Industrial Relations at EU Community and Sector Levels: a Glass Half Full as Well as Half Empty?

For many commentators, the story of industrial relations at the EU Community and sector levels is one of a failure to develop a vertically integrated system equivalent to those of most national systems. The reasons have been exhaustively analysed (see Falkner, 1998; Hay, 2000; Keller, 2000; Streeck, 1995; 1998). They include the sustained opposition of employers, the preoccupation of trade unions with specific national problems, differences amongst governments about the role of social policy and the immensely practical difficulties of overcoming the collective action problem of multiple sovereign bodies reaching agreement. In addition, they extend to considerations intrinsic to the process of ‘negative’ rather than ‘positive’ integration, whereby obstacles to a single market were removed rather than measures being put in place to control its operation. Crucially, although the EU has developed a far more extensive political dimension than the NAFTA, a ‘highly developed state prota-gonist’ (Traxler, 1996: 289) has not emerged with sufficient authority to sponsor the creation of a vertically integrated system. Indeed, instead of responding with greater EU regulation to the ‘declining domestic governability’ referred to in Chapter 1, the commitment to subsidiarity means that member states have confirmed the sovereignty of national systems.