The double face of anti-liberalism in the era of fascism: A global approach

The first wave of democratization at the turn of the twentieth century was associated with globalization and economic liberalism, but a few years later, a global wave of autocratization constituted not only a turning point in the dynamics of globalization, especially after the crisis of 1929, but also gave rise to a political reverse wave, whose most important role of political and institutional diffusion was led by Italian fascism. This wave of autocratization was marked by a double dynamic of an authoritarian alternative to political and economic liberalism, giving rise to dictatorships that projected and built politics, and State-led social and economic institutions aimed at combating liberal democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, and liberal internationalism. The hypothesis tested in this chapter is that authoritarian corporatism constitutes the political and institutional cement of this reverse wave of the so-called ‘Era of Fascism’.