The Nature of Fascism Revisited

THE NATURE OF FASCISM REVISITED ANTÓNIO COSTA PINTO THE NATURE OF FASCISM REVISITED SOCIAL SCIENCE MONOGRAPHS, BOULDER DISTRIBUTED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK 2012 © 2012 António Costa Pinto ISBN 978-0-88033-666-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009939128 Printed in the United States of America For my son Filipe Contents !. List of Figures and Tables vii 2. Preface and acknowledgements ix 1. Fascists: A ‘revolutionary right’ in interwar Europe ! 2. The origins of fascist ideology: The Sternhell debate "# 3. New interpretations (I): The constituencies of fascism $% 4. New interpretations (II): Conceptual problems &' 5. Fascism, dictators, and charisma %# 6. Ruling elites, political institutions, and decision- making in fascist-era dictatorships: Comparative perspectives (# 7. Fascism, corporatism, and authoritarian institutions in interwar European dictatorships !!# 8. Index !)! List of Figures and Tables Figures 5.1 *e charismatic triangle 82 Tables 5.1 Forms of political legitimation 85 6.1 Ministers’ occupational background (%) 108 6.2 Political o+ces held by ministers (%) 109 7.1 Dictatorship and corporatism in Europe (1918–45) 125 Fascism, corporatism, and 7 authoritarian institutions in interwar European dictatorships Corporatism put an indelible mark on the -rst decades of the 20th century, both as a set of institutions created by the forced integration of organized interests (mainly independent unions) in the state and as an organic-statist type of political representation alternative to liberal democracy.1 Variants of corporatism inspired conservative, radical right, and fascist parties, not to mention the Roman Catholic Church and the third-way options of segments of the technocratic elites. It also inspired dictatorships – stretching from António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portuguese New State through Benito Mus- solini’s Italy and Engelbert Dollfuss’ Austria, right across to the new Baltic states – to create institutions to legitimate their regimes. *e European variants spread throughout Latin America and Asia, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey.2 When we look at 20th-century dictatorships we note a large degree of institutional variation. Parties, cabinets, parliaments, corporatist assemblies, juntas, and a whole set of parallel and auxiliary structures of domination, mo- bilization and control were symbols of the (often tense) diversity character- izing authoritarian regimes.3 *ese authoritarian institutions, created in the 1 Like Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, we use this expression to refer to the ‘vision of political community in which the component parts of society harmoniously combine... and also because of the assumption that such harmony requires power and the unity of civil society by the architectonic action of public authorities-hence organic-statism’. See A. Stepan, The state and society: Peru in comparative perspective, Princeton, NJ, 1978; J. J. Linz, Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Boulder, CO, 2000, pp. 215–7. 2 See P. H. Lewis, Authoritarian regimes in Latin America: Dictators, despots, and tyrants, Lanham, MD, 2006, pp. 129–54; D. Musiedlak, ed., Les experiences corporatives dans l’aire latine, Bern, 2010; T. Parla and A, Davison, Corporatist ideology in Kemalist Tur- key. Progress or order?, Syracuse, NY, 2004. 3 A. Perlmutter, Modern authoritarianism. A comparative institutional analysis, New Ha- ven, CT, 1981, p. 10. 120 !e nature of fascism revisited political laboratory of interwar Europe, expanded across the globe after the end of the Second World War: particularly the personalization of leadership, the single-party and the organic-statist legislatures. Some contemporaries of fascism had already realized some of the institutions created by the interwar dictatorships could be durable. As the committed early 20th-century ob- server, 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 de-nitive way enriched humanity’s patrimony... corporatism and the single party.’4 Manoilescu dedi- cated 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.5 Interwar dictatorships were personalized authoritarian regimes:6 even those regimes that were institutionalized following military coups or military dictatorships gave rise to personalist regimes and attempts to create single or dominant regime parties.7 However, autocrats need institutions and elites to exercise their rule and their role has often been underestimated as it has been taken as a given that decision-making power was centralized in the dictators.8 To prevent the undermining of their legitimacy and the usurpation of their authority, dictators need to co-opt elites and to either create or adapt institutions to be the locus of the co-optation, negotiation, and (sometimes) decision-making: ‘without institutions they cannot make policy concessions.’9 If the typical fascist regimes of Italy and Germany were based on a take- over of power by a party, many civilian and military rulers of interwar Europe did not have a ‘ready-made organization upon which to rely.’10 In order to counteract their precarious position, dictators tended to create regime parties. 4 M. Manoilescu, Le parti unique: Institution politique des regimes nouveaux, Paris, 1936, p. viii. 5 M. Manoilescu, Le siècle du corporatisme, Paris, 1934; Manoilescu, Le parti unique. 6 A. C. Pinto, R. Eatwell and S. U. Larsen, eds, Charisma and fascism in interwar Europe, London, 2007. 7 More than half of all 20th-century authoritarian regimes ‘initiated by militaries, parties, or a combination of the two, had been partly or fully personalized within three years of the initial seizure of power’. See B. Geddes, ‘Stages of development in authoritarian regimes’, in V. Tismaneanu, M. M. Howard and R. Sil, eds, World order after Leninism, Seattle, WA, 2006, p. 164. 8 A. C. Pinto, ed., Ruling elites and decision-making in fascist-era dictatorships, New York, 2009. 9 Geddes, ‘Stages of development’, p. 185. 10 J. Ghandi, Political institutions under dictatorship, Cambridge, 2008, p. 29. Fascism, corporatism, and authoritarian institutions 121 Some fascist movements emerged during the interwar period either as rivals to or unstable partners within the single- or dominant-government party, and often as inhibitors to their formation, making the institutionalization of the regimes more di+cult for the dictatorial candidates. Interwar dictators also established controlled parliaments, corporatist assemblies, or other bureaucratic-authoritarian consultative bodies. Autocrats also need compli- ance and cooperation and, in some cases, ‘nominally democratic institutions can help authoritarian rulers maintain coalitions and survive in power,’11 and corporatist parliaments are legitimating institutions for dictatorships and are also sometimes the locus of that process. In this chapter we will examine the role of corporatism as a political device against liberal democracy that permeated the political right during the -rst wave of democratization, and especially as a set of authoritarian institutions that spread across interwar Europe and which was an agent for the hybridization of the institutions of fascist-era dictatorships. Powerful proc- esses of institutional transfers were a hallmark of interwar dictatorships, and we will argue corporatism was at the forefront of this process, both as a new form of organized interest representation and as an authoritarian alternative to parliamentary democracy. Social and political corporatism during the !rst wave of democratization Corporatism as an ideology and as a type of organized interest representation was initially promoted by the Roman Catholic Church from the late-19th through to the mid-20th century as a third way in opposition to socialism and liberal capitalism.12 Much of the model predates the Papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), and was due to the romanticization of medieval Eu- rope’s feudal guilds by 19th-century conservatives who had become disen- chanted with liberalism and fearful of socialism and democracy. 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).13 Corporatism became a powerful ideological and institutional device against liberal democracy during the -rst half of the 20th century, but the 11 Geddes, ‘Stages of development’, p. 164. 12 M. Conway, ‘Catholic politics or Christian democracy? *e evolution of interwar political Catholicism’, in W. Kaiser and H. Wohnout, eds, Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–45, vol. 1, London, 2004, pp. 235–51. 13 R. Morck and B. Yeung, ‘Corporatism and the ghost of the third way’, Capitalism and Society 5, no 3, 2010, p. 4. 122 !e nature of fascism revisited neocorporatist practices of some democracies during its second half – not to speak of the more recent use of the word within the social sciences – demands a de-nition of the phenomenon being studied, and for the sake of conceptual clarity, to disentangle social from political corporatism: Social corporatism ‘can be de-ned as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory,

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