Corporatism and Development in the Iberic-Latin World: Persistent Strains and New Variations

Abstract

Wherever one looks in the Iberic-Latin world, corporatist or neocorporatist forms of authority and sociopolitical organization appear to have staged a resurgence. One is used to thinking about such traditional states and societies as Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Paraguay in terms of their authoritarian and corporatist structures, and Portugal has by now been a self-proclaimed corporatist state for some 40 years. We shall have more to say regarding these “persistent strains” later on; what concerns us now is the apparent reemergence of corporatist ideology and organization in a variety of rapidly modernizing systems. Brazil, for instance, has always been less corporatist than Portugal in theory and in law, but today is probably just as corporatist in actual practice. Research on Mexico has by this time largely abandoned the approach that stressed that country's quasi-democratic character or its supposed democratic aspirations in favor of an approach that takes Mexico on its own terms and analyzes its frankly authoritarian and corporatist structures. The resurgence ofPeronismoin Argentina clearly carries with it echoes of the corporatist, in this case “justicialist,” solutions of the 1930's and 1940's. In Peru the military elite has vowed to carry through a “revolution from above” employing corporatist ideas and organizations to structure popular participation at the grass-roots and intermediary levels and reaching up to the Council of Ministers and the central state apparatus. And of course in Chile we have seen both Allende's abortive design to install a unicameral legislature based on corporative functional representation, as well as the plans by the generals that overthrew him to inaugurate a similarly functionally representative congress (though obviously the groups represented and their weights would be significantly different in these two designs) and to deal with price, wage, and production issues through a government regulated and controlled system ofgremio-sindicatorelations.