Chapter 4
The Rise and Fall of CorporatistConstitutionalism: A Sociological Thesis
Chris Thornhill, University of Manchester
Introduction
In interwar Europe and Latin America, there were few societies that did not undergo, simultaneously, a political-economic and a legal-political transformation, which led to the emergence of states with pronounced corporatist features. Generally, this created states which: (a) claimed legitimacy through the internalization and mediation of class adversity by partly incorporating organized labour in the state, or at least by recognizing the autonomy of organized labour in economic legislation; (b) institutionalized an economic co-determination framework, in which both big business and big labour could participate in establishing legal parameters for industrial production; (c) gave constitutional recognition to collective socio-material rights for sectoral associations, especially those representing organized labour; (d) made provisions for state-directed judicial mediation and arbitration of industrial conflicts, often permitting public officials to issue arbitrational rulings with erga omnes force. In most cases, this process of corporatist transformation meant that states evolved constitutions that possessed at least a corporatist bias, in which labour law was constitutionalized as a vital medium for balancing the interests of rival social classes. Central to corporatism was the principle that labour law could be utilized to translate economic interests, however divergent, into a collective corpus of public law, drawing heightened public authority from the resolution of deep societal conflicts. In post-1918 Europe, some states, such as Italy in the period 1922-1927, Portugal in 1933, and Austria in 1934, devised comprehensive systems of corporatist public law,aggregating industrial interest groups in representative bodies (in professional syndicates or corporatist chambers), which were intendedentirely to integrate productive sectors in the state. Other societies, such as the Weimar Republic and the Second Republic of Spain,developed constitutions that were primarily based on a positivistic model, but which still contained clear corporatist elements. Of course, Germany and Spain converted to ultra-authoritarian corporatism in the 1930s. But their original democratic constitutions were oriented around a conception of consensualist democratic corporatism. Even in societies, such as France and the UK, which did not enshrine corporatist objectives at the level of public law, corporatist arrangements were institutionalized at sub-executive level.[1] In interwar Latin America, corporatist experiments were also the order of the day, and there were a number of short-lived attempts to create corporatist governments. Notable examples are Brazil under Vargas and Chile under Ibañez. After 1945,however, some societies, such as Argentina (1949)and Bolivia (1952), established more comprehensive corporatist orders, which, in some cases, were committed both to a deep interaction between the executive and organized labour and to a not insubstantial redistribution of domestic income.[2]
Many reasons can be given to explain the proliferation of corporatist constitutionalism after 1918, oriented towards consensual integration of the organized labour movement in political decision making. Notably, in Europe, it is widely observed, not inaccurately, that corporatist experiments established a pattern of organized capitalism, based in a deepened penetration of state activities into the economy, which was partly pursued as an attempt to assuage, or at least to contain, class conflicts, which had become politically unsettling through the franchise extensions of the years immediately before and after World War I.[3] This was in fact especially the case because of the risk that in states that had converted to democracy after 1918 newly enfranchised constituencies might be inspired by the events in Russia in 1917. In Europe, further, the corporatist turn was also driven by anxieties regarding the demobilization of vast military populations after 1918, and conciliatory techniques for production management were used as an instrument for the concerted integration of potentially volatile, still militarized, cohorts of young workers. Perhaps most persuasively, the rise of corporatism is seen as the result of the fact that World War I had already created a quasi-corporatist system of political and economic organization.[4] During the war, most belligerent states had acquired corporatist features in their economic dimensions: they had developed high-taxation fiscal regimes, they had integrated organized labour in order to accelerate and regulate production of armaments, they had established fora for peaceful co-operation between business and unions to maximize efficiency in military mobilization, and they had provided for judicial institutions in industrial units, either to soften or coercively to resolve conflicts in the production process. During the war, most belligerent states had also acquired corporatist features in their political dimensions: in addition to the above, they had peaceably integrated labour-friendly politicians into executive roles, they had created conditions for informal co-operation between parties on different sides of the economic divide, and they had established some degree of cross-party consensuson the most divisive questions of political economy.[5]To this extent, the shift towards corporatism after 1918 was in many respects not a revolutionary legal-political phenomenon. Instead, it entailed a relatively organic solidification of structures of bargaining and co-ordination, which had been informally instituted during the period of military conflict. In Europe, further, it is immediately striking that most semi-corporatist constitutions after 1918 had a strong capitalist/developmentalist emphasis. This emphasis also perpetuated tendencies initiated in the war. As in the war, developmentalism involved the use of corporatist policies to mobilize productive forces, and to stabilize the position of national economic and national states within a global system of competition.[6]
In Latin America, the historical foundations of corporatist experiments had some differences from those in Europe. In Latin America, notably, some societies experimented briefly with corporatism, but then reverted to more conventional constitutional models.[7]In Latin America, more importantly, the military context for the rise of corporatism was much less pronounced than in Europe. Leaders of corporatist transitions in Latin America usually had strong military links. In some cases, corporatism was favoured by the military transformation of political institutions – Bolivia in the aftermath of the Chaco war is a case in point.[8] Yet, in broad terms, corporatism in Latin America did not evolve against a background of military mass-mobilization. Unlike in post-1918 Europe, it is difficult to observe the main examples of corporatism, for example in Brazil and Argentina,as extensions of already extant patterns of governance, cemented through military adversity. It was only in a later period, from the 1960s onwards, that the nexus between corporatism and military rule in Latin America was intensified. In Latin America, in addition, some corporatist experiments clearly aimed at a policy of effective class equilibration. The more elaborate corporatist experiments in Europe did little factually to placate the class antagonisms which they internalized, and the rhetoric of class balancing underlying European corporatism was usually a facade. By contrast, some variants on corporatist constitutionalism in Latin America effected a substantial realignment between classes, and they clearly transformed the domestic political economy. Argentina under Perón is the most obvious example of this.[9]
Despite these divergences, however, we can see very prominent overlaps between corporatist constitutionalism in Europe and Latin America. Most obviously, first, Latin American experiments in corporatism were also stimulated by acute class-conflicts, and corporatistpolitical systems tended to be created in situations in which class antagonisms threatened to destabilize existing institutional structures and prevailing economic conventions. As in Europe, corporatist constitutionalism was established to prop up the system of political and economic management against the conflictual dynamics unleashedthrough the onset of mass democratization. Second, in Latin America, corporatism had a strong developmentalist bias; the developmentalist dimension to corporatism was even more pronounced than in Europe. As is widely documented, the rise of corporatism in Latin America was tied to a strategy of import substitution, and it was intended to stabilize the position of relatively marginal economies within an emergent global division of labour.[10]
More importantly, however, it is possible to discern a series of deeper, sociological continuities between corporatism in Latin America and Europe. Indeed, it is possible to observe that the rise of corporatism, especially as a constitutional form, crystallized the same macro-sociological processes in both these environments. In both settings, corporatism evolved as a response to similar pressures, inhering in the emergent structure of modern mass society. On this basis, moreover, it is possible to observe that in both Europe and Latin America the ultimate failure of corporatist constitutionalism was induced by similar factors, which were also deeply imbedded in a general societal structure. Accordingly, the purpose of this Chapter is to investigate the structural phenomena underlying the historical rise and failure of corporatism, and it is designed to construct these phenomena as part of a wide sociological inquiry into the formation of modern society. In so doing, this Chapter proposes the thesis that corporatist constitutionalism represents a distinct evolutionary stage in the emergence of modern national societies, the features of which are relatively constant across a variety of social and geographical contexts. The creation of a corporatist system of public law formed a key moment in a quite generalized process of institutional differentiation and societal inclusion, which runs through the evolution of national social structures. Moreover, the collapse of corporatist constitutionalism also formed a distinct moment in a general socio-evolutionary trajectory, which also be explained as part of a generalized process of societal inclusion.
The social foundations of corporatism
- Class and nation
Corporatism became a prominent legal and political form in an era in which most members of most societies were increasingly obliged to select whether they construed their social affiliations in relation to their class or in relation to their nation. It is no coincidence that the two greatest philosophers in interwar Europe were separated, in essence, by their rivalry over the question of whether class or nation provided the dominant motivation for human thinking and human action.[11] Exponents of corporatism, notably, positioned themselves self-consciously within this theoretical polarity. Indicatively, state corporatism was originally born in Italy through a fusion of syndicalism, originally linked to the organized assertion of class interests, and statist nationalism, which, after 1900,was increasingly attached to Conservative social groups.[12] As a result, proponents of corporatism explained corporatist political ideasin relation both to the politics of class and to the politics of nationality. On one hand, they saw corporatism as a means of sublating class identities intoa socially transcendent theory of integration, and of assimilating all social groups in a unifying, economically hyper-productive, ideology. On the other hand, they saw the distinction of corporatist states as residing in the fact that they were able to integrate populations through an emotive appeal, not to class interests, but to national affiliation. Unlike liberal/capitalist states, therefore, proponents of corporatism claimed that corporatist states could generate one single, encompassing, indivisible bedrock of support in society, and through this holistic appeal they were able to mobilize all society both for the political system and for economic production.[13]In these respects, corporatism sought to extract material substance from one of Max Weber’s primary sociological observations (or aspirations): namely,that affiliation to a nation could ultimately generate stronger motivations for action than affiliation to a class, and that a motivationally integrated national community could form a vital foundation for national economic growth.[14]For these reasons, the defining sociological inquiries into corporatism have often attached particular explanatory weight to the concepts of class and nation. Research on corporatismhas often argued that corporatist constitutions were constructed to palliate, or even conceivably to resolve, conflicts between social classes, and, above all, that corporatism gained popularity as a legal technique for subordinating class affiliations to the interests of the national economy, ideologically sustaining the interests of the national ruling class over the national proletariat.[15]Underlying corporatism, on most sociological accounts, is an ideological triumph of nation over class.
Focus on the relation between nation and class undoubtedly generates a vital sociological perspective for interpreting the growth of corporatism. In most cases, however, it can be observed that corporatism was not constructed through the simple subsumption of class interests under already existing national interests, and the establishment of corporatist legal orders did not result solely from nationalist endeavours to weaken the power of class ideologies. In fact, most corporatist states were created in very insecurely constructed nations, often in settings in which nations, defined as realized legal-political orders, had not been conclusively established. In such settings, corporatism was widely used as a technique, not only for the suppression of counter-systemic class affiliations in the name of national unity, but for the creation of nations as socially meaningful realities. In most states, in fact, corporatist instruments for co-ordinating interactions between diverse economic groups assumed a vital role in a twofold process of, partly coerced, national integration: these instruments were utilized bothfor the integration of different classes in the national economy and for the integration of different regional territories, and regional elites, in the larger structure of the nation state. Corporatism was thus promoted to allow national states to stabilize their position by offsetting two sets of lateral affiliations: it was designed both to placate conflicts in society caused by class divergence, and to soften antagonisms in society caused by pressures resulting from strong centre/periphery divisions. In consequence, classical corporatism can be interpreted as part of a model of nation building, in which concerted articulation between group interests was fostered in order to stabilize a uniform legal political order, incorporating, at one and the same time, otherwise highly counter-systemic economic organizations and highly centrifugal regional actors. In particular, in most cases, corporatism utilized labour law as a medium of inclusion in this dual nation-building process. Typically, corporatism revolved around the re-location of labour conflicts from the sphere of civil law into the sphere of constitutional law. In so doing, it foresaw an intensifiedpoliticization of labour law, in which labour law was used to establish bargains between rival social groups, to co-ordinate economic production in consensual fashion, and to bind regional groups into a direct relation to the central state. In each society that converted to an elaborated model of corporatism, therefore, corporatist constitutions used labour law both to secure the pacification of class conflict, and, quite expressly, to cut across and unify centrifugal regional groups.
This twofold function of corporatism is clearly observable in interwar Europe. The objective of class mediation in the corporatist experiments in interwar Europe was quite manifest. At the same time, however, corporatist experiments usually had greatest importance in societies in which the general convergence of society around the state was relatively low, and in which, accordingly, there existed a clear mismatch between the ideological construction of centralized national states and the factually existing, still clearly localized, structure of society as a whole. In such settings, corporatist constitutional norms were applied to link regional groups to the state, and to harden the centration of society, as a national society, around the state. At one level, theanti-regional aspects of corporatismwere clear enough in the nationalist rhetoric that accompanied corporatism, which proclaimed corporatist social organization as an inextricable part of strong nationhood.[16] More instrumentally, however, most corporatist constitutions in Europeans contained provisions which were clearly designed to promote regional integration just as much as class integration. Notably, for example, corporatist constitutions typically integrated accorded representation to different economic sectors in categories defined solely by professional affiliation, and most of them established unitary organs for economic delegation, in which interests of different parties were addressed without regard for distinctions between labour and management: this meant organizations on both sides of the class divide were fused in single councils.[17] Obviously, this aspect of corporatism was intended to diminish the power of lateral affiliations linked to class identities. To that end, it separated social organizationsfrom their location in the system of class conflict, and it forced organized labour to co-operate with organized business, usually on clearly unequal terms. However, the establishment of unitary professional corporations was also intended to diminish the force of lateral affiliations attached to regional identities. To that end, it detached social groups from their locations in the context of centre/periphery partitions, and it linked all workers in all regionsimmediately to the central state. In the latter respect, the integration of society in professional syndicates was clearly conceived as a mechanism by means of which the state could cut through regional loyalties and undermine sources of authority based in distinct localities. In addition, the anti-peripheral aspects of corporatism were evident in the fact that corporatist constitutions clearly provided for the cross-societal distribution of material goods through the state apparatus, and, in so doing, they provided social groups, especially disadvantaged regional groups, with strong incentives for acceptance of centralized state authority, usually in settings in which society still persisted in its traditionally localized form. In some cases, moreover,corporatist constitutional systems institutionalized particular agencies to co-ordinate relations between centre and periphery, and to ensure that the political centre had a strong hold on different regions.[18] Generally, therefore, European corporatism can be perceived as a legal/politicalorder proportioned to a twofold demand for national construction. Corporatism was created as a legal order designed to stabilize the political system in a wide social landscape marked by two deeply embedded sources of conflict – class conflict and centre-periphery conflict – both of which obstructed the rise of the political systemand prevented the emergence of relatively even, uniformly national societies.