Abstract
As I announced at the beginning of the year, after this issue I hand over the Editorship of the European Journal of Industrial Relations to the safe hands of my long-standing friend and colleague Guglielmo Meardi, whose record of intensive industrial relations research across Europe, East and West, is truly remarkable.
When the EJIR was launched 25 years ago, one major objective — at a time when ‘international’ industrial relations typically meant North American — was to encourage understanding of the distinctive and variegated dynamics of work and employment in our own continent. Well before the notion of ‘varieties of capitalism’ was coined, it was clear that the socially and collectively regulated relations between workers, employers and public authorities in Europe had to be analysed in their own terms.
More broadly, the aim was to encourage comparative research. By ‘making the strange familiar and the familiar strange’, we are able to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about typicality and causality. This in turn provides a foundation for explanations which are far more encompassing than those derived from experience in a single country, and hence offers a route to theoretical enrichment.
Back in the early 1990s, comparative industrial relations in this sense was in its infancy. Serious, intensive cross-national comparative research is not undertaken lightly. It demands time, analytical sensitivity and linguistic capability. Hence a key part of our mission was to provide a vehicle for such research, in particular by younger scholars. Here I trust we can claim success, and indeed many of those younger scholars are now established figures in the field.
The 1990s were the decade when the ‘social dimension’ of European integration seemed to promise an upwards harmonization of both procedural and substantive rules governing the labour market. The enhanced regulatory competences provided by the Maastricht Treaty formed the basis for directives, among others, on European Works Councils, Working Time and Equality. They also spurred the ‘autonomous’ regulation by employers and unions at European level. Hence a second major aim of the EJIR was to encourage analysis of the nature, dynamics and limitations of the ‘Europeanization’ of industrial relations.
It since became clear that the decade marked the high point of EU interventionism in fostering strong European employment standards. The window of opportunity, which some already considered chimerical, soon closed. The advance of neoliberalism removed the ‘shadow of the law’ which had encouraged employers to negotiate seriously at European level. The brutal enforcement of austerity after the crash of 2007-08, institutionalized in the EU’s ‘new economic governance’, brought attacks on collective bargaining, on collective organization, on statutory employment protections.
Not surprisingly, the lurch to market as against social regulation, bringing increasing unemployment, precarious work arrangements and drastically reduced wages and conditions, has provoked a reaction against the whole idea of European integration. The political dividend has been reaped, in the main, by right-wing nationalists and xenophobes, not least in my own country.
In the main, our readers and authors are supportive of the principle of Europeanization, but strongly opposed to ‘negative integration’ as its guiding direction. To redefine these commitments in current circumstances, and to influence popular debates on these questions, is an ever more urgent task.
This is for the future. It remains to me to thank our publishers, SAGE, for supporting the EJIR from the outset 25 years ago; our Editorial Advisory Panel for sterling service over the years; the reviewers who have willingly provided the expertise which is essential for any academic journal; and not least the authors who have submitted their work over the years. The EJIR has built up a solid foundation, and we can be confident that its success will continue under new leadership.