Planning and Discussing Corporatism and the “New International Order”

The chapter analyses the institutional and cultural parable of corporatism by studying the conferences promoted by the fascist regime to involve Italian economists, jurists and social scientists in providing theoretical foundations to an economic model conceived as a “third way” between liberalism and socialism. The National Conferences of Corporative Studies, organised in 1930 and 1932 by the Ministry of Corporations under the direction of Giuseppe Bottai, saw the participation of the main fascist economists who boldly justified the “reforms” introduced by Mussolini’s government to suppress free trade unions and create corporative institutions to regulate labour relations and markets. The second conference was a dramatic confrontation between the “Right” and the “Left” of the corporatist movement, from which the latter—led by Ugo Spirito, who defended the idea of distributing the capital of joint-stock companies among the workers—was forever defeated. After 1935 the regime was urgently compelled to address more urgent problems, such as autarky deriving from the embargo that the League of Nations had imposed to Italy for the invasion of Ethiopia, and, during the Second World War, the “new international order” that would emerge after the end of the war. At this stage corporatism was either openly rejected or used as a sort of nominalistic label to define a planned, authoritarian, imperial and mixed economy, inserted in an international order in which weaker countries were reduced to ancillary, non-competing economies serving the interests of the two hegemonic powers, Germany and Italy. At this stage, the main fear was the hegemony of Germany over Italy, an issue that prompted the rediscovery of more orthodox tools of economic analysis.