Preliminary Programme

In the 20s and 30s, it was current in Brazil the political and intellectual debates about the building of the "truthful Brazilian Nation", and of a modern and developed country, taking as reference different cases of the European countries and the USA. Besides, it was also tried the adequation of these influences to the peculiar social conditions of the Brazilian reality.
About these debates, we stress the thought of Francisco José de Oliveira Viana, an important Brazilian jurist, who produced expressive work between 1920 and 1951, when he died, which included many books, journal articles and juristic reports. Besides, in that time Viana already had his name pointed as one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals, and during the Vargas Era (1930-45) he had an important and active participation in the definition of the Brazilian political system, defined as a nationalist, authoritarian and corporative regime.
However, in this respect it is important to observe that neither Oliveira Viana`s ideas were defined in the same way and with the same references in his different works, nor was Vargas`s regime a simple application of his ideas in political practices in Brazil.
On the one hand, taking as reference all of his works, the objective of this study is to analyze what Oliveira Viana understands about nationalism, authoritarianism and corporatism, stressing their possible changes of meanings and mutual relations to building the "truthful Brazilian Nation", according to Viana. On the other hand, this study also intends to identify the possible convergences and divergences between his conceptions and the Brazilian political system in the Vargas Era, defined by historians as a nationalist, authoritarian and corporative regime.
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The social composition of the Legion of Archangel Michael in
interwar Romania has been subject to numerous scholarly controversies,
various authors emphasizing preponderantly either its peasant or petty
bourgeois components. Based on novel archival evidence, this paper argues
that the Legion was a charismatic catch-all party, incorporating diverse
elements of society, among which the most important were students,
blue and white collar workers, lower rural and urban bourgeoisie, members
of the rural and urban intelligentsia, and members of the aristocracy.
While greatly affected by the postwar upheaval, these social strata were
united by the feeling of being excluded from the benefits of the social
and political transformation.I argue that Codreanu's charismatic type of
legitimisation, based on a compensatory salvational ideology,offered the
unifying cement among these heterogeneous social strata. It managed to
mobilize socially disenfranchised and economically impoverished groups
who perceived themselves as the losers of the parliamentary political
regime,forging a new political consciousness and thus obscuring internal
social conflicts.
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The main object of study in my ongoing phd thesis in history is the Swedish party National Socialist Labour Party (NSLP), active from 1933–1950. The aim is to analyse how NSLP legitimated and made the fascist ideology intelligible by examining representations of gender, race and class in revolutionary visions and interpretations of political realities in the party propaganda. In the paper proposed for this conference I will focus on results regarding the following thematic strands:

'The elite': Representations of the party leader and the political activism in relation to the ideological visions about a new society and a new man.

'The people': Representations of the Swedish people in past time, present time and in the future in relation to desirable and undesirable values and political reforms.

'The enemies': Representations of racial and political enemies in relation to the massive critique against the contemporary society.

At the same time as NSLP strived to depict a subversive future in the propaganda the party was of course also captured in its own context. As a small party in the fringe of the public sphere, NSLP had to situate themselves and the political message in relation to central contemporary political issues, socioeconomic structures and cultural norms, in order to make the ideology comprehensible. There was a constant balance for the party trying to be responsive in how to create an appealing propaganda while maintaining the organizational unity and not abandon the ideological core.
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The main subject of the ongoing research is the diffusion and reception of thoughts of a corporatist and productivist based socio-economic system in Great Britain during the first half of the 20th Century. In the same period an increasingly lively corporative debate was taking place in Italy among thinkers close to Fascism and, as demonstrated by Charles Maier (Recasting Bourgeois in Europe), a technocratic reorganisation principle of the capitalistic society, with clear productivist elements, was spreading across Europe. The main thesis which underpins this paper is to consider Italian corporatism not as an original product of the Fascist post-war ideology, but as a national declination of a more widespread reflection about the relationship between State, society and market, begun in the Western societies at the turn of the century in response to the socio-political crisis of the Liberal State. Consequentially, this long period perspective allows us to analyse the corporatist thought on a wider and European point of view. According to the previously mentioned thesis that corporatism, having more profound roots and origins, does not belong necessary to Fascist ideology, it could be possible to find corporatist trends in a broader geographical and cultural milieu, including among non-fascist political subjects.
Notably, as in the Italian experience, ideas for a corporative society could be presented in several forms, with different tools, backgrounds and sources. The main purpose of this paper is to shed a light on the variegate and multiple British proposals of a corporate, more organised and orderly society. Those plans for a new hierarchical State were all based on the principle of social harmony and they aimed to realise, with different modalities, institutional forms of co-operation between Capital and Labour in order to increase the industrial productivity and the richness of the nation. These corporatist proposals ranged on a various and wide spectrum of possibilities and forms. It could be possible to find corporatist elements both in the pre-war and in the post-war period. Before 1914, in the theories of Gilbert K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, founders of the so-called Distributist Movement inspired by the Rerum Novarum of 1891, in the Guild Socialism – mostly prompted up by G.D.H. Cole and S.G. Hobson – , in The New Age circle or in the proto-fascist functionalist ideas of Ramiro De Maetzu. After the WWI, we can find a corporatist framework in the early thought of Harold Macmillan – leader of the Young Tories and author of books such as Industry and the State (1927) and Planning for Employment (1933) – , in the proposals for an industrial self-government drafted by some think-thank groups, such as P.E.P., The Next Fiver Year Group and the Industrial Re-Organisational League, and in the corporatist elaboration of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. All these theorisations could be ascribed to the same European corporatist trend for a different organisation of the liberal and capitalistic system.
Researching the diffusion of the corporatist thought in Great Britain – a country traditionally considered liberal and immune to organic form of representation – could be extremely beneficial in assisting us to better understand the details and nuances of the corporative phenomenon. Phenomenon that cannot be considered exclusively within a national perspective but has to be analysed on an international and comparative point of view. In fact, despite ideological and political labels, the basic idea behind this paper is that it is possible to recognise a general corporative pattern in the whole Europe that mirrored the need of new social, political and economical reform after the crisis of the Liberal State. In this sense, the United Kingdom was not an exception. (Show less)