The Role of Social Diplomacy: the European Trade Union Confederation and the Transition from Communism to Post-Communism in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia

This chapter focuses on the relations between the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the organisation established in 1973 to coordinate and represent workers and their trade unions at European level, and trade unions of Central and Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union - and later Russia - in the period between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. The main aim is to analyse the attitudes of the ETUC towards the critical rethinking and, later, the collapse of Communist systems and regimes; another aim, in this context, is to assess whether - and, if so, to what extent – the ETUC was able to influence the reform processes affecting post-Communist trade unionism. The chapter, in particular, shows that the ETUC was unable to avoid the nationalist rifts in the Yugoslav trade unions and the dramatic disintegration of Soviet trade unionism, exacerbated by the failed coup in 1991. Meanwhile, the essay argues that the ETUC played a crucial role in encouraging trade union pluralism in Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and accompanying new and old organisations towards membership in international democratic trade union organisations. At the same time, the ETUC failed in its attempt to put workers and trade unions at the centre of national reform processes and agreements between CEECs and the European Union. The research is based on the existing literature, published documents from the ETUC and the EC/EU institutions and primary sources of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the World Confederation of Labour (WCL) and the ETUC kept in the Historical Archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.