Economic Flexibility and Social Solidarity

In a recent paper, P. Schmitter (1989) acknowledges that changes in the international markets and technological advances have led to a “turnaround in the tendencies of the corporatist trend” in the western capitalist societies. The signs which indicate the decline of the institutionalised and centralised systems of the representation of social and economic interests are clearly evident. Two of the nations which since the Second World War have developed, more than others, strong Keynesian policies, are Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany. In these countries the governing social democratic parties, which in the past had ensured the regulation of relations between politics and economy on the lines of a class compromise (Bordogna, Provasi, 1984), lost their majority positions, either temporarily or definitively, in the latter half of the 1970's or thereafter. On the other hand, in Great Britain and the United States, two neoconservative administrations won and maintained their control for the whole of the 1980's. Even in Italy, where there have been governments which were not anti‐labour and where there has been a socialist executive, social concertation at a macro level has sharply declined since 1984.