Italy Corporate Order

The new conception of statonation, the corporative conception, has its document in the Labor Charter (see charter, IX, p. 206 ff.), A fundamental act of the regime recognized by parliament as a rule of public law. His first proposition says: “The Italian nation is an organism having ends, life, means of action superior in terms of power and duration to those of the individuals, divided or grouped, that compose it. It is a moral, political and economic unity which is fully realized in the Fascist state ”. The Labor Charter, while referring mainly to labor relations, proclaims the following fundamental principles of the fascist state from the economic and social point of view: individual interests and activities are subordinated to the interest of the nation organized as a state; work is elevated to a social duty, a civic function; trade union or professional organization is free, but only the legally recognized and state controlled trade union has the right to legally represent its category; solidarity between the various factors of production is concretized in the collective bargaining agreement; the corporations constitute the unitary organization of the productive forces; the corporate state considers private initiative in the field of production as the most effective and useful tool in the interest of the nation: but since the private organization of production is a function of national interest, the organizer is responsible to the state: State intervention in production takes place only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient or when political interests of the state are at stake. These concepts are based on what is called, with a synthetic expression now very widespread, the corporate state, not in the sense that all citizens only occasionally participate in public life as members of corporations or in the sense that all public powers are expressed through the corporations, but in the sense that the state has accepted as a fundamental principle of social organization the recognition of economic categories as public institutions and their participation in the political and administrative life of the state, ordering the relations of work under your own control. In addition, the state in the exercise of its social function believes that it must exercise control over the direction of national industry: and a typical, very important and profoundly original manifestation of this right is the new law of 12 January 1933, n. 141, which delegated to the government the powers to submit new industrial plants to authorization. And such is the importance recognized in the new Italian public law to the trade union and corporative order, that it is expressly stated in the law on the Grand Council as a constitutional matter (see corporation, XI, pp. 463-465).

At the top of the corporative order is the National Council of Corporations, which reports directly to the head of government, who presides over it by right, as well as presides over all the organs of the council, but who can delegate the presidency to the Minister of Corporations. . It was established with royal decree n. 1131, as a body of pure internal consultation at the Ministry of Corporations, but was radically reformed in composition, powers and functioning by the constitutional law of 20 March 1930, n. 206, and by the royal decree of 12 May 1930, n. 908. To what is said in the aforementioned corporation article it must be added that, for art. 32 of the decree of 12 May 1930, n. 908, with regard to the regulatory power of the board, it has been established that the board is unable to issue rules on matters already governed by laws or regulations. There is a very lively dispute among jurists over the juridical nature of the National Council of Corporations, especially on the question of whether or not it is a constitutional or purely administrative body, and what are its relations with parliament and with the government. What can certainly be said is this: the National Council of Corporations has taken its place in the Italian political system, as a state body of public law, with functions that are not only consultative but also creative of legal rules and with functions of coordination and control over the whole corporate order, reporting directly to the head of the government who gives it impetus and presides over its activity: it therefore does not represent a third legislative chamber, nor does it take the place of parliament in any way, since its regulatory faculty is subordinated to laws and even to other state regulations, which it cannot modify. It is an original creation, which cannot be compared to the other economic councils established in several states, since its faculties are much broader and the principles on which it is based are different.