Portugal The Society and Its Environment
Monsaraz, a medieval village near the Spanish frontier
AS A RESULT OF CHANGES wrought by the Revolution of 1974,
Portugal in the 1990s would be almost unrecognizable to
persons
who knew the country twenty or thirty years ago. The
Revolution
of 1974 set loose social and political forces that the
country
had not seen before on such a large scale and which could
not be
entirely controlled. The revolution, in turn, occurred and
had
such a profound impact because of other, gradual social
pressures
that had been building for decades and even centuries. In
the
mid-1970s, these changes exploded to the surface. In the
aftermath of the revolution, as Portuguese society
continued to
modernize and the country was admitted as a full member of
the European Community
(EC--see Glossary),
social change
continued,
but not so frenetically and dramatically as during the
revolutionary mid-1970s.
Before 1974 Portugal was a highly traditional society.
It
resembled what historian Barbara Tuchman called the "Proud
Tower"
of pre-World War I European society. Class and social
divisions
were tightly drawn and defined, society was organized on a
rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian basis, and social
relations were often stiff and formal. One was born into a
certain station in life and was expected to stay there and
to
accept that fact; social mobility was limited. Class
standing and
class relations were clearly delineated by criteria of
birth,
dress, speech, and manner of behavior. Visitors often
remarked
that in Portugal one could still find a nineteenth-century
society existing within a twentieth-century context.
Even within this rigid, very conservative, and
traditionalist
society, however, considerable change was beginning to
occur,
particularly during the 1960s as economic development
accelerated. The trade unions had grown in size and
assertiveness. The middle class was emerging as a
numerically
larger and sociologically more important element than
therefore.
A new business-industrial class had grown up alongside,
and
frequently overlapped with, the more traditional landed
and noble
class. In addition, Portugal experienced urbanization; at
the
same time, many Portuguese left the country in search of
better
opportunities abroad. Literacy was also rising, though
slowly. As
modernization and social change began to accelerate in the
1960s
and early 1970s, discontent with the closed and
authoritarian
regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (1928-68) and his
successor
Marcello José das Neves Caetano (1968-74) also began to
mount.
These and other pressures culminated in the Revolution of
1974.
Following the revolution, which led to the
establishment of
democracy in Portugal, societal pressures continued.
Pressures
for education, land, jobs, better health care, housing,
social
equality, and solutions to Portugal's pressing social
problems
mounted. Portugal remained, even with the economic growth
of the
1980s and early 1990s, a poor country compared to the West
European standards. Moreover, rising expectations were
threatening to overwhelm the democratic regime's
capacities for
resolving the problems. Portugal's full economic
participation in
the EC at the end of 1992, when it would no longer have
the
protection of high tariff barriers, added to social
tensions and
uncertainties. Thus, as Portugal began the 1990s, the
promise of
a new, stable, democratic era of development coexisted
with a
fear of what the future might bring.
Data as of January 1993
|