Citizens and Producers: Political Participation and Economic Interests in the Aftermath of World War I

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, European societies experienced a profound transformation linked to the emergence and growth of powerful economic interest groups – such as trade unions, agricultural leagues, and industrial or banking federations – which increasingly challenged the traditional bourgeois liberal and individualistic order based on restricted suffrage and limited political participation. Approaching the topic from the perspective of the history of political thought, this article investigates reform projects that, after 1919, combined corporatist and democratic principles in order to elaborate alternative systems of political participation and representation. Specifically, the article examines three cases of non-authoritarian corporatism: (a) the Portuguese constitutional reform enacted under Sidónio Pais in 1918; (b) the guild socialist project developed in Britain by G. D. H. Cole between 1913 and 1920; and (c) the Constitution of Fiume written by Alceste De Ambris in 1920. The article argues that these experiences reflected a shared European sensibility towards corporatist solutions to the crisis of legitimacy of the liberal state, centred on integrating organized economic interests into institutional decision-making processes. Although these ideas did not prevail in the interwar period, they later resurfaced – albeit in different forms – in the neo-corporatist consultation practices widely adopted in Western Europe after 1945.