• 2 P. J. Williamson, Varieties of Corporatism. A Conceptual Discussion, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge (...)
• 3 H.-J. Puhle, “Historische Konzepte des entwickelten Industriekapitalismus. „Organisierter Kapitali (...)
• 4 Ch. S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decad (...)

3“Corporatism” is indeed a multifarious notion. When subject to historical inquiry, it easily transcends monistic attributions and demands to be tackled via a syncretic approach. Since the late 19th century, its varieties stretched widely along the political spectrum from liberal-consensual to authoritarian-coercive models2. Understood as an attempt to (re-)order modern societies in spite of labor struggle and class conflict, its local and ideal permutations are a characteristic expression of western industrial capitalism undergoing major and often critical shifts during its “organising” phase3. Seen as an answer to the crisis of liberal-democratic capitalist order, it is unsurprising that the notion and its related concepts experienced a major success since the 1920s. In its peculiarities, fascist and nationalist authoritarian corporatism – a paramount occurrence of the interwar years – thus represented one among many contingent responses towards a stabilisation of industrial societies in the unruly aftermath of the First World War4.

• 5 M. Pasetti ed., Progetti corporativi tra le due guerre mondiali, Rome, Carocci, 2006; Id., L’Europ (...)
• 6 A. C. Pinto, Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism. The Corporatist Wave, Abington-Ne (...)

4Recent scholarship – mostly within the scope of transnational and global fascism studies – has taken a major interest in the processes of circulation, transfer, and hybridisation of authoritarian corporatist doctrines. The last two decades of research indicate that, having its cradles in fascist Italy, de Rivera’s Spain, and Salazar’s Portugal from the mid-1920s onwards, forms of fascist-authoritarian corporatism soon experienced a wide reception throughout Europe. Since the fin-de-siècle, its multiform heritage ranged from reactionary national-conservatism to anti-modern authoritarian Catholicism, reform-oriented industrial liberal-conservatism, guild socialism, and revolutionary syndicalism, hence offering a rich texture of dispositions with which the new reappraisal could ideally intertwine5. At the same time, often channeled through new legislations, regime propaganda, and academic discourse arising from the Italian and Iberic peninsulas, corporatist models soon began to be transferred and adapted across the Atlantic. Throughout Latin America, the new authoritarian-coercive corporatist doctrines developed into a recurrent element in labor and institutional reforms, while the onset of the Great Depression eventually led to an increased public interest in the United States as well6. Unsurprisingly, contributions focusing on the circulation of authoritarian corporatism represent a major share of the recent literature on fascism across borders. By first testing and applying genuine transnational approaches and categories, scholarship has engaged in a crucial sector for interwar right-wing relationships across the globe and thus projected the field well beyond its traditional Europe-centered comfort zone.

• 7 D. Toro, “Brokerage as a Relational Catalyst for Fascist Entanglements. Waldemar Pabst’s Function (...)
• 8 W. Schieder, “Faschismus”, in R. van Dülmen ed., Fischer Lexikon Geschichte. Akt., vollst. überarb (...)
• 9 G. Albanese, Dittature mediterranee. Sovversioni fasciste e colpi di stato in Italia, Spagna e Por (...)

5At the same time, as innovative and dynamic as the field began to unfold, it has also crystallised around some reiterated features. On the one hand, while focusing on the actions of brokers7, most contributions primarily understand corporatism as a given set of ideas travelling across borders. On the other hand, the contextual entities involved on both sides of the transfer (be they on the exporting or receiving side) are almost exclusively technical experts, governmental actors, or state agencies. As a result, scholarship has been able to touch upon new key findings, such as the major role played by corporatist legislation and propaganda in establishing the primacy of Italian fascism as a model abroad; the adoption and adaptation of European experiences in Latin American technical discourse and institutional reforms; or the fastening of these processes through transnational academic and experts circles – as a matter of fact, all questions still unasked until only a few years ago. Accordingly, corporatism scholarship thus far has been mostly concerned with regimes, while the influence of authoritarian corporatism on fascist and right-wing movements still struggling for power has largely been neglected. The matter plays a major role in analytical terms due to the difference in terms of practices and goals between fascist movements and regimes, viz. with or without direct access to power and the state apparatus8. This historical condition becomes all the more relevant considering that, besides Italy, Spain, and Portugal, those few other countries – mostly in eastern Europe – which experienced an authoritarian takeover until the late 1920s, did so outside of an openly fascist-inspired agenda9. Furthermore, the nexus between fascism and corporatism has been investigated mostly on a genuine discursive or ideal basis as a matter of cultural-ideological transfer. Even when reconnected to the question of economic agencies reform, institutional implementation, labor legislation, and overall regime development, the issue has been regarded as the circulation of technical knowledge by experts and organisations. Thus, the practical aspect of the notion “corporatism”, and especially its action-informing dimension on a transnational stage, if considered at all, are mostly boiled down to the circulation of intellectual influences on regime building.

• 10 Such the definition of fascism sketched by Michael Mann, Fascists, Cambridge, Cambridge University (...)

6The question of how corporatist ideas informed transnational fascist political action outside any access to power still remains unanswered. Against this historiographical backdrop, the present article investigates the practice-informing role of corporatism amidst transnationally intertwining fascist movements. In doing so, it aims at showing that corporatism represented a key notion orienting the relational agency of right-wing formations towards a common, transnationally shared vanishing point. It argues that corporatism worked as a projection into the near future – a promise of socio-economic-political reordering of the state to be fulfilled after the upcoming takeover that informed present actions of diverse movements and national milieux towards a mutually shared, even if only vaguely specified, horizon. Resonating with the core fascist expectation of a nation-state eventually cleansed from enemies and minorities through violence10, this produced a synchronisation of expectations among movements that enabled their mutual networking beyond present-day tensions, real-political conflicts, and overall dispositional incommensurability. In other words, corporatism offered a largely undefined vanishing point in the nearest future which was able to transcend the conflicts of the present by mutually re-orienting practices and dispositions towards a shared expectation. Accordingly, while the following paragraph sketches a conceptual localisation of corporatism as a practice-orienting projection, the third section presents an empirical overview of processes of transnational synchronisation via shared corporatist notions as observable in the case of the German-Austrian-Italian fascist networks of the early interwar years. The conclusion summarises those empirical findings and outlines the major analytical implications emerging from these cases.

• 11 A. Kallis, “The ‘Fascist Effect’. On the Dynamics of Political Hybridization in Inter-War Europe”, (...)
• 12 M. Pasetti, L’Europa corporativa, op. cit., pp. 169-189.
• 13 Ph. C. Schmitter, “Still the century of corporatism?”, The Review of Politics, vol. XXXVI, no. 1, (...)
• 14 S. Berger ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe. Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformat (...)
• 15 A. Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2010; Id., “The corporativism of Fas (...)

7The syncretic elasticity of corporatist notions across political divides and sociocultural borders presents a key analytical challenge. Of course, this adaptivity was deeply embedded in the authoritarian hybridisation processes unfolding since the mid-1920s and having corporatism at their core11. At the same time, they are also a consequence of the analytical tension emanating from a perceived gap between institutional reality and regime propaganda. Arising from the international political debates between pro- and anti-fascists voices following the earliest corporatist reforms pursued by the Italian regime since 1925/26, this dichotomy resonated in the subsequent “universalistic” export of the fascist model abroad as well as in large part of the contemporary and later scholarly discussion on the topic12. Since the 1970s, neo-institutionalist approaches have offered a solution to this analytical tension by interpreting corporatism as an “actual practice” embedded in a specific “system of interest representation”13. Historical scholarship increasingly adopted this input and called for an analysis of corporatism in terms of practices and the sociocultural background on which they relied14 – a plea more recently applied also in scholarship on the Italian corporatist model, its historically observable mechanisms, and its coeval reception abroad15.

• 16 R. O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, New York, Knopf, 2004, pp. 9-15.
• 17 S. Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde. Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und i (...)
• 18 Th. Welskopp, “Der Mensch und die Verhältnisse. „Handeln“ und „Struktur“ bei Max Weber und Anthony (...)

8The analytical conflation of notions operationalised by scholars on corporatism resonates with those approaches within fascism studies that, in order to overcome the evident dissonances between fascist sayings and actions16, put practices in the spotlight17. By aiming at the analytical intersections and interplay between structures and agency, collectives and individuals, processes and events, idea and action, praxeological approaches offer a syncretic perspective able to recollect the facets and contingent complexity of embodied human doings beyond reductive dichotomies18. Accordingly, a praxeological viewpoint allows us to operationalise the new-institutionalist understanding of corporatism as an historically given practice oriented towards a system of social representation and facilitates its inquiry in historical terms. What is more, it enables to investigate the influence of corporatism well beyond its immediate technical-institutional discourse and to trace its influence within distant, and hitherto unsuspected, spheres of political action. For example, it facilitates an understanding of corporatism as informing the doings of formations outside of governmental spheres and without any immediate chance of legislative influence. In other words, the study of practices unveils those spheres of influence of corporatism which remained well below the state-governmental stage.

• 19 M. Emirbayer and A. Mische, “What is agency?”, American Journal of Sociology, vol. CIII, no. 4, 19 (...)

9Nevertheless, to understand this nexus it is necessary to localise the exact place of corporatism in the transnational action of fascist movements. From a relationalist standpoint, human agency – and fascist transnational agency along with it – can be analytically unfolded as the mutual intertwining of three temporally oriented spheres: an “iterational element” consisting of “past patterns of thought and action”; a “practical-evaluative element” embracing “the capacity of actors […] to make practical and normative judgements among alternative possible trajectories of action”; and a “projective element” entailing “the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action”19. In the historical case of fascist movements striving for power, corporatism remained largely confined to the projective sphere. Experiences of economic crises, social unrest, and labor struggle (iterational) shaped and reiterated the extreme nationalist dispositions of right-wing formations and individuals. These habits informed the recurrent recourse to radical action in the present (practical-evaluative) as much as the expectation of gaining power, cleansing the nation-state and eventually realise the imagined national or racial community around a new social order based on a hierarchical, exclusionary, and corporative system in the future (projective).

• 20 D. Werberg, Der Stahlhelm – Bund der Frontsoldaten. Eine Veteranenorganisation und ihr Verhältnis (...)
• 21 A. Salvador, “Frontsozialismus der Tat. War Experience as the Foundation of Corporatism in the Sta (...)

12Founded in December 1918 as a veteran organisation engaged in re-establishing the status quo in the revolutionary aftermath of World War I, the Stahlhelm soon diffused throughout the Reich and became the leading right-wing paramilitary organisation until the rise of the NSDAP and its SA from 1930 onwards. Primarily grounded into the protestant national-conservative milieu in central-northern Germany and eastern Elbe Prussia, due to its porous federal structure and the suppression of competing organisations since late 1923, the league experienced a rapid expansion of its membership profile and ideological spectrum. By the mid-1920s, its federal leadership under founder Franz Seldte (Magdeburg) and his more intransigent, competing second, Theodor Duesterberg (Halle/Saale), tightened its bounds with the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) and took the organisation towards a distinctly party-political and uncompromising radical nationalist turn in which revisionism, revanchism, antisemitic völkisch nationalism and paramilitary training coexisted with increasingly minoritarian national-conservative attitudes20. The Stahlhelm’s corporatist views had been shaped by previous völkisch tendencies and by the experience of war. Already since 1918/19, the league – joined by a growing number of workers after 1923 – had attempted to practice a “Frontsozialismus der Tat” (Front socialism of action) and aimed at building a hierarchically solidary “Volksgemeinschaft” (People’s community) on the backdrop of an idealised veteran front camaraderie. This worldview, shaped along the leading principle of a new soldatischer Nationalismus and later further developed into the notion of an all-encompassing “organic state”, resonated in the establishment of communitaristic representative bodies – such as the Deutscher Arbeitnehmerverband (DAV), the Stahlhelm Selbsthilfe with its own Betriebsgruppen, or the Bund für die organische Wirtschafts- und Staatsaufbau (BOWS) – under the aegis of the league, and was deeply influenced by its internal political advisor, the catholic-authoritarian Heinz Brauweiler21.

• 22 F. L. Carsten, Faschismus in Österreich. Von Schönerer zu Hitler, Munich, Fink, 1977; C. E. Edmond (...)
• 23 L. Höbelt, “Italien als Vorbild für Österreich? ,Berufsständische Ordnung‘ und ,Corporativismo‘”, (...)

13A similar process of radicalisation, from catholic ordo-conservatism to a more radical nationalism, was experienced by the Heimwehren during the 1920s. Founded in 1919/20 as a plethora of regional formations embedded within the conservative catholic milieu throughout rural Austria, they mainly consisted of small landowners, white-collar workers, and state servants (both civilian and military). In 1926, the individual regional groups gathered around the uncompromising Steidle (Tyrol) and his deputy Pfrimer (Styria). Their anti-democratic and authoritarian course was also pursued – albeit with growing internal tensions – after the leadership fell into the hands of the philofascist Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (Upper Austria) and the national-catholic Emil Fey (Vienna) in September 1930. Like the Stahlhelm, the Heimwehren represented the major paramilitary formation in the Austrian First Republic up to the rise of the Austrian branch of the Nazi party (“NSDAP-Hitlerbewegung”) in the early 1930s22. The corporatist foundations of the Heimwehren were rooted in a different background than the Stahlhelm’s military-collectivism. The guards’ leadership was much closer to the technical-scholarly debates on a universally valid, holistic, and organic “true State” promoted in Vienna since 1920 by Othmar Spann and his lively elitist academic circle – first and foremost, his above-mentioned disciple and Heimwehr federal leadership member Heinrich23.

• 24 T. W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich. Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft, Opladen, Westde (...)

14Compared to Stahlhelm and Heimwehren, the NSDAP represents a unique specimen. On the one hand, its ideal and practiced radicality distinguished the Nazi party and its SA from most right-wing movements on the domestic and European stage, while its late emergence on the German stage following the Great Depression made it a political outsider for most of the 1920s. On the other hand, before and after access to power, NSDAP notions of a new social order were heavily influenced by the absolute primacy of an all-encompassing, organic-biological “Volksgemeinschaft” racially cleansed and unified under Hitler’s utterly vertical authority as the indisputable people’s and party leader. Thus, the new organic order envisioned by the NSDAP was based on the absolute primacy of a racial-biological rationale. Accordingly, class struggle had to be overcome and labor relations among members of the “Volkskörper” (people’s body) harmonised, while employees were expected to perform at their best to serve the higher interest of the community and to deserve their belonging to the Volk. The Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellen-Organisation (NSBO, National Socialist Factory Cell Organisation) had been founded in 1928 against this backdrop with the aim – at least in the party leadership self-understanding and propaganda – to help establish a corporative social order among blue collar workers24.

• 25 G. Albanese, “Non solo propaganda. Il modello fascista all’estero”, in Id. ed., Il fascismo italia (...)
• 26 Á. Alcalde, War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 20 (...)
• 27 G. E. Rusconi, L’azzardo del 1915. Come l’Italia decide la sua Guerra, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005, p (...)
• 28 A. Gruber, Südtirol unter dem Faschismus. 3., überarb. Aufl., Bozen, Athesia, 1973, pp. 20-44; R.  (...)

15For more than a decade, Stahlhelm, NSDAP, and Heimwehren were confronted with an unprecedented historical peculiarity. Being the first fascist formation coopted into power by conservative elites, the Partito Nazionale Fascista and its quickly unfolding regime served as an example for right-wing formations abroad since the earliest aftermath of the “March on Rome”25. At the same time – and herein lies the peculiarity –, the fascination emanating from the Italian example put leading German-speaking formations at unease due to conflicting worldviews on two crucial right-wing issues: war experience and national territorial integrity26. On the one hand, Italy had fought at the side of the allies during the war, thus becoming not only a military enemy, but also a “traitor” due to its refusal to support the Central Powers notwithstanding its previous ratification of the Triple Alliance27. On the other hand, this first incongruence reverberated with the South Tyrolean question: since November 1918, the Kingdom of Italy had occupied and then annexed the German-speaking province in amendment of Wilson’s ninth point and in fulfillment of the Treaty of London of 1915. What is more, only a few weeks after accessing power, the fascist-led Italian government hat implemented its repressive nationalisation policies of forced “Italianisation” against German-speaking residents28.

• 29 S. V. Kofler, Adolf Hitler Entlarvt! Die Südtirolfrage im öffentlichen Diskurs 1920 bis 1939, Boze (...)
• 30 D. Toro, “Fascist transnationalism. The networking process between the German, Austrian, and Itali (...)

16Under Hitler’s insistence, and not without repeated internal resistances, the NSDAP renounced to any claims over South Tyrol by the half of the 1920s in the hope (which remained futile until 1930) to obtain a political endorsement by and a later strategic convergence with the Italian regime29. But Stahlhelm and Heimwehren had major problems in coming to terms with these issues. Some sectors of both organisations saw Mussolini’s regime as a forerunner and welcomed its support, but the contradiction between this attraction and the allegiance to the nation was too blatant to be ignored and constituted a clear incommensurability on the path for closer cooperation30. In other words, the interaction with Italian fascism was heavily jeopardised both on the basis of a mutually positively shared past experience, disposition, or habit (iterative) and in terms of an openly shared set of current political decisions, activities or initiatives (practical-evaluative).

• 31 R. Gerwarth, “Fighting the Red Beast. Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Cen (...)
• 32 M. Pasetti, L’Europa corporativa, op. cit., pp. 31-58.

17It was here that corporatism came into play with its projective function. The revolutionary uprisings following World War I – a major, traumatic rupture in the development of European right-wing and early counter-revolutionary movements31 – had fostered the search for a representative system with which to impose a new ordering stability onto industrial societies in all three countries. The early rediscovery of domestic corporatist models within the German, Austrian, and Italian fascist-nationalist milieux represented parallel responses to coeval and comparable domestic developments. At the same time, these close and originally distinct “corporative revivals”32 offered a shared background on which all three organisations could unfold mutual recognition and interaction. On its side, the Italian regime had soon caught the chance to present its corporatist turn as a path-breaking innovation. Linked to the earliest attempts of cross-border propaganda in the mid-1920s, this soon caught the attention of organisations abroad. Thus, by the second half of the decade, Stahlhelm, NSDAP, and Heimwehren also became interested in the Italian case and its supposedly novel “third way”.

• 33 D. Werberg, op. cit., p. 21, p. 195.

18Until the end of the 1920s, these ideas had not thoroughly permeated yet and domestic traditions remained predominant in projections of a new order. This was for example the case of the “Fürstenwalde Hate Declaration” pronounced by Elhard von Morozowicz, Brandenburg leader of the Stahlhelm, during a local gathering of the organisation on 4th September 1928. The statement, representing a key moment in the increasing radicalisation of the Stahlhelm against the Weimar Republic33, had intertwined the refusal of parliamentarism, the opposition to Marxism and class struggle, and the renewal of the nation with the idea of an organically structured community under a new social and statal order:

• 35 A. Salvador, op. cit., p. 115.
• 36 W. Wiltschegg, op. cit., pp. 311-312; L. Höbelt, op. cit.; L. Kerekes, Abenddämmerung einer Demokr (...)
• 37 D. Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit. Zur internationalen Freizeit- und Sozialpolitik des faschistische (...)

19Representatively, the “Hate Declaration” had took place in a social setting – the local gathering of a radical-nationalist organisation – bearing some analogies to the one of the “Korneuburg”. But differently than two years later under the Heimwehr in Korneuburg, in Fürstenwalde there had been no open reference to the Italian example. It was in fact exactly during this same period, shortly after its foundation in early 1928 and still prior to the Great Depression, that the Stahlhelm Selbsthilfe developed first traits inspired by the Italian model and converged towards the idea of an autarchic and organic community of veterans fighting against hostile disintegrating forces, such as socialism, trade unions, and capitalism35. By 1927/28, the Heimwehren, too, had started to look south of the Alps due to their closer cooperation and the conspicuous material support arriving from Rome via Budapest36. At the same time, the future leader of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF, German Labor Front) Robert Ley developed his long-lasting interest in Italian corporatism and labor organisations such as the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND, National Afterwork Organisation) and vainly attempted to organise a study trip to Italy with some NSDAP deputies of the Prussian parliament as early as in 192937.

• 38 K.-P. Hoepke, Die deutsche Rechte und der italienische Faschismus. Ein Beitrag zum Selbstverständn (...)
• 39 K.-P. Hoepke, op. cit., p. 150.
• 40 M. Wichmann, Waldemar Pabst und die Gesellschaft zum Studium des Faschismus 1931-1934, Berlin, Org (...)
• 41 Ibid., pp. 103-108.

21Fascist economic doctrines and their universal value and applicability abroad were for example a recurrent topic during the hearings which Mussolini granted to distinguished guests, among them many Germans, at Palazzo Venezia. Within this framework, actors as crucial for the broad public diffusion of Italian corporatist paroles within the late Weimar Republic as the author Hans Reupke and the philosopher Georg Mehlis had a privileged personal exchange with the dictator, respectively in 1931 and 193438. Reupke himself, who by 1931 had been author of three pamphlets on the topic and joined the NSDAP that same year39, following his visit to Mussolini gave a talk and discussed with a public of some fifty people, among them also the special guest Starhemberg, in the newly founded Gesellschaft zum Studium des Faschismus (GSF, Society for the Study of Fascism) in Berlin on the “Social idea within fascism and its realization” with a peculiar twist on its potential implementation in Germany40. The GSF, bringing together members of DNVP, Stahlhelm, NSDAP, big business agents, academics, and more generally the Prussian right-wing establishment, had soon discovered economic issues and Italian corporatism as an adhesive able to coalesce a ragbag of diverging political-organisational profiles around a loosely shared interest. Accordingly, some of the lecture evenings following Reupke’s, soon developing in happenings for the local milieu, revolved around topics such as “Professional associations, how they are and how should they be in consideration of fascist syndicates”, “Fascism or a German national economy with an organically built self-administration?”, “Right of association and labor unions in the new state” or “Economic turn through social individual economy”41.

• 42 D. Toro, “Brokerage as a Relational Catalyst for Fascist Entanglements”, op. cit.
• 43 L. Kerekes, Abenddämmerung einer Demokratie, op. cit.
• 44 M. Pasetti, “The Fascist Labour Charter and its Transnational Spread”, in A. C. Pinto ed., Corpora (...)
• 45 W. Wiltschegg, op. cit., pp. 309-315, esp. pp. 310-311.

22The mastermind of the GSF, the German former Freikorps leader and putschist Waldemar Pabst, being based in Innsbruck and Vienna during the decade previously to his return to Germany in 1931, had assumed a crucial brokering function in radicalising and intertwining the Heimwehren with the PNF and the German milieu – a role which, as mentioned above, had already allowed him to redraft the “Korneuburg Oath”. Backed by Steidle as his Austrian patron, Pabst had decisively contributed tailoring the convergence between the Austrian paramilitaries and the Italian regime42. Originally oriented towards conspicuous material and financial fascist support as to counter social democratic efforts in and outside Vienna and thus pave the way for an eventually never realised coup attempt in the future43, this form of cooperation came into being in the few early months following the fascist Carta del Lavoro in April 1927 with its universalist afflatus44. Along with – and partially also ex post through – Pius XI’s Encyclical Quadragesimo anno later on in 1931, the Carta del Lavoro represented a major inspiration paving the way for the Heimwehren’ interest in Italian authoritarian corporatism, so that since the late 1920s the idea of a berufsstädnische Wirtschaftsordnung (professional-corporative economic order) became a widely discussed agenda item for the federal Heimwehren leadership and its closer scholarly experts45.

• 46 L. Höbelt, op. cit., pp. 93-96, esp. p. 95.
• 47 M. Wichmann, op. cit., pp. 97-98.
• 48 L. Höbelt, op. cit., pp. 98-99.

23Symptomatically, all debates and exchanges of ideas on an inter-organisational level remained rather vague, if they not consisted in an utterly redundant sequence of dissonances: Walter Heinrich saw the Italian experience with some condescension as a theory-less and contingent empiricism46; Reupke criticised Spann as reactionary and took unsurprisingly the Italian side47; the Italian government did not acknowledge the “Korneuburg Oath” as a profession of fascistisation and expected resolute action, rather than words48. Behind the often bombastically technical titles and the vehement paroles, in other words, lied a surely genuine, but often naïve and poorly informed interest for political developments beyond national borders. This vagueness was, of course, a consequence of the lack of shared language and goals between the refined expert knowledge on the one hand and the everyday political agenda of the organisations and their driving actors on the other. Moreover, the primacy of the respective national experiences which was so pivotal in the horizon of all right-wingers across Europe dissolved foreign experiences in an inextricable discursive crossfire of lack of information and ethnonationalist chauvinism. Thus, neither Morozowicz as a ringleading tribune could or wished to reach the rhetoric finesse or deepen the technicalities of the academic discourse in Fürstenwalde, nor Spann’s disciple Heinrich revealed able as a national economist to boil down his sophisticated scholarly ideas into a practically feasible political agenda for antisocialist paramilitaries in Korneuburg, nor Reupke’s translation attempts of the Italian experience or his critique against Spann’s views were particularly successful in making the fascist case feasible of particular trust in the eyes of his GSF public.

• 49 A. C. Pinto ed., Corporatism and Fascism, op. cit.; Id., Latin American Dictatorships, op. cit.
• 50 D. Werberg, op. cit., pp. 227-286.
• 51 L. Höbelt, op. cit., pp. 103-104.
• 52 A. Gagliardi, op. cit., pp. 106-116.
• 53 M. Wildt and M. Buggeln, op. cit., pp. xiv-xvi; D. Liebscher, op. cit.

26Firstly, there is an evident absence of path dependencies following the spread of the Italian model. Rather, as the cases discussed above show, the early Central European “corporatist wave”49 developed through locally distinct domestic responses to a supra-national crisis of the industrial liberal-democratic order. Stahlhelm, NSDAP, and Heimwehren originally relied on quite different traditions and understanding of corporatism. Despite the convergence produced through the contact with the Italian case in the mid-1920s, this did not necessarily lead to an overall implementation of a shared representative system: the Stahlhelm was eventually dismembered within the “Third Reich” and its corporatist projects left space for the predominantly racial Nazi understanding of a “Volksgemeinschaft”50; the Austrian “Ständestaat” nominally, but never practically reintroduced long dismissed Heimwehren concepts from the 1920s in its 1934 constitution51; Italian fascism eventually started setting up its corporations in institutional terms only in 1933/3452; the Nazi regime quickly implemented its own institutional understanding of an organic society in a tense competition with – rather than adaption of – the Italian model along the notions of Betriebsgemeinschaft (factory’s community) and Leistungsgemeinschaft (performance community), viz. through the newly established DAF, the leisure organisation Kraft durch Freude (KdF), the Treuhänder der Arbeit (Trustees of Labour) and the Labor Law of 1934 (Gesetz zur Ordnung der Nationalen Arbeit)53.