discussing the impact of the new member states on the enforcement of EU law, "without
functioning industrial relations in the workplace, the substantive rules of European labor
law run the risk of being mere paper constructions" (Malmberg, 2004).
Likewise, the attempts of European trade unions to establish cross-border
coordination of wage bargaining also rely on the soft regulation approach of the open
method of coordination. Any such attempt at supra-national wage coordination logically
requires that institutions of wage coordination already exist at the national level, and as
we have seen, this is simply not the case in the new member states. Thus, it is hard to see
how the initiatives of western European trade union aimed at the cross-border
coordination of collective bargaining can succeed in the enlarged EU when the
institutional capacity for sectoral bargaining is missing in the new member states
(Marginson, 2006: 18).
If the prospect for European-level solutions to these challenges to Social Europe
appears dim, might national-level solutions suffice? Might, for instance, the "social
pacts" that arose in a number of western European countries around Monetary Union
(EMU) offer an avenue for social reconciliation in eastern European countries as well?
Preparation for joining the Eurozone are going to pose significant challenges for the new
member states, as budgetary constraints, even perhaps additional austerity policies, all but
rule out significant increases in social spending. However, in the case of the western
Europe, "instead of the final strike of EMU on collective bargaining and labor market
regulation, the astonished public has witnessed the reinvention of social pacts as a means
to achieve the EMU" (Kittel, 2002: 17). Unions were of course central to these outcomes;
they were welcomed into the process in part because while they might slow down
decision-making, "they can ensure decisions are not subject to constant resistance"
(Regini, 2003: 260). Yet again, the contrast with eastern Europe is stark. There, the
prospects for meaningful social pacts are judged to be bleak (Visser, 2004: 293). The
striking counter-example is again Slovenia, the first postcommunist country slated to join
the EMU, where a social pact on measures for joining the Eurozone was reached in 2003.
A similar attempt at a social pact in Poland failed; elsewhere, "the weakness of trade
unions makes it doubtful that a government might see any additional legitimacy deriving
from measures agreed to under a social pact," rather than using the currently available
Convention