Intercultural Neo-Corporatism - A Possible Alternative to Liberalism?
Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2025 8:03 am
Intercultural Neo-Corporatism: Re-Embedding Economy, Culture, and Community
Introduction
The political landscapes of the late modern world are marked by fragmentation, disaffection and an increasingly visible disconnect between government institutions and the citizens they claim to represent. In many established democracies, corporatism once acted as a mechanism to stabilise this relationship, drawing trade unions and organised business into structured negotiation with the state. Yet, as Wyn Grant’s analysis of interest group politics in Britain reveals, neo-corporatism entered a long decline from the 1970s onwards as globalisation, ideological realignment and the breakdown of traditional social cleavages dissolved the foundations on which it rested. Simultaneously, single-issue campaigns, identity-based activism and online mobilisation began to reshape the political terrain. The question is no longer whether corporatism can be restored in its old form, but whether a new political architecture can respond to the pressures that destroyed it.
This essay argues that a synthesis between interculturalism and a post-liberal form of neo-corporatism offers such a framework. Interculturalism supplies the cultural, relational and dialogical components that classical corporatism lacked, while neo-corporatism supplies the structural, negotiated and communitarian elements that contemporary identity politics lacks. The result is a model that re-embeds economic governance within cultural communities, decentralises authority and constrains corporations not through technocracy but through shared participation. It is also a model compatible, though critically, with certain aspects of Alain de Benoist’s post-liberal thought, particularly his critique of liberal individualism, economic disembedding and the homogenising tendencies of global capitalism. However, this compatibility is conditional: the ethnopluralist rigidity of Benoist’s cultural separation must be rejected in favour of the intercultural emphasis on hybridity, exchange and relational identity. What remains is a political-economic architecture capable of negotiating diversity without collapsing into fragmentation or domination.
The Decline of Neo-Corporatism
Neo-corporatism was never merely an economic arrangement. It was a political settlement: a system in which the state, organised labour and organised business acted as the primary negotiators of national economic policy. Grant’s account identifies corporatism as the first phase of post-war group politics, built on the assumption that labour and capital both possessed strong, cohesive associations capable of delivering consent. As he notes through the work of Samuel Beer, corporatism was deeply rooted in British political traditions of consultation, especially at the level of producer groups. The model worked, in a limited way, because the economy was national, industries required collective wage restraint, and unions and employers’ associations possessed enough internal discipline to enforce agreements.
But the conditions that enabled corporatism became precisely those that undermined it. Grant’s synthesis of Streeck, Beer and Eichengreen identifies three families of explanation: structural, operational and normative. Structurally, globalisation hollowed out national economic autonomy, rendering domestic wage-setting arrangements obsolete. Operationally, unions and employers struggled to maintain internal discipline, delivering neither wage restraint nor productivity gains. Business increasingly bypassed associations and sought direct access to government. Normatively, Thatcherism reframed interest politics as rent-seeking and rediscovered the political acceptability of unemployment, shattering the Keynesian assumption of full employment as a central state duty.
Corporatism, then, was not overthrown but decayed from within. Grant shows that its disappearance opened the space for a second and then a third phase of group activity: cause-oriented movements and eventually single-issue identity or lifestyle-driven activism. Without corporatist structures to aggregate demands, politics became increasingly fragmented and emotive. The Blair era did not restore corporatism but replaced it with direct, often opaque channels between government and large corporations. The result was not pluralistic coordination but asymmetrical influence, what Grant calls a “company-state” tendency. Where corporatism attempted to embed economic power within a negotiated structure, its absence allowed economic power to become disembedded from society and re-embedded directly in the executive.
The Contribution of Interculturalism
If neo-corporatism collapsed because the social cleavages it relied on fragmented, interculturalism addresses precisely this fragmentation. Interculturalism is not simply multiculturalism with warmer rhetoric. It is a philosophy grounded in the idea that cultures are neither sealed nor identical, but relational entities forged through contact, negotiation and hybridisation. It recognises the reality of diversity without attempting to flatten it into sameness or segregate it into isolated spheres. At its core is the idea that political structures must make space for cultural communities to articulate their interests, negotiate with others and transform through dialogue.
The problem that Grant’s post-corporatist landscape reveals is not diversity itself but the lack of structured arenas in which diversity can be negotiated. Single-issue campaigns emerge not because identities multiply, but because the institutions of liberal democracy are no longer capable of aggregating demands. Political parties, once the great mediators of class and ideology, have hollowed out. Professionalised bureaucracies no longer maintain strong links to local communities. The result is a politics of frustration, spontaneity and episodic indignation.
Interculturalism offers a remedy by providing a representational framework capable of organising fragmented identities into deliberative councils. Cultural groups—indigenous communities, migrant communities, linguistic groups, religious minorities, diasporas—gain formal spaces in which to articulate concerns. Where neo-corporatism organised functional producers, interculturalism organises cultural communities. The two are not contradictory but complementary. The intercultural framework does not dissolve economic interest; it extends political representation beyond the producer paradigm that Grant rightly characterises as dated.
Towards Intercultural Neo-Corporatism
To fuse the two traditions is to imagine a system in which cultural councils and producer councils exist side by side, participating in shared negotiations over policy. In this model, corporations remain present, but they are dethroned from their privileged bilateral access to government. They are no longer the primary interlocutors but become one functional group among others. The neo-corporatist insight—that the economy is too complex to be governed solely by market forces or centralised technocracy—is retained. But the interculturalist insight—that communities must be recognised not just as economic categories but as cultural identities—is added.
This produces a political architecture with multiple chambers of negotiation. A labour chamber representing unions, cooperatives and professional associations; an employers’ chamber representing firms and sectoral bodies; and a cultural chamber representing diverse communities. Legitimacy flows not only from elections but from the participation of these intermediate bodies, restoring the mediating structures that Grant identifies as indispensable to a functioning democratic polity.
Intercultural neo-corporatism also solves a second problem Grant identifies: the rise of single-issue politics. Without structures capable of aggregating demands, governments face constant overload. Intercultural corporatism does not suppress activism but channels it into institutional frameworks. Issues raised by patient groups, environmental movements or identity campaigns are filtered through councils that weigh claims against broader social priorities. In this model, the emotive and fragmented energy of late modern group politics is not dismissed but given form.
The Post-Liberal Dimension
Alain de Benoist’s post-liberal thought offers further resources for developing this synthesis, though it must be used critically. Benoist’s critique of liberal individualism, economic disembedding and the homogenising tendencies of globalisation resonates with both Grant’s account of corporatism’s collapse and interculturalism’s relational ontology. He insists, as Karl Polanyi once did, that markets cannot exist without the social institutions that sustain them. He rejects the idea that individuals are purely autonomous agents detached from culture, history or community. And he argues that the modern state and the global market have both eroded forms of local, communal belonging.
Where Benoist becomes useful in this synthesis is not his ethnopluralism, which seeks to freeze cultures into impermeable blocs, but his insistence that economic life must be embedded in cultural life. Intercultural neo-corporatism adopts his communitarian insight while rejecting his cultural rigidity. Instead of impermeable cultural spheres, it embraces relational identities. Instead of cultural separation, it supports cultural negotiation. Instead of the fixed boundaries of ethnopluralism, it adopts the porous boundaries of interculturalism.
This reinterpretation aligns Benoist’s critique of liberal capitalism with interculturalism’s emphasis on dynamic cultural interaction. It also aligns with Grant’s observation that corporatism collapsed when interest politics mutated into private lobbying and executive-corporate bilateralism. A post-liberal corporatism does not revert to protectionist tripartism. It creates a decentralised, federated system of community-rooted economic governance.
Corporations, Power and Re-Embedded Economy
The Grant text shows that as corporatism decayed, corporations shifted from collective representation within business associations to individual influence through private channels. This is precisely the opposite of embedded economic governance. In the intercultural neo-corporatist model, corporations are re-embedded in community structures. They must negotiate not only with producer associations but with cultural communities whose identities are shaped by the social consequences of economic activity. Power is redistributed through shared deliberation. Corporations are not demonised but repositioned as participants rather than sovereign actors.
This is crucial. Intercultural neo-corporatism avoids the pitfalls of technocratic depoliticisation by ensuring that decisions are made through a plurality of voices. It avoids the pitfalls of neoliberalism by preventing corporations from bypassing society. And it avoids the pitfalls of classical corporatism by incorporating cultural diversity directly into political negotiation.
Decentralisation and Regional Autonomy
Both intercultural theory and post-liberal thought emphasise that identity is lived at local and regional scales. Neo-corporatist systems historically depended on large national bodies, but contemporary societies require a more decentralised model. Intercultural neo-corporatism therefore assumes a federal or confederal architecture in which regions have autonomy to negotiate their own cultural and economic arrangements. National coordination still exists, but legitimacy flows upwards from communities rather than downwards from institutions.
Conclusion
The decline of neo-corporatism described by Grant was not merely the collapse of a wage-bargaining system. It was the collapse of a political architecture capable of mediating interests, identities and economic power. Liberal democracy, deprived of these mediating structures, has struggled ever since to contain the fragmentation of identity politics and the expansion of corporate influence. Interculturalism provides the relational and representational tools needed to rebuild social cohesion without suppressing diversity. A post-liberal reinterpretation of corporatism provides the structural tools needed to re-embed the economy within cultural and communal life.
The combination of these models—intercultural neo-corporatism—offers a framework capable of negotiating diversity, restraining corporate domination, and stabilising democratic life. It is a political economy that respects cultural pluralism without dissolving into fragmentation, and that maintains structured negotiation without collapsing into rigidity. It answers the collapse of corporatism not by restoring the old tripartite system but by constructing a new architecture grounded in community, dialogue and shared governance.
Introduction
The political landscapes of the late modern world are marked by fragmentation, disaffection and an increasingly visible disconnect between government institutions and the citizens they claim to represent. In many established democracies, corporatism once acted as a mechanism to stabilise this relationship, drawing trade unions and organised business into structured negotiation with the state. Yet, as Wyn Grant’s analysis of interest group politics in Britain reveals, neo-corporatism entered a long decline from the 1970s onwards as globalisation, ideological realignment and the breakdown of traditional social cleavages dissolved the foundations on which it rested. Simultaneously, single-issue campaigns, identity-based activism and online mobilisation began to reshape the political terrain. The question is no longer whether corporatism can be restored in its old form, but whether a new political architecture can respond to the pressures that destroyed it.
This essay argues that a synthesis between interculturalism and a post-liberal form of neo-corporatism offers such a framework. Interculturalism supplies the cultural, relational and dialogical components that classical corporatism lacked, while neo-corporatism supplies the structural, negotiated and communitarian elements that contemporary identity politics lacks. The result is a model that re-embeds economic governance within cultural communities, decentralises authority and constrains corporations not through technocracy but through shared participation. It is also a model compatible, though critically, with certain aspects of Alain de Benoist’s post-liberal thought, particularly his critique of liberal individualism, economic disembedding and the homogenising tendencies of global capitalism. However, this compatibility is conditional: the ethnopluralist rigidity of Benoist’s cultural separation must be rejected in favour of the intercultural emphasis on hybridity, exchange and relational identity. What remains is a political-economic architecture capable of negotiating diversity without collapsing into fragmentation or domination.
The Decline of Neo-Corporatism
Neo-corporatism was never merely an economic arrangement. It was a political settlement: a system in which the state, organised labour and organised business acted as the primary negotiators of national economic policy. Grant’s account identifies corporatism as the first phase of post-war group politics, built on the assumption that labour and capital both possessed strong, cohesive associations capable of delivering consent. As he notes through the work of Samuel Beer, corporatism was deeply rooted in British political traditions of consultation, especially at the level of producer groups. The model worked, in a limited way, because the economy was national, industries required collective wage restraint, and unions and employers’ associations possessed enough internal discipline to enforce agreements.
But the conditions that enabled corporatism became precisely those that undermined it. Grant’s synthesis of Streeck, Beer and Eichengreen identifies three families of explanation: structural, operational and normative. Structurally, globalisation hollowed out national economic autonomy, rendering domestic wage-setting arrangements obsolete. Operationally, unions and employers struggled to maintain internal discipline, delivering neither wage restraint nor productivity gains. Business increasingly bypassed associations and sought direct access to government. Normatively, Thatcherism reframed interest politics as rent-seeking and rediscovered the political acceptability of unemployment, shattering the Keynesian assumption of full employment as a central state duty.
Corporatism, then, was not overthrown but decayed from within. Grant shows that its disappearance opened the space for a second and then a third phase of group activity: cause-oriented movements and eventually single-issue identity or lifestyle-driven activism. Without corporatist structures to aggregate demands, politics became increasingly fragmented and emotive. The Blair era did not restore corporatism but replaced it with direct, often opaque channels between government and large corporations. The result was not pluralistic coordination but asymmetrical influence, what Grant calls a “company-state” tendency. Where corporatism attempted to embed economic power within a negotiated structure, its absence allowed economic power to become disembedded from society and re-embedded directly in the executive.
The Contribution of Interculturalism
If neo-corporatism collapsed because the social cleavages it relied on fragmented, interculturalism addresses precisely this fragmentation. Interculturalism is not simply multiculturalism with warmer rhetoric. It is a philosophy grounded in the idea that cultures are neither sealed nor identical, but relational entities forged through contact, negotiation and hybridisation. It recognises the reality of diversity without attempting to flatten it into sameness or segregate it into isolated spheres. At its core is the idea that political structures must make space for cultural communities to articulate their interests, negotiate with others and transform through dialogue.
The problem that Grant’s post-corporatist landscape reveals is not diversity itself but the lack of structured arenas in which diversity can be negotiated. Single-issue campaigns emerge not because identities multiply, but because the institutions of liberal democracy are no longer capable of aggregating demands. Political parties, once the great mediators of class and ideology, have hollowed out. Professionalised bureaucracies no longer maintain strong links to local communities. The result is a politics of frustration, spontaneity and episodic indignation.
Interculturalism offers a remedy by providing a representational framework capable of organising fragmented identities into deliberative councils. Cultural groups—indigenous communities, migrant communities, linguistic groups, religious minorities, diasporas—gain formal spaces in which to articulate concerns. Where neo-corporatism organised functional producers, interculturalism organises cultural communities. The two are not contradictory but complementary. The intercultural framework does not dissolve economic interest; it extends political representation beyond the producer paradigm that Grant rightly characterises as dated.
Towards Intercultural Neo-Corporatism
To fuse the two traditions is to imagine a system in which cultural councils and producer councils exist side by side, participating in shared negotiations over policy. In this model, corporations remain present, but they are dethroned from their privileged bilateral access to government. They are no longer the primary interlocutors but become one functional group among others. The neo-corporatist insight—that the economy is too complex to be governed solely by market forces or centralised technocracy—is retained. But the interculturalist insight—that communities must be recognised not just as economic categories but as cultural identities—is added.
This produces a political architecture with multiple chambers of negotiation. A labour chamber representing unions, cooperatives and professional associations; an employers’ chamber representing firms and sectoral bodies; and a cultural chamber representing diverse communities. Legitimacy flows not only from elections but from the participation of these intermediate bodies, restoring the mediating structures that Grant identifies as indispensable to a functioning democratic polity.
Intercultural neo-corporatism also solves a second problem Grant identifies: the rise of single-issue politics. Without structures capable of aggregating demands, governments face constant overload. Intercultural corporatism does not suppress activism but channels it into institutional frameworks. Issues raised by patient groups, environmental movements or identity campaigns are filtered through councils that weigh claims against broader social priorities. In this model, the emotive and fragmented energy of late modern group politics is not dismissed but given form.
The Post-Liberal Dimension
Alain de Benoist’s post-liberal thought offers further resources for developing this synthesis, though it must be used critically. Benoist’s critique of liberal individualism, economic disembedding and the homogenising tendencies of globalisation resonates with both Grant’s account of corporatism’s collapse and interculturalism’s relational ontology. He insists, as Karl Polanyi once did, that markets cannot exist without the social institutions that sustain them. He rejects the idea that individuals are purely autonomous agents detached from culture, history or community. And he argues that the modern state and the global market have both eroded forms of local, communal belonging.
Where Benoist becomes useful in this synthesis is not his ethnopluralism, which seeks to freeze cultures into impermeable blocs, but his insistence that economic life must be embedded in cultural life. Intercultural neo-corporatism adopts his communitarian insight while rejecting his cultural rigidity. Instead of impermeable cultural spheres, it embraces relational identities. Instead of cultural separation, it supports cultural negotiation. Instead of the fixed boundaries of ethnopluralism, it adopts the porous boundaries of interculturalism.
This reinterpretation aligns Benoist’s critique of liberal capitalism with interculturalism’s emphasis on dynamic cultural interaction. It also aligns with Grant’s observation that corporatism collapsed when interest politics mutated into private lobbying and executive-corporate bilateralism. A post-liberal corporatism does not revert to protectionist tripartism. It creates a decentralised, federated system of community-rooted economic governance.
Corporations, Power and Re-Embedded Economy
The Grant text shows that as corporatism decayed, corporations shifted from collective representation within business associations to individual influence through private channels. This is precisely the opposite of embedded economic governance. In the intercultural neo-corporatist model, corporations are re-embedded in community structures. They must negotiate not only with producer associations but with cultural communities whose identities are shaped by the social consequences of economic activity. Power is redistributed through shared deliberation. Corporations are not demonised but repositioned as participants rather than sovereign actors.
This is crucial. Intercultural neo-corporatism avoids the pitfalls of technocratic depoliticisation by ensuring that decisions are made through a plurality of voices. It avoids the pitfalls of neoliberalism by preventing corporations from bypassing society. And it avoids the pitfalls of classical corporatism by incorporating cultural diversity directly into political negotiation.
Decentralisation and Regional Autonomy
Both intercultural theory and post-liberal thought emphasise that identity is lived at local and regional scales. Neo-corporatist systems historically depended on large national bodies, but contemporary societies require a more decentralised model. Intercultural neo-corporatism therefore assumes a federal or confederal architecture in which regions have autonomy to negotiate their own cultural and economic arrangements. National coordination still exists, but legitimacy flows upwards from communities rather than downwards from institutions.
Conclusion
The decline of neo-corporatism described by Grant was not merely the collapse of a wage-bargaining system. It was the collapse of a political architecture capable of mediating interests, identities and economic power. Liberal democracy, deprived of these mediating structures, has struggled ever since to contain the fragmentation of identity politics and the expansion of corporate influence. Interculturalism provides the relational and representational tools needed to rebuild social cohesion without suppressing diversity. A post-liberal reinterpretation of corporatism provides the structural tools needed to re-embed the economy within cultural and communal life.
The combination of these models—intercultural neo-corporatism—offers a framework capable of negotiating diversity, restraining corporate domination, and stabilising democratic life. It is a political economy that respects cultural pluralism without dissolving into fragmentation, and that maintains structured negotiation without collapsing into rigidity. It answers the collapse of corporatism not by restoring the old tripartite system but by constructing a new architecture grounded in community, dialogue and shared governance.