Introduction

Jepsen and Serrano Pascual (2005, p 1) explain that the term ‘European Social Model’ (ESM) is increasingly used within the European Union (EU) as a ‘catchword describing the European experience of simultaneously promoting sustainable economic growth and social cohesion’. However, the vague nature of this concept becomes apparent as soon as one focuses on the question of its definition. As part of the overall research task undertaken in this book, this chapter focuses on establishing social dialogue as an intrinsic regulatory tool of the ESM. Developed in the last few decades and strengthened in the 1980s and 1990s by the European institutions in collaboration with the member states, social partners have increasingly been given a crucial role in the European process of ‘deregulation’ with a view to ‘re-regulation’ in order to achieve a viable and well-functioning level of ‘concerted regulation’. This principle of concerted regulation aims to involve all actors from all sections of the spectrum in order to lighten the weight of government legislation, which has proven rather inefficient for long-term viable employment solutions in the past, and to give more importance to social dialogue and collective bargaining, the latter being better suited to finding appropriate long-term solutions to each sector and/or plant. This rather young process within the EU15 had still to prove its worth before the latest enlargement process took place, in May 2004. The question raised in this chapter is whether social partnership structures, in the new member states, are ready to receive the ESM and respond to its demands. The focus will be, first, on their organisational models, but also on the different countries’ economic markets, and in so doing will question the suitability of the ESM for these new members who carry strongly different traditions and historical backgrounds and whose future economic and social interests may also accordingly be rather different. Second, the potential threats that these new member states represent for the future of European social dialogue will be pointed out and, as such, for the ESM as a whole.

The ESM or Concerted Regulation Model

The literature on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ demonstrates that the European countries have long opted for a different economic model than the one observed in the United States (US) (Soskice and Hall, 2003).