The present issue is devoted to a comparative investigation of the relations between political parties and trade unions in four countries of the European Community: France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain. It is the result of a conference jointly organized by the Policy Studies Institute and our journal, held on 23 June 1978 in London. In turn, the conference was the first in a series of similar comparative investigations of the relations between political parties and functional interests, employers, farmers, intellectuals etc., in the countries of the European community to be organized in the near future. These investigations will contribute to the search for the ‘more profound and less obvious trends and prospects as a whole’ in the 1978 and 1979 elections in Europe which we announced in our last issue. We then went on to state that: ‘The premisses of these comparative investigations are rooted in the common problems facing all Western European states because they all belong to one, specific region of modern industrial society — a region which presents the characteristic problems of mixed economies and welfare states, and which is marked by its specific geo-political position. The variations in the democratic politics of each of these Western European countries are closely linked, if in different ways, to these two major problems. These democratic policies can be new and passionate in Italy, traditional and calm in Britain - but they are still variations on the same themes.’

In western democracies different patterns of cooperation among working class organizations have developed. The three ‘pillars’ of the working class movement in Britain, the trade unions, the party and the cooperative movement, have no equivalent in the history of Germany, for two reasons.

The problem of ‘tutelage’ of trade unions by political parties in italy must be seen against a background of: the structural conditions of the labour market (where trade unions are active) and those of the ‘political market’ (where parties are active) as masses for manoeuvre used to attain certain aims; the characteristics of the leadership of the trade unions and those of the political parties; the ‘styles of leadership’ (including the conduct of conflict) by trade union and party leaders.

The intellectual structures which can easily be applied to the political and social realities of Northern Europe are largely irrelevant to those of Southern Europe, and certainly, to those of France.

Three postulates are implicit in considering the problem of the changing relations between the trade unions and the working-class parties.

One is that in every European industrial country there are working-class parties. In addition there are parties which are not working class, but bourgeois middle class, conservateurs, popolare or volksparteien (and the logic of this postulate even implies that there is, in fact, only one working-class party of any real political significance).

In the past two decades the relationship between the unions and the labour party — the central feature of labour politics in Britain — has undergone some remarkable changes. It has passed through severe crisis: reinforcing tensions which built up in the 1960s became so great at the end of the decade that the alliance appeared ‘threatened as never before’. One scholar of labour movement politics suggested at the time that there might be a life-span to ‘Labour’ parties. To the Left of the Labour Party some revolutionary critics looked to a militant union break with ‘the immense contradiction’. To the Right of the Labour Party some social democratic critics looked to a realignment which would facilitate the emergence of a new radical centre party.

The object in trying to compare the relationship between trade unions and working-class political parties in these four countries was to see how far the relationship had changed in response to certain trends supposed to be common to the countries concerned. The trends were: (i) the changing role of working-class parties themselves; (ii) the decline of political representation, especially by parliamentary means, in favour of direct action; (iii) the growth of government in the social and economic sphere and increasing direct participation by trade unions in governmental decision-making. It was considered important to look at these countries together in view of their growing economic and political interdependence, in spite of fundamental differences among them which affect the roles both of political parties and of trade unions.