PORTUGAL.

One of Europe's oldest nation-states, Portugal by 1914 was a third- or fourth-ranked continental power, long past its brief time in the sun as a leading imperial and world power (a time that began in the 1470s and ended in 1580). If its size and location were marginal, its strategically located Atlantic islands (the Azores and Madeira, which were considered strategic during both world wars and the Cold War) and imperial possessions in Africa and Asia, as well as its tungsten mines, lent the small Iberian state more influence in world affairs during wartime than its military weakness warranted. Clinging sometimes desperately to its large overseas empire and constantly reminding its citizens of the country's central role in Europe's discoveries, Portugal was conditioned as well by other historic legacies, including continuing migration of its workers to richer countries; an Atlantic, maritime orientation; and dependence for defense of its metropolitan and imperial sovereignty on the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, world diplomacy's oldest connection.

THE FIRST REPUBLIC

In the twentieth century, Portugal experienced four different political systems: the twilight of the waning constitutional monarchy (1900–1910); the First Republic (1910–1926); a dictatorship with two constitutional phases: military dictatorship (1926–1933) and the Estado Novo (New State; 1933–1974), Europe's longest surviving authoritarian system; and democratic Portugal (established in 1974). For a period just before World War I, Portugal adopted a republican form of government (Europe's third republic) and appeared to be more advanced politically than other southern European states. The illusion died quickly: Portugal's novice parliamentary republic became the most unstable government in twentieth-century Western European history.

The republic compiled an unenviable record of civil strife, public violence, chaos, and instability. Forty-five governments held power in fifteen-anda-half years, for an average lifespan of four months per government. American humorist Will Rogers quipped some years later that in Portugal a premier hardly had time to unpack his bags before he was out on the street; 1920s France coined a new verb, portugaliser, meaning "to bring political chaos to a situation." To excessive political instability was added legislative and executive instability and lack of administrative continuity. "Revolutions," or, more properly, military and civil insurrections to overthrow besieged governments, were frequent. As many as five thousand people died in civil strife in these incidents and in ephemeral civil wars; only one president served out his full four-year term (Antonio de Almeida, r. 1919–1923) and that was at great risk to his life and at the cost of his health.

The builders of the ill-fated republic included some talented leaders who had noble dreams and plans for modernizing Portugal but they confronted daunting conditions and complex problems. From the monarchy, the republic had inherited deadly legacies of poverty, 75 percent illiteracy, and heavy debt, and new republican policies sparked bitter opposition and raised the expectations of many groups—expectations the new system could not satisfy.

The republic began on 5 October 1910, when after several days of fighting in Lisbon a civilian and military conspiracy overthrew the monarchy and Portugal's last reigning king, Dom Manuel II of Braganza, fled into exile in England. From the beginning, the republic's political process was held hostage to repeated military interventions. Republican ideology was based on the belief that Portugal's backwardness was due largely to domination by a reactionary Catholic Church and an incompetent, profligate monarchy. In their efforts to modernize the country, republicans carried out a sweeping anticlerical policy, which by the spring of 1911 included separation of church and state; secularization of education, public holidays, and overseas missionary work at all levels; state confiscation of all church property, including church buildings; the legalization of divorce; and the expulsion of religious orders. To address what republicans perceived as a tradition of monarchical abuse of executive powers, the Constitution of 1911 also featured a prominent legislature and a weak executive, which was composed of a prime minister and a president elected by the two legislative chambers rather than directly by the people; fearing opposition from conservative rural classes as well as much of the career army, the republicans greatly limited the franchise and during many elections employed fraud and intimidation. In terms of the franchise, the republic, with the exception of one brief period, was less democratic than the final phases of the constitutional monarchy.

Heavy migration from Atlantic Island and northern Portugal had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century and the republic's instability, violence, economic problems, as well as its anti-clerical policies, created a massive wave of emigration to the traditional destinations of these earlier migrants, Brazil and North America; this exodus reached a peak in 1912 and served as a kind of national social barometer. Table 1 indicates the pattern of Portuguese emigration during much of the twentieth century.

MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

What popular support the republic enjoyed in the early years was dissipated in a series of crises: a disputed anticlerical policy; an economy riven by unprecedented inflation, currency depreciation, capital flight, and heavy foreign and domestic debt; and the negative consequences of Portugal's participation on the Allied side in World War I. One political party, the Portuguese Republican Party, nicknamed the Democrats, dominated most elections and the congress, yet it lacked sustained popular support and alienated a wide range of many groups, including businesspeople, unions, employers, and the career military. By 1925, despite some useful reforms in education and society, the political system had reached a dead end. Although the military had tried to take power previously, it remained disunited until a grievance regarding contested privileges of an officer militia gave military conspirators the temporary unity necessary to organize a coup d'état. On 28 May 1926, in a bloodless coup, the professional military overthrew the republic and brought in a military dictatorship.

The military dictatorship established by "young lieutenants" found itself unable to solve the economic and political crisis or find effective leaders in the subsequent chaos of what a French writer aptly described as "barracks parliamentarism." In April 1928, military leaders asked an academic expert in finance to take charge of the ministry of finance and this extraordinary figure, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970), an economics professor at Coimbra University, soon dominated government, initiated reforms, and worked himself into the position of dictator. The reclusive, crafty Salazar was named prime minister in July 1932 and served in that post until he was felled by a stroke in September 1968. After 1930, the political system he had created labeled itself the New State and based itself on the varied ideologies of the ruling coalition, which included Catholics, monarchists, nationalists, conservative republicans, pseudofascists, fascists, and corporatists. Although for a period (1936–1944) the regime embraced the symbols, trappings, and selected ideas of fascism and from then on was consistently characterized by its opponents on the left as fascist, its inspiration was more strongly Catholic, nationalist, conservative, and corporatist than fascist. It maintained power for as long as it did for a number of reasons: its effective repressive machinery, dominated by a political police force; the complicity and support of the career military leadership, the Catholic Church, and the wealthier classes; the divided nature of the opposition; and a largely apolitical population. Regime domination of the media combined with press censorship to create the illusion of political peace and popular support, but in fact the only period when the regime had a measure of genuine popularity came before 1945. After World War II, political opposition became more intense and the regime confronted a series of unexpected crises.

When it came to power, the New State promised to overcome the economic crisis, balance budgets, stabilize politics, restore a depleted national pride, and deliver competent governance to a country still reeling from the experience of what some critics called "the nightmare republic." But authoritarian Portugal experienced a series of foreign policy, economic, and imperial crises that tested the talents of the ruling group. Stabilizing the empire's debt-ridden economy was a slow process, but the New State could claim at least some success by the mid-1930s. Two major back-to-back foreign policy crises, the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) and World War II (1939–1945) challenged Salazar as an interim foreign minister, and many domestic reforms had to be postponed. Portugal's stalwart support for General Francisco Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish civil war was an important if little known factor in Franco's eventual victory over the Spanish Republicans in 1939. Portugal remained neutral in World War II but made important economic gains from wartime mineral (especially wolfram or tungsten ore for hardening steel) and food exports to the Allies once the Axis began to lose the war and once the Allies put pressure on Lisbon to assist their war effort. A major turning point came in October 1943, when Portugal granted the British (and later the Americans) lease rights for military bases in the Azores Islands, which proved to be an important precedent later in 1949, when Portugal was a founding member of NATO.

As large crowds of flag-waving Portuguese celebrated VE (Victory in Europe) Day on 8 May 1945 in Lisbon's streets, few could have imagined that their odd dictator would still be in office twenty-three years later. Portugal's ruling group faced a postwar economic downturn and after 1950 new anticolonial pressures. Portugal refused to decolonize its territories in India when Indian passive resistance marchers entered its enclaves in 1954 and 1955. It declared to the United Nations, when it was admitted as a member along with Spain in late 1955, that its territories in Africa, Asia, and Oceania were not colonies but "overseas provinces." Portugal confronted a Goa crisis after India won independence in 1947. In 1961, when insurgents rose in northern Angola, African colonial wars presented a new, unprecedented challenge to the armed forces, which (except for some volunteers who fought in the Spanish civil war) had not experienced combat since World War I. Another blow to both the regime and the empire was India's conquest of Portugal's Indian territories in only two days during December 1961.

Although by 1960 economic growth and development were steady, the colonial crisis that began in early 1961 presented a double challenge to the ruling group. The political fallout of the insurgencies in Angola was quickly repressed, and the slaughter of several hundred Portuguese settlers brought a surge of at least temporary popular support for the regime and weakened the already divided opposition. The regime enjoyed a new, brief lease on life, but its aging leadership was forced to devote unaccustomed attention and resources to saving Angola and other African colonies from what it claimed were communist-inspired attacks and to convincing the world that although the other imperial powers had retired, Portugal, a NATO member, would take a stand in its empire.

REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Following a stroke in September 1968, the ailing Salazar was replaced by Marcello Caetano, a professor of law at Lisbon University who, although younger than Salazar by seventeen years, was one of the key architects of the New State and had served in many top posts. Although Caetano promised change within the system, he confronted a political system without a real future and a military crisis without a military solution. For several years, Caetano was successful in bringing about minor reforms and reinforcing Portugal's forces in its three colonial wars, but by 1970 his political honeymoon was over. Internal opposition grew, as did massive emigration pressures, the human and financial costs of three simultaneous and widely dispersed colonial wars, and the restiveness of the career military. In 1973 the crisis deepened as career military officers entered into a conspiracy to overthrow the government. As had happened in 1926, an initial military grievance regarding the officers' privileges became the rallying cry that temporarily united career military personnel and galvanized them. They overturned a regime that during a thirteen-year war in Africa had been unable to end the conflict and had blamed the military for its failure. The regime had also been unable to deal effectively with a severe economic crisis that was due to an Arab oil boycott and an international recession, a confrontation between the police and the military in Africa, and defections among the regime's waning coalition of supporters.

On 25 April 1974, an organization of career military personnel, the Armed Forces Movement, an unusual military coalition led by a group called the captains, who had spent years fighting in the colonial wars, overthrew the New State in a bloodless coup d'état based in Lisbon. The group's initial program was threefold: to restore democracy and end the dictatorship; to end the empire; and to bring sustained economic development to a society hamstrung by poverty and great economic inequalities. Many of the captains were heavily influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology and anticolonialism, but their presumed leader, the conservative war hero and senior general Antonio Spinola, was against rapid decolonization and favored a slow transition to a Portuguese-dominated federation of former colonies. Although he was initially appointed president of the republic, General Spinola resigned under fire from the more radical captains and led a failed coup to restore a more conservative government. For eighteen months, Portugal experienced a unique post-coup revolution during which 60 percent of the economy was nationalized; many workers went on strike (strikes had been banned under the New State) and occupied factories, housing, and farmlands; and the radical Constitution of 1976 was approved, decreeing a transition to socialism and the triumph of the proletariat. A severe economic crisis followed, along with rapid decolonization (except for East Timor and Macau), and the unexpected arrival in Portugal of at least 500,000 Portuguese and African retornados (returned ones), adding new social, economic, and political pressures to the revolutionary atmosphere. Moderate career military officers ousted the radical military elements on 25 November 1975 and began the process of the stabilization and normalization of the movement toward full democracy.

Since 1974 Portugal has maintained a stable democracy. Unlike the First Republic, this Third Republic (the New State is counted as the Second Republic) had a number of advantages that made possible its stability, wide freedoms, broad franchise, economic development, integration into the

European and world communities, and policies that sought to achieve economic equality, women's rights, the safeguarding of the environment, and a functioning multiparty democracy. Although in the early years the country experienced an economic crisis and recession, which lasted at least until the early 1980s, sustained growth and some prosperity followed. Post-1974 democratic Portugal has not directly confronted a war of its own overseas (it sent token contingents to theaters of war in the Balkans, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq). It has a much lower emigration rate than in the past and has enjoyed a greater degree of political and social peace, with a modicum of economic prosperity for a larger number of citizens,

Portugal's long tradition of migration abroad has continued but at a much lower rate. According to Overseas Portuguese Communities Population Figures by Country of Residence, just over ten million people lived in continental and Atlantic Island Portugal in 2002, and another four million Portuguese citizens, amounting to about 40 percent of the nation's population, lived abroad as resident workers, although many regularly revisited Portugal. As Table 2 shows, the largest portion of the overseas Portuguese communities resided in Brazil, France, and North America, but Portuguese migrants are found in many other countries as well.

Portugal is poorer and less industrialized than Spain but considerable economic and social progress has been made since the troubled 1970s and early 1980s. The new Portugal enjoys wide democratic freedoms, a functioning multiparty system dominated by two parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialists, a more racially and religiously diverse population, greater literacy, and an improved (if still challenged) educational system. A major factor in the modernization of the country has been its membership in the European Union, which it joined in 1986. Loans and grants from the European Union, as well as the adoption of the euro, have helped transform the economy and infrastructure. Portugal's 1998 Expo, a kind of Lisbon World's Fair, demonstrated anew that the Portuguese have adapted to changes and yet have preserved their historic patrimony while at the same time attempting to safeguard another legacy, an environment under that is threat. Portugal, like so many other small Western European countries, seeks to preserve its unique identity and its best traditions at the same time that it faces a challenging future both as a nation and as a member of an expanding European Union.

See alsoFascism; Portuguese Empire; Salazar, Antonio; Spanish Civil War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Costa Pinto, Antonio, ed. Modern Portugal. Palo Alto, Calif., 1998.

Ferreira, Hugo Gil, and Michael W. Marshall. Portugal's Revolution: Ten Years On. Cambridge, U.K., 1986.

Graham, Lawrence W., and Douglas L. Wheeler, eds. In Search of Modern Portugal: The Revolution and Its Consequences. Madison, Wis., 1983.

Mailer, Philip. Portugal: The Impossible Revolution? London, 1977.

Martins, Herminio. "Portugal." In European Fascism, edited by S. J. Woolf. New York, 1969.

Maxwell, Kenneth. The Making of Portuguese Democracy. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.

Wheeler, Douglas L. Republican Portugal: A Political History, 1910–1926. Madison, Wis., 1978.

——. "Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970)." In Research Guide to European Historical Biography. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C., 1992.

——. Historical Dictionary of Portugal. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md., and Oxford, U.K., 2002.

Douglas L. Wheeler