ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

17 / 60

ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
made them an interesting laboratory for analysing corporatist institutions. The creation of a
single or dominant party and of corporatist legislatures also presided over the consolidation
of these regimes, enabling a safer assessment of their functions.
In September 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera led a coup against the liberal regime,
issuing a manifesto to the country in which he denounced social agitation, separatism and
clientelism. His imposition of order was justification for a transitional dictatorship; however,
he held a plebiscite on a plan to change the constitutional order and institutionalize a new
regime. This was quickly implemented through the creation of a party, the Patriotic Union (UP
– Unión Patriótica) controlled by the government, of a corporatist parliament with limited
powers and an attempt to integrate all organized interests into the state with the abolition of
class-based unions. The fact the dictator was a soldier was no obstacle to the
institutionalization of the regime, and Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship was an
illustration of ‘the idea that the existence of a single national interest contained in military
thinking coincides with the vision of the common good of the organic-statist model’, an
ideological element that became part of the history of 20th-century dictatorships The UP
played the role of the regime party in Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, despite the regime’s
limited pluralism allowing other parties to exist legally, indicating that ‘within the regime
there is only one party’ In fact, the UP represented the attempt to create a party from the
top down, based on sections of the conservative elites of the previous oligarchic parties. As it
was mainly an instrument of the dictator and of the government, the UP was weak as a single
party in terms of elite recruitment and as a decision-making centre that only exercised some
functions at the local administration level.
The institutionalization of social corporatism, started at the beginning of1923, with the labour
code and culminated in November 1926 when the Labour Minister, Eduardo Aunós, signed
the law for the institution of the National Corporatist Organization (ONC – Organización
Nacional Corporativa). In particular, as in the Fascist model, the ONC was a centralized and
state-led organization with a pyramidal structure that provided control over labour relations,
but although he admitted his intellectual debt to Italian Fascism and to its primacy, the
Spanish counterpart had more concessions to the liberal tradition, including a degree of trade
union freedom, retaining the right to strike and even collaboration with part of the socialist
movement, which was not banned. Eduardo Aunós was a genuine representative of
corporatism thinking in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s He was secretary to the conservative
liberal politician Cambó and influenced by traditional Catholic thought and the works of the
15