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Corporatist Ideas in Inter-war Greece: Theory and Practice
| My paper will examine the influence and dissemination of corporatist ideas in inter-war Greece. Greek intellect and politics were certainly not immune to corporatism. As a matter of fact, one sixth of the members of the Greek Congress, a legislative body that was (re)founded in 1929, were representatives of professional organisations. However, in the first decade of the inter-war period corporatist theory was a rather hazy response to rising communist agitation. Corporatist ideas became widespread in Greece in the late 1920s, following a series of agricultural crisis that inflicted the national economy. Since nearly 60% of the country’s economically active population was engaged in agriculture and husbandry, Greek corporatism became entangled with radical agrarianist and ‘peasantist’ nationalist ideas. Konstantinos Karavidas, the head of a department in the Ministry of Agriculture and a publicist who became well-known for his radical agrarianist, nationalist and corporatist ideas, developed the notion of ‘communalism’ (κοινοτισμός) as an answer to his misgivings about the agrarian co-operative movement. The global economic crisis of the 1930s, which inflicted Greece in April 1932, and the exacerbation of class conflict gave a greater incentive to conservative intellectuals and nationalist activists to elaborate on corporatist ideas. For instance, Greek war veterans espoused in 1936 the ‘full co-operation of capital and labour’, along with the other social reforms, in support of the existing social order and in the name of the attainment of ‘social justice’. Nevertheless, parliamentary democracy was a serious barrier for the application of such ideas. The establishment of the Metaxas semi-fascist dictatorial regime on 4 August 1936 turned the tables in favour of corporatism. The regime declared from the very beginning, in September 1936, its intention to establish a corporatist state, and drawing on the fascist model envisaged the establishment of a Great Council of National Labour and the Assembly of Professions. Corporatism was fully put into practice in agriculture: in November 1938 the ‘Houses of the Farmer’ replaced the Agricultural Chambers. The foundation of a Ministry of Co-operatives in September 1939 was another clear landmark towards this political direction. However, the eruption of the Second World War at the time precluded the expansion of such institutions to other sectors of the economy. Last but not least, it should be noted that corporatist ideas were not limited to conservative and quasi-fascist circles but inspired different nuances of intellectuals. For instance, Demetrius Kalitsounakis, a prominent economist of social-democratic leanings, was admittedly enticed by ‘social corporatism’.
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