Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism

The Corporatist Wave

António Costa Pinto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000448856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism focuses on the reverse-wave of dictatorships that emerged in Latin America during the 1930s and the transnational dissemination of authoritarian institutions in the era of fascism.

António Costa Pinto revisits the study of authoritarian alternatives to liberal democracy in 1930s Latin America from the perspective of the diffusion of corporatism in the world of inter-war dictatorships. The book explores what drove the horizontal spread of corporatism in Latin America, the processes and direction of transnational diffusion, and how social and political corporatism became a central set of new institutions utilized by dictatorships during this era. These issues are studied through a transnational and comparative research design to reveal the extent of Latin America's participation during the corporatist wave which by 1942 had significantly reduced the number of democratic regimes in the world.

This book is essential reading for students studying Latin American history, 1930s dictatorships and authoritarianism, and the spread of corporatism.

Part I

Dictatorships and political institutions in the fascist era

1 Social and political corporatism during the first wave of democratization

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.¹ Some of these authoritarian institutions, created in the political laboratory of inter-war Europe, expanded across the globe, particularly the personalization of leadership, the single-party and organic-statist legislatures, and contemporaries of fascism realized some of these institutions 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’.² 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.³ In the world of inter-war dictatorships, however, both the single (and/or dominant) party and the corporatist bodies became the backbone for the institutionalization of these regimes.⁴

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.⁵ Variants of corporatism inspired conservative, radical-right, and fascist parties, not to mention the Roman Catholic Church, the ‘third way’ favoured by some sections of the technocratic elites, and even some proposals coming from the left of the political spectrum.⁶ But it mainly inspired the institutional crafting of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy through Primo de Rivera in Spain or the Uriburu dictatorship in Argentina and New State in Brazil. Some of these dictatorships, such as Mussolini’s Italy, made corporatism a universal alternative to economic liberalism, the symbol of a ‘fascist internationalism’.⁷ 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 1974.⁸ In fact, variants of corporatist ideology spread to the global world of dictatorships in the 1930s.⁹

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.¹⁰ Much of the model predates the Papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), and was due to the romanticizing of medieval Europe’s feudal guilds by nineteenth-century conservatives who had become disenchanted with liberalism and fearful of socialism and democracy.¹¹ Indeed, corporatist ideas became increasingly the vogue among younger Catholics frustrated with ‘parliamentary’ political Catholicism. 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).¹² Pope Pius XI assumed that as a result of the Great Depression, liberal capitalism and its associated political system were in decline and that new forms of economic and social organization were now needed.¹³ The powerful intellectual and political presence of corporatism in the political culture of Catholic elites in both Europe and Latin America paved the way for other more secular influences.

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 – demand a definition of the phenomenon being studied, and for the sake of conceptual clarity, to disentangle social from political corporatism:¹⁴

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’.¹⁵

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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷

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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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 towards corporatist structures developed both before and concurrently with the emergence of fascism’.²⁰ In fact, occupational representation was not limited to the world of dictatorships, with several democracies discovering complements to the typical parliamentary representation.²¹ Corporatist ideology was a particularly powerful influence in Ireland’s 1937 Constitution, for example, while several other inter-war bicameral democracies introduced corporatist representation to their upper chambers.²² France in the 1930s 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’.²³ 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.²⁴

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.²⁵ 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.²⁶

Under inter-war dictators...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Dictatorships and political institutions in the fascist era
• PART II The worlds of dictatorships in Latin America
• Index