Corporatism and the Franco dictatorship in Spain

Abstract

Corporatism became widely accepted as a social and political doctrine in the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1903s. Communism and fascism were two fundamental doctrines from which their respective political regimes would subsequently emerge with the aim of eliminating the old economic and political liberalism. Corporatism in Spain is rooted in the pre-liberal era, as demonstrated by the case of the Carlists, who reinforced their position in the last decade of the nineteenth century with the proposals encompassed within the Catholic Church hierarchy's political and social doctrine, based on the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. The corporatism residing in Carlist ideology was strengthened through contact with other ideological trends of an organicist or panentheist nature, such as Romanticism and Krausism, which although based on different principles, included similar procedures in their approach. The Franco regime began to organize itself under the direction of Ramon Serrano Suner, with the creation in April 1937 of the Traditionalist Spanish Falange.