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NATION AND CONFLICT IN MODERN SPAIN 
anti-Catalanist espafiolista outlook and of a secular, modernizing form of
corporatism. Libre 
espafiolismo began as an opportunistic power grab linked to the union's usurpation,
with the 
collusion of Interior Minister Martinez Anido, of the Centre Autonomista
de Dependents del 
Comerf i de la Induistria (CADCI), a powerful white-collar union in Barcelona
closed by the 
dictatorship for its outspoken Catalanism.4 It gradually evolved, however,
into a militant 
ideological defense of the Hispanic identity of Catalonia that reduced its
political aspirations 
to the most anodyne administrative decentralization and annihilated the regionalist
com- 
ponent of traditionalism. Although at first fueled by mere negativism-particularly
against 
radical Carlism's longtime nemesis, the Lliga-Libre espaholismo soon took
on a wider sig- 
nificance, endowing the union with a rabid hypernationalist ideology of hispanidad,
the 
absence of which had been so striking before 1924. 
Just as collaboration with the dictatorship's anti-Catalanist policies triggered
and de- 
veloped Libre espaniolismo, so the union's participation in Labour Minister
Eduardo Aun6s' 
corporative system called forth latent productivist and organicist elements
in Libre ideology. 
During the Primo de Rivera regime the uneasy balance between obrerismo and
productivism 
in Libre ideology eroded and the latter, attired in new corporatist finery,
became the domi- 
nant force in the union's thought. In embracing corporatism the Libres were
not primarily 
drawing upon the social Catholic formulations of Vazquez de Mella but were
responding 
to the practical demands of the dictatorship's experiment in corporative
labor organization. 
This eventually led to the Libre goal, seldom baldly stated, of replacing
the liberal regime 
with a corporate state. This was no return to Carlist roots, for the Libres
embraced a secular, 
modernizing, and potentially statist form of corporatism that was generally
shunned by tra- 
ditionalists. In a poll of twenty-six top unionists, for example, only four
indicated that guilds 
or medieval socioeconomic organization had any relevance to present day corporatist
prac- 
tice. Ram6n Sales, moreover, came close to making an explicit totalitarian
appeal when he 
emphasized that in the Libre conception of corporatism the state was above
all, of particular 
interest, and "should intervene in everything at every moment.'35 
Rocky relations with Carlism began as early as 1925, when Don Jaime issued
a manifesto 
expressing forceful disapproval of the dictatorshi Libre militants for whom
loyalty to Don 
Jaime and a Catalanist conception of Carlism were primary quit the union
at this time.6 By 
1927 the break between the party and the Libres was irreversible. Ram6n Sales
placed himself 
beyond the Carlist pale by conniving with Martinez Anido to take over the
huge La Margarita 
Carlist worker center in Barcelona, which the regime had closed as part of
an anti-Carlist crack- 
down earlier in the year. Sales and Anido used the same tactics they employed
to take over the 
CADC1, and the center was reopened under the control of Sales' handpicked
cronies who cut 
all relations with the official chiefs of Catalan Carlism.7 The party announced
publicly in May 
that there were no relations between it and the union, although some individuals
who had 
been members were now Libre leaders. When, in contrast, the party had made
a similar decla- 
ration in 1923 it had likewise denied organic links between the two entities
but had vigorously 
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