ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
formally elected through a restricted electoral system. Needless to say, the cabinet was
responsible to the head of state and Cortes was designed to advise and to deliberate upon
proposed laws coming from the government. To avoid the creation of informal factions within
Cortes, its president was nominated by Franco and the heads of commissions were
nominated by the president of Cortes. Few institutional changes took place during the
dictatorship’s long duration.
The Nazi exception and the Austrian model: Corporatism in Germany and in Dollfuss’s Austria
The fate of corporatism in the Nazi dictatorship is complex. From very early on social
corporatism was present in the Weimar Republic and during the great restructuring of the
‘organized interests’, especially of labour under Nazi rule. As stressed above, one should be
careful when using the concept of corporatism in relation to Nazi Germany, but it help us
‘understand a number of important characteristics and institutions of the regime in its
relationship with industry, commerce and agriculture’
The founding programme of the German National Socialist Party (NSDAP –
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), published in 1920, made mention of
‘corporatist and professional chambers’, but political corporatism remained essentially a
playground for intellectuals until 1930 with little presence in Nazi political manifestos.
Nevertheless, some sections of the Nazi elite remained sympathetic to a ‘form of socio-
political representation by hierarchically-organized occupational estates (berufsstande),
which were to bring together individual and general interests in an “organic” manner’.
Othmar Spann’s corporatist model was partially endorsed; however, proposals for corporatist
representation in inter-war Germany were mainly contained in the political culture of
conservative and authoritarian elites and the Italian ‘Fascist corporatism was praised as an
antidote to Nazi socialism’ In the late Weimar period, Von Papen had taken an important
step towards authoritarian government, liberating it from dependence on shifting
parliamentary majorities; but a second chamber with representatives of the professions and
corporations, an idea that had been advanced by some corporatist thinkers, was never on the
cards. The ‘window of opportunity’ presented by the Weimar’s late authoritarian period was
closed with the Nazi rise to power in 1933.
From 1933, the Nazi regime began eliminating free trade unions, integrating them into the
state-sponsored German Labour Front (DAF – Deutsche Arbeitsfront). Cristian trade unions
assumed they enjoyed special sympathy from the Nazis because of ‘their nationalist and
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