1 Trade unions and politics in Cyprus: a historical comparative analysis across the dividing line Gregoris Ioannou (Frederick University & University of Cyprus) and Sertac Sonan (Cyprus International University) Forthcoming in the journal “Mediterranean Politics” Abstract: This article is the first comparative study on the historical development of trade unions in Cyprus. It assesses the impact of the historical trajectory and ethnic division on the contemporary condition of the trade unions, which substantially diverge from each other. It compares and contrasts the framework, conditions and forms of trade unionism across the dividing line, focusing on the current conjuncture and accounts for them using a historical institutionalist approach. It concludes that disparity is likely to persist although recent austerity policies have been posing similar challenges to the trade unions on boths sides of the divide. Key words: trade unions, north Cyprus, Republic of Cyprus, economic crisis, historical institutionalism, path dependence Introduction: Looking at the contemporary trade union landscape of the two communities in Cyprus, one may easily get the impression that rather than forming two parts of a small island, they are worlds apart. According to a recent report on the trade unions in the island (Ioannou & Sonan 2014), Greek Cypriot trade unions are much larger and active in both the public and private sectors whereas Turkish Cypriot trade unions are small, fragmented, and operating almost exclusively in the public and semi-public sectors with a negligible level of unionization in the private sector. Furthermore, while trade unions in the south have organic or close ideological ties with political parties, in the northlinks between political parties and trade unions are more obscure with their positions in political spectrum being largely determined by their stance on the Cyprus problem. At the labour relations level, collective bargaining in the Greek Cypriot community takes place at both sectoral and workplace levels with a tendency for the latter to grow at the expense of the former, while in the Turkish Cypriot community collective bargaining is overwhelmingly a public and semi-public sector affair and takes place in the latter largely at workplace level. What seems to be common about the two sides today is the fact that both communities are suffering from deteriorating labour rights and declining trade unions. Yet, when we scratch the surface, what we see is that once again, despite similar repurcussions on the respective communities, the nature of the crises they face widely differ from each other. While austerity measures are imposed by Ankara to ‘reform’ the internationally isolated and anemic Turkish Cypriot economy, which is indeed in a quagmire of political clientelism due to the Turkish Cypriot political elite’s seccessionist ambitions and hence condemned to failure at any rate (Sonan 2014), the Greek Cypriot economy is feeling the heat from the Eurozone crisis. Given the fact that the labour union movement started as a cross-ethnic affair in the 1920s, how can we explain the dramatic disparity today? This paper seeks to answer this question with a historical approach tracing the roots of their divergence in two ‘critical junctures,’ underlining the significant impact of the broader politico- economic context in trade union development: first in the period between the mid-1940s and early 1960s when