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Henk, 
 
      I would agree that the Dutch have had their own variant on corporatism, which in the
study I cited is lumped in with the Scandinavian variety as more or less of that type.
Certainly the Scandinavian ones developed on their own out of their own societies without
any direct influence from the Catholic Church, in Sweden also prior to World War II.
Recent Dutch policies have often been viewed as distinctive, with recent discussions of
the "polder" system, which by referring to the Dutch dikes, give a distinctively Dutch
origin to the social harmonization policies followed there more recently.
 
      I said nothing about distribution of incomes between different sizes of firms,
although you are right that the 1891 encyclical emphasized general social harmony.  But
the rising issue then was indeed between wages and profits, and this has been the main
focus of so-called corporatist policies since.
 
     I also fully agree that Italian fascism and German naziism differed in many ways,
although I believe that when it came to labor -management relations they institutionally
resembled each other, with the "chambers" model originating in Italy and migrating to the
other fascist and Nazi regimes later, and surviving in its democratic form in Austria
until very recently.
 
     It may be that the EU's CAP was started by a Dutchman following Dutch corporatist
policies.  But it has long been argued that the overwhelmingly most important influence on
those policies have been the French, whose goal has been to protect the French farmers.  I
would say that the current distortions should be laid at the feet of the French rather
than at the foot of Dutch corporatism.
 
      I would also note that there are competing definitions of corporatism.  Thus more
recently some have identified the Mitbestimmung system in Germany of labor representatives
sitting on corporate boards as a form of corporatism.  Maybe. Claiming that planning is
corporatist is clearly extending the concept to where it does not necessarily lead.  There
is no central planning in the Scandinavian countries, and certainly this was not called
for in the original Catholic encyclical of 1891.
 
Barkley Rosser 
 
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