ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
Marquis de La Tour du Pin (1834-1924). He was also an international reference of the spread
of corporatism in international organizations, as president in 1929 of the
(ILO). After the end of
Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, it continued to be one of the most active ideologues of
corporatism in Spain, in exile during the Second Republic, and joined Falange de las JONS in
1937, becoming a minister in Franco’s government
A national consultative assembly was established in 1927 which, as its name suggests,
collaborated rather than legislated. This assembly, the first corporatist chamber in inter-war
Europe, consisted of 400 representatives of the state, local authorities, the party,
municipalities and professional groups, in a process controlled by the interior ministry.
Even while participating in this corporatist assembly, some conservatives remained suspicious
of its consultative functions. On the eve of the dictatorship’s collapse in 1929, the project for
the new constitution that would result in a dramatic increase in the executive’s powers and
the establishment of a single chamber, the members of which were to be nominated by the
UP and elected by direct and corporatist suffrage in equal measure, was presented to the
public. According to the preliminary draft of the constitution, the new parliament would have
been constituted as follows: half of the members elected by direct universal suffrage, 30 life
deputies by royal appointment and the others ‘elected by special colleges of professions or
classes’
Some of the institutional traces of this early dictatorial experiment in the Iberian Peninsula
were also present in Portugal, which experienced one of the longest dictatorships of the 20th
century, and which until the end claimed a corporatist legitimacy. On 28 May 1926, a military
coup put an end to Portugal’s parliamentary republic. Between the end of the republic and
the institutionalization of Salazar’s New State there were seven unstable years of military
dictatorship; however, it is worth citing the project for a new constitution that the leader of
the military uprising, General Manuel de Oliveira Gomes da Costa, presented to the first
government of the dictatorship just one month after the coup: ‘A new constitution based on
the following principles: national representation by direct delegation from the municipalities,
the economic unions and the educational and spiritual bodies, with the absolute exclusion of
individualist suffrage and the consequent party representation’. Other projects were
discussed during the years that followed, but this example demonstrates the importance of
corporatist alternatives in Portuguese anti-democratic elite political culture. In fact, in 1918,
during the brief dictatorship of Sidónio Pais, a parliament controlled by a dominant party
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