Dr. Thomas Zaugg

I took a PhD at the University of Zurich in 2019 with a biography of the Catholic conservative Swiss politician Philipp Etter (https://www.nzz-libro.ch/thomas-zaugg-bundesrat-philipp-etter-1891-1977-978-3-03810-437-7). This work offers insights into the cultural, economic, and social policies of a small state from the interwar years until the 1950s, while also portraying the development of political Catholicism from the authoritarian tendencies of the 1930s to the liberalisation of the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council.

After completing my PhD, I lecture at the universities of Zurich, Lucerne, and St. Gallen (https://uzh.academia.edu/thomaszaugg). I am responsible for the History Dossier in the arts section of Neue Zürcher Zeitung (https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton). Since 2022, I have been the co-editor of the online economic history Zug Goes Global together with Dr. Luca Froelicher. Together with approximately 30 authors, we describe the industrial history of the Swiss canton of Zug and its worldwide connections from the nineteenth century to the present day (https://ziw.infosnake-prev.ch/pdf/statements.pdf).

My postdoctoral project, supervised by Professor Martin Conway (Oxford University, Balliol College) and Professor Tobias Straumann (University of Zurich), focuses on corporatism. The study takes a new research approach to the history of democracy in western Europe during the transitional period between the 1930s and the 1950s. After 1945, Christian democracy and social democracy were dominant in many western European states during a phase of stability and prosperity. In the aftermath of the devastating war, however, it could not be taken as given that democracy would successfully return to Europe. Current historical research is therefore focusing more than ever on the elements and the prehistory of these post-war democrats. Their rise can be explained by a paradigm that has been reformulated in recent times and involves the development, primarily in Christian democratic circles, of a “democratic corporatism” before 1945. Despite the existence of preparatory work in the field of political science, international research on democratic corporatism is still in its infancy.

The term “corporatism”, coined in the nineteenth century, alludes to the professional organisations of medieval times. Organised associations in a different, more modern form played a key role in Europe from the 1870s onwards. Trade associations and trade unions influenced the legislature and not infrequently took the place of political parties. As early as 1900, contemporary commentators were describing the influence of the associations on politics as a “corporative” tendency and a corrective to economic liberalism. In the 1920s and 1930s, corporatist plans were executed in dictatorial states like Italy and Austria, where control was transferred to the highest political echelons, compulsory associations were established, and free trade unions were banned. After 1945, therefore, corporatism was discredited as an authoritarian concept. Nevertheless, the influence of the associations remained considerable even during the Cold War. They participated in the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and were also involved in the larger integrative process in Europe.

These new, democratic forms of corporative negotiation were decisively influenced by representatives of Christian democracy, many of whom had endorsed authoritarian political forms during the interwar years, while some had even been close to the dictatorial regimes of Italy, Austria, Portugal, and Spain. However, the Christian democrats corrected their course by simultaneously developing a democratic variant of corporatism, which was espoused by social democrats as well. These models called for an order based on professional associations or communities to give more political weight to the associations and trade unions and a greater say to the social partners without placing the associations under state control.

This transformation from authoritarian to democratic corporatism was central for western European post-war democracies. To date, the question of which thought collectives influenced one another and continued to set the tone after 1945 remains largely unanswered. My work presents the international expert discourse on corporatism with its knowledge transfers and controversies between the 1930s and 1950s. Numerous economists, social scientists, theologians, and political publicists continued to develop the concept of corporatism, which was already being discussed in the late nineteenth century, and read it as a pan-European problem. The main emphasis of my research is on Germany, France, the Benelux states, and Switzerland.