c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 177 the corporatist structures are the result of a strongly organised working class or labour movement. Maybe the process has gone the other way round, so that the strong pre-industrial legitimacy of corporatist structures in some countries has contributed to the emergence of politically strong labour movements. Thus a formally sovereign parliament could chose to give the interest organisations a strong position on the administrative level due to the fact that by tradition they can satisfy the demand for the legitimate execution of the laws. Thus the interest organisations have played the crucial role of giving state power legitimacy instead of management by rules or professions.368 Per Eklund and Gösta Hultén describe a somewhat different legal history by asserting that the Swedish labour movement was severely oppressed by the employers’ organisations as well as by the state. Although formally neutral, the Swedish legislation and judges have not only disguised fundamental conflicts between capital and labour, but also remarkably often, against the wishes of the working masses, contributed to preserve an unfair distribution of power within working life.369 In this context, one can also pay attention to Niklas Bruun’s comment that the process of juridification, in which conflicts of interest are transformed to legal conflicts, can have several functions. For example, the symbolic and illusory functions reflect an ambition to protect the status quo by protecting established positions of power in the guise of misleading pictures of real life.370 We must also pay attention to that part of the contemporary debate which centred on whether the disputes concerning collective agreements ought to be solved by mandatory arbitration at a labour court. The sketch of the developments in France, England and Germany in the beginning of 20th century indicates that “judge-made law” elaborated the essential components 368 Rothstein 1992. 369 Eklund 1974, pp. 35, 59-149, 214, 334, 369-372; Hultén 1971, pp. 239-250. 370 Bruun 1987, pp. 136-152; Göransson 1988, pp. 401-412, 424. See also Töllborg 1986, p. 26.
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