Busi­ness should stand up to author­it­ari­an­ism

In his excel­lent piece on the con­cerns that cor­por­ate Amer­ica is play­ing down the risks of a return to the White House for Don­ald Trump (“Wall Street’s bar­gain with Trump”, Opin­ion, Janu­ary 25), Edward Luce recalls the favour­able atti­tude of the Fin­an­cial Times and the Amer­ican busi­ness com­munity towards Fas­cist Italy in the 1930s. The June 1933 FT sup­ple­ment claims that Italy “has been remod­elled . . . under the vig­or­ous archi­tec­ture of its illus­tri­ous prime min­is­ter, Signor Mus­solini”.

This atti­tude was also shared by the Italian busi­ness com­munity of that time. As founder of the Fiat car com­pany, Gio­vanni Agnelli (Gianni Agnelli’s grand­father) used to say in the 1920s “indus­tri­al­ists are min­is­terial by defin­i­tion”.

Even though the 1930s may also seem like the dis­tant past, 20thcen­tury his­tory in other parts of the world — Latin Amer­ica or the Iberian pen­in­sula for instance — teaches us that there is no determ­in­istic rela­tion­ship between the devel­op­ment of cap­it­al­ism and the evol­u­tion of demo­cracy.

The cap­it­al­ist sys­tem can flour­ish in very dif­fer­ent social con­texts and under very dif­fer­ent polit­ical regimes — demo­cratic as well as author­it­arian.

Yet without a busi­ness com­munity ready and will­ing to stand up to author­it­ari­an­ism, soci­et­ies come to depend on the instru­ments for social inclu­sion, demo­cratic par­ti­cip­a­tion, fiscal equity and wealth redis­tri­bu­tion to pre­serve their demo­cratic future.

And that is a les­son that Europe needs to learn, as fast as pos­sible.

Valerio Tor­reg­giani
Research Fel­low in Eco­nomic His­tory, Insti­tute of Social Sci­ences, Uni­versity of Lis­bon, Por­tugal