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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
. 1This 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.
2Corporatism 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.
3Variants 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
. 4But 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’
. 5In 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.
6Some variants of corporatist ideology spread
across Latin America and Asia, finding fertile soil in Brazil, Turkey, India and Japan
. 7When 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
. 8These 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
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