An Authoritarian Third Way in the Era of Fascism

Diffusion, Models and Interactions in Europe and Latin America

António Costa Pinto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000482133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book takes a transnational and comparative approach that analyses the process of diffusion of a third way? in selected transitions to authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America.

When looking at the authoritarian wave of the 1930s, it is not difficult to see how some regimes appeared to offer an authoritarian third way somewhere between democracy and fascism. It is in this context that some Iberian dictatorships, such as those of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Salazar's New State in Portugal and the short-lived Dollfuss regime in Austria are mentioned frequently. Especially during the 1930s, and in those parts of Europe under Axis control, these models were discussed and often adopted by several dictatorships. This book considers how and why these dictatorships on the periphery of Europe, especially Salazar's New State in Portugal, inspired some of these regimes' new political institutions particularly within Europe and Latin America. It pays special attention to how, as they proposed and pursued these authoritarian reforms, these domestic political actors also looked at these institutional models as suitable for their own countries.

The volume is ideal for students and scholars of comparative fascism, authoritarian regimes, and European and Latin American modern history and politics.

1 Looking for a third way Salazar’s dictatorship and the diffusion of authoritarian models in the era of fascism

António Costa Pinto

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100119-2

In November 1940, a few months after the invasion of Denmark, a conservative circle led by an entrepreneur proposed establishing an authoritarian regime along corporatist lines to the king, which would often refer to the Portuguese dictator, António Salazar, and his New State. In 1941, a New York Times journalist visited ten Latin American countries and wrote an article expressing his concerns about Catholic sympathies towards corporatism, dictatorships, and fascism across the continent. He concluded, “Repeatedly one heard from priests and laymen throughout South America the view that the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal was an almost ideal state, and this seemed to be accepted as a fairly general Catholic view.”¹ More thorough research could have added more references, both in Europe and Latin America, and not necessarily coming from countries with a dominant Catholic political culture: from the Baltic States, the Netherlands, Vichy France, to Horthy Hungary, Vargas’s Brazil, or the Greece of Metaxas its presence is traceable, but the importance of Salazarism and some of its political institutions as a reference to follow by authoritarian leaders was well captured by this American journalist.

When looking at models for new authoritarian political institutions during the “era of fascism,” those most often mentioned throughout the late 1930s were the Italian Fascist regime and German National Socialism.² Nevertheless, with personalized leaderships, corporatist political representation as an alternative to liberal democratic parliamentarism, and the single-party built from above as the three main institutional features of the new dictatorships of the fascist era, few of them looked at Nazi Germany when crafting their political institutions. Even after Nazi Germany became the dominant power in occupied Europe during the early 1940s, the institutional construction of dictatorships by their authoritarian elites was often regarded with the relative vigilant indifference, and often outright hostility, of the occupier. The same cannot be said of Italian Fascism, which was a powerful diffusion model, particularly in respect of the corporatist Carta del Lavoro, which was perhaps the most influential and adapted document for the regulation of labour relations in the dictatorships of the 1930s and early 1940s.³ Nevertheless, there were many variations of the emulation processes, political learning and even regime promotion in various directions during the genuine authoritarian political laboratory of the era of fascism.⁴

When we look at the process of political regime change in the 1930s, it is not difficult to see how some regimes represented a third authoritarian way. As Robert de Bruin notes, despite having been “far more common in Europe during the inter-war years than fascism and communism, many historians often seem to overlook this type of political system as a contender of parliamentary democracy when speaking about the crisis of liberal democracy.”⁵ As some scholars, particularly Kurt Weyland, note, “much of the autocratic wave of the 1920s and 1930s emanated from the double deterrent effect, driven by fear of the communist left as well as the fascist right.”⁶

It is in this context that some dictatorships, such as those of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain, Dollfuss in Austria, and Salazar’s New State in Portugal, are often associated with and played a leading role in models of this authoritarian third way that appealed to interwar conservative and radical right-wing intellectuals and political and conservative elites. These were often referred to in the dynamics of debate over and construction of political institutions during the age of fascism, and when they did not serve directly as models for diffusion, they did so indirectly. Through projects for authoritarian constitutions and the design of political institutions put forward by intellectual-politicians, parliamentary commissions, or even dictators and candidates for political and interest group leaderships, these regimes offered authoritarian alternatives to liberal democracy. Notably present during the 1930s, these models were discussed and sometimes adopted by many of the puppet regimes installed in those parts of Europe occupied by the Axis. Whether because of its stability and durability or the nature of its political institutions, which created a form of ideological legitimation, the hypothesis behind this chapter is that Salazarism was one of the main protagonists in the diffusion of this third way during the era of fascism, one that embodies an authoritarian corporatist model. The Salazarist model was primarily associated with the spread of corporatism as an alternative to liberal democracy in terms of political and social representation and it was in this process that it emerged as a model.⁷

As an authoritarian “gravity centre” in the interwar period, the Portuguese New State was not the product of active propaganda or power capacity.⁸ Its force of attraction derived, essentially, from having an international means of diffusion: important segments of the Catholic Church’s organizations and intellectual-politicians, and particularly from having led a corporatist and authoritarian political system model.⁹ From this perspective, Salazar was an example of how an authoritarian “gravity centre” “can unintentionally project and produce diffusion effects or actively strive to export autocratic governance in terms of institutional settings, procedures, norms or practices.”¹⁰

How and why did Salazar’s New State inspire some of the new political institutions proposed by radical right-wing elites or created by many of these regimes? This chapter tackles this issue by adopting a transnational and comparative research approach, paying particular attention to the primary mediators of its diffusion and analyzing institutional reform processes in selected transitions to authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America.

Authoritarian models and the diffusion of corporatism in the era of fascism

Corporatism was promoted vigorously 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 socialism and liberal capitalism. Much of the model predated the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and was due to the romanticizing of medieval Europe’s feudal guilds by nineteenth-century conservatives disenchanted with liberalism and fearful of socialism and democracy. Indeed, corporatist ideas became increasingly in vogue among younger Catholics who were 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).¹¹ 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.¹² 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 made an indelible mark on the first decades of the twentieth century – particularly during the interwar period – as a set of institutions created by the forced integration of organized interests (mainly independent unions) into the state and as an organic-statist alternative to liberal democracy.¹³

During the interwar period, corporatism permeated the main political families of the conservative and authoritarian political right: from the Catholic parties and social Catholicism to radical right-wing royalists and fascists, not to speak of Durkheimian solidarists and supporters of technocratic governments associated with state-led modernization policies.¹⁴ Royalists, republicans, technocrats, fascists, and social Catholics shared “a considerable 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.¹⁵ However, there were differences between the Catholic corporatist formulations 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 more explicit, with many reinforcing “integral corporatism” vis-à-vis the social corporatism of Catholicism.

Variants of corporatist ideology spread to the global world of dictatorships in the 1930s. Some of these dictatorships, such as Mussolini’s Italy, made corporatism an alternative to economic liberalism and the symbol of a “fascist internationalism.”¹⁶ Salazarism made an aborted attempt to establish the League of Universal Corporatist Action (Liga de Ação Universal Corporativa), which was much closer to the Catholic third way as a diplomatic means of exporting the Portuguese corporatist model – the most durable of all corporatist dictatorships, which survived from 1933 to 1974.¹⁷

Under interwar 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 eliminated their independence: especially the independence of the trade unions. Social corporatism offered autocrats a formalized system of interest representation to manage labour relations: legitimizing the repression of free labour unions through the co-optation of some of their groups in state-controlled unions, often with compulsory membership. Finally, corporatist arrangements also sought to “allow the state, labour and business to express their interests and arrive at outcomes that are, first and foremost, satisfactory to the regime.”¹⁸ During this period, corporatism mainly referred to the comprehensive organization of political society beyond state-social groups relations seeking to replace liberal democracy with an anti-individualist system of 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, and thereby becoming the primary and/or complementary legislative or advisory body of the ruler’s executive.¹⁹ From this perspective, corporatism was an extremely appealing proposal for crafting and a powerful agent for the institutional building of interwar dictatorships, largely surpassing the ground from which it sprang. Since representation is an essential element of modern political systems, authoritarian regimes tended to create political institutions in which corporatism legitimized organic representation, ensuring the co-optation and control of sections of the elite and organized interests.

Often emerging in the wake of polarized democratizations, interwar dictatorships tended to choose corporatism as a process for the repression and co-optation of the labour movement, interest groups, and elites through “organic” legislatures. The constitutions, constitutional revisions, and their authoritarian equivalents are a clear indication of this dynamic.²⁰ The curtailment of this new legislature’s powers and the autonomy of an executive with a head of government who is not responsible to parliament is an almost universal proposal of corporatists in early twentieth-century Europe and Latin America.²¹

Salazarism and the authoritarian third way of corporatism

In 1937, in the context of several publications produced by the National Propaganda Secretariat (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional), led by the highly effective and cosmopolitan António Ferro, the Portuguese dictator summarized the principles of his regime in Une Revolution dans la Paix and Comment on Relève un État (A Peaceful Revolution and How to Build a State).²² The Salazarism consolidated during the 1930s was perceived by conservative elites just as Salazar intended and was defined in these publications as an authoritarian, Catholic, and corporatist alternative to liberal democracy and, while sharing their same anti-communism, an alternative to National Socialism and Italian Fascism.²³

The main characteristics and institutions of the New State, particularly those that were often highlighted as the model, are easy to describe. Starting with the leader: Salazar’s image was that of a “Catholic dictator,” who was simultaneously conservative and technocratic. He pursued a university career as a professor of economic law: his only political activity under the Portuguese liberal republic took place within the strict limits of the social-Catholic movement. The image Salazar cultivated was that of a reserved, puritanical dictator.²⁴

Salazar was an “academic” dictator. He was ideologically and culturally tradition...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• The diffusion of authoritarian models in the era of fascism. An introduction
• 1 Looking for a third way
• 2 The multifaceted appeal of the Portuguese new state
• 3 ‘Salazar’s splendid dictatorship’
• 4 Portuguese Salazarism as an example for a third way ‘renewal’ in the Netherlands, 1933–1946
• 5 Unlikely Mediterranean authoritarian crossings
• 6 Vichy and the Salazarist model
• 7 Dimitrije Ljotić and Zbor’s corporatist project for interwar Yugoslavia
• 8 Corporatist models in the ideology of the Czechoslovak National Fascist Community
• 9 The three faces of Croatian corporatism, 1941–1945
• 10 The Andes encounters the Iberian dictatorships
• 11 Selective appropriations of Iberian dictatorships and the radical right in 1930s Argentina and Chile
• 12 Intellectual debates about Catholic corporatism in 1930s Brazil
• Index