1.1 Why studying social concertation?
In times of economic crisis – most recently as a consequence of the Coronavirus pandemic since early 2020 – the question arises whether governments seek to include the social partners (trade unions and employer associations) into their crisis-response management or whether they unilaterally bypass them. When the global financial market crash in September 2008 triggered a prolonged economic crisis, all member states of the EU, except Poland, experienced negative growth rates in the following year. With growing mass unemployment, many European governments launched ad hoc stimulus packages during the first two crisis years. Soon thereafter, the Euro sovereign debt crisis led to a second wave of fiscal and economic crisis, hitting in particular Greece, other Southern and most Eastern European countries. In addition to rescuing financial institutions through bailouts, the preceding neo-Keynesian policies contributed to growing budget deficits, which subsequently – reinforced by push from international creditors – pressed governments to adopt austerity measures despite sluggish growth, mass unemployment, and rising poverty. In this edited volume, we explore the role of the social partners in dealing with the 2008/2009 financial and economic crisis and its aftermath in Europe. We not only seek to explain the cross-national variations in when (and why) social partners were part of crisis politics, but also assess how their inclusion (or lack thereof) has affected neo-corporatist arrangements in the respective countries.
When times were tough and problems “wicked” (Peters 2017), many European governments had pursued collective policymaking in the past, involving the social partners in social concertation. Such governments sought not only concluding a joint agreement on policy, but also sharing its implementation in order to increase the social and economic benefits for all sides. Since the 1970s, such tripartite policymaking and implementation has been known as “neo-corporatist” interest intermediation (Schmitter 1974), though these efforts became less frequent with the shift toward neoliberal policies during the 1980s. However, there had been signs of a “renaissance” of neo-corporatist efforts during the 1990s (Grote and Schmitter 1999), especially – and quite surprisingly – in countries without strong corporatist tradition (Avdagic, Rhodes and Visser 2011b). Most prominently, numerous “social pacts” between governments and social partners were concluded in preparation of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in several Southern European countries as well as Ireland (Molina and Rhodes 2011; O’Donnell, Cahill and Thomas 2010; Regini and Colombo 2011).
Given the self-imposed fiscal discipline, “competitive corporatism” (Rhodes 1998) was sought to restore global competitiveness in a number of continental European countries such as the Netherlands or Germany (Ebbinghaus and Hassel 2000; Visser and Hemerijck 1997) or contributed to adapting innovation-based competition in Northern Europe (Ornston 2013). Pragmatic policymakers relied on these joint solutions as they created legitimacy for tough but necessary choices, while resulting in economically desirable outcomes. Compared to earlier decades, these deals were no longer a political exchange of wage moderation for increased social benefits, but combined supply-side-oriented economic measures with negotiated welfare state restructuring (Ebbinghaus and Hassel 2000). Moreover, these efforts were also normatively in line with the European Social Model that embraces social dialogue as one of its key characteristics (Baccaro and Simoni 2008; Sapir 2006).
Given the extraordinary problem load since 2008, neo-corporatist scholars would expect national governments to seek collective solutions not only during the onset of the Great Recession, but also after the initial crash, when the situation remained notoriously precarious. Double-dip recessions, sluggish economic growth despite a “zero interest rate” policy by the European Central Bank (ECB), stubbornly high unemployment rates, and rising inequality were coupled with external shocks or long-term problems such as the so-called refugee crisis, global trade wars, climate change concerns, and the “Brexit” referendum in the UK. The crisis implications and austerity policies contributed to a rise in anti-EU, mostly anti-establishment right-wing populism, threatening the very foundations of modern democratic welfare capitalism. Despite the apparent need for concerted action, some scholars rather point to a “death” of social pacts (Culpepper and Regan 2014; Teague and Donaghey 2015) or the ineffectiveness of “PR corporatism” (Bernaciak 2013). Similarly, Hyman concludes that “the crisis seems to have made peak-level social dialogue very difficult in most countries” (Hyman 2010, 7). Others, in contrast, identify trends of corporatist conflict resolution (Eichhorst and Weishaupt 2013; Lesch and Vogel 2017), focusing on the resilience of corporatist arrangements (Dekker, Bekker and Cremers 2017; Luque Balbona and González Begega 2015), the “return” of trade unions as crisis facilitators during times of acute need (Lehndorff 2011; Urban 2015), or note the “ups and downs” in social dialogue (Molina and Guardiancich 2017; Van Gyes, Terlinden and Vandekerckhove 2017).
In this edited volume, we investigate several key research questions in respect to societal crisis management during the Great Recession by way of comparative analyses and selected country case studies. Our first question asks: what explains cross-national variations in governments’ decisions to involve the social partners in crisis management across Europe? This implies also a second research question: what have been the main consequences of such concertation efforts (or their failure or absence) on labour relations and the future of neo-corporatist policymaking? Additionally, we address a third topic in the study of EU social dialogue: when and why are the social partners involved at the EU level? The evidence we provide is based on a mix of different methods, including a larger-N fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) of 29 countries (27 EU members, including the UK but not Croatia, plus Norway and Switzerland), eight in-depth country case studies, one EU-level chapter, and a concluding comparison of the selected case studies, followed by a Postscript on the pandemic.
In the remaining parts of this introduction, we briefly outline the trajectory of a collectively organized policymaking and crisis management before 2008, while also defining key analytical terms such as neo-corporatism, social pacts, and social concertation. Thereafter, we provide an overview of the most common explanatory factors for collective crisis management. Based on the social science literature, we differentiate three lines of argument, including predominantly socio-economic (functionalist) factors; explanations focusing on politics, electoral competition, and political institutions; and those approaches investigating power resources, labour relations, and wage bargaining. We give also a rationale for our research design that is underpinning the empirical findings presented in this volume. Finally, we briefly outline the key findings for each country as well as the comparative analyses and the EU-level chapter.
