This article compares the role of government in collective bargaining in five small West European countries. For the period until the second half of the 1970s, a distinction is made between countries in which government often interfered in wage bargaining, e. g. Denmark and The Netherlands, and countries in which government refrained from intervention, like Sweden. Belgium and, to a lesser degree, Norway. In all countries the tradition of (non)‐intervention had already started before the Second World War. The article reviews some explanatory variables: in Scandinavia centralization of labour relations is crucial, in the Low Countries the nature of politicalverzuiling. Recent developments show that government intervention has become a characteristic of labour relations in all but one countr