Noord-Brabant en het corporatisme

romantische droom en realiteit in de lange twintigste eeuw

Samenvatting

North Brabant and Corporatism: Romantic Dream and Reality in the Long Twentieth Century

The Tilburg Academy, and particularly professor Martinus Cobbenhagen, played an important role in formulating a corporate alternative as the solution to the social tensions during the economic crisis in the thirties. The Tilburg staff members used the encyclic Rerum Novarum (1891) as the ideological base for their work. In this document, the example of the medieval guilds was used to plead for a cooperation between employers and employees. Rerum Novarum was formulated so vaguely that both more progressive and (radical) right organisations could use it in their programmes.

The efforts at the academy bore fruit after the war when, in 1950, the Law on the Corporate Organisations was accepted in parliament. The law planned the establishment of corporations and product boards. The author of the law was the Tilburg economist, Jan van den Brink. Of the proposals in the law, little was achieved. Important economic sectors, like the industry and the banking and building sectors, did not take part and soon there was criticism about the high costs of the corporate organisations. The organisations, however, played a positive role in the creation of a stabIe economic climate in the post-war years. In the 1980s and 1990s, a process of restructuring and mergers began with the result that, by 2000, only a handful of corporate organisations remained. At the end of 2014, their activities were stopped by parliament decision.