Spain: A Unique History (22 page)

The Portuguese of the expansion revealed an extraordinary degree of self-confidence, an almost infinite daring and courage very similar to that of Spanish conquistadores, and a profound sense that they were the most warlike and proficient of all the Latin Christians. They scoffed at any notion of military dependency, but this had changed by the seventeenth century. The Portuguese mentality altered from the offensive to the defensive, from the audacious to the prudent. Whereas they had fought off the crown of Castile all by themselves in the fourteenth century, by the seventeenth century they looked to outside assistance to a degree unknown before, and by the eighteenth century would, when in trouble, sometimes call upon the English to send a general to organize their forces. Portugal would not again expand overseas until the nineteenth century.

When one talks of "national character" in this regard, the reference is primarily to the psycho-emotional ethos of the elite sectors. The Portuguese aristocracy never fully recovered from the trauma of 1578, which destroyed some of its leading elements. Though the domestic social structure would remain much the same for three centuries, the fire and drive was gone from the old military nobility, which preferred to live off its rents. It might be asked whether this reflected a subjective change on the part of the elite, or rather an objective adjustment to a world of increased competition in which the Portuguese could inevitably expect to achieve less. The answer probably is that it reflected a certain amount of both.

It may be objected that the concept "change of character" creates a caricature. Ordinary Portuguese behaved much the same before and after 1578. In both eras the most typical subject of the Portuguese crown was a peaceful peasant who worked the land. Moreover, there was never a monolithic Portugal. The fifteenth-century elite had been sharply divided about the wisdom of crusading in Morocco, and also about the Atlantic voyages. There had always existed more prudent and practical elite sectors, whose point of view imposed a more pragmatic and "modern" policy after 1640. Rather than a change of character, this might be interpreted as a natural evolution, even though crucially precipitated by trauma.

A certain militancy and expansionism was regained under modern nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Portugal was much more successful in this regard than was Spain, amassing the second largest empire of any of the smaller European countries, a situation that greatly stimulated German cupidity on the eve of World War I. Given the relative poverty of modern Portugal, this was a considerable achievement, but of course at no time had the country been wealthy, in comparative terms, and the "third empire" (Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau), though noteworthy, did not reflect an originality and a daring equivalent to the fifteenth century. Portuguese society to some extent lost its atavistic military ethos without developing the full structure and values of a modern society. This also paralleled the experience of Spain, but in the case of Portugal the disaster of 1578 and the temporary loss of full sovereignty marked a before and an after. Though later exceeded in character and extent by the radical transformation of Germany after 1945, it constituted a more marked change than was to be found in the early modern history of any other European country.

The positive side of the decline in militancy in modern Portuguese culture has been the absence of civil war and prolonged civil violence, except for the conflict of 1832-34. The perpetual instability of the "Primeira República" (1910-26) produced intermittent violence that was nonetheless low in volume. Even the long Portuguese dictatorship of 1926-74 was comparatively gentle, the only one in Europe referred to as "uma catedocracia" (a professorocracy) because of the prominent role of university personnel.

Portugal has never been a particularly modern or advanced country, and did not hold such status even at the time of its expansion in 1415. Nevertheless, it has exhibited certain symptoms of precocity to the extent that it carried out new achievements or introduced new institutions earlier than did Spain or other parts of southern and eastern Europe, or even, in some cases, northwestern Europe. The "advantages of backwardness," as it is sometimes called, offer no explanation, for this refers more to the possibility of making unusually rapid advances by taking advantage of institutions or policies already pioneered by more developed countries.
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The only advantages that Portugal possessed were a militant ethos, a compact geography and privileged strategic location.

Among the many Portuguese "firsts" may be found:

1. The first Hispanic kingdom to complete its full southern reconquest;

2. The first western kingdom to initiate major expansion in Africa and Asia;

3. Establishment of the first maritime constellation to span much of the globe;

4. Introduction of a new program of administered monarchist capitalism, though in the long run this proved a failure;

5. Beginning the transatlantic slave trade;

6. Initiating the development of the plantation economy of the Atlantic islands and of the Western Hemisphere;

7. Carrying out the first peaceful decolonization in the Western Hemisphere;

8. Becoming the first Iberian country to resolve the liberalism/traditionalism conflict in the nineteenth century;

9. Becoming the first Iberian country to stabilize nineteenth-century liberalism;

10. Introducing the first permanent new republic of the twentieth century in Europe (1910);

11. Establishing the first new-style twentieth-century authoritarian regime in Europe (1917-18), though it did not last;

12. Introducing Europe's first corporative constitution in 1933;

13. Initiating the first overthrow of an authoritarian regime in southern and eastern Europe during the late twentieth century (1974).

Some of the internal political achievements or innovations were no doubt facilitated by the small size of the country, and one or two of them possibly encouraged more by weakness than by strength. Moreover, several of these innovations were destructive, as has been the case in the history of most human societies. In general, however, they indicate a degree of initiative that has been overshadowed in foreign perceptions by Portugal's social and economic backwardness. These more precocious features of change, however, reveal a not inconsiderable degree of continuing activism, despite the limitations of the socioeconomic context.

At the first meeting of the International Conference Group on Portugal, held at the University of New Hampshire in October 1973, the sociologist Herminio Martins referred to his native country as the land of the "negative superlative." By this he meant that while some countries are referred to in terms of positive superlatives such as the most, the biggest, and the like, comparative references to Portugal in modern times have been in the negative superlative as the most backward, most underdeveloped, poorest, most illiterate of the west European countries. So long as one is looking at the main part of Europe north and west of the Balkans, such negative comparisons have usually been statistically justified.

At no time has Portugal been an economic or a technological leader (except for certain aspects of maritime science in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) and, from the seventeenth century on, it has been a relatively underdeveloped country that in comparative terms lost rather than gained ground during the nineteenth century. This is a story somewhat reminiscent of Spain, save that the comparative Portuguese statistics in modern times have been rather lower than those for Spain as a whole. Only in a few other parts of southern and eastern Europe has economic development been slower.

During the Middle Ages Portugal experienced the relative economic marginality common to most of the Christian kingdoms in the peninsula, though, as we have seen, in a time of generally slow economic change this did not result in a situation of profound underdevelopment. In the fifteenth century, Portugal, like Castile, probably ranked not much lower than a "low medium" on the general comparative scale of western economic development. Moreover, it momentarily took the lead in several specific areas of maritime technology and of long-range commercial organization, though these advantages would not long endure.

A fundamental question in Portuguese history is why the income generated by the thalassocracy for several generations was not used to stimulate positive economic growth. Several factors seem to have been important. One was that the maritime enterprise of the "first empire" was not as profitable as might have been thought. Certain voyages and initiatives did return a considerable profit, but conversely the overall expenses were very great, and remained extremely high even as profits declined. Militarization of the process in some respects increased rather than diminished. The Portuguese expansion was not based on a highly productive hinterland, but moved fairly rapidly from a modest domestic base to a large-scale enterprise without any significant development of that domestic base. It may be argued that almost all major enterprises spring initially from modest origins. In the Portuguese case, however, no positive balance was achieved, partly because the motivations and priorities were not primarily economic in the first place. Though Portugal did briefly pioneer certain forms of royal and long-range commercial organization, it did not constitute a capitalist society to the extent that Venice and Genoa already had during the Middle Ages or that Holland and England would become in the seventeenth century. Portuguese society and priorities remained more traditional, the crusade eventually trumping commerce, even though the two were supposed to be intertwined. This may be considered typically "Luso-Hispanic" but not very modern. Moreover, the maritime breakthrough did not in the long run provide the country with the kind of commercial advantages that briefly appeared to be the case at the beginning of the sixteenth century. International competition soon increased, while Portugal did not possess — and proved incapable of developing — the kind of financial basis and commercial network to take full advantage of these opportunities. At least as important was the contradiction/competition between the crusade of conquest in Morocco and the long-range thalassocracy. They had begun as different parts of the same enterprise, but the former came to overshadow the latter. Already by the middle of the sixteenth century the crown encountered severe financial trouble; the twentieth-century historian Garrett Mattingly has described João III as "the proprietor of a bankrupt wholesale grocery business."
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In the case of Portugal as in that of Spain, much of whatever profit derived from empire was skimmed off by the crown and invested in nonproductive military exercises. What little profit entered Portuguese society was largely absorbed nonproductively by the aristocracy. Not much was invested in productive enterprise within the country. The modest extent of the domestic market made it unpromising, and a relative absence of creative economic undertakings guaranteed that that would continue to be the case.

The "second empire" in Brazil became quite profitable by the late seventeenth century, yet it seems that very much the same story repeated itself. The crown and a small elite prospered, and by the early eighteenth century it had become possible to reconstruct the Portuguese navy, at least in part; yet again the proportion of money invested in stimulating domestic enterprise was comparatively slight, even though from the late seventeenth century on the Portuguese government was at least cognizant of the problem. It was not until the repatriation of capital from Brazil after the latter's independence that empire-generated capital began to be invested more directly in domestic activities, and even then much was sunk into the disamortization of landed estates, though this also made possible enough investment in the national debt to maintain to some extent the financial stability of the government. Moreover, by the nineteenth century it had become necessary to run much faster merely to stand still and not lose more ground, as far as the international competition was concerned, a problem equally challenging in the case of Spain.

An aristocrat-dominated traditional social structure was common in one way or another to nearly all of Europe, but Portuguese society was unusually emphatic in its absence of internal economic enterprise. Given the small market and very limited purchasing power, together with the absence of natural resources or prior domestic accumulation, the possibility of becoming a second Belgium was never a genuine possibility. At the same time, terrain and agricultural conditions meant that it could scarcely become a second Denmark.
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A more feasible model might have been something like a second seafaring Norway, but for this constituent factors were also lacking.

Spanish historians consistently ignore the history of Portugal as much as they possibly can, with the primary and laudable exception of Hipólito de la Torre Gómez, despite the fact that the history of Portugal much more closely parallels that of Spain than does the history of any other country. Though the preceding generalization is undoubtedly correct, the disparity in size of the two countries renders a less useful parallel or heuristic field than might be the case for countries of more nearly equivalent dimensions. On that level, of course, the appropriate comparison for Spain is with the contemporary history of Italy, and it is certainly true that of the larger European countries no two have as many similarities as do Spain and Italy. The main differences in comparability between Spain and Italy have to do first with politics and second with economics. Prior to 1860 Italy was never a united country, and for nearly four centuries before that time comparability could be achieved in political terms only at a high level of abstraction. Second, the spurt of industrialization that Italy experienced in the 1890s continued for some time, so that by the end of World War I Italy — which in the early nineteenth century overall had a per capita income scarcely superior to that of Spain — was for the time being at least twenty years ahead of Spain in economic development and modernization. Spain did not generally catch up until the last years of the twentieth century.