A New Century of Corporatism. Neocorporatist Arrangements in Post-Communist Romania

Abstract

Almost eight decades ago Mihail Manoilescu (1938) argued that strong state corporatism would overcome other institutional arrangements like liberalism and communism, because of higher capacities for policy enforcement invested on the state by labor and capital forces, and more efficient policies pursued by the state in collaboration with hierarchical and strong interest groups. Although considered to be extinct after the WWII, corporatism was revealed in its best known contemporary forms: state and societal, in a multitude of researches and papers (Schmitter and Lechmbruch 1979; Lechmbruch and Schmitter 1982; Cawson 1985; Pekkarinen et all. 1992; Royo 2002; Iankova 2002; Streeck 1992). Between the ’30s and the ‘50s it was commonly associated with autocratic regimes, especially with the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy and Spain. The end of the WWII seemed to bring the end of an ideology that reached a high level of representation in the interwar period. The success of liberalism and communism in the WWII was supposed to represent the end of corporatism. However, corporatism had never ceased to exist under various forms in post WWII countries like Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands. Although present in these democratic countries, in a context of liberal reforms’ pressures, corporatism found new greenfields in Eastern Europe after 1989. Economic reforms in East Central Europe under the direct observation and influence of liberal-orientation IMF and World Bank have created the premises of pluralist behavior of interest group politics. Post-communist transition’s policies of collective bargaining and social agreements between government, trade unions and employers’ associations have instead revealed neocorporatist (segmental rather than national) instances of interest politics.Several questions are raised concerning the interaction between unions, employers and the state in post-communism, like what type of relationship is developed by the interaction between unions, employers and the state? what is the role of neocorporatist institutions in fighting the economic crisis? do these two interest groups act like regular civil society organization? My paper will try to address these questions.