Suchergebnisse

The article surveys the ideological drives to the Right and to the Left in the Romanian space, as they applied to the field of labor and social policies, over the period stretching from the first local reactions taken to the corporatist restructuring of syndical organization in fascist Italy up to the installation of communism. The developments involved are placed against their early XXth century historical background and the identity of the liberal approach to the issues concerned, enjoying a dominant position over the years coming in the aftermath of the First World War, is delineated in order to be invoked as a reference against which the tenets of the rival perspectives are evaluated. The full-blown fascist and communist relevant views are related to the other varieties of right-wing and respectively left-wing demands. The issue of syndicalism is taken as the central thread of the process of change under scrutiny, and the shaping of the legislative and institutional devices meant to address the problem of the representation of professional interests in an authoritarian guise is treated as the cornerstone of the same process.

The article takes as a point of departure the prevailing association of interwar Romanian corporatism with the politics of the Right and the figure of the influential theorist M. Manoilescu
alone, having the result of historically relegating the advocacies of the kind to a rather marginal
compartment of the process of ideological development in the country. It is underscored that the interpretative tendency in question comes primarily from the legacies of scholarship shaped under communism and prone to deny any connection of significance between the corporatist view and the growth of social policies, themselves placed exclusively in relation to the social pressures of a syndical character. The search for uncovering the sense of corporatism in the context as both a model of professional association bearing upon the emergence of welfare devices and a vision of overall political reconstruction is then shown to lead towards an understanding of the interplay between the moderate and the stark authoritarian varieties of the local corporatist pleading and experimentation.

The article surveys the various stances taken in interwar Romania towards the contemporary international - particularly French - trends of legal and political theory meant at counteracting the shortcomings manifested by the legislative patterns of Napoleonic provenance when confronted with the exigencies of expanding associational life and the need of growing state intervention in the sphere of the relations between economic factors. The crisscrossing visions of federalist syndicalism and, respectively, juridical socialism - exposed most conspicuously by the legal philosophers Léon Duguit and Emmanuel Lévy - are shown to receive various evaluations in the local milieu, from the part of authors connected with the leading journal of the Romanian Social Institute and otherwise (and always by reference to the predicament of social reform in the national space). It is highlighted that the impact of the ideas involved in the debate was broader and more diffuse than one could assume when taking into consideration only the outspoken - and partly obsolete - objectives and premises of the argumentations in question.

The article takes issue with the deeply entrenched historical conception about the shaping of social policies in pre-communist Romania, which indicates socialist politics and socialist-enlisted worker trade-unionism as the only significant agents of change, also depicting the non-socialist political forces of the time as participating to the process by merely employing the strategy of stern resistance and piecemeal concessions. The alternative view offered stresses the pivotal roles performed in the context by the ideological trend of socially-minded liberalism, by the movements of professional representation with petty entrepreneurial and white-collar constituencies and by the corporatist design for the representation of professional interests. The successive stages of the inquiry leading to the formulation of such interpretative theses - and inaugurated as a research on the relation between fascist modernism and the corporatist vision of rapid economic growth under an authoritarian political cover in the local milieu - are disclosed all throughout.

The article traces the beginnings of corporatist advocacy and politics in interwar Romania to two distinct - however interrelated - paths of development: the top-down one, of ideological imports from the milieus of the rising right-wing political regimes with corporatist credentials, primarily that of fascist Italy; and the bottom-up one, leading from the grass-roots associational structures with petty entrepreneurial and white collar constituencies - themselves placed at the crossroads of the changing, and overlapping, legislative designs for the representation of professional interests - to projects of overall political reconstruction. The contextualization of Mihail Manoilescu's theory of corporatism and of the corporatist conception of professional representation itself is the larger target of the inquiry.

The article inquiries into the interplay between the discourses of cooperatism and corporatism in pre-communist Romania, by locating both trends within the fold of the drive to economic planning prevalent in the 1930's and relating them to the development of syndicalism and social policies over the long run. The sophisticated engagement of the cooperatist theorist Gromolsav Mladenatz with the spread of corporatist ideas and practice in Europe is placed at the center of the account and contextualized in the national ideological and political setting, with an emphasis on his efforts to explore the validity of the claims advanced by the contemporary economic theory with a right-wing orientation to strike a revolutionary path away from liberal capitalism, as well as on his largely negative assessment of the same claims. Mladenatz's own searches for a way out of the economic predicament of the time is shown to have led him, at the end of the period covered, towards a departure from the tenets of dirigisme (otherwise shared, on all accounts, by the cooperatist and corporatist camps). The corresponding contextualization of Mihail Manoilescu's view of corporatism, by relating it to the various strands of the Romanian politics of professional representation and to all the ideological attitudes of relevance, is the larger objective targeted all throughout.

The article broadens a typological approach to the history of Romanian ideological development centered upon an approach of the same kind taken to the evolution of ideological liberalism in the pre-communist period. Focusing on the period 1900-1940 and on three periodicals of the time, it delineates two minority liberal discourses, alongside the mainstream one of modernizing liberalism with a strong statist and nationalist commitment, best incarnated historically in the practices of the National Liberal Party and having counterparts in all East European countries. The local typology thus disclosed is then related to the world-wide evolution of the main trends of liberalism over the long run. The study underlines that the existing comparative bibliography does not offer an appropriate understanding of the varieties of liberal theory and experience within the region. The article is intended to start filling this gap of the available literature.