ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
Students of Quisling’s short rule in Norway offer different reasons for the abrupt end to the
project to convene the Riksting and institutionalize the National Assembly. Among the
reasons was that this Riksting, with its limited authority, did not have the unanimous support
of the National Unity leadership, who feared it would be infiltrated by the old parties. There
was also some resistance from organized interests, particularly from within the economic
sector, to the forced integration into the state, while the Nazi authorities, fearing social
conflict, viewed it with suspicion. However, the most plausible explanation may be the social
resistance to ‘corporatization’, and the lack of belief that Quisling’s controlled assembly
'could be trusted as state organs’. Quisling then decided to make plans for a legislature that
was based on the single party rather than on the corporations. However, he decided to make
the Næringsting and Kulturting advisory bodies to the ministries of industry and of culture,
respectively. He announced this plan at the National Unity convention in September 1942 and
informed the party that a new constitution would have to create a new political
representation that was mainly based on the single party. The corporatist chambers should
be, in his own words, ‘exclusively of a professional and not a political nature’.
Concluding Remarks
Inter-war dictatorships created political institutions that were to become generalized after
the Second World War: personalized leadership; the autonomy of the executive; and a single
or dominant party system. The major contribution of corporatist models to these
dictatorships was to offer a ‘third way’ between economic and political liberalism and ‘class
struggle’ socialism that legitimized bringing the independence of the union movement to an
end and the (more limited) state structuring of interest groups. This is the most important
explanatory factor in the transnational spread of Italian Fascism’s labour charter (Carta del
Lavoro) among inter-war dictators. On the other hand, and independently of the extent of its
institutionalization, corporatism also offered an ‘organic statist’ model of political
representation as an alternative to liberal parliamentarism.
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