Wars always increase the authoritarian, if not necessarily totalitarian, power of an executive leader, however chosen. Bill Clinton could declare a state of emergency tomorrow and would have all kinds of power to send black helicopters all across the landscape, as the right-wing loonies constantly fear.
I think the question is whether or not the mechanism for selecting a leader has become undone. I don't know when there is supposed to be another presidential election in Yugoslavia, but will His Excellency cancel it? If so, then I would say that we have dictatorship and not merely the usual increase in executive authority associated with war.
Hitler was elected, sort of, but it was clear that he became a dictator after he abolished elections and opposition parties after the Reichstag fire. The mechanism for democratically removing him was itself removed.
With respect to corporatism, clearly this is one of those fuzzy terms that gets used in a lot of ways. The AHD is not exactly the world's greatest dictionary, but... You had it right in your article that the term derives from Roman Catholic social theorizing going back into the last century. It was first used in an open political context by the Italian fascists in the 1920s which kind of soured its use for a lot of people. Modern analysts usually distinguish between "authoritarian (fascist) corporatism" and "liberal corporatism" (although Austria sometimes gets put in its own slot as "coercive corporatism"). I don't know for sure, but I would bet the term may have been invented by the French Catholic Social Christian theorist, Frederic Ozanam who participated in the 1848 revolution and was beatified by the Pope in 1997. If not by him, it certainly was in the Catholic writings of the 1890s that advocated a smoothing over of class conflict in a social Christian compact.
There are certainly plenty of other papers, including some very recent ones, that use the term as I did. I can throw some other references if you want. But like "socialism" it is a term that gets used in a lot of ways. I have seen some right-wingers use it to refer to any kind of government regulation of industry.
With respect to E-A's usage, I find this vaguely incoherent. Supposedly Sweden was not corporatist, and yet a lot of the income redistribution in Sweden was tied to one's employment. Maybe the LIS folks have bought into this, but it would seem to have some problems.
In any case, your article is very good. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, May 07, 1999 1:49 PM Subject: Re: latest LBO
>J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:
>
>> Well, I finally got my latest LBO. A few remarks, first
>>on the Hayden interview on Kosovo.
>> 1) Hayden labels Milosevic a "dictator." I think that
>>we have established on these lists that he was democratically
>>elected, however imperfectly.
>
>Hitler was elected, wasn't he? The anti-Milosevic folks in Yugo have been
>saying that the war turned his regime from an authoritarian one into a
>totalitarian one.
>
>> Congrats to Doug on the section on transfer payments and
>>poverty drawing on the LIS studies. Well done!
>
>Thanks.
>
>> My only complaint involves the use of the term "corporatism."
>>Esping-Andersen may use it to describe the German style system
>>in contrast to the Scandinavian or the British/US. But this is an
>>idiosyncratic usage out of line with how most people use the term.
>
>That may be, but it's become pretty standard in the income/poverty
>literature since E-A coined it about 10 years ago. The distinction is
>between a welfare state organized around one's membership or non-membership
>in a certain group (industrial sector, blue collar vs. white collar,
>employed vs. unemployed, male breadwinner vs. stay-at-home mom, etc.) vs.
>the universal one.
>
>Believe it or not, the word corporatism isn't in the American Heritage
>Dictionary.
>
>Doug
>