ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
George Valois, the syndicalist ideologist of French Action (Action Française) and founder of
one of the first French fascist movements, encapsulated the functions of corporatist
legislatures when he proposed the replacement of parliament with general estates (etats
géneraux) . ‘This body was not to be an assembly in which decisions were made based on
majority votes or where the majority would be able to overwhelm the minority; rather, it was
to be an assembly in which the corporations adjusted their interests in favour of the national
interest’ In 1926, the Spanish general, Miguel Primo de Rivera, was not engaging in
intellectual romanticism when he introduced corporatist principals in his dictatorship,
proclaiming ‘the parliamentary system has failed and no-one is crazy enough to re-establish it
in Spain. The government and the Patriotic Union (UP – Unión Patriótica) call for the
construction of a state based on a new structure. The first cell of the nation will be the
municipality, around which is the family with its ancient virtues and its modern concept of
citizenship’. In Austria in 1934, Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss reaffirmed the words of the
Spanish general – words many dictators were either thinking privately or repeating publicly –
‘this parliament… will never, and must never, return again’. From this perspective,
corporatism was an extremely appealing proposal for crafting and a powerful agent for the
institutional hybridization of inter-war 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 the function of corporatism was to
give legitimation to organic representation and to ensure the co-optation and control of
sections of the elite and organized interests. ‘Working out policy concessions requires an
institutional setting: some forum to which access can be controlled, where demands can be
revealed without appearing as acts of resistance, where compromises can be hammered out
without undue public scrutiny and where the resulting agreements can be dressed in a
legalistic form and publicized as such’ Another implicit goal of the adoption of corporatist
representation, Max Weber noted, was to disenfranchise large sectors of society. As Juan
Linz states: ‘corporatism encourages the basic apoliticism of the population and transforms
issues into technical decisions and problems of administration’.
Institutionalized, in many cases in the wake of polarized democratizations, inter-war
dictatorships tended to choose corporatism both as a process for the repression and co-
optation of the labour movement, interest groups and of elites through ‘organic’ legislatures.
Nevertheless, if the introduction of social corporatism was firmly associated with the
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