National Syndicalism

National syndicalism is a historical ideology that emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century. It combined nationalism with ideas taken from syndicalism, the labor movement that wanted trade unions, or syndicates, to run the economy. Unlike revolutionary syndicalism, which was internationalist and opposed to the state, national syndicalism placed the syndicates under a strong national state. It rejected both liberal capitalism and Marxist class struggle. Instead, it proposed that workers and employers in each branch of production should be grouped into a single vertical syndicate that served national goals. Historians generally treat it as closely linked to fascism, and in Spain it became the official doctrine of the Falange, the single party of the Franco regime.

Historians trace the roots of national syndicalism to France and Italy before the First World War. In France, the Cercle Proudhon, founded in 1911, brought together monarchist nationalists and some followers of the syndicalist thinker Georges Sorel. Georges Valois was a leading figure in this milieu. In Italy, several revolutionary syndicalists, including Sergio Panunzio, moved toward nationalism during and after the war, and their ideas contributed to the corporatist doctrine of Italian fascism. In Spain, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos founded the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, known as the JONS, in 1931. In 1934 the JONS merged with the Falange Española, founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, whose movement received financial support from Benito Mussolini's Italy. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco merged the Falange with the Carlists into the single party of his regime. In Portugal, Francisco Rolão Preto led a National Syndicalist movement that the Salazar government suppressed in 1934.

The French current was intellectual and linked to monarchist circles. The Italian current fed into fascist corporatism, in which state-controlled corporations grouped employers and workers. The Spanish current, Falangism, combined national syndicalism with Catholic tradition and calls for national expansion. The Portuguese movement under Rolão Preto was more radical than the Salazar government and was banned by it. Some later Falangist groups in Spain claimed to preserve the original program and opposed parts of the Franco regime.

Critics from liberal and democratic traditions argue that national syndicalism removed free elections, independent trade unions and civil liberties, and that its single party and vertical syndicates served as tools of state control. Critics on the left argue that vertical syndicates gave workers little real power and protected employers while banning strikes. Some critics on the traditional right, including supporters of Salazar in Portugal, viewed the movement as too radical and revolutionary. Historians also note that in Spain the original national syndicalist program was only partly applied, which makes it difficult to judge the ideology by the record of the Franco state.

The clearest application of national syndicalist ideas was in Franco's Spain. The regime created the Spanish Syndical Organization, in which employers and workers were grouped into compulsory vertical syndicates, and independent unions were banned. The Falange, renamed the National Movement, remained the only legal political organization until the transition to democracy after 1975. In Italy, related corporatist institutions were set up under fascism. After the Second World War, national syndicalism lost almost all influence and survives today mainly as a subject of historical study.