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2016

When in 1952, in a country far from Europe, President Laureano Gómez tried (and failed) to

reorganize political representation along corporatist lines, there were signs of it being the end

of an era that had begun with the regimes of Sidónio Pais in Portugal (1917-18), General

Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-31) and Italian Fascism (1922-43). A Catholic corporatist with

authoritarian tendencies close to those of Francoism in Spain, and leader of the Colombian

Conservative Party, Gómez hoped to bring about constitutional reform that would have

transformed him into the president of an authoritarian, paternalist and more confessional

state with an executive that was increasingly independent of the legislature and with a

corporatist senate

. 1

This failed experiment marked the end of an era of authoritarian

institutional reform inspired by corporatism, which was one of the most powerful

authoritarian models of social and political representation to emerge during the first half of

the 20th century.

2

Corporatism put an indelible mark on the first decades of the 20th century – during the inter-

war period particularly – both as a set of institutions created by the forced integration of

organized interests (mainly independent unions) into the state and as an organic-statist type

of political representation, alternative to liberal democracy.

3

Variants of corporatism inspired

conservative, radical-right and fascist parties, not to mention the Roman Catholic Church and

the ‘third way’ favoured by some sections of the technocratic elites

. 4

But it mainly inspired

the institutional crafting of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy through Primo de

Rivera in Spain and the Austria of Engelbert Dollfuss, and the new Baltic States. Some of these

dictatorships, such as Mussolini’s Italy, made corporatism a universal alternative to economic

liberalism, the symbol of a ‘fascist internationalism’

. 5

In peripheral Portugal, Salazarism also

made an aborted attempt to establish a League of Universal Corporatist Action (Liga de Ação

Universal Corporativa) that was much closer to the Catholic ‘third way’ as a diplomatic means

to export the Portuguese corporatist model – the most durable of all the corporatist

dictatorships, surviving from 1933 to 1974.

6

Some variants of corporatist ideology spread

across Latin America and Asia, finding fertile soil in Brazil, Turkey, India and Japan

. 7

When looking at 20th-century dictatorships we note some degree of institutional variation.

Parties, cabinets, parliaments, corporatist assemblies, juntas and a whole set of parallel and

auxiliary structures of domination, mobilization and control were symbols of the (often tense)

diversity characterizing authoritarian regimes

. 8

These authoritarian institutions, created in

the political laboratory of inter-war Europe, expanded across the globe after the end of the

Second World War: particularly the personalization of leadership, the single party and the

3