Preliminary Programme

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, relations with the regimes in Eastern Europe and with the dissidents in these countries became an important issue for many Western socialists. It also became a bone of contention both within and between Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Western Europe, most clearly between the French Socialist Party and the German SPD. The difference was sometimes presented as an opposition between those who primarily believed in a detente from above and those who favored contacts with dissidents and other social forces in Eastern Europe (i.e., a detente from below). At several occasions these differences came to the fore within the Socialist International, most publicly during the Polish crisis. My paper will analyze the differences existing in this field between the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy. It will thus try to shed light on a crucial aspect of the Cold War's history: the role which Western attitudes and policies played for dissident movements in Eastern Europe during the Soviet Bloc's final years. It should also contribute to our understanding of the recent history of the non-communist left in Western Europe. (Show less)

Michael Ross (1898-1963) was the International Affairs Director for the CIO from 1945 and for the AFL-CIO from 1958 to his death. As such, he played a leading role in the Cold War anti-communist labour politics of the post-war era.

Ross’s personal trajectory makes his later politics particularly interesting. Born in Britain, a soldier in the First World War, he was a member of the Labour Party in the 1920s before joining the Communist Party and spending eighteen months in Moscow. He emigrated to the USA in 1933 and worked as a researcher and publicist for the New Deal before a wartime post as research director for the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers brought him to Washington DC and the heart of America’s war economy. This served as the conduit to his later role and prominence.

The paper analyses Ross both as an individual with a life of unique experiences and transitions and as a prism through which to view the broader evolution of international labour politics in the twentieth century. Ross’s own extensive writings and labour movement records allow a careful reconstruction of both aspects.

There were powerful consistencies as well as significant shifts in Ross’s politics. Despite his early left-wing affiliations, he was never a “useful idiot” of the Communist movement and it was not for him a “God that failed”. Rather, he consistently held a belief in History’s objective forces and an aspiration that these be harnessed to social progress. Through the “necessities” of Stalinism, through his aspirations for the evolution of New Deal economics in the direction of “consumism” (as he coined it), through his expectations of state regulation of the economy during the Second World War and post-war era, he maintained a practical hope in the possibilities of planning as a means of social improvement. Conversely, he found his ideas increasingly contained - circumstantially by the changes in both international and domestic politics and personally by his own progressively circumscribed and bureaucratised role in the trade union movement. In this, one sees not betrayal of one-time idealism but a diminution of hopes and a perhaps unavoidable accommodation with those objective forces that he once believed so progressive.

The paper will link this story with the development of the labour movement in this period. Broadly, the CIO’s brand of “social democratic” politics (with which Ross initially identified) was eclipsed by the pro-market orientation of American politics and the hegemony of corporate culture. The undeniably oppressive reality of Soviet communism (which Ross experienced at first hand) led labour movement democrats into a proper advocacy of “free” trade unionism and a wider anti-communism that came to limit the possibilities of progressive reformist politics. Specifically, Ross’s participation in the New Deal, in wartime planning, in the creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions and its break-up, in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, and in the Cold War battle against Communism provides a mirror by which to view the evolution and circumscription of progressive labour politics. (Show less)

Internationalism of the early Dutch trade-unions
Dutch trade-unionism was already in the decades of the 1880’s linked to international trade-unionism by common issues and interests. This was especially the case of the cigarmakers and the transportworkers. There was a network of informal and formal relations between the Dutch and foreign, mostly British trade-unions. Harry Orbell of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union of Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands established in 1889 a Rotterdam and an Amsterdam Branch. As Havelock Wilson of the National Amalgamated Union of Sailors and Firemen did for the seamen in Rotterdam. Dutch unionists travelled to Great Britain to learn from the ‘new unionism’.
The early Dutch trade-unionism existed before the First World War mainly out of autonomous local or regional unions. In 1893 the Nationaal Arbeids-secretariaat (NAS) (National Labour Secretariat) was founded and evolved after 1906 into a more or less revolutionary syndicalist federation of decentralized affiliaties. Two of them were the Dutch Cigarmakers’ and Tobacco Workers’ Association (Nederlandsche Internationale Sigarenmakers- en Tabaksbewerkersbond) and the Dutch Transport Workers’ Federation (Nederlandsche Federatie van Transport-Arbeiders) and its forerunners. The last federation had a large membership of seamen, firemen and dockworkers.
The NAS and its affiliaties sought for international contacts long before the NAS became a member of the International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres, from which it withdrew in 1907 and the International Syndicalist Congress in London in 1913.
The internationalism of Dutch trade-unions was nevertheless in the first place a form of expressive politics, an expression of solidarity and highly symbolic. Expressive politics is mainly concerned with the spreading of principles. It had almost no associational or organizational existence. Internationalism was not a material case of bread and butter. But for the cigarmakers and transportworkers it was. So their internationalism was primarily instrumental of character. Instrumental politics can be thougt of as that which is directly geared to the attainment of concrete and specific achievements. The NAS and its affiliaties combined elements of both approaches and so did for instance the two unions mentioned before. But for both cigarmakers and transportworkers international relations were important. The transportworkers had to act on a international basis because ships could easily sail to other harbours, when there was a strike. The mobility of the employers was a problem when there was a confrontation. Cigarmakers could easily act as blacklegs, because they travelled light and there was an international migration of cigarworkers between London, Antwerpen and Amsterdam.
So there was a strong need to organize these workers beyond national borders in order to defend their shared interests. The central aim of the paper is to have a first look at the internationalism of the early Dutch trade-unions roughly over the period 1885-1903, the year of the general strike of april 1903. (Show less)

Following a growing trend of amalgamations into larger organisations in Britain during the latter half of the nineteenth century, British-based unions began to expand into Ireland and amalgamate with local unions. With the development of national markets and improved communications and transport, trade unions needed to co-ordinate their actions nation-wide. If unions were expanding and amalgamating within Britain in order to strengthen their bargaining power and financial base, and to protect their wages and standards against competition, it follows that they would also turn their attentions to organising in Ireland. Where competition between centres might exist, trade union expansion was necessary. Sympathetic action between centres in Britain and Ireland was not uncommon.

The beginning of the twentieth century brought with it a rise in nationalist sentiment and and the founding of many Irish-based unions. The question of the presence of the British-based union in Ireland was contanstly being debated by Irish labour leaders and politicians, especially following independence in 1922. Whilst many labour leaders tried to defeat the British-based union through the poaching of membership, and through the lobbying of employers, successive governments and the Irish TUC. The campaign against the British-based unions was long and continuous and often made the job of operating in Ireland an arduous one and tested the resolve of the British unions and their commitment to Ireland. Yet despite the opposition to their presence, many British-based unions continue to remain strong and active participants in the Irish labour movement.

This paper will as if the enduring presence of British-based unions in the post -independence Irish labour movement was an expression of international solidarity or the product of their organisational interests? Did the changing political and economic climate affect the attitude of the British union headquarters towards their Irish brethren and if so, to what extent did it shape their policies on the membership in Ireland? Taking three British-based unions in particular, this paper examines the different reactions of the leadership of each union to the conflicts and difficulties posed by operating in a foreign jurisdiction, and analyses the factors which informed them. What tensions existed between the organisational interests of the British unions and the interests of the Irish membership. What influence did market competition and the labour market have on decisions made by the British leadership in relation to their Irish membership? The case studies chosen for this paper are the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, the National Union of Railwaymen and the Transport and General Workers Union. These three case studies represent different types of trade union, e.g. general union, industrial union etc., and they operated in different industries. Their motivations for operating in Ireland will be examined and compared.

Finally, this paper will examine the presence of the British-based unions in Ireland in the context of the concerns of British labour and its attitude to international organisation. What was the place of the Irish branches in the British Labour movement? (Show less)