ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

34 / 60

ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
dictatorships in Estonia and Latvia, which were only brought to an end with the Soviet
invasion of 1940. The most elaborate attempt to institutionalize corporatist regimes in the
region took place under Konstantin Päts in Estonia and Karlis Ulmanis in Latvia.
The institutionalization of social and political corporatism in the Baltic States illustrates both
the greater distance from the cultural matrix of corporatism in Catholicism and the radical
right, as well as its almost immediate employment as an alternative to liberal
parliamentarianism. In Estonia, for example, Päts was far removed from the ideological and
cultural origins of his peers in Southern Europe.
Despite the influence of the Catholic Church and a generous concordat in Lithuania, the swift
concentration of power to President Smetona caused a number of conflicts between the now
dominant party, the Tautininkai, and the Christian Democrats, which had initially been
involved in the pro-authoritarian coalition. By the end of the 1930s, this party had a youth
wing and a militia. Parliament eventually became a simple consultative body and the
president elected by ‘special representatives’ of the nation selected by the dominant party;
however, despite this, pressures for the official party to have a more active role were not
supported by the president.
Corporatist economic bodies were established during the 1930s, and even if it was the
opposition Christian Democrats who explicitly advanced the idea for the creation of an
organic state, its implementation became central to Smetona’s political discourse. The
strategy for controlling parliament involved an electoral process in which the candidates were
selected by the municipalities and not the political parties, which had in the meanwhile been
dissolved. The dominant party obtained an overwhelming majority in the parliament that had
mere consultative powers. With Smetona being glorified as the ‘leader of the people’,
Lithuania became the first authoritarian single-party state of the Baltic countries.
After the silencing of parliament following the 1934 coup d’état in Estonia, in 1935 Päts
dissolved the political parties and sought to create a single party, the Fatherland League
(Isamaaliit), to support the president. This party was not so very different in its origins and
initial functions from those of its peers, such as the UN in Salazar’s Portugal, the UP of Primo
de Rivera or the Fatherland Front in Austria, and its elite had been co-opted from the former
political parties. With the hostility of the local radical right organized in the Vaps movement,
which was banned and periodically persecuted, Päts’ strategy in the meanwhile illustrated
that the ‘expropriation of the more popular ideas and external forms of fascism by
32