International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War

This is a study of the role of industrial unions in the launch of the Cold War in the 1940s. Using unpublished archival material from Europe and American, Denis MacShane challenges existing interpretations of international labour's role in the Cold War, arguing that European traditions and political differences were more important than American interventions in determining labour's attitudes to international problems after 1945. Existing interpretations which focus on national confederations such as the TUC in Britain or the AFL in America treat the question of labour and the Cold War as a political and diplomatic quarrel. Dr MacShane destroys the myth that the TUC shaped post-war trade union structures in West Germany, or that any TUC blueprint existed for German industrial trade unionism after 1945. In particular he examines trade unions in the engineering, steel, car, and metal industries who were at the peak of their power, size, and influence in 1945. Their productionist philosophy, which was powerfully tapped by the Marshall Plan, is examined to show why Leninist and Stalinist forms of trade union organization were rejected after 1945.Table of ContentInternational Trade Union politics; Metalworkers and Trade Union Internationalism 1890-1920; The impact of Communism on the International Metalworkers Federation 1920-1940; Metalworkers and the creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions; Centralism or diversity: Two world views; The American Federation of Labor and the International Labour Movement after the Second World War; Internationalism and the Congress of Industrial Organizations; The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the WFTU, and the Marshall Plan; British Metalworkers and the origins of the Cold War; British Metalworkers, Communism, and the Soviet Union after 1945; The politics of German unions after the end of Nazism; The organisation of German Metalworkers after 1945; The divisions in French Unions; External interference in French Labour; The lessons of 1945.