ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
as the state-led forced integration of interest groups into para-state structures and especially
of the decapitation of independent union movements transcends the inter-war period;
however, the process of political engineering through which these dictatorships provided a
channel for complex interest group structure co-optation became a blue print of the 1930s.
In the Portuguese New State, Dollfuss’s Austria, Tizo’s Slovakia and even in Spain under
Franco, political Catholicism was a greater presence than in Vichy France, Estonia or Quisling’
Norway, for example. However, this is central in the design of a common heritage for the
creation of structures of interest intermediation, for the dissolution of independent unions
and the establishment of state-led bargaining structures within these regimes. Even when
such institutions remain on paper, as in the case of Greece under Metaxas, the outlines are
very similar. The institutional design of some projects in German-occupied Europe are also
very instructive, since they were the product of regimes that found a ‘window of opportunity’
enabling them to implement social corporatism because of its local strong ideological
presence rather than as a result of pressure from the Nazi authorities. That was clearly the
case in Vichy, Slovakia and Quisling’s Norway.
The quasi-universal adoption of social corporatism by inter-war dictatorships was not always
followed, as some theorists anticipated, with the institutionalization of corporatism as a
representational structure. However, even where it was, the creation of ‘organic legislatures’
should not be separated from the creation of the regime parties – whether single or
dominant – that provided legitimation for the abolition of political pluralism, forcing the
authoritarian coalition to merge in a single or dominant party under personalized rule.
As we have seen above, very few inter-war European dictatorships existed without a single or
dominant party. If the regimes of Italy and Germany were based on a takeover of power by a
fascist party, many civilian and military rulers of inter-war Europe did not have a ‘ready-made
organization upon which to rely’. In order to counteract their precarious position,
dictators tended to create regime parties. Some fascist movements emerged during the inter-
war period either as rivals to or as unstable partners within the single or dominant
government party, and often as inhibitors to their formation, making the institutionalization
of the regimes more difficult for the dictatorial candidates – as in the case of Vichy or
Romania. However, almost all of the inter-war dictatorships created (or attempted to create)
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