National Union União Nacional | |
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![]() Logo used until the 1960s[1] | |
Other name | Ação Nacional Popular (1970–74)[2] |
Leaders | António de Oliveira Salazar Marcello Caetano[3] |
Founded | 30 July 1930 |
Dissolved | 25 April 1974 |
Headquarters | Lisbon, Portugal |
Membership | 20,000 (1933 est.)[4] |
Ideology | Integral nationalism[5][6] Corporate statism[7][8] Authoritarian conservatism[9] National Catholicism[10] Lusotropicalism[11][12] Lusitanian integralism[13] Pluricontinentalism[14] |
Political position | Right-wing[15] to far-right[16] |
Religion | Roman Catholicism |
Colours | Blue White Green (1970–74) |
Party flag | |
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Corporatism |
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History of Portugal |
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Timeline |
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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.[15]
Once Salazar assumed the premiership, the National Union became the only party legally allowed to function under the Estado Novo.[15] Salazar announced that the National Union would be the antithesis of a political party.[17] The NU became an ancillary body, not a source of political power.[17] 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.[18]
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.[19] Compared to other ruling Fascist parties, the National Union played a much smaller role in its regime. 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.[20]
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."[21]
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,[22] 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".[23] 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.[24]
[...] 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,
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.
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."
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