ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
delegates of the municipal councils. Corporatist representation, unlike the labour charter,
never officially figured in any Vichy constitutional text that saw the light of day.
While Pétain’s regime proved to be poorly institutionalized, the same cannot be said of
Catholic Slovakia, a satellite state with a status similar to that of Vichy France. When the
Slovak state was created as a German protectorate in 1939, the expanded heir of Andrej
Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (HSLS – Hlinkova slovenská l’udová strana) became the single
party, led by his successor and vice-chairman, the Catholic priest Józef Tiso, under the motto
‘One God, one people, one party’ Greatly influenced by the Austrian Catholic Church and
by Ignaz Seipel, ‘as early as 1931, [Tiso] moved away from parliamentary democracy by
endorsing the Catholic corporatism of Quadragesimo Anno‘ As Tiso noted in 1930, the
nation was a single set of origins, customs and language, constituting an organic whole
However, despite being the guide of the dictatorship and of the single party, Tiso had to share
power with Vojtech Tuka, who was more radical and had been appointed prime minister, and
whom the Germans wished to retain.
The new constitution, inspired by Salazar’s Portugal and Dolfuss’s Austria, sought to reconcile
liberal parliamentarianism with corporatism, and within the single party, the Party of National
Unity (SSNJ – Strana Slovenskej Národnej Jednoty), the pro-corporatist clerical faction was the
most important. The regime’s brief existence, Tuka’s more radical faction and the
influence of Nazi Germany and of the German minority prevented the rapid evolution
towards a consolidated corporatist and organic system.
The 1939 constitution proclaimed Slovakia a Catholic state in which ‘the nation participates in
power through the HSLS’, and in fact the single party took control of parliament The
newly created council of state developed into a corporatist upper house to advise Tiso, who
had in the meanwhile become president, and who in 1942 was to be proclaimed leader by the
Slovak assembly. Members of this Privy Council included the prime minister, the president of
the Slovak assembly and members nominated by Tiso, the single party and each corporation
(stände): moreover, in a manner similar to Mussolini’s Fascist Grand Council, this council
chose the candidates for parliament. The implantation of a corporatist system called
Christian solidarism was then programmed. All Slovaks were obliged to join one of the
corporations (agriculture, industry, commerce, banking and insurance, liberal professions,
public servants and cultural sector employees) that replaced the unions, and the political
cadres within these corporations had to be members of the single party. As in other
dictatorships, the institutionalization of social corporatism was resisted by industrialists who
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