Serva ordinem... ´Cooperation or ´Stand´

The Constitution of 1 May 1934 saw an attempt made in Austria to create an alternative to parlia- mentary democracy in the form of an order based on the professional Stand (corporation). The coun- try, economically depressed and under pressure from Fascist Italy, thus attempted to establish corpora- tive structures. The failure of this attempt was due to the nature of the Stand itself which, as something organi- cally grown, is not accessible to institutionalisation. The measures required to bring about such institu- tionalisation entailed the use of authoritarian methods hence the term Austrofascism applied to the political system existing in Austria in the years 1933-1938. The fact that it rejected any form of totali- tarianism, as well as its potential for resistance to Nazism, is underestimated in the current prevailing narrative. The efforts to establish a corporative order are even more confusing given that so many contempo- rary protagonists were aware of the anachronisms and paradoxes involved. In reality, the corporation was just a means of enabling conservative thinking, in a much wider sense, to influence politics, a hangover of traditional forms of rule. As the literature has not given due credit to these tensions, this paper explores the full meaning of the term Stand. In order to avoid anachronistic misuse typical of present day concepts of democracy, the term is located in its roots in the history of Conservative politics in Austro-Hungary. The then-current scenarios, Socialism/Marxism and National Socialism, contradicted Natural Law and Catholic social teaching, which give prominence to the idea of a human person realising their full development in the community. The theory of personalism (Max Scheler) was an appropriate means of placing freedom and human dignity back on a secure footing and of protecting people against exces- sive politicisation, far-reaching control and the total activation of all dimensions of existence the defining characteristics of Fascism and National Socialism. The core of the investigation was based on the writings of those who were appointed to the federal legislative bodies established by the May Constitution, with other contemporaries also quoted. This especially means those social groups in which the notion of corporatism was particularly long-lived. In this context the so-called Austria idea, cultivated in the shadow of imminent annexation to the Ger- man Reich, also had to be thoroughly appraised: the fact that corporative thinking underlies this has too remained a largely overlooked aspect. In its innermost core, the study documents, that it is not justified to consider authoritarianism the only characteristic of the politic system in Austria. On the contrary, its intellectual roots revealed basic human sensitivities. The years 19331938 must thus be treated as an attempt at a political utopia.