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Striking a Balance: An Analysis of Portugal’s European and Lusophone Affiliations and Their Effect on the Evolution of Portuguese National Narratives by Sarah Hart Ashby A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Sarah H. Ashby This dissertation by Sarah H. Ashby is accepted in its present form by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ________________ __________________________________________ Dr. Leonor Simas-Almeida, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ________________ __________________________________________ Dr. Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, Reader Date ________________ __________________________________________ Dr. Anani Dzidzienyo, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ________________ __________________________________________ Dr. Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my father, Dr. Jerry W. Ashby, whose early inspiration, unwavering support, and loving encouragement enabled me to follow in his estimable footsteps. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Sarah Hart Ashby was born in Rota, Spain. She attended primary and secondary schools in Italy, Texas, Spain, Germany, and Portugal before graduating as class valedictorian from Zama High School in Tokyo, Japan. During her undergraduate degree program at Middlebury College, Sarah majored in International Studies with a minor in Portuguese. At Middlebury College, Sarah was able to pursue her interests in international politics as well as language pedagogy, ultimately editing the College’s Roosevelt Policy Journal and co-writing an ESL textbook. Sarah graduated summa cum laude from Middlebury College in 2010. In 2011, Sarah entered Brown University’s combined master’s and doctoral program in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. She remained at Brown University as a student and teaching assistant until December 2013, at which point she was awarded an in-program Master of Arts and relocated to Albania in order to further a professional interest in international development. Since June of 2014, Sarah has been researching, writing, and living in Lisbon. After graduation from Brown University with a Doctor of Philosophy degree, Sarah intends to join the American Foreign Service as a Foreign Service Officer. v PREFACE This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Brown University. The research described herein was conducted between June 2013 and May 2015 within the ambit of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and under the supervision of Dr. Leonor Simas-Almeida, Dr. Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, and Dr. Anani Dzidzienyo. This dissertation is an original and unpublished intellectual product of the author, Sarah H. Ashby. References to previous work and outside sources can be found throughout the text and in the bibliography. ACHKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Leonor Simas-Almeida for her pivotal role in helping this project come to fruition. I would also like to thank my readers, Dr. Onésimo Teotónio Almeida and Dr. Anani Dzidzienyo, for their commitment to my research and to my growth as a student, a social scientist, and an informed and conscious scholar. Without the endless guidance, enthusiasm, knowledge, and friendship of my dedicated committee, this dissertation would never have been possible. I would also like to thank the faculty, staff, and students of Brown University’s Department of Portuguese Studies. The scholarly comradery of the Meiklejohn House continues to be a source of strength and inspiration to me. I am grateful to the Luso-American Development Foundation and to the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for providing me with the opportunity to mine the riches of the Portuguese diplomatic archives. Finally, I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my family for their love, unfailing encouragement, and support. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ........................................................................................................ iv Curriculum Vitae ...............................................................................................v Preface and Acknowledgements ...................................................................... vi Introduction ........................................................................................................1 Chapters: Chapter I: Life on the European Periphery ......................................28 Chapter II: The Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries ......77 Chapter III: Portugal, Europe, and the Lusophone World: Points of Intersection ....................................................131 Chapter IV: Portugal, Europe, and the Lusophone World: Points of Diversion .......................................................168 Chapter V: Portuguese Discourses of Modernity: Living in the Future, Not the Past .................................212 Conclusion .....................................................................................................264 Bibliography ..................................................................................................310 vii INTRODUCTION From a Portuguese perspective, Europe of the 1960s and 70s did not exist in geographic terms, nor could it be found on a map. “Europe” did not refer to the clearly delineated landmass stretching from Lapland to Aegean beaches, from the jagged Atlantic coast to the broad Eurasian plains of central Russia. Rather, Europe was an idea; a concept; a figurative destination. Europe was epitomized by its enlightened core of Marshall Plan reindustrialization and progressive social liberalism. Europe was a site of post-war optimism enshrined in the European Community of Steel and Coal, itself a belief that shared resources and free market ideals could bind together former staunch enemies. Europe was a rising middle-class standard of living accompanied by systems of multi-party parliamentary democracy. The anachronistic autocracies of Spain and Portugal clearly did not fit this model, and so the Iberian Peninsula remained defiantly outside of the European club until the last decades of the 20st century. Things would soon change, however. The scene would look very different in the middle of Portugal’s so-called European “honeymoon,” that heady decade-and-a-half following Portugal’s 1986 European Community (EC)1 accession when European coffers seemed endless and Portuguese optimism was at an all-time high. Average 1 The European Community would morph into the European Union (EU) in 1992, after the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht. This treaty, among other things, reinforced the EU with a Common Foreign and Security Policy, created the Justice and Home Affairs Department, and paved the way for the adoption of the single currency. 1 unemployment rates in Portugal from 1993-2000 were a staggering low of 4.1%, lower than the unemployment rates of Germany, France, Spain, and the U.K., and only half that of the European Union aggregate (Baer and Leite 742). Eurobarometer polls from the late 1990s to the early 2000s show that Portuguese public opinion on the European Union was consistently higher than that of the EU average (Public Opinion: Standard Barometer). The mainstream opinion in Portugal was that joining the European Community was akin to “joining the best country club in town.” Money was flowing into the country in the form of structural funds, or funds offered by the European Union to modernize Portuguese infrastructure. Structural funds primarily financed the country’s express highway network, telecommunications system, educational facilities, and investments in new technologies, meaning that results were rapid and tangible (Baer and Leite, 746). Fresh express highways suddenly stretched from Lisbon up to the northern industrial city of Oporto and back down to the sunny Algarve, and contented citizens cruised these roads in shiny new Renaults purchased on credit. The future looked undeniably positive: Portugal’s GDP per capita had risen from 53% of the EU average in 1986 to 75% in 2002 (740), and exports of goods and services as a proportion of GDP rose from 23.8% in 1970 to a robust 34.5% in 2000 (741). Average yearly growth rates of GDP in the early half of the 1990s exceeded the EU average at 4.22% (Baer, Dias, and Duarte 346), and easy access to cheap credit combined with low risk of devaluation meant that standards of living rose sharply across classes (351). Some twenty years earlier, Eduardo Lourenço, Portugal’s twentieth-century “public intellectual” par excellence, had spoken of Portugal’s inclusion in the European Community as a belated but inevitable return to the motherland. “After 800 years,” 2 Lourenço wrote in This Little Lusitanian House: Essays on Portuguese Culture, “we are ‘here inside’ … in our own house” (“Portugal as Destiny” 65). As the first nation to set sail from the European dock and the last to return, Portugal’s destiny was seen by Lourenço as firmly intertwined with and indeed inseparable from that of Europe. The centuries of Portuguese isolation from the European continent were, in Lourenço’s eyes, a historical aberration, for Portugal had entered the European milieu “as though we have always been there” (57). Lourenço’s optimism regarding Portugal’s adhesion to the