‘Organic unity through a new order’: Ideas of corporatism and the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling

Abstract

This paper analyses the complex relationship between ideas of corporatism, the Norwegian fascist party Nasjonal Samling (National Unity, NS), fascist Italy, and fascist internationalism in the 1930s. It demonstrates how the NS fused the foreign corporative model provided by fascist Italy with nativist traditions and used corporatism to its ends as a signifier for a national and international ‘new order’ on the rise, based on ideas of solidarity. The NS party manifesto from 1934 envisioned corporatism as a promising alternative to capitalist liberalism and as a solution to the parliamentary crisis. The corporatist NS program also facilitated connections between the Norwegian party and Italian Fascism, culminating in the idea of corporatism as a uniting principle of fascist internationalism in the mid-1930s. Finally, the paper discusses briefly the legacy of the corporatist NS program and its fragmentary implementation in the 1940s during the German occupation of Norway (1940-1945).