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Portugal Other Countries and Areas
At the beginning of the 1990s, Portugal still retained
a
special interest in its former colony Brazil, although the
Portuguese continued to occasionally look down on
Brazilians as
"people from the tropics," just as Brazilians had their
own jokes
about the Portuguese. Relations between the two countries
were
shaped by Brazil's much greater size and more powerful
economy.
For this reason, Brazilian investment in Portugal in the
1970s
and 1980s was considerably greater than Portuguese
investment in
Brazil. Brazilian telenovelas (soap operas) also
dominated
Portuguese television, leading to additional resentments.
In
general, however, relations between the two countries were
good,
although as of the beginning of the 1990s, any "special"
relationship was now largely historical, cultural, and
nostalgic,
rather than a reflection of concrete interests.
Portugal also sought to maintain good relations with
North
African and Middle Eastern countries, in part because of
geography and in part because Portugal depended entirely
on
imported oil. Its "tilt" toward the Islamic countries
sometimes
produced strains in United States-Portuguese relations,
particularly when the Middle East was in turmoil and the
United
States wished to use its bases in the Azores in pursuit of
its
own Middle Eastern policies.
East Timor, Portugal's former colony on the eastern
half of
the island of Timor in Indonesia, remained a concern for
Lisbon
in the early 1990s. Portuguese settlers first came to the
island
in 1520, but it was not until the second half of the
nineteenth
century that Portugal had control of the territory. In
1975 war
broke out between rival groups striving for independence
from
Portugal. Late in the year, Indonesian troops invaded to
stop the
fighting, and in 1976 East Timor was declared part of
Indonesia.
As of the early 1990s, continuing resistance on the part
of
Timorese guerrillas against Indonesian rule had claimed
the lives
of as many as 100,000 people.
As of the early 1990s, the UN continued to regard
Portugal as
the administering authority in East Timor. Portuguese
officials,
for their part, believed that their country had a moral
obligation to remain involved in the affairs of its former
colony. Through a variety of diplomatic moves, Lisbon
attempted
to move the Indonesian government to arrange a settlement
that
could bring peace and even independence to East Timor.
Indonesia
refused to loosen its hold on the territory because it
feared
such an action might embolden other areas restive under
its
control, such as West Irian, to seek independence.
* * *
During the Salazar era, the authoritarian nature of the
regime made it difficult to carry out serious, scholarly
research; in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of
1974,
some of the research was partisan and ideological. More
recently,
a wealth of scholarship has begun to emerge.
The Salazar era is covered in António de Figueiredo's
Portugal: Fifty Years of Dictatorship; Hugh Kay's
Salazar and Modern Portugal; and Howard J. Wiarda's
Corporatism and Development. Richard Alan Hodgson
Robinson's Contemporary Portugal and Tom
Gallagher's
Portugal: A Twentieth Century Interpretation are
thoughtful and analytical introductions to Portuguese
affairs.
Especially valuable are the edited volume by Lawrence S.
Graham
and Harry M. Makler, Contemporary Portugal, and
that by
Graham and Douglas L. Wheeler, In Search of Modern
Portugal, incorporating papers from the meetings of
the
Conference Group on Modern Portugal.
The revolutionary period of the mid-1970s is covered
well in
Kenneth Maxwell's articles in Foreign Affairs and
the
New York Review of Books, and in Douglas Porch's
The
Portuguese Armed Forces and the Revolution. A more
specialized account is Nancy Bermeo's The Revolution
Within
the Revolution.
Albert P. Blaustein and Gisbert H. Flanz's
Constitution of
the Countries of the World provides a text and
commentary on
the constitutional changes of the post-Salazar period.
Good
treatments of political events and of the main forces
involved
are in Thomas C. Bruneau's Politics and Nationhood,
Bruneau and Alex Macleod's Politics in Contemporary
Portugal, Walter C. Opello's Portugal's Political
Development, and Portugal in the 1980s, edited
by
Kenneth Maxwell. A skeptical view of Portuguese
developments is
provided in Howard J. Wiarda's The Transition to
Democracy in
Spain and Portugal; a more hopeful perspective by the
same
author is Politics in Iberia. (For further
information and
complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of January 1993
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