How did the Soviet bloc affect the development of West European social policies?

What is it about?

How did the Soviet Union and its European satellite states – as competitors and role models – affect the development of West European social policies? The article develops this question on the basis of the case of workplace democracy policies. The article re-traces the evolution of expert discourse within the International Labor Organization (ILO) on the issue of worker participation in management decision-making at the work place. Here, several communist regimes, including Yugoslavia but also Poland and even the Soviet Union, struggled to win the bureaucratic legitimacy of the ILO for their domestic worker participation policies. The article shows how expert discourse within the ILO eventually came to treat East European worker participation reforms as relevant, comparable, and even exemplary to the West European experience. Furthermore, ILO publications legitimized and spread European communist regime self-portrayals of their domestic worker participation reforms. Secondly, the article also maps the timing of worker participation reforms across Europe, showing how East European reforms preceded and were co-constitutive to a pan-European process of policy isomorphism, arguably adding momentum to the late 1970s wave of West European upgrades of existing systems of worker participation.

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Why is it important?

In studies of cultural globalisation, the influence of communist regimes on Western Europe has remained under-theorised and little explored. Addressing this gap in research, this article puts forward the glocalisation grid of world polity theory as a means for conceptualising and investigating how East European communist regimes helped shape the evolution of West European welfare states during the Cold War.

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