Authors

Liisi Veski¹;  ¹ University of Tartu / University of Glasgow, UK

Discussion

Mary Hilson (2019) argues that although Scandinavian co-operative systems had always been “implicitly” supportive of democratic institutions and cultivating their members’ democratic outlook, after Hitler’s rise to power, the idea of co-operative associations as the “school for democracy” became more “explicit”. Hilson, Neunsinger, and Patmore (2017) suggest that the relationship between authoritarian regimes and co-operative movements has been ambiguous: there have been attempts to integrate these systems into statist regimes as well as examples of co-operative associations becoming the platform for resistance against the same regimes.
In this paper, I will explore the relationship between the co-operation movement and the authoritarian state in Estonia in the years 1934–1940. I will be particularly interested in how the co-operation movement provided a platform for democratic opposition. I will also analyse the relationship between co-operation and corporatism. I will argue that there existed a tension between corporatism as reinforced by the authoritarian state, and co-operation with its emphasis on bottom-up activism. I will particularly focus on co-operative journals and some central or learned co-operative societies (such as the Academic Co-operative Society). I propose that studying the co-operative movement as a platform for the liberal opposition in the latter half of the 1930s helps us to gain new and interesting insights.