A Tiny History of Contemporary Portugal

Portugal has to get poorer if it is to survive the crisis, prime-minister Passos Coelho said yesterday (http://aeiou.expresso.pt/passos-coelho-so-vamos-sair-da-crise-empobrecendo-video=f683176 in Portuguese). This is an eloquent example of what we are being subjected to. In the meanwhile, people are slumbering in a mixed state of panic and depression.

This country is now awakening from two decades of daydreaming. I can, from my personal experience, illustrate that very well. When I was a child, I remember that the country lived in the anticipation of its first major international event, the Expo98. A universal exhibition centered on the theme of the oceans, it was meant to be a culminating national celebration. The narrative was indeed uplifting: a small country on the edge of Europe had, in the past, been able to turn its peripheral position into a new world centrality (if you take a look at a world map you’ll notice that Portugal, despite being on a corner of Europe, is right at the center of the world); some five centuries later, the country had finally been able to shake off its burden of obscurantism left by half a century of dictatorship and was then re-emerging as a modern, fully European nation, bound to be (it was just a matter of time, it was believed) as rich and developed as any northern state like, say, Switzerland or Denmark.

It is interesting that we spoke of these places without really knowing them: for our purpose of would-be nouveau-riche our only idea of developed Europe was precisely that: they were rich, and we wanted to be like that also. Of course, we weren’t totally ignorant: we were selectively so. As the typical guy with an inferiority complex, we only saw what we wanted to see. Besides, there were lots of Portuguese emigrants abroad, but far from throwing some light on real differences and similarities, they just played the same game: Portugal was for them just a fading memory of poverty and absurdities, a country where nothing works properly. Even the seventh-hand BMW, which had always worked perfectly in Düsseldorf (as it had spent the whole year in the garage) had capriciously decided to break down as soon as it crossed the border (damn Portuguese roads!).

The result was a general sense of animosity towards emigrants returning on summer holidays which could be fairly summed up as the usual suspicion of the nouveau-riche seeing in each other a reflection of their ill-disguised lack of pedigree.

But back to history. The Expo was great (and quite expensive), but we were suddenly without the prospect of a future party. Then came the Euro 2004. Ten stadia were built, some of them costing tenfold the initial predictions: who cares? But the European championship itself left an ominous taste behind it. The day we lost the final against Greece the country was ungoverned, as our prime-minister had left office to go somewhere to Europe. Since then, we and the Greeks were doomed, and our government was never again to leave that place somewhere in Europe. Eventually we would find that the actual places where our government had made its abode were Berlin (on weekdays) and Paris (on weekends).

And now, after two decades believing ourselves almost rich, we are told that we have to get poorer. In fact, we never were anything else but poor: we just bought our way out of poverty, with the ensuing burden of indebtedness. Well, recognizing that we’re poor has at least some solace in it: we can always get poorer… Or die trying.