ERT's focus from the late 1980s on the dismantling of the welfare state and a fundamental restructuring of the so-called European social model, and the DG for Industry's call in 1996 for 'a radical rethink of all relevant labour market systems - employment protection, working time, social protection, and health and safety - to adapt them to a world of work which [would] be organised differently' (a passage that continued beyond the part quoted by van Apeldoorn as follows: 'in particular one where the boundaries between work and leisure, work and learning, employee and self-employed are, or may become, less well-defined. The concept of security for workers has to be reformulated, focusing more on security based on employability and the labour market rather than security based on the individual work place. It should be focused on security in change, not security against change' (European Commission, 1996: 20); and it was precisely expressed in the summary van Apeldoorn offers: 'Now competitiveness is about survival of the fittest in a fully open environment of a global free market, in which no "artificial", that is non-market based, means to enhance one's position are allowed' (172), with the proviso that it applies most of all to the citizen-worker. So van Apeldoorn (179) draws on Wolfgang Streeck, who saw the concept of 'employability' in the European Employment Strategy as ‘[defining] the responsibility of public policy, not in terms of de-commodification of individuals, but to the contrary of creation of equal opportunities for commodification’ (Streeck 1999: 6) to assert that 'In sum ... although the EU's employment strategy is officially meant to provide the social cohesion part of the new Lisbon Agenda ... it in fact seems above all to promote the further commodification of labour'.
The Gramscian idea of the achievement of hegemony through articulation with competing discourses does not quite get to the heart of this, especially when it goes no further than to argue that neo-liberalism was 'embedded' in the sense that 'the neo-liberal project stops short of fully disembedding the market economy from its post-war social and political institutions' (160). Particularly as regarded the relationship between capital and labour (the 'capital relation') no stopping short was envisaged. On the contrary, the 'social purpose' was to impose a continual process of adjustment to ever more intensive competitiveness (Nunn and Beeckmans, 2015). To quote the 16 June 1997 Resolution of the European Council on growth and employment (97/C 236/02):
'it should be a priority aim to develop a skilled, trained and adaptable workforce and to make labour markets responsive to economic change. Structural reforms need to be comprehensive in scope, as opposed to limited or occasional measures, so as to address in a coherent manner the complex issue of incentives in creating and taking up a job. Economic and social policies are mutually reinforcing. Social protection systems should be modernized so as to strengthen their functioning in order to contribute to competitiveness, employment and growth, establishing a durable basis for social cohesion' (para. 1).
In short, the objective was not to shift the balance between employment and social protection, but to transform social protection completely, from a means of sheltering individuals from the need to compete in the labour market to a mechanism that obliged them to do so. Its character was to be entirely transformed, with the intention of creating a new basis for social cohesion (the responsibility of everyone to equip themselves to work productively), and, crucially, removing the basis for a turn back from complete dependence on the market. In Polanyian terms, it set out to rule out any future 'double movement'. And despite the evident failure to bring about any significant shift in productivity, or to enhance competitiveness, the EU has succeeded in advancing this goal, and remains unwaveringly committed to it, intensifying its efforts whenever the opportunity has arisen, and notably in times of 'crisis'. In this context, 'consent' is not given periodically in the ballot box, but every day, in conformity to the discipline of labour markets in which all must compete. So the European Pillar of Social Rights, consistent with what has gone before, predictably states that: 'Economic and social progress are intertwined, and the establishment of a European Pillar of Social Rights should be part of wider efforts to build a more inclusive and sustainable growth model by improving Europe’s competitiveness and making it a better place to invest, create jobs and foster social cohesion' (#11), confers no new powers or tasks upon the Union (#18), and gives EU citizens 'the right to quality and inclusive education, training and life-long learning in order to maintain and acquire skills that enable them to participate fully in society and manage successfully transitions in the labour market' (Ch. 1, #1), along with 'the right to timely and tailor-made assistance to improve employment or self-employment prospects' (CH. 1, #4); and everything is subject to 'the necessary flexibility for employers to adapt swiftly to changes in the economic context shall be ensured', otherwise known as the 'right to manage' (Ch. 2, #5(a)). This does not mean that the rights of labour can never be asserted over or against the rights of capital in Europe. But it does mean that they will have to be asserted against rather than through the institutions of the European Union, whose version of 'social Europe' is neo-liberal through and through.
Further reading
Barnard, Catherine, and Simon Deakin, 1999. A year of living dangerously? EC social rights, employment policy, and EMU. Industrial Relations Journal, 30, 4, 355-372.
Cammack, Paul. 2004. Giddens' Way with Words. In Sarah Hale, Will Leggett and Luke Martell, eds, The Third Way and Beyond, Manchester: Manchester University Press, https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526137883/9781526137883.00016.xml
Cammack, Paul. 2012. Risk, social protection, and the world market. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42, 3, 359-377.
Commission of the European Communities. 1985. Completing the Internal Market. COM(85)310.
European Commission. 1996. Benchmarking the Competitiveness of European Industry. Luxembourg.
Gill, Stephen. 1998. European governance and new constitutionalism: Economic and Monetary Union and alternatives to disciplinary Neoliberalism in Europe, New Political Economy, 3, 1, 5-26.
Goetschy, Janine. 1999. The European Employment Strategy: Genesis and Development, European Journal of Industrial Relations, 5, 2, 117-137.
Nunn, Alex and Paul Beeckmans. 2015. The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous Adjustment in EU Meta-Governance, International Journal of Public Administration, 38, 12, 926-939.
OECD. 1997. The World in 2020: Towards a New Global Age, OECD: Paris.
Streeck, Wolfgang. 1999. Competitive solidarity: Rethinking the European social model, MPIfG Working Paper, No. 99/8, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, http://www.mpifg.de/pu/workpap/wp99-8/wp99-8.html
Van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan. 2013. The European capitalist class and the crisis of its hegemonic project', in Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber, eds, Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class. Merlin Press/Monthly Review: London and New York.
Van der Pijl, Kees. 1984. The Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class, Verso: London.
Vanhercke, Bart, Dalila Ghailani and Slavina Spasova, with Philippe Pochet, eds. 2020. Social policy in the European Union 1999-2019: the long and winding road, European Trade Union Institute/European Social Observatory: Brussels.
Wigger, Angela. 2019. The new EU industrial policy: authoritarian neoliberal structural adjustment and the case for alternatives, Globalizations, 16, 3, 353-369.
World Bank. 2001. Social Protection Sector Strategy: From Safety Net to Springboard, World Bank: Washington.
The decade leading up to the publication of Transnational Capital and the Struggle over European Integration was a momentous one for the European Union. It had its pre-history, of course, notably in the 1985 White Paper from what was then the Commission of the European Communities, Completing the Internal Market (COM(85)310) - with its ominous insistence that: 'The new strategy must be coherent in that it will not merely need to take into account the objective of realizing a common market per se, but also to serve the further objectives of building an expanding market and a flexible market. It must aim not simply to remove technical barriers to trade, but to do so in a manner which will contribute to increasing industrial efficiency and competitiveness, tending to greater wealth and job creation' (#62, p. 18). Nobody can say that they were not warned. 'As the physical and technical barriers inside the Community are removed,' it bluntly announced, 'the Commission will see to it that a rigorous policy is pursued in regard to state aids so that public resources are not used to confer artificial advantage to some firms over others. An effective Community discipline will make it possible to ensure that available resources are directed away from non-viable activities towards competitive and job creating industries of the future' (#158, pp. 39-40). The architect of the document, (Francis) Arthur (Lord) Cockfield, had been banished to Brussels by Margaret Thatcher in the first place for the sin of knowing the Treaty of Rome better than she did, and insisting so to her face; he was to be followed in due course by Leon (Lord) Brittan, who became a driving force behind the development of European competition policy throughout the 1990s. Between the Maastricht Treaty (1992), and the adoption in 1999 of the euro, and in 2001 of the 'Lisbon Agenda', intended to turn Europe into 'the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world', it was the adoption of the 'European Employment Strategy' in the mid-1990s that was the true core of the transformation of social relations across the Union. The thirty-plus years' war that unfolded from 1985, concluding in 2017 with the mis-named European Pillar of Social Rights (in truth, the Constitution of the Capital Relation), was every bit as significant as its earlier counterpart that ran from 1618 to 1648.
All this was clear at the time. Stephen Gill, drawing in part on an early presentation by van Apeldoorn of his as then unpublished research, argued in 1998 that Maastricht and Economic and Monetary Union were intended to lock in political commitments to orthodox market-monetarist fiscal and monetary policies, and emphasised that the intention was to expand state activity in order to increase the scope for free enterprise and 'de-socialise risk provision': this was a strategic intervention, involving 'actively remaking state apparatuses and governmental practices and the institutions of civil society' (Gill 1998: 5, 8, 9). It is a salutary reminder of how old some 'recent' issues are that he itemised austerity, precarious work, and an impending crisis of social reproduction as aspects of the bid to permeate state and civil society with 'market practices, values, discipline, transparency and accountability' (ibid: 9, 21-3). A year later, recounting the genesis and development of the Employment Strategy from Maastricht and numerous other successive summits through to the Employment Guidelines of 1999, Janine Goetschy listed the core recommendations (Essen 1994) as 'improving employment opportunities by promoting investment in vocational training (especially for the young) and encouraging life-long learning; increasing the employment intensity of growth, particularly through a more flexible organization of work and working time, wage restraint, job creation in local environmental and social services; reducing non-wage labour costs to encourage employers to hire low-skilled workers; developing active labour market policies through the reform of employment services, encouraging occupational and geographical labour mobility and developing incentives for the unemployed to return to work; and targeting measures to help groups particularly affected by long term unemployment' (1999: 121-2). In short order, out went 'full employment', replaced by a 'high level of employment', to be achieved by promoting 'a skilled, trained and adaptable workforce and labour markets responsive to economic change' (Amsterdam Treaty, cited ibid: 125). In came the Broad Economic Guidelines, the Stability and Growth Pact, and their attendant practices of discipline and surveillance. Goetschy noted the emphasis on active measures, changes in the behaviour of the workforce, the anticipation and evaluation of policies, and the reduction of direct and especially indirect labour costs, and concluded that the development of precarious forms of employment and a more fragmented workforce were 'integral to the EU strategy of job creation': 'The demand for a disposable workforce and flexible labour markets is taken for granted; its ideological content is no longer perceived. Hence the EU employment guidelines are not an innocent vehicle; they imply a new productive and working order within the EU, which should be open to serious political debate' (ibid: 135-6). In the same year, Catherine Barnard and Simon Deakin offered a shrewd commentary on the 'constitutionalisation of employment policy', introduced by the comment that following the signature of the Maastricht Treaty, 'concern shifted from social rights to continuing high levels of employment' (1999: 355). They found 'an unresolved tension between social policy and the growing clamour for flexibility through regulation' (ibid: 359), not least because the virtues of social dialogue were strongly signalled while under conditions of economic and monetary union the goal of keeping wage increases lower than increases in productivity could only be met through giving social partners 'a role in suppressing wage growth which could be regarded in a highly negative light by some' (ibid: 364). Precisely for that reason, the European Council's 1997 resolution on growth and employment (Amsterdam, 6 June) called upon 'all the social and economic agents, including the national, regional and local authorities and the social partners, to face fully their responsibilities within their respective sphere of activity' (COM 97/C 236/02). The Commission and Council were by no means alone in their crusade - this was the period of the OECD's 1994 Jobs Study, and its proposal, in The World in 2020: Towards a New Global Age for the reform of social protection so that the degree of security it offered would ‘encourage individuals to take risks and be flexible in responding to changes in their economic circumstances’ (OECD, 1997: 19), the World Bank's 1995 World Development Report, Workers in an Integrating World, and Anthony Giddens' thoroughly duplicitous The Third Way (1998), all of which insisted on the need for the dismantling of welfare and job protection in favour of labour market flexibility (Cammack, 2004, 2012). It would culminate at the turn of the century in the re-engineering of 'social protection' at the World Bank, to convert it from a safety net into a springboard into productive employment (World Bank, 2001). The notion of 'social Europe' as a source of protection from competitive markets aiming to generate economic efficiency and greater productivity was under concerted attack.
This was the context from which Transnational Capital and the Struggle over European Integration emerged. Its focus was on a period in which 'the relaunching of Europe went hand in hand with the reconstruction of the post-war order of European capitalism along predominantly neo-liberal lines'; it was grounded in 'neo-Gramscian transnationalism' (5, 17-46), 'a (Gramscian) historical materialist perspective that focuses upon the role of transnational social forces as engendered by the transnationalisation of capitalist production associated with the global expansion and deepening of capitalism as a social system'. It conceived of the European integration process as 'a struggle between transnational social forces’, in which rival projects gave rise to broad transnational coalitions and were ‘consciously articulated and propagated by certain elite groups at the apex of (fractions of) transnational social forces', with 'a particularly critical role ... played by the agency of an emergent transnational capitalist class’ (1-2). Importantly, it looked beyond lobbying and formal interest representation to 'class agency': ‘a “higher” form of political agency', transcending the level of narrow corporate interests, and 'oriented towards the articulation of a more “general capitalist interest”, expressing a longer-term and comprehensive view of how the interests of transnational capital, and of private enterprise in general, can be best secured in terms of the general institutional and policy framework in which capital operates' (3). And it found such class agency in the European Round Table of Industrialists founded in 1983, ‘a group of about 45 leaders of Europe’s biggest and most transnational industrial corporations, the members of which transcend their role as business executives by adopting a rather political role: meeting with fellow transnational capitalists to reflect upon and discuss their (often medium to long-term) interests vis-à-vis other groups (such as labour) in society and, subsequently, to work out a common political strategy on the basis of which they then seek to influence European governance’ (4).
After this succinct introduction, the first chapter outlined the theoretical perspective of the book, oriented towards examining the social purpose of European order and the struggles through which it changed over time. Crucially, it drew on the distinction made by Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1957) between embedded and disembedded market economies, with the former organised around the principle of social protection, and the latter around the principle of economic liberalism, and the tendency for a 'double movement' to recur: when states retreat from social protection, the resulting social disruption engenders 'a counter-movement in which social forces ... organise themselves around the principle of social protection, and the liberal economy becomes "re-embedded"' (12-13). In the particular case of the EU, the Commission was a key ally: 'In the emergent transnational and multi-level state-society complex of the EU we may, I suggest, start to discern the contours of a transnational power bloc, at the apex of which we find a transnational capitalist class elite allying with the more outward-looking elements of “EU government”, the European Commission in particular’ (48). This identification of a "partnership" between big business and the Commission in the form of 'a strategic alliance between the corporate executives of Europe's leading TNCs and the political executives of the Commission' is central to the analysis.
The second chapter, 'Global restructuring, transnational capitalism and rival projects for European order' then identified three rival projects for European integration: neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and supranational social democracy (50). Drawing particularly on Kees van der Pijl's seminal Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class (Verso, 1984), it noted the double crisis of the Fordist growth model and the Keynesian welfare state in the final quarter of the twentieth century, alongside the 'globalisation of production', and rising competition from Japan and East Asia more generally, and linked it to calls for labour market reform and the abandonment of the pursuit of 'full employment', and the neo-liberal critique of 'Euroscelerosis' (63-7): ‘Flexibility is here equated with the freedom of capital (in the name of higher profits, or “shareholder value”) to shed “excess” labour; to differentiate wages (and lower them at the bottom end); to weaken the influence of national trade unions, etc.’ (67). The ensuing debate took place, Apeldoorn argued, in the context of a 'political economy of conflicting capitalisms', one aspect being the differences between British, French and German 'models' of capitalism, and another the emergence of competing strategies for advancing the internal market based respectively on embedding social democracy in a strong supranational political framework (supranational social democracy), strengthening European 'champions' through active industrial policy and a degree of protectionism (neo-mercantilism), and pursuing global competitiveness (neo-liberalism).
This is the background to three chapters that discuss the role and influence of the ERT, which is seen not as a 'lobby' group, but as a business forum that 'synthesises and organises ideas into a coherent political strategy that, while effectively representing the perceived material interests of European big business, ideologically transcends those interests as well by appealing to a wider set of interests and identities' (83). Its members were exclusively large transnational companies with their headquarters in Europe, represented either by the chairman or the chief executive officer. Dominated at first by companies keen to boost the competitiveness of European firms in a stronger and better integrated European market, it came in the 1990s to be controlled by groups that favoured the pursuit of competitiveness on a global level, and from the first it had strong links with the European Commission: 'The two most important men behind the formation of the ERT were Pehr Gyllenhammar, the then chief executive officer (CEO) of Volvo, and Viscount Etienne Davignon, at the time one of the vice-presidents of the European Commission and charged with industrial affairs' (84-5). 'The most urgent need,' in short, 'was for the creation of a unified European home market, to serve as a springboard for the world market' (86). Thereafter, van Apeldoorn reports later, rather formal meetings took place about twice a year between the Commission president and the ERT Steering Committee or a similar representative group, and similar groups or individual members often had ad hoc meetings with individual commissioners, while three former commissioners were among its membership, and former ERT vice-chair David Simon went on to become Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in the UK Labour government in 1997 (114; and cf. 155).
Following a detailed analysis of ERT membership (primarily but not exclusively industrial, practically all entirely in the private sector, dominated by French, German and British companies, and by agro-alimentary, chemical, oil and pharmaceutical sectors, but with electronics and telecommunications firms starting to appear by the millennium), van Apeldoorn characterises the organisation as follows:
‘First, compared to big cross-sectoral associations representing several “constituencies”, the Roundtable has – lacking any formal responsibility to represent the whole or indeed even a particular part of European industry – less diverging interests to balance, and can act with relative speed and flexibility’. ... Second, ... the fact that the members themselves are the Roundtable, and that these members control Europe's biggest companies, gives the ERT a power that cannot be matched by any interest group in which that power is mediated through a bureaucracy of representation. ... Third, the ERT’s elite character allows it to play a more strategic role, one that transcends lobbying or interest representation in a more restricted sense. The ERT does more than defending relatively clear-cut (narrow) corporate interests. In their role as leaders of Europe’s corporate elite, ERT members come to the table with a wider vision, in which they seek to express what they think is good not so much for their company, or for their sector (for these they have other channels), but for European business in general. These general business interests are also formulated from within a relatively long-term and forward-looking perspective oriented towards the shaping of Europe’s socio-economic order. … It is the Roundtable’s longer-term and more strategic orientation – as enabled by the elite character of the organisation – that is here taken as an expression of the “general” capitalist class interest as formulated from the vantage point of transnational (industrial) capital. ... The general capitalist class interest is in fact something that has to be constructed through an organisation like the ERT, where leading capitalists come together to reflect on what their common interests might be - vis-à-vis labour and vis-à-vis the state - and how they can articulate them into ‘a coherent and comprehensive strategy that can then be represented as serving the general public interest’ (104-6).
The political agency of the ERT is then summarised (112-4) in terms of three 'levels': the first and least strategic is lobbying, in which it engages only marginally, and generally on issues such as internal market programme, and Trans-European Infrastructure Networks. The second, agenda setting, 'does not necessarily involve ideas that the Roundtable itself has "invented"; rather, it involves ideas that are reformulated and presented in such a way (and within an overall "vision") that policy-makers and politicians pick up on them and carry them forward', the internal market again being the prime example. The third level ‘may best be described as the level of discourse production, or the level of ideological power’, and the best example is the concept of competitiveness (113).
The penultimate chapter, 'The Roundtable’s changing strategic project and the transnational struggle over European order', tracks the three competing projects identified earlier through to 1992. The final chapter then takes the story forward to the turn of the century. In summary, there was a gradual shift, within the ERT and Europe's emerging transnational capitalist class more widely, from a more neo-mercantilist to a more neo-liberal orientation, albeit one that retained elements of the former in a modified form; the 'third project, that of supranational social democracy, and the underlying socio-economic structures of continental Europe, also necessitated some accommodation on the part of neo-liberal social forces, but was never able to realise its ambitions', so that: 'In the end ... the outcome of these struggles was one in which a new comprehensive concept of control was articulated, one that I will denote with the term "embedded neo-liberalism". Embedded neo-liberalism will be interpreted ... as the emerging hegemonic project of the European capitalist class, and argued to underpin the current socio-economic European order' (115).
The significance of the book hinges on this argument. The claim that the neo-liberal project entailed some accommodation to 'social Europe', and that the 'supranational social democratic project' was not altogether dead, was more justifiable then that it is now, but is still widely held today. I argue that it is wrong, and that while this perspective was once a basis, however weak, for opposition and resistance to the neo-liberal project, it is now an obstacle to it. So from this point I first summarise van Apeldoorn's careful, detailed and convincing empirical account through the two chapters of the turn of the ERT towards a project for global competitiveness and its direct influence on the European Commission, then set out and critique his argument that it retained an element of accommodation with the idea of social Europe.
In brief outline, then, the neo-mercantilist project (described as 'protective regionalism', p. 123) lost momentum as the sections of European capital that favoured industrial policy and protectionism had to adapt to broader changes in the global economy: '"Fortress Europe" was no longer an option, and globalisation became an increasingly dominant strategy'. The period 1988-92 was a transitional one, with 'strong elements both of a neo-mercantilist discourse still enduring in some areas, and of a rising neo-liberal discourse, above all in the area of labour market and social policies'; and with regard to this latter area, 'the Europeanist and globalist fractions within the ERT's ranks were increasingly united in their opposition to the "Social Europe" agenda that in the years leading up to Maastricht was promoted by socio-democratic forces' (116). The case for building European champions and a strong home market, first made by the ERT from its founding in 1983, directly influenced Delors and the content of Cockfield's 1985 White Paper (129-30), but by 1988 the composition of ERT membership was changing, and globalist forces were in the ascendant. And whereas initially there was limited appetite to address high social security costs and labour market inflexibility, ‘a neo-liberal offensive against labour market “rigidity”’ (142-3) came to the fore from 1988, as the transnational capitalists in the ERT called for the 'dismantling of the welfare state', and 'advocated a much more fundamental restructuring of the so-called European social model' (144), as reflected in the marked shift of tone between two ERT publications, Making Europe Work (1986) and European Labour Markets (1990). I couldn't access either (or any other ERT documents), I'm afraid, but van Apeldoorn reports an emerging focus on institutional rigidities (including social protection, and 'too high and downward rigid wages'), and inappropriate attitudes and behaviour, unwillingness to work, and unrealistic expectations regarding job quality (145): European Labour Markets called for deregulation to end job security and provide 'necessary labour market flexibility' (43, cited p. 145). Reshaping Europe (1991), a 'blueprint and action plan for Europe in the 1990s' described here (150) as one of the ERT's most ambitious reports, still reflected a compromise between neo-mercantilism and neo-liberalism, calling for an industrial strategy and stronger links with Europe outside the community, but also a single market and a single currency. It was 'vehemently opposed' to positive policies or harmonised standards in the area of labour market and social policies: 'An over-centralised, over-regulated, and over-harmonised Europe is the last thing we want' (16, cited p. 152).
Two years later, in the midst of a sharp recession, the ERT's Beating the Crisis (1993) described Europe as 'a high-cost, low-growth economy that is not adapting fast enough and is therefore losing its competitive advantage to more dynamic parts of the world' (5, cited p. 161). Its discourse was now 'explicitly neo-liberal', focusing on deregulation, labour market flexibility, and downsizing the public sector, while unequivocally supporting global free trade: 'the industrialists of the Roundtable now seem[ed] to give more priority to deregulation and flexibilisation as instruments to enhance competitiveness than to industrial policy proper' (162). Van Apeldoorn documented this shift in industrial policy (towards the creation of an environment that promotes competitiveness), trade policy (towards complete and unequivocal support for free trade), monetary union (supported by all, with a strong emphasis on the benefits of convergence and financial discipline), and labour market and social policies, where he found 'the clearest manifestation of the rising hegemony of neo-liberal ideas within the ERT': it called for action to 'flexibilise and upgrade the supply of labour, along with wage moderation and flexibility, with 'lower wages where necessary', in order to bring about 'durable employment and European competitiveness'. 'A very large amount of the effort to adjust European labour markets,' it concluded, 'will rely on labour' (169). These proposals came together in what he describes as the 'new competitiveness discourse' (170). In European Labour Markets (1993), it called for a new social consensus that would make possible 'a change of our economic and social structures': 'We need a consensus on the European level that only a healthy, efficient and competitive private sector is able to provide sufficient jobs, and that markets should be left to allocate labour efficiently’ (9, cited 171, emphasis original). Such a consensus would need to be created at an elite level, then disseminated to the population at large. For the ERT, it should focus on a neo-liberal understanding of competitiveness, understood to mean 'complying with the logic of a globalising world economy’ (172). As van Apeldoorn documents (173-5), Beating the Crisis directly influenced and shaped Delors' 1993 White Paper Growth, Competitiveness, Employment, and prompted the setting up in 1995 of the EU's Competitiveness Advisory Group, reporting to the European Council. A subsequent ERT report, Benchmarking for Policy Makers (1996), focused on labour costs, flexibility, working and factory hours and termination costs, conceived of benchmarking as not just an analytical device, but a means of influencing social change, and fed into initiatives such as the DG for Industry's Benchmarking the Competitiveness of European Industry (1996), which called for 'a radical rethink of all relevant labour market systems - employment protection, working time, social protection, and health and safety - to adapt them to a world of work which will be organised differently' (11, cited p. 177) From this point van Apeldoorn turns briefly from the ERT to the development of the European Employment Strategy reviewed above, describing it as 'embedded neo-liberalism in practice' (178-80).
As van Apeldoorn saw it, then, 'Maastricht represented a kind of compromise between the three rival projects, a compromise in which the neo-liberal ideology was clearly dominant though, and that as such prefigured the emerging synthesis of embedded neo-realism' (116, 146-9). Delors' insistence that the single market should have a social dimension was reflected in the Single European Act of 1986 and Social Charter of 1989, though van Apeldoorn says of the first that its social content was disappointing, as the call for a social dialogue (Article 118b) 'remained at the level of symbolic politics and was acceptable to UNICE [the employers' Union des Industries de la Communauté Européenne] because of its 'voluntariness'; and of the second, described by Martin Rhodes (1991: 263) as a "highly diluted compromise", that it 'only constituted a mere declaration of broad principles and carried no legal obligations'. Most of the directives that came from the Social Action Programme that followed it 'never went beyond the drafting stage as they were blocked in the Council of Ministers', and the three that emerged later under the European Social Dialogue, on parental leave, part-time work and fixed-term work, had been criticised 'for setting very general standards that are below those that are already in place in most EU countries' (147-8). So here van Apeldoorn accepts that the social dimension failed: 'Generally, European "social partnership" not only remains restricted to a very limited area but in practice seems more a mechanism through which neo-liberal flexibility is implemented, with the support of both "social partners" (i.e., in a way that ensures the maintenance of the social consensus), than an instrument for the creation of an organised space for European industrial relations as envisaged by Delors' (148). In short, the Maastricht 'social chapter' represented 'the high point of the efforts of the Commission to create a "social dimension"' (148), and at the same time the ERT and other representatives of transnational capital saw to it that 'this minimal programme would only be minimally implemented' (155). A short summary at the end of Chapter 4 says that 'Maastricht was ... a project not just of big business but also of social-democratic political and social forces', but that the social-democratic interpretation 'failed to materialise'. It 'contained elements of all three of our rival projects, even though it was biased in favour of the neo-liberal project, as the central part of the treaty, monetary union, came to reflect what Gill (1998) has called disciplinary neo-liberalism'. But 'the albeit rather weak "social chapter" nevertheless constituted an important ideological interpellation of Europe's social-democratic forces and trade union movement, and at the same time (in a longer-term perspective) still offers them an albeit weak legal-institutional base from which to pursue their project further' (156).
When van Apeldoorn turns to the post-Maastricht period and addresses the rise of embedded neo-liberalism as a new concept for European socio-economic order (158), shaped in part by the agency of the ERT, his wording is precise, and cautious:
'What was required was a hegemonic articulation of the now dominant neo-liberal perspective with remaining elements of the neo-mercantilist discourse. It is this articulation, then, that I will call embedded neoliberalism. The embedded neoliberalism of the ERT is hence also at the same time formulated in response to the agency of other social forces, and in particular those bound up with the socio-democratic project' (158-9). As such, it had 'increasingly come to define the socio-economic content of the current European integration process'. And further, it was 'ideologically under-pinned by what I will identify as a neo-liberal competitiveness discourse':
'Competitiveness, I claim, has become the key concept in EU policy making, constituting a master policy discourse to which other policy discourses are subordinated. The meaning of the word “competitiveness” is not fixed, however, but has to be actively articulated through the agency of groups that perceive themselves to have a particular interest in defining the term in certain ways. Here I claim that the agency of the ERT has played a significant role in giving an increasingly neo-liberal content to the concept of competitiveness’ (159).
Embedded neo-liberalism does not constitute a return to the embedded liberalism of the post-war period. But 'within (continental) Europe, there are so far stronger limits to this process of disembedding than for instance in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and inasmuch as these limits are acknowledged, the neo-liberal project tends to be reformulated by incorporating elements of other ideological orientations into its discourse as well, albeit at a subordinate level' (159).
At this point van Apeldoorn returns to Polanyi's idea that labour and other social forces will organise to demand social protection as the disembedded market continues to disrupt their lives: ‘Thus, precisely because of the double movement, a class or class fraction that aspires to hegemony must in the longer run articulate its interests both ideologically and materially with those of the “population" at large: that is, it cannot afford to fully ignore the principle of social protection’ (160, emphasis mine). The passage that follows is crucial:
'Given its relative distance towards (sic) any single domestic society, the ideological perspective of the globalist fraction has tended towards neo-liberalism or the principle of economic liberalism. However, pure laissez-faire would both hurt its own direct economic interests (as it still needs the state to educate the workforce, to maintain social and political stability, to provide the infrastructure, to pursue macro-economic policies that favour growth and investment, etc.) and, more abstractly, would undermine capitalist class hegemony as it might provoke a counter-hegemonic movement seeking to re-establish political and societal control over capital and the free market' (160).
The greater preponderance of industrial capital (as opposed to financial capital) in continental Europe meant that 'neo-liberalism needed to be modified in order not to harm the interests of industrial capital' (160); and 'the position of organised labour, and the traditions of corporatist labour relations and of social consensus (particularly in the Rhineland countries) have proven so strong as to make it impossible for neo-liberal forces to adopt the same antagonistic stance (vis-à-vis labour) as again, for instance, the Thatcher regime did' (161). For these reasons, van Apeldoorn argues, the neo-liberal discourse the ERT developed around the idea of competitiveness had to incorporate elements of both the neo-mercantilist and the social democratic projects in order to achieve hegemony. The first of these involved 'being able to compete in the global market place by first shielding oneself from the forces of globalisation, in order to then enter the fray on the basis of increased strength achieved through non-market means'; the second, in the 'new social democracy' promoted by Delors, was to be achieved 'not by negating the market, but by "organising" it in such a way that its productive capacities are developed. This translates into an employment strategy that does not focus on deregulation but rather on investment in education, training, high technology, infrastructure, etc., as productivity-enhancing policies aimed at improving the capacity of labour (rather than just capital) to adapt to the exigencies of the global economy, thus avoiding unemployment and protecting workers' income' (172). In articulating with these elements, the ERT's discourse went beyond orthodox neo-liberalism, contradicting the principles of pure laissez-faire by stressing that the state should be an 'enabling force', creating the 'conditions of competitiveness' through attention to innovation and new technology, education and training, and trans-European infrastructure.
Reflecting on this, and the subsequent development of the European Employment Strategy, Apeldoorn comments that although its agenda might be seen as adapting the European social model in order to preserve it, 'it in fact fits in very well within the framework of embedded neoliberalism, which, although distinct from Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, does have as its primary objective the fundamental restructuring of the European political economy in such a way as to prioritise the principle of economic liberalism over that of social protection' (178): 'Not redistribution, but creating the opportunity to participate in the market, is the objective of these policies' (179). So: 'As long as the policy responses to European unemployment are tied to a neoliberal competitiveness discourse that serves the interests of the most transnationalised segments of European capital, prospects for any alternative policy response remain bleak' (180).
This being so, van Apeldoorn suggests that 'the real "test" of embedded neo-liberalism will probably come at the next serious economic downturn’, as in such a crisis the project 'is bound to face serious challenges in terms of its legitimacy among the European populations' (185). Such a crisis of legitimacy might too be rendered more acute by the consequences of enlargement to the east, and the project of monetary union with ongoing liberalisation, as support for both projects was already low. In a recession made worse by the disciplinary pressure of monetary union and the Stability Pact, 'social forces bound up with labour may ... start to question this core element of the European project, and demand more social protection again' (187). Alternatively, too great a focus on money capital and shareholder value might prompt a renewed alliance between capital and labour (188-9). And he concludes:
‘The struggle over European order will thus continue. Whether the social purpose of this order may yet be re-organised around the principle of social protection will in the end depend primarily on the extent to which those groups that lose out in the neo-liberal globalisation and Europeanisation process will be able to form a stronger countervailing power at both the national and European levels. ... At the moment the prospects appear to look bleak. ... It will above all have to be an ideological struggle, in which social forces rallying around the principle of social protection will have to, if one wants to come to a true counter-hegemony, radically disassociate themselves from the currently hegemonic neo-liberal competitiveness discourse' (189).
What shall we say, then, near enough two decades on, about Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration? First, it is an indispensable point of reference for the analysis of the neo-liberal turn in Europe, establishing as it does the significance of the role played by the ERT. Second, by showing that the ERT went beyond the specific short-term interests of its members to promote competitiveness on a global scale, it both avoids a crude instrumentalism, and makes an important contribution as an early study of the emerging politics of global competitiveness. Third, it shows that the central issue, both in the European context and in relation to the broader politics of competitiveness, was the relationship between capital, labour and the state, and specifically the issue of the reform of labour markets, welfare and 'social protection'. These aspects secure its classic status, and make it a book to which it rewarding to return periodically, and especially at the present moment. As the discussion above of the initiatives from the OECD and the World Bank in the same period illustrate, it is not a comprehensive study of the politics of reform in the period, but it tells very well the story of a very significant aspect of it.
What is more, it is clear throughout in emphasising the subordinate character of the supranational social democratic project which advanced the cause of 'social Europe', and its fragility in the face of pressure for reform. Van Apeldoorn notes that the social dimension was rarely more than symbolic, unable to secure binding Europe-wide commitments as social policy remained in national hands, and compromised from the start by Delors' 'basic acceptance of the primacy of market integration' and of 'much of the neoliberal agenda' (146-7). As noted above, he went so far as to say that in practice social partnership seemed more a mechanism through which neo-liberal flexibility was implemented with the support of both social partners than an instrument for the creation of an organised space for European industrial relations. The analysis in the text thoroughly justifies these conclusions, and overall it cannot be said that van Apeldoorn was over-optimistic about a renewal of social democracy at the supranational level.
It is all the more surprising, then, that he held out any hope at all for the resurgence of the social-democratic project, and here my interest is in the basis on which such hope as he held out was advanced. In summary, as expressed at the end, if the neo-liberal project entered into a legitimacy crisis as a result of a serious economic downturn, a counter-hegemonic movement might bring about a return to a new social democratic project based on social protection, once again prised away from the grip of hegemonic neo-liberal competitiveness. Underlying this is an unreconstructed commitment to an alternative analytical framework that preceded the neo-liberal turn, and runs as a sub-current throughout the book: a composite model which puts together democracy, legitimacy and social consent on the one hand, and Polanyi's double movement on the other. On this model, no project can survive for long without legitimacy and social consent, while the faltering of a regime based upon economic liberalism will in time evoke a counter-move back to social protection. Such hopes were indeed widely voiced when the neo-liberal project was 'tested' by the 'global financial crisis' a few years later, but the Commission and Council proved able to reinforce the machinery of disciplinary neo-liberalism through austerity, enforced 'adjustment', and the various packages and strengthened forms of surveillance leading to the European Semester. At the same time, the adoption of the European Pillar of Social Rights and the debate that has gathered pace over the potential for a European Social Union seemed to suggest that the battle for a 'social Europe' capable of achieving hegemony and placing limits on the politics of competitiveness was not yet lost (Vanhercke et al, eds, 2020). Following this line of argument, one might point out, as Gill, van Apeldoorn and others did twenty years ago, that the attempt to introduce the single market was partial, that the disciplines envisaged have never entirely worked, that the Lisbon Agenda and the Europe 2020 initiatives both failed to achieve their objectives, that there is still a strong 'social' element to the governance of the Union, that significant social groups still offer resistance, that social protection has been modernised, but not abolished, and so on. And this fits well with a method of analysis that centres on the pursuit of hegemony as a battle between competing sets of ideas, in which the social meaning of key signifiers is always up for grabs, to which van Apeldoorn is not entirely immune.
To the extent that van Apeldoorn bought into the Polanyian framework, and continued to see economic liberalism and social protection as competing poles in a recurrent movement back and forth, he was led astray. If we take instead his fundamentally important proposition that the ERT reflected 'the general capitalist interest', and use it as a lens to reflect on the trajectory of reform since the late 1980s, a different perspective emerges. Put simply, the general capital interest is that capital should be able to accumulate surplus value, by exploiting populations who have no option other than to offer themselves for work, and if possible to increase the rate and character of accumulation by investing in and increasing the productivity of worker. So the first requirement is that propertyless individuals should have no option but to offer themselves for work, and the second that employers should be free to organise the work to achieve maximum productivity. This was what the reforms of the 1990s were about, as was reflected in Gill's reference to the objective of de-socialising risk (so the individual would have to bear it and behave accordingly), Goetschy's references to the need for a disposable workforce and flexible labour markets, and the objective of a new productive and working order within the EU, and Barnard and Deakin's observation that the focus had shifted from social rights to continuing high levels of employment. It was also reflected, as van Apeldoorn makes clear, in the ERT's focus from the late 1980s on the dismantling of the welfare state and a fundamental restructuring of the so-called European social model, and the DG for Industry's call in 1996 for 'a radical rethink of all relevant labour market systems - employment protection, working time, social protection, and health and safety - to adapt them to a world of work which [would] be organised differently' (a passage that continued beyond the part quoted by van Apeldoorn as follows: 'in particular one where the boundaries between work and leisure, work and learning, employee and self-employed are, or may become, less well-defined. The concept of security for workers has to be reformulated, focusing more on security based on employability and the labour market rather than security based on the individual work place. It should be focused on security in change, not security against change' (European Commission, 1996: 20); and it was precisely expressed in the summary van Apeldoorn offers: 'Now competitiveness is about survival of the fittest in a fully open environment of a global free market, in which no "artificial", that is non-market based, means to enhance one's position are allowed' (172), with the proviso that it applies most of all to the citizen-worker. So van Apeldoorn (179) draws on Wolfgang Streeck, who saw the concept of 'employability' in the European Employment Strategy as ‘[defining] the responsibility of public policy, not in terms of de-commodification of individuals, but to the contrary of creation of equal opportunities for commodification’ (Streeck 1999: 6) to assert that 'In sum ... although the EU's employment strategy is officially meant to provide the social cohesion part of the new Lisbon Agenda ... it in fact seems above all to promote the further commodification of labour'.
The Gramscian idea of the achievement of hegemony through articulation with competing discourses does not quite get to the heart of this, especially when it goes no further than to argue that neo-liberalism was 'embedded' in the sense that 'the neo-liberal project stops short of fully disembedding the market economy from its post-war social and political institutions' (160). Particularly as regarded the relationship between capital and labour (the 'capital relation') no stopping short was envisaged. On the contrary, the 'social purpose' was to impose a continual process of adjustment to ever more intensive competitiveness (Nunn and Beeckmans, 2015). To quote the 16 June 1997 Resolution of the European Council on growth and employment (97/C 236/02):
'it should be a priority aim to develop a skilled, trained and adaptable workforce and to make labour markets responsive to economic change. Structural reforms need to be comprehensive in scope, as opposed to limited or occasional measures, so as to address in a coherent manner the complex issue of incentives in creating and taking up a job. Economic and social policies are mutually reinforcing. Social protection systems should be modernized so as to strengthen their functioning in order to contribute to competitiveness, employment and growth, establishing a durable basis for social cohesion' (para. 1).
In short, the objective was not to shift the balance between employment and social protection, but to transform social protection completely, from a means of sheltering individuals from the need to compete in the labour market to a mechanism that obliged them to do so. Its character was to be entirely transformed, with the intention of creating a new basis for social cohesion (the responsibility of everyone to equip themselves to work productively), and, crucially, removing the basis for a turn back from complete dependence on the market. In Polanyian terms, it set out to rule out any future 'double movement'. And despite the evident failure to bring about any significant shift in productivity, or to enhance competitiveness, the EU has succeeded in advancing this goal, and remains unwaveringly committed to it, intensifying its efforts whenever the opportunity has arisen, and notably in times of 'crisis'. In this context, 'consent' is not given periodically in the ballot box, but every day, in conformity to the discipline of labour markets in which all must compete. So the European Pillar of Social Rights, consistent with what has gone before, predictably states that: 'Economic and social progress are intertwined, and the establishment of a European Pillar of Social Rights should be part of wider efforts to build a more inclusive and sustainable growth model by improving Europe’s competitiveness and making it a better place to invest, create jobs and foster social cohesion' (#11), confers no new powers or tasks upon the Union (#18), and gives EU citizens 'the right to quality and inclusive education, training and life-long learning in order to maintain and acquire skills that enable them to participate fully in society and manage successfully transitions in the labour market' (Ch. 1, #1), along with 'the right to timely and tailor-made assistance to improve employment or self-employment prospects' (CH. 1, #4); and everything is subject to 'the necessary flexibility for employers to adapt swiftly to changes in the economic context shall be ensured', otherwise known as the 'right to manage' (Ch. 2, #5(a)). This does not mean that the rights of labour can never be asserted over or against the rights of capital in Europe. But it does mean that they will have to be asserted against rather than through the institutions of the European Union, whose version of 'social Europe' is neo-liberal through and through.
Further reading
Barnard, Catherine, and Simon Deakin, 1999. A year of living dangerously? EC social rights, employment policy, and EMU. Industrial Relations Journal, 30, 4, 355-372.
Cammack, Paul. 2004. Giddens' Way with Words. In Sarah Hale, Will Leggett and Luke Martell, eds, The Third Way and Beyond, Manchester: Manchester University Press, https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526137883/9781526137883.00016.xml
Cammack, Paul. 2012. Risk, social protection, and the world market. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42, 3, 359-377.
Commission of the European Communities. 1985. Completing the Internal Market. COM(85)310.
European Commission. 1996. Benchmarking the Competitiveness of European Industry. Luxembourg.
Gill, Stephen. 1998. European governance and new constitutionalism: Economic and Monetary Union and alternatives to disciplinary Neoliberalism in Europe, New Political Economy, 3, 1, 5-26.
Goetschy, Janine. 1999. The European Employment Strategy: Genesis and Development, European Journal of Industrial Relations, 5, 2, 117-137.
Nunn, Alex and Paul Beeckmans. 2015. The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous Adjustment in EU Meta-Governance, International Journal of Public Administration, 38, 12, 926-939.
OECD. 1997. The World in 2020: Towards a New Global Age, OECD: Paris.
Streeck, Wolfgang. 1999. Competitive solidarity: Rethinking the European social model, MPIfG Working Paper, No. 99/8, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, http://www.mpifg.de/pu/workpap/wp99-8/wp99-8.html
Van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan. 2013. The European capitalist class and the crisis of its hegemonic project', in Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber, eds, Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class. Merlin Press/Monthly Review: London and New York.
Van der Pijl, Kees. 1984. The Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class, Verso: London.
Vanhercke, Bart, Dalila Ghailani and Slavina Spasova, with Philippe Pochet, eds. 2020. Social policy in the European Union 1999-2019: the long and winding road, European Trade Union Institute/European Social Observatory: Brussels.
Wigger, Angela. 2019. The new EU industrial policy: authoritarian neoliberal structural adjustment and the case for alternatives, Globalizations, 16, 3, 353-369.
World Bank. 2001. Social Protection Sector Strategy: From Safety Net to Springboard, World Bank: Washington.