Water from the Tagus River washes around the Belém Tower in Lisbon. Built in 1514 during Portugal’s golden age, the fortification is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.
The rise and fall of the Portuguese Empire reads like a parable. In an age of expanding authoritarianism, the modern West should listen to its message.
The Largo do Carmo is a short walk south from the posh Pessoa Hotel. Unassuming by Lisbon’s jaw-dropping standard of architectural excellence, the small square is only given a cursory glance by many tourists on their way to more popular attractions like the nearby Rossio and Arco da Rua Augusta.
Those with an understanding of Portuguese history, however, know this is a place worth lingering.
There are tell-tale clues hinting at the significance of the Largo do Carmo. One indicator is the presence of National Republic Guard (GNR) service members standing silent watch in front of their headquarters at the northeast corner of the square. The other is the Guarda Nacional Republicana Museum, which mentions a revolution 48 years ago that changed the fortunes of this small Western European nation.
Dig deeper into Portuguese history, and you will see the narrative as a relevant parable for our present. Five centuries ago, Portugal – along with its Iberian ally Spain – was its era’s equivalent to America and the post-war West. Five decades ago, the Largo do Carmo is where the former empire bounced off the bottom. And if we don’t learn from the past, the alliance overseeing the current rules-based world order is destined to follow a similarly decadent course.
The Golden Age
The work of Italian masters rightfully highlights 15th and 16th century studies of European history. The continent was at the climax of the Renaissance, an unparalleled artistic and literary awakening that bridged the gap between the Middle Age and modern times. Immortalized by Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Artists, legendary figures like Michelangelo and da Vinci remain household names to this day.
Meanwhile to the west of Italy, another critically important chapter of human history was being written: Portugal and its eastern neighbor Spain were leading the Age of Discovery. Portuguese explorers like Magellan, da Gama, and Columbus (who sailed to America flying the Spanish colors) helped the two nations establish new maritime shipping routes and discover lands previously unknown to Europeans.
To prevent potential conflict as they carved up the globe, the Portuguese and Spanish agreed to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. A line of demarcation was drawn west of Africa’s Cape Verde. Portugal was free to claim lands to the east; Spain took the west.*
Enriched with resources from new trading partners and conquered lands, Portugal became the world’s foremost economic power. UNESCO World Heritage Sites like the Belém Tower (completed in 1514) and the mesmerizing Jerónimos Monastery (begun in 1502) still stand in modern-day Lisbon as opulent testaments to a time when the Portuguese were on top of the world.
Human history is fickle, though, and eerily redundant. The Iberian Union – an alliance bearing similarities to the confederation of Western nations protecting today’s rules-based world order – was formed when the Spanish monarchy took control of Lisbon’s levers of power in 1580. Spain’s enemies were now Portugal’s enemies, and they would prove to be a formidable lot.
The English, French, and Dutch were now on the rise, and the Portuguese had become vulnerable. Perhaps due to greed, poor foresight, or both, Portugal had overextended its trading network and was unable to effectively defend its foreign power. The planet’s once-premier empire slowly began to recede into itself like a dying star.
A sudden cataclysm only hastened the decline.
* Aided in part by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the atrocities of colonialism were unleashed on Indigenous peoples across the globe. I cover that in a three-part series of articles available now on my Feature Articles page; the trilogy begins with “Jamaica: The Road to Redemption.”
The Earth Shook
Overlooking Bairro Alto and the more distant Tagus River from the north, the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte offers a captivating view of Lisbon. The city is among the most beautiful in Western Europe and also one of the oldest in the world. The Phoenicians likely settled Lisbon as early as 1200 BCE, and the Romans and Islamic Moors eventually laid claim to it.
Despite Lisbon’s ancient history, few structures visible from the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte predate November 1, 1755, one of the darkest dates in European history. On the morning of All Saints’ Day, many of Lisbon’s Christian populace were attending mass when a catastrophic earthquake hit. Thousands disappeared under crumbling churches.
Multitudes more that survived the initial quake fled to the riverfront as aftershocks rumbled, believing it to be safe from fires and falling debris. Then a tsunami at least 20 feet high swept into the city.
Today, standing almost level with the banks of the Tagus at the Praça do Comercio, one can’t fathom the inescapable horror that residents must have felt as the ground trembled and an ocean-borne monster closed upon them. An estimated 60,000 residents died during the earthquake and its aftermath. Lisbon, far and away Portugal’s most important city, was now in ruins.
Finding the Bottom
As Ramasamy and his team explain in Geomatics in Tsunami, the quake put Portugal’s colonial ambitions on the back burner during the final half of the 18th century as the country rebuilt its destroyed capital. The ensuing hundred years saw the Portuguese lose many of their foreign territories, most notably Brazil in 1822. As the world entered the Second Industrial Revolution near the end of the 1800s, the nation was a shell of its former glory.
Decadence was accelerating. Conservatives and liberals were at each other’s throats. Authoritarianism – lurking in the shadows, hiding in the undercurrent – was ready to pounce.
Following a liberal revolution that disbanded the Portuguese monarchy and the resulting 16-year period of chaos knows as the First Portuguese Republic, a military coup was staged by nationalists on May 28, 1926. The era of the Estado Novo had suddenly arrived, and the next five decades of Portugal’s history would be shaped by the ideology of its dictator, economist Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
Published near the beginning of World War II, Michael Derrick’s 1939 book The Portugal of Salazar provides a glimpse into the mind of the conservative autocrat:
“But in Portugal there is no party. Salazar is not the leader of a party: he is the leader of Portugal. The Unaio National is not a party. It is not concerned with politics; politics have been banished from Portugal. It is the expression of national support for the work of Salazar; and the work of Salazar is to realise the national good.”
Salazar was a man who believed that he alone had the vision to make Portugal great again. All he needed to execute his plan was absolute power. As I mentioned earlier, history is eerily redundant. A century later, we are hearing similar messaging from a growing number of contemporary politicians championed by conservative nationalists.
As most already know, Portugal was not an authoritarian outlier in pre-World War II Europe. Stalin in the communist Soviet Union, Mussolini in fascist Italy, and (most notoriously) Hitler in Nazi Germany all rose to power during this same period. The recession of democracy and free society on the continent had opened the door to the festering spread of autocracy.
Salazar kept Portugal neutral during the Second World War, but his corporatist economic philosophy did significant damage to the country during the initial post-war period.* In Salazar’s 1970 obituary in The New York Times, journalist Alden Whitman shed light on how far the country had fallen domestically: Portugal at the time had the lowest per capita income of any country in Western Europe and the region’s highest illiteracy rate.
Pushing into the 1970s, the Portuguese citizenry became increasingly exasperated with the negligence of the Estado Novo. The former Age of Discovery superpower had hit the domestic bottom when compared with the rest of Western Europe. The only way up was through revolution.
* Corporatism refers to states or organizations controlled by large interest groups. Some academics like former University of Missouri professor emeritus and agricultural economist John Ikerd believe that America has evolved from a capitalist to a corporatist economy.
April 25, 1974
This is where the story comes full circle, returning to the Largo do Carmo. Standing in the square on a brisk early spring morning, I attempted to imagine April 25, 1974, the day that the Portuguese people took back their country from autocracy.
Fed up with the mismanagement of the Portuguese Colonial War – a long and increasingly expensive campaign to retain some of the final vestiges of the nation’s former empire – a faction of liberal military leaders known as the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) concocted a plan to overthrow the government. Using the airing of Portugal’s 1974 Eurovision song entry as a signal, the MFA suddenly surrounded the Quartel do Carmo in the northeast corner of the square. Marcelo Caetano, Salazar’s successor, had no choice but to surrender power.
A quick Google search for images shows the streets of Lisbon on the day of what would be coined the Carnation Revolution – the day that freedom arrived in Portugal. Young women and men, unable to contain their exuberance, flooded squares and climbed up on military tanks. Soldiers, some photographed smiling, stuck carnations in the barrels of their rifles. The flowers were offered by civilians as a symbol of their peaceful resistance to the now-fallen Estado Novo.
The MFA ended the Portuguese Colonial War and installed a system of democracy, effectively handing over power to the people. The country could now rebuild itself using its own collective vision.
A Warning for Our Present
Throughout civilization’s history, the rise and fall of empires has followed the same general cycle. It’s the nuances to each of these stories – the devilish variant in a particular dynasty’s demise – that reveal important lessons for today’s superpowers, particularly America and its allies in the West.
At its height, Portugal held territories across the globe, including Africa, Asia, and South America. The problem wasn’t amassing land and resources, it was retaining them. Much like ancient Rome before it and Britain later, the Portuguese Empire and the greater Iberian Union overextended itself, a situation termed “imperial overstretch” by Yale historian Paul Kennedy. Power always has its economic and militaristic limits. As strong as they were during the Age of Discovery, Portugal and Spain were still only two nations against a collection of rising rivals on the same continent.
Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “Change is the only constant in life.” Due to the continual metamorphosis of the human dominion, history doesn’t give us exact parallels. However, there’s a strong similarity between the headwinds that ultimately doomed the Iberian Union and the ones facing today’s NATO, which is staring down a growing threat from expanding authoritarianism.
The obvious menace at present is autocratic Russia and its lap dog Belarus, but you might have missed a rather alarming snippet of continental news last month from outside the Ukrainian battlespace: As Russian forces were slaughtering civilians in Bucha and razing Mariupol, Hungary and Serbia elected far-right, pro-Putin heads of state. The result of the Hungarian election is particularly disturbing considering the country is a member of both the EU and NATO, an alliance that was originally formed in 1949 to repel potential aggression from the Soviet Union (i.e., the Russian Federation’s predecessor).
This feature article is the second half of a series on imminent threats facing the Western world. Click to read the first installment “Seattle: An Indictment of American Plutocracy.”
The storm clouds of authoritarianism are also gathering elsewhere. It’s been widely reported that the Chinese are watching the global dynamics of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, hoping to discern weakness in the Western coalition’s cohesion that might open the door to an invasion of Taiwan. The developing dilemma between the Chinese and Taiwanese is fraught with geopolitical and economic danger for the globalized West; much of the world’s trade runs through the Far East.
Additional to these foreign threats and in exception to Hungary, there are also a growing number of far-right grassroots movements inside the NATO alliance’s membership that are sympathetic and/or supportive of authoritarian regimes. The attack on the U.S. Capitol Building in January 2021 was an outward expression of a wider problem hiding in the slipstream; America, NATO’s leader and the world’s current equivalent to Age of Discovery-era Portugal, is suffering from increasing political division and conservative extremism.
Our allies in the West aren’t the only ones aware of it, either. The Russians are paying close attention and even working to divide us further by meddling in our elections and spreading disinformation on online platforms like social media. They’re not attempting to disguise their intentions. Here’s a statement from political scientist Malek Dudakov on Russian state television a few weeks ago:
“With Europe, economic wars should take priority. With America, we should be working to amplify the divisions and – in light of our limited abilities – to deepen the polarization of American society.”
In the near-term the Russians see an opportunity to further polarize the U.S. by bringing back a familiar face from the political sidelines: Donald Trump. Russian state television host Evgeny Popov declared earlier this month that it will soon be time “to again help our partner Trump to become president.”
While it’s an official conclusion by the American intelligence community that the Russians favored Trump in the 2016 election, I think the most telling word in Popov’s statement is “again.” If meaning is not lost in translation, it implies an indirect admission that the Russians did in fact employ clandestine measures to aid Trump’s rise to the presidency. Regardless of your political affiliation, that should give you pause.
An autocratic enemy attempting to install favored political leaders in America. China biding its time in the Far East. Domestic trouble brewing within NATO. These are indeed perilous times in the free world.
An Imperfect yet Essential Union
I want to make a couple of things clear. One, I do not believe the West is presently endangered by authoritarianism but rather threatened. The impassioned and collaborative response by NATO and its allies in Ukraine has been nothing short of inspiring, and the largely successful Ukrainian resistance against a superior Russian military has further confirmed something I have believed all along: People want to be free.
Second, I recognize the West is far from perfect. Ukraine’s fledgling democracy is a descriptive example of the flaws of the free world, as dissenting opinions to Western intervention in the former Soviet Bloc state have pointed out. Ukrainian society suffers from an extremely disappointing amount of racism and misogyny. The existence of the significant far-right, neo-Nazi political party known as the Azov regiment is yet another troubling indicator of how far Ukraine has yet to come.
Imperfections acknowledged, what makes the Western coalition of free nations so essential is we have created an environment where societal improvement is not only possible but perpetual. Since Allied Forces in World War II beat authoritarianism back into the bushes in the 1940s, the West has made leaps and bounds in human progress.
Advances in critical social areas such as racial equality, civil rights, women’s rights, quality of life, and education standards have not just positively affected our societies; we are starting to see the values ripple into emerging economies across the globe.
Our charge now is to stand together and hold the line. Nationalism is an antiquated ship that sailed long ago, much like the imperialist Portuguese vessels of Magellan and de Gama. To maintain what we have gained in the West, to give legitimate hope to emergent democracies and would-be free societies aspiring to liberty themselves, we must keep our strength in numbers. Otherwise, we risk following the same pattern of imperial overstretch that plagued past empires like Portugal.
Even Switzerland, long the Western world’s foremost isolationist state, got the memo after Russian forces crossed into Ukraine. Setting aside its centuries-old policy of neutrality, it joined the EU in sanctioning autocratic Russia, thus acknowledging the clear and present danger facing the rules-based world order.
Changing times require evolution. To alter a well-known phrase from the movie Moneyball, “Adapt or decadence.”
The Ties that Bind
Recent political division and extremism in the West, fueled largely by rising inequality (you can read more on that in “Seattle: An Indictment of American Plutocracy,” have weakened the ties that bind us together. Signs of decadence are visible, but there’s no reason to give up hope. We here in America and the larger Western world still control our own fate, but we must work cohesively – conservatives and liberals alike – to adequately protect our modern empire of free societies.
Returning focus to Portugal for a final time, there’s a telling public health statistic that illustrates how quickly the nation’s democracy has turned things around. In the waning years of the Estado Novo regime, the infant mortality rate was an atrociously high 55.5 per thousand. By 2005, only 40 years later, that number had miraculously dropped to 3.5 per thousand.* Liberty literally breathed life back into an ailing Portuguese populous.
It’s the same sacred ideal that the Ukrainian military and armed civilians, thought to be hopelessly outgunned from the outset by Russian forces, have clung to as they fight for every inch of their land. The message from the capital city of Kyiv is clear: Freedom is worth dying for.
Let’s keep our ranks closed in the West and protect the most precious of human rights at all costs.
* This statistic came from the 2011 book Higher Education in Portugal 1974-2009: A Nation, a Generation by Guy Neave and Alberto Amaral.
Related Content
– Click to view my high-resolution photo collection from Lisbon.
– Click to read my feature article “Carcavelos: Wine of the Legends” to learn how the folks at Villa Oeiras helped save the Carcavelos wine tradition from extinction.
– Click to read my feature article “Tangier: City of Spies” about Tangier’s historical connection to espionage.