Corporatism in Interwar Romania: Overlapping Sources and Competing Varieties

Abstract

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.