johncrosthwaitgotopieces: ignorance about Portugal

Ignorance about Portugal

What do I know about Portugal? Trying to answer that question in advance of a short trip to the Algarve in January, the reply I had to give myself was “very little”. This was to be my first visit to the country, apart from a weekend break in Lisbon some years ago. I chiefly remembered Lisbon as a city where it was possible to walk to most places where a weekend visitor might want to go, so long as one didn’t mind labouring up a lot of very steep hills.

Where to begin, with listing areas of ignorance? Some salient ones, among many others:

- Why are there two countries on the Iberian peninsular, one large, one small? In other words, why does Portugal exist, separate from Spain?

- Like Spain, the region that is now Portugal was for centuries under Moorish rule. What was the history of the Reconquista in Portugal? What happened to Moors, and Jews, in Christian Portugal?

- Why is Portugal, according to the historical cliché, “Britain’s oldest ally” and has this ever meant anything in practice?

- Both Portugal and Spain were ruled by dictators for much of the C20 – were their regimes similar?

- Why does one not hear much about modern Portuguese politics? What goes on?

Some sketchy answers.

In the Middle Ages, Portugal, or that part of it then taken from the Moors, was a province of gradually emerging Spain (then the Kingdom of Leon, later to unite with Castille). It became increasingly semi-autonomous under powerful Counts, one of whom, at a time of Leon weakness, proclaimed his country independent and himself king. The country regards its sovereignty established as of 1139. Today, Catalans and Basques may well look with envy on this history.

Occasionally the Spanish whale has swallowed, or re-swallowed, the Portuguese Jonah – once in the C16, when Philip II claimed the Portuguese throne by a convoluted right of inheritance and enforced that claim by successful military action. This period of Spanish re-domination lasted 60 years. In the early C19, Napoleon overran the whole Iberian peninsular, placing his brother as king, until his armies were defeated.

Portugal got out of the Spanish maw in these historical cases. It seems very unlikely that it will be swallowed again- there is no dispute about sovereignty or territory.

The early Portuguese kingdom, like the powers in Spain, had the business of the Reconquista to get on with, in the Middle Ages. Portugal managed its task a lot quicker than Spain. By the end of C13 it had established its borders as they exist today. Spain, by contrast, still had 250 years to go, while the Moorish kingdom of Granada (basically southern Andalucía) continued.

This time gap largely explains why there was not a post-Reconquista tension concerning new Moorish subjects in Portugal, as there was tragically in Spain. If Portuguese Moors did not assimilate, and become noiselessly part of the general population, they could just move over the new border to Granada.

By contrast, the fate of the Jews in Portugal, in the later C16, was in the end similar to that of the Spanish Jews. To begin with, Portugal provided refuge from Spanish persecution, but the Inquisition saw to it that the Jews were harried out of Portugal as well, if they did not convert.

In 1386, by the Treaty of Windsor, Portugal and England entered into an alliance that persists to this day. I’m not sure what it has amounted to, unless one counts the British campaign against Napoleon in the Peninsular War. Perhaps the best that can be said is that the two countries have never been on opposite sides of a conflict, except during the C16 when Portugal was re-absorbed by Spain and the Armada launched against England. It is also the case that the Portuguese dictator, Salazar, no fan of Hitler, helped keep the Peninsular out of the fascist side in WW2.

In modern times, the interesting questions concern dictators, of whom both Portugal and Spain had contemporaneous experience. In Portugal, Salazar got going by stages, taking effective control in the early 1930s. Franco came to power in 1939, after a civil war. They both lasted to the mid 1970s.

The huge difference between them was the price in blood. In Spain, the ferocious war involved widespread slaughter and executions, and imprisonment, inflicted overwhelmingly by the victors on the defeated. The poisonous legacy sulks beneath the surface of Spanish life and politics until this day.

Franco’s regime was established with lethal brutality aimed at leftists and liberals. Salazar, by contrast, did not instigate, or inherit the consequences of, a civil war, but rather slid Portugal into dictatorship. Dissenters were kept quiet, but not killed en masse. Every such regime has its bloody back pocket – Portugal’s was small by the standards of European dictatorships.

Portugal came out of dictatorship in politically better shape than Spain. Its politics since then have been reasonably orderly. The post-Salazar constitution had something of a bias towards the left, and its left of centre Socialist Party has been fairly successful, alternating in power in recent times with the centre right Social Democratic Party. Without doubt, Portugal has been one of the countries to have benefited most, both economically and politically, from membership of the EU.

So much for a little filling in of my ignorant gaps..

In my three days in the Algarve, two things especially struck me. One was the pride that the Portuguese take in their country, and its relatively successful negotiation (with the exception of the early and middle C20) of the rocky road from medieval super-colonial power to the modest but stable republic it is today. The second is the absence of the building scars of tourist development, of the sort that make some of the neighbouring parts of Spain so hideous.

For example, the small coastal city of Faro, the capital of the Algarve, is not disfigured by high-rise developments and hardly has any touristic hotels. It has a wonderfully preserved old centre. This pattern is repeated in other towns (with the ironic exception of our big modern hotel, dominating one side of Tavira).