Transnational Labor Politics in the Global Cold War

Abstract

The historiography on international labor politics in the Cold War era, and particularly on the AFL-CIO’s global projection, seems to be advancing in leaps and bounds. It started out at the height of America’s domestic conflict about Vietnam and empire with polarized, antagonistic accounts, which lambasted the AFL’s submission to the US government’s imperial designs1 or praised its independent international campaign for free trade unionism.2 After a lull of almost 15 years, it reemerged in the late 1980s when a new crop of scholars, mostly based in Europe, addressed new issues, and some of the old ones, from a different perspective. They produced archive-based works focused not only on the nature and intent of American labor unions’ foreign policy but also on its impact and effectiveness.3 These historians framed their main questions within the contemporary debates about the political economy of Western Europe’s reconstruction and its intricate relationships with US hegemony.4