National Diversity, Regime Competition and Institutional Deadlock: Problems in Forming a European Industrial Relations System

The neo-corporatist experiments of the 1970s were attempts to preserve the labor-inclusiveness of post-war European political economies in increasingly adverse domestic and international conditions. Since their demise in the early 1980s, industrial relations in Western Europe are characterized by high divergence between national systems combined with rising interdependence among national economies, creating a growth potential for inter-regime competition . Endeavors to provide the Internal Market with a Social Dimension are attempts to make the externalities of national industrial relations systems governable in a supra-national industrial order. The odds against European-level political reconstruction of industrial relations appear overwhelming.