Networks, power and politics: The power of business in Britain and Italy before and during the interwar period in comparative perspective

©Mary Brennan Rose and Andrea Colli All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission, provided that full acknowledgement is given. [This is a preliminary draft and may not be quoted without the authors' permission] One of the most striking contrasts, if British and Italian business is compared during the interwar period, is the difference in the relative political power of businessmen, especially industrialists. In interwar Italy, government-industry relations were increasingly close, with industrialists enjoying considerable power. This was despite the fact that employers' associations were imperfectly developed at the beginning of the twentieth century only emerging as economic growth gathered momentum. Even then their declared goal was not political action. Berta 1998, IX) By contrast in Britain, despite an increasing level of organization and a growing parliamentary presence, industrialists were politically impotent. imperial preference, which gained in popularity in Britain even before the First World War and gathered pace in the 1920s, were vigorous but singularly unsuccessful in securing any policy modifications. On the other hand, relations between Italian industrialists and the state were increasingly close and can best be described as reciprocal. Considerable attention has been directed towards explaining differences in the form and conduct of twentieth century government-industry relations internationally, in the twentieth century, with models varying from what has been described as the company state , as in the United States, where dominant firms lobby government through a decentralised political system, to a 'party state', as in Italy, where government-industry intermediation is through factions within the dominant political party in which industrialists are normally 'insiders'. Britain, on the other hand, has been placed somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, with arms-length government-industry relations and associations acting as negotiators between government and the state. Similarly political scientists have also explored the relationship between the political system and the conduct and construction of commercial policy (Grant 1993: 9-17; Katzenstein (ed.),1978) In terms of the political bargaining power of businessmen in Britain and Italy attention has been given at the national level to the manoeuvrings of industrialists. Italian historians have especially concentrated on the emergence of a powerful liberal, industrial bourgeoisie especially following the late 1880s' tariff reforms. (Baglioni 1974: 366 ff.; Lanaro 1979). They have also looked at the evolution of employers' associations immediately before and after the First World War against the background of 2 socialist …