Os Políticos e a Crise - De Salazar a Passos Coelho (Portuguese Edition)

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For the Portuguese ruling regime, the overseas empire was a matter of national identity. In the s, armed revolutionary movements and scattered guerrilla activity reached Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea. Except in Portuguese Guinea, the Portuguese army and naval forces were able to suppress most of these insurgencies effectively through a well-planned counter-insurgency campaign using light infantry, militia, and special operations forces. However, despite the early military successes, Colonel Francisco da Costa Gomes quickly pointed out that there could be no permanent military solution for Portugal's colonial problem.

Botelho Moniz ended up being removed from his government position. His political ally Francisco da Costa Gomes was nonetheless allowed to publish a letter in the newspaper "Diario Popular" reiterating his view that a military solution in Africa was unlikely. In the s, most of the world ostracised the Portuguese government because of its colonial policy, especially the newly independent African nations. Domestically, fractions within Portugal's elite, including business, military, intellectuals and the church started to challenge Salazar and his policies. Later, despite tentative overtures towards an opening of the regime, Marcelo Caetano balked at ending the colonial war, notwithstanding the condemnation of most of the international community.

The Carnation Revolution brought retreat from the colonies and acceptance of their independence, the subsequent power vacuum leading to the inception of newly independent communist states in , notably the People's Republic of Angola and the People's Republic of Mozambique , which promptly began to expel all of their white Portuguese citizens. A brief conflict drew a mixture of worldwide praise and condemnation for Portugal. In India, the action was seen as a liberation of territory historically Indian by reason of its geographical position, while Portugal viewed it as an aggression against its national soil and its own citizens.

After India gained independence on 15 August , the British and French vacated their colonial possessions in the new country.

Subsequently, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru initiated proceedings to find a diplomatic solution to the Goa problem. The Portuguese had been in Goa since , while an independent India had only just been established. Nehru argued that the Goans were Indians by every standard and that Goa was a colony ruthlessly administered by a racist and fascist colonial regime, "just a pimple on the face of India", in his famous phrase. Salazar maintained that in spite of Goa's location and the nature of Portugal's political system, it was a province of Portugal as integral to his nation as the Algarve.

Salazar further asserted that Goans nowhere considered or called themselves Indians, but rather deemed themselves to be Portuguese of Goa and that Goans were represented in the Portuguese legislature; indeed, some had risen to the highest levels of government and the administration of Portuguese universities. The Goans had Portuguese citizenship with full rights, thus access to all governmental posts and the ability to earn their living in any part of the Portuguese territories. Throughout the debate between Salazar and Nehru, Goans seem to have been apathetic regarding either position, [] and there were no signs in Goa of discontentment with the Portuguese regime.

With an Indian military operation imminent, Salazar ordered Governor General Manuel Vassalo e Silva to fight to the last man and adopt a scorched earth policy. Salazar forced the general into exile for disobeying his order to fight to the last man and surrendering to the Indian Army. Adlai Stevenson , the American Ambassador to the United Nations, stated "we are confronted by the shocking news that the Indian Minister of Defence Krishna Menon , so well known in these halls for his advice on peace and his tireless enjoinders to everyone else to seek the way of compromise, was on the borders of Goa inspecting his troops at the zero hour of invasion.

Charter, stated in Article 2. On the other hand, Valerian Zorin , the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations, maintained that the Goan question was wholly within India's domestic jurisdiction and could not be considered by the Security Council. After Rhodesia proclaimed its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in , Portugal supported it economically and militarily through neighbouring Portuguese Mozambique until , even though it never officially recognised the new Rhodesian state, which was governed by a white minority elite.

In , the Mozambican Liberation Front took over the rule of Mozambique following negotiations with the new Portuguese regime installed by the Carnation Revolution. Ian Smith later wrote in his biography The Great Betrayal that had Salazar lasted longer than he did, the Rhodesian government would have survived to the present day, ruled by a black majority government under the name of Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Despite the authoritarian character of the regime, Portugal did not experience the same levels of international isolation as Spain did following World War II. Unlike Spain, Portugal under Salazar was accepted into the Marshall Plan — in return for the aid it gave to the Allies during the final stages of the war.

Furthermore, also unlike Spain, it was one of the 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO in , a reflection of Portugal's role as an ally against communism during the Cold War in spite of its status as the only non-democratic founder. It joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in , and finally, Portugal signed a free trade agreement with the European Economic Community in , still under the auspices of the Estado Novo.

Although the militants of the First Republic had chosen education as one of their banner causes, the evidence shows that the more democratic First Republic was less successful than the authoritarian Estado Novo in expanding elementary education. Under the First Republic, literacy levels in children aged 7 to 14 registered a modest increase from 26 per cent in to 33 per cent in Under the Estado Novo , literacy levels in children aged 7 to 14 increased to 56 per cent in , 77 per cent in and 97 per cent in In addition, the long-established universities of Lisbon and Coimbra were greatly expanded and modernised.

The last two decades of the Estado Novo, from the s to the Carnation Revolution were marked by strong investment in secondary and university education , which experienced one of the fastest growth rates of Portuguese education in history. After the politically unstable and financially chaotic years of the Portuguese First Republic , financial stability was Salazar's highest priority. His first incursions into Portuguese politics as a member of the cabinet were during the Ditadura Nacional , when Portugal's public finances and the economy in general were in a critical state, with an imminent threat of default since at least the s.

The first era of his rule was thus an economic program based on the policies of autarky and interventionism , which were popular in the s as a response to the Great Depression.

Portugal's credit worthiness rose in foreign markets and the external floating debt was completely paid. However, Portugal remained largely underdeveloped, its population relatively poor and with low education attainment when compared to the rest of Europe. Conservative Portuguese scholars such as Jaime Nogueira Pinto [] and Rui Ramos [] claim that Salazar's early reforms and policies allowed political and financial stability, therefore social order and economic growth.

On the other hand, historians such as the leftist politician Fernando Rosas claim that Salazar's policies from the s to the s led to economic and social stagnation and rampant emigration that turned Portugal into one of the poorest countries in Europe. From the s, the picture changed, and even leftist historians recognise "that industrial growth throughout the s and s was generally quite positive and, given Portugal's basic problems, could probably have only been improved slightly by a more creatively liberal regime".

Throughout the s, Salazar maintained the same import substitution approach to economic policy that had ensured Portugal's neutral status during World War II. From until Salazar's death, Portugal saw its GDP per capita increase at an annual average rate of 5. The rise of new technocrats in the early s with a background in economics and technical-industrial expertise led to a new period of economic fostering, with Portugal as an attractive country for international investment.

Industrial development and economic growth would continue throughout the s. This marked the initiation of Salazar's more outward-looking economic policy. Portuguese foreign trade increased by 52 per cent in exports and 40 per cent in imports. The economic growth and levels of capital formation from to were characterised by an unparalleled robust annual growth rates of GDP 6. Despite the effects of an expensive war effort in African territories against guerrilla groups, Portuguese economic growth from to under the Estado Novo created an opportunity for real integration with the developed economies of Western Europe.

For forty years, Portugal was governed by a man that had been educated at a seminary, had received minor orders, and had considered becoming a priest. During their university years at Coimbra they shared a house, an old convent known as "Os Grilos". In July , with Salazar acting as minister of finance, the government revoked a law that had facilitated the organisation of religious processions. Salazar presented his written resignation to the prime minister saying, "Your Excellency knows that I never asked for anything that might improve the legal status of Catholics".

He carefully avoided adding more problems to an already troubled nation, but he could not accept the "violation of rights already conceded by law or by former government to Catholics or the Church in Portugal". Despite his identification with the Catholic lobby before coming to power and the fact that he based his political philosophy around a close interpretation of the Catholic social doctrine, he did nothing directly for religion in the initial phase of his rule.

He wanted to avoid the divisiveness of the First Republic, and he knew that a significant part of the political elite was still anti-clerical. Church and State remained apart.

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The Church's lost property was never restored. The role of the Church should be social and not political, he argued. In the Constitution, Article 45 provided for freedom of public and private worship for all religions, together with the right to establish Church organizations and associations in accordance with the norms of law and order.

Salazar based his political theory on the doctrines of the popes and throughout the s achieved great prestige in the Catholic world. In , the episcopate expressed its full support for the regime in a Carta Pastoral, reaffirmed the following year by the head of the Portuguese Catholic Church. Pope Pius XII said, "I bless him with all my heart, and I cherish the most ardent desire that he be able to complete successfully his work of national restoration, both spiritual and material".

Salazar wanted to reinstate the Church to its proper place, but also wanted the Church to know its place and keep it. He made it clear when he declared, "The State will abstain from dealing in politics with the Church and feels sure that the Church will refrain from any political action. In May , a Concordat between the Portuguese state and the Vatican was signed.

The legislation of the parliamentary republic was not fundamentally altered: The Bishops were to be appointed by the Holy See, but final nomination required the government's approval. The clergy were subject to military service, but in the form of pastoral care to the armed forces and, in time of war, also to the medical units.

The Catholic religion and morality were to be taught in public schools unless parents had requested the contrary. The law stated that "It is understood that by the very fact of the celebration of a canonical marriage, the spouses renounce the legal right to ask for a divorce. Pinto and Rezola argue that a key strategy Salazar used to stabilise his regime was to come to terms with the Catholic Church through the Concordat. Anti-clericalism would be discouraged and the Church would have an honored and central position in Portuguese life.

The Church agreed to stay out of politics, but it did operate numerous social groups for adults and youth. The Church role became a major pillar of the New State's "limited pluralism. Despite this landmark agreement, Church-state relations and inter-Church relations in Portugal were not without some tensions through the s.

Some prominent oppositionist priests, such as Abel Varzim and Joaquim Alves Correia, openly supported the MUD in and the granting of more social rights to the workers. Abel Varzim, who had been a supporter of the regime, attacked Salazar and his claims of the Catholicism of the corporatist state, arguing that the regime was not true to Catholic social teaching as the people suffered in poverty. Varzim's newspaper, O Trabalhador The Worker , was closed in Joaquim Alves Correia was forced into exile in the United States, where he died in The opposition candidate in the presidential election, Humberto Delgado , a Roman Catholic and a dissident of the regime, quoted Pope Pius XII to show how the social policies of the regime were against the social teachings of the Church.

It was time, he said, for the Church to come out of the catacombs and speak its mind. The bishop was not formally exiled, but he decided to leave the country, and it appears that Lisbon made it clear to Rome that the bishop's presence in Portugal would not be appropriate. After the Second Vatican Council , a large number of Catholics became active in the democratic opposition. The pope's decision to travel to Bombay in December to take part in the Eucharistic Congress represented for the Portuguese head of government — who saw in India little more than the illegal occupier of Goa since December — no less than a direct affront to the nation as a whole.

On 21 October , the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Franco Nogueira, officially defined the visit as an agravo gratuito. Directly linked with the pope's visit to India, a second event of significant importance preceded the pope's visit to Portugal: From the very start, he made every effort to remove any political significance from his visit. Religions other than the Catholic faith had little or no expression in Portugal.

Throughout the period of Salazar's Estado Novo there was no question of discrimination against the Jewish and Protestant minorities, and the ecumenical movement flourished. According to Saraiva, Salazar's prose deserves a prominent place in the history of Portuguese literature, and only political barriers have deprived it of the place. Saraiva says it is written with the clarity of the great prose of the 17th century, cleansed of all the distractions and sloppiness that often obscures the prose of the Portuguese scholars. In , Salazar suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

Most sources maintain that it occurred when he fell from a chair in his summer house. In February though, there were anonymous witnesses who admitted, after some investigation into Salazar's best-kept secrets, that he had fallen in a bath instead of from a chair. Despite the injury, Salazar lived for a further two years.

As a symbolic display of his views of Portugal and the colonial empire, there is well-known footage of several members of the Mocidade Portuguesa , of both African and European ethnicity, paying homage at his funeral. Due to Salazar's long rule, a detached evaluation of him is difficult. He is considered either a saviour of interwar Portugal and an exponent of Christian philosophy in politics, or, on the contrary, a fascist-leaning dictator who obstructed his country's democratic evolution.

He rejected the secularism and anticlericalism of the French Revolution, which had a stronghold in the cities but was weak in rural areas. Negative traits that were seen in the governments of other parts of Europe were not prevalent. He never claimed the superiority of a pure Portuguese stock. There was no policy of antisemitism and he helped Jews escape the Nazis. Catholicism was emphasised but the bishops and the pope had to keep their place in the system he quietly controlled without fanfare or charisma.

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Nationalism was used as a major justification for building a huge global empire that long outlasted those of France, Britain and the others. Salazar also succeeded in using national pride to overwhelm localism and the bitter factionalism that had long troubled the nation before His coalition brought together monarchists, moderate republicans, businessmen, churchmen, landowners and the military. Each of these groups understood that only with him in charge could their privileges be guaranteed.

He believed in stability not democracy, but Portugal remained poor as Europe flourished in the s and s. He spent large sums on soldiers to fight for control of the many colonies; it was a losing battle and by this time the old man was himself losing prestige and stature. He always rejected goals such as modernity and progress and liberalism in favour of tradition, stability and conservatism, and the themes are still echoed into the 21st century by his admirers. Historian Neill Lochery claims Salazar was one of the most gifted men of his generation and hugely dedicated to his job and country.

Wiarda, despite certain problems and continued poverty in many sectors, the consensus among historians and economists is that Salazar in the s brought remarkable improvements in the economic sphere, public works, social services and governmental honesty, efficiency and stability. Life declared that "most of what is good in modern Portugal can be credited to Dr. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar The dictator is everything that most Portuguese are not — calm, silent, ascetic, puritanical, a glutton for work, cool to women.

He found a country in chaos and poverty. He has balanced the budget, built roads and schools, torn down slums, cut the death rate and enormously raised Portuguese self-esteem. Hoare asserted that, in his 30 years of political life, he had met most of the leading statesmen of Europe, and regarded Salazar highly among those. Salazar was to him a learned and impressive thinker — part professor, part priest, part recluse of unshakable beliefs.

He regarded him as ascetic, concentrated on serving his country, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Europe and indifferent to ostentation, luxury or personal gains. Hoare strongly believed in Salazar as "being a man of one idea — the good of his country", not wanting to endanger the work of national regeneration to which he had devoted the whole of his public life. He met Salazar in person and agreed with Ambassador Hoare. Hayes wrote that Salazar 'didn't look like a regular dictator. Rather, he appeared a modest, quiet, and highly intelligent gentleman and scholar In his memoirs, Staercke dedicates a full chapter to Salazar and ranks Salazar, together with Churchill and Paul-Henri Spaak as one of the three greatest political leaders he has met in his life.

Spanish dictator Francisco Franco spoke effusively of Salazar in an interview published by France's Le Figaro newspaper: The Portuguese historian, scholar, and editor, A. He became more and more of a dictator, more and more inclined to deify himself and to trust others less. In November , Time magazine said of Salazar: There are a few cracks in the facade.

The assembly functions only as a rubber stamp. The opposition candidates are usually feeble old men left over from a regime that was discredited and overthrown four decades ago, and Salazar decides what they can and cannot talk about The Portuguese poet, writer, and literary critic Fernando Pessoa wrote that Salazar was "capable of governing within the limits of his area of expertise, which is financial science, but not capable of governing with the lack of limits of government in general", adding that "What is wrong, here, is not that Sr.

Oliveira Salazar is Minister of Finance, which I accept is right, but that he is minister of everything, which is more questionable. The American author and political scientist, Paul H. Lewis , wrote of Salazar: He was cold, intellectual, and dedicated — a man of "painful reserve: In and two public opinion television shows aroused controversy.

The 10th anniversary of the Revolution, in , occurred during the worst moment of economic crisis after the fall of the dictatorship. Ten years later, positive answers to these questions rose to In , a pervasive negative perception of the revolutionary legacy overlooked all actual data on how democracy had evidently improved mass education: In , after decolonization but before integration in the European Community , no more than A shy authoritarian Economics professor, he posed, like Salazar before him, as an apolitical politician. When the Berlin Wall fell and real socialism collapsed in , the attitude of leading right-wing stakeholders in politics, the media, university and corporations towards the past was apparently majoritarian: Thirteen years after the end of revolutionary expectations — or disillusionment — mostly under right-wing governments, social and cultural atmosphere was ripe for the confrontation that occurred between opposing memorial discourses and policies.

It then became commonplace to produce memorial accounts on the dictatorship into which were squeezed highly negative references to the Revolution of , thus producing a historically-confusing discourse, often clearly anachronistic. The first widespread public debate over the Portuguese dictatorship took place three years later.

The former inspector , systematically addressed as such by an especially kind moderator, who deliberately avoided embarrassing questions, was impudent enough to deny that torture and executions had been practiced by the political police until Strong-worded reactions came from anti-Salazarist resistants.

That we have imagined this whole story? What on earth will be our legacy?

By means of the undervaluation and deliberate mystification of History, and by airing the opinions, with no adequate critique, of some of its representatives, there is an attempt to cleanse crimes committed by the dictatorship and to retrieve its ideology. Very few right-wing intellectuals decided to take part in the debate. For a short while, but for the first time since , they felt comparatively uneasy. Some, however, went straight to the same old point: It was not PIDE who did those.

Thus, Moura chose to drag decolonization into the debate, that specific feature of social memory regarding the fall of the authoritarian regime and the Revolution which continued, over the years, to be negatively perceived by a majority of the Portuguese, both until and after At the same time, a self-portrait was emerging of the Portuguese as the victims of the war: Self-victimization impelled them to talk about their own experience, openly asking State and society to empathize with their feelings and their pain, as well as their legal demands.

The pervading lack of determination of most of the new African States except perhaps Mozambique in developing specific memorial policies on the war from an African perspective left room for Portuguese-centered memorial policies conveyed by the Portuguese Armed Forces and former associations of combatants and retornados.

In fact, all those who subscribe to the narrative of the amputated Nation operate inside a widespread consensus on a sort of culturalistic self-indulgent explanation, the Lusotropicalism , committed to proving a special capacity for cultural assimilationism, an alleged multi-racialism and the absence of racial prejudice, a supposedly fatherly attitude of Portuguese colonists.

Meanwhile, in academia, there was a highly significant change in attitude towards historical research on the period. Indeed, research on these subjects have been booming since the late s, as have fiction, autobiography and film both fictional and documentary. On the one hand, solid works have been produced on Salazarist repression and violence, especially on the role of the political police, and including, at long last, some of its colonial dimensions see Mateus, ; Pimentel, ; on the other, as in several other national cases, a kind of nostalgic literature on the two dictators Salazar, , and Marcelo Caetano, , both biographical and pseudo-historiographical, as well as on their families and friends, former ministers and so forth, have flooded bookstores and the media, usually written by reporters, but also by certain trendy right-wing historians whose work was especially welcomed by publishing houses.

A clear symptom of this sort of approach to history and collective memory was the TV contest Grandes Portugueses , broadcast over several months throughout autumn and winter by RTP, the public broadcasting company, which imported it from the BBC. On the other hand, the TV station decided to appoint a defender defensor for the ten characters with most votes in a bizarre first stage to the contest. In the last 40 years, it is hard to find a better example addressing the history of the recent past under the extreme conditions imposed by the new media-oriented, technological mass culture, especially with such pedagogical pretensions, which used highly simplistic, virtually acritical procedures, to convey a memorial discourse presented as if it were a collective national memory.

After six months, Salazar had won the contest. However, the media became significantly more attentive to scientific research when full access to archives since the mids began to have an effect. As far as the right-wing memorial policies are concerned, however, what became visible in the 21 st century is, more than internal dissonance, a true division of labor: All in all, revisionist views of the Revolution and the decolonization process still have a strong impact on public opinion, but they have lost the hegemony they seemed to have enjoyed in the mids, especially because, since the rebellion of memory of , they have been openly disputed.

A symbolic struggle, however, still continues among different memory discourses disputing hegemony on the process of rebuilding the past. The nature of the visibility of each memory discourse creates a specific balance between the forces operating in this battle over memory. Memorial policies play a central role in the struggle for ideological and symbolical hegemony, in the construction of the terms of perception and organization of social reality: For the revisionist anti-republican standpoint, Moa surely remains the most representative example. In February and March , nationalist rebellions in Angola started a Colonial War which soon spread to Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique A total of , Portuguese soldiers were drafted, 10, killed, 30, wounded, an estimate of over , returned from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Fados & Fardos by Mr. Jose Filipe Pinto (2014-05-27)

On transitional justice in the years following the Revolution, see Pimentel et al. Egreja and Manuel S. Menezes, and Brigadier Orlando R. Estrategias da ou Para a Lusofonia? O Futuro da Lingua Portuguesa. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now.

José Filipe Pinto

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