ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
corporatist traditions’, but they were soon disabused. Workers, employees, craftsmen,
trade industry and liberal professionals were to be organized into five associations, with DAF
as the peak association In 1936, with the creation of the central economic chamber, the
reorganization of employers’ associations was complete and was later articulated with DAF
and the Nazi Party, which brought Nazi Germany closer to the social corporatist model.
‘Organic’ representation was never on the cards in Nazi Germany as well. As a Nazi law
Professor wrote in 1934, ‘The German people were not a static organism in the sense of
corporatist theories, but were “followers of the Führer on the road to the
Volksgemeinschaft”. The fate of the corporatist institutions in Nazi Germany shows that
the Nazis were not willing to accept institutions that might curtail Hitler’s political power, and
political corporatism was apparently incompatible with the ‘polycracy’ evolution of the Nazi
political system in the late 1930s.
Further south, in Austria the opposite was happening in 1933 and 1934. Othmar Spann and
other corporatist ideologists had a greater presence in the political arena. In fact, the
institutionalization of Englebert Dolfuss’s dictatorship in Austria was one of the most
complete expressions of an attempt at the authoritarian fusion of social and political
corporatism under the hegemony of authoritarian political Catholicism. Its most more
significant characteristic is that it originated from an authoritarian derivation of dominant
sections of the Christian Social Party (CS – Christlichsoziale Partei), and was based on a
constitution that promoted integral corporatism and was pursued after the assassination of
Dollfuss by his successors before the indifference and sometimes hostile reaction of Austrian
National Socialists, and which was suppressed quite brutally following the 1938 Anschluss.
In Austria, corporatism was a project shared by fascist Heimwehren (home guard) and
conservative Catholics; however, the hegemony of its institutionalization by political
Catholicism was obvious. From the beginning of the 1920s the CS put forward proposals
for the partial corporatization of political representation and, by the beginning of the
following decade, under the leadership of Ignaz Seipel, the CS moved away from democracy.
This CS leader was one of the most important supporters of the corporatist option as the
‘true democracy’ in Austria In 1929, the CS repeated some of its 1919 proposals for a
corporatist upper chamber, a proposal that was rejected by the Social Democratic Workers’
Party of Austria (SDAPÖ –Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs). However, when
Dollfuss suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament, banned the political parties and
began governing with emergency powers, the transition to authoritarianism was enabled
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