Decentering the Cold War in Southern Africa The Portuguese Policy of Decolonization and Détente in and Mozambique (1974–1984)

✣ Bruno C. Reis

[Détente] is a policy that can be summarized by the formula: change through rapprochement. Egon Bahr1

Portugal was the European country on which détente had the greatest conse- quences. Ernesto Melo Antunes2 The end of the Portuguese empire in Southern Africa in 1975, after prolonged wars of decolonization and amid revolutionary turmoil in , resulted in the independence of Mozambique and Angola under openly pro-Soviet regimes.3 This has long been recognized as an important event in the global Cold War. In particular, the intervention by Cuban forces in the Angolan civil war from 1975 to 1989 to counter South African and Zairean interventions made it a proxy war between the Eastern and Western blocs and a major factor in the so-called crisis of détente during the final stage of the Cold War.4

1. Egon Bahr quoted in Timothy Garton-Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 66. 2. Melo Antunes quoted in M. Inácia Rezola, Melo Antunes: Uma biografia política (: Âncora, 2012), p. 452. 3. For an introduction to Portugal during the relevant period, see António C. Pinto, ed., Contemporary Portugal: Politics, Society and Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholar- ship, 2011). For an overall analysis of the April revolution and its implications, see Kenneth Maxwell, The Making of Portuguese Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an overview of Portugal’s third and last overseas empire, predominantly in Southern Africa, see Valentim Alexandre, Velho Brasil, novas Áfricas: Portugal e o império (1808–1975) (Porto: Afrontamento, 2000). Also useful are Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Douglas Wheeler and René Pélissier, História de Angola (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2011). 4. The already extensive literature on the later stages of the Cold War, including détente, has been growing with the opening of more archives. For a recent synthesis, see Melvyn Leffler and Odd

Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2019, pp. 3–51, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00873 © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00873 by guest on 28 September 2021 Reis

The Portuguese side of this story, however, is not well known. Studies of the Cold War tend not to pay attention to Portugal. Despite the shift toward a more pericentric and global approach, Portugal seems to be perceived as too small to matter. Studies of Portuguese foreign policy usually focus on the turn toward Western Europe. Yet, both the impact of Portuguese decolonization in the Cold War in southern Africa and the possibility that a pro-Soviet regime would gain power in Portugal, leading to a potential domino effect in the southern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), were for some time, especially during the crucial final stages of the Helsinki Conference in 1975, an important source of friction between the two Cold War blocs.5 Western governments sought to use détente as a way to press the USSR not to support revolution in Portugal led by the pro-Soviet Portuguese Com- munists. This worked to some degree to the benefit of moderates in Portugal, at least until the Helsinki agreement was signed, justifying Portuguese Foreign Minister Major Ernesto Melo Antunes’s claims about the decisive impact of détente in post-1974 Portugal.6 The focus of this article will not be on the impact of détente on metropolitan Portugal per se, although that impact will be taken into account as part of the wider context required to understand a Portu