Corporatism and Fascism

The Corporatist Wave in Europe

Antonio Costa Pinto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315388885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book is the first conceptual and comparative empirical work on the relation between corporatism and dictatorships, bringing both fields under a joint conceptual umbrella. It operationalizes the concepts of social and political corporatism, diffusion and critical junctures and their particular application to the study of Fascist-Era dictatorships. The book's carefully constructed balance between theory and case studies offers an important contribution to the study of dictatorships and corporatism.

Through the development of specific indicators in 'critical junctures' of regime change and institutionalization, as well as qualitative data based on different sources such as party manifestos, constitutions and constitutional reforms, expert commissions and the legislation that introduces corporatism, this book traces transnational sources of inspiration in different national contexts.

By bringing together a number of both established and new voices from across the field, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of fascism, dictatorship and modern European politics.

Part I
Comparative perspectives

1
Corporatism and ‘organic representation’ in European dictatorships

Antonio Costa Pinto

When in 1952, in a country far from Europe, President Laureano Gómez tried (and failed) to reorganize political representation along corporatist lines, there were signs of it being the end of an era that had begun with the regimes of Sidónio Pais in Portugal (1917–18), General Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923–31) and Italian Fascism (1922–43). A Catholic corporatist with authoritarian tendencies close to those of Francoism in Spain, and leader of the Colombian Conservative Party, Gómez hoped to bring about constitutional reform that would have transformed him into the president of an authoritarian, paternalist and more confessional state with an executive that was increasingly independent of the legislature and with a corporatist senate.¹ This failed experiment marked the end of an era of institutional reform inspired by corporatism, which was one of the most powerful authoritarian models of social and political representation to emerge during the first half of the twentieth century.²

Corporatism put an indelible mark on the first decades of the twentieth century – during the inter-war period particularly – both as a set of institutions created by the forced integration of organized interests (mainly independent unions) into the state and as an organic-statist type of political representation, alternative to liberal democracy.³ Variants of corporatism inspired conservative, radical-right and fascist parties, not to mention the Roman Catholic Church and the ‘third way’ favoured by some sections of the technocratic elites.⁴ But it mainly inspired the institutional crafting of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy through Primo de Rivera in Spain and the Austria of Engelbert Dollfuss, and the new Baltic states. Some of these dictatorships, such as Mussolini’s Italy, made corporatism a universal alternative to economic liberalism, the symbol of a ‘fascist internationalism’.⁵ In peripheral Portugal, Salazarism also made an aborted attempt to establish a League of Universal Corporatist Action (Liga de Ação Universal Corporativa) that was much closer to the Catholic ‘third way’ as a diplomatic means to export the Portuguese corporatist model – the most durable of all the corporatist dictatorships, surviving from 1933 to 1974. Some variants of corporatist ideology spread across Latin America and Asia, finding fertile soil in Brazil, Turkey, India and Japan.⁶

When looking at twentieth-century dictatorships we note some degree of institutional variation. Parties, cabinets, parliaments, corporatist assemblies, juntas and a whole set of parallel and auxiliary structures of domination, mobilization and control were symbols of the (often tense) diversity characterizing authoritarian regimes.⁷ These authoritarian institutions, created in the political laboratory of inter-war Europe, expanded across the globe after the end of the Second World War: particularly the personalization of leadership, the single party and the organic-statist legislatures. Some contemporaries of fascism realized some of the institutions created by the inter-war dictatorships could be durable. As the committed early twentieth-century observer, Romanian academic and politically authoritarian Mihail Manoilescu, noted, ‘of all the political and social creations of our century – which for the historian began in 1918 – there are two that have in a definitive way enriched humanity’s patrimony . . . corporatism and the single party’.⁸ Manoilescu dedicated a study to each of these political institutions without knowing in 1936 that some aspects of the former would be long-lasting and that the latter would become one of the most durable political instruments of dictatorships.⁹

In this chapter we will examine the role of corporatism as a political device, against liberal democracy, that permeated the authoritarian right and dictatorships during the first wave of democratization, and especially as a set of authoritarian institutions that spread across inter-war Europe and which was an agent for the institutional consolidation of fascist-era dictatorships. Powerful processes of institutional transfers were a hallmark of inter-war dictatorships and we will argue corporatism was at the forefront of this process of cross-national diffusion of authoritarian institutions, both as a new form of organized interest co-optation by the state and of an authoritarian type of political representation that was an alternative to parliamentary democracy.¹⁰

Social and political corporatism during the first wave of democratization

Corporatism as an ideology and as a form of organized interest representation was promoted strongly by the Roman Catholic Church, from the late nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century, as a third way of social and economic organization in opposition to both socialism and liberal capitalism.¹¹ Much of the model predates the Papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), and was due to the romanticization of medieval Europe’s feudal guilds by nineteenth-century conservatives who had become disenchanted with liberalism and fearful of socialism and democracy.¹² Indeed, corporatist ideas became increasingly the vogue among younger Catholics frustrated with ‘parliamentary’ political Catholicism. Yet its influence on the formation of the policies of European Catholic parties in the post-war decade was limited.¹³ However, ‘the church’s explicit endorsement surely moved corporatism from seminar rooms to presidential palaces’, especially after the publication of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931).¹⁴ Pope Pius XI assumed that as a result of the Great Depression liberal capitalism and its associated political system was in decline and that new forms of economic and social organization were now needed.¹⁵ The powerful intellectual and political presence of corporatism in the political culture of Catholic elites ensured it became one of the most important elements in its spread.

Corporatism became a powerful ideological and institutional device against liberal democracy during the first half of the twentieth century, but the neo-corporatist practices of some democracies during its second half – not to speak of the use of the word within the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – demands a definition of the phenomenon being studied, and for the sake of conceptual clarity, to disentangle social from political corporatism:¹⁶

Social corporatism ‘can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically-ordered and functionally-differentiated categories, recognized or licenced (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and support’.¹⁷

Political corporatism can be defined as a system of political representation based on an ‘organic-statist’ view of society in which its organic units (families, local powers, professional associations and interest organizations and institutions) replace the individual-centred electoral model of representation and parliamentary legitimacy, becoming the primary and/or complementary legislative or advisory body of the ruler’s executive.

A central ideal of corporatist thinkers was the organic nature of society in the political and economic sphere. This was based on a critique of what Ugo Spirito called the egotistical and individualist homo economicus of liberal capitalism, which was to be replaced by a homo corporativus, who would be motivated by the national interest and common values and objectives.¹⁸

During the inter-war period corporatism permeated the main political families of the conservative and authoritarian political right: from the Catholic parties and Social Catholicism to radical right royalists and fascists, not to speak of Durkheimian solidarists and supporters of technocratic governments associated with state-led modernization policies.¹⁹ Royalists, republicans, technocrats, fascists and social-Catholics shared ‘a notable degree of common ground on views about democracy and representation’ and on the project of a functional representation as an alternative to liberal democracy, namely as constituencies of legislative chambers or councils that were established in many authoritarian regimes during the twentieth century.²⁰ However, there were differences between the Catholic corporatist formulations of the late nineteenth century and the integral corporatist proposals of some fascist and radical-right-wing parties. When we look at fascist party programmes and segments of the radical right, like the Action Française-inspired movements, the picture is even clearer, with many reinforcing ‘integral corporatism’ vis-à-vis the social corporatism of Catholicism.

Although cut from the same ideological cloth, social and political corporatism did not necessarily follow the same path during the twentieth century. The historical experience with corporatism has not been confined to dictatorships, and in liberal democracies ‘implicit tendencies toward corporatist structures developed both before and concurrently with the emergence of fascism’.²¹ In fact, occupational representation was not limited to the world of dictatorships, with several democracies discovering complements to the typical parliamentary representation.²² Corporatist ideology was a particularly powerful influence in Ireland’s 1937 constitution, for example, which called for the election of groups representing interests and services, while several other inter-war bicameral democracies introduced corporatist representation to their upper chambers.²³ France in the 1930s (and the Vichy regime) became one of the most important locations for the spread of the most significant variant of corporatist ideologies, witnessing ‘a veritable explosion of corporatist theorizing as intellectuals and politicians grappled with the implications of economic depression, social division and escalating international tension’.²⁴ In addition to the neo-socialists and technocrats, many jurists and conservative and Catholic economists translated, interpreted and promoted corporatist alternatives, with significant transnational impact, particularly the Institute for Corporatist and Social Studies (Institut d’études corporatives et sociales).²⁵

Many ideologists of social corporatism – particularly within Catholic circles – advocated a societal corporatism without the omnipresent state, but the praxis of corporatist patterns of representation was mainly the result of an imposition by authoritarian political elites on civil society.²⁶ In fact,

whatever pluralist elements there were in corporatism (notably the stress on the autonomy of corporations), they were annihilated by a foundational commitment to a supreme common good, infusing with a sense of purpose and direction a complex pyramidal edifice that had the state at its apex.²⁷

Under inter-war dictatorships, social corporatism became synonymous with the forced unification of organized interests into single units of employers and employees that were tightly controlled by the state and which eliminated their independence: especially the independence of the trade unions. Social corporatism offered autocrats a formalized system of interest representation with which to manage labour relations: legitimizing the repression of free labour unions through the co-optation of some of its groups in state-controlled unions, often with compulsory mem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• PART I Comparative perspectives
• PART II European experiences
• Conclusion: the ‘corporatist moment’ in inter-war Europe
• Selected bibliography
• Index