ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
influence on institutional reform was limited. In 1938, a very moderate proposal – more a
project of social concertation than of corporatist organization – was approved by the senate.
The Rexist Party (Parti Rexiste) led by Leon Degrelle emerged from a split within Catholic
Action in November 1935. Independently of the complex path followed by Degrelle’s Rexists
on their way to fascism, this movement’s roots were within the Catholic camp and did not
escape the rule of the authoritarian radicalization of corporatist representation as a means of
differentiating themselves from the conservatives. However, Rexism’s growing criticism of
parliamentarianism went beyond corporatism, which was not a central theme of their
political agenda. Other examples of similar tensions could be provided – from Romania to
Portugal – as we shall see below.
Although cut from the same ideological cloth, social and political corporatism did not
necessarily follow the same path during the 20th century. The historical experience with
corporatism has not been confined to dictatorships, and in liberal democracies ‘implicit
tendencies toward corporatist structures developed both before and concurrently with the
emergence of fascism’ In fact, occupational representation was not limited to the world of
dictatorships, with several democracies discovering complements to the typical parliamentary
representation Corporatist ideology was a particularly powerful influence in Ireland’s 1937
constitution, for example, which called for the election of groups representing interests and
services, while several other inter-war bicameral democracies introduced corporatist
representation to their upper chambers. France in the 1930s (and the Vichy regime) became
one of the most important locations for the spread of the most significant variant of
corporatist ideologies, witnessing ‘a veritable explosion of corporatist theorizing as
intellectuals and politicians grappled with the implications of economic depression, social
division and escalating international tension’. In addition to the neo-socialists and
technocrats, many jurists and conservative and Catholic economists translated, interpreted
and promoted corporatist alternatives, with significant transnational impact, particularly the
Institute for Corporatist and Social Studies (Institut d’études corporatives et sociales).
Many ideologists of social corporatism – particularly within Catholic circles – advocated a
societal corporatism without the omnipresent state, but the praxis of corporatist patterns of
representation was mainly the result of an imposition by authoritarian political elites on civil
society In fact, ‘whatever pluralist elements there were in corporatism (notably the stress
on the autonomy of corporations), they were annihilated by a foundational commitment to a
supreme common good, infusing with a sense of purpose and direction a complex pyramidal
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