PART I

Portugal, the colonies and the 1974 Revolution

1:The influence of overseas issues in Portugal's transition to democracy

Richard A. H. Robinson

For historians, assessing influence is a perennial and perforce inexact art. Different people weight factors differently. For example, those of the Marxist persuasion are perforce bound by their belief-system to attach particular importance to economic and socio-economic factors with a particular teleology in mind. The revolutionary process of 1974-75 in Portugal, however, was illuminating for non-Marxist observers as they watched Marxist commentators revise their explanatory apparatus from the all-importance of the macro-analysis of socio-economic structures and trends and the unimportance of individuals' activities to include, at least in real day-to-day practice, the supreme importance of individuals' actions and the discernment of regimental political loyalties and potential fire-power. That quondam War Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Friedrich Engels, would certainly have approved of the latter practice.

Nevertheless, historians of all persuasions continue to demonstrate that they think the comparative weight to be attached to different factors in explaining events of all magnitudes, even if their judgements are disputable. This common historical 'tradition' is continued in this piece, where the judgements are inspired by evidence whose completeness and accuracy is very far from being beyond dispute. As so often in the practice of historians, speculation and guesswork are to the fore: this writer would not wish to disguise these with masking words such as 'insight'.

Background

It could plausibly be argued that overseas events and issues have determined the course of Portugal's history at a number of critical junctures. The very process of 'the Discoveries' brought Portugal a world-historical significance that it would otherwise have lacked and gave it a maritime trading empire in Africa and Asia in the sixteenth century which in turn brought the Portuguese Crown great wealth, enabling monarchs to be free of constitutional constraints which their subjects might otherwise have placed upon them. In 1578 it was in an overseas land close to home – Morocco, 'the Algarve Beyond the Sea – where the 'splendid and most Portuguese Madness' (Ameal 1968: 314) of the crusading King Sebastian led Portugal to disaster at the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir. Many important elements of the elite were slain or had to be ransomed for enormous sums and the childless monarch was succeeded by his uncle, the properly childless Cardinal-King Henry, after which the line passed to the Spanish Habsburgs. Thus it was an overseas event that led to what Portuguese have customarily called 'the Spanish captivity' of 1580-1640, which nationalist historiography has seen as the veritable loss of national independence.

It would not be plausible to explain the success of the revolt of John of Braganza in 1640 by invocation of overseas (as opposed to international, or foreign) causes. The inability of the Spanish monarchs to defend Portuguese possessions overseas from Dutch and English encroachments could, however, be listed as a contributory background factor. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the wealth of Brazil that made the Portuguese Crown strong, freeing it from constitutional pressures, while the policies of Pombal sought to exploit this wealth more systematically for the good of the homeland. It was foreign, European events in the form of the French invasion of 1807, which put a definitive end to the trans-Atlantic basis for the national recovery of the eighteenth century, but it was the centralising endeavours of the liberal revolutionaries of 1820 in relation to Brazil which led to the 'cry of Ipiranga' (the declaration of independence). The loss of Brazil greatly diminished the Portuguese resource base, making the weakened country more susceptible to outside interference, while the commitment of Pedro IV as Emperor of Brazil brought on the debilitating 'Brothers 'War'. Those immersed more deeply than this author in the methodology of the 'ifs of history' could find fruitful material for their counter-factual speculative enquiries in imagining Portuguese development if Pedro IV had been simply King of Portugal after the demise of João VI in 1826, with or without the retention of Brazil as chief colony.

In more recent times, there is evidence that overseas issues have at least played an important part in determining the fate of the homeland. Lord Salisbury's ultimatum of 1890, preventing Portugal giving reality to the pink-coloured map of a Portuguese band of territory in southern Africa stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans, is said so to have humiliated the liberal regime of King Carlos that it made converts to militant nationalist Republicanism and opened the road that led (for Republicans, inexorably) to the events of 5 October 1910. The opinion is general that it was the retention of African overseas possessions, though some might say the preservation of the Republic of the 'Democrats' whose raison d'être was imperial nationalism, that determined Portugal's ruinous intervention in the First World War, which some see as inextricably related not only to Sidónio Pais's seizure of power in December 1917 but also the military movement of 28 May 1926 which put paid to parliamentary liberalism (Teixeira 1996; Meneses 2000).

The policies of Salazar, beginning with the Colonial Act of 1930, tied the politics of the Portuguese homeland even more closely to the overseas by its centralising imperial policies and the eventual full-scale adoption of French-style integration of the overseas possessions which had in 1911 officially become 'colonies', following the French fashion of that time. The formal existence of one indivisible pluri-continental Portugal 'from the Minho to Timor' dated from the constitutional revision of 1951, though the official distinction between 'indigenous' and 'non-indigenous' inhabitants had to wait until the repeal of the Native Statute in 1961.

From Abrilada to Abrilada

1961-1974 are the dates assigned – without speculation or guesswork – to the last...