ABSTRACT
In the decades since World War II world capitalism entered a global reorganization and in the Mediterranean started to reshape itself into a new order, part of a new International Division of Labour (IDL). This new IDL developed in southern Europe around the dichotomy and complementarity of ‘Fordism’ and ‘peripheral Fordism’ (Lipietz, 1983b). Fordism was used by Gramsci in pre-war Italy and by Henri de Mas in France to describe the American model or a regime of intensive accumulation characterized by extensive use of machinery, scientific work organization and workers’ savoir faire.1 While France and northern Italy, after World War II and the Marshall Plan, established themselves within ‘central Fordism’, Spain and Greece (together with Portugal and other ‘newly’ industrialized countries) fell behind to what Lipietz (1983b) called ‘peripheral Fordism’. Peripheral Fordism is characterized by a combination of old style import-substitution with modern export-promoting strategies, industrialization via foreign capital investment, the considerable rise of middle classes, together with state bureaucracy, intensive tourist development, international labour migration and, above all, a specific type of authoritarian rule. In Spain, Italy and Greece, with varying intensity, this new IDL reached dimensions that affected simultaneously the economic, political and cutural/ideological levels.
