The Emerging Euro-Polity and Organized Interests

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Abstract
European integration poses considerable and novel challenges to the associability of both capital and labor. As the locus of political decision-making shifts during this process, class, sectoral and professional interests at the national and subnational levels are confronted with the need to adapt their existing political strategies and/or to create ex novo appropriately novel organizational structures. After exploring the various alternative configurations that might be adopted by the Community, we argue that the emerging Euro-polity is not likely to become a stato/federatio and is even less to regress to a confederatio. As it moves unwillingly and unimaginatively toward becoming a novel form of political domination, either a consortio or a condominio, the range of possibilities in terms of interest organizability and intermediation widens. Sectorally or functionally specific arrangements for the regulation of product markets and supply-side governance of labor markets are compatible with a basically pluralist structure at the EC/EU level because both forms of concertation are likely to be highly selective. Furthermore, these forms of intermediation are most likely to emerge and be sustained where the relevant policy area already has a long tradition of concertation within the member states.