Lisbon rising

Urban social movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–75

Pedro Pinto, Pedro Ramos Pinto

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780719085444
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526103062
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Lisbon rising explores the role of a widespread urban social movement in the revolutionary process that accompanied Portugal's transition from authoritarianism to democracy. It is the first in-depth study of the widest urban movement of the European post-war period, an event that shook the balance of Cold War politics by threatening the possibility of revolution in Western Europe.

Using hitherto unknown sources produced by movement organisations themselves, it challenges long-established views of civil society in Southern Europe as weak, arguing that popular movements had an important and autonomous role in the process that led to democratisation, inviting us to rethink the history and theories of transitions in the region in ways that account for popular agency.

Lisbon rising will be of interest not only to students of twentieth-century European history, but across disciplines to students of democratisation, social movements and citizenship in political science and sociology.

1

Introduction

The Carnation Revolution revisited

The Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75 was a critical juncture in the second half of the European twentieth century, the first in a series of authoritarian collapses that would bring the whole of western and central Europe into liberal democracy. For those following the events in Portugal over those two years, however, the so-called Revolution of the Carnations was also many other things. For the first time in almost half a century the possibility of a real popular revolution was felt in the West. Events in Portugal shook the balance of Cold War politics with the possibility of socialism in western Europe, and gave rise to aspirations of new forms of direct democracy that ignited high hopes on the left throughout the continent. Alongside land and factory occupations across the country, the unexpected emergence of a grassroots movement of the poor in Portugal’s cities was one of the aspects of the revolution that most excited contemporary observers, holding out the promise of a truly popular and socialist democracy. This urban social movement engaged many thousands in democratic neighbourhood assemblies deciding the fate of the city, built houses, roads, schools and hospitals and occupied thousands of apartments. To this day, while it remains for many a symbol of the possibilities of grassroots democracy, little is known about how this movement appeared, what role it played in the Revolution of the Carnations, and why it disappeared after 1975.

Since 1926 Portugal had suffered under one of Europe’s longestlasting authoritarian regimes and, despite rumblings of discontent from the 1960s onwards (in the form of student protest or an incipient strike movement) few expected what seemed like an acquiescent population to take to politics with such determination. The dictatorship was not brought down by a groundswell of popular mobilization. Instead, its end came at the hands of a group of junior military officers intent on bringing to an end the 13-year war against liberation movements in Portugal’s African colonies. While the captains’ plot of 25 April 1974 encountered little resistance from a tired and deflated regime, it still came as a surprise to the military and to opposition politicians who had laboured in clandestinity, how quickly the population burst onto the scene, cheering and supporting the plotters and storming the most symbolic buildings of the deposed regime.

This was not a momentary exuberant celebration: through a period of nineteen months not only were the remnants of the dictatorship swept away, but Portugal also experienced what felt like a state of permanent social, economic and political revolution. Traditional social strictures dictating sexual and personal ethics were challenged, hierarchies of power in workplaces, cities and villages were turned upside down, the economy was largely nationalised, voters massed to the polls to chose between a range of political systems, and turned up to almost daily street demonstrations and parades.

Yet by November 1975 the revolution had lost steam. A quick military operation disarmed the more radicalised sections of the army, who had spearheaded the drive to create a revolutionary regime. While in April 1974 the people had rushed to the street in support of the military coup, just nineteen months later few or none did so. The slow construction of a liberal democracy that followed was finally completed in 1982 when the military at last relinquished its political role, giving place to a regime that resembled those who Portugal sought to join in the European Community. By the mid-1980s the Portuguese political system looked very much like that of a ‘consolidated’ western democracy, ruled by alternating centrist parties that monopolised systems of representation, and witnessing levels of political disengagement and electoral abstention almost identical to those of most other countries on the continent.¹ The heady days of the revolutionary period seemed very far away.

The contrast between a supposedly anaemic public sphere in today’s Portugal and the remarkable levels of popular political participation of the transition period has contributed to the construction of narratives that underplay the impact of the latter. The contentious, at times even violent, nature of the Portuguese path to democracy has been underplayed in both the collective and academic memory of those two tumultuous years.² As Kenneth Maxwell noted, current political debate in Portugal rests on a degree of obfuscation of the deep divisions that ran through the revolutionary period, what he terms a ‘flattening out’ of a lumpy, contentious process.³ Such representations have served to crystallise the portrayal of popular movements in the period as either an irrelevant sideshow, or as a foundation myth used to critique the political system that emerged afterwards. The former view dismisses it as an extraordinary occurrence, an outpouring of youthful enthusiasm ultimately irrelevant for the creation of a ‘European’ democracy, society and economy. For others, the era has assumed an almost mythical status as a moment ‘when everything seemed possible and each felt the destiny of the country was also in their hands’, but whose defeat replaced hope with apathy.⁴

This polarisation of historical memory was brought to the surface in 2004 during the commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1974 coup, when the government, then led by the centre-right, created a new slogan – ‘April is Evolution’ – de-emphasising the revolutionary character of the period and looking to focus instead on economic and social modernisation. This prompted a reaction from the left which included a campaign to deface the official commemoration posters so they would read ‘April is (R)Evolution’, as well as rivers of ink debating the meaning and place of the revolution in contemporary Portuguese society. Revealingly, however, even many of those who criticised the conservative view tended to speak of the revolution in ways that removed a sense of collective agency from the moment, using passive verb constructions such as ‘the Revolution was made’, or ‘democracy arrived’.⁵

In essence, both the right’s ‘evolutionary’ perspective, and the left’s emphasis on broad abstractions served to remove the people as an actor and agent, and of conflict from the discussion and memorialisation of the revolution. This omission is a result of the near-hegemony of political parties on the Portuguese public sphere, for whom these accounts serve as legitimating strategies. The moderate parties who came to form the central axis of the establishment, the Socialist Party (PS) and the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) set about dismantling the idea that there had been anything like broad-based popular movement embodying the possibility of different society.⁶ Arguing that a great deal of the mobilisation of those years was little more than the result of manipulation by small revolutionary groups, the moderates cited the support they received in the elections of 1975 as the real source of popular legitimacy.⁷ Wary of forms of political participation they had little connection to, the moderates sought to paint the popular movements as unrepresentative and an irrelevance to the process. This served the purpose of sustaining the moderate parties’ self-projection as the sole progenitors of democracy and, later, helped deal with social protest during the difficult economic environment of the late 1970s.

The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), in turn, defines the revolution as the creation of ‘an advanced democracy on the road to socialism’ – not, note, socialism itself.⁸ But while it often refers to the popular mobilisations of 1974–75, it portrays them as synonymous with the party itself, allowing it to claim the role of only legitimate representative of the working class, and defender of the social rights that it considers the ‘conquests of the revolution’. This strategy has been particularly important as the party finds itself in competition with a political coalition to its left, emerging from a combination of far-left organisations and who also emphasises similar themes.⁹

The omissions of competing ‘political memories’ of the revolution are, in many ways, reflected in the academic analysis of the period. In part, this is a result of the fact that much of this analysis was produced by scholars who were themselves participants in the revolutionary process – and this is the case not only with Portuguese nationals, but also the work of engagé political scientists and sociologists who travelled to Portugal in this period. But the relative neglect of investigation of the role of popular movements in the Portuguese Revolution is also the result of the interpretative models of democratisation and revolution that came to dominate the social sciences in the later 1970s and 1980s, models which tended to relegate collective actors to the condition of a sideshow. Authors approaching these subjects from a Marxist perspective focused on macroeconomic and class processes, where autonomous popular agency was deemed to play little or no role, and need little study. For Nicos Poulantzas, or in the closer analysis of Matias Ferreira, Portugal’s partly industrialised economy had not yet produced a ‘class-for-itself’ imbued with the history and experience of class struggle; instead, an ‘immature’ popular movement was unable to mount a revolutionary challenge.¹⁰ In turn, radical Marxists idealised popular movements as the harbingers of revolution, but accused the Communist Party and its allies in the military of betraying them and failing to provide revolutionary leadership.¹¹ For Eisfeld, the Carnation Revolution wilted as the contending political parties were ‘too successful’ in manipulating the grassroots to conquer state power. Real devolution of power, which in his opinion could have channelled mobilisation towards building a real socialist democracy, was never a priority.¹² Bill Lomax, although more positive regarding autonomy of the popular movement, echoed the interpretation of manipulation by suggesting that the voluntarism of parts of the left had inflated the revolutionary potential of the popular movement, whose role in 1974–75 was, in his opinion, ‘largely illusory and epiphenomenal’.¹³

A handful of more balanced, homegrown, academic reflections on the revolutionary process did appear in the 1980s, raising a number of questions about the origins and relationship between popular movements, other political actors, and the Portuguese Revolution.¹⁴ But the questions they raised were overlooked by an emerging new paradigm in the study of transitions to democracy. Just as the Portuguese dictatorship was coming to an end, scholarship focusing on political transformation was experiencing a shift in perspective. Building on Dankwart Rustow’s critique of structural models of transition, a new approach to democratisation broke away from the determinism of modernisation theory and its teleology of necessary steps and conditions.¹⁵ This critique was encouraged by what appeared to be a ‘wave’ of democratisation sweeping across countries – starting with Portugal in 1974 – with substantially different economic structures, political trajectories and cultural contexts.¹⁶ The emerging paradigm of democratisation, clearly influenced by the nature of the process in Spain, saw transitions as open-ended political processes, where choice is available to political actors and outcomes are uncertain rather than predetermined. Because of this emphasis on political choice and strategy, this approach often led to a preoccupation with the role of political elites as the key social actors of democratisation. In these analyses, the skills and virtú of leaders could make or unmake democracies in almost any circumstances, while the role of collective actors was at best subordinate. Despite the very visible presence of ordinary people in the political arena during the Portuguese transition, political scientists of the ‘transitology’ school argued them away from explaining democratisation. In their influential work, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, O’Donnell and Schmitter, gave an equivocal role to the ‘popular upsurge’: while it is said to perform the ‘crucial role of pushing … transition further than it would otherwise have gone’, it is also something that needs to be contained and controlled in order for countries to democratise successfully.¹⁷ This was the case in Portugal where, they argued, the explosion of participation pushed the transition far beyond liberalisation and towards socialism, but not through its own agency, rather as the result of the MFA’s ‘choreography’ of civil society, creating a situation which required skilful leadership to steer the democratic course.¹⁸ Building on these observations, a generation of scholarship repeatedly painted the role of popular movements (in Portugal and elsewhere) in essentially negative terms.¹⁹

While the ‘elitist’ school of democratisation became largely dominant in western political science, by the 1990s dissenting voices at the fringes and in other disciplines began suggesting alternative models. Buoyed by the renewed interest in the possibilities of mass action brought about by the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe, social scientists began exploring the role of collective actors in conditioning the choices and options available to political elites, arguing that collective actors can have a critical role in frustrating attempts to renew the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, with widespread protest not just signalling disagreement, but creating a ‘climate of ungovernability’ which increases the cost of repression and pushes elites to the negotiating table.²⁰ In comparative historical sociology, Rueschmeyer, Stephens and Stephens developed second-generation structural accounts which qualified, but still supported, class-based accounts of democratisation in the long run.²¹ Other authors raised objections to transitology’s endogenous or ‘internalist’ model of political change whose focus on the decisions of political leaders were said to hide broader factors leading to the breakdown of consensus within authoritarian regimes and to the dynamic relationship between supposed ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’.²² As Sidney Tarrow noted, elites do make choices, but so does the mass public, and focusing solely on the former leaves out the ‘infinitely varied and highly problematic politics of transition processes, in which elites, and masses, institutions and newly formed organisations interact in the context of social and institutional structures’.²³ The challenge, as set by Tarrow, is to question the role of collective actors beyond their ‘destabilising’ function – already recognised by O’Donnell and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: the Carnation Revolution revisited
• 2 The New State and the transformation of urban citizenship, 1926–74
• 3 From rights to action: April to December 1974
• 4 Building a movement: September 1974 to June 1975
• 5 The street and the ballot box: June to November 1975
• 6 Urban social movements and the making of Portuguese democracy
• Select bibliography
• Index