Beyond Confrontation

Abstract

The proponents of globalization contend that European countries are now converging on an Anglo-American model of capitalism. Contrary to this prediction, this article shows that in Spain, globalization and the European Monetary Union have promoted rather than undermined cooperation among economic actors. Unable to escape from economic interdependence, they have developed coordinating capacities at the macro and micro levels to address and resolve tensions between economic interdependence and political sovereignty. In particular, this article analyzes the resurgence of national-level social bargaining in Spain in the 1990s. This development was partly the result of the reorientation of the strategies of trade unions. They have supported social bargaining as a defensive strategy to retake the initiative and influence policy outcomes. This article shows that successful social bargaining depends on not only the organization of the social actors, the main claim of the neocorporatist literature, but also the interests and strategies of the actors themselves.