Read an Excerpt
The Last Empire
Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization
By Stewart Lloyd-Jones, António Costa Pinto Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2003 Intellect
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-897-9
CHAPTER 1
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 phase of Portuguese colonialism. 1961 marks the start of the African wars in Angola and the loss, after four and a half centuries, of the Portuguese State of India; 25 April 1974 marks the effective end of the forces of the Portuguese Republic's attempts to impose its will by force on its overseas territories in the wake of the military movement of 25 April 1974.
The neatness of the dates is however only superficial as far as the history of the homeland is concerned. From the standpoint of the history of the Salazarist New State, 1958 and the presidential campaign of the volatile ultra-rightist-turned-democrat General Humberto Delgado marks the beginning of the end. Connected with the legal campaign were various attempts to overthrow Salazar's regime by force between 1958 and 1962, inevitably involving military conspiracy. Had any of these plots been successful, or had his legal presidential campaign been allowed to prosper, it would have resulted in the dismissal of Salazar and the presumed inauguration of a policy aimed at replacing Salazarist notions of integration with some sort of 'commonwealth solution' for the relationship of the Portuguese metropole and its various overseas territories.
Potentially more threatening for the regime than Delgado's conspiratorial efforts were the coup plans of Salazar's Defence Minister General Botelho Moniz, known as the abrilada of 1961. Had these plans not been thwarted at the last minute by Premier Salazar and President Thomaz, with the help of others including General Kaulza de Arriaga, it seems that Botelho Moniz and his military supporters (who apparently included General Costa Gomes but not General Spínola) would have installed the one-time Colonial Minister Marcello Caetano as the chief civilian in power (Delgado and Figueiredo 1991; Valença 1977; Gomes 1980). It is believed that at that time he was in favour of a federalist solution for the imperial problem which would not in the short term have been incompatible with the ideas then advocated by the United States for immediate liberalisation with a view to self-determination of the colonial territories after a number of years (Rodrigues 2002; Nogueira 1984: 210-417, 458-63, 514-9, 581-7). At this time some have recently alleged that Salazar himself did not rule out self-determination in the long run, but he was implacably opposed to Belgian, British or French policies of 'scuttle' in Africa in the shorter term. He was well aware of the politically immature state in which Belgium left the Congo in 1960 (which was to have a most significant impact on Angola), of the British Colonial Secretary's desire to be the first out of Africa and of the French retreat from the integrationist Algérie française position and de Gaulle's offer of independence to the overseas territories of the French Union (an offer immediately accepted only by French Guinea). Salazar's would-be substitutes presumably looked to the Gaullist French Community as an exemplar while Salazar stood firm on his interpretation of the doctrine of unripe time.
In 1961, then, overseas issues failed to change the course of Portuguese political history. In the mythology of the MPLA, 4 February is celebrated as the anniversary of the beginning of the armed liberation struggle on account of the attack on a prison in Luanda, while the massacres occasioned by Holden Roberto's FNLA's insurgency in northern Angola in March 1961 mark the definitive start of Portugal's African wars. At the same time as Salazar's outwitting of the Botelho Moniz conspiracy there appears to have been a certain patriotic closing of ranks in the face of the threat in Angola and it perhaps would be possible to ascribe the longevity of the Salazarist New State to a new lease of life occasioned by the Angolan 'confusion' – and this despite the 'facts' that Botelho Moniz's coup was scheduled for a month after the FNLA's massacres and that the regime's unsuccessful gamble over the State of India led to its loss and Salazar's televised weeping over this humiliation in December 1961. Two years later the commander in Goa, General Vassalo e Silva, was expelled from the Army for his decision to surrender rather than futilely to resist Indian vastly superior numbers and, at least after 25 April 1974, this political scapegoating of the military was conventionally said to have had a profound effect on the officer corps, thus preparing minds for the officers' movement which carried it out (Silva 1975; Morais 1980). This may well be so but there seems to be no hard evidence of discontent in the officer corps until about 1972. Discontent among other ranks could be indicated by a number, but an unknown and not apparently significant number, of desertions from the armed forces in the field and the increasing numbers of conscripts not turning up for service between 1961 and 1974. What is not known is what proportion of these young absentees were put off by colonial warfare and the possibility of extended service in different territories and what proportion was attracted by unprecedented earning opportunities in other booming West-European economies during this period. The matter is further complicated by the truism that in the real world motives are infrequently unmixed.
While it would seem that there is little hard evidence to be had on civilian or military morale and thinking from 1961 to 1968, the situation changes somewhat with the incapacitation of Salazar. The relationship of overseas and metropolitan domestic issues then becomes bound up with assessments of Marcello Caetano's motives and real desires. There are those that contend that, when he became Premier in 1968, he abandoned the ideas of federalist reformism on the overseas question which he had allegedly, and possibly opportunistically, espoused when kept out of power during the preceding decade. Others point to evidence suggesting that Caetano accepted office to reform the regime but had to accept the condition of key conservative members of the military and political elite, including President Thomaz, that he adhere to the essentials of Salazarist integrationism regarding the Overseas Provinces. In this latter interpretation Caetano failed to make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy because of his inability to resolve the overseas question, which meant increasing military expenditure to a ruinously unacceptable extent, growing war weariness and disappointment of the expectations raised in 1969-70 for genuine political reform. Such interpretations often point to indecisiveness and weakness of character in his failure to force faster evolution on the overseas question than the moves toward constitutional statehood in Angola and Mozambique as well as to the irrevocable alienation of non Communist oppositionists such as Mário Soares with whom he might have been able to do business in a controlled transition to democracy had it not been for the need to prohibit through censorship and other forms of repression public debate on overseas policy objectives on the grounds that such debate would exacerbate divisions on the home front to the advantage of national enemies, internal and external (Caetano 1973; 1974; 1976). Thus unresolved overseas issues are seen as the key determinant in the failure of Caetano to make a transition to a more pluralist and democratic political system in the homeland.
Overseas issues in the form of apparently perpetual and unwinnable colonial conflicts of varying intensities in Africa (and an officially outstanding irreversible military situation on the Indian sub-continent) did indeed bring about and essentially cause the overthrow of the regime on 25 April 1974 by military coup. In published reminiscences it seems that senior military personnel became more agitated about the need for a political way out of the colonial cul-de-sac around 1972, when it became clear that political evolution had ground to a halt. Less senior officers involved in the overthrow of Caetano subsequently explained how their consciousness had been changed by reading revolutionary literature for their own psychological warfare purposes and by contact with politically conscious conscripts. Thus large sections of the regular officer corps came to resent the regime's political manipulation, as in the episode of the Congress of Combatants in 1973 and to fear becoming scapegoats for defeat like Vassalo e Silva. The unpopularity of colonial counter-insurgency, despite the modest casualty rate of 4,027 deaths in action (but 8,290 military deaths altogether) in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea from 1961 to 1974 (Comissão para o Estudo das Campanhas de África 1988, 264-6), had taken its toll on the attractions of an increasingly poorly paid military career. While the arrival of the SAM-7 missile in Guinea in 1973 and Mozambique in 1974 changed the military balance, the key catalyst for anti-regime organisation among officers was Decree 353/73 in July 1973, which offended regulars by allowing conscript officers to gain rank on an accelerated basis, the government's idea being to try and overcome the growing shortage of junior officers. From these protests came the Armed Forces' Movement (MFA), while the regime was thrown into confusion by allowing publication of Spínola's book, Portugal e o futuro, on 22 February 1974, which broke official silence on the overseas question. Military discontent had turned into political discontent. The MFA's 25 April was essentially a consequence of overseas problems and was to change the course of Portuguese politics irrevocably.
From 25 April to 28 September 1974
The course of the revolutionary process is conventionally divided into three phases marked by the episodes of 28 September 1974, 11 March 1975 and 25 November 1975. This general schema will be followed here, with 11 March being seen as an attempt by Spínola to reverse the outcome of the 28 September fiasco that had provoked his resignation as provisional President of the Republic two days later.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last Empire by Stewart Lloyd-Jones, António Costa Pinto. Copyright © 2003 Intellect. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
