|
|
Previous |Next |Title |Contents
The subject of this paper were the broad institutional conditions that fragmented citizenship under ,,pooled sovereignty" (Keohane and Hoffmann 1991) creates for politics in economically integrated Europe. As long as Europe is governed by a constitutional construction under which most Europeans remain foreigners to most other Europeans, and common policies are not backed by the power of a common state, outcomes seem likely that do not fit the optimistic image of inexorable progress towards advanced forms of citizenship divorced from state coercion and based in the common values of a stateless European civil society. Regulating national citizenship through a supranational non-state regime does open up national systems to foreigners, but only in a very limited way. And the price for this seems high as regime competition must be allowed to continue, undermining strong national regimes and, in the longer term, probably all others.
In the perspective of ,,policy analysis", workplace participation is just one ,,policy area" among others. What the character of integrated Europe as a polity is can therefore be determined, if at all, only by surveying all such areas and somehow aggregating the results. Workplace participation may also be seen as an ,,industrial" issue of declining significance in a ,,postindustrial" society in which, allegedly, consumer interests take precedence over producer interests (Majone 1993). None of these positions is taken here. Since workplace participation regimes regulate, or may precisely fail to regulate, the extent to which the organization and intensity of work may be governed by market pressures, and since social regulation of the ,,effort bargain" at the workplace may be anti-competitive, they present a strong test for the ability of a polity to mediate the impact of competition on social life. Not all ,,policy areas" are equally instructive when what is at stake is the relationship, not between institutions, but between politics and markets. Moreover, as markets expand and their competitiveness increases, what institutional resources a society has or has not at its disposal to regulate its ,,labor process" would seem to become more rather than less important.
What responses creative human action may devise to new institutional constraints and opportunities, and what it may accomplish in relation to the problems and probabilities these pose, can never be predicted with certainty. All this paper tried to do was explore the institutional potential of what Weiler calls the Community, as opposed to the Unity, model of European integration - not to offer a strategic recipe of how to deal with the exigencies of a two-level polity that separates rights of citizenship from state capacity. Indications are that a non-state regime of industrial citizenship rights that is forced to rely heavily on national and managerial voluntarism must accept considerable inequality, as it must allow participation to vary with firms' national origin and corporate strategy. It also seems likely that the industrial order that it will bring about will be more market- and efficiency-driven, more private and less public, and much more internally diverse than the national regimes of the postwar period, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the structure of European societies and their social cohesion. On the other hand, while social science may sometimes be able to understand the conditions of action, its imagination is too limited to preempt its results.
Previous |Next |Title |Contents