National Union (Portugal)

National Union
União Nacional
Other nameAção Nacional Popular [pt]
(1970–74)[2]
LeadersAntónio de Oliveira Salazar
Marcello Caetano[3]
Founded30 July 1930; 94 years ago (1930-07-30)
Dissolved25 April 1974; 50 years ago (1974-04-25)
HeadquartersLisbon, Portugal
NewspaperDiário da Manhã[4]
Membership20,000 (1933 est.)[5]
IdeologyIntegral nationalism[6][7]
Corporate statism[8][9]
Authoritarian conservatism[10]
National Catholicism[11]
Lusotropicalism[12][13]
Lusitanian integralism[14]
Pluricontinentalism[15]
Political positionRight-wing[16] to far-right[17]
ReligionRoman Catholicism
Colours  Blue   White
  Green (1970–74)
Party flag
Corporatism
Concepts
Schools
People
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The National Union (Portuguese: União Nacional) was the sole legal party of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, founded in July 1930 and dominated by António de Oliveira Salazar during most of its existence.

Unlike in most single-party regimes, the National Union was more of a political arm of the government rather than holding actual power over it. The National Union membership was mostly drawn from local notables: landowners, professionals and businessmen, Catholics, monarchists or conservative republicans. The National Union was never a militant or very active organization.[16]

Once Salazar assumed the premiership, the National Union became the only party legally allowed to function under the Estado Novo.[16] Salazar announced that the National Union would be the antithesis of a political party.[18] The NU became an ancillary body, not a source of political power.[18] At no stage did it appear that Salazar wished it to fulfill the central role the fascist party had acquired in Mussolini's Italy; in fact, it was meant to be a platform of conservatism, not a revolutionary vanguard.[19]

The National Union's ideology was corporatism, and it took as many inspirations from Catholic encyclicals such as Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno as well as from Mussolini's corporate state.[20] Unlike fascist parties, the National Union played no role in the government - it only served as a tool for the selection of National Assembly deputies, as well as a way to provide some legitimacy to non-competitive elections that Salazar's regime regularly held.[21] The National Union was set up to control and restrain public opinion rather than to mobilize it, and ministers, diplomats and civil servants were never compelled to join the party.[22]

According to António Costa Pinto, the National Union was a moribund party, created by a governmental decree rather than by political activists, and which was "dominated by the administration, put to sleep and reawakened in accordance with the situation at the time". He describes the party as "an empty, undermined space into which were formally sent those who wanted to join the regime and which, once full, was closed". Pinto notes that the army was kept away from public life, and political activity was prohibited outside public life. This included the National Union, which lacked any kind of political activism. Therefore the party lacked an ideology, and did not mobilize the masses. Pinto argues that it was the opposite, as "in fact demotivation was openly encouraged". He concludes that the party had a "non-fascist nature" and argues that it "neither reached power at all nor, once created, fulfilled functions of control and monopoly of access to power or mobilization of the masses, which, in general, the fascists did."[23]

Scholarly opinion varies on whether the Estado Novo and the National Union should be considered fascist or not. Salazar himself criticized the "exaltation of youth, the cult of force through direct action, the principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, [and] the propensity for organizing masses behind a single leader" as fundamental differences between fascism and the Catholic corporatism of the Estado Novo. Scholars such as Stanley G. Payne, Thomas Gerard Gallagher, Juan José Linz, António Costa Pinto, Roger Griffin, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and Arnd Bauerkämper,[24] as well as Howard J. Wiarda, consider the Portuguese Estado Novo conservative authoritarian and not fascist. In his The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton express the same view, writing that Salazar's regime was "not only nonfascist, but voluntarily nontotalitarian".[25] On the other hand, Portuguese scholars like Fernando Rosas, Manuel Villaverde Cabral, Manuel de Lucena, Manuel Loff and Raquel Varela think that the Estado Novo should be considered fascist.[26]

  1. ^ Os atestados de bom comportamento moral e civil até ao 25 de Abril de 1974. Exposição 'Documento do Mês' do Arquivo Municipal de Silves, Terra Ruiva supplement, April 2018, p. 5.
  2. ^ CRUZ, Manuel Braga da. «National Union», in ROSAS, Fernando; BRITO, JM Brandão de (right). New State History Dictionary. Venda Nova : Bertrand Editora, 1996, vol. II, p. 989-991.
  3. ^ See Decree N° 48597.
  4. ^ Sardica, José Miguel (2011). "The Memory of the Portuguese First Republic throughout the Twentieth Century". Journal of Portuguese History. 9 (1): 10–17. doi:10.26300/2k33-w151.
  5. ^ Payne, Stanley G. (2001). A history of fascism, 1914-1945. London: Routledge. p. 314. ISBN 0-203-50132-2.
  6. ^ Stéphane Giocanti, Maurras – Le chaos et l'ordre, éd. Flammarion, 2006, p. 500.
  7. ^ Ernesto Castro Leal; Correll, Translated by Richard (2016). "The Political and Ideological Origins of the Estado Novo in Portugal". Portuguese Studies. 32 (2). Translated By Richard Correll: 128–148. doi:10.5699/portstudies.32.2.0128. JSTOR 10.5699/portstudies.32.2.0128. S2CID 157806821.
  8. ^ Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo, eds. (7 September 2011). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. SAGE Publications (published 2011). ISBN 9781483305394. Retrieved 9 September 2020. [...] fascist Italy [...] developed a state structure known as the corporate state with the ruling party acting as a mediator between 'corporations' making up the body of the nation. Similar designs were quite popular elsewhere in the 1930s. The most prominent examples were Estado Novo in Portugal (1932-1968) and Brazil (1937-1945), the Austrian Standestaat (1933-1938), and authoritarian experiments in Estonia, Romania, and some other countries of East and East-Central Europe,
  9. ^ Eccleshall, Robert; Geoghegan, Vincent; Jay, Richard; Kenny, Michael; Mackenzie, Iain; Wilford, Rick (1994). Political Ideologies: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 208.
  10. ^ Howard J. Wiarda, Margaret MacLeish Mott. Catholic Roots and Democratic Flowers: Political Systems in Spain and Portugal. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. p. 49.
  11. ^ Stanley G. Payne (1984). Spanish Catholicism: An Historical Overview. Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. xiii. ISBN 978-0-299-09804-9.
  12. ^ Miguel Vale de Almeida, Portugal’s Colonial Complex: From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony
  13. ^ Castelo, Cláudia (5 March 2013). "O luso-tropicalismo e o colonialismo português tardio". Buala (in Portuguese, English, and French). Retrieved 15 April 2022.
  14. ^ Griffin, Roger (2013). The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-415-09661-4.
  15. ^ MACQUEEN, N. (1999). Portugal's First Domino: ‘Pluricontinentalism’ and Colonial War in Guiné-Bissau, 1963–1974. Contemporary European History, 8(2), pp. 209-230. doi:10.1017/S0960777399002027.
  16. ^ a b c Lewis 2002, p. 143.
  17. ^ Griffiths, Richard (2000). An Intelligent Person's Guide to Fascism. Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. p. 133. ISBN 9780715629185.
  18. ^ a b Gallagher 2020, p. 43.
  19. ^ Gallagher 2020, p. 44.
  20. ^ Lewis 2002, p. 185.
  21. ^ Pinto, António Costa (2002). "Elites, Single Parties and Political Decision-Making in Fascist-Era Dictatorships". Contemporary European History. 11 (3): 431. doi:10.1017/S0960777302003053.
  22. ^ Gallagher 1990, p. 167.
  23. ^ Pinto, António Costa (1991). "The Salazar "New State" and European Fascism: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation" (PDF). EUI Working Paper HEC. 91 (12). Florence: European University Institute: 57–58.
  24. ^ Bauerkämper, Arnd [in German]; Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz [in Polish] (2017). Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78533-469-6. However, dictatorships such as Francisco Franco's Spain and Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal were not fascist, but authoritarian in the first instance. They lacked the idea of a permanent and national revolution, which propelled fascist movements and regimes, and they clung to the past or the present.
  25. ^ Paxton, Robert (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 150. ISBN 1-4000-4094-9. Hoping to spare Portugal the pains of class conflict, Dr. Salazar even opposed the industrial development of his country until the 1960s. His regime was not only nonfascist, but "voluntarily nontotalitarian," preferring to let those of its citizens who kept out of politics "live by habit."
  26. ^ Fernando Rosas (2019). Salazar e os Fascismos: Ensaio Breve de História Comparada (in Portuguese). Edições Tinta-da-China.