ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
organic-statist legislatures. Some contemporaries of fascism realized some of the institutions
created by the inter-war dictatorships could be durable. As the committed early 20th-century
observer, Romanian academic and politically authoritarian Mihail Manoilescu, noted, ‘of all
the political and social creations of our century – which for the historian began in 1918 –
there are two that have in a definitive way enriched humanity’s patrimony… corporatism and
the single party’ Manoilescu dedicated a study to each of these political institutions without
knowing in 1936 that some aspects of the former would be long-lasting and that the latter
would become one of the most durable political instruments of dictatorships.
In this chapter we will examine the role of corporatism as a political device, against liberal
democracy, that permeated the authoritarian right and dictatorships during the first wave of
democratization, and especially as a set of authoritarian institutions that spread across inter-
war Europe and which was an agent for the institutional consolidation of fascist-era
dictatorships. Powerful processes of institutional transfers were a hallmark of inter-war
dictatorships and we will argue corporatism was at the forefront of this process of cross-
national diffusion of authoritarian institutions, both as a new form of organized interest co-
optation by the state and of an authoritarian type of political representation that was an
alternative to parliamentary democracy
Social and political corporatism during the first wave of
democratization
Corporatism as an ideology and as a form of organized interest representation was promoted
strongly by the Roman Catholic Church, from the late-19th through to the mid-20th century,
as a third way of social and economic organization in opposition to both socialism and liberal
capitalism Much of the model predates the Papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), and
was due to the romanticization of medieval Europe’s feudal guilds by 19th-century
conservatives who had become disenchanted with liberalism and fearful of socialism and
democracy. Indeed, corporatist ideas became increasingly the vogue among younger
Catholics frustrated with ‘parliamentary’ political Catholicism. Yet its influence on the
formation of the policies of European Catholic parties in the post-war decade was limited.
However, ‘the church’s explicit endorsement surely moved corporatism from seminar rooms
to presidential palaces’, especially after the publication of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno
(1931). Pope Pius XI assumed that as a result of the Great Depression liberal capitalism and
its associated political system was in decline and that new forms of economic and social
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