Portugal's Revolution of Carnations: Patterns of Change and Continuity

Abstract

7~9HE Portuguese revolution of April 25, 1974 provided political commentators with particular evidence for a larger thesis on the decline of Europe. This thesis underwent a period of eclipise during the 1960s and early 1970s when it became fashionable to, talk of Western Europie's rebirth, (the groiwing prosperity of Mediterranean countries and the relative impoverishment of northern European nations, especially Britain. But the rise in the price of oil anid of raw materials, America's unilateral declaration of a nuclear alert in October 1973 and the efforts of Western European states to ingratiate themselves with oil proiducers seemed to, discount this view. Portuguese efforts to achieve a new identity during the following two years merged therefore with a wider questioning of Western Europe's. future. Portugal's revolutionthe dismantling of institutions and policies associated with the old regime and the search for new formulas-was not enacted in isolation, but played out in an international environment subject to tensions of a force unprecedented since the end of the Second World War. One explanation of the regime's collapse, on which all parties to Portugal's revolution of carnations were agreed, referred to the disaster for the national economy of Salazar's foirty years of deflatioln. Oliveira de Salazar was invited by the Portuguese military in 1928 to forestall League of Nations interventioln in Poirtugal's affairs and set the nation's finances in order. There followed the setting up of a corporate state, strictly balanced budgets and state control of foreign trade. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Salazar gradually liberalised the external sector without any modification of domestic priorities so that Portugal stagnated as Western Europe experienced its cheap oil boom. A yawning deficit developed on the coimmercial balance, compensated on the service account by a growing flood of remittances from the 1-2 million Portuguese woirking abroad. Total population declined from 9*7 million in 1960 to 8 5 million in 1970. Until the late 1960s investment stagnated at about 10 per cent. of GNP. Agricultural production declined as younger generations fled the land. Inflation rose from 4 per cent. in 1964 to about 20 per cent. in 1974 and is now estimated as running at around 70 per cent. Foireign investors flooded in to avail themselves of cheap labour controlled by the state syndicates. A regime rooted in a policy