Will the Present Crisis Revive the Neo-corporatist Sisyphus?

Abstract

Despite a much less favorable context, neo-corporatism a.k.a. social concertation did not completely disappear from the practice of European interest politics after the 1970s. In a few countries, the former survived, but only by shifting a good deal of the latter to the meso-level of economic sectors and even by permitting micro-level bargaining at the level of individual firms. The most frequent and persistent form of neo-corporatism or social concertation in Europe came to rest on so-called “pattern bargaining;” whereby, organizations representing one industrial sector (usually metal-working) reached an agreement on wages and other issues and this was then generalized from sector-to-sector to cover almost the entire economy—without any need for a formal national accord. Many advanced capitalist economies, however, proved immune to this form of interest politics, much to the delight to neo-liberal economists who persisted in asserting their belief in the superior performance of pluralist systems or, even better, in systems where no collective bargaining at all took place. With the dramatic financial crisis that began in late 2008, the conditions that had previously promoted or impeded neo-corporatism, tripartism, policy concertation, social pacting, systems of political exchange or whatever it should be called, were radically altered due to a decline in the balance of forces between capital and labor in favor of the former. This article explores whether the 30-year cycle of the neo-corporatist Sisyphus, postulated by Jürgen Grote and myself, will be revived by this crisis—or whether it can be safely exorcised from political practice and academic debate.