West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship, 1968–1974

Between Cold War and Colonialism

R. Lopes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349486649
  9781137402066
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137402080
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship 1968-1974 examines West Germany's ambiguous policy towards the Portuguese dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano. Lopes sheds new light on the social, economic, military, and diplomatic dimensions of the awkward relationship between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Caetano regime.

1

The International Front: An ‘Insult to Africa’ and Other Offences

Although greatly overshadowed by neue Ostpolitik, Bonn’s policy towards the Caetano regime was nonetheless subjected to considerable external scrutiny. This chapter assesses the ways in which Bonn saw its policy depicted by various international agents, those depictions evolving into attempts to pressure, or at least steer, the West German course of action. Taking into account the political developments in different parts of the world, the chapter explores how the FRG’s policy fitted into the global dynamics of the time and how, in turn, such dynamics expanded the policy’s significance far beyond the bilateral relations with Portugal.

The African world

The origins of the Portuguese-African conundrum

Although international indignation over the Estado Novo’s colonialism escalated during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was hardly a new phenomenon. Even before Portuguese troops had begun fighting in the bush, the dictatorship had already been battling for its empire in the diplomatic arena, particularly since Portugal had joined the UN in 1955.¹ In the recurrent UN debates, no one would condemn Lisbon’s policy as passionately as those countries which had only recently attained their own independence. Criticism had thus been strongly reinforced in 1960, when the African nations had become the largest geographical group represented in the UN General Assembly. That December, the assembly had adopted the ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’, known as Resolution 1514. The outbreak of the colonial wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique had made the issue all the more pertinent, leading to increasingly harsh resolutions directed against the Salazar dictatorship on the part of the Special Committee on Decolonisation, the General Assembly, and even the Security Council.² As previously explained, in response Lisbon had come to emphasise the alleged ‘multiracial’ sensibilities of its imperial project and to present the colonial conflict as a manifestation of the Cold War. Portuguese diplomacy had also furthered the relations with the white-ruled African regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, while attempting to influence or to overthrow the governments of African states supportive of the liberation movements.³

For West Germany, which had been supplying equipment used by the Portuguese troops from the start, the Afro-Portuguese friction represented a serious hazard.⁴ Throughout the 1960s, the FRG had relied on its positive image in Africa to promote both economic expansion and the isolation of the GDR. Bonn had successfully established widespread diplomatic ties with the post-colonial states and had heavily backed them with development aid. The federal governments had then employed the Hallstein doctrine as a type of ‘political blackmail’ by threatening to cut off economic assistance to any state which granted de jure recognition to the GDR. In turn, some African leaders had learned to take advantage of inter-German competition: they would swing towards East and West Germany, or at least threaten to do so, in order to ensure better deals for their countries. By the end of the decade, the impractical inflexibility of the Hallstein doctrine and the moral implications of using Third World aid to sustain European rivalry had begun discrediting the FRG’s African policy (Afrikapolitik). Consequently, then-Foreign Minister Willy Brandt had redefined the priority as that of gathering African support behind neue Ostpolitik. He now argued that détente in Europe would free up German resources for use in development aid for African states and hence deserved those states’ endorsement.⁵

Crucially, Brandt’s new guidelines of Afrikapolitik, announced in the spring of 1968, failed to adequately respond to African concerns regarding the endurance of racism and colonial domination in southern Africa, namely in the Portuguese territories, in the unrecognised state of Rhodesia, and in the apartheid system of South Africa, including colonised Namibia. Although Brandt spoke of support for the Africans’ right to self-determination, he also explicitly claimed that the FRG had no intention of disturbing its trading relations either in the case of the Portuguese colonies or in the – much more lucrative – case of South Africa.⁶ Following a recommendation from the UN Security Council, Bonn agreed to officially implement sanctions against Rhodesia, but not very thoroughly.⁷ Furthermore, 1968 saw the adjudication to the international consortium Zamco of the construction of the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric dam in Mozambique, designed to supply most of its electricity to South Africa.⁸ Zamco included five West German companies⁹ operating with Bonn’s credit guarantees, as well as three French, one Swedish, one Italian, and three South African firms, working together with several Portuguese groups.¹⁰ Even more than the mounting evidence of the FRG’s material contribution to the colonial wars, the Cahora Bassa project shook Bonn’s carefully constructed image in Africa. The dam came to represent Portugal’s commitment to its empire at a time when other imperial powers had largely completed their processes of decolonisation and soon became a global target of anti-colonialist criticism. The situation for the FRG was slightly aggravated by the role of West German banks and investors in financing a similar hydroelectric project in the Cunene River Basin in Angola.¹¹

West Germany’s increasingly high-profile entanglements with African regimes under white minority rule coincided with the outcry against those regimes by the members of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Although hardly a novel cause,¹² the outcry reached a peak during this period. It was famously expressed in the Manifesto on Southern Africa, issued by the leaders of 13 east and central African states¹³ in Lusaka on 16 April 1969 and subsequently ratified by the OAU in September, and by the UN on 20 November of the same year.¹⁴ The manifesto rejected a racialist interpretation of the cause of African liberation, expressing a refusal to ‘accept that any individual or group has any right to govern any other group of sane adults, without their consent’. The signatories thus called for other countries to join in on the effort to convince the regimes under minority rule to commit to putting an end to apartheid and colonialism. The text read both as a pacifist plea and as an ultimatum, hinting that post-colonial Africa, unless there was some positive change on this matter, would put all of its support behind a more violent approach to liberation. Despite the firm tone, however, the Lusaka Manifesto displayed important signs of openness, even stating that ‘if changed circumstances were to make [peaceful progress] possible in the future, we would urge our brothers in the resistance movements to use peaceful methods of struggle even at the cost of some compromise on the timing of change’.¹⁵

The manifesto addressed the issue of external support to Lisbon, although without naming specific countries. It pointed out the contrast between the Portuguese actions in Africa and the democratic values which the Estado Novo’s allies – such as the FRG – professed to defend. In this way, it sought to distance the colonial conflict from the Cold War connotation that the Portuguese dictatorship insisted on attaching to the liberation struggle:

Portugal, as a European State, has naturally its own allies in the context of the ideological conflict between West and East. However, in our context, the effect of this is that Portugal is enabled to use her resources to pursue the most heinous war and degradation of man in Africa. The present Manifesto must therefore lay bare the fact that the inhuman commitment of Portugal in Africa and her ruthless subjugation of the people of Mozambique, Angola and the so-called Portuguese Guinea, is not only irrelevant to the ideological conflict of power-politics, but it is also diametrically opposed to the policies, the philosophies and the doctrines practised by her allies in the conduct of their own affairs at home. The peoples of Mozambique, Angola and Portuguese Guinea are not interested in communism or capitalism; they are interested in their freedom.¹⁶

The African appeal was as much directed to Portugal’s allies as to Portugal itself. Encouraged by Marcelo Caetano’s reformist reputation, in early 1969 both the Senegalese leader Léopold Senghor and the Congolese leader Mobutu sent Lisbon friendly proposals for partial decolonisation.¹⁷ Moreover, after talking to the OAU’s representative in the UN, an informer told the Portuguese Mission to the UN that the African group had decided to present the Lusaka Manifesto in the General Assembly in mid-October 1969 with the underlying goal of influencing the domestic situation in Portugal, where elections were looming on 26 October. According to this informer, the OAU, inspired by the news coverage of the campaign, believed that it could encourage those political forces in Portugal – even within the government – who supported the self-determination of the colonies.¹⁸ Lisbon frustrated those expectations less than a month after the elections. The Portuguese delegate in the UN voted against the adoption of the Lusaka Manifesto by the UN General Assembly in November, even though he insisted that Portugal shared many of its stated pacifist and anti-racist views.¹⁹

The aftermath of the Lusaka Manifesto was characterised by the co-existence of two different strands of African discourse on liberation: a moderate one, willing to engage in a constructive dialogue with Portugal (as well as with South Africa), and a more militant one, emphasisin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The International Front: An Insult to Africa and other offences
• 2  The Domestic Front: Facing the Tribunal
• 3  The Economic Front: From Auenwirtschaft to Auenpolitik
• 4  The Military Front: The Price of Germanic Greatness
• 5  The Diplomatic Front: Trapped by the Typical Dilemma
• 6  The Parallel Front: Either Weapons or Coffins
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index