«Dealing With the Legacy of Authoritarianism: Political Purges and Radical Right Movements In Portugal's Transition to Democracy 1974-1980» (original) (raw)
Related papers
Authoritarian Legacies, Transitional Justice and State Crisis in Portugal's Democratization
2006
The nature of the Portuguese transition to democracy and the consequent state crises created a ‘window of opportunity’ in which the ‘reaction to the past’ was much stronger in Portugal than in the other Southern European transitions. The transition’s powerful dynamic in itself served to constitute a legacy for the consolidation of democracy. This article analyses how the nature of the transition affected the legacy of authoritarianism superseding and transmuting that regime’s impact on the ‘quality’ of Portugal’s democracy, and illustrating how the majority of ‘authoritarian legacies’ were more a result of the nature of the transition than they were of the authoritarian regime.
Political Purges and State Crisis in Portugal's Transition to Democracy, 1975—76
2008
Changes of regime oblige the new authorities to come to terms with the legacy of the past, and democratic transitions have been fertile ground for attitudes that are more or less radical in relation to the elimination of authoritarian legacies, and, in particular, the political punishment of élites and dissolution of the institutions with which they are associated. Samuel Huntington argues that the emergence, or non-emergence, of 'transitional justice' is less a moral question, and more one relating to the 'distribution of power during and after the transition'. In simple terms, 'only in those states where political authority radically collapsed and was replaced by an opposition did the possibility of prosecution present itself'. 1 In transitions by reform, in which the authoritarian élite is a powerful partner in the transitional process, the scope for the introduction of retributive measures is limited. Huntington was writing in 1990, when the transitions in central and eastern Europe were only just beginning, and in many cases the calls for punishment and reparations continued, even in the negotiated transitions that had already resulted in consolidated democracies, in apparent counterexamples to his assumptions. 2 However, when we take an overall view of the democratic transitions at the end of the twentieth century, if we differentiate between transitional and retroactive justice tout court, we see that Huntington was correct, since we are dealing with the former, and not the latter. That is to say, when 'proceedings begin shortly after the transition and come to end within, say, five years', we are referring to what Jon Elster calls 'immediate transitional justice'. 3 We are dealing with a dimension of regime change: the processes of retribution as a dynamic element of democratic transition. Accountability is central to the very definition of democracy, and new processes can be unleashed in any postauthoritarian democracy, even though the time dimension tends to attenuate the retributive pressures, particularly when there has already been a degree of
2013
In recent years the agenda of how to ‘deal with the past’ has become a central dimen- sion of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena. This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader ‘politics of the past’: an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present.
Culture & History Digital Journal, 2014
This article inserts itself into larger discussions regarding post-dictatorship memory politics in Portugal and comparative studies of similar histories of violence in Europe, particularly examinations of National-Socialism, Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as comparative studies of twentieth-century fascist dictatorships in the Iberian peninsula. In spite of the revolutionary, radical nature of the Portuguese democratisation process, studies conducted during the last four decades on the social and political (re)constructions of memory regarding the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974) have demonstrated that state policies regarding the past have depicted the dictatorship as one that is very similar to events in countries where the process of democratic transition was actually quite different from that of Portugal. Right-wing groups and those who self-describe as "victims" of processes of decolonisation that occurred between 1974 and 1975 have established a pattern of public debate that leaves no room for discussing the dictatorship without also referring to the 1974-1975 Revolution. This mode of debate seems to suggest that these two periods of history are indicative of a global regime phenomenon and that both the processes of decolonisation and revolution affected Portuguese society in similar ways. This paper attempts to complicate these narratives in order to question the democratic forms that emerged after the Revolution and to compare it to Salazar's dictatorial regime.
The Legacy of the Authoritarian Past in Portugal’s Democratisation, 1974–6
The Portuguese military coup of 25 April 1974 was the beginning of the ‘third wave’ of democratic transitions in Southern Europe. Unshackled by international pro-democratising forces and occurring in the midst of the Cold War, the coup led to a severe crisis of the state that was aggravated by the simultaneous processes of transition to democracy and de-colonisation of what was the last European colonial empire. This article analyses how Portugal’s political elite and society struggled with two aspects of the authoritarian legacy during the transition: the elite and the institutions associated with the Dictatorship. The nature of the Portuguese transition and the consequent state crises created a ‘window of opportunity’ in which the ‘reaction to the past’ was much stronger in Portugal than in the other Southern European transitions. In fact, the transition’s powerful dynamic in itself served to constitute a legacy for the consolidation of democracy.
Former clandestine militants' voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese " battle over memory " , because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives. Only recently did the traditional political narratives start to be questioned and debated by Portuguese scholars. Such political narratives took root in the country in the decades that followed the April Revolution, with various scholars and politicians denying the fascist categorisation of Estado Novo and adopting an authoritarian, non-totalitarian and non-fascist perspective, while recurrently depicting the Revolution as highly negative (namely as the source of the economic troubles of the country). Thus, for a long time, Portuguese conservatives opted to avoid debates on the 48 years of the Estado Novo's regime which, among other things, maintained a very repressive and violent political police force, a camp of forced labour in Cape Vert known as Tarrafal, and a Colonial War on three African fronts. This article examines the existent academic publications which counter such oblivion of memory regarding armed struggle in Portugal. It also explores the reasons behind, on the one hand, the whitewashing of Estado Novo and the historical revisionism typical of the 1970s and 1980s, and, on the other hand, the " rebellion of memory " which emerged in the 1990s.
Dealing with the Legacy of Authoritarianism
Dealing with the Legacy of Authoritarianism, 2011
In recent years the agenda of how to 'deal with the past' has become a central dimension of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena. This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader 'politics of the past': an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present. This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.
Former clandestine militants' voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese " battle over memory " , because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives. Only recently did the traditional political narratives start to be questioned and debated by Portuguese scholars. Such political narratives took root in the country in the decades that followed the April Revolution, with various scholars and politicians denying the fascist categorisation of Estado Novo and adopting an authoritarian, non-totalitarian and non-fascist perspective, while recurrently depicting the Revolution as highly negative (namely as the source of the economic troubles of the country). Thus, for a long time, Portuguese conservatives opted to avoid debates on the 48 years of the Estado Novo's regime which, among other things, maintained a very repressive and violent political police force, a camp of forced labour in Cape Vert known as Tarrafal, and a Colonial War on three African fronts. This article examines the existent academic publications which counter such oblivion of memory regarding armed struggle in Portugal. It also explores the reasons behind, on the one hand, the whitewashing of Estado Novo and the historical revisionism typical of the 1970s and 1980s, and, on the other hand, the " rebellion of memory " which emerged in the 1990s.