Patched-up
Raymond Carr
Republican Portugal: A Political History 1910-26 Douglas L. Wheeler (Wisconsin £14) Portugal: Birth of a Democracy Robert Harvey (Macmillan £3.95) On the European Left, starved of the excitements of enjoying a revolution in someone else's country, the 4 April 1974 in Portugal had the same inspiriting effect as the fall of the Bastille on Wordsworth. A group of junior officers overthrew an outworn dictatorship, caught in the process of reforming itself. (The lesson was not lost on Spain :if you,want to de-dictatorize you must be sharp about it.) . This was not Portugal's first essay in radical revolution manufactured in Lisbon. In 1910 Republican conspirators had overthrown the monarchy and imposed a new regime by telegraph on a backward agrarian country. Would 1974 see a repeat performance of the Republican experience of 1910-1926?
Professor Wheeler sets out on the difficult and original task of describing that complicated and depressing experiment in democratic politics. Perhaps inevitably the result often resembles a piece of knitting rather than a slice of history. But thank God, it is political history, a genre that will come into its own to explain political happenings, once the structuralists have shot their fashionably boring bolt. Like most regimes the monarchy fell, in 1910, less because the opposition was strong than because the opposition had sapped its moral confidence to resist. The Republicans promised to regenerate . a nation that had lost, they claimed, even its sense of identity under corrupt and decadent monarchy. But political mores do not change overnight. Monarchical politicians had managed elections. The Jacobins of the victorious Portuguese Republican Party (PRP) based their monopoly of power on an exploitation of patronage that would have left the monarchical politicians gasping, supplementing it with organized street violence and a secret police that was a model for Salazar's P1DE.
With so many cards in their hands the PRP could not produce strong government: forty-five cabinets in fifteen years; 1500 dead in street brawls, coups and counter coups; massive imprisonments of priests and reactionaries that brought conservatives throughout Europe up in arms. It is no good in Portugal, it would seem from Professor Wheeler's analysis, controlling the political machine and the security forces if you don't control public opinion— a lesson not lost on Dr Salazar. Just as the Republican propaganda had morally isolated the monarchy, so virulent press attacks produced an atmosphere in which the soldiers could take over in 1926 to restore order out of the mess which every newspaper attributed to the energumens of the PRP.
To explain the chronic political instability of the Republic Professor Wheeler puts a good deal of weight on what he — and the Portuguese — call 'personalism': the intractable feuds that split parties into personal factions. Debates in Congress degenerated into fisticuffs; the patching up of cabinets became a nightmare. Was this chronic fac tion fighting the result of the scramble for government jobs in an underdeveloped economy where the members of a university-educated middle class could find no other gainful employment? Is it that a stable democracy demands an econo-my with a sizeable and expanding service sector? In Spain, the development of a modern society on the Western European model in the Sixties made Francoism a misfit and gave democracy a chance. In Portugal, kept in an economic and social straitjacket by Salazar, there was a serious danger that the young officers who brought off the coup of April 1974 might exercise a revolutionary dictatorship over the poorest country of Western Europe.
Mr Harvey is a cautious optimist. His book is a masterpiece of contemporary history and proof that journalists are better at the job than we professional historians.
In the early days, once the inconveniently democratic General Spinola, figurehead of the captains' revolution, had been pushed out, it looked as if the army radicals might play the role of the Jacobins of the PRP. But whereas the PRP had no clear vision of the perfect society and at least pretended to work through the democratic process, the army radicals had picked up a social blue print from the third world Marxism of the guerillas they had been fighting in Africa and made no pretence of believing in 'bourgeois' democracy. If elections failed to bring to power a government committed to their maverick Marxism, then to hell with elections. This was a left-wing version of standard military political theory; the army was the guardian of the 'essence' of the nation an essence defined by the officer corps independent of what the nation might happen to say it wanted.
Yet the army radicals and their Communist allies made exactly the same blunder as the PRP politicians. They brought party politics into the army and in so doing wrecked discipline. Sowing the same wind, they reaped the same whirlwind. Professional soldiers, their orders disobeyed by politicized, semi-mutinous troops, determined to kick out the politicos. That the professional soldier. President Eanes, who did this was a democrat is to Mr Harvey an uncovenanted blessing. But as Mr Harvey emphasizes, it was the support of the people for civilian democrats like Soares that ended the military Jacobinism of men like Otelo de Carvalho, creator of his own version of the praetorian guard of the Republicans of 1910: COPCON.
That Portuguese democracy is not safely home and dry Mr Harvey, I think, would admit. The present political impasse and a disastrous economic situation is not encouraging. For the Portuguese the plank of salvation for a feeble economy almost destroyed by amateur Marxists, and the security for democracy, is membership of the EEC. They see in what Mr Harvey calls a 'shambling colossus' everything that it is not. The decision to admit Portugal would be a political decision and, if taken, then the financial consequences for the Community of taking on an economic lame duck must be faced. If they arc not, then there may soon be no democracy left to bolster up.
Previous page
