Mark Jones wrote:
> 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.
Well, in lots of ways, this is a very different country than it was in the 60's.
Whereas, back then, Portugal was an isolated backward country, with a monopolistic
bourgeoisie thriving on the stagnating waters of state industrial policy and
extreme social repression, now we have a backward country with open borders to
foreign capital, de-industrialized, tertiarized, with the rural interior
progressively deserted.
Whereas back then we were poor, ignorant and "proudly alone" (Salazar), now we are
poor, ignorant and in a state of kitsch frenzy, bombarded with mass culture and
mass consumptionism.
> 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.
>
I'm very skeptical about the "sanitary" ambitions of northern capital. Where there
is capitalism there is corruption and that is that. Be it in France, Germany,
Britain or Italy, the strict application of their own criminal law would put most
of the ruling classes behind bars.
The problem here in Portugal - and this is indeed an after-life of fascism - is
that, though our institutions are thoroughly "democratic", public opinion and
civic criticism are very weak. There is a reverential fear for public authority.
Judges would never dare to unmask and persecute state corruption, except of course
when this same corruption is leaked to the press by any of the warring faction in
the state apparatus itself. If you are charged, it's because you have fallen in
disgrace.
João Paulo Monteiro
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