6 - The dictatorship and the African empire

Summary

The great depression of 1930 affected Portugal as profoundly as any country in Europe. The external dimension of the economy had hitherto continued to reach two ways, northward to Britain which supplied consumer goods and southward to Brazil which supplied money in the form of savings sent home by emigrants. The depression ended this system of two-way dependency and forced Portugal to become more self-reliant at home and to seek new trading partners abroad. The domestic change involved a severe retrenchment in the scope of government. The liberal reforms of the bourgeois monarchy and of the republic were abandoned and a new autocratic oligarchy gained ascendancy which curtailed workers’ rights, restricted expenditure on education and services and repressed political opinions with an increase of police surveillance. Politics were increasingly dominated by a single dictator who satisfied the aspirations of the old-style army officers while distancing them from the practice of politics, Upper middle-class Catholic civilians formed a new generation of politicians who quietly admired the disciplinarian politics of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. They also looked southward with a view to extracting new wealth from the African empire both as a closed market for wines and textiles and as a cheap source of tropical sugar and cotton. The austerity of the inter-war dictatorship was increased by the outbreak of the Second World War and the further curtailment of seaborne commerce even among neutral nations. In 1943, as in 1917, Portugal was forced to compromise its neutrality and support the British war effort against Germany, this time by opening military bases on the Azores Islands to the Atlantic allies. After the war continuation of the dictatorship was tolerated by the allies because of its anticommunist stance, though as a nondemocratic country Portugal was initially excluded from the United Nations. Stern government prevented a civil war such as afflicted post-war Greece but did not attract investment and industry such as revitalised post-war Italy. By the 1960s rapid social change was brought about by a renewed vitality in the African empire and by the European ‘economic miracle’ which created a large market for Portuguese migrant workers. The ruling oligarchy proved sufficiently flexible to ride the change until 1974 by which time both industrialists and the military wanted to force the pace of modernisation.