by Tony Judt
Portugal’s defense of its colonial holdings was expensive, bloody and increasingly hopeless; the armed forces knew this better than anyone. And they had other reasons to feel frustrated. To secure his own power and distract attention from the country’s overseas woes, Marcello Caetano—Salazar’s anointed successor—had eased credit restrictions, borrowed heavily from abroad and encouraged the flow of imports. In the years 1970-73, further fuelled by remittances from Portuguese working abroad, the country underwent a brief consumer boom. But it was followed in short order by spiraling inflation brought on by the oil crisis. Wages in the public sector began to fall far behind prices.
For the first time in many years Portugal was hit by strikes. The residents of the shanty towns around the capital, many of them recent arrivals from the impoverished Alentejo region, suffered not just their own endemic indigence but the sight of a new and showy wealth in nearby Lisbon. The army increasingly resented fighting the country’s ‘dirty wars’ in far-away lands on behalf of an unpopular government run by unelected technocrats, and its discontent was now finding a widespread echo at home. The grievances of junior officers and their families, unable to subsist on already low wages further reduced by inflation, were now shared by a rising generation of businessmen frustrated at their rulers’ incompetence and who understood that their country’s future lay in Europe, not Africa.223
On April 25th 1974, officers and men of the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas—MFA) ousted Caetano and his colleagues from office and declared a provisional government whose goals were to be democratization, decolonization and economic reform. The coup (like the young officers’ pronunciamento that first brought Salazar to power in 1926) aroused little resistance, and the leaders of the old regime were allowed to fly into exile—first to Madeira, thence to Brazil. General António de Spínola, former deputy chief of staff of the Portuguese army and governor of Guinée from 1968 to 1972, was appointed by his fellow officers to head the junta. The secret police was abolished, all political prisoners were released, freedom of the press was restored and the leaders of Portugal’s Socialist and Communist parties returned from exile, their organizations legally permitted for the first time in nearly half a century.
The revolution was immensely popular everywhere.9 Spinola brought centrists and socialists into his provisional cabinet and in July he publicly announced plans to offer the African colonies full self-determination. Within a year the colonies were all independent—and Indonesia had seized control of Portuguese East Timor. The decolonization was more than a little chaotic—guerillas in Guinée and Mozambique ignored Spinola’s insistence that they first lay down arms and Angola deteriorated into civil war—but seen from Portugal it had the virtue of being quick. It also precipitated, in the wake of the army’s retreat and violent clashes in the Angolan capital, Luanda, the return to Portugal of some 750,000 Europeans. Many of them settled in Portugal’s more conservative north and would play a significant political role in coming years.
These rapid changes disturbed Spinola, whose conservative instincts were at odds with the increasingly radical projects of his younger colleagues, and in September 1974 he resigned. For the next fourteen months Portugal appeared to be moving towards a full-scale social revolution. With the enthusiastic support of the MFA and Álvaro Cunhal’s uncompromisingly Leninist Communist Party (PCP), banks and major industries were nationalized and a massive agrarian reform was undertaken: notably in the Alentejo, the grain-producing region of southern Portugal where most holdings were still in the hands of large, often absentee landlords.
Nationalization was popular in the towns, and agrarian reform in the South—essentially collectivization of the land—was driven initially by ‘spontaneous’ occupations and land seizures by local tenants and labourers mobilized by the Communists and their allies, the Communists in particular benefiting from their well-deserved reputation as the best-organized and most effective clandestine opponents of the old regime. But the same practices in the center and north of the country, where the land was already sub-divided into thousands of small, family-run property holdings, were decidedly unwelcome. Rural and small-town northern Portugal was also (and still is) actively Catholic, with an average of one priest for every five hundred souls in 1972; the figure for south-central Portugal was 1:4500, and lower still in the far south. The anti-clerical, collectivizing projects of Communist unionists and peasant leaders thus encountered strong and vociferous opposition in the populous northern regions.
In essence, the Portuguese revolutionaries of 1974 were repeating the mistake of the agrarian radicals of the Spanish republic in the Thirties: in seeking to impose a collectivist land reform based on southern social conditions upon the privately-owned and more efficient smallholders of the north, they turned the latter against them. In the Constituent Assembly elections of April 1975 the Communists were held to just 12.5 percent of the vote. Right-of-center parties did better, but the big winner was the Portuguese Socialist Party, founded in exile two years before by Mário Soares, who campaigned very effectively on the slogan ‘Socialism, Yes! Dictatorship, No!’ and won 38 percent of the vote.
The MFA and the Communists were unhappy with the outcome of the vote, and Cunhal openly acknowledged that if the parliamentary route to power was blocked, an alternative path might have to be taken—as he put it to an Italian journalist in June 1975, ‘There is no possibility of a democracy like the one you have in Western Europe . . . Portugal will not be a country with democratic freedoms and monopolies. It will not allow it.’ From April to November tensions rose. Foreign commentators warned of an impending Communist coup, and Portugal’s NATO allies and western European trade partners held out promises of aid and affiliation if the country abjured Marxist revolution.
Matters came to a head at the end of the year. On November 8th the Constituent Assembly in Lisbon was besieged by building workers and for two weeks there were rumors of an imminent ‘Lisbon Commune’ and even a civil war between north and south. On November 25th groups of radical soldiers attempted a putsch. Initially they had the tacit support of the PCP, but when it became clear that the bulk of the armed forces and even some of the left-wing officers themselves were opposed to the uprising, even Cunhal backed off. As some of the MFA leaders were later to acknowledge, the outcome of the April 1975 elections had discredited in advance the goals of the revolutionary officers: the Left could have parliamentary democracy or a revolutionary ‘transition’, but not both.
In February 1976 the Portuguese military, still in effective control of the country nearly two years after their coup, officially handed over power to the civilian authorities. The country was to be governed under a Constitution approved in April 1976 and which continued to echo the rhetoric and ambitions of the post-’74 political mood, committing Portugal to a ‘transition to socialism through the creation of conditions for the democratic exercise of power by the working classes.’ In the legislative elections of that same month, the Socialists once again came first, though with a slightly reduced vote, and Mário Soares formed Portugal’s first democratically-elected government in nearly half a century.
The prospects for Portuguese democracy remained cloudy—Willy Brandt was just one of many sympathetic contemporary observers who saw in Soares another Kerensky, an unwitting stalking horse for undemocratic forces that would replace him at the earliest opportunity. But Soares survived—and more. The armed forces remained confined to barracks, the role of their politicized fringes increasingly marginal. The Communists’ vote actually rose—improving to 14.6 percent in 1976 and thence to 19 percent three years later, as the economy deteriorated and Soares’ moderate policies frustrated his party’s left-wing, to whom he had promised the coming destruction of capitalism in a Socialist Portugal—but at the price of abandoning their insurrectionist ambitions.
In 1977 the Parliament passed an Agrarian Reform Law that confirmed the land collectivization of the immediate past but confined it to the South, wi
th restrictions on the amount of land that could be expropriated from existing owners. This move ended the risk of rural conflict and a conservative backlash, but it could do little in the short run to alleviate the economic mess that democratic Portugal had inherited. Deprived of cheap raw materials from its former colonies (and the captive market they had provided for its otherwise uncompetitive exports), unable to export unskilled labour to Western Europe as in the past, and constrained under the terms of vital IMF loans to balance its budgets and practice fiscal rigor, Portugal suffered years of unemployment and under-consumption.
The military had not completely left the scene: under the 1976 Constitution a ‘Council of the Revolution’ composed of non-elected representatives of the armed forces retained a right of veto, and in the course of 1980 it rejected twenty three pieces of legislation, including a plan by the right-of-center government elected that year to denationalize domestic banks. But they offered no objection when parliament revised the constitution in the course of the next two years, reducing the power of the executive (abolishing the Council of the Revolution itself in 1982), and quietly removing the anti-capitalist emphasis in the original document.
For the next twenty years the Socialists and their opponents, centrist Social Democrats led by Aníbal Cavaço Silva, were to alternate in office. Mário Soares himself, his anti-capitalist rhetoric long-since abandoned, ascended to the country’s Presidency in 1986, the year Portugal was admitted to the European Community. The country remained strikingly poor by West European standards, a tribute to Salazar’s enduring legacy. But against all expectations Portugal had avoided both a ‘White Terror’ and a ‘Red Terror’. The Communists, while still popular in the rural south and the industrial suburbs of Lisbon, remained unrepentantly hard-line under the ageing Cunhal, who stayed in charge until 1992. But their influence was permanently diminished. The repatriated colonials never succeeded in forming a far-right party of embittered nationalists. In the circumstances, the emergence of a democratic Portugal was a very considerable achievement.
To a visitor crossing from France into Spain in, say, 1970, the chasm separating the two sides of the Pyrenees seemed immense. Franco’s thirty-year long reign had accentuated the social backwardness and cultural isolation in which Spain had languished for much of the past two centuries, and his authoritarian regime appeared even more at odds with modern European political culture than it had at the outset. At first sight the Sixties appeared to have passed Spain by altogether: rigid censorship, strict enforcement of laws regulating public dress and behavior, an omnipresent police and draconian penal laws for political critics all suggested a land frozen in time, its historical clock set permanently at 1939.224
On closer inspection, however, Spain—or at least northern Spain and the cities—was changing quite rapidly. Franco was a rigid and truly reactionary dictator, but unlike his neighbor Salazar he was also an economic realist. In 1959 Spain abandoned the autarkic practices of the past two decades and, at the instigation of a group of Opus Dei ministers, adopted a National Stabilization Plan intended to stifle the country’s endemic inflation and open it up to trade and investment. The initial economic impact of the Plan was harsh: devaluation, budget cuts, a credit freeze and wage restrictions—all firmly and uncompromisingly enforced—brought inflation down but forced tens of thousands of Spaniards to seek work abroad.
But the private sector, hitherto constrained by corporatist regulations and a longstanding policy of import substitution, was freer to expand. Tariffs were reduced; Spain joined the World Bank, the IMF and the GATT, and was admitted to the OECD as an Associate Member (in 1962 Franco even applied—unsuccessfully—to join the EEC). The timing of Franco’s new economic policy was propitious. The Spanish domestic economy had been protected against competition in the early years of Europe’s post-war boom, but was opening itself to foreign commerce at just the right moment. Starting in 1961, GNP began to rise steadily. The percentage of the labor force employed on the land—one worker in two in 1950—fell precipitatelyas rural laborers from the South and West moved north to work in factories and the burgeoning tourist trade: by 1971 only one Spaniard in five was left in agriculture. Already, by the mid-Sixties, Spain had ceased to qualify as a ‘developing nation’ under UN criteria.
Franco’s ‘economic miracle’ should not be overstated. Spain was not burdened by the residue of empire and thus faced none of the economic or social costs of decolonization. Most of the foreign cash flowing into the country in the Sixties came not from the export of Spanish-produced goods, but rather from overseas remittances by emigrant Spanish workers or else holiday-makers from northern Europe: in short, Spain’s economic modernization was largely a by-product of other nations’ prosperity. Outside of Barcelona, the Costa Brava, parts of the Basque country and (to a lesser extent) Madrid, the transport, education, medical and service infrastructure of the country still lagged far behind. Even in 1973, per capita income in the country as a whole was still lower than that of Ireland and less than half the EEC average.
Nevertheless, the social consequences of even limited economic modernization were significant. In a time before television Spain may have been largely shielded from the cultural impact of the Sixties elsewhere, but the economic disparities and disruption engendered by the Stabilization Plan produced widespread labour discontent. From the later Sixties through Franco’s death, strikes, lockouts, demonstrations and widespread demands for collective bargaining and union representation became a fixture of Spanish life. The regime was adamantly opposed to any political concessions; but it could not afford to present too repressive a public face, at a time when so many foreigners were visiting the country—17.3 million in 1966, rising to 34 million the year before Franco’s death.
Nor could the Spanish authorities forgo the cooperation and skills of a growing urban work force. They were thus constrained to concede the de facto emergence of a labor movement, overwhelmingly based in Catalonia and the heavy industries of the Basque region. Together with the unofficial unions formed by public employees, banking staff and other expanding white-collar occupations, this semi-clandestine network of workers’ and employees’ representatives could call upon nearly a decade of organization and experience by the time Franco died.
Labor protest in Spain, however, was kept firmly confined to bread and butter issues. By its last years, Franco’s regime—rather like that of János Kádár in Hungary—depended not on open and violent repression but rather upon a sort of enforced passive acceptance, a decades-long de-politicization of the culture. Student protesters, who since 1956 had been seeking greater campus autonomy and a relaxing of moral codes and other restrictions, were accorded a certain liberty to organize and protest within strictly circumscribed boundaries; they could even count upon some sympathy from the regime’s internal critics—reform-minded Catholics and disappointed ‘social-Falangists’ among others. But all active expressions of sympathy or collaboration across sectors—with striking miners, for example—were strictly off limits.225 The same applied to the regime’s adult critics.
Indeed, all properly political opinions were kept firmly under wraps, and independent political parties were banned. Until 1967 the country lacked even a constitution, and such rights and procedures as existed were largely window dressing for the benefit of Spain’s Western partners. Officially a ‘regent’ for the suspended monarchy, Franco had anointed the young Juan Carlos—grandson of Spain’s last king—to succeed him in due course, but for most observers the question of the monarchy played little part in Spanish affairs. Even the Church, still a major presence in the daily life of many Spaniards, played only a limited role in public policy.
Spain’s traditional role as a bulwark of Christian civilization against materialism and atheism was a staple of the primary-school curriculum; but the Catholic hierarchy itself (unlike the modernizing ‘crypto monks’ of Opus Dei) was kept well away from the reins of power, in marked contrast to the neo-Crusading ‘National Catholicism�
�� spirit of the regime’s first decade.226 In June 1968, bowing to modern reality, Franco conceded for the first time the principle of religious freedom, allowing Spaniards openly to worship at a church of their choosing. But by then religion itself was entering upon a long decline: in a country that could boast over 8,000 seminarists at the start of the Sixties, there were less than 2,000 twelve years later. Between 1966 and 1975 one third of all Spain’s Jesuits left the Order.
The military, too, was kept at a careful distance. Having himself come to power by a military coup, Franco understood very well the risks of alienating a military caste that had inherited an over-developed sense of its responsibility for the preservation of the Spanish state and its traditional values. Throughout the post-war years the Spanish Army was cosseted and flattered. Its victory in the Civil War was celebrated annually in the streets of major cities, its losses ostentatiously memorialized in the monumental Valley of The Fallen, completed in September 1959. Ranks and decorations multiplied: by the time the regime fell there were 300 generals, and the ratio of officers to other ranks was 1:11, the highest in Europe. In 1967, an Institutional Law of the State made the armed forces formally responsible for guaranteeing the nation’s unity and territorial integrity and defending ‘the institutional system’.
In practice, though, the armed forces had become superfluous. Franco had for decades preserved his military from any foreign or colonial wars. Unlike the French or Portuguese armies, they suffered no humiliating defeats or forced retreats. Spain faced no military threats, and its domestic security was handled by police, gendarmes and special units formed to fight terrorists—real and imaginary. The army, largely confined to a ceremonial role, had become risk averse; its traditional conservatism was expressed increasingly in enthusiasm for the return of the monarchy, an identification that was to prove ironically beneficial in the nation’s transition to democracy.