Trade unions and Euroscepticism: The crisis of 'social Europe'

The signing of the Treaty of Maastricht and the transformation from the European Community to the European Union can be regarded as a turning point after which opposition to integration (now named as 'Euro-scepticism') became 'embedded'.The hitherto 'permissive consensus' which rendered opposition to integration as marginal and residual began to break down and was replaced by a more contested process in which opposition became a more pervasive and enduring, if not permanent, response to integration (Usherwood & Startin, 2013).However, it can be argued that for trade unionism, the inclusion of a social chapter in the Maastricht Treaty marked, not the emergence of 'Euro-scepticism', but its retreat in the face of a new wave of 'Euro-enthusiasm'.This was based around the new mobilising project of 'Social Europe' that filled the 'vacuum of inspirational ideology' following the collapse of communism, the crisis of social democracy and the subsequent triumph of neoliberalism (Hyman, 2003: 3-4).This 'Euro-philic' turn was epitomised by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) which has been its elite vanguard.However, even the ETUC began to take a more critical approach to integration as the social dimension stalled in the 2000s and this has been accompanied by increasing popular dissent amongst workers who have borne the brunt of the Euro-crisis (Taylor & Mathers, 2004).In this context, the unions have become increasingly marginalized following the EU's welldocumented turn to neoliberalism, the post-Lisbon hardening of 'ordo-liberalism', the turn to austerity in the context of the Eurozone crisis and the post-2009 clash of legal hierarchies illustrated in the Laval-Viking-Rffert cases.There are, however, marked divisions both within and between European trade unions in respect to the most appropriate response to the dynamics of European integration (see Hyman, 2010).This chapter will trace and explore the increasingly critical orientations of European trade unions to European integration in order to highlight the complex, contested and multifaceted nature of Euro-scepticism amongst European trade unions.In the next section, we present an overview of the main developments and dynamics that have contributed to a growing disillusionment of European trade union towards European integration.We then provide a series of case studies that highlight the growing negative orientation to European integration and the institutional dynamics of the EU amongst trade unions in the UK, France, Sweden and at the European level.We conclude by deconstructing the concept of Euroscepticism as applied to trade unions and present a typology of the divergent orientations of European unions to questions of European integration. Trade unions and Euroscepticism: An OverviewThe Euroscepticism literature which developed from the 1990s focused on political parties and public opinion and only recently has it become interested in civil society (Leconte, 2010).Research specifically on Eurosceptic discourse or campaigning by trade unions is relatively rare which tends to reflect the opportunity structure in which unions operated during periods of European institution-building.In the context of a decline of oppositional ideologies within the labour movement, a policy environment developed that was friendly to 'social partnership' and this encouraged a pro-European belief structure that corresponded to the automatic internationalism of the trade union ideational repertoire.From the beginning, the leaders of Europe's main (non-Communist) union confederations were ideologically committed to European integration as a touchstone of democracy.The legacy of WWII and, in the context of the Cold War, these unions became 'professional Europeans' (Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman, 2013:179) and were co-opted willingly into the project of constructing a European economic community.In the 1980s, the establishment of the Single Market offered trade unions the opportunity to contribute to the future development of

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