ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
of interest groups to the state. Moreover, from its promulgation in April 1927, the Carta
del Lavoro was heralded by its promoter as a ‘universal document’. In Bottai’s words, through
this corporatist charter, Italy regained its pre-eminence among nations. The great depression
increased the pace of the popularization of corporatist policies and its institutions spread
across Europe and the world. Corporatism was now, more than ever, a transnational keyword
that met the expectations of the dictators and conservative political elites.
The institutionalization of political corporatism was, however, very much slower in Fascist
Italy. In the celebrated Futurist manifesto of 1918, Filippo Marinetti announced the
‘transformation of parliament through the equitable participation of industrialists, farmers,
engineers and businessmen in the government of the country’ However, even before their
fusion with the National Fascist Party (PNF – Partito Nazionale Fascista), the nationalists of
Enrico Corradini and Alfredo Rocco were the most systematic ideologists of integral
corporatism and national syndicalism. For Rocco, this integral syndicalism represented both
the integration into the state of organized interests and the elimination of parliament and
senate in favour of bodies representing professions and other functional groups Rocco’s
statism was perhaps the most different from Catholic corporatism since it was a strategy for
the passive and subordinated integration of the masses into the state.
Many authors stress the primacy of institutional reform over the economic question in Italian
Fascism. In the inaugural speech of the Fasci di Combattimento (Italian League of
Combatants), Mussolini immediately referred to the need for the ‘direct representation of
interests’, which was also noted in the PNF’s 1921 programme Mussolini and the PNF had
institutional reform and the elimination of liberal representation in mind ever since the
March on Rome of 1922; however, the ‘legal’ nature of the Fascist seizure of power, the
presence of a monarch who was heir of the liberal period and some inter-institutional
conflicts, particularly with the PNF, ensured the process was slow and full of tension
The first concern of the Fascists was to secure political control of parliament, which they
quickly achieved, while eliminating its capacity for legislative initiative and declaring the
independence of the executive and the head of government Following this, corporatist
representation was an ever-present in the proposals for the abolition of a parliament that
managed to continue existing – at least formally – for a few more years. The capacity to
implement fully the reform introducing corporatist representation were limited. There were
significant differences between the projects of Giuseppe Bottai, in which the institutions of
the Chamber and the senate were illogical and meaningless in a corporatist state, and more
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