In 2013 the ETUC celebrated its 40th anniversary and on that occasion commissioned a study of the history of the ETUC. The second volume of this study has an emphasis on the relation between the ETUC and its national member organizations. he conferences gathered scholars from various disciplines (history, industrial relations, political economy and sociology) to debate the specific relationships of national trade unions with the process of European integration and the role that the ETUC have played in this concern. In general the various ETUC members hold different conceptions about how European integration should be evolving. Typically there had been two extreme tendencies. One position represented by those who believe that the process of European integration should take a federalist position in which the ETUC would play the role of creating a European trade union movement and a transnational social and industrial relations dimension. Another for whom the process of European integration could not impinge in the autonomy of national actors to define their own national social models and therefore the ETUC would attempt to influence various EU policies to preserve this plurality without engaging into a convergence towards a common social European model. The conference was organized by Sigfrido Ramírez Pérez, Jens Arnholtz and Eva Hartmann, and was generously sponsored by the EURECO initiative at the University of Copenhagen