Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Europe and Latin America

Crossing Borders

António Costa Pinto, Federico Finchelstein, António Costa Pinto, Federico Finchelstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138303591
• eBook ISBN: 9781351398848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XX

What drove the horizontal spread of authoritarianism and corporatism between Europe and Latin America in the 20th century? What processes of transnational diffusion were in motion and from where to where? In what type of 'critical junctures' were they adopted and why did corporatism largely transcend the cultural background of its origins? What was the role of intellectual-politicians in the process? This book will tackle these issues by adopting a transnational and comparative research design encompassing a wide range of countries.

1 The worlds of authoritarian corporatism in Europe and Latin America

António Costa Pinto and Federico Finchelstein

In 1952, President Laureano Gómez tried (and failed) to reorganize political representation in Colombia along authoritarian corporatist lines and this attempt might be the end of the first wave of corporatism associated with the era of fascism in Europe and Latin America. A Catholic corporatist with Francoist sympathies and authoritarian tendencies, and leader of the Colombian Conservative Party, Gómez hoped to bring about a 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 a time of authoritarian 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 20th century.² But corporatism was not entirely gone. After 1945, this authoritarian corporatism would be highly influential in the development of the new populism, especially in Latin America when populists first reached in power.³ If Gómez had failed, leaders like Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina will not forget the interwar legacy of corporatism.⁴

Corporatism left an indelible mark on the first decades of the 20th century – during the interwar 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 (and more rarely complementary) to liberal democracy.⁵ Variants of corporatism had 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 and even by left-wing elites.⁶ Democracies and hybrid regimes, from Ireland, to Weimar Germany, Brazil or France, were also to create corporatist institutions, but corporatism stimulated the political crafting of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy through Primo de Rivera in Spain and the Austria of Engelbert Dollfuss, to Getúlio Vargas’s ‘New State’ or the brief dictatorship of José Felix Uriburu in Argentina. Some of these dictatorships, especially Italian Fascism in the 1930s made corporatism a universal alternative to economic liberalism.⁷ As one of the most cited theoreticians of corporatism, 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

This book deals with the diffusion of corporatism in Europe and Latin America, and especially as a set of authoritarian institutions that spread across the interwar period. Powerful transatlantic processes of institutional transfers and ideological and political diffusion were a hallmark of interwar dictatorships and 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 The book represents the first attempt to analyse the transnational processes of intellectual and political diffusion of corporatism in both sides of the Atlantic and of its processes of institutionalization in Europe and Latin America.¹¹

Social and political corporatism during the first wave of democratization

Corporatism was a modern take on past forms of organization with the aim of disputing emerging forms of liberal democracy across the Atlantic and beyond. The model was the medieval corporations but the enemy were the political forms that emerged out of the ideals of the enlightenment. Also corporatism was a key dimension of what historian Zeev Sternhell has powerfully described as the anti-enligthtenement¹²

Corporatism as an ideology and as a form of organized interest representation was first promoted strongly by the Roman Catholic Church, from the late-19th through to the mid-20th century, as a third way of social and economic organization in opposition to both socialism and liberal capitalism.¹³ 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.¹⁴ The powerful intellectual and political presence of corporatism in the political culture of Catholic elites both in 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 20th century, but the neo-corporatist practices of some Dictatorships and democracies during its second half – both in Europe and Latin America and the different traditions of the use of the concept within the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – demands a conceptual clarification of the phenomenon being studied in this book. This includes disentangling social from political corporatism:¹⁵

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’.¹⁶

‘Political corporatism can be presented 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.’¹⁷

During the interwar period corporatism existed across the right wing political spectrum and beyond. It permeated the main political families of the conservative and authoritarian political right: from the Catholic parties and Social Catholicism to radical right and fascists, not to speak of Durkheimian solidarists and supporters of technocratic governments associated with state-led modernization policies. 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 20th century.¹⁸ However, there were differences between the Catholic corporatist formulations of the late-19th century and the integral corporatist proposals of some fascist and radical-right-wing parties.

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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰

In practical terms, the institutionalization of social corporatism followed models close to the proclamations contained in the Italian labour charter (Carta del Lavoro), thereby demonstrating its primacy among transnational corporatists of the time. State intervention, a large imbalance between business and labour associations (with the former having greater influence and the independence of the latter eliminated) and the creation of strong para-state institutions, was typical of almost all the corporatist experiments. In fact, the elimination of free unions and their forced integration into the state was the dominant characteristic.

However, during this period corporatism was also used to refer to the comprehensive organization of political society beyond state-social groups relations seeking to replace liberal democracy with an anti-individualist system of representation.²¹ From Oliveira Vianna or Azevedo Amaral, in Brazil, to Manoilescu in Europe, ‘what did unite the corporatist was their indifference to the concept of democracy and democratic norms’ and from this it was just a small step to corporations as a representational structure.²² Corporatist theorists presented a reasonable diversity of the ‘organic basis of representation drawing on the permanent forces of society’, in their alternatives to liberal democracy, but as the Marquis de La Tour du Pin (1834–1924) noted, this representation must be ‘essentially consultative’.²³ 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 20th-century Europe and Latin America.

It is from this perspective we revisit the processes of the institutional crafting of social, economic and political corporatism, on three axes: transnational diffusion of corporatism both across and within Europe and Latin America, travelling models and debates, and experiences of institutionalization. Thus, the book as a whole analyses corporatism as an ideology and practice of power which was widely shared and it was discussed, reformulated and applied on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book

Mihail Manoilescu is probably the most cited of corporatist authors and his works the most influential in the interwar period. His classic book, the Century of Corporatism, was translated into many languages. Less known is his role in his native Romania. In Chapter 5 (‘Mihail Manoilescu and the debate and practice of corporatism in Romania’), Constantin Iordachi gives us an excellent introduction to Manoilescu’s tumultuous political career in Romanian politics, as Minister, political activist, counsellor of King Carol II, President of his own National Corporatist League (1933–1938) and ‘fellow traveller’ of the Iron Guard, the major Romanian fascism movement. As Iordachi states, always motivated by the primary goal, ‘he set to his political activity… the complete reorganization of the Romania along corporatist lines’ – state, economy and society.

In Chapter 12 (‘The appropriation of Manoilescu’s The Century of Corporatism in Vargas’s Brazil’), Angela de Castro Gomes puts in ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’ the books of Manoilescu with the books of Azevedo Amaral, Manoilescu’s Brazilian translator in 1938 and one of the most important right-wing intellectuals and supporters of the Getulio Vargas’s ‘New State’. In a juncture where corporatism was read by Azevedo Amaral, not only as a possibility of political reform of the liberal order of representation, but as a ‘true’ model of national organization, encompassing government institutions and organizations corporatism ​became a nodal point for triggering an entire proposal for national reorganization that also significantly involved the pro-nationalization and pro-industrialization of Brazil.

Oliveira Vianna, ideologue of the authoritarian state and a legal adviser of the Ministry of Labor in the 1930s, is undoubtedly the most important author of the institutionalization of social corporatism in Brazil. In Chapter 10, ‘Fascism and corporatism in the thought of Oliveira Vianna. A creative appropriation’, Fabio Gentile analyses the appropriation of fascist and corporatist ideas in the thinking of Brazilian intellectual and functionary, Oliveira Vianna. His aim is to open a dialogue between the debate on fascism as a ‘transnational’ and ‘transatlantic’ phenomenon and the process of ‘shared-circulation’²⁴ of ideas at a global level between the two world wars. Gentile explains how corporatism was received from the Italian model and reworked in the authoritarian nationalist thinking of Oliveira Vianna.²⁵ His thesis is that fascism updated the instrumental authoritarianism of Oliveira Vianna’s search of a new model of organization for the processes of modernization that were going on in Brazil in the late 1930s.

Oliveira Vianna is very much present on Chapter 11 as well (‘Law and legal networks in the interwar corporatist turn: The cases of Brazil and Portugal’), by Melissa Teixeira. She deals with the exchange of legal ideas and promotion of shared experiments with corporatism between Portuguese and Brazilian Jurists, exploring the rise of corporatism in Brazil and Portugal in the 1930s and 1940s. Teixeira follows the le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. The worlds of authoritarian corporatism in Europe and Latin America
• 2. Corporatism and Italian Fascism
• 3. Intellectuals in the mirror of fascist corporatism at the turning point of the mid-thirties
• 4. Self-fashioning of a conservative revolutionary: Salazar’s integral corporatism and the international networks of the 1930s
• 5. Mihail Manoilescu and the debate and practice of corporatism in Romania
• 6. Corporations against corporatism in Quisling Norway, 1940–1950s
• 7. Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America: the first wave
• 8. From Rome to Latin America: the transatlantic influence of fascist corporatism
• 9. A travelling intellectual of a travelling theory: Ramiro de Maeztu as a transnational agent of corporatism
• 10. Fascism and corporatism in the thought of Oliveira Vianna: a creative appropriation
• 11. Law and legal networks in the interwar corporatist turn: the case of Brazil and Portugal
• 12. The appropriation of Manoilescu’s The Century of Corporatism in Vargas’s Brazil
• 13. Corporatism, dictatorship and populism in Argentina
• 14. Nationalist authoritarianism and corporatism in Chile
• 15. The global circulation of corporatism: concluding remarks
• Bibliography
• Index