Ambivalences of the countermovement: A proposal on how to study international trade unionism

Abstract After globalization has led to what can, by drawing on Karl Polanyi, be referred to as a disembedding of the labor market from its nationally segmented settings, recent decades bring about a development which has by a range of scholars been identified as a countermovement in the Polanyian sense. Drawing on the cases of international co-determination in Volkswagen, as well as the European minimum wage, the article draws three conclusions, with regards to the emergence of a transnational countermovement in the Polanyian sense. In order to understand if international resistance against neoliberal globalization can transform into a transnational countermovement, research has to be conceptualized from an action theoretical angle (1), take on a constructivist perspective (2), and establish a multidimensional understanding of space (3).