Echoes of Italian Fascism in Brazil (1930-1945)

The worldwide return of nationalist and authoritarian ideologies calls for examination of its prior manifestations and spread. This Element examines the appropriation of Italian Fascism and its project of a corporative state during the 'Vargas Era' in Brazil (1930-1945), which launched Brazil into twentieth-century modernity. Though influenced by the 'transnational' and 'transatlantic' circulation of fascist ideology, emblematic of modernity at the time, Vargas and his collaborators' project of nacional-desenvolvimentismo incorporated the Italian Carta del Lavoro, shorn of its totalitarian framework, into comprehensive social legislation to respond to the challenges of modernization and the rise of mass society. It is reductive to speak of the Brazilian project as a 'copy' tout court of Fascist corporatism, because the rigid statist dirigisme of the Italian model was adapted to a particular national project, which guaranteed certain fundamental social rights and adapted corporatism in a context different from Italy between the World Wars.