Contenu du sommaire : le Portugal du politique

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, Portugal was occupied with the question of Africa. The intention of building a multiracial and multicultural society, the acceptance and integration of other cultures and cultural institutions all seemed incompatible with the absolute superiority of European civilization. If it could not distance itself from the Atlantic, Portugal never ceased being European. Neither did it have to abandon the Atlantic in order to enter into Europe. A number of other European countries, after all, have maintained non-European commitments. The end of the imperial cycle, after a thirteen-year war that prevented the country's economic growth, has only rarely been considered as a shock for the nation. Numerous are those that continue to emphasize Portugal's links with Brazil, the western hemisphere and, most importantly, with Africa. The revolution of 25 April 1974 and the consolidated democracy that followed have created the conditions for Portugal's integration into a democratic and pluralist Europe. Tolerent of ideological diversity, this new Europe ensures the preservation of national identities.

This article provides an empirical analysis of the impact of regime changes on the composition and patterns of recruitment of the Portuguese ministerial elite. The violent nature of most regime transformations accounts for the extensive replacements of the political personnel, namely of the uppermost officeholders. In the case of Cabinet members, such discontinuities did not imply, however, radical changes in their social profile, and a series of salient characteristics has persisted over time. The typical Portuguese minister is a male in his mid-forties, of middle-class origin and predominantly urban-born, highly educated and with a state servant background. The two main occupational contingents have been that of the university professors — except for the First Republic (1910-26) - and the military, the latter having only eclipsed with the consolidation of contemporary democracy. As regards career pathways, the most striking feature is the secular trend for the declining role of parliamentary experience, which the democratic regime did not reverse.

Characterizing the essence Salazar 's « New State » is a difficult, indeed almost an impossible, exercise. It is not too strong to say that there exists an ideological and historiographie tradition that characterizes the « New State » as a unique regime, different from all others normally classified as "fascist". Must we, however, simply adopt this thesis without further discussion ? This is precisely the problem posed in this article with a view, not to finding a definitive solution, but rather to encourage further reflection. Progress on this question, the article concludes, will depend less on theoretical reflection than on new and additional empirical research.

Thirty years after the April Revolution, Portugal is in the midst of the most successful democratic experience of its history. A product of the pact signed by the principal political parties and the Armed Forces Movement, the Portuguese constitution established a semi presidential system of power, which ensures that the principal organs of sovereignty exercise reciprocal control over each other. The presence of a unique political-military body — the Council of the Revolution — acted as a safety valve for the system during the transition period until 1982. Successive revisions of the constitution have perfected this architecture of power, while eliminating the ideological rhetoric inherited from the revolutionary period This article describes the functioning of the system on the basis of the evolution of electoral results, of the various arrangements attempted for forming governments, and of characteristics of the principal political parties. The growing tendency toward abstention is the object of particular consideration. The highly autonomous judicial system and the armed forces, increasingly under civilian control, is also be analyzed. In conclusion, the article considers the challenges of Portugal's immediate future, including the deepening of participatory democracy, the need to lessen both the bureaucratic weight and the excessive centralism of the state, and the quest for a system of justice that will be at once speedier and more efficient.

The process of democratization in Portugal has affected its foreign policy as well as its domestic politics. Democratic Portugal has defined for itself not only a new model of society and political institutions, but also a new model for its participation in international affairs. The fundamental objective of this article is to formulate an approach to understanding the international dimension of the democratic transition and consolidation in Portugal. A first area of reflection, in the context of the long term, considers historical models of the international role of Portugal. This is followed by consideration of the international dimension of democratization between 1974 and 1986. A final section presents the main strategic orientations of contemporary Portuguese foreign policy in the perspective of continuity and change, and concludes that democracy has indeed introduced a new model of participation in international affairs for Portugal

The leading role taken on by Portugal since the middle of the 1980s in the debate surrounding the creation of an international regime for the ocean is quite remarkable. Portugal's tradition of largely passive foreign policy, marked chiefly by prudence and by a close alignment with the policies agreed to by the member states of the EU was broken in 1995 by an important set of initiatives in the area of oceanic diplomacy. The focus of these was the Independent World Commission for Oceans (IWCO). This article analyzes the role IWCO as a new institutional model, one that marks a tradition between the traditional and the "post-Westphalian " worlds, and examines the role played by Portugal in the work of this commission. In this context, it analyzes the concept of the new internationalism through which states work with actors such as NGO's and social movements in order to encourage structural change in the international agenda.

This article traces the evolution of Portugal's relations with its former African colonies over the thirty years since independence. It begins by identifying the special place held by Africa in the Portuguese political imagination, and shows that the relationships with the former colonies are still heavily influenced by this heritage. The past three decades have been witness to deep transformations in Portuguese foreign policy as a result of the end of the empire and the entry into the European Communities. Nevertheless, one finds that Africa reappears systematically as an important point of reference in Portuguese foreign policy, despite the inexistence of anything that might be called an Africa policy. The article then looks at Portugal's different relations with each of the former colonies, all of which show a tendency for deeper and stronger links over the years. Development aid is mentioned as an example of Portuguese difficulties in developing policy instruments, and the emergence of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries is shown, with its strengths and fragilities to be evidence of the emergence of an era in which the scars of the colonial period are much less important than in the past.

Portuguese economy registered several significant transformations in recent decades, after the democratic revolution (1974) and the EEC accession (1986). A deep integration in the EU and an original and unexpected context of Iberian integration are main points of the new picture. The changes in specialization, the emergence of a public service economy, the centrality of financial external relations, and the new condition of Portugal as a net foreign investor and as a country of immigration are some of the main processes for the analysis of Portuguese economic Governance in this period. This last objective implies to study the coordination mechanisms of collective action. The State, as the agent of 'relational order', the market, as an increasingly narrow place of governance, and the community, as the expression of the Portuguese specific internal structures, are considered in this paper as main institutional arrangements and bases for economic governance.

Endowed with previously unknown measure of constitutional legitimacy, local power in Portugal following the 1974 revolution was given a central role in the consolidation of democracy in Portugal, as well as matters of local development. The local level of government has benefited from its new legal framework, a situation that has spawned high hopes. Nevertheless, studies of this level have tended to be limited to normative works calling for movement towards an ideal or, alternatively, to studies decrying the defects that are frustrating hopes for a more thorough institutional renewal. The persistence of centralism, the personification of power and the compartmentalization of elites: all of these characterize local power in Portugal. These features allow us both to situate it in the broader context of Portuguese society and to approach its study from the perspective of its most striking paradoxes.

The analysis of urban planning and of the rehabilitation of Portugal's architectural and urban historical heritage over the past fifteen years demonstrates a clear intensification of local processes aimed at preserving and enhancing historical sites. Three trends in particular are evident. The first is the effort to gain official recognition of world heritage sites. In addition, we note the spread of international methods of urban management. Finally there is a tendency towards excessive "packaging" or esthetic presentation of public spaces. Taking as examples the historic centers of four Portuguese cities, (Coimbra, Guimarâes, Porto, and Santarém) this article seeks to analyze the specificities of these policies with a view to understanding their experimental nature and to assessing the cultural sustainability as well of the policies themselves as of the urban centers that are their objects.

The evolution of the Portuguese university system reveals two contradictory trends. Higher education is at once sensitive to the strategic needs of the national state and drawn by the pressures of globalization to pursue transnational aspects of teaching, research, and community service. The doctrine of political centralism had long assimilated the university into a strategic doctrine for Empire, but as decolonization was completed, this was replaced by an emphasis on European networks. Over time, legitimacy drawn from the state and the church has been replaced by performance-based legitimacy resting on tangible results. At the dawn of the new millenium, the development of transnational networks has reinforced the institutional autonomy of the university and reinforced its sense of unique mission.