ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
royal dictatorship sought to steal some of the Iron Guard’s ideological appeal, adopting the
propaganda of ‘organic nationalism, family, church and the gospel of work’. According to
the new constitution submitted to a plebiscite in 1938, the new parliament was selected
according to the sectoral categories of agriculture, industry, commerce, the professions and
the intelligentsia. Corporations were not the base of the process but a new ‘organic’ electoral
system. At the end of 1938, however, a system of guilds (bresle) was created to frame
professional interests by field of activity or profession, and which was responsible for
collective labour contracts. The senate came to be made up of representatives of the
‘state bodies’ and by leaders of institutions representing professionals included in the
categories recognized by the constitution Ministers were chosen by the king and were
responsible only to him while legislative initiative was transferred from parliament to the
king. Manoilescu, the theoretician of corporatism, was an eminent strategist of the royal
dictatorship’s economic policy.
Following the execution of Codreanu and other fascist leaders, and coming under Nazi
pressure to integrate them into the regime, King Carol II reorganized his single party, which
he renamed the Party of the Nation (PN – Partidul Națiunii), which incorporated the
remaining fascists and to which membership was compulsory for all public and corporatist
office holders. Corporatism was a minor ideological component for Codreanu’s Iron Guard,
despite Manoilescu’s attempts to develop it As the legionary leader Ion Mota stated,
corporatism ‘is entirely colourless from a folk point of view’ and just after modification of the
‘ethnic structure of the state’ could be an option for Romania
In 1940, King Carol II went into exile, leaving his son to preside over a duumvirate constituted
by General Antonescu and the Iron Guard, now led by Horia Sima. During the short time the
Iron Guard was the single party of the National Legionary state, no initiatives for corporatist
reorganization were advanced. When Antonescu withdrew the Legion from government, the
regime that remained took on the appearance of a military dictatorship with a plebiscitary
tone. Antonescu concentrated all powers without a single party and with a General
Plebiscitary Assembly of the Romanian Nation’ (Adunarea Obsteasca Plebiscitara a Națiunii
Române), a pompous name for the two plebiscites he convened. At the municipal level,
the local councils were replaced by administrative officials, representatives of professions and
trade selected by the prefects.
Corporatism also made a brief appearance in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and, more clearly, in
Metaxas’s Greece. In Bulgaria, following Colonel Damian Velchev’s 1934 coup d’état, both
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