Joco Paulo Monteiro wrote:
>> the story is even more exemplary in terms of
> contemporary
> politico-ideological trends.
Joco, thanks for this. It's a comment on my own shameful ignorance of
Portugese history that I hadn't realised just how much Salazar's regime had
managed to acquire this kind of horrible after-life; I had thought that
'bourgeois renewal', under the twin signs of Brussels and the Portugese social
revolution, had progressed further; but evidently this is wrong.
There is also to my mind an enduring question about the extent to which the EU
fosters renewal and reform, and the extent to which it does the opposite and
merely entrenches and hyperdevelops corruption, particularly it seems in the
Mediterranean rimland. I'm genuinely puzzled about this. There is an almost
historically-invisible but crucial contest or dialectic going on between the
sanitary ambitions of northern European capital, and the age-old reality of
the Mezzogiorno, the Adriatic and the Hispano-Portugese isthmus, a dialectic
now also overlain by irredentism in Spain, climate change and desertification,
and pulses of immigration from northern Africa and elsewhere. It would be
goood to reconceptualise the European dynamic in these core-periphery terms,
and to factor in the new entrants to the EU from northern Europe, which share
many of the same symptomata: Poland, Hungary etc.
Mark
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