RCCS Annual Review, #0 - OpenEdition Journals

RCCS Annual ReviewA selection from the Portuguese journal Revista Críticade Ciências Sociais

#0 | 2009Issue no. 0

Electronic versionURL: http://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/76DOI: 10.4000/rccsar.76ISSN: 1647-3175

PublisherCentro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra

Electronic referenceRCCS Annual Review, #0 | 2009, « Issue no. 0 » [Online], Online since 01 July 2009, connection on 10October 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/76 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rccsar.76

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Summary

Articles

Critical Edge and Legitimation in Peace StudiesJosé Manuel Pureza and Teresa Cravo

Labour, Social Inequalities and Trade UnionismElísio Estanque

Governance: Between Myth and RealityBoaventura de Sousa Santos

“Defeat happens only to those who stop fighting”: Protest and the Democratic State inPortugalJosé Manuel Mendes

From Identitary Construction to a Web of Differences: A Glance at Portuguese-languageLiteraturesLaura Cavalcante Padilha

On the Question of Aufhebung: Baudelaire, Bataille and SartreFrançoise Meltzer

Governance and the European Education Area: Regulating Education and Visions for the‘Europe’ ProjectFátima Antunes

Different as Only We Can Be. Portuguese LGBT Associations in Three MovementsAntónio Fernando Cascais

RCCS Annual Review, #0 | 2009

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Summary

1 Published originally in 2005 and 2006, the articles in this issue address a variety of

topics and areas: from Peace Studies to Queer Studies, from literature to economics,

from governance to education (and education governance).


2

ArticlesArtigos


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Critical Edge and Legitimation inPeace Studies*

José Manuel Pureza and Teresa Cravo

Translation : Monica Varese

EDITOR'S NOTE

Translated by Monica Varese

Revised by Teresa Tavares

Introduction

1 Peace Studies is invariably referred to as a salient element among the theoretical

currents that embody the post-positivist rupture in the field of International Relations

– in itself a heterogeneous field where feminist perspectives cross paths with critical

theory studies, with deconstruction, and with new normative formulations. What

unites this plurality of approaches is the challenge to the positivism of normal science

in International Relations, in which retrospective validation of internal “laws” and the

presumption of objective knowledge, cleansed from subjective preconceptions, are

taken as axioms. In this regard, and in the context of the epistemological debate within

this field of knowledge, the different post-positivist currents display the same desire to

break with the realist canon of the discipline of International Relations. However, the

self-representation of Peace Studies as a critical edge is currently under the closest

scrutiny. Established as a discourse grounded on the aspiration to thoroughly

transform reality with a view to achieving peace (at physical, structural and cultural

levels), Peace Studies has become, especially since the 1990s, a conceptual and

analytical field called upon to tend to public policy related primarily to the conducting

of the international system by its main actors (including the major funding agencies,

the platforms of global governance, and the States which control the mechanisms of

international decision-making). It is thus important to examine the extent to which the


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alternative nature of Peace Studies has persisted in respect of the founding paradigm of

this discipline.

2 We will do so in three stages. Firstly, we will follow the steps taken by this theoretical

approach in its endeavour to become one of the strongest expressions of the

paradigmatic alternative sought since the 1980s for a discipline (International

Relations) marked at its inception by a vocation for analytical legitimation of the

international order. A second stage will seek to locate the expressions of co-optation of

Peace Studies – both in regard to its theoretical assumptions, and in regard to the

latter’s translation into public policies – and its corresponding loss of critical edge vis-

à-vis the prevailing international disorder. Lastly, in the third part of our article, we

will analyse the scenario of Peace Studies’ theoretical and political contraction, which

goes hand in hand with a resurgence of the realist paradigm appearing on the horizon

at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Itinerary of a rupture foretold

3 The creation of International Relations as a discipline admirably illustrates the Kuhnian

relationship between paradigm, as a matricial view shared by the members of a

scientific community in respect of the object of their disciplinary field, and normal

science, as a certain map of knowledge espoused by such a scientific community.

4 To summarize the trajectory of the disciplinary formation concerned is to describe an

intense paradigmatic dispute centred on rival maps of knowledge, espoused by

antagonistic scientific communities. Having triumphed in the founding clash against

idealism (Cravinho, 2002: 116), the realist school became the defining canon for normal

science in this area. As highlighted elsewhere, realism, “segregated in the process of

affirmation and consolidation of the inter-State system […], is a specific expression of

the cultural climate of scientific positivism, from which it absorbs the radical

opposition between facts and values, granting absolute epistemological priority to the

former over the latter” (Pureza, 2001: 9). By elevating those regularities observed in the

past flow of international reality to the status of sacred laws, realism erected three

standards for normal science, which constitute three defining features of the

International Relations map of knowledge: State individualism, the anarchic nature of

the international system, and the representation of the latter as an arena of the rawest

power politics.

5 The simplistic nature of this map and its conservative vocation have been arraigned as

challenges to the political and academic construction of an alternative paradigm. This

challenge has only been taken seriously in the ongoing debate which pits the positivist

tradition against a plurality of currents that depart, in different ways, from the

epistemological and ontological premises that shape the map of normal knowledge.

6 As a consistent version of this alternative – based on a clear conceptual definition, a

significant body of teachers and researchers and solid institutionalisation – Peace

Studies has not yet been in place for fifty years. Even though its most remote origins

can be found well before the 20th century, the different proposals and initiatives

designed to pursue the goal of world peace were too isolated and autonomous to be

considered at the time a distinct, organised and consistent field of study (van den

Dungen and Wittner, 2003: 363). The launching of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in


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1957, followed two years later by the establishment of the Center for Research on Conflict

Resolution at the University of Michigan, by Kenneth Boulding and his colleagues

Herbert Herman and Anatol Rapoport, represented the first challenge to the realist

paradigm as the predominant model for interpreting the phenomena of peace and war.

However, the search for scientific recognition of a discipline then still in its infancy –

precisely at a time when positivism in the social sciences had reached its zenith –

confined the behaviourist-inclined U.S. school to quantitative and non-valuational data

gathering on conflicts (Terrif et al., 1999: 69). Research was thus restricted in its

concept of peace – presented in its negative formulation as an absence of war and

violence – and consequently in its agenda – markedly minimalist, as it sought only to

reduce the occurrence and the spreading of conflicts.

7 Until then, as Martinez Guzmán states, the main challenge for this new research

approach was precisely that of turning peace itself into an object of analysis (2005: 49).

The figure who sparked this turning point – and who is, for this very reason, regarded

as the founder of Peace Studies – was the Norwegian Johan Galtung. The new direction

of this field of studies – begun with the creation of the Oslo Peace Research Institute in

1959, and five years later, the Journal of Peace Research – is unequivocally rooted in this

author’s original proposal.

8 In characterising Peace Studies, Galtung drastically shattered the positivistic

distinction between theory and practice. Surpassing the false notion of the neutrality of

science (since it was acknowledged that all types of knowledge inevitably presuppose a

value-laden gaze on the part of analysts), Peace Studies asserted itself as a “socially

productive” discipline – that is, one that produces effects on the social, political,

economic and cultural life of societies. These effects are intended to be consistent with

the goals of promotion of cooperation, peaceful resolution of disputes and non-violent

social and political change. In other words, Galtung embodied the resurgence of

normative theory – the major novelty of this social science – by affirming a

commitment to values, especially a commitment to peace. According to McSweeney

(1998), without this central normative claim, Peace Studies would surely have lost “its

raison d’etre as a distinctive approach to the international order.” To know about the

values of peace is thus not sufficient: an “emotional adherence to these values” is most

particularly demanded (Martinez Guzman, 2004:412). Within the framework of an

intimate link between theory and practice, theoretical production is “prospective and

prescriptive” (Pureza, 2001: 14): it is only complete when it actively fosters the

commitment to peace and takes shape in concrete strategies. Faced with the critiques

of those who greeted with scepticism his goal of studying peace scientifically by means

of a normative theory, Galtung responded by using his famous medical analogy: Peace

Studies, ethically directed towards peace (as opposed to violence and war), would be no

less rigorous than medical research, ethically directed towards healing (as opposed to

illness) (Galtung, 1996: 1).

9 Additionally, emphasis should be given to the fact that, in this school of thought,

searching for non-violent processes of political change necessarily implies profound

transformations in existing power structures (Rogers and Ramsbotham, 1997: 753). In

other words, by taking Peace Studies as a simultaneously analytical and normative

instrument, the international system does not remain unscathed vis-à-vis the intent to

change an unjust status quo that fosters inequalities. Galtung thus built up a distinction

in the conceptualising of peace which was to become key to the development of this


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discipline – “negative peace,” as an absence of war, and “positive peace,” as integrated

human community, as social justice and freedom.

10 Furthermore, in Galtung’s view Peace Studies should be interdisciplinary, inasmuch as

dialogue between International Relations and the different approaches of the social

sciences, such as sociology, anthropology or psychology, can contribute to the decisive

enriching of the conceptual framework for interpreting both peace and violent

conflicts, given their multifaceted nature (Rogers and Ramsbotham, 1999: 741).

11 This alternative focus of analysis in Peace Studies, as it was developed in Northern

Europe, would become pivotal for further developments in this area of studies. It

became the basis of a different orientation from that of its North-American

counterpart, and thus provided a response to critiques which in the meantime had

been levelled at this field. Underlying these critiques were charges regarding the

persistence of epistemological traces of realism in the theoretical frameworks of peace

research, which thus could not break free from the accusation of legitimising the world

system’s power relations (Terrif et al., 1999: 70-71).

12 The recognition of both the reproduction of the hierarchy between centre and

periphery,1 and its legitimisation by means of the prevailing paradigm in International

Relations, as well as the fact that Peace Studies was not fully equipped to challenge

either situation, gave rise to a major reconceptualisation of the discipline, set in motion

by Galtung’s creative impulse.

13 The Nordic author identified the triangle of violence, in apposition to which he set the

triangle of peace. The distinction between the three vertices is made in accordance

with different time frames:

Direct violence is an event; structural violence is a process with ups and downs; cultural

violence is an invariant, a ‘permanence’ [...] The three forms of violence enter time

differently, somewhat like the difference in earthquake theory between the earthquake

as an event, the movement of the tectonic plates as a process, and the fault line as a

more permanent condition. (Galtung, 1990: 294)

14 Direct violence is thus posited as an intentional act of aggression; structural (indirect)

violence derives from the social structure itself – repression, in its political form, or

exploitation, in its economic form; and lastly, cultural violence underlies structural and

direct violence, making up the system of norms and behaviours which bestows social

legitimacy on the preceding types (Galtung, 1996: 2).

15 Peace Studies has traditionally focused on direct violence (obvious and sudden) –

which, on being eliminated, represents negative peace – rather than on structural and

cultural violence (static and concealed) – which, on being eliminated, creates positive

peace. In the broadest sense of the term, peace – i.e., direct peace + structural peace +

cultural peace – ultimately corresponds to Galtung’s ambition, given that the mere

absence of war can hide deeper instances of injustice which, if not addressed, may

contain the seeds of potential, violent conflicts (Terriff et al., 1999: 193).

16 With this trilogy, Galtung laid bare the global dynamics of exploitation, responding to

the critique that traditional Peace Studies colluded with the dominant conception of

power, and broadening the spectrum of his action-research, previously centred on the

strategic relation between the superpowers and on the logic of dissuasion. In addition,

the unit of analysis broadened to encompass not only the nation-State, but also the

dynamics of class and power at the intrastate and transnational levels. This was a


7

significant change with respect to the prevailing paradigm after World War II (ibid.:

193).

17 Materialising this normative shift within Peace Studies, the agenda structured

throughout the 1980s – articulated with a solid academic-institutional base – gave clear

priority to topics such as disarmament, the transformation of the unequal global

system, environmental issues and the analysis of processes of conflict negotiation and

mediation (Miall, Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, 1999: 48-49). In following the key issue

of that decade’s international politics – disarmament (as a counterpoint to the

superpowers’ arms race and the beginning of the “Second Cold War”) – Peace Studies

displayed an unprecedented capacity for theoretical production. But the great

prominence that this area achieved at the time was mainly due to its appropriation by

pro-peace and anti-nuclear social movements. Campaigns for peace and the pro-

nuclear-disarmament movement, which grew and diversified, illustrate the capacity of

Peace Studies to include in its agenda topics which were traditionally marginalised by

the mainstream (Van den Dungen and Wittner, 2003: 365). Likewise, they reflect the

action-research dialectic so dear to this discipline, spotlighting its affinity with

activism. By the end of the 1980s, the Peace Studies community had become a diverse,

active school, with effective international impact (Rogers and Ramsbotham, 1999: 749).

Emancipation or standardisation?

18 The end of the Cold War was a turning point in the assertion of the field of Peace

Studies. Countering fears of its loss of relevance in a world lacking bipolar

confrontation, the 1990s offered a unique opportunity for Peace Studies to contribute

directly to the resolution of the growing number of particularly long and violent civil

conflicts which challenged the stability of the new world order.

19 These “new wars” (Kaldor, 1999) demanded the commitment of the international

community and prompted the emergence of a model of response that would take into

account the sources, the actors, the dynamics, as well as the consequences of the new

patterns of conflict – already discernible since World War II, but which the end of the

bipolar system had clearly intensified (Rasmussen, 1999: 43). In this context, the

doctrinal and institutional stance taken by the United Nations in the early 1990s proved

to be structuring. Realising that there was an opportunity for expanding the UN role,

and embracing the widespread expectations for a rebirth of the organisation at the end

of the bipolar confrontation (Roberts, 1998: 300), the Secretary General, Boutros-Ghali,

proposed that the UN’s work (and that of the international community in general)

should be centred on the proliferation of internal conflicts within endemically fragile

States positioned on the peripheries of the world system. This meant involving the

organisation in actively fostering the peaceful resolution of these conflicts, by closely

following negotiations on political agreements and by committing itself to assist in the

implementation of peace processes ensuing from these agreements.

20 The need to set up a framework for action to respond to this challenge cleared the way

for assimilating and subsequently applying the theoretical assumptions that had been

put forward by Peace Studies. The first close contact of this discipline with the UN came

precisely with the Agenda for Peace in 1992 (Boutros-Ghali, 1992: 11), whose strategies

for action – preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding –

stemmed from concepts formulated by Galtung in the 1970s. The comprehensive


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application of these strategies virtually all over the world during the 1990s, made it

possible for Peace Studies to be included in the so-called policy-oriented mainstream.

Starting out as theoretical assumptions, they became real social norms, accepted and

reproduced by the community (Santos, 1978). This was a sign that the field of Peace

Studies was entering into a period of “scientific normalisation,” which entailed, to

return to Kuhn, defending, broadening and deepening the paradigm, by resolving

problems in accordance with the new, assimilated modes of solution.

21 This discipline thus benefitted from the new world order, and took on a major role in

the international decision-making system, a role it had not until then played.

Beginning with the UN, its hegemony was welcomed by the scientific community, by

multilateral organisations, by donor countries, and by NGOs, and was appropriated by

these actors as a guide for devising peace-promoting policies.

22 Faced with the intensifying of post-Cold War internal conflicts in the so-called failed

States within the contemporary world system (Ayoob, 1996: 67) – States whose attempt

at centralising the power inherent to State-building had failed – the policies grounded

in Peace Studies took on a standardised pattern. This standardisation implied the

transformation of situations of near anarchy into situations of centralised, legitimate

power, with actual capacity to deal with the problem of security and with the political,

economic and social inadequacies experienced by the countries concerned. In other

words, the response of the international community would include, in practical terms,

support to post-war (re)construction of the State itself (peacebuilding).

23 As the expression of a dominant scientific model in this area, post-war reconstruction

conveys a certain methodological conception, proposing standardised rules and

technical procedures to resolve the problems faced by States riven by internal strife.

The model inevitably splits into four dimensions – military and security, political-

constitutional, economic-social, and psychosocial – regardless of the context to which

it is applied, giving shape to what Oliver Ramsbotham (2000) calls standard operating

procedure.

24 The most often voiced criticism of this model has to do with the standardised nature of

the framework for action. Since it is a single, generically applied model, it fails in not

allowing much room for neither local singularities nor the emergence of alternative

solutions that might be more appropriate for the different realities. This criticism of

standardisation is all the more incisive as we find that this model, aspiring to universal

application, does not comprise multicultural experiences. Rather, it confines itself to

reproducing a clear Western matrix in countries that are overwhelmingly non-

Western. Thus, this approach gave rise to a number of criticisms, ranging from the

culturally insensitive behaviour displayed by troops on the ground, to the rejection of

the so-called model of liberal internationalism (Paris, 1997), based on two pillars in

particular: electoral democracy and the market economy.

25 The triumphant emergence of this liberal recipe after the end of the Cold War and the

collapse of the Communist Bloc led to ample endorsement of this kind of approach.

Being unchallenged, it was even forced upon the four corners of the earth (Clapham,

1998: 193‑194). Hence, it is understandable that local agents should have a reduced role

in determining the agenda for the reconstruction of their own countries. There has

been an unequivocal failure in amply exploring the virtues of local capabilities, insofar

as the model further endorses excessive centralisation of decision-making in the

United Nations itself and in small elites with prior connections to the conflict. In fact,


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there has been a chronic lack of attention to what might be called the base of the

pyramid, which corresponds to the majority of the population. The idea of

consolidating peace from below has been thwarted by the top-down, State-centred

approach adopted by the United Nations, which neglects indigenous resources and

agents that are crucial in building a more participatory democracy and a more

inclusive and, necessarily, more sustainable peace.

26 Feminist critiques (by authors such as Betty Reardon and Birgit Brock-Utne) have been

particularly scathing in denouncing the fact that this peacebuilding model actually

reproduces the relationship between dominator and dominated. In questioning the

stereotypes that give rise to these practices, such as women’s inherent passivity in both

war and peace, feminist critiques contest the secondary, virtually invisible or even non-

existent role of women, systematically relegated to the informal sphere and to the

psychosocial dimension of peacebuilding. Their contributions have been most useful in

condemning the public discrimination to which women are subjected – with some

noteworthy exceptions – in the negotiation, signing and implementation of peace

agreements, resulting in their considerably limited access to the decision-making

process in post-conflict situations (Moura, 2005).

27 These critiques show that the knowledge produced is concentrated in the mechanisms

that reinforce domination and instruments of control. By pre-determining an

institutional framework as if it could automatically achieve the supposedly

unquestionable goals of peacemaking, Peace Studies showed that it was not open to

incorporate and put into practice the new creative, critical and constructive inputs

from perspectives such as development theories and practices, critical social theory,

cultural and gender analysis, among others.

28 The experience of the 1990s thus seemed to represent the climax of the discipline’s

institutionalisation: Peace Studies provided the hegemonic models, and dominant

institutions imposed them. As highlighted in the collective work Security Studies Today,

referring to the post-World War II period, “‘Peace’ fell within the domain of high

politics, imposed on States by supranational institutions as a product of a hierarchical

power relationship, and consonant with an external, categorical notion of a notion of

‘the good’ for international actors” (Terrif et al., 1999: 68).

29 The new circumstances might have led to the development of quite ambitious action-

research as a distinctive feature of Peace Studies, insofar as much of its theoretical

production was applied to public policies for the promotion of peace. However, the

1990s worked as a test of the veracity of the post-positivist formulation which this area

of study had explored and somehow abandoned. Peace research was put at the service

of a lyophilised universalisation of institutional and political models produced by

Western modernity, proving it had not yet succeeded in breaking free from this domain

(Santos, 2004: 16). In this sense, the experience of the post-Cold War period showed the

extent to which Peace Studies fell short of what was needed to carry out the

paradigmatic transition in epistemological terms, and above all in social and political

terms.

Paths and detours in a return to critique

30 As an institution, Peace Studies appears nowadays to have lost some of its rhetorical

appeal (Patomaki, 2001: 734). The end of the Cold War, its association with


10

neoliberalism conveyed by post-war reconstruction models imposed throughout the

1990s, and the distancing from its original conceptual formulation, made in the 1970s,

may have prompted the decline in the discipline. Having emerged as a form of critical

knowledge – committed to putting in place a normative, emancipatory project – Peace

Studies proved in the end to be easily co‑opted into the hegemonic discursive and

ideological bloc.

31 By disfiguring the project that motivated the founding fathers to break drastically with

the positivist-realist tradition of International Relations, Peace Studies has been unable

to present itself as an alternative to the outlook and discourse legitimising the

practices of domination concealed within the prevailing paradigm. What’s more, it runs

the risk of becoming a locus for the legitimising and refining of the established power

system. It is surely no accident that the main research centres in this field have shifted

from developing primarily theoretical work to increasingly providing consultancy

services in the context of international operations “on the ground.”

32 The radical nature of the alternative that it set out to be tends to remain within the

confines of the conceptual plane, without materialising in the design and

implementation of policies. The risk of instrumentalisation is thus great, facilitated to

the extent that Peace Studies explicitly defines itself as a policy-oriented field of action-

research. What is in fact at stake is not leaving behind “theoretical purity,” but rather

the loss of critical capacity vis‑à‑vis the emerging systems of international domination.

In these circumstances, the intimate link between academic theory and community

practice may prove to be counterproductive, as it reinforces the structural, relational

and cultural contradictions that lead to conflicts.

33 In our view, Peace Studies now are, to some extent, confronted with a challenge

identical in nature to that which was in place during the reflection on economic

development processes from the 1980s onwards. In the same way that it became

increasingly obvious that proceeding with development policies that were deliberately

blind to the depletion of natural resources would result in eventual catastrophe, thus

too it has now become clear that the aim of building a solid peace calls for a critical

distancing from all sources of violence, even (and especially) when these appear in the

guise of instruments that normalise or reduce merely epidermic violence. However, the

challenge does not end here. There are lessons to be learnt from the way the demand

for sustainability was assimilated by development policies. What was originally

supposed to be a basis for radically distinct policies has become, with the concept of

sustainable development – or at least with the dominant practices associated with it – a

means of saving business-as-usual, lending it a slightly greener shade.

34 It is our understanding that the challenge of a sustainable peace cannot mean less than

an unequivocal distancing from institutional prescriptions, from the power relations

and social relations which neoliberalism carries within it. Very tangibly put, this means

that setting sustainable peace as a goal of peacebuilding processes implies not only

eradicating war and its immediate aftermath, but also creating conditions to prevent

military violence from being replaced, in the short or long run, by steadily intensifying

social violence. This type of violence is seen in exponentially rising indices of domestic

violence and crime, or in the reconfiguration of relations between political forces, as

well as between these and the population at large, in ways that truly clone the relations

that created the conditions for and perpetuated war. These are perhaps the two most

perverse results of a mechanical application of the standard operating procedure, and of


11

the central role that it gives to the articulation between neoliberal, low-intensity

democracy and structural economic adjustment.

35 In this context, Peace Studies are in want of a profound decolonising process. What has

until now been a solid conceptual formulation coming from the North, more than ever

needs incorporate contributions from the South and its singularities. If Peace Studies

does this, it will be able to re-invent its emancipatory character and rid itself of the

social and political praxis to which it has hitherto subscribed (Santos, 2004: 6). A first

step in this direction is to acknowledge that war is a structural social condition of the

periphery, and this necessarily entails opening up this field of studies to formulae and

experiences of peace that are rooted in the selfsame territories of violence and conflict.

The institutional framework which is most appropriate for the goal of sustainable

peace must be supplied by the context in each case, seeking to meet real local needs

and aspirations. In very concrete terms, learning from the South means that public

policies underpinned by Peace Studies’ conceptual universe, notably in post-conflict

reconstruction or conflict prevention and crisis management, must achieve greater

distance from the standardised prescriptions formulated in the universities and

chancelleries of the North; policies need to confer a more central role on local actors,

be it by paying greater heed to practices rooted in local customs and to regional

cultural and social contexts, or by giving absolute priority to the empowerment of local

societies.

36 However, this need to critically re-centre Peace Studies is at present faced with an

adverse climate. In the post-9/11 international system, the realist paradigm has

resurfaced, claiming to have a more accurate worldview of the dawn of the 21st century.

The emergence of the “war on terror,” as a guiding principle for the response to the

new threats to worldwide security and stability, has imposed a dramatic narrowing of

the international agenda, which Peace Studies has neither been able to prevent nor, so

far, to reverse.

37 Similarly to what happened in the ten years following World War II, when the realist

paradigm ruled unchallenged over the analysis of international relations, so now Peace

Studies have allowed themselves to be taken hostage by the idea of the inevitability of

conflict. Considering the 9/11 attacks in isolation and analysing them simplistically,

without questioning their relations to the disorder or the power relations of the

current international system, have silenced that which ought to be the contribution of

this discipline. In this context, Peace Studies runs the risk of becoming marginalised

and relegated to certain “agenda niches” – such as post-war reconstruction,

environmental issues, or nuclear disarmament – thus being cut off from its true

emancipatory vocation.

38 Disarmament will, no doubt, continue to be a pressing issue on the agenda of Peace

Studies, especially in this new post-Cold War nuclear era. The risks of nuclear weapon

use – which, since 1945, has posed a prevailing threat to worldwide stability – remain,

now within a scenario of insecurity marked by horizontal proliferation and by the

tension between the desire of new States to gain entry into the nuclear club and their

repression by those who already possess such capabilities. However, Peace Studies are

now far from being able to mobilise the pro-peace and anti-nuclear movements in

numbers equalling those of the last years of the Cold War, whose activism contributed

in such large measure to foreground the cause as well as the discipline itself.


12

39 There remains yet another scenario, which, if it becomes a reality, may especially

penalise Peace Studies: that of the “originality” of the realist paradigm in its second

life-stage launched after 9/11. The re-emergence of this paradigm in and of itself

appears as déjà vu – in the emphasis it gives to military readiness, in its discourse on the

inevitability of clashes between States or in its pursuit of the national interest. Yet, it

also displays particularities that have nothing to do with the assumptions we have

grown accustomed to associating with this traditional view of International Relations.

As the war against Iraq shows, we are dealing today with a realism dressed up as

democratic missionising – one that appropriates the normative discourse which had

been traditionally alien to it and invokes the commitment to certain values in order to

legitimise the war. The very same quarters that defended “anarchy” now lay claim to

the image of “community.” Using the same bases of the critique of violence, but at the

service of the moral legitimising of war, they are progressively taking over the ethical

and normative field of Peace Studies.

Conclusion

40 The transforming promise conveyed by Peace Studies lost its character in the

standardising of peacebuilding policies in the 1990s, and today stumbles against the

polymorphous resurgence of realism as a discourse that is allegedly more appropriate

to the circumstances of the international relations system. The political contraction of

Peace Studies, which consigns it to a status of instrumental utility in the management

of the peripheries of the world system, also entails a theoretical contraction. However,

the genetic particularity of Peace Studies resides precisely in its radical nature. It is this

radical nature that will bring to a halt its slide to the locus of normal science – a science

closed to innovation, that canonises the future in terms of the past.

41 For this reason, and in order to achieve its full post-positivist expression, Peace Studies

must now radicalise its critical approach, assuming the biases and flaws of the concepts

underlying Western modernity and, as a result, opening up to heterogeneity, to

plurality, to the periphery and to the epistemological contributions of feminist,

environmental and cultural studies. Decolonising its knowledge and striving for

sustainable peace appear as the necessary tools for the return of Peace Studies to its

critical vocation. Only thus will Peace Studies become a vehicle for overcoming

relations of power and domination, whose indictment and deconstruction determined

its birth and affirmation. It is only thus that its emancipatory goal of social

transformation will materialise and that its conversion into a new form of social

oppression can be averted.


13

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayoob, Mohammed (1996), “State-Making, State-Breaking and State Failure: Explaining the Roots

of 'Third World' Insecurity,” in Luc van de Goor et al. (eds.), Between Development and Destruction.

An Enquiry into the Causes of Conflict in Post-Colonial States. London: MacMillan, 67-90.

Boutros-Ghali, Boutros (1992), An Agenda for Peace. New York: United Nations.

Clapham, Christopher (1998), “Rwanda: The Perils of Peacemaking,” Journal of Peace Research,

35(2), 193-210.

Cravinho, João (2002), Visões do mundo: as relações internacionais e o mundo contemporâneo. Lisbon:

Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Dungen, Peter van den; Wittner, Lawrence (2003), “Peace History: An Introduction,” Journal of

Peace Research, 40(4), 363-375.

Galtung, Johan (1990), “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291-305.

Galtung, Johan (1996), Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization.

London: Sage.

Kaldor, Mary (1999), New and Old Wars. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Martínez Guzmán, Vincent (2004), “Epistemologías para la Paz,” Enciclopedia de Paz y Conflictos.

Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada.

Martínez Guzmán, Vicent (2005), Podemos hacer las paces. Reflexiones éticas tras el 11-S y el 11-M.

Bilbao: Desclée De Brouwer, S.A.

McSweeney, Hill (1998), “Peace Studies & IR Theory after the Cold War,” Peace Studies Section

Newsletter (Syracuse University). Available at http://www2.mcdaniel.edu/ peacestudies/pdf/

newsletters/nov98.pdf

Miall, Hugh; Ramsbotham, Oliver; Woodhouse, Tom (1999), Contemporary Conflict Resolution.

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Moura, Tatiana (2005), Entre Atenas e Esparta. Mulheres, paz e conflitos armados. Coimbra: Quarteto.

Paris, Roland (1997), “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” International

Security, 22(2), 54-89.

Patomaki, Heikki (2001), “The Challenge of Critical Theories: Peace Research at the Start of the

New Century,” Journal of Peace Research, 38(6), 723‑737.

Pureza, José Manuel (2001), “Estudos sobre a paz e cultura da paz,” in J. M. Pureza (ed.), Para uma

cultura da paz. Coimbra: Quarteto Editora

Ramsbotham, Oliver (2000), “Reflections on UN Post-Settlement Peacebuilding,” in Tom

Woodhouse; O. Ramsbotham (eds.), Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution. London: Frank Cass

Publishers, 169-189.

Rasmussen, J. Lewis (1999), “Peacemaking in the Twenty-first Century,” in William Zartman; J. L.

Rasmussen (eds.), Peacemaking in International Conflict – Methods and Techniques. Washington, D.C.:

United States Institute of Peace Press, 23-50.


14

http://www2.mcdaniel.edu/%20peacestudies/pdf/newsletters/nov98.pdf

http://www2.mcdaniel.edu/%20peacestudies/pdf/newsletters/nov98.pdf

Roberts, Adam (1998), “The Crisis in UN Peacekeeping,” in Chester A. Crocker et al. (eds.),

Managing Global Chaos – Sources of and Responses to International Conflict. Washington, D.C.: United

States Institute of Peace Press, 297-319.

Rogers, Paul; Ramsbotham, Oliver (1999), “Then and Now: Peace Research – Past and Future,”

Political Studies, 47(4), 740-754.

Sousa Santos, Boaventura (1978), “Da sociologib a da ciência à política científica,” Revista Crítica de

Ciências Sociais, 1, 11‑56.

Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2004), “Do pós-moderno ao pós-colonial. E para além de um e de

outro,” Keynote Address, 8th Luso-Afro-Brazilian Congress of the Social Sciences, 16-18 September.

Available at http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/misc/Do_pos-moderno_ao_pos-colonial.pdf.

Terriff, Terry et al. (1999), Security Studies Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

NOTES

*. Article published in RCCS 71 (June 2005).

1. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos reminds us (2004: 8, 19), colonialism as a socio-economic

relation survived colonialism as a political relation, retaining, in virtually unaltered form, the

structural patterns of oppression, discrimination and violence.

ABSTRACTS

Historically established as critical knowledge and thus an alternative to normal science in

International Relations, Peace Studies came to be co-opted, in the 1990s, by the regulatory

structures of the international system as a cornerstone of many of the options put into practice

especially in post-war reconstruction processes. In this context, recovering the critical lineage of

Peace Studies today involves two radical options. The first entails qualifying intended peace as

sustainable peace. The second implies the epistemological decolonisation of Peace Studies.

INDEX

Keywords: peace studies, international relations, postpositivism, critical theory

AUTHORS

JOSÉ MANUEL PUREZA

School of Economics and Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal

TERESA CRAVO



15

http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/misc/Do_pos-moderno_ao_pos-colonial.pdf

http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/misc/Do_pos-moderno_ao_pos-colonial.pdf

Labour, Social Inequalities andTrade Unionism*

Elísio Estanque


EDITOR'S NOTE



Introduction

1 This text focuses on the profound recomposition which has been taking place in the

economy and in the world of labour, stressing its close ties to more overarching social

change and the restructuring of classes and social inequality. Its main aim is to situate

some of the issues and implications concerned as regards the Portuguese trade union

movement and the new challenges which these raise in the current context of

economic globalisation.

2 I will begin by referring to current trends in the recomposition of labour, underscoring

the importance of processes of flexibilisation and precarisation of work and

employment. There will then follow a discussion of some of the contours and new

faultlines which emerge from the current class structure in Portugal and

transnationally, bearing in mind the manifold links – between the market and the

State, the economy and society, production and consumption, the objective dimension

and the subjective representations of actors – which sustain the ongoing processes of

change, as well as their impact in the field of opportunities, lifestyles, practices and

expectations of persons and groups from different social strata. Lastly, I will debate the

main issues which, following upon these processes of change, trade unionism faces

today an formulate some queries and proposals aiming to contribute towards

pondering trade union renewal and the modernisation of the Portuguese economy.


16

1. The recomposition of work

3 In the past few years, several theses have emerged stressing the loss of centrality or

even the end of work as a decisive value in structuring society. Celebrated authors

contend that we are witnessing a disenchantment in respect to work and a relegating of

the work sphere to a secondary plane. Instead, alternative dimensions of exercising

citizenship, such as associativism, voluntary work and third sector areas, have been

chosen as primary spheres for civic participation and factors in social cohesion and

change (Beck, 2000; Méda, 1999; Rifkin, 1997). It is true that work is tending to lose its

meaning as the main symbol of what we are, or rather, as stressed by André Gorz, work

conceived of as a profession or job we have – or the defining core of each person’s social

status – is tending to fade away amongst the virtual realities of the intangible economy,

becoming an ever more scarce, fluid good which it is difficult to perpetuate. However,

work as a factor of creation or that which is made is far from having lost its importance.

What happens is that the attributes which before connoted work with creativity and

autonomy have, in a manner of speaking, been driven out of the occupational sphere.

However, this does not correspond to a “liberation” of workers and much less does it

translate into an expansion of the public sphere. Movable capital and the power of the

financial economy, operating beyond the political sphere, have fragmented “work” as a

way of disciplining the rebelliousness of the working class. But it is still the main form

of subsistence, of preserving self-esteem and seeking after social recognition in a

process where new forms of subjection and exploitation appear to be reviving human

problems which were thought to be vanquished (Burawoy, 1985; Castel, 1998; Castillo,

1998; Gorz, 1999).

4 Therefore, the impact and problems which technological innovation and the so-called

knowledge-based society have brought in their wake cannot but be viewed in the

framework of global processes and of the new social inequalities thereby generated.

The breakdown of the old Fordist wage relation, the crisis of the Welfare State, the

increase in competitiveness at a global scale, especially from the mid-1980s onward,

occurred as a new liberal wave emerged, largely grounded on technological innovation

and the IT revolution. These trends are generating profound changes and new

contradictions and social inequalities in every area of contemporary societies, with

striking results in the recomposition and destandardisation of traditional forms of work

(Beck, 1992 and 2000; Castells, 1999; Hyman, 2002; Ruysseveldt and Visser, 1996). The

contrast between development poles and exclusion and deprivation areas is now more

glaring than in the past. Far from being a linear and homogenising process,

globalisation is, therefore, polymorphic and contradictory. The recomposition of the

labour market places skilled sectors, engaged in the new technology, side by side with

situations of utmost precariousness and even of “neo-slavery.” The logic of

“localisation” is the other side of the “globalisation” coin; the new forms of exclusion

and exploitation are the flip-side of the new privileges and opportunities.

5 It is too soon to know whether the crisis in the Fordist model and its incapacity to

respond to the new demands of the global markets will give way to a new production

model, or whether, on the contrary, the response to the new demands can be attained

through a combination of several models. The emergence of flexible production models

is grounded as much on production organisation as it is on consumer markets, and


17

represents a response to the decline in the old logic of mass production destined for

stable markets. However, it is not a matter of simply passing from an industry-centred

economy to a service-centred economy. Rather, we are faced with the end of Fordisms

in the context of a post-industrial economy in which industry and services converge

increasingly on their way to a complex production system, with intensive use of

technology and human resources, and directed at flexibility and quality, but, at the

same time, generating new segmentations and inequalities.

6 The fragmentation of production systems has promoted organisation models onto

which, increasingly, contradictory lines of logic have been juxtaposed: on the one hand,

the Fordist model remains an important space for certain sectors of activity, regions

and/or countries, retaining its principles due to the fact that the process of diversifying

end products has been followed through by large-scale standardisation of processes, subsets

and/or components (Kovács and Castillo, 1998); on the other hand, the growing

establishment of the lean production model in the more advanced economies, which

still carries within it a number of traditional production forms handed down from

Taylorism, but with the addition of new elements such as, for example, the reduction in

stocks and staff, greater organisational mobility and flexibility, concern with product

quality and business company culture, team work, polyvalence and, at times, an

effective engagement of workers in management. Flexibility, lean manufacturing,

outsourcing, delocalising the more labour-intensive production sectors to the

periphery, etc., bring on a type of internalised Taylorism that contributes to the

worsening of working conditions and the marginalisation of segments of the less skilled

work force. All of this results from a Japanising logic or so-called Toyotism,1 which can

only with great difficulty be applied successfully in Western societies and in Europe in

particular (Burawoy et al., 2001; Castillo, 1998; Kovács, 1998; Santos, 2004).

7 These processes of change in the world of labour are, as we know, phenomena which do

not just express more overarching social change, but also participate directly in

recomposing inequalities and the class structures concerned. Despite the obvious link

between these two issues, what can be said is that, on the one hand, studies on work

and employment issues rarely articulate with the theme of classes and inequalities; on

the other hand, studies on class have ceased to be part of sociologists’ concerns, or are

only generically referred to when justifying explanatory models based on socio-

occupational typologies.

2. Restructuring class and inequality

8 This text does not aim to discuss the multiple determinants of social class structure,

nor to develop any theoretical debate hinging on the concept of class, of the loss in

topicality it has undergone or otherwise, of the various dimensions which it should

include, or, for example, on the importance of the cultural and identitary facets in its

restructuring. It would make even less sense to pick up anew the old and unending

debates on Marxist structuralism, attempting to identify frontiers or defend the

primacy of any one abstract model over another. We know that class has ceased to be

the determining fact of collective action, for social reality has become more complex

and the new faultlines surrounding phenomena such as sexual, ethnic, racial and

religious difference have taken on the role of areas energising identity and political

struggle which compete with class, although generally in articulation with it.


18

9 Following up on previous work on these matters (Estanque, 2000, 2003 and 2004), I seek

to take up again here two core ideas associated with these themes: the first is that

work, the productive sphere, still is, as previously mentioned, a core element in social

analysis, whether because it is a decisive factor in preserving societies’ cohesion, or

because it still is the main field where individual inequality and opportunity are

organised; the second is that inequality not only continues to have its insurmountable

touchstone in the economic factor but it also rests on relational structures and

mechanisms – grounded on relations of interdependence and power discrepancies –

tending to assure privilege and to reproduce multiple forms of oppression and

exploitation.

10 As a result of current trends in economic globalisation and of the fragmentation of

work systems, we can today invoke new lines of social recomposition having a strong

impact on the restructuring of social classes. It can be said that this recomposition has

implications which affect simultaneously every level of the social pyramid, from the

new professional, managerial and institutional elites to the more excluded and

proletarianised strata, including also the so-called “new middle classes.” It is worth

situating some of the main contours of these trends in the transformation of class

structures.

2.1. Subclasses and overclasses: Transnational and fragmentationdynamics

11 In the first place, we observe the extraordinary increase of situations of “atypical”

work, to a large extent resulting from economic globalisation, such as precarious jobs,

deregulation of labour rights, illegal trafficking in human labour (illegal migration),

child labour, poverty, unemployment and underemployment, etc. (Ferreira, 2003).2

These situations are located in the close interdependence between work/

unemployment/the family/communities, introducing a logic of localisation not just in

the sectors which are more dependent and where the work force is more exploited, but

in a range of social categories where poverty, exclusion and oppression proliferate –

that is, those who suffer the effects of localised globalisms, according to Boaventura de

Sousa Santos’s formulation (1995: 263). It is social groups of this nature which can be

viewed as comprising local subclasses. They are subclasses because, in the light of

conventional indicators, they do not possess a well‑defined class position, that is, they

are outside or ‘below’ the traditional working class. The case of migrant workers, for

example, is a good illustration of the perverse effects of neoliberal globalisation and the

way in which the latter promotes new “localised” effects. Besides the pockets of

poverty and marginalisation which illegal migration helps to consolidate, these sectors

of the transnational work force, it can be said, did not become globalised, rather they

were “delocalised,” as a rule remaining more fixed and territorially circumscribed, at

times relegated to a state of utter dependence and subjected all types of pressure.

12 Secondly, at the top of the social pyramid, we see the constant flow of corporate

officers of the major multinationals, top management, State institution officials, highly

skilled personnel, political leaders, prestigious scientists, etc., who make up a new

socio-professional and institutional elite which monopolises knowledge, skills, data,

social networks, moving on a planetary scale. They keep up with and benefit from

technological evolution like no one else, travel in business class and, on the same day,


19

switch continents and take their meals in the best restaurants and hotels, separated by

thousands of miles. Despite their diversity, these sectors hold in common the privilege

of power and wealth, and can, as it were, be placed ‘above’ the structure of classes in its

traditional sense, thus forming a global overclass,3 since they place themselves above the

old nation-based ruling class.

13 The phenomena I have singled out above go hand in hand with the shift in social

structures and express the multiplying of inequalities through the widening of social

and spatial distances which mark the passing from the national to the transnational

scale. But of course this increase in inequality does not simply mean a change in scale.

Above all, it means a stupendous intensifying of levels of complexity, given the

emergence of new factors of instability and new processes of fragmentation and

reconversion of the different class positions which are part of the structural change in

the job market, the education system, State institutions and of society as a whole. In the

case of Portugal, this evolution takes on peculiar contours.

14 Thus, where class structure in Portugal is concerned, social and labour changes over

the past three decades have led to very significant alterations, which bring new

difficulties to the old models of trade union action. Many of these phenomena have

already been left behind in the more advanced European societies, but have only made

themselves felt in Portugal over the past decades:

New, internal divisions within the ranks of wage workers – between manual and non-manual

workers, between technocrats and bureaucrats – as a result of technological evolution in

industry, of the professionalising of management, of the growth in the public sector, etc.

Increased rates of social mobility within the frame of the growing tertiarisation of society,

which in turn results from the set of structural changes in large measure brought in by

European Community membership, with clear impact on the employment structure and on

the processes of litoralisation and urban concentration.

Growing internal differenciation of the salaried middle class4 and new tensions and faultlines

within it, with the emergence of new occupations and professions – sectors in decline

overlapping with emerging sectors – creating new forms of closure and different lifestyles.

Increased union membership in some segments of the middle-class to which I have referred,

which is linked to increased institutionalisation of trade union structures and neo-

corporatism, and the growing fragility of working class-based trade unionism.

New patterns of class formation and growth of new faultlines and new forms of polarisation,

of a post-Fordian and post-industrial type, notably with the appearance of proletarianising

phenomena in the service sector.

The emergence of new modalities of collective action and new social movements, with

significant impact in the cultural and political fields, as a rule associated with youth cultures

and “middle-class radicalism” (Butler and Savage, 1995; Eder, 1993; Esping-Andersen, 1993;

Melucci, 1996; Parkin, 1968; Touraine, 1969 and 1981).

15 These trends of class structure recomposition have taken on a number of peculiar

contours in Portugal, both in respect of new class faultlines and where subjective

attitudes and participation are concerned. It is important to situate these aspects

because they are directly related to the processes of recomposition of labour and to the

new challenges which rise to meet Portuguese trade unionism.

16 In studies carried out at the Centre for Social Studies on social classes in Portuguese

society (Estanque and Mendes, 1998) and on what I have named the middle class effect

(Estanque, 2003), it was possible to show some of these contours based on empirical

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.


20

evidence. For example, in the mid-1990s, the category of “proletarians”5 corresponded

to 46.5% of the actively employed population, of whom about 24% worked in the public

sector. This means that a considerable number of wage workers in the service sector –

considered, as a rule, as part of the salaried middle class – is situated here in a segment

which is significantly resource-deprived, proving that tertiarisation does not simply

mean a “swelling” of the middle class, but rather a reinforcement of the proletarianised

strata, which appear to be on the increase also in the tertiary sector. In fact, this

research proved the sparse percentage of wage workers in these intermediate

categories within the entirety of the active Portuguese population. For example, skilled

and semi-skilled high-level personnel and leadership cadres did not account for more

than 5.6% of the population, and the remaining intermediate sectors (holding few

qualifications and lacking authority, sometimes designated as “contradictory class

locations”) amounted only to 11.5%, which means a total percentage of about 17% of

the actively employed (with the exception of the self‑employed).6 Mention must also be

made of the fact that the vast majority of these “contradictory” (or middle class)

locations found employment in the State sector of the economy. It is true that the

results obtained some years later, ensuing from the International Social Survey

Programme (ISSP) surveys, based on identical criteria, showed relative growth of the

intermediate categories holding more qualifications and a reduction in the proletarian

category.7 However, both the intermediate personnel in positions of authority, such as,

for example, supervisors, still counted for far less in percentage terms than those of

other countries used as a means of comparison.8

2.2. The effects of State action on the segmentation of the middleclass

17 The salaried middle classes and their greater or lesser weight in the socio-occupational

structure undoubtedly represent an invaluable indicator with which to measure the

level of modernisation or technological development of each society. As is well known,

State and government policies have a very relevant role in this domain. We have but to

consider that the entire legislative and institutional apparatus which the State sets up

produces and reproduces multiple forms of interdependence between State action and

the broader economic life, be it in the more State-based or in the more liberal

economies, as has already been demonstrated by several authors. The State and the

market have always been essential factors in rationalising social systems. Hence, the

main societal structures are permanently under the direct or indirect influence of

these two pivotal pillars of social regulation (Jessop, 1990; Offe, 1984 and 1985; Santos,

1990 and 1994).

18 Interference by State action and its capacity to promote structuring of productive

activity may be direct or indirect and may take place via multiple channels. Examples

of this, over and above actual legislative measures and labour law, are scientific and

technological research policies, collective bargaining, workplace inspection, applying

European directives, health, hygiene and safety at work measures, or, further, on a

more general scale, education and vocational training policies and, of course, economic

and employment policies. The effects of such measures stem not just from the State’s

coherence and regulatory capacity, but also, obviously, from its interaction with

market dynamics in each economic cycle.


21

19 For example, in the current scenario of contraction and economic crisis, the neoliberal

orientations which have prevailed in world and European contexts – with intensifying

competition coming from Asian countries and the processes of delocalising businesses,

of privatisation and restructuring in the most varied domains – have had obvious

repercusions both in employment supply and in the type of labour contract, with direct

influence on the greater or lesser degree of security, stability or precariousness. These

processes translate into movements of expansion or contraction of different categories

of the work force, acting as factors of risk and instability among various occupational

sectors, administrative, technical and specialised staff of different types. This results in

constant repositioning between segments, especially as regards those that occupy the

social space of the salaried middle class, making some enter into decline and lose

status, proletarianising them, and causing others to gain ascendancy and strengthen

their position in the struggle for consolidating or for achieving a status compatible

with desirable lifestyles.

20 Thus, the weight of the State in structuring the Portuguese “middle class” has operated

alongside more in-depth social processes of recomposition and structural change in the

job market. These processes have been redesigning new faultlines and segmentation of

the working class taken as a whole, and especially between the different fractions of

the middle class. It can even be said that a struggle is unfolding for the monopoly and

redefinition of status positions among these different fractions, with gains and losses

for some over the others. In fact, correlated issues of this debate, such as social mobility

and meritocracy, are nowadays very problematic, since closing-off mechanisms are

extremely powerful, generally succeeding in supplanting the criterion of “merit.” And

even those (few) who attain elite positions by their talent “close the door behind them

as soon as they attain their status. Those who get there through ‘merit’ start to want to

have all the rest – not just power and money, but also the chance to decide who is

allowed in and who remains outside” (Dahrendorff, 2005).

21 The middle class as a whole not only displays dubious contours and was never

effectively very large in Portugal, but it appears in actual fact to have fallen into

decline. In other words, as mentioned above, the reinforcing of the middle class is more

apparent than real,9 especially if attention is paid to the fact that a significant number

of employees in the tertiary sector (State or otherwise) are close to the proletarian

category, at least according to the structural criteria considered in the above-

mentioned studies. Over the past few years, within the framework of liberal policies

and the ongoing economic crisis, phenomena such as family indebtedness, the weight

of illegal work and of freelance work, with all the array of situations of abuse of power

and the intensifying of productivity pressure, appear to have worsened and currently

affect wide sectors of the work force, including the middle class, be it in public services

or the tertiary sector in general, enhancing relations of dependence, precariousness

and de facto proletarianising. This does not, of course, make it less important to reflect

on the phenomenon.

22 It is pertinent to recall here the classic concept coined by João Ferreira de Almeida

(1986), the so-called escalator effect, which points to the delusions created on the

subjective plane when certain groups move from the lower or middle steps of social

stratification to the steps above, losing sight of the fact that the higher steps have in

the meantime moved similarly. In addition, the very effect of the reference group –

especially because it works as a standard for comparison measuring the social


22

condition of individuals by referring to other groups in the same situation or even

lower (neighbours or relatives, for example) – broadens the meaning of relative

deprivation and thus renders illusive the degree of proximity, or of progression, on the

stratifying scale among different fractions within the middle class or those on its

fringes (Parkin, 1979).

23 These trends in the retructuring of inequalities do not mean that Portuguese society is

moving gradually from an agro-industrial model to a services society based on the new

technological resources and on the new forms of knowledge and communication;

rather, they express the enormous complexity of a society in problematic transition,

riven with multiple contradictions and strong social inequalities, which appears to push

down some of the work force sectors which had apparently already detached

themselves from the old, impoverished condition in which they found themselves. The

old faultlines are in place, with new ones now being added on.

24 To the classic contradictions between manual work and employment in the third

sector, between workers and employers, between rich and poor, the excluded and the

included, women and men, etc., we must now add the new inequalities of the era of

globalisation, between skilled and unskilled, info-included and info-excluded, stable job

and precarious job, graduates and non-graduates, Portuguese nationals and

immigrants, legal and illegal workers, the majority and ethnic or sexual minorities, and

so on and so forth. At the same time, the social and economic crisis which Portugal has

experienced in the past few years, with the delocalising of businesses, the rise in

unemployment, the fragmentation of work and the multiplication of precarious work

contracts, changes in labour laws, the increase in “flexibility,” among others, are

factors which have been enhancing precariousness and contributing to generate new,

proletarianised sectors, both those associated with old occupations in the industrial

sector, as well as some of those to be found in the so-called middle class (Esping-

Andersen, 1993; Estanque, 2003 and 2004).

2.3. Inequalities and class identification

25 Since, as is well known, Portuguese society is still considerably characterised by the

importance of the industrial sector, it is worth referring to some of the contours and

specificities of one of this country’s paradigmatic industries (footwear) and the

asymmetries which remain in this industry as regards the configuration of inequalities.

When conducting a comparison between class structures at national level and in the

footwear-producing region – based on a survey centred on the area of São João da

Madeira (Estanque, 2000)10 – I found deep social contrasts between the country and this

region. From the example of the footwear industry in this region we can better

understand some of the social contours which characterise the more traditional sectors

of the Portuguese economy.

26 Indeed, the results obtained illustrate well the working conditions which continue to

prevail in this region of diffuse industrialisation. The immediately striking feature is

that middle-class positions – which, as has been shown, were scarcely representative at

national level – virtually disappear in this region. The more skilled categories of the

work force go from 0.3% to 0.7%, that is to say, the so-called “middle class” virtually

disappears in this region, whereas the “proletarian” category jumps dramatically to

60.2%. Market forces and individual competition among workers join with a traditional


23

cultural matrix, marked by economic scarcity and by symbolic references to the rural

world. There is a permanent convulsion in the managerial fabric in the footwear sector,

mostly made up of micro-businesses, whose owners are almost exclusively former

workers. This survey compared two generations: that of the respondents and that of

their parents. It shows high social mobility flows, side by side with high rates of social

reproduction: for example, in the employer category, 28% also had parents who had

been employers, but 44% of respondents’ parents had been proletarian; in turn, the

parents of 70% of proletarian respondents had also been proletarian, but the parents of

22% of respondents had been employers. Thus, as regards this objective component of

the analysis, the survey showed that, taking a global view of the class structure of the

two generations under comparison, the logic of inequality remained virtually

unchanged, that is, despite the significant rates of individual mobility (from top to

bottom and from bottom to top), the configuration of class positions in both

generations displayed virtually no change.

27 We may well ask to what extent these structural inequalities interfere in subjective

representations. The surveys mentioned previously (Estanque, 2000 and 2003) also

made it possible to determine the degree of consistency between objective class

positions and respective orientations regarding society and class identification. In

addition, they supplied important indications with respect to perception of the

antagonism and conflict of interests experienced (which I will examine in section 3

below).

28 The comparative survey between the region of São João da Madeira and the Portuguese

working population (Estanque, 2000) disclosed that, despite the greater presence of

proletarianised sectors in this region, subjective attitudes were clearly more optimistic

and less critical of the social and economic system. This was the case of all the class

segments, including those enjoying fewer resources. From evaluations regarding the

improvement or worsening of the family’s economic situation in the previous ten

years, to expectations with respect to the immediate future, through perceptions

regarding the possibility of workers participating in the choice of leaders or regarding

reasons behind poverty,11 in every item responses from the sample in this region

displayed a greater degree of optimism when comparing the present to the past and in

respect of expectations for the future and a greater degree of attachment to liberal and

conservative principles. On the other hand, where class identification was concerned,

many workers in this region, including part of the “proletarians,” regarded themselves

as members of the “middle class” – mention must be made that most industrial workers

in this sector earn the equivalent of the minimum national wage – and tended to

express opinions on society and labour relations which very often coincided with

managerial ideology.

29 In respect of subjective identification with the “middle class,” the survey under

consideration developed under the auspices of the ISSP showed that, in Portugal, about

37% of “proletarians” identified as members of the “middle class” (combining the

lower-middle, middle and upper-middle sub-categories) and the same applies to 52% of

employers (Estanque, 2003: 100). It is precisely this attracting principle which makes

the notion of the middle class a major reference in the representations of the

Portuguese.

30 The conclusion can be drawn that the asymmetries and inequalities existing in

Portugal, besides being grounded on enormous discrepancies in opportunities and


24

standards of material well-being, promote models of subjective representation,

expectations and labour relations which clearly show the power of the oppression

established over the more dependent and precarious segments of the work force.

Paradoxically, it is the situations where exploitation mechanisms are most notorious,

where the contrast between wealth and poverty is more stark, which appear more

greatly to contribute to the manufacturing of “consent mechanisms” (Burawoy, 1979

and 1985), no doubt grounded on powerful systems of control and micro-ideologies of a

feudal nature, tending to legitimise inequalities and the prevailing status quo.

3. Subjective perception of conflicts of interest:Resentment and acceptance

31 This may appear paradoxical, but the above-mentioned tendency towards consent on

the part of the Portuguese is not incompatible with a deeply-etched notion of the

existence of conflicts of interest. The surveys I have referred to show that Portuguese

society has a sharply-defined sense of the presence of very significant conflicting

interests among all the polarisations under consideration, namely between rich and

poor, between the middle class and the working class, or between workers and

managers (Cabral, 1997 and 2003; Estanque, 2000 and 2003).

32 If we examine the faultline between the working class and the middle class, for

example, we find that the Portuguese consider it of great importance, since 63.2%

indicated the existence of “strong” or “very strong” conflicts of interest between them

(Estanque, 2003: 94). Not only are the standards of living of each of these categories

(the working class and the middle class) seen as diverging, but in addition a symbolic

struggle for demarcation lines between the two can be inferred. This tells us something

about what I have called a middle class effect as a symbolic and social reference in the

Portuguese imaginary. This is an “attraction” effect, which expresses the fact that

subjective identification with the “middle class” tends to spread beyond the (objective)

limits of this stratum. This may help interpret the perception of interests between the

working class and the middle class as conflict-riven. There appears to be on the

subjective plane a struggle which plays out in two directions: from the viewpoint of

those who already consider themselves to be part of the middle class, and who thus

show their difference in status; and from the viewpoint of those who identify as

working class, who thus show the difficulties in attaining a position in the middle class.12

33 The conflict between management and workers was the feature to which most

respondents pointed as relevant (87.8%). Over and above all other considerations, this

proves the centrality of labour relations as a field in which inequality is structured,

both in objective and subjective terms. The rapid restructuring of the production fabric

in Portugal, together with the presence of traumatic experiences in the trade union

struggle in the recent historical past, means that today, despite the growing fragility of

trade unionism, subjective representations denote strong social faultlines structured

around work conditions, despite the fact that current precariousness trends inhibit

open expression of labour conflicts.

34 These signs should be interpreted in tandem with the already classic idea which points

to the distance from power as one of the more obvious features in Portuguese society


25

(Hofstede, 1980). That is to say, the Portuguese tend to have high levels of tolerance

when faced with power and status discrepancies. The perception of antagonism across

society, however, does not mean an intolerance of power and status discrepancies, but

perhaps the idea that there are well marked-off positions as regards (symbolic and

material) opportunity and privilege. Objective inequalities appear to spread out on the

subjective plane, mirroring significant levels of relative deprivation among the

Portuguese.

35 We know that, in the labour sphere, the high level of tolerance which subordinates

accept with respect to the exercise of authority by hierarchical superiors facilitates

every type of abuse. On the one hand, those who fill prominent posts and leadership

positions demand endless devotion from their subordinates. On the other hand,

subordinates themselves, either because they lack alternatives or because they hope

thereby to gain some return, very often allow themselves to be caught up in a logic of

resignation, fed by feelings of unconditional loyalty, thus enlarging their superiors’

resources and authority. Hence, when these ties of affinity and dependence shatter and

the weaker party begins to invoke rights, violent reactions very often erupt, be they

personal or institutional, more blatant or more subtle, giving rise to psychological

violence and moral harassment in the workplace, and even to physical violence (as can

be gleaned from the number of lawsuits brought to court).

36 The divisions existing in Portuguese society and in the world of labour are thus an

expression of entrenched social barriers. However, there is a need to stress the growing

importance of precariousness. It is at the same time an objective reality and a

subjective feeling. Employers’ viewpoints deliberately equate precariousness with

“flexibility” – because the latter means, as actually practised by business, a reinforcing

of the exercise of power over workers, which forces them to accept everything, to

accept the hierarchy’s orders without protesting, even when they are relegated to

performing tasks for which they do not feel qualified or which affront their

qualifications and status. But precariousness, being also a subjective feeling, translates

into impotence and fear. And incorporating fear in turn gives way to acceptance or

resignation, that is, to self-denial in the struggle for rights.

37 Against the current backdrop, and especially when the salary relation is precarious,

workers know they can be discarded at any moment. Hence the withdrawal, the

subjective flight mechanisms, the mental evasion, the fear of retaliation, and so on,

which, although fostering an overall feeling of unwillingness at work, translate into a

refusal to take part in union activism and other forms of group action – even though, as

we should recall, these cultures of resentment conceal in everyday industrial life a

multiplicity of tacit forms of resistance and subversion vis-à-vis disciplinary

mechanisms, in the form of power games which are almost invisible but of great

sociological relevance, as I showed in a research study carried out in a footwear factory

involving participant observation (Estanque, 2000). Indeed, although contained within

a subjective logic of high levels of tolerance, labour relations in these environments can

turn into deregulated conflictuality, with unpredictable outcomes, especially if the

standard of living dips suddenly beyond the margins of tolerable relative deprivation.

And it is as well to remember that the margins of tolerance are lower where State

intervention is greater and the salary relation more stable. If, for certain sectors, the

principle of regulation follows socio-cultural grounds rather than the legal framework,

what can be expected is that a recontractualising of labour relations based exclusively


26

on the market principle will legalise the inclusion/exclusion duality, ushering in

situations of de facto deregulation (Ferreira, 2003: 130). According to a recent study,

Portugal is, with Brazil,13 one of the countries where the following ideas are most

prevalent: “You have to be corrupt to get anywhere in life” (40.7% agreement), or

“Inequalities exist because they benefit the rich and powerful” (80%), or, yet again,

“Inequalities continue to exist because people don’t come together to fight them”

(69.6%) (Cabral, 2003). These findings clearly show the presence of feelings of

impotence and resentment associated with the heightening of precariousness.

38 It is, however, important not to forget that subjective attitudes have their main source

in concrete reality. Indeed, increased precariousness and flexibilisation in labour

relations such as fixed-term contracts, subcontracting, home-based work, the growth

of illegal networks of international work force mobility and an entire set of atypical

and/or illegal forms of work, have all been contributing to heighten new forms of

discretionary power, new forms of despotism, exclusion and oppression in the

workplace. The factory systems in place in most Portuguese industrial companies are

but the tip of the iceberg, for authoritarianism and forms of violence in the workplace

are to be found virtually in every employment sector. And neoliberal globalisation has

contributed to heighten the situations of oppression, exploitation, precariousness and

dependence which today characterise the world of work.

4. Challenges facing trade unionism

39 In view of the above, I aim, in this last section, to point out some of the implications of

these processes of social change – in the world of work, in the restructuring of class

inequalities and on the plane of subjective attitudes – for collective action and trade

union action.

40 As is well known, the trade union movement has tended to become less predominantly

working class-based, as societies become tertiarised, and this is a trend also found in

Portugal. But it is important to recall the historical role of the working class movement,

since it was this movement which, at least until the 1960s – and in the case of Portugal,

until more recent times – fed the social bases of trade unionism, and it is that reference

and that memory which continues to underlie the discourse and proposals for action of

a significant current of Portuguese trade unionism. It can be said that this conception

still rests upon a vision of the world of work anchored to the old class contradictions,

handed down from the Marxist structuralism which was hegemonic in public discourse

in the period after the 1974 revolution in Portugal.

4.1. The decline of the working class

41 It is now unanimously acknowledged that this vision ceased to be adequate to describe

the reality of the world of work. In other words, even though the social classes

structured from within the production sphere continue to be the main underpinning of

inequality, it is a fact that, as almost every study confirms (Estanque and Mendes, 1998;

Pakulsky and Waters, 1996; Wright, 1985 and 1997), class has long since ceased to be the

main determining factor of political conflict. Against a backdrop of increasing

globalisation and individualisation of social relations, class faultlines simultaneously

produce conflicts of interests and consent relations within the sphere of production, be


27

they grounded on hegemonic or despotic regimes (Burawoy, 1985). If, up to the 1960s,

the class struggle led by the working class movement in the industrialised countries

was deeply imbued with social and political meaning, this was because there were

conditions within which to build strong working class cultures, in the shape of

communities of resistance or emancipation, which in the meantime have faded away or

become quite simply extinct. The traditional Taylorist production system and the

Fordist regulation model began to split and to fragment, causing new forms of work to

emerge which were more deregulated and included in a social framework more

intensely characterised by the tertiarisation of employment and by the expansion of

mass consumption.

42 The Portuguese case, however, displays singularities which it is important to examine.

Most strikingly, late and incipient industrialisation and a Welfare State which was only

able to expand in the period after the 1974 revolution. The full affirmation of the

Portuguese trade union movement occurred in a revolutionary context in which class

language hegemonised public debate and mass movements became the main source of

political legitimacy. On the one hand, a Marxist discourse focused on a model of

socialism which seemed to be just around the corner, guided working class struggles in

the second half of the 1970s, and under the strong influence of the far left and the

Communist Party the power of CGTP-Intersindical [General Confederation of

Portuguese Workers] was consolidated. On the other hand, reformist trade unionism

emerged with UGT [General Union of Workers], which took a stance opposed to that of

CGTP (an initiative taken by the two major parties in power, the Socialist Party and the

Social-Democrat Party) following the victorious struggle against the system of single

unions, and began to gather support in the service sector and later in other sectors,

presenting itself as the partner of choice in social dialogue. In a context of deep

political-ideological faultlines entrenched from 1974-75 onward, divisions on the trade

union plane developed, in large measure, as a reflection of party political activity and

subsequent vying for hegemony within the structures of each of the union

confederations. This process, incidentally, is still ongoing and has gained new contours

as trade union difficulties grow in face of the need for new responses and for

consolidation of greater autonomy as regards political party influence (Castanheira,

1985; Cerdeira, 1997; Costa, 2004; Lima, 1991; Lima et al., 1992).

43 With the loss of vitality of the old model of union action centred on mobilising the

working class – and especially with the growth of the tertiary sector, that is, the so-

called service class14 – there was a progressive fall in trade union membership rates. But

in the sectors of administrative services and civil service, as also in banking and

insurance, this fall was less significant than in industry (Cerdeira, 1997). At the same

time, growing prominence on the institutional plane gave the trade union movement a

new role in designing the major social reforms, a process which unfolded in

conjunction with its loss of capacity to mobilise workers. It can be stated that, over the

past decades, the acquired rights of workers and the trade union movement gave way,

in practice, to the pressures of cooptation, becoming part and parcel of the very

dynamics of the system. In other words, they were absorbed into the logic of

regulation, now being part of State activity itself (Santos, 2001, 2004). In effect, the

institutionalising of collective bargaining and trade union participation in the

processes of social negotiation and dialogue, mainly from the 1980s onward, favoured

the development of a logic of neo-corporatist15 action on the part of many unions. This


28

means that, in practice, the strength of the apparatuses has become all the greater as

the room for manoeuvre of union members has declined. Such situations have

contributed greatly to inhibit participation and to hinder the spreading of trade union

discourse and activity throughout society and the weaker segments of the work force.

44 Thus, it can be said that the hesitations, difficulties and dilemmas found in Portuguese

trade unionism are directly linked to the processes of class fragmentation I mentioned

above, especially those which are bringing about new differentiations among fractions

of the middle class – civil servants, teachers, bank staff, doctors, nurses, judges, etc. –

whose struggles with respect to careers, working conditions and professional status

interefere with the organisational processes and proposals of trade unions taken as a

whole. Although still in the militant garb of a form of trade unionism which took on the

role of mouthpiece for the working class, in the name of its mythic unity (whose

foundations point to the defense of the political interests of the working class

vanguard), the aims and bargaining capacity are in fact an expression of struggles to

defend the interests of “professional class” A or B. The diversity of rationales and forms

of action in the trade union field is thus ever more clear. It is the result of the drastic

segmentation of socio-occupational categories, types of contract, qualifications,

precarious links, in a word, of the overall instability which has characterised the world

of work in these past years.

45 Trade unionism remains strong in some sectors of public service and of services, not

because a “class” discourse of resistance persists – unifying the working class as a

whole only insofar as appearances are concerned – but because it very often rests on

the defense of particular interests whose success is mainly due to the capacity for

bargaining with the political power structure, as well as to the strength of the pressure

groups which support it. Many trade union leadership structures, most especially in the

middle class sectors where State expansion was greatest, tend to devote more time and

resources to defending the more stable segments, to providing services, to making

available legal support and other technical activities, than they do to pondering and

reflecting on the structural problems of employment or to triggering action strategies

directed at defending the more precarious sectors of the work force. While the latter

discontinue membership or never take out membership, those groups which can still

rely on job security, albeit ever lessening, retain significant influence and bargaining

power. These phenomena have, incidentally, been identified within several

international contexts and converge with issues related to employment policies and the

restructuring of the labour market in the current context of the global economy,

presenting trade unions with new challenges and difficulties (Ashwin, 2000;

Bezuidenhout, 1999; Castells, 1999; Costa, 2005; Estanque, 2004; Frege and Kelly, 2004;

Hyman, 2002; Herod, 2001; Moody, 1997; Murillo, 2001; Waterman, 2002).

4.2. The new questions posed to trade unionism

46 Against this negative backdrop and the growing stagnation and weakening of trade

unionism, what responses is the trade union movement able to offer? How will the

leadership structures of the Portuguese trade union confederations react? Is there

space for real renewal which will create a “new” social trade union movement

embracing the global or transnational scope? Do the signs of the ongoing opening up

and attempt to transnationalise mean that the forces of renewal will find it possible to

carry through the re-invention that the trade union movement needs? What outcome


29

can be expected from the internal contradictions that exist in each of the two major

Portuguese confederations? Given these difficulties, can we hope that CGTP and UGT

will draw closer?

47 The prominent role of the trade unions as forces mobilising against economic

liberalism now finds potentially fertile ground for the social struggles of the immediate

future, in a climate of social and economic crisis which warrants our concern. But

society demands far‑ranging renewal of them. Faced with the growing might of global

capitalism, the need to renew action-taking methods and strategies and to rethink the

unity of trade union action on new premises is an urgent task and a priority. However,

the more orthodox currents cling to a crystallised dogmatism and seize every means to

resist any critical thought, even though the labour reality of our times demands new

strategies, alliances and methods of intervention.

48 Trade unionism can only gain expression and reinvigorate itself if it is able to think

about work and its problems at the beginning of the new century by taking into itself

the most up‑to-date knowledge available in this field and grounding its discourse on it.

Faced with a social world of growing complexity, at a time when the pathways of the

future are so uncertain, there is a need to dare to challenge the dogmas and certainties

which are still entrenched. Raising doubts and formulating new questions, grounded on

the new reality, is a first step.

49 The questions posed below do not, obviously, set out to act as a script or to outline any

trade union and political action programme. This will have to be drawn up by the

relevant actors. However, the standpoint of researchers and their distance from the

issues which engage trade unionists on a daily basis afford greater objectivity and may

help promote debate and raise polemical issues. The following questions aim to do no

more than this.

50 Should the unions go on investing in the old, class-based trade unionism, or attempt to

expand collective action to a trade unionism of movements, forging an alliance with

the new social movements? Should they continue to centre mobilisation on the sector

and national planes, or increasingly promote action-taking based on transnational

solidarity networks? Should they go on believing in a future model of society wrenched

from the spoils of the current system, or work within that same system to create

alternative areas for social organisation and emancipation? Should they work jointly

with worker committees and promote their democratic election, or simply work with

them when they become an instrument of the union? How can union leadership strata

be renewed, promoting the defense of internal democracy and younger union

members, making use of their critical capacity and their militant activism? How can

women be represented and how can they be afforded access to leadership positions,

since we live in one of the most feminised European countries where labour is

concerned? Should resistance among worker collectives be privileged or should

intervention and discourse be opened up in a propositive and proactive sense? Should

Union action concentrate on the more stable sectors, which have greater bargaining

power, or should action be spread to and intensified among the most precarious labour

segments, who are also the most difficult to mobilise? How can negotiation be

combined with organised struggle? How can unions combine involving workers in

union demands for rights with institutional means of action-taking both within the

legal and court framework and the labour inspection system? How can action be taken

within particularly precarious sectors such as those of immigrants and the long-term


30

unemployed, for example? Should unions continue to thrust Union hegemony on civic

movements and associations or should they exert persuasion and make concessions

where these are called for? How can economic and labour struggles be combined with

struggles for recognition promoted from within the community? These are some of the

questions which, in view of the current social and labour climate in Portugal, merit

serious consideration by trade union leaders.

51 On the other hand, on the economic plane, renewing the Portuguese labour fabric

demands an ever more consistent policy where collective bargaining is concerned,

contemplating strategic objectives for the country, involving political power, employer

confederations and trade union structures. The current conjuncture appears to favour

putting this strategy in place. The difficulties of reconciling the defence of social

cohesion and labour rights with business and economic competitiveness are well

known. But the effort to be expended, in a context such as that of Portugal and Europe,

can only move in this direction. There is an entire set of interconnections between

apparently conflicting objectives, but which, in my view, should, indeed must, be made

compatible.

52 Offered as examples, I list the following strategic objectives:

Programmes for business companies’ technological innovation and social aims.

Competitiveness and full engagement in training persons, both in the context of vocational

training and in the continuous training of workers and cadres.

Technological innovation and organisational innovation with flexible and participatory

management models.

Management efficiency and worker motivation based on delegation of responsibilities,

recognition of merit and team work.

Scientific research activity at the level of universities, laboratories and other institutions

based on programmes of technological innovation and industrial modernisation developed

in the business companies or coordinated by business associations.

The pursuit of excellence and respect for workers’ trade union rights and freedoms, creating

true cultures for conflict negotiation at business company level.

Strategic planning and flexibilisation which will safeguard labour citizenship, especially

through tax incentives for good practice in management and innovation.

Conclusion

53 The Portuguese labour market and society are undergoing great turmoil and today face

well‑known difficulties that result largely from the recompositions and changes set in

motion by the global economy in which we live and by the social and institutional

pressures played out transnationally. To that extent, the analysis I have sought to

outline in this text is designed, above all, to act as a contribution towards our

understanding of the enormous complexity and the countless social contrasts which

currently permeate the world of labour in Portugal. The processes and trends I have

discussed here have made it possible to show the need to promote critical and up-to-

date knowledge of the connections between work and social inequalities, with a view to

accounting for the new contradictions and problems which have been emerging in the

past few years. More than providing a systematically and empirically grounded

diagnosis, I have sought to summarise a set of interpretative hypotheses and raise a

number of possibly controversial questions, above all aimed at promoting debate and

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.


31

addressing the social actors, especially the trade union leaders and activists who, in a

terrain which is difficult and run through with numerous obstacles, fight for a more

dynamic trade unionism which can meet the challenges now facing the Portuguese

economy and workers.

54 The overall instability of the labour market and the multiplying of work forms and ties

in the past few years have drawn new demarcation lines in social inequalities,

increasing factors of risk and precariousness among worker strata situated in varying

status and class fraction positions. These new dynamics and faultlines assert

themselves in very heterogenous (individual and collective) practices and

subjectivities, be it with regard to work and social life in general, or with regard to

trade union activity in particular. Indeed, the field of labour has changed to such an

extent that we are very often confronted with the more visible effects of such change

without being able to discern the structural and sociological nature at its root. It is not

infrequent for economic agents and trade union actors to face the present from the

viewpoint of immediate objectives and act from perspectives grounded on paradigms

that are no longer applicable to concrete social reality.

55 To conclude, I have sought in this text to underscore the close interdependence

between labour issues, social inequality and the challenges of trade unionism.

Responses to the questions raised can only meet with success if they are faced in the

light of the most profound social dimension in which they lie. And awareness of this

dimension from a critical perspective requires the assumption that, beyond growth, the

economy can only truly bring development if its dividends are supported by

distributive policies guided by the search for general welfare and the reduction of

social inequality and injustice. It is from this point of view that trade union

reinforcement and democratic revitalising become pivotal elements in the revitalising

of democracy itself.

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NOTES


1. Originally developed by Taiichi Ohno, the engineer who, after World War II, promoted the so-

called Toyota Production System, that is, a new management model grounded on principles of

work process reorganisation and technological innovation, seeking to adjust management and

production organisation to an international framework of growing market diversification and


35

segmentation, oriented towards small-scale production. As is commonly known, Japanisation,

that is, the application of these models originating in Japan to North-American and European

businesses, has been the target of countless critiques. Despite its team work and greater

flexibility, its effects have been deemed to be mostly negative because of the intensifying of

production rhythms, greater fragmentation of work, extended working hours, trade union

fragilisation, in sum, because of growing worker submission, growing situations of

precariousness and new forms of factory despotism.

2. On deregulation and precariousness of labour relations, see also Ruysseveldt and Visser (1996),

Beck (2000) and Hyman (2002).

3. Some authors, such as Leslie Sklair, analyse the growing importance of the Transnational

Capitalist Class (Sklair, 2001). This concept drew further inspiration from authors such as P. Evens

(1979), Becker and Sklar (1987), Santos (1995: 252-268 and 2001: 31-106) and Lash (1999: 19-20).

4. This concept has given rise to ample polemical exchanges within the social sciences since the

beginning. Marx attached little importance to it, since he believed it was a matter of “transition

classes,” preferring to stress what he judged to be the growing dichotomy of the class struggle

between the bourgeoisie and an ever more homogenous proletariat. In turn, Max Weber and his

followers perceived that, on the contrary, with the development of capitalism, it would expand,

as the heterogeneity of the working class and the phenomenon of social mobility also grew. I do

not propose to take up this debate here, but it is worth noting that the “middle class,” especially

when considering wage workers, is defined in negative terms. That is, especially since the

mid-20th century, the middle class began to be regarded as corresponding to the diverse work

force sectors who are not blue collar, as the literature came to define the old manual working

class, nor, obviously, the ruling class. Thus, in a broad sense, we refer to the middle class when

discussing office workers, public and private sector staff, bureaucrats and technocrats, teachers,

the technical professions, middle level personnel and skilled workers, etc. Such a diverse set of

workers is not and has never been a “class” in the real sense of the term, but rather a somewhat

nebulous “smudge” situated somewhere between the elites and the poor, or between the ruling

class and the manual working class. It has also been named “the new working class” (Mallet and

Gorz), “new class” (Gouldner), “new petite bourgeoisie” (Poulantzas), “contradictory class

locations” (Wright) or even “service class” (Goldthorpe; see below, note 15). Many consider that

these sectors are above all holders of individualistic values and at times operate as a type of

“buffer zone” which works to absorb the impact of structural conflicts and the class struggle. See,

among others, Dahrendorff (1982), Giddens (1975, Goldthorpe (1969 and 1995), Wright (1983) and

Estanque (2003).

5. Which includes not just the unskilled industrial work force but the entirety of the segments of

the work force reduced to the most precarious state, that is, lacking authority and significant

skills. It should be noted that the structural criteria used in these studies, based on Erik Olin

Wright’s neo-Marxist analytical model, did not follow the traditional typologies of social

stratification theories, choosing instead a typology based on a combination of property resources,

educational resources and qualifications; organisational or authority resources. See Estanque and

Mendes (1998: 66-72) and Wright (1985).

6. If these were included, we would have, in the first study (Estanque and Mendes, 1998), a total

of 27.3% of the active employed population, and if, to top this, we were to add the independent

workers in the agricultural sector (12.4%), the net result would be 39.7% for the class positions

which could, broadly speaking, be included in the so-called middle class. This would in fact be an

exaggeration, especially if we take into account that, beyond the fact that “independents” are

actually very often dependent, the Portuguese agricultural sector itself still remains to a

significant degree at subsistence level and, therefore, is to be found closer to the “proletarian”

condition, that is, it is difficult to tell it apart from the manual working class.


36

7. In this second study, based on a survey applied four years later, class categories underwent

slight aggregations in the typology used, but even so, it can be said that the sum of the

intermediate categories of wage workers corresponded to about 24% of the active population

(also excluding independent and semi-skilled workers) (Estanque, 2003: 82).

8. The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) refers here to 1999 data and included the

project on Portuguese Social Attitudes carried out by the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) (Cabral

et al., 2003). The countries under comparison in this case were Sweden, Canada and the Czech

Republic. The previously mentioned study gathered data in 1995 from a sample of the employed

active population, and its results are published in Estanque and Mendes (1998). The countries

compared in this case were Sweden, the USA and Spain.

9. Involved in this is the issue of identification with the “middle class,” which I will address

below.

10. Which in this case was based on a sample of the active population, applied in the

municipalities of São João da Madeira, Oliveira de Azeméis and Vila da Feira (Estanque, 2000).

11. Merely as an example, one of the statements carrying an emancipatory thrust which was

presented to respondents was “If possible, workers should participate in choosing directors and

managers.” This garnered the agreement of 68.4% of the countrywide sample and only 55% of

that of the region. The “proletarian” category agreed at 71.4% countrywide, and 60.6% at

regional level. Another of the statements, of a conservative/liberal bent, was as follows: “One of

the main reasons why there is poverty is that poor people are not intelligent enough to

compete.” This garnered, in all, the agreement of 53% countrywide and 85.7% at regional level.

The “proletarian” category agreed at 53.8% countrywide, and 87.4% at regional level. For a

detailed analysis of these results, see Estanque, 2000, 209-240.

12. A reading that derives inspiration from the concepts of exclusion strategies and usurpation

strategies, developed by Frank Parkin (1979).

13. The other countries included in M. Villaverde Cabral’s analysis are Canada, Spain, the Czech

Republic and Sweden (Cabral, 2003).

14. The concept of service class, inspired by David Lockwood’s approaches (1966), was formulated

by Erikson and Goldthorpe in the following terms: “employees render service to their employing

organization in return for ‘compensation’ which takes the form not only of reward for work

done, through a salary and various perquisites, but also comprises important prospective elements

– for example, salary increments on an established scale, assurances of security both in

employment and, through pension rights, after retirement, and, above all, well-defined career

opportunities’” (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992: 41-42)

15. Structured from negotiation and the compromise between State action and associations, in

the name of the national interest. With regard to debates on neo-corporatism, see Lucena (1985),

Offe (1984) and Schmitter and Lembruch (1979).

ABSTRACTS

In recent years, the world of labour has been affected by a vast array of changes in the context of

the global economy in which we live and as a result of the effects of several transnational forces

and institutions. Resorting to examples from recent empirical studies carried out by the author,

this article analyses and discusses the ongoing processes of change, taking as a starting point

issues related to the world of labour and connecting them with the broader issue of inequality


37

and social classes. The main aim is to make a diagnosis and a critical interpretation of some of

these changes in Portuguese society, showing their relevance, significance and implications for

trade unionism. Thus, after a critical reflection on the new lines of labour market segmentation

and social inequality, the author points to a set of questions concerning trade unionism, offering

points for further reflection and critical analysis of the experiences and problems with which it is

engaged.

INDEX

Keywords: labour, trade unionism, social inequality, class structure recomposition, economic

globalization

AUTHORS

ELÍSIO ESTANQUE



38

Governance: Between Myth andReality*

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

1 From the beginning of recorded time until 1975, the British Library catalogue

registered 47 titles with the word “governance.” Since then this term has exploded in

all the disciplines of the social sciences. This sudden and overwhelming presence has

only one parallel, in the same period, in the term “globalization.” This convergent

trajectory is no coincidence. As I will try to show, since the mid 1990s, governance has

become the political matrix of neoliberal globalization. I call it a matrix because it is

both an embedding or grounding structure and a generative environment for an

interconnected network of pragmatic ideas and cooperative patterns of behavior,

shared by a group of selected actors and their interests, a network self-activated to deal

with chaos in a context in which both outside‑generated top-down normative order

and autonomous bottom-up non-pre-selected participatory ordering are unavailable

or, if available, undesirable. Crucial to this matrix is the idea that it sees itself as

cooperatively self‑generated and, therefore, as inclusive as it can possibly be. As any

other matrix, it is, in fact, based on a principle of selection, and, thus, on the binary

inclusion/exclusion, but, in this case, the excluded, rather than being present as

excluded, are utterly absent and out of the picture. Governance is therefore a matrix

that combines horizontality and verticality in a new way: both are self-generated, the

former as all-existing, the latter as non-existing.

2 Bob Jessop calls this ideological and political phenomenon the “governance paradigm”

(1998). Paradigm is probably too strong a concept to characterize this phenomenon,

particularly if we take the concept in Kuhn’s original formulation, as “universally

recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and

solutions to a community of practitioners” (1970: viii). Because different concepts of

governance abound,1 located differently in the political spectrum, I prefer to use a

weaker and narrower term – the term matrix. Discernible is, therefore, both a

governance matrix and a governance crowd. An elusive ideology and by and large an

untested practice function as a vague call that manages to mobilize social scientists and

policymakers coming from different intellectual backgrounds and political loyalties. I


39

distinguish the governance matrix from the governance crowd because, however

vague, the matrix is less heterogeneous than the groups that claim it. We are at a stage

in the development of the concept of governance very similar to that of globalization in

the mid-1990s, when social practices did not allow us fully to discern the cleavages and

contradictions being engendered by the processes of globalization themselves. In the

following I will try to answer three questions: (1) How and why did governance come

about? (2) What is its political meaning? (3) Are there other stories of governance?

1. The genealogy of governance

3 In order to understand the emergence of the governance matrix we have to go back to

the early 1970s, the student movement and the crisis of legitimacy it gave rise to. As

Claus Offe (1985) and Habermas (1982) have shown, the crisis derived from the radical

questioning of both the social and the democratic content of the social contract that

had underlied social democratic states since the end of the Second World War. For the

student movement, soon to be joined by the feminist and the ecological movements,

the social contract, very inclusive in appearance, was indeed exclusionary. It

completely excluded large social groups (minorities, immigrants) and important social

issues (such as cultural diversity and the environment) and included other groups by

subordinating them to disempowering forms of inclusion, as was the case, most

notably, of women. On the other hand, all this had been possible because democracy

had failed to fulfill its promise of building free and equal societies. The ideas of popular

sovereignty and popular participation had been hijacked by elitist forms of democratic

rule with the complicity of the two social actors historically charged with the task of

deepening democracy and bringing about social emancipation: the working-class

parties and the labor unions. It was a crisis of legitimacy because it was a crisis of

government by consent. It dominated political protest in the North in the first half of

the 1970s (Monedero, 2003).

4 The turning point occured in 1975, when the Trilateral Commission published its report

on the crisis of democracy authored by Crozier, Huntington and Watanu. According to

them, there is indeed a crisis of democracy but not because there is too little

democracy, as the crisis of legitimacy claims, but because there is too much democracy.

Democracies are in crisis because they are overloaded with rights and claims, because

the social contract rather than being exclusionary is too inclusive, precisely due to the

pressures brought upon it by the historical social actors decried by the students, the

working-class parties and the labor unions. The crisis of government by consent is

thereby transformed into a crisis of government tout court, the crisis of legitimacy

becomes a crisis of governability. The nature of the political contestation is thereby

profoundly changed. From the incapacity of the state to do justice to the new social

movements and their demands, as diagnosed by the crisis of legitimacy, we move to the

ungovernability of society and to the need of containing and controlling society’s

claims on the state. Soon the diagnosis of the crisis as a crisis of governability became

dominant, and so did the political therapy proposed by the Trilateral Commission: from

the central state to devolution/decentralization; from the political to the technical;

from popular participation to the expert system; from the public to the private; from

the state to the market. The following decade saw the construction of a new social and

political regime based on these ideas, a regime soon to be imposed globally under the


40

name of Washington Consensus. It was a decade of profound political and ideological

transformations that paved the way for the rise of the all-encompassing solution to the

crisis of governability: the market rule.

5 While the crisis of legitimacy saw the solution in state transformation and enhanced

popular participation through autonomous new social movements, the crisis of

governability saw the solution in the shrinking of the state, by forcing its withdrawal

from the social and economic sectors, and in the taming of popular participation, by

constraining it within the boundaries of an individualistic conception of civil society

dominated by business organizations. The latter, whose belonging to civil society had

been made problematic by the increasing autonomy of republican civil society vis-à-vis

the market, are smuggled into civil society by a process of double identification, as both

market agents and social actors.

6 By 1986, it was evident that all the other recommendations of the Trilateral

Commission were to be accepted as “natural,” once three ground-rules were put in

place: privatization, marketization, and liberalization. These three ground rules

became the three pillars of neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. The following

decade (1986-1996) was the high time of neoliberalism: withdrawal of the state from the

social and economic sectors; market rule as both economic and social regulation;

proliferation of civil society organizations, aggregated under the general designation of

“third sector” (for being both non-state and non-market organizations), whose goal is

to fulfill the human needs that the market cannot fulfill and the state is no longer in

condition to fulfill (Santos, 2002: 439-95; Santos e Jenson, 2000). It is also the period in

which the failures of the market, as the major principle of social regulation, become

evident and dysfunctional. The dramatic increase in income and wealth polarization,

and its devastating effect on the reproduction of the livelihoods of large groups of

people, the generalized rise of corruption, the perverse effects of the mix of market

rule and non-redistributive democracy, leading to the implosion of some states and

inter-ethnic civil wars, all these facts became too pervasive to be discarded as

anomalous deviations. It was at this juncture that governance emerged as a new

political and social matrix.

7 The last thirty years can thus be summarized in this sequence of concepts: from

legitimacy to governability; from governability to governance. To put it in Hegelian

terms, we can think of governance as being the synthesis that supersedes both the

thesis (legitimacy) and the antithesis (governability). Governance seeks, indeed, to

combine the demand for participation and inclusion called for by the legitimacy

reading of the social crisis with the demand for autonomy and self-regulation called for

by the governability reading. However, it is a false synthesis, since it operates entirely

within the governability framework. Rather than resuscitating the legitimacy quest of

the 1970s, it seeks to reconstruct governability in such a way as to turn it into an

alternative conception of legitimacy. To this I turn now.

2. The political meaning of neoliberal governance

8 In order to identify the political meaning of neoliberal governance we must pay

attention not only to what it says but also to what it silences. The most important

silences in the governance matrix are: social transformation, popular participation,

social contract, social justice, power relations, and social conflict. These were the


41

concepts with which the legitimacy crisis was formulated in the 1970s. They were also

the concepts that grounded modern critical theory. By silencing them and offering no

positive alternative to them, governance signals the defeat of critical theory in both

social and political affairs. Indeed, the alternatives offered by governance to the

silenced concepts are all of them negative in the sense that they define themselves by

opposition to the legitimacy concepts: rather than social transformation, problem

solving; rather than popular participation, selected stakeholders’ participation; rather

than social contract, self-regulation; rather than social justice, compensatory policies;

rather than power relations, coordination and partnership; rather than social conflict,

social cohesion and stability of flows.

9 These alternative concepts are not unequivocally negative. Indeed, a number of them

echo some of the aspirational features of deep democracy. They are negative in so far

as they are used in opposition to the other silenced concepts, rather than as

complementary parts of the same political constellation. Thereby, rather than being at

the service of a project of social inclusion and social redistribution, they are at the

service of social exclusion and economic polarization.

10 At the core of the legitimacy crisis was the idea of popular sovereignty and popular

participation which grounded the basic equation of enabling social transformation:

there is no benefit without participation; there is no participation without benefit. This

equation was based on the following premises: the right to determine benefit is vested

on those who participate; the condition for such self-determination is the self-

determination of participation. The governance matrix deals with this equation in a

complex way. It accepts the equation on the condition of replacing self-determined

participation by selective participation, participation selected according to a principle

of selection in the terms of which some actors, interests or voices are selected in while

others are selected out. Participation may be autonomous but not the criteria by which

participants are chosen. Those who are selected in may benefit, but always at the cost

of those who are selected out. The equation is thereby deradicalized and

instrumentalized, and in such a way that, under conditions of governance stress, the

abandonment of the equation may be part of the solution rather than of the problem. If

the principle of selection is questioned and the selected out enter into the picture, they

may be conceded some benefits, but on the condition of not participating. If the nature

or range of the benefits is questioned by the selected-in participants, these may be

granted the possibility of continuing participating but on the condition of not insisting

on the self-determination of their benefits. In extreme cases, the benefit will be said to

reside in participation per se.

11 Pursuing the exercise of a sociology of absences applied to governance (Santos and

Rodríguez-Garavito, 2005), two nonexisting actors can be detected: the state and the

excluded. They are made nonexistent in different ways. As to the state, it is not the

state per se that is absent but rather the principle of sovereignty and the power of

coercion that goes with it. The state is therefore a legitimate partner of governance,

provided that it participates in a non-state capacity, ideally on an equal footing with

other partners. But this is only part of the story. The non-existence of the state as state

is the external necessary condition of governance. The movement from legitimacy to

governability was brought about by the incapacitation of the state as a social regulator.

But the state was incapacitated of social regulation, not of meta-social regulation, that

is, of the regulation of the regulators. The withdrawal of the state from social


42

regulation was sanctioned on the condition that it would open the space for legitimate

non-state self-regulators. The state was deprived of most of its sovereign commands

over social regulation, but not of its power of influencing it within the horizon of

possibilities of regulation established by the governance partners. Needless to say, this

is a very different type of state intervention when compared with the one that presided

over the social contract. In the latter case, the state selected two very well defined and

contrasting social actors – capital and labor – and brought them to a negotiation table

controlled by the state and with the objective of reaching verifiable and enforceable

agreements, if necessary by state force. The political formation being thereby

generated was one of institutionalized conflicts rather than of stable flows; of peaceful

coexistence rather than of common goals.

12 The excluded are made nonexistent in a very different way. They cannot be simply kept

outside as they were in the social contract and the welfare state because, contrary to

the latter, the governance matrix does not accept the binary inside/outside. Whatever

is outside is socially inert, that is, is not conceived as source of an enabling power that

can turn exclusion into inclusion. Inclusion and exclusion are thereby depoliticized.

They are technical dimensions of coordination. In the absence of a sovereign command,

exclusion only exists as the dilemma of exclusion: how to get power to fight for

inclusion in the governance circle if all the power there is derives from belonging to

the governance circle?

13 Critical theorists of law, myself included, have written that the modern juridification of

social life – that is, the conception of social transformation as struggle for rights

regulated by liberal democracy and the rule of law – has meant the receding of politics

as the protection of more and more social interests became a function of technical-

minded legal experts rather than of political mobilization and political leverage (Santos

1995, 2000, 2002). In a retrospective comparison, the juridical paradigm appears as

much more political than the governance matrix. The critical theorists have argued

that the depolitization brought about by law was a highly political option. Of course,

the same is true of governance.

14 The conception of governance as neoliberal governance may be disputed since, after

all, the ideological and technical conceptual apparatus of governance is at odds with

the one that underlies market rule. Instead of competition, coordination and

partnership; instead of creative destruction, social problems; instead of profitability,

social cohesion; instead of unintended consequences, consequences to be dealt with as

if they were intended; instead of the market, civil society. In sum, the governance

matrix has emerged to correct market failures impelled by a social rather than an

economic logic. The high period of neoliberalism saw indeed the exponential growth of

civil society organizations (CSOs), many of them with the purpose of offering some

relief to populations caught by the phasing out of the safety nets once provided by the

welfare state and unable to buy welfare in the market.

15 The resurgence of the civil society in the 1980s and 1990s is a complex phenomenon not

susceptible of monocausal explanation. I distinguish three different processes. The first

process is comprised by the civil society organizations (CSO) that emerged in Central

and Eastern Europe to reclaim an autonomous non-state public sphere from where to

fight against the authoritarian state socialist regimes. They were very influential in the

period of democratic transition that followed the demise of the socialist regimes. A

similar type of civil society emerged in many Latin American countries during the


43

period of democratic transition that followed the demise of the military dictatorships

that had ruled from the mid‑1960s or mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. While in Central and

Eastern Europe CSOs questioned both the political and the economic regime, in Latin

America the CSOs questioned the authoritarian political regime but, in general, not the

economic model being put in place concomitantly with democracy: neoliberal

capitalism. When the democratic transitions were completed, most of these CSOs were

phased out or dismantled, converted themselves into political parties or consultancy or

lobbing firms, or reconstructed themselves to fit the third type of CSOs mentioned

below.

16 The second process is the most closely related to the governability crisis and consists of

CSOs that questioned neither the political regime (liberal democracy) nor the economic

model (neoliberal capitalism), but rather saw themselves as solidarity organizations

fulfilling the human needs of the victims of economic restructuring, dispossession,

discrimination, environmental degradation, inter-ethnic and other kinds of warfare,

massive violations of human rights, and so on and so forth. They are the bulk of the

third sector. Their focus is on the private, not on the public, on the social, not on the

political, on the micro, not on the macro (liberal democracy, neoliberal capitalism). In

this group one should distinguish between the CSOs that were generated within the

suffering communities and those that were organized from the outside and in solidarity

with them, notwithstanding the fact that many of the former were created with the

support of the latter.

17 Finally, there is a third process underlying the resurgence of civil society. It comprises

those CSOs, many of them originating in new social movements, both in the South and

in the North, that fight against neoliberal globalization. Although many of them

provide services similar to those of the CSOs of the second type, they frame their

actions according to a broader concept of political activism. They question the

hegemonic model of democracy and advocate participatory grassroots democracy.

They refuse the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization, consider

themselves anticapitalistic and advocate alternative economies, alternative models of

development or alternatives to development. Although most of them are locally based,

they network with similar organizations in other places and with global organizations.

These local/global linkages and networking constitute what I call counter-hegemonic

globalization.

18 The landscape of CSOs is thus very rich and diverse. The different processes that

accounted for the resurgence of CSOs in the 1980s and 1990s led to two main types of

civil society: the liberal civil society, constituted by the CSOs that focus on the private

rather than on the public, on the social rather than on the political, on the micro level

rather than on the macro level. The second type of civil society is the subaltern,

counter-hegemonic civil society, consisting of the social movements and CSOs that

keep an unstable balance between the macro and the micro, the public and the private,

the social and the political, by focusing on the deeper causes of the human suffering

they seek to minimize. They are involved in the creation of non-state public spheres at

the local, national and global scale.

19 This cleavage between two major types of civil society explains the centrality of the

principle of selection in the governance matrix. The selected in civil society is the

liberal civil society because its organizations alone share the values that underlie self-

regulated coordination and partnership. Problem solving and social cohesion are best


44

achieved when politics and ideology do not interfere with the construction of common

goals and common interests. Only open-ended, relatively indeterminate, fragmented,

pragmatic conceptions of interests and benefits can be intelligible to and have an

impact on the market, the most flexible and indeterminate institution of all, thereby

helping the markets to flourish unimpeded by its all too evident failures.

20 In light of this, neoliberal governance operates what Massimo de Angelis calls

“Polanyi’s inversion” (2003: 23). While Karl Polanyi argued that the economy, rather

than being a separate realm, as claimed by neoclassical economics, was embedded in

society, the governance matrix is premised upon the need to embed society in the

economy. As the UN sponsored global compact states, “The rationale is that a

commitment to corporate citizenship should begin with the organization itself by

embedding universal principles and values into the strategic business vision,

organizational culture and daily operations” (2000: 3). In other words, “universal

values” are good for business and on this premise lies the voluntary character of the

compact (Shamir, 2005). There is no possibility of such values or principles endangering

the robust profitability that grounds the flourishing of economic organizations, as

happened, for instance, with taxation when it was first imposed. Because it was

imposed, the public policy of taxation ended up selecting the businesses that could

survive under taxation. On the contrary, in the governance matrix it is up to the

businesses to select the values and principles they can live with. It is true that the cost

of a too restrictive selection may be high particularly in brand dominated sectors

(public shaming), but in such cases it is still an economic calculation rather than a

social one that drives the decision.

21 In light of this, I would say that governance is a genetically modified form of

government to make it more resistant to two dangerous plagues: on one side, bottom-

up non‑pre‑selected potentially chaotic pressures; on the other, state- or inter-state led

politically motivated uncontrollable and abrupt changes in the rules of the game, that

is, of capital accumulation.

3. Social struggles within the governance frame ofaction

22 The historical relationship between democracy and capitalism is non-linear if for no

other reason because, in the last two hundred years, different models of democracy

(Macpherson, 1966, 1977; Held, 1987) as well as different models of capitalism (Boyer,

1986; Boyer and Drache, 1996; Santos, 2001) have been in place. Moreover, democracy,

whatever its model may be, has a double existence as a real existing political regime

and as a popular aspiration to self-rule. Throughout the 20th century the tension

between democracy and capitalism in the North centered around the question of social

redistribution. This was one of the core questions underlying the crisis of legitimacy in

the 1970s. The conversion of the crisis of legitimacy into the crisis of governability was

the capitalist response to the pressures for wider and deeper social redistribution.

Neoliberalism neutralized or strongly weakened the democratic mechanisms of social

redistribution: social and economic rights and the welfare state. Deprived of its

redistributive potential, democracy became fully compatible with capitalism, and to

such an extent that they turned into the twin concepts presiding over the new global


45

model of social and political affairs, being imposed worldwide by neoliberal

globalization, structural adjustment policies and, lately, also by neocolonial warfare.

23 Thirty years later, the question of redistribution is more serious than ever. The rates of

exploitation have assumed such high levels in some sectors of production and in some

regions of the world that, together with the mechanisms used to obtain them, they

suggest that we are entering a new period of primitive capital accumulation. Moreover,

the unexploited or unexploitable populations are in an even more dramatic situation as

the conditions of reproduction of their livelihoods have deteriorated in the meantime

due to economic restructuring and environmental degradation. They have been

declared discardable populations. Finally, the triadic recipe of privatization,

marketization and liberalization has eroded the modern commons created by the state

and transformed it into a new generation of enclosures. A new form of indirect rule has

emerged in which powerful economic actors detain an immense and unaccountable

power of control over the basic livelihoods of people, be they water, energy, seeds,

security or health. Having this in mind, I have tried to show elsewhere that we may be

entering a period in which societies are politically democratic but socially fascistic

(2002). This explains why it has become so risky for people to take risks in a society

seemingly full of opportunities.

24 The question of social redistribution is the most serious question confronting us at the

beginning of the 21st century. But it is not the only one. Since the 1980s, the question of

social redistribution has been compounded with the question of the recognition of

difference. Today we live in societies tremendously unequal, but equality is not the

only value we cherish. We also cherish difference, equal difference, an aspiration which

was not prominently present in the conception of the crisis of legitimacy of the 1970s.

25 The litmus test for governance is therefore the extent to which it can confront both the

question of social redistribution and the question of the recognition of difference. In

light of what I said above, I don’t see any potential for meaningful social redistribution

being generated in the governance matrix. Hypothetically, as I suggest, governance

may address the question of recognition of difference more convincingly than the

question of social redistribution. But even here the structural limitations of governance

will surface. My hypothesis is that it is more likely that it recognizes cultural diversity

in the public sphere than that it confronts the racialization of the labor force as a

mechanism to reduce the value of labor power.

26 I don’t deny that governance may bring some benefits to the more disadvantaged

groups within the circle of partnership. As I said, such benefits may even spill over to

the excluded, and this fact must be acknowledged. But I don’t see in this any potential

for enabling popular participation or for social redistribution as a matter of rights. In

other words, what is beneficial does not determine, by itself, what is emancipatory. If

the population of the homeless is growing exponentially, it is a good thing that

homeowners allow them to take shelter in the porches of their houses. It is better than

nothing. But, because of its voluntary character, whatever redistribution is thereby

achieved is achieved under the logic of philanthropy. That is, it does not occur in an

enabling way, in recognition of both the right to the benefit and the right to reclaim

the effectiveness of the economic right in an autonomous, participatory way.

27 It may be argued that, under certain circumstances, the voluntary character of

compliance is more virtual than real, given the pressures exerted upon the governance

circle, oftentimes from the outside. In this case, different social processes may be at


46

work and they must be distinguished. Let’s look at two examples of outside pressure

brought about by the state. The first example is the case of the codes of conduct in the

apparel industry in Guatemala, as analyzed by César Rodriguez-Garavito (2005). Here,

in the process of negotiation of the free trade zone of Central America, the Guatemalan

State is pressured by the USA to be more active in the repression of human rights

violations in the workplace. Itself under pressure, the Guatemalan State pressures the

subcontracting firm of Liz Claiborne to comply with the code of conduct and the firm

complies. In the second case, as analysed by Heinz Klug (2005), the state of South Africa,

pressured by a strong social movement calling for free or affordable retroviral

medicines for HIV/AIDS patients, successfully pressures the pharmaceutical companies

to withdraw their suit against compulsory licensing and the production of generics and

to lower the prices of their brand products.

28 It is important to note that, in both cases, the state, which had ejected itself from social

regulation, intervened supposedly from the outside, using its sovereign prerogative, if

not formally at least informally, to put pressure on the governance circle and obtain a

given outcome, considered politically important. But, while in the Guatemalan case the

state intervenes under pressure from above and the benefited workers are not called

upon to participate in the deliberation over the benefits, in the South African case the

state is pressured from below and yields to the pressure of the social movement.

Indeed, the state joins forces with the social movement for that particular purpose. In

the first case, if the benefits are taken away from the workers, they will be as powerless

as before to reclaim them. In the second case, the state action contributes to empower

the social movement, to enhance its leverage in social contestation in a particular case

and possibly in future cases, eventually even against the state. In sum, these two cases

show, first, that the state is the absent structure of the governance matrix – a fact that

is best revealed in conditions of institutional stress – which means that the governance

matrix operates inside the “self-outsidedness” of the state; second, that,

notwithstanding the unfavorable conditions of the present, the enabling struggle for

the right to social redistribution – the right to have rights in Arendt’s formulation

(1968: 177) – may have some success, not because of governance, but in spite of

governance.

4. Are there other stories of governance?

29 In this paper I deal with neoliberal governance. It is apparently the only game in town.

But it is not. I said above that, in recent years, neoliberal globalization, albeit the

dominant form of globalization, has been confronted with another form of

globalization. In the last ten years, and most clearly since 1999 and the Seattle

contestation of the WTO meeting, another form of globalization has been emerging by

force of the social movements and civil society organizations that, through networking

and building up local/global linkages, are conducting a global struggle against the

inequality, destitution, dispossession and discrimination brought about or intensified

by neoliberal globalization, a struggle most generally guided by the mobilizing idea

that another world is possible. I call this form of globalization counter‑hegemonic

globalization.

30 My claim is that, in the womb of this alternative globalization, another governance

matrix is being generated, an insurgent counter-hegemonic governance. It consists of


47

the articulation and coordination among an immense variety of social movements and

CSOs with the purpose of combining strategies and tactics, defining agendas and

planning and carrying out together collective actions, from protests against the

multilateral financial institutions to the organization of the four editions (so far) of the

World Social Forum, and of a large number of regional, national and thematic social

fora. Quite strikingly, the main features of the neoliberal governance matrix are also

present in the insurgent governance matrix: voluntary participation, horizontality,

autonomy, coordination, partnership, self-regulation, etc. Different historical

trajectories have led to this surprising convergence. On the side of neoliberal

governance, the originating impulse has been the refusal of state centralism and state

coercion and the formulation of a new model of social regulation based on the interests

and voluntary participation of the stakeholders. On the side of counter-hegemonic

governance, the originating impulse has been the refusal of the working class parties

and labor unions as the privileged historical agents and modes of organization of

progressive social transformation and the formulation of a new model of social

emancipation based on the recognition of the diversity of emancipatory agency and

social transformative goals.

31 Even more striking is the fact that counter-hegemonic governance faces some of the

challenges and dilemmas that confront neoliberal governance. For instance, in both

cases, a principle of selection is at work. In the case of counter-hegemonic governance,

the most excluded social groups, those that would conceivably benefit most from a

successful struggle against neoliberal globalization, do not participate and are unlikely

to see their interests and aspirations taken into account. The negative utopia that

aggregates all the movements and CSOs – the refusal of the idea that there is no

alternative to the current capitalist global disorder – coexists with the different and

even contradictory interests, strategies and agendas that divide them. The struggle to

expand the circle of counter-hegemonic governance goes on and some of the

movements and CSOs that participate in it are the same that fight for the expansion of

the circle of neoliberal governance.

32 Will the neoliberal governance and the counter-hegemonic governance ever meet in a

kind of dialectical synthesis of global governance? I very much doubt it. Are they going

to influence each other? I think that it is possible and that indeed it is already

occurring.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Angelis, Massimo de (2003), “Neoliberal Governance, Reproduction and Accumulation”, The

Commoner, 7, 1-27.

Arendt, Hannah (1968), The Origins of Totalitarism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Boyer, Robert (1986), Capitalismes fin de siècle. Paris: Maspero.


48

Boyer, Robert; Drache, Daniel (eds.) (1996), States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization. New

York: Routledge.

Crozier, Michel; Huntington, Samuel; Watanuki, Joji (1975), The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the

Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York UP.

Habermas, Jürgen (1982), Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

Held, David (1987), Models of Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jessop, Bob (1998), “The Rise of Governance and the Risks of Failure: The Case of Economic

Development,” International Science Journal, 155, 29-45.

Klug, Heinz (2005), “Campaigning for Life: Building a New Transnational Solidarity in the Face of

HIV/AIDS and TRIPS,” in Boaventura de Sousa Santos; César Rodríguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and

Globalization from Below. Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 118-139.

Kuhn, Thomas (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Offe, Claus (1985), Disorganized Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.

Macpherson, C. B. (1966), The Real World of Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon.

Macpherson, C. B. (1977), The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Monedero, Juan Carlos (2003), La trampa de la gobernanza: Nuevas formas de participación política.

Mexico: Cámara de Diputados.

Rodríguez-Garavito, César (2005), “Global Governance, Cross-Border Organizing, and Labor

Rights: Codes of Conduct and Anti-Sweatshop Struggles in Global Apparel Factories in Mexico and

Guatemala,” Politics & Society, 33(2), 203-33.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (1995), Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the

Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2000), A crítica da razão indolente: contra o desperdício da experiência.

Porto: Afrontamento

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (ed.) (2001), Globalização: Fatalidade ou utopia? Porto: Afrontamento.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2002), Toward a New Legal Common Sense. London: Butterworths.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa; Jenson, Jane (eds.) (2000), Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in

Regulation and Innovation. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa; Rodríguez-Garavito, César (2005), “Law, Politics, and the Subaltern

in Counter-Hegemonic Globalization,” in Boaventura de Sousa Santos; César Rodríguez-Garavito

(eds.), Law and Globalization from Below. Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1-26.

Shamir, Ronen (2005), “Corporate Social Responsibility: A Case of Hegemony and Counter-

Hegemony,” in Boaventura de Sousa Santos; César Rodríguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and Globalization

from Below. Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 92-117.

United Nations (2000), Global Compact Primer. New York: United Nations

(www.unglobalcompact.org).

NOTES

*. An extended version of this paper was published in RCCS 72 (October 2005).


49

1. For a good overview of the vast literature on governance, see Rodríguez-Garavito (2005).

ABSTRACTS

Governance is today presented as a new paradigm of social regulation that has come to supplant

the previously established paradigm based on social conflict and on the privileged role of the

sovereign state to regulate this conflict through the power of control and coercion at its disposal.

In this article, the author presents a radical critique of the new paradigm, conceiving it as the

regulatory matrix of neoliberalism, seen as a new version of laissez faire capitalism. Centered on

the question of governability, this regulatory matrix presupposes a politics of law and a politics

of rights that tend to aggravate the crisis of legitimacy of the state.

INDEX

Keywords: governance, social regulation, neoliberal globalization, counter-hegemonic

globalization

AUTHOR

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS



50

“Defeat happens only to those whostop fighting”: Protest and theDemocratic State in Portugal*

José Manuel Mendes

EDITOR'S NOTE


1. Introduction

1 In her book about the production of political apathy in everyday life, Nina Eliasoph

(1998) found that political ideas circulated in just the opposite way from what was

postulated by scholars writing about the public sphere. In other words, it was only

backstage that it was possible to hear conversations about national politics, justice or

public goods. Eliasoph called this tendency the cycle of political evaporation (1998:

255). In the cycle of political evaporation, the more public the context of conversations,

the more people express opinions and grievances pertaining only to their small world

or to their communities. As politics and political life are unavoidable for all of us as

citizens, Nina Eliasoph concludes that political apathy requires a specific production

logic and derives always from personal and collective activities such as, for example,

the definition of very specific contexts where dissent and critique are possible. Her

argument is that, in the name of a mythical community, people avoid public

expressions of opinion against the general consensus.

2 Contrary to Nina Eliasoph’s findings, I will argue that in Portuguese society political life

and political activities exacerbate passions and produce complex public spheres where

contradictory voices, discourses and identities intersect. Instead of an evaporation

cycle we have political effervescence cycles that structure social relations, frame

friendships, mould family networks and profoundly shape people’s daily lives. Thus, in


51

this article I seek to understand how citizenship is built by looking at of a locality

strongly marked by collective mobilisation. This case study allows us to analyse the

dynamics of intersection of the local community with the control and power logics of

the Portuguese central state.

3 Two episodes will be used to illustrate the struggle of a local movement to gain the

status of municipality for Canas de Senhorim, a struggle that has been going on since

the Revolution of 1974.1 The first episode has to do with the voting of a bill in

Parliament that would grant the locality such status, and its subsequent veto by the

President of the Republic. I will show how the political elites and the media

commentators tried to normalise, politically and discursively, local demands and

struggles.2 This was achieved by using technical and administrative arguments and by

applying a rational logic to territorial planning. In addition, local actions were devalued

and labelled as extremist and irrational. Such labelling is generally used to justify the

rightfulness of elite views and to exclude common citizens from the public sphere.

4 The other episode is related to the shipping of some tons of depleted uranium that

were deposited in the locality, extracted from the mines in the region in the 1980s. This

episode allows us to see how the Portuguese State, based on the rule of law, employs

sheer force and the judicial apparatus to control and repress local initiatives.

5 Drawing on direct observation and informal conversations with participants of the

local movement, I seek to show how the political is produced in everyday life, how the

local inhabitants mobilise politically and how they interpret State practices. I also seek

to analyse the complex production of personal and collective identities.

2. Protest actions, localism and political participation

6 To analyse the spatial anchoring of the local movement and to discuss the question of

localism I draw on John Agnew’s study on the role of localism in Italian politics (2002),

rather than on the classical contributions from community studies.1 Agnew proposes a

multiscale concept of place that provides a better understanding of the spatial

dimension of political processes (2002: 216-220). People produce the places they live in

through active socialisation, by constructing identities and mobilising social and

political interests. The networks in which people are embedded always have a

territorial grounding. Place, for Agnew, should be seen as topological space crossed by

different scales and crystallising different historical contingencies. It follows that

political action can only emerge from within concrete life contexts, delimited by very

specific historical and geographical markers. To conceptualise the role of places in the

production of political practices and representations is to take into account the

emergence of a multiplicity of identities that coexist in a contradictory way and that

take root in and project themselves onto territories with variable configurations.2

7 The theoretical challenge is to understand the regime of collective action that

structures and frames these territorial configurations. Since local or personal ties

constitute the basis of what Laurent Thévenot (1999) called proximity regimes or

proximate politics, they deserve closer attention. However, the workings and the

constraints of these proximity regimes are not well known given social scientists’

general condemnation, from a civic standpoint, of personal ties of dependence, which

are usually labelled as nepotism, favouritism, caciquism, caesarism and paternalism.

The analysis of proximity regimes should focus on their ability and potential to develop


52

and to rise to the general category of the political with civic relevance. Collective and

public involvement implies the transformation of personal and localised concerns,

deceptions, and problems into public issues.3

8 In conceptualising the relationship between democracy and protest actions, it is

important to distinguish, as proposed by Jacques Rancière, the notion of politics from

that of police order. Police order, for Rancière, is an organisation of spaces with no void

and no supplement: society is made up of rigid and clear functions, places and ways of

being that constitute all that it is possible to imagine.4

9 The essence of politics, on the other hand, for Rancière, is dissensus, the manifestation

of a rupture in the way of being in the world. Political demonstrations are always

sporadic and their subjects always precarious. Politics resides in the dissenting modes

of subjectivation that express the difference between society and its members. Politics

is not defined by any entity that precedes it. It is, on the contrary, the political relation

that makes the political subject thinkable. Politics consists in transforming the space of

circulation defined by the police into a space of demonstration for a political subject.

Taking equality as the only political universal, Rancière argues that real participation is

the invention of the unpredictable subject that occupies the street, of the movement

that arises from nothing but democracy itself. Taking to the streets and demonstrating

are indicators of community and agency.

10 In a similar argument, Andrew Barry, in his study of protest movements against the

construction of new roads in the United Kingdom, suggests that the analysis of those

protests as political events should pay close attention to the protest actions themselves,

rather than postulate underlying political identities, ideologies or social movements

(2001: 175-196). Barry establishes an interesting analogy between scientific

demonstrations and political demonstrations, since as much work is needed to turn

something into an object of scientific knowledge in a laboratory as it is to turn an

object into a political object and to create specific sites where political action can take

place. For this author, an action is political to the extent that it opens up new sites for,

and creates new objects of, contestation.5

11 Protest actions and processes can only be fully understood if we take into account what

Roger Dupuy (2002: 183-193) calls people’s politics, that is, the way established powers

and agents construct and discursively frame popular actions and the persons who carry

them out (2002: 183-193). From a historical and anthropological perspective, Dupuy

shows how protest actions tend to be included in the descriptive – rather than

analytical – concept of populism. In order to theoretically recover this concept, he

proposes a distinction between spontaneous populism (democratic or of social protest –

demos-plebs) and instrumentalised populism (involving invariably identity protest –

demos-ethnos). However, this merely typological distinction is not helpful for a critical

analysis of the concept or the ideological work that it performs.

12 This task was undertaken by Annie Collovald, who presented a brilliant deconstruction

of populism in works published in 2004 and 2005. She shows that the movements which

called themselves populist started out on the left of the political spectrum, and that in

the second half of the 20th century there was a conservative ideological revolution,

originating from specific local debates in the United States, which would become

widespread among intellectuals, social scientists, journalists and political analysts. In

these debates, the term populism became connoted with authoritarianism, which

depoliticises the notion of the people, reinforces the role of charismatic leaders, and


53

categorises popular mobilisations as irrational (2005: 225). This conservative

reconceptualisation, she argues, legitimises elite domination and disqualifies popular

protests and demands and the very notion of the people, the essential foundation of

democratisation processes.

13 Methodologically, as my main concern in this article is with power relations and the

role of the State, I follow Michel Foucault when he proposes that the analysis of micro

powers or of “governmentality” procedures is not a question of scale but of point of

view, and that the analyst must adopt a deciphering method (2004: 192). Instead of

relying on universals like sovereignty, the people, subjects, the State or civil society,

and deduce concrete phenomena from them, one should begin with concrete practices

and test the universals against these practices (2004: 4-5). For Foucault this has to do

with understanding power in its extremities, in its finest filaments, where it becomes

capillary and overrides the rules that organise it and define its limits, materialising in

local and regional forms and institutions (1997: 21-28). This analytical proposal doesn’t

postulate the diffuse presence of power in every context, but calls attention to

subjectivation and subjection processes, in which the production of subjects and

collectives is embedded in relations of domination.

14 Taking these theoretical frameworks as a guide, I now turn to the analysis of the social

dynamics of mobilisation of a local social movement that confronted directly the

policies and agents of the Portuguese State.

3. A local social movement

3.1. The bill on the reinstatement of the Canas municipality and thePresident's veto: Citizenship and the elites

15 After having boycotting all the elections in Canas de Senhorim since 1999, and

following official appeals from national authorities, namely by the President of the

Republic and different political party leaders, the Movement for the Restoration of the

Municipality of Canas de Senhorim decided to ask the population to vote in the

parliamentary elections of March 2002.1 The national representatives of the Social

Democratic Party (PSD) agreed to present a bill on the reinstatement of Canas as a

municipality if “the legal order was re‑established” in the parish. In the weekly

meetings of the Movement, its leader began to convey the message that they had to

choose the institutional route. This strategy was publicly presented on 3 March 2002 at

a meeting that included PSD district leaders. At the beginning of the session, the leader

of the Movement, Luís Pinheiro, reported that several parties had agreed to support

their demands, namely PSD, CDS-PP (Social Democratic Centre-Popular Party), BE (Left-

Wing Bloc) and PCP (Communist Party). He also told the audience that the President

had made an appeal for the re-establishment of order, and had suggested that the

approaching political period might be favourable to their demands.

16 Many were reluctant to accept this change of strategy and insisted on radicalising their

struggle until Canas was reinstated as a municipality, but the leader of the movement

argued that voting was also a weapon of struggle. He went on to say that the boycott

continued in Canas, since there was no electoral campaigning or political propaganda

in the parish, which was interdicted to politicians unless they were expressly invited.2

According to Luís Pinheiro, voting was a way of responding to the appeals of district


54

and national political authorities and could be strategically used in the struggle of the

Movement. Following this argument for institutional normalisation, he also

emphasised the need to re-establish the legal functioning of the parish council.3

Strategically, he argued that the Movement was a popular expression that was distinct

from the parish council, given that the latter had a legal status and institutional

legitimacy. However, the council and the people should act together as a form of

pressure on the government.

17 The results of the national elections of March 2002, with the victory of the Social

Democratic Party and the prospect of a government coalition with the Popular Party,

were favourable to the political aspirations of the movement.4 On May 31, PSD would

indeed present a bill in Parliament to grant Canas the status of municipality (Bill no.

44/IX).5

18 The institutionalisation strategy of the movement would be strengthened with the

constitution of a single list for the local elections that took place in July 28 of the same

year. The institutionalisation of the local struggle led the Movement to normalise its

political activity, thus suspending all street actions and demonstrations.

19 One year later, on 12 June 2003, PSD presented a proposal to change the national law

that defined the general conditions for the creation of municipalities (Bill no. 310/IX/

1).6 This bill provided for exceptional cases, which required a general consensus and a

qualified majority in Parliament or a favourable vote on the part of the local authorities

involved. In its first formulation, due to the opposition of the Socialist Party (PS) to the

specific case of Canas de Senhorim, only the possibility of creating a new municipality

in Fátima was politically consensual.7

20 Political dispute within and between parties about amendments to the national law was

fierce from the beginning. As the report of the parliamentary committee on Local

Government, Territorial Planning and Environment shows, PS and PCP voted

favourably a resolution that stated that the PSD bill was unconstitutional. However,

and almost paradoxically, PS would also vote with the governmental parties (PSD and

CDS-PP) in favour of the discussion of the same bill in the parliamentary plenary

session.

21 On the first day of the plenary debate, on 12 June 2003, PSD would present a version of

the proposed amendments to the national law that was different from the one that had

been discussed and voted in the parliamentary committee. This new version eliminated

the rule of qualified majority voting.8 The parliamentary debate was marked by

procedural questions and reservations about this new revised version, and all the

opposition parties were against it. Even inside the Cabinet of Prime-Minister Durão

Barroso, and within his own political party, PSD, there were divisions on this issue.

Journalist Helena Pereira, of the national newspaper Público, in an article significantly

entitled “Canas de Senhorim embarrasses the government,” reported that although it

had been an electoral promise, the granting of the status of municipality to Canas had

the opposition of the PSD standing committee and of many of the Cabinet ministers

(June 21, 2003).9

22 The conference of parliamentary party leaders scheduled the discussion and voting of

the cases of Fátima and Canas de Senhorim for July 1. Since the amendments to the

general law on the establishment of municipalities had not yet been approved, both

cases had to be considered on the basis of the existing law, whose requirements were


55

not met by the two towns.10 The proposal of Fátima was voted favourably by all parties

and Canas de Senhorim had the opposing votes of PS.11

23 Contrary to all expectations, and in contrast to Fátima, only some of the leaders and

supporters of the Canas Movement went to Parliament to attend the debate. Given the

Movement’s previous history of powerful public actions, this was a form of absence, of

maintaining a low profile, of playing the democratic game.12 The people from Canas

who witnessed the final voting in Parliament showed visibly restrained joy, thus

respecting the rules of the institution. They recalled their long struggle and the hunger

strike in 1999 in front of the Parliament building.13 Theirs were personal memories of

anti-establishment actions, of desacralisation and of victory over the established

political powers. With a sense of relief and satisfaction, now that they had achieved

their goal, they swore repeatedly that they would “never again” suffer or make

personal sacrifices.14

24 In Canas de Senhorim the celebrations lasted for a week. On the day following the

parliamentary vote, a local cultural association bought food and beverages that were

freely given to all those who came to the town centre. The local choral group sang in all

the cafés and bars, suspending momentarily the social and political differences that

structure the everyday leisure spaces. In one of the days local women organised the

festivities, followed on the next day by the men. The women's initiative was a challenge

to male dominance and symbolised their autonomous capacity for action, which had

been apparent in the role they had played in the local political struggle. Women thus

affirmed their importance to the struggle, but also demanded that their social and

political visibility and presence in the public sphere be maintained.

25 A communitarian and non-commodified logic prevailed during the festivities. It was a

ludic and liminal way of reworking identities, of affirming community and equality. Old

rivalries and enmities were momentarily forgotten, and even those who had been

critical of the Movement or of its goals were accepted into the common fold. The

celebrations affirmed the population’s self-respect, the recognition of their existence

and their worth, and the possibility of development for future generations. All media

publicity, both positive and negative, about the Movement’s struggle over the years

had projected the locality onto the national political space, and offered to its

inhabitants a basis to transcend their daily lives, a central feature in all personal and

collective work of construction of identities.

26 This idea of a mythic community, ritualised in annual commemorations on August 2,

with free distribution of food and beverages, is the main factor that explains the

tenacity of the people and the long duration of their struggle.

27 In the meantime, in the national media, analysts and political commentators were

unanimous in denouncing the parliamentary process that had ended with the creation

of the two new municipalities. They criticised Parliament for yielding to populist

pressures, arguing that this would legitimise extreme or illegal acts in Portugal. They

explicitly asked for a presidential veto, although at first there were no indications that

this would happen. According to an article by journalist Alexandra Marques (Jornal de

Notícias, 3 July 2003), sources from the President’s Office had suggested that the law

might be sent to the Constitutional Court for review and returned to Parliament with a

message from the President.

28 The opinions of political analysts and commentators reveal a narrow view of the

democratic state, founded on rationality, deliberation and elitization of the political


56

system. Citizenship is reduced to acceptance of parliamentary decisions and of the logic

of the political and party microcosm.15 Analysts criticised the casuistic manner in which

municipalities had been created, accused representatives of being uncritical and of

pandering to popular wishes with an eye to future elections, and denounced the

collaboration of left-wing parties in the voting in Parliament. The socialist Augusto

Santos Silva, in his weekly column in the newspaper Público (July 5, 2003), argued that

the case of Canas de Senhorim had shown the success of what he ironically called a

“gauche” version of politics. According to him, whenever groups are involved in

struggles they should always get the support of the extreme left. The creation of

municipalities thus overrides technical and administrative rationality, and depends

only on the social capital of those who demand it. According to Santos Silva, the voting

in Parliament conveyed the idea that “Rational, here and now, is to fill a square, to tear

up railroad tracks, to cut off a road.”16

29 The commentaries of analysts, based on legalistic and technocratic arguments,

reinforce the legitimacy of the political rules of the party-political and parliamentary

microcosm, and disqualify local struggles and social and political conflicts that arise in

the public sphere. Politics is reduced to an inter- and intra-institutional game and to

the rational application of the rules devised by the elites. But aren’t protests a sign that

the political system actually works, as well as an indicator of the maturity of a

democracy, as Jack Golsdtone states (2004)?

30 All the press articles that I analysed conveyed a decontextualized view of local

demands, merely reproducing images and features derived from media reconstructions

of the events. They thus actively contributed towards producing and perpetuating the

negative representation of protest actions. Labelling protests as populist or unrealistic,

as Annie Collovald (2005) argues, implies normalising and negatively including the

dynamics of participatory citizenship in the public space (Collovald, 2005).

31 On 31 July 2003, the President vetoed the new law on the creation of municipalities.17 In

his message to Parliament he stressed the danger of multiplying new demands with no

rationality or logic, and emphasised the need of merging municipalities into more

cohesive and viable administrative units. He also recommended that a white paper on

municipalities be prepared, with clear guidelines for territorial planning in the

country.18 On the same day, the speaker of PSD declared that his party accepted the

decision of the President, thus announcing the end of a political process that have been

so divisive for the national political elites.

32 The news was received in Canas de Senhorim with no public signs of protest. The leader

of the Movement, in the weekly meetings with the members, showed some hope of a

negotiated solution for the presidential veto. After unsuccessful meetings with some

political parties and with the President’s advisors, the local struggle and the political

protests would resume officially on 20 January 2004.

33 In a symbolic gesture, the room for the weekly meetings was transferred from the first

floor to the ground floor of the parish council building. This room was decorated with

the colours of the Movement, and behind the main table stood the flags of Portugal, of

the Movement and of the European Union, reinforcing the institutional nature of the

new space. Symbolic solemnity and the rituals that go with it were to be maintained.

The walls were lined with pictures of many of the protest actions of the Movement and

poems on the bravery and resistance of the people. Turning to the persons gathered

there, the leader declared: “It's the room of the struggle.”


57

34 This official and symbolic resumption of the struggle was publicly confirmed on

January 25 at a rally in Canas, where the leader made the most radical of his speeches

to date, electing as privileged targets of his attack the journalists and the media. This

speech would alienate journalists from the movement, and would prove very costly in

political terms. Although at this time a possible institutional arrangement to solve the

situation had not yet been discarded, the demand for full citizenship would soon rely

once again on election boycotts. On 13 June 2004, Canas boycotted the European

elections. On October 5 of the same year, the day of the official inauguration of the

Museum of the Presidency of the Republic, the leader of the Movement and a group of

followers19 chained themselves to the main gate of the Belém Palace in Lisbon, a protest

action that had extensive national media coverage. It was clear that their political

target was now the President. On November 6, hundreds of Canas’ inhabitants

deposited uranium-mining tailings in the public gardens in front of the presidential

palace. This protest action sought to alert public opinion to the environmental

degradation caused by the presence of thousands of tons of uranium tailings left behind

after the closing of the mines in Canas in the 1980s.

35 The dissolution of Parliament by the President of the Republic in December 2004 made

all the bills of the legislature void, and the cases of Canas and Fátima would not be

taken up again by Parliament.

3.2. The depleted uranium shipments: An affair of State and theaffirmation of a local struggle

36 On 10 October 2004, the electronic edition of the newspaper Diário Económico reported

that the National Institute of Engineering, Technology and Innovation [Instituto

Nacional de Engenharia, Tecnologia e Inovação], which held 337 tons of depleted

uranium deposited in Canas de Senhorim, would sell 127 of those tons to Germany.

37 This coincided with a turbulent phase of the protest actions of the Movement after the

presidential veto. It was the first time, since the beginning of the new phase of the

struggle in 1998, that there was an opportunity to launch an initiative of resistance

directly against the central State. The uncertainty resided in how the central State

would react to local actions. Although the same political coalition governed the country

(PSD and CDS-PP), there was now a new Prime Minister and a new Cabinet, and the

Movement had only had informal contacts with the new government.

38 The radicals, including many of the women who participated in the weekly meetings,

rejected any kind of compromise, and demanded that the question of the establishment

of Canas as a municipality be discussed directly with the government and the President.

On 15 November 2004, there was a rumour that the uranium shipment had been

scheduled for the next day, and that two trucks were already inside the premises of the

Empresa Nacional de Urânio [Uranium National Company]. As it happens, the Movement’s

leader had negotiated with the national authorities that the shipment would meet no

opposition from the population. However, many of the Movement's supporters did not

receive this news well, and denounced what they saw as a compromise in a process that

should be consistent with the final goal of their struggle.

39 On November 16, hundreds of persons gathered outside the company building to

prevent the uranium shipment. Confronting a significant police apparatus,

demonstrators chanted slogans in favour of the establishment of Canas as a


58

municipality. After a whole morning of negotiations, the Minister of the Environment,

Nobre Guedes, agreed to meet with the Movement's leader in Lisbon. At the end of the

afternoon, local representatives of the Movement received the news that an agreement

had been reached and that the trucks could leave. Reluctantly, with many angry shouts

and jeers against politicians and the President of the Republic, protestors demobilised,

and slowly the trucks rolled out to their destination.20

40 In statements to the press, after the meeting with the Minister of the Environment, the

Movement's leader stressed the Minister’s promise to initiate the environmental

requalification of the area and to attend to the labour problems of the miners.

According to him, the solution for the issue of the establishment of the municipality

rested entirely with the President, given that he had vetoed the bill.

41 In Canas, the people who had been involved in the protest against the uranium

shipment read the episode in a very different manner. As the trucks departed, they had

expressed strong emotions of anger, indignation and sadness. For many of them, the

political weight of the Minister of the Environment was minimal and the

environmental requalification of the area a secondary issue. Some told me that it

seemed that with the trucks went also a part of their struggle, that this episode raised

questions about a collective memory that had been built over the years on

confrontations with local and national authorities. In the words of a woman, “We will

now have no coin for exchange. Do we want the municipality or requalification? What

we did there [in front of the company building] was good for nothing.”

42 This partial defeat was symbolically heightened by the fact that it had happened in

their own space. As one of the protesters said, “And then going down there [to Lisbon].

He [the Movement's leader] should never have gone. The meeting should have been

here. We protested on April 25 [of 1999], did a lot of things in other places, and here in

our town they accept this?” This downgrading of the local space opened up a symbolic

breach in the Movement’s collective memory, which was almost impossible to mend. In

addition, the political affiliation of the Movement's leader with PSD, one of the political

parties in power, was seen by many as an obstacle to the radicalisation of the local

struggle.

43 Because of these positions, the leader was compelled to carry out the rhetorical and

practical work of symbolic reconstruction of the struggle, and this involved carefully

separating the positions and actions of the government from those of the President. In

the weekly meeting that preceded the second uranium shipment, faced with the

radicalism of many of the participants, he called for dignified restraint and passive

resistance based on non-violent actions.

44 On the date of the second shipment, 23 November 2004, the police apparatus in Canas

was impressive.21 The sale of depleted uranium by a Portuguese scientific institution

assumed the status of an affair of State, and it was viewed as a test to the ability of the

State to apply sovereign power and enforce the rule of law (Foucault, 1997). This aspect

of the issue was reinforced by the presence of a great number of local and national

journalists from the press, the radio and the national TV networks. From early morning

dozens of persons concentrated near the uranium company premises. Throughout the

morning the Movement's leader talked to the demonstrators through an improvised

sound system, and called for dignified, non-violent resistance, saying that he was

waiting for an answer from the President.22


59

45 Around 12:15 the police opened the gates so that the trucks could leave. As people said,

this time was strategically chosen by the police commander, since, given the traditional

gender division of labour, women had returned home to prepare lunch for their

families. As a form of resistance, the demonstrators sat down on the road. The police

commander, enforcing the law and reinforcing the repressive role of the State, warned

them that road blocks were a crime according to the Portuguese Criminal Code, and

read aloud the relevant section of the law.23 Afterwards, riot police began removing

demonstrators from the road. It was a pure confrontation of bodies, as the police did

not use any of its special equipment. There were two types of confrontation: one of

bodies disciplined and trained to enforce authority against male demonstrators

accustomed to hard work, in a pure logic of masculinity and virility; the other, of

policemen against women, many of them quite old, which emphasised the grotesque

nature of the event and led to outbursts of emotion and violence.

46 After these confrontations, the police managed to elude demonstrators and to drive the

trucks safely out of town. Enraged, dozens of demonstrators drove to the nearby

railway and cut off all circulation. A regional train was stopped at the station, and

throughout the afternoon there were violent clashes between the demonstrators and

the police, who tried unsuccessfully to make the train advance. At dusk, police forces

abandoned the site, and the demonstrators saw this as a victory over not only the

police forces but also the State and political power. At an evening rally, which was

broadcast live by some national TV channels, the Movement's leader blamed the

President for the events of the day and appealed to the President’s own experience as

an anti-fascist student during the 1960s in Lisbon, thus making a deliberate analogy

between the events in Canas and the fascist regime.

47 These events had extensive media coverage, and throughout the day there were many

live TV reports from Canas. On the following day, national newspapers carried front-

page headlines about the events, and all the articles conveyed a negative image of the

demonstrators’ actions and arguments. In Público, the front-page headline read, “GNR

[National Republican Guard] forced to intervene against demonstration in Canas de

Senhorim” (24 November 2004). In the inside pages, the title was “Canas de Senhorim

demonstrators involved in confrontations with GNR.” Alongside the detailed

description of the events, there was an inserted commentary by another journalist that

recalled the Movement's leader inflamed speech against journalists which had occurred

in January 2004.24

48 Jornal de Notícias chose to present the official declaration of one of the President’s

advisors on its front page: “Canas’ protests ‘defy democracy’.” The title in the inside

pages carried a very different message: “Canas gives Sampaio a week” (November 24,

2004). The journalist presented an extensive description and contextualisation of the

events, emphasising in the end the statements of the President’s advisor: “The

positions assumed by the Movement defy democracy and are contrary to the rule of

law. What happened today in Canas de Senhorim is nothing more than a police case.”25

49 In a clear way, the President’s advisor activated the distinction proposed by Jacques

Rancière between politics and police order. By turning local events into a police case,

he re‑established order and social hierarchies and silenced the local population’s

protests and demands. As representative of a supreme political institution, he took the

initiative of defining what is or is not political, and of denying legitimacy to the persons


60

that protested on the street. In other words, his declarations emptied out the core of

democracy: the construction of a dissensual public sphere open to dialogue

50 Another shipment was scheduled for 14 December 2004. But this time there was an

important institutional change. Parliament had been dissolved by the President and a

transitional government was in place. The Movement’s leader, who was also the

president of the parish council, called a general council meeting for the same day, to

take place outside the uranium company premises. This was a way of asserting

democratic legitimacy and mobilising local authorities, as well as a pretext to delay the

uranium shipment. During the meeting, the Movement's leader read aloud the

complete official report on the environmental requalification of the area.

51 As the day went by, the unrest and lack of coordination of the police forces were

becoming visible. The goal of the police commander was to make the trucks leave

before the hundreds of local men that worked outside Canas returned home. As the

trucks started moving at 4:30 p.m., violent confrontations ensued between hundreds of

demonstrators and the riot police. A woman was arrested and a few demonstrators

were wounded. These events would be broadcast live by all national TV channels.

52 Taking the same critical stance as before, the national press emphasised the agonistic

relationship between the authorities and the local population, viewing it as a

simulacrum of a fight with several rounds. All the news reports celebrated the re-

establishment of order and normalcy, and thus participated in the ideological work of

devaluing the protest actions, which were labelled as idealistic.

53 As a consequence of these events, and following a request by the Attorney General, the

police identified thirty people involved in the protests and summoned them to appear

in court. In his statement to the national newspaper Público (22 January 2005), the

Movement's leader declared that this was the kind of “outright intimidation typical of

the fascist period,” since the police had identified “entire families, namely those that

were more active [in the struggle].” He also appealed to all local inhabitants to

voluntarily present themselves at the local police station and declare that they had

participated in the protest against the uranium shipment. According to Movement

sources, around four hundred persons answered to this appeal. In front of the police

station some of them displayed sheets of paper with the statement “Defeat happens

only to those who stop fighting.”

54 The Movement hired a famous lawyer from Coimbra to defend the prosecuted

inhabitants of Canas. In declarations to the newspaper Jornal de Notícias (February 11,

2005), on the occasion of the first court session, this lawyer minced no words and stated

the following:

This is a matter to be resolved politically by the competent political powers. It isnot a relevant criminal situation, which justifies the intervention of the courts. [...]To bring these matters to the courts is to instrumentalise them, to put thempossibly at the service of political interests, with the goal of intimidating anddissuading people from getting on with the struggle for what they find just andnecessary for their hometown. [...] This should be solved by Parliament, by thePresident of the Republic and the Government, and not by this dramaticmetamorphosis that turns honest and hard-working people into criminals [...]. Thisis the kind of behaviour that is typical of dictatorial regimes.

55 In one of the weekly meetings of the Movement, it was established that all the legal

fees, including the lawyer’s, would be paid with money raised among the population of


61

Canas, as way of showing the community’s solidarity with the persons that had been

indicted.

4. Conclusion

56 The process of democratic normalisation in Portugal has been grounded in a

parliamentary consolidation of the rule of law, in an inexorable process of re-elitization

of political life through representative democracy. The rhetoric of an European and

modern Portugal participates in the constant work of construction of a selective

collective memory and of wilful forgetting of a recent revolutionary past, slowly and

systematically eroding the ideals of equality and popular participation.

57 The professionalization and the specialisation of political life reinforce the internal and

self-centred dynamics of the political arena. This closed circle, this microcosm,

legitimises itself through the technical-bureaucratic rationality of a project of

modernisation whose centre is the production of a legal and political system that

affirms order and the established hierarchies. This functioning of the political sphere

projects itself onto, and is reproduced in, the media, where journalists, newspaper

editors, columnists and political analysts, many of whom are parliamentary

representatives, produce disqualifying discourses on popular protest actions in

Portugal. Labels like populism, caciquism, caesarism, and so on, reshaped according to

the requirements of the democratic game, imply irrational behaviours and

underestimate the capacity for political subjectivation of common citizens, suppressing

the concrete socio-political processes that explain certain actions or representations in

the field of politics.

58 This point of view allows us to understand why political authorities and agents in

Portugal have such extreme reactions when confronted with election boycotts, for

instance. These boycotts bring common citizens into the political space and the public

sphere, and allow them to affirm their citizenship and their right to participate in the

political – often outside party politics – by using their voices and their bodies to disturb

the myth of a conflict-free democracy. By suspending the principles of representative

democracy, election boycotts compel us to reflect on the concept of citizenship and the

rights and obligations that it entails. The disruption of the normal democratic game

clearly points to the fictionality of the idea of a government of the people, by the

people and for the people. Boycotts are extreme political acts that create opportunities

for the critical construction of political subjects and for an analysis of the basic

principles of democratic regimes.

59 The two episodes that I described in this article allow us to understand how Portuguese

elites construct and legitimise, through a legalistic and technocratic vision, the powers

that be. In this case study, the political and media elites were faced with a local popular

movement with a long tradition of struggle and a repertoire of innovative and

disruptive actions that targeted the national political institutions. The endurance of the

local movement is explained by a proximity regime with civic relevance, based on a

non‑commodified social interaction that builds a mythic community of equals. This

idea of equality is reinforced in the daily activities of the Movement, since the local

elites do not participate in them. The strong politicisation and radicalisation of the

Movement’s members contrast with the institutional vision of the leader, who favours

political negotiation, compromise and the purely political game.


62

60 The voting and vetoing of the bill that would establish Canas as a municipality were a

direct consequence of the specific rules of the parliamentary game, of the tense

relationship between the political institutions involved, and of the interests of political

parties. As such, they show the reproduction logic of the political and institutional

spheres in Portugal, and the way in which local demands can be used to perpetuate the

established hierarchies and the status quo. The delicate political balance that is in place

is not conducive to raising questions about the notion that local populations are too

naive and irrational to decide about their own destinies, to participate in territorial

planning options. The planning of the national territory belongs to specialists, and the

rule of law in a democratic state ensures that the appropriate legal and technical

mechanisms are fully applied.

61 The events connected to the shipping of depleted uranium show how the Portuguese

State effectively uses its sovereign power. By enforcing the law and using physical

violence, a simple financial operation was turned into an affair of State. The size of the

police apparatus that was mobilised and the judicial indictment of many of the local

inhabitants reveal the ways in which the State seeks to normalise the functioning of

democratic institutions by removing from the public space the voices and bodies that

engage in protest. As Jacques Rancière aptly noted, police action seeks to effect an

adequate distribution of places and functions and to construct that which legitimises

this hierarchical distribution.

62 The two episodes can be seen in light of this concept of the police. The national elites

defined the political agenda and the relevant themes to be discussed, treating common

citizens as mere consumers of policies, political discourses and measures. This was

done by the combined action of three components: the law, which criminalises an ever

greater number of actions in public space, defines strict territorial planning rules, and

so on; the national media, which defines what is newsworthy and what should be made

visible in the public sphere; and, finally, the security forces, which stand as the bedrock

of the power of the State.

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NOTES


1. For a detailed description of the socio-economic characteristics of Canas de Senhorim, located

in the Central Region of Portugal, the inception of the local movement and the main events

related to its struggle from 1974 to 2000, see Mendes (2005). My sources for the present article

are news published in national and local papers on these two episodes, official documents


64

(proceedings of parliamentary debates and committees) and leaflets and flyers of the Movimento

de Restauração do Concelho de Canas de Senhorim [Movement for the Restoration of the Municipality

of Canas de Senhorim].

1. For a review of community studies, see Liepins (2000); for a comprehensive critique of

community theories, see Estanque (2000: 40-67); for an anthropological analysis of the territorial

anchoring of identities in Portugal, see Silvano (1997).

1. Canas de Senhorim was a municipality until 1852, when it was abolished and annexed by the

municipality of Nelas. The Movement for the Restoration of the Municipality of Canas de

Senhorim was created soon after the 1974 Revolution, and achieved a significant victory when

the town got a separate postal code after several days of confrontation with the police in August

of 1982. In 1997, Luís Pinheiro, a secondary-school teacher who had the support of the Social

Democratic Party, became the leader of the Movement. From then on, it would conduct its

struggle on the national level, negotiating with central political authorities. On the history of

protests in this town, as well as on the political and social dynamics associated with the

Movement, see Mendes (2005).

2. We must keep in mind that elites constitute a plural and heterogeneous reality, and that there

are competitive processes between different elites (political, economic, cultural, etc.) and various

degrees of autonomy as well as different forms of recruitment. For a recent re-evaluation of the

concept of elite, see Heinich (2004). For the Portuguese case, see Pinto and Freire (2003).

2. For a discussion of the complexity of identity issues, see Mendes (2001).

2. In addition to PSD, the Popular Party and the Communist Party would also hold meetings in

the parish.

3. In an article on globalisation and social movements, François Dubet shows the increasing

importance of self politics, recognition and private life in the political arena (2004: 703).

3. The local parish council had been operating as an administrative committee since its

dissolution in January 1999.

4. In her brilliant book about May 68 and its political consequences in France, Kristin Ross (2004)

argues, closely following Jacques Rancière, that much of the sociological production about the

events of 1968 in France tends to share police language and discourse, obliterating the

singularity of experiences and the subjective sense that people attribute to this singularity (2005:

30-31).

4. The movement's leader was officially affiliated with PSD.

5. Barry points to the relevance of an ethnography of the political that is attentive to the

specificity of political events (2001: 177).

5. On 11 June 2002, the Left-Wing Bloc (BE) also presented a bill to the same effect.

6. This law (no. 87/1989, of September 9) established the geographical, demographic,

infrastructural, electoral and institutional conditions to create municipalities. In a small country

like Portugal, few localities meet the established criteria, and given the long tradition of

centralisation, the creation of municipalities is a controversial issue. Since 1974, only four new

municipalities have been created: Amadora, Odivelas, Trofa and Vizela. The first two are large

peripheral localities of the metropolitan area of Lisbon and their creation was consensual. But

the other two only became municipalities after fierce political debates and violent protests,

especially in Vizela.

7. The national newspapers conveyed the idea that Fátima was consensual among all parties in

Parliament, as it was an internationally famous Catholic shrine and counted on the political

leverage of the Catholic Church. The Socialist Party and the President also favoured the

establishment of Canas as a municipality (Jornal de Notícias, 2 July 2003). But according to the new

bill, the localities of Esmoriz (proposed by PS), Tocha (proposed by CDS‑PP) and Canas de

Senhorim (proposed by PSD and BE) did not fulfil the requirements to become municipalities.


65

The prospects of change in the national law led the Communist Party to propose another locality

for municipality, Samora Correia, and PS and PSD followed suit with proposals to the same effect.

8. This was due to backstage political negotiations between the Canas Movement and Ministers of

the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister, Durão Barroso. The first formulation of the revised

law, requiring a qualified parliamentary majority, due to the opposition of PS, made the creation

of the municipality of Canas de Senhorim impossible. Only on the eve of the last plenary session

on the creation of new municipalities, 30 June 2003, would this change be approved in the

parliamentary committee, with the favourable votes of PSD and CDS-PP, and the opposing votes

of PS and PCP.

9. Confirming internal party divisions on this issue and backstage negotiations and pressures,

PCP would also propose a bill to establish Canas de Senhorim as a municipality on the eve of the

last plenary session.

10. The fact that the final vote on the amendments to the general law would take place only two

days later, on July 3, clearly shows the inconsistency of the whole process involving these two

bills.

11. Opinions were not unanimous among the socialist representatives, and since party discipline

on voting was exerted, many of them made personal floor statements, including the socialist

parliamentary leader (Público, 2 July 2003, article by Nuno Sá Lourenço, “New municipalities

reduced to Fátima and Canas de Senhorim”).

12. In 1998, when Odivelas, Vizela and Trofa became municipalities, many people from Canas de

Senhorim demonstrated their disagreement in the galleries of Parliament and were removed by

the police. In 2003, this low profile strategy was so entrenched, and consciously assumed, that

the bill on the establishment of Canas de Senhorim as a municipality was not even included on

the parliamentary agenda.

13. In the collective memory of all the protest actions undertaken by the Movement, hunger

strikes stand as the most difficult, the most painful and the less effective, being perceived as

offensive to personal dignity and humiliating as citizenship acts. Hunger strikes would be

completely ruled out of the Movement's repertoire of protest actions.

14. This feeling of superiority in the confrontation with the established powers (which I

witnessed from the time I began fieldwork, in 2000) would be seriously shaken in the events

related to the shipment of depleted uranium in 2004, which I will describe in the next section of

this article.

15. For the concept of political microcosm, defined by violence and closely connected to

Manichean notions of life and death, see Abélès (2005).

16. Similar arguments can be seen in the columns of Henrique Monteiro, a well-known journalist,

published in the national weekly Expresso (July 5, 2003), and Vital Moreira, a Professor of

Constitutional Law at the University of Coimbra, in Público (July 8, 2003).

17. The veto was on the law approved on July 3, which defined the new criteria for the creation of

municipalities, and not on the bills approved on July 1, pertaining to the specific cases of Fátima

and Canas de Senhorim. In juridical terms, these bills had no legal basis after the presidential

veto.

18. The fact that this recommendation was never taken up shows that political institutions and

parties were unwilling to discuss such controversial issues.

19. This group consisted of about twenty persons, evenly distributed by gender and ranging in

age from 20 to 80 years old.

20. The national press presented different interpretations of this episode. In the newspaper Jornal

de Notícias (November 16, 2004), the headline “Protests can't prevent the shipment of 30 tons of

uranium” suggested the powerlessness of the population. In contradistinction, the headline of

the newspaper Público was “Population of Canas de Senhorim blocked the shipment of uranium at

ENU” (November 16, 2004).


66

21. In addition to hundreds of regular officers of the National Republican Guard, there were in

the field K9 teams, mounted police and dozens of officers of the anti-riot Operational Battalion.

22. The radicalism of some of the demonstrators was apparent in one of the banners, which read

“Sampaio=Salazar,” thus comparing the current President with the fascist dictator Salazar.

23. In Portugal, the criminalisation of road blocks was only introduced in the Criminal Code of

1995, partly as a consequence of the blocking of the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon in 1994.

24. The same journalist, Nuno Amaral, would sign an opinion article with Nuno Sousa, another

journalist from Público, classifying the actions of the movement as blackmail on the President and

urging him to publicly acknowledge the impossibility of Canas ever becoming an autonomous

municipality (27 November).

25. In the same article, the Minister of Internal Affairs stated that “The obstruction of a railway

or of any kind of public space is a type of behaviour that demands decisive intervention because

it constitutes in itself an illicit act of a criminal nature.”

ABSTRACTS

In this article, the author seeks to understand how citizenship is constructed by examining the

case of a local space strongly marked by collective mobilisation. The case study is used to

understand how the dynamics of the local community intersect with the logics of control and

power of the central state. He argues that the concepts of populism, bossism, caesarism, and so

on, reshaped by both media and political elites according to the requirements of the democratic

game, point to irrational behaviours and disqualify the capacity for political subjectivation of

persons and populations, suppressing the socio-political processes that may explain certain

actions and representations in the field of politics.

INDEX

Keywords: citizenship, collective action, protest, local movements, central state, representative

democracy, participatory democracy

AUTHOR

JOSÉ MANUEL MENDES



67

From Identitary Construction to aWeb of Differences: A Glance atPortuguese-language Literatures*

Laura Cavalcante Padilha


EDITOR'S NOTE



1. Brief initial outlines

1 The act of pondering the issue of the Portuguese identitary cartography implies

considering a trajectory which ranges from its imaginary construction to its expansion

beyond European geographical and cultural boundaries and buttresses. Portuguese-

language literary production captures this trajectory, from the point of view of both –

it is fair to say – its “luminous” affirmation and its problematic aspects, as well as in its

collision with the ethno‑cultural differences of the non-European peoples whose

symbolic matrices coloniality (Mignolo, 2003) sought to elide. The Portuguese language

was – and is – the cultural element which was made into one of the main foundations of

the identitary constructions in the European space as well as of the sedimentation of

what we can consider as being the web of differences which was and is woven in the

colonised countries where it became either the national tongue, or the official

language.

2 Following this imaginary trajectory, built up by the ethical, historical and cultural body

of Lusitanity, two symbolic constructs are arrived at: Lusism, interpreted as something

which spills over from the linguistic domain to become a way of affirming itself in the

European space, and Lusophony, which emerged in the wake of the expansion of the


68

language and culture beyond Europe, when both were disseminated among peoples of

different origins in America, Africa and even parts of Asia and Oceania. In this process

of expansion, the Portuguese language gained other subjects who “speak it, speaking of

themselves in it,” as Eduardo Lourenço puts it (2001: 123), and for this very reason it

became one of the main threads in the weaving of the fabric of the new ethno-cultural

web which thus emerged.

3 The sea, by then made Portuguese, as much by the concrete historical given as by the

imaginative route represented at first by the aesthetic efficacy of Camões’s epic,

becomes the main route of this identitary trajectory in the process of expanding, by

which, more so than the language, an entire imaginary was disseminated. Lusism and

Lusophony intersect, the latter being the destination of the former.

4 In turn, the literatures produced in Portuguese ultimately become a tool of cultural

dissemination. It is through them that, in the case of European literature, the diverse

euphoric and dysphoric moments of Lusism are played out; and the other literatures

also show the serious clashes engaged in by the different cultures which were subdued

in the process of seizing unknown peoples and lands, always following the dictates of

the political‑economic project of overseas expansion. Lusism and Lusophony ultimately

become important focal points for researchers who choose such literatures as their

research areas. The study of these literatures is greatly enhanced by considering Lusism

and Lusophony in relation to each other, showing the clashes that arose from the

construction of the Portuguese-language cultural space. This applies as much to the

literature produced in Europe, it too brimming with perplexities, confrontations and

erasures, as it does to the artistic manifestations of the dominated peoples, who from

the start were excluded from the literate universe.

5 Such issues gain even more theoretical-critical weight at the present time when

literary and cultural studies find themselves in an in-between space created by the

porousness of their previously significantly rigid frontiers. Now new negotiations

emerge with a bearing on meaning in the area of contemporary literary studies, as a

predictable outcome of their dialogue with cultural studies. This new methodological

stance seeks to contribute to a break with the politics of silence which always

descended on that which was deemed as being “non-canonical,” and for that reason

was removed to the margins of what hegemonic literary culture hallowed and still

hallows. Productions in the Portuguese language, especially those of non-European

origin, were summarily excluded from the “Western canon,” as has already been quite

widely discussed and exposed by the “resentful ones,” in Harold Bloom’s classification,

the latter, incidentally, being one of the authors most closely committed to setting up

that very same canon (1995).

6 A prior statement of clarification is here in order as to my own locus of enunciation,

Brazil, the place which underpins my personal and academic discourse and, to some

extent, conditions my reading – allowance will be made, I hope, for this personal touch

– of the issues raised from this point on. In addition, my research interest lies in

African literatures in the Portuguese language, with special emphasis on those

produced in Angola and Mozambique. Such a network of belonging and choices causes

a kind of crossroads to emerge, moulding types of knowledge and issues of a cultural

nature among which I move and which lead me to tread various and supplementary

paths. Although diverse, these have a point of convergence: the Portuguese language, a

frame which embroiders and reinforces my own subjective, historical and political


69

experience and, in a special way, my imaginary readers – the latter indeed being the

trigger for the reflections which follow.

7 The goal of this article is clear: to bring to the surface the Lusism movement, such as the

Portuguese literary series mapped it, and to problematise the issue, for some

equanimous, of Lusophony. This construct is sustained by what Lourenço aptly terms

“Lusophone mythology” (2001: 178), an idea that will provide the necessary

foundations for the reflections contained in this article. The starting point, or the first

movement of the text, as already stated, will be an analytical reading of Lusism, as it

plays itself out in the Portuguese fictional webs. I will seek to apprehend in them a type

of historical, symbolic and cultural concatenation, ranging from the creation and

reinforcement of the concept, to some degree euphoric, to the later problematisation

which exists to this day. I will then consider the issue of Lusophony, understood in the

power of its difference, more than in any presumption of unity and/or hegemony.

2. Lusism: Construction, reinforcement andreconfigurations

8 In the linguistic field, and referring readers to Antenor Nascentes, the word Lusism

means “a word, expression, construction, peculiar to the Portuguese language spoken

in Portugal” (1972, 4: 1015-b). This meaning, with merely formal variants, appears also,

for example, in the Brazilian edition of Caldas Aulete’s dictionary, coordinated by

Nascentes himself (1958), reappearing in Antônio Houaiss’s dictionary (2001) and again

in that of Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira (1988 and 1999). Alongside this initial

meaning, a further definition is recorded whereby the word is presented as a synonym

of Lusitanity, that is, according to Antônio Houaiss, “the peculiar, individualising

character or quality of what or who is Portuguese” (2001: 1792-c). Thus, Lusism is seen

as an identitary construction, and it is on this sense of the word that this article will

centre.

9 As is well known, each and every identity – even if we take into account the fact that

there is no assumption of immutability, permanence or essence underlying the

meaning of the concept (Hall, 2003: 10-3) – presupposes a feeling of belonging, almost

always arising when there is a face-to-face encounter, or at least a symbolic negotiation

between an “I” and an Other, or, to use Todorov’s term, between “us and them”

(Todorov, 1989). Thus, to build itself as difference in the Iberian space, Portugal initially

confronted the Other, the Castilian, since its creation by Afonso Henriques, of the first

Alphonsine dynasty. To set himself up as master of the land already extended by his

father, Henry of Bourgogne, the son fought against his mother and stepfather for

possession of the territory. This matricidal confrontation birthed what we can call,

with Lourenço (1988), the traumatic origin of the Portuguese State, a trauma which

would, from its inception, mark the “imagined community” (Anderson 1989) that we

call Portugal.

10 In the texts of Fernão Lopes, the first Portuguese medieval chronicler, we find the first

foundations for the building up of Lusism, just as the 16th century, with Camões’s epic,

hallowed it. We need but read, for example, the episode regarding the so-called “Siege

of Lisbon” in Crónica de Dom João [Chronicle of King John] (1st ed.: 1644), to realise,

especially because of the force attributed to the besieged people in the city, the nature


70

of the clash between the Portuguese and the Castilians. For his part, the second

chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, foregrounds, in his Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta [The

Chronicle of the Capture of Ceuta] (1st ed.: 1644), the spatial situation of Portugal,

wedged between Spain and the sea, when he writes: “as for us, on one side the sea

encircles us and on the other we have our battlements at the kingdom of Castile”

(1992: 52). This territory thus “encircled” with but two frontiers, takes on another

historical, symbolic and even geographical dimension, as it expands its European

spatiality when it appropriates, by the colonising process, parts of America, Africa, Asia

and Oceania.

11 The work which captures the moment of expansion and greatness, whereby the then

known world gained another configuration, becoming globalised, is beyond doubt Luís

Vaz de Camões’s The Lusiad (1572). It is no coincidence that his modern epic, written in

Portuguese in the 16th century, became the great sustaining block of the Portuguese

imaginary, or its great reference, as Lourenço so rightly notes (1988: 151). The moment

of unequivocal greatness leaps from history into fiction, as it is woven, as already

stated, by the aesthetic efficacy of Camões’s words. The future opens up for Portugal,

luminously, in the poetic word, on the eve of closing down abruptly upon the death of

King Sebastian and the loss of Portuguese political hegemony to Spain (1580-1640).

12 Thus, the greatness mapped out along the path of fictionality in a sense signals what

became of national history itself, as we know. “Every Portuguese road leads to Camões”

and to his epic, thinking here with José Saramago (1984: 180-81). The text seems to fit

every purpose, and from it, ideologies and counter-ideologies have gathered strength,

as well illustrated in the dialogue proposed, again, by Saramago in his play Que farei com

este livro? [What Shall I Do with this Book?] (1979). The following dialogue unfolds

between Diogo do Couto, Camões and Damião de Góis, emblematic historical subjects,

and takes place in the tense moment when the epic poet, in the fictional fabric of the

play, struggles to have his book published, finding closed doors where he would wish to

find help:

LUIS DE CAMÕES: However, the book will not be different from what it is.DAMIÃO DE GÓIS: The difference will lie in the eyes that read it. And the part thatemerges victorious will see to it that the book is read by the eyes that best suit it.DIOGO DO COUTO: And the losing side, what will they do?DAMIÃO DE GÓIS: They will wait for their turn to read and make it be readdifferently.(Saramago, 1998: 55).

13 Through this infinite possibility of readings, the European identitary fabric and its

textual reinforcement transform Camões’s epic into a promise of some measure of

future and offer the meaning for each present experienced since then, even when the

ideology underpinning the work is impugned. Through it is forged an auratic past, of

which the Portuguese national imaginary has always been able to avail itself,

disseminating it in one form or another. Thus it is that Lourenço states the work to be

“the unanimous reference of what we can call, in all ambiguity, the ‘national spirit’”

(1988: 151).

14 Therefore, Camões’s epic text builds up the locus of strength of Lusism, going beyond

the constraints of time and space, mainly because the work makes clear a

supplementary counterpoint in what concerns the construction of the identitary

features. Better put: The Lusiad shows the Portuguese diachronically as a people which,

in European terms, confronted its Iberian peninsular Other, the Castilian people, in


71

order properly to outline its profile in difference. This profile has one of its strongest

features in the languages spoken on either side of the frontier. At the time of Gama’s

voyage, turned into synchronic time by the presentification of the narrative – lest we

forget that he too is one of the narrators of the Portuguese “past” – other Others

appear, outside the peninsular and European space, Others who in the end intensify

even further the features of the Lusitanian identitary cartography. The south, where

Portugal is located and which defines it in the European space, seeks spaces in the

southernmost South, where the “noble barons” will experience, to quote Fernando Gil,

“the surprise continually aroused by that which is absolutely new, as terrifying as it is

dazzling” (1998: 37, emphasis in original).

15 Throughout Camões’s poem, there is thus a parade of several Others – Moors, Africans,

Indians – who reinforce Lusitanian identity by the face-to-face encounter with different

historical-cultural subjects who confront them as difference. The portals of the

colonising process open up, and such Others are compelled to exchange their identitary

masks in the name of Faith and Empire. This process brings about the intersection of

“radically different and even incompatible socio-cultural universes,” as António

Cornejo Polar notes (2000: 77), when directing the spotlight on the colonising process of

Hispanic America. In the Portuguese case, this was the moment when Lusophony

pounded its first stakes into the cultural ground and began to build its future. For this

very reason, Camões’s text will be summoned once more in the part that follows.

16 The locus of greatness became problematised, right from the 17th century, when,

following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Portugal became a “semiperipheral country

within the modern capitalist system” (2001: 23). The greatness built up by the history of

the 1500s and amplified by Camões’s voice was then plunged into crisis. From then on,

it became more and more diminished, taking on, in the 19th century, an undeniably

traumatic dimension. This latter century saw the crumbling of the entire euphoric

imaginary construction of Portuguese identity. In its historical condition as a European

imperial country, Portugal lived, in the 1800s, through a harsh experience of successive

losses that led to what Margarida Calafate Ribeiro has termed a “hangover brought on

by a century of traumas.” And she continues:

Weakened, struck at the core of its imperial consciousness, Portugal found itself inits small and marginal European position, lacking a new space that, in its own eyesand in others’, might make up for its actual little weight in the “Balance of Europe”,on which Garrett had, really and symbolically, weighed Portugal. (Ribeiro, 2004: 55)

17 Two writers of fiction in particular gave shape to this blank page which resulted from

the fading away of what was then already a merely imaginary greatness. They are

Almeida Garrett and Eça de Queiroz. Among these writers’ works, two stand out as of

greater significance to this article’s reflections, and they are respectively Viagens na

minha terra [Travels in my Homeland] (1846) and A Ilustre Casa de Ramires [The

Illustrious House of Ramires] (1897 and 1900). These put forward a new way of reading

Portugal and its identitary cartography, at that historical moment of sheer symbolic

and institutional crisis.

18 Garret’s Travels propose the trajectory of the Tagus, in lieu of starting the journey

across Camões’s sea, in search for an “ever-to-be-found port,” as Pessoa’s future voice

was to proclaim (1974: 79). Readers are invited by the novelist to push onward into the

land where they will discover the submerged myths and understand the meaning of the

people’s strength as a transforming agent of history. To achieve his intention, Garrett


72

takes up anew the perspective of Fernão Lopes, especially in the scene where, almost at

the end of the novel, the narrator decides to leave Santarém, the last river port of his

journey into the country. In this chapter, and upon viewing the decaying tomb of King

Fernando, one of monarchs whom Lopes had hallowed in his chronicle, Garrett analyses

the decay of Portugal itself. He asks where the tombs of Camões and Duarte Pacheco

might be – the latter incidentally always more forgotten than the former – and

proceeds to state:

Another ten years of barons and of nature’s way, and infallibly we will lose the verylast sigh of the spirit from this agonising body which is Portugal.I believe this with the utmost conviction.But I have better hopes, nonetheless, because the people, the people is sound [...].We who are the base prose of the nation, we do not understand the poetry of thepeople. (Garrett, 1946: 375)

19 It is interesting to see that the word breathed in Travels continues to be that of Camões,

just as the inside out motor of greatness is sought in the fabric of the 16th century epic

in a game of attraction/revulsion, as evinced in Chapter VI. In this, the narrator affirms

his continued belief in Camões, that he feels “while reading The Lusiad” an “intimate

feeling of the beautiful” (emphasis in original), although he cannot enjoy “pleasures in

the present, in which love of the fatherland” is perhaps no more than a

“phantasmagoria,” compromising the “hopes for the future” (Garrett, 1946: 47-8).

20 The quest for past greatness, moving Garrett’s journey more along the path of the

medieval chronicles than along that of the Renaissance epic, is announced in the first

chapter in a spirit which is positive, joyful, and, to some extent, euphoric. This fades

away at the end, but the author salvages the beauty of the land and of its submerged

myths and stories, despite the disheartened final reckoning. At the beginning, with his

usual irony, the narrator presents his “proposition,” telling of the ambition of his

“pen” which “wants a broader subject” and announcing his “travels,” situated in the

present and not in past memories, although he extols the glorious memory the land

holds. He goes on to say: “I am going to Santarém, no more and no less.” He then

signals his intent to “chronicle” everything he sees and hears in this Ribatejan town

which he considers “the most historical and monumental of our towns” (ibid.: 3-4). The

result of this journey towards historical and identitary recognition is, when all is said

and done, crossly melancholic, as we know. It closes in the shape of a ruin,

metaphorised by that of the town of Santarém itself, although, as already stated, the

people is extolled:

Decidedly I am leaving, I cannot be here, I do not want to see this. It is not horrorthat strikes me, but nausea, disgust, and anger.Cursed be the hands that defiled you, Santarém... that dishonoured you, Portugal...that debased and degraded you, you nation which has lost all, even the pillars ofyour history!...Woe, woe, Portugal! (Garrett, 1946: 374)

21 For his part, fifty years later, Eça de Queiroz too decided to stage journeys, in The

Illustrious House of Ramires. The first of these, imaginary with regard to the story within

which it is embedded, appears in the form of a rewriting of the past by the main

character, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires. This rewriting becomes the novel A torre de Dom

Ramires [The Tower of Dom Ramires], originally a romantic poem authored by one of

Gonçalo’s uncles. It duplicates, back to front, the present time of the narrative,

supplementing it.


73

22 In the character’s work the past returns, phantasmagorically wrapped in and wrapping

itself around the present time of the narrative. Thus, even though taking the

personalised shape of a family history, the latter is necessary to “resurrect these men

[...] the brave soul, the sublime will which nothing bends” – as José Castanheira, friend

and publisher of the novel, says when he urges Gonçalo to write about his ancestors.

Camões again appears, and Castanheira’s desire is, through fiction, to take up anew the

lost greatness, shaking off “[b]y the renewed awareness of our having been so great, [...]

our tepid consent to remain small!” (1947a:19). The success of the novel when it was

published shows that the wish to “startle Portugal” was fulfilled (ibid.: 18), nourishing

the present with past greatness, even though its author, Gonçalo Ramires, repudiates

that past at the end of his work, when, moved by the cruel and inhumane death of Lopo

de Baião, the Bastard, he is led to say, “the martyrdom of the Bastard had left him with

an aversion for that remote Alphonsine world, so bestial, so inhumane!” (ibid.: 377).

23 On the other hand, there is a second journey in The Illustrious House, on the diegetic

plane, that is, that of Gonçalo to Africa on the passenger ship Portugal, another of the

author’s corrosive ironies. From thence Gonçalo returns four years later, by this time

transformed by the colonial African adventure of 1819. Through this adventure, and in

the spirit of what Rider Haggard had put forward in King Solomon’s Mines – a novel

which was translated or merely revised by Eça (we do not know) and published in

Portuguese in 1891 – Gonçalo is enriched, returning, as his cousin Maria Mendonça’s

letter advises, “On great form! More handsome even and above all more of a man.

Africa has not even lightly tinged his face. He is as fair-skinned as ever” (ibid.: 409). The

greatest nightmare of the European white West had thus been averted: during his

Mozambican sojourn, Gonçalo’s skin had not been darkened, nor had he “gone native.”

At this moment, Eça’s text shows the power of the intrinsic racism that Kwame

Anthony Appiah writes about (1997), whereby the historical Western white subject

considers his race to be hegemonic, to the detriment of other races, always seen as

inferior and thus a fair target for subjugation, indeed as they are presented in The

Lusiad.

24 Seen through our own eyes today, we can problematise the sudden enrichment of

Gonçalo, who, with the money picked from the African shilling and pence tree,

transforms his metropolitan territoriality both physically and economically. Thus is

shown, in the play of the imaginary, that Africa was still worthwhile and that it had

been possible to fulfill the character’s dream of “a field in Africa, under murmuring

coconut trees, enveloped by the peppery scent of radiant flowers, which thrust upward

from among boulders of gold” (ibid.: 59). In this context, it is worth turning to an essay

by the Brazilian historian Alberto Costa e Silva, in which he challenges the notion that

the character could possibly have gained riches by legitimate means in such a short

period of time: “And if the nobleman of the Tower got rich in such a short time, it can

only have been through much luck, abuse or cunning, or because he oppressed the

villages that existed in his domain and wrung from them everything they had to give

and yet some” (Silva, 2000: 13). If we bear in mind that Gonçalo is identified with

Portugal by Gouveia, because of his “entirety [...], his weakness, sweetness of

disposition, kindliness” (Queiroz, 1947a: 418), and especially because of his physical and

symbolic re-energising, his enrichment may be read as the possibility of renewal of the

European colonial power. António Candido sees in Gonçalo’s revitalization “the re-

energising of the national consciousness which inspired so many Portuguese


74

intellectuals at the end of the 19th century, as epitomized in the patriotic biographies of

Oliveira Martins in his later phase” (2000: 21). With its own corrosive irony and its play

of ambiguities (as I see it), the text lets the matter remain unresolved, as a merely

possible interpretation. In this returning, I perceive, purely and simply, yet another

barb of Queirozian irony, a tangible result of his own disenchantment.

25 In the 20th century, Pessoa’s Mensagem [Message], taking the path of messianism, sets

out to conjure up anew the greatness of the past, giving more weight to the power of

symbolic, rather than physical, territoriality. For this reason, after singing the building

of his “Portuguese sea,” he ends his poem with the line “The hour is come!,” followed

by the Latin expression “Valete, Fratres” (1974: 89).

26 After the Revolution of the 25th of April of 1974, and with the independence of the

African colonies – to take a necessary leap – the process of Portuguese autognosis finds

its deepest thrust especially in fiction. Among the voices which show the shattering of

what might be called euphoric Lusism, it is difficult to choose those which best

represent the endeavour to establish new historical-cultural negotiations which might

still sustain the quest for a present time by national subjects who were divided and

plunged into an identitary crisis. While Gonçalo Ramires leaves for Africa on the

“passenger ship Portugal,” it is not by accident that the narrator of Helder Macedo’s

Partes de África (1991) returns from it at the age of 12, reaching Lisbon on another vessel

called, in contradistinction to the former, Colonial. On this return voyage, the narrating

subject tells us the ship put in at “Cape Town, Moçamedes, Lobito, Luanda, São Tomé,

Madeira.” As a result of moving from one territory to the other, he later shows he had

“an undefined feeling of injustice which [he] confusedly feared might correspond to a

new way of being in the world” (1991: 13).

27 This “new way of being in the world” is one of the hallmarks of the subjects who can be

seen in the works of José Saramago, of Helder Macedo himself, of Lobo Antunes, of João

de Melo and so many others who, like the latter, set out to conduct some type or other

of Autópsia de um mar em ruínas (1984) [Autopsy of a Sea in Ruins]. To materialise this

intention, at times, as with Garrett, the direction chosen is inland, as is the case of

Saramago’s work, be it in Levantado do Chão [Risen from the Ground] (1979), or Memorial

do Convento [Memoirs of the Convent] (1982); at others, writers point to post-colonial

travel and to exile as the only possible response to the shattering of a subject who no

longer identifies with the sense of the hegemony of Empire. Such is the case of Partes de

África and even of Pedro e Paula, also by Helder Macedo (1998), besides the novel which I

will take as a possible paradigm for the problematisation of Lusism, in the period

following the overthrow of Salazar’s fascist regime and the loss of the colonial empire.

The novel concerned is Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal [The Splendour of

Portugal] (1997), a title which clearly echoes the national anthem, whose lyrics were

written by Henrique Lopes de Mendonça. Non‑coincidentally, part of the anthem is

used as an epigraph, which in itself configures a more than symbolic and symptomatic

rhetorical procedure. I quote:

Heroes of the sea, noble people,Brave and immortal nation,Lift up today anewThe splendour of Portugal. (Antunes, 1999: 5)

28 The novel smashes to pulp in every sense the motif proposed, staging, rather than the

splendour, the absolute decadence of the overseas imperial dream. The writer achieves

this, at times by making the narrative action unfold in the former colony, Angola, by


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now transformed into an independent nation, at other times by changing the space of

action to Portugal, to which the last three descendants of a white Angolan colonial

family repair in the post-independence period, at the outbreak of the civil war in this

African nation. Loneliness, illness, madness, exile, hallucinated reality characterize

both spaces, turning the “splendour” into a sea of ruins whose “autopsy” is carried out

in an angst-ridden and surprising fashion.

29 Forsaking any form of linearity, this text displays the fragmentation of national history

–projected metonymically onto that of subjects without a family locus – by structuring

the narrative from dated fragments which are organised into three parts, according to

the viewpoint of this colonial family’s three siblings, exiled in a land which is no longer

theirs, Portugal, and with which they no longer identify – Carlos (the father’s bastard

son and a mestizo); Rui (the schizophrenic son of an adulterous affair of his mother’s);

and Clarisse (the couple’s daughter born in wedlock). Throughout the three parts, the

mother, Izilda, speaks from Angola, more precisely from the interior of this country.

Her words are triggered by the play of memory which envelops the different periods of

the character’s life since her rural childhood, always in the Cassanje region.

30 In contrast to the lyrics of the national anthem, Izilda, a white woman whose forebears

were Portuguese colonists, is not a “mighty dawn,” but a being immersed in a dark

night with no exit. In addition, her “mother’s kisses” do not protect or sustain her

children “against the affronts of fate.” Quite the contrary. Through the imagery

associated with this character, the anthem loses its patriotic sense and turns inside out.

Furthermore, as Izilda does not leave her Angolan territoriality, or her “fatherland,”

not returning to Portugal, she compels the reader to plunge into an ever-elided locus

from the perspective of coloniality, which is sustained from the start by hegemonic

Lusism itself. In this cartography, Lusism is thus reconfigured in the shape of loss, as if it

were a film negative.

31 The death of Izilda, gunned down by Angolan government troops – and not by UNITA –

at Christmas of 1995, the date of the piecing together of the textual mosaic, shows her

place of non-belonging, her exclusion from Angola too, her nowhere place, in sum. On

the other hand, the supper which does not take place, during which the siblings were

meant to meet – in the European metropolis which is Lisbon and in Carlos’s belated

dream of seeing them again – undoes any chance of renewing ties of affection. Each of

the three emerges in their irreversible loneliness, which at the same time negates any

chance of rebirth to which the idea of Christmas might point. In Maria Alzira Seixo’s

felicitous analysis, “It is, in fact, the issue of agency on the post-colonial plane which is

here at stake, and which in this work follows upon the confirmation of the strangeness

and disruption of identities” (2002: 353).

32 This “disruption of identities” offers one of the keys to reading The Splendour of Portugal

and other contemporary Portuguese fictions in which Lusism is reconfigured and sets

forth in search of new meanings, as yet concealed in the margins of a future-to-be.

Perhaps Saramago intuited a possible solution in his Jangada de Pedra [Stone Raft]

(1986), showing “the peninsula” as “a child who was formed on its travels and now

tosses in the sea in order to be born, as if it were inside an aquatic uterus” (1986: 139).

The new chance for rebirth points here to a reconfiguration of Lusism, sustaining the

very idea of Lusophony as a symbolic place to be erected, since the raft drops anchor – in

an equally symbolic geographical coordinate – between Africa and America.


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3. Lusophony: Symbolisations and the web ofdifferences

33 I have already stated that, just as much as Lusism, Lusophony at first constitutes a

linguistic fact. As with the former, it comes to mean, in a more encompassing context, a

political gesture which affirms Lusitanian symbolic-cultural strength, as is the case

with Francophony, Anglophony, and so on, constructions whose point of departure is

signaled by the hegemony of the colonising nations and by the equally hegemonic

language spread by the colonising process.

34 The competent research conducted by Ana Isabel Madeira, within the Prestige network,

traces “the trajectory of the emergence of the Lusophony category” (Madeira, 2003: 6).

This author begins by showing the late recording of the term in dictionaries, which

coincides with the equally late entry of the construct in the area of Portuguese Studies.

This situation can also be confirmed by the fact that in Brazil the term only appears in

the dictionary edited by Antônio Houaiss. It reads as follows: “1. the sum total of those

who speak Portuguese as their native language or otherwise. 1.1. the sum total of

countries having Portuguese as their official or dominant language” (2001: 1793-a).

Also, in the electronic version of Aurélio’s dictionary (1999), the following is recorded:

“Adoption of the Portuguese language as a cultural language or lingua franca by non-

native speakers; this occurs, for example, in several countries colonised by the

Portuguese.” This compiler provides a further definition: “A community formed by

peoples who ordinarily speak Portuguese.”

35 Having read these definitions, it becomes quite clear that Lusophony is always conceived

of in an oppositional way, whereby the Portuguese language manifests itself as

“mother‑tongue or not,” “official or dominant,” or further “cultural language or lingua

franca.” In other words, there is always a difference in the use of the language and in

the relation of belonging established by its use. This reinforces, to return to Madeira,

“the notion of Lusophony as a unit in the functioning of discourse [...] as a feature in

the chain of narratives that articulate the history of the peoples who use the

Portuguese language” (Madeira, 2003: 13). The “feature” singled out by Madeira

becomes blatantly obvious in Houaiss’s definition, when the latter spells out such

“chain of narratives” in square brackets:

[Besides Portugal, Lusophony includes the countries colonised by Portugal, asfollows: Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé andPríncipe; it further includes the varieties spoken by part of the population of Goa,Damão and Macau, in Asia, and also the variety spoken in Timor, in Oceania](Houaiss, 2001: 1793-a).

36 In the context of the reflections I propose here, the space I shall approach will be that

of the African countries once colonised by Portugal, whose literature, as already stated,

is my main field of research. However, I will also call upon Brazilian literature, for, in

the community in which we all, speakers of Portuguese, take up our place, there is a

series of identifications that bring us together, side by side with the far-reaching

diversities which differentiate us. Since Portuguese literature has already been covered

in the previous section on Lusism, I will not discuss it here. However, we cannot ponder

Lusophony without going back to The Lusiad, if literature in Portuguese is the goal of the

mind’s eye.


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37 The nature of the meeting of the Selves, the Portuguese, and the Others, the Africans,

in the specific case of the 16th century epic, is brought to the fore in several passages. In

the play of representation, at times the encounter becomes more palatable, when the

possibility of linguistic communication is there, at others it turns into fortified

battlements, when the always “alien” “people” does not have a grasp of any

recognisable code. There is an issue, raised by the navigators right at the start of the

voyage (Canto I, 42), which eventually opens the curtains of the first protocolar scene

presenting European subjects and the inhabitants of a small island glimpsed by Gama. I

transcribe it (my italics): “What people can these be (they said to themselves) / What customs,

what law, what king might they have?” (1972, I, 42: 71). The issue thus posed becomes the

motif for later encounters with other identitary formations.

38 Continuing the previous scene, the Portuguese present themselves thus: “Portuguese

are we from the West / We search for the lands of the Orient” (ibid., 50: 17). To this

statement the Others thus engaged retort in Arabic, understood by some, as the text

clarifies on several occasions:

We are (one from the islands replied)Strangers in the land, law and nation;For the natives are those whomNature created, lacking law and reason. (ibid., 53, 1 to 4: 75)

39 The Black Africans, owners of the island which has already been invaded and which we

will later learn is called Mozambique, are excluded from the scene and viewed as being

created by nature, “lacking law and reason.” On the representational plane, the void of

the subject who owns the land is thus established. It is only in Canto V, therefore much

later in the text and through Gama’s words, that readers are informed of the existence

of a prior encounter – the first in the narrative’s flashback montage, with the Blacks

metonymically represented by the figure of one of them, described as “a strange, black-

skinned being” (ibid., V, 27, 6: 296). In the next stanza, this “strange being” is

characterised as being “more of a savage than the brutish Polyphemus” (ibid., 28, 4:

296).

40 At this point in the narrative, the linguistic battlements take shape and the result is

incommunicability between the two ethno-cultural groups who, for the first time, come

face to face. Gama says: “He neither understands us, nor we him” (ibid., 28, 3: 296).

There is thus no dialogue, nor a protocolar introduction, for there is no prior

knowledge of the codes of either people, which leads to an absolute impossibility of

linguistic intercourse. Inevitably, all this will be followed by the first physical clash,

with arrows on the one side and firearms on the other. The cultural worlds are

mutually exclusive and confrontational, precisely because of the absence of porous

linguistic frontiers where they might intersect. This is, incidentally, the moment when

the curtain is raised on the drama of colonisation, coinciding with the moment when, I

repeat, Lusophony starts to become future, and the language of the dominator enforces

itself as hegemonic, because it is the only one which makes sense in that “alien” world

where it puts in, a world characterised by “savagery.”

41 At this stage, there is a need to clarify that we, the former colonised, speak the

Portuguese which has reached us as a legacy of the European other, and with the

variants resulting from the cultural formation of each of our countries, mapped by

geographical lines and boundaries set down by the hegemonic colonial power. It is in


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this Portuguese language that we tell of ourselves and, in some places, build part of our

national identities.

42 Emphasising the strength of these linguistic diversities that differentiate us, José de

Alencar, the Romantic writer who, more than most, sought to construct the pathways

of a Brazilian literary nationality inscribed in difference, rhetorically asks, in his

preface to the novel Sonhos d’ouro (1872) [Dreams of Gold]: “Can the people who suck

the cashew fruit, the mango, the cambuca and the jaboticaba speak a language with the

same accent and the same spirit as the people who drain the fig, the pear, the apricot

and the loquat?” (1953: 88). We all know that the verb “to suck” means the same as “to

drain,” but between the two signifiers and their respective significations there is an

Atlantic distance separating the gesture and the “flavour” of the two actions, besides

the diversity of the fruit which is “sucked” or “drained.”

43 On the other hand, we must consider that the Portuguese language was harshly

imposed by European domination, as can be seen, for example, in the rigid rules of the

statute whereby the process of assimilation in Africa was upheld. We should not forget

that assimilation was the only way Blacks had of accessing a range of rights enabling

them to rise to merely middle-ranking citizenship status. In his penetrating analysis,

Alfredo Margarido summarises the meaning of this imposition, when he states that the

tool of linguistic domination aimed to

ward off the Other and most especially the groups classified by European proto-anthropology as falling under the category of savages: those without a territory,without a government, without a religion, Africans and Native Americans. Which isnot to say that Asians were entirely free from this condemnation. Tell me whatlanguage you speak and how you speak it, and I will tell you who you are not – suchcould be the central aphorism associated with Portuguese linguistic practices.(2000: 66-7)

44 It is starting from this idea of linguistic dominance, to which the deliberate erasure of

autochthonous symbolic representations is linked, at every stage under the dictating

force of European representations, that Lusophony must be considered, including it in

the context of the “sociology of absences.” As formulated by Arriscado Nunes and

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this sociology is to be understood as “a resource [...]

capable of identifying the silences and the multiple manifestations of ignorance which

define the incompleteness of cultures, of experiences and of knowledges” (2003: 26). It

is in this space where silence is erected on that which we do not know and do not even

wish to know that Lusophony moves. Precisely because of this, it must be pondered as a

political gesture that underpins an entire symbolic construct, through which frequent

attempts are made to erase the web of differences which nevertheless insist on

projecting themselves onto the meshes, in the event, literary, woven by the fabric of

the imaginary of producers from the countries once colonised by Portugal. As Cornejo

Polar quite aptly stresses with regard to Latin-American literatures, a formulation

easily extendable to African literatures, such productions set themselves up as

a field unlocked to the unsaveable heterogeneity of plural and dissident voices andletters, to the many stages of a history which is more awe-inspiring and dense thanits linear equivalent, to the various, nuanced and confused consciousnesses whichcross them and confer on them bewildering consistency. (2000: 84).

45 Turning once again to the linguistic issue, a basic assumption must be considered when

pondering the community of the seven countries where Portuguese appears as a

mother‑tongue, a cultural, official or dominant language. It is the fact that, in the


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intercontinental projection of this language, there is a foundational difference between

what happens in Brazil and Portugal, on the one hand, and what happens in the

historical-social space of the five African nations, on the other. Here, Portuguese is but

one of the languages used and not the language which confers national “unity” – let

allowance be made for the term. For this reason, there can be no skirting the matter of

plurilingualism when working on the literatures of the five nations, in addition, of

course, to all the diversity to be found in the cultural dimension, made even more

sweeping by such linguistic polyphony. In this regard, Inocência Mata clarifies:

[I]n the case of the African literatures, in contrast to their Portuguese and Brazilianequivalents, we must not forget that this literature [in the Portuguese language]represents part – a significant part, it is true – of the literary systems of thePortuguese-speaking African countries, which systems also include productions inAfrican, creole or autochthonous languages. (2004: 350)

46 This realisation is important when pondering the issue of Lusophony within the context

of that part of Africa which adopted Portuguese as its official language. It is not simply

the case that in some areas national languages are spoken to a larger extent than the

European variant, but also that these countries produce literary works in these

languages, albeit in small number. In addition, these very often confront Portuguese

within the same artistic‑verbal production, as attested in the poetry of Odete da Costa

Semedo, a poet from Guinea-Bissau:

Irans of Bissau from Klikir to Bissau bedjufrom N’ala and from Renufrom Ntula and from Kuntumfrom Ôkuri and from Bandim[...]The seven djorsons of Bissauwill be presentthe souls of the katanderaswill be present. (2003: 83-4)

47 In one of her chronicles, entitled “Mother-tongue,” the Angolan poet and historian Ana

Paula Tavares stresses linguistic crossover and addition in the context of her culture:

I have always taken pleasure in observing the generous alchemy of the Portugueselanguage, adding its voice to the Umbundu song, smiling at Kimbundu humour orincorporating words fit to make milk go off, characteristic of the Nyaneka language.The reverse is also valid and works for the entire universe of the Bantu languagesand not just those spoken in the territories where today Portuguese is also spoken.(1998: 13).

48 At this point, it is worth mentioning the famous Brazilian “Letter to the ‘Icamiabas’,”

one of the chapters in Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928), in which the

anthropophagic parody of the use of the language appears stripped of disguise. This

occurs in the letter from the initial fact of Macunaíma’s showing native Sao Paulans’

lack of knowledge of what “icamiabas” might possibly be – another way of saying

“Amazons,” according to the character, in the “spurious” (1978: 59) and would-be

erudite voice built up in São Paulo, the place where the letter is written. The passage

below, initiated by an inside-out return to Camões, shows how the issue of the use of

the Portuguese language, in the Brazilian modernist project, aims to reinforce

nationhood, for which purpose it picks up anew Alencar’s project, endowing it with a

different meaning:


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The sun had not risen five times since we left you, when [...] on a fine night in theIdes of May of the past year, we lost muiraquitã; that others spelt muraquitã, andcertain learned beings, eager for arcane etymologies, spelt muyrakitan and evenmuraquéitã, smile not! [...] this word, so familiar to your Eustachian tubes, is almostunknown in these parts. (Andrade, 1978: 59)

49 The ironic tracery of the letter discloses that in São Paulo – a metonymic

representation of the Brazilian cities where the colonising might solidified to a greater

extent – two languages coexist: the spoken (“a barbaric and multifarious wordifying”)

and the written one, “very close to that of Virgil [...] a gentle tongue which, with

unimpeachable gallantry, is called the language of Camões!” (ibid.: 107). The Brazilian

modernist project sought to set up another locus of speech which would serve as a

possible new model for the African nations, when they committed themselves to dis-

assimilating from the prevailing European models. An example can be found in the

poetry of Manuel Bandeira, in which the utterance of the people, the popular street

cries, the songs, the new rhythm, etc., inseminate the poetic corpus, bestowing a

certain ‘Brazilianity’ to the contours of this corpus, as the first stanza of “Berimbau”

clearly illustrates:

The aguapés of the aguaçaisIn the igapós of the JapurásMove, move, move.The saci calls: ‘yes yes yes yes!’‘Awoo, awoo, awoo, awoo!’ howls the iaraIn the aguaçais of the igapósOf the Japurás and of the Purus. (1977: 196)

50 For this very reason, some African poets such as Agostinho Neto, António Jacinto and

Viriato da Cruz, for example, identified with this new rhythm in Brazilian poetry, as

Bandeira expressed it, in turn creating diversified pathways and rhythmic modulations

characteristic of a poetic utterance in difference. This is shown – to linger on just one

of the productions of one of the poets – in “Punishment for the ‘Rascal Train’” by

António Jacinto, in his explicit dialogue with Bandeira’s “Iron Train.” Let us read the

following fragments:

Coffee and breadCoffee and breadCoffee and breadHoly Mother, what was that, engine driver?[…]Oh, Mr. Stoker Chuck fireInto the furnace‘Cos I needA lotta strengthA lotta strengthA lotta strength (Bandeira, 1977: 236-37That rascal traingoes bygoes straight by with the power it haswoo-woo woo-woo woo-woochuga-chuga chuga-chuga chuga-chugaclickety-clack clickety-clack clickety-clackthe rascal traingoes by (Jacinto, 1985: 23)


81

51 On the other hand, African national literary projects use the Portuguese language itself

as a way of facing up to the dominator, seeking to shatter normative rigidity and

presenting distinct verbal solutions with which to structure the bases of an artistic

production in difference. If the Greek phoné means sound, what we perceive at first is

this intrinsic change at the basic sound level of the language, a procedure which is not

restricted simply to this phonic level, but which increasingly goes beyond it, to reach

the syntactic and morphological corpus of the language. This is what we detect, for

example, when reading the novels of José Luandino Vieira, likewise Angolan. To

illustrate this aesthetic procedure, I quote a passage from this author’s novel João

Vêncio: os seus amores [João Vêncio: Regarding his Loves] (1979), a work in which we

have yet another problematic hero, like Macunaíma, and his utterance in difference as

regards European norms:

I not like people – effing camundongos! The guv’ment should make hut villages faraway for dese idiots live in. The city would be just shaked out beauty,houses’n’trees, nuttin’ else. Nobody what come and hassled him with their catingas(1987: 81)

52 Outside the centre where Lusophony is set up, on its margins, to be more precise, a web

of complicity is thus created, as shown, for example, by the importance which reading

Jorge Amado’s fiction had for the process of African authors’ literary growth. This

occurred precisely because Amado stages, on the one hand, the self-justifying life-styles

of Bahia Blacks and, on the other, because he opts for staging an aesthetic of

deprivation whereby the excluded attain their turn and voice, showing in that voice an

utterance in difference:

No one had noticed Jubiabá had arrived.The Macumba man spoke:– But he died an ugly death...The men lowered their heads, they knew full well they couldn’t take on Jubiabá,who was a witch-doctor.[...] He spoke in Nagô then and when Jubiabá spoke Nagô the blacks were leftquaking:– Ôjú ànun fó ti iká, li ôkú. (1983: 33-4)

53 The interviews which Michel Laban carried out with Angolan and Mozambican writers,

among others (Laban, 1991, 1998), make it very clear how important reading Amado’s

work was – in addition to others, of course, such as that of the Portuguese neo-realists –

for the growth of readers who would become the writers of the future in the countries

concerned. The Mozambican Noémia de Sousa stressed this importance when,

responding to the interviewer, she explained why she had written her “Poema a Jorge

Amado” [Poem to Jorge Amado]: “This is because of Jorge Amado’s books: there’s one

book [...] I think it’s São Jorge dos Ilhéus, that says: “Come my Black girl and sit on the

jetty” [...] or could it be Jubiabá? And I was deeply affected by Jorge Amado” (Laban,

1998, 1: 307).

54 For all these reasons, it becomes very clear to readers of the African productions of the

late 1940s onwards that these writers wished to undermine the authority of the Other

who colonised them in historical and literary terms, by carrying the artistic word to

their own symbolic territoriality. In so doing, they sought to overcome European

authoritarian power, confronting it face to face. They turned this word, “initially an

enigmatic sign of the ruling power,” as stated by Polar, into a “territory to be preserved

or conquered, almost as if it were a segment of the politics or of the economy of


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appropriations, expropriations and reappropriations, which tense and cut through

colonial life in its entirety” (2000: 83). Language is one of the foundational elements of

such an “economy,” the result of which is a process of reallocation of the imaginary.

55 In “Hino à minha terra” [Hymn to my land], a sort of response to the Lusiad navigators’

inability to name difference, as sung in the 16th century epic, José Craveirinha re-names

his Mozambican historical-cultural universe. His “hymn,” in contrast to the Portuguese

equivalent deconstructed by Lobo Antunes, is grounded on pride and a positive

outlook. It opens with an epigraph that acts as a kind of proposal which throws down a

riddle, so attuned to African taste:

The blood of the namesis the blood of the menSuck it too if you can bring yourself to do itYou who do not love it

56 And the poet goes on, after this epigraph/riddle:

Dawn breaksOn the cities of the futureAnd a yearning grows in the names of thingsAnd I say Metengobalame and Macomiaand Metengobalame is the warm wordblacks made upand nothing other Macomia[...]Oh the beautiful lands of my Africk country[...] and all the names I love beautiful in the Ronga languageMacua, Swahili, ChanganaXitsua and Bitonga (1980: 21-2)

57 This blood of African names, which lends lustre to so many other languages and

cultures in the continent in their foundational ethno-cultural diversity, shows the

cosmogonic power of the African word, always an even-further beyond-of-itself. It

connects the visible and the non-visible; the living and the dead; the past and the

future, as taught by Makhily Gassama, Alassame Ndaw, Honorat Aguessy, Kwame

Anthony Appiah, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Tidjani Serpos and so many other African

scholars working in different areas of knowledge.

58 This cosmogonic construction, which is Other, the articulator also of other

symbolisations by which European-based phonics can be problematised, allows us to

ponder, without any trace of essentialism – always a form of erasure rather than of

reinforcement, from the viewpoint of Edward Said (1995), to which I here adhere – an

Africophony, intractable, because irreducible unto itself. We need but read Wole

Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Amós Tutuola, Luandino Vieira,

Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Boaventura Cardoso, Paulina Chiziane, Abdulai Sila, Mia Couto,

Pepetela, Alda Espírito Santo and so many other “written voices” to understand the

meanings covered by this Africophony. In Brazil, for example, it is present in a

significant number of works by writers of African descent committed to representing a

locus which the literary canon always elides.

59 This Other-trace of permanence, outside symbolic European standards, spills itself out

in a broad literary constellation. Two poetical works by the Brazilian Edimilson de

Almeida Pereira and António Risério, O livro de falas ou Kalunbungu (1987) and Oriki Orixá

(1996) respectively, are more than pertinent examples of the symbolic power of this


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constellation, whose planets are other languages, other cultures, other forms of

knowledge, in sum. I quote excerpts from one of Pereira’s poems:

“Kauô Kabiecile!” “Come and see the King descend upon earth!” This is Shango’ssalutation [...] in days of old he was the fourth monarch of the city of Oyo [...]FESTAFrom ages of old the use of lightning-bolts comes to me. [...] I suffered in the love ofangels, but I crowned stone and lightning-bolt. Old words are queens and forgottenmen, the deciphering of masks. (1987: 13)

60 I quote from one of Risério’s translations in which he recreates a Yoruban oriki [praise

poem], also on Shango. It begins thus:

SHANGO ORIKI 2Shango oluasho sparking beast orobô eyeObi cheeksFire from his mouth, master of Kosso, Fearsome orisha.Punish whoever doesn’t respect youCrimson-clothed shango, master of the house of riches.Mouth of fire, feline in hunting. (1996: 133)

61 For his part, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho pertinently clarifies the power of African symbolic

matrices translated to the texts produced in the Portuguese language. Showing the

entry into this language of other forms of representation which do not refer to white

Western matrices, but surpass them, thereby creating a network of cultural knowledge

and belonging, the Angolan author writes about an artistic procedure specific to his

work, one which can be extended to several others, as is the case of the work of

Edimilson Pereira and António Risério:

If it is true that, in translating and adapting into my language sources of Africanoral expression, I have transferred onto them the stamp of my own poetic language,it is also undoubtedly true that, in so doing, I was introducing into the Portugueselanguage features of an imaginary which is OTHER. (Carvalho, 1995: 75)

62 Ruy de Carvalho’s Ondula Savana Branca [Undulate White Savanna] (1982), as is the case

of Pereira’s and Risério’s works, is tangible proof of this effort to translate something

other into the space viewed as Lusophony. This something other, though written in

Portuguese, reaches far beyond a symbolic “sonority” underpinned by a Luso-European

matrix, as is shown in the long poem “Peul,” included in the above work, of which I

quote the closing lines:

Take, at the last, the jujubas keptin the matrix of the world.Only those who have come this far can grasp them.You’re at the frontier of human knowledge.From here on divine is the science at your disposal.Foroforondou will now watch over you. (ibid., 1982: 65)

63 The construct of Africophony offers itself to us, through all these symbolic

disseminations, as a signifier capable of covering – in the case of the continent – not

one, but every language spoken there and, by extension, its polymorphic cultures

which ultimately are always transculturally recovered by literatures, in a kind of

artistic re-mapping, one of the most inspiring in the space of Afro-Luso-Brazilian

literary and cultural studies. It is in pondering this Africophony and Brazil, as my own

locus of enunciation, that I venture to raise the following issues, by way of a conclusion:

are we truly all Lusophones, journeying through Lusophone places; thinking, loving,

believing, creating, and other gerunds we might wish to add, Lusophonically? Or are we


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all, the ex-centrics, voyagers in a language which took the risk of dropping anchor in

other, distant harbours, possessing us and always containing us as identities in

difference?

64 To answer such musings, it is necessary to reiterate the historical-cultural fact that,

through the common use of our language, a fertile space is created offering mutual

possibilities for understanding, in which there is, likewise, a proliferation of many

complicities and countless interwoven histories. However, for the understanding, the

complicities and the histories to become more and more consolidated, it is equally

necessary to construct another way of reading and viewing the web of differences, so

that they can also be read and viewed without elisions or erasures laid down by any

type of hegemony of a historical, symbolic and, above all, political-cultural nature. Only

thus can Lusism fulfill its promise of a future, and Lusophony gain new, inspiring

meanings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Letras.

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inter-identidade,” in Maria Irene Ramalho; António Sousa Ribeiro (eds.), Entre ser e estar: Raízes,

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do cosmopolitismo multicultural. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 25-68.

Saramago, José (1982), Levantado do chão. São Paulo: DIFEL.

Saramago, José (1983), Memorial do convento. São Paulo: DIFEL

Saramago, José (1984), O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis. Lisboa: Caminho.

Saramago, José (1986), A jangada de pedra. Lisboa: Caminho.

Saramago, José (1998), Que farei com este livro?. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Seixo, Maria Alzira (2002), Os romances de António Lobo Antunes. Lisboa: Dom Quixote.

Semedo, Odete Costa (2003), No fundo do canto. Viana do Castelo: Câmara Municipal.

Silva, Alberto da Costa e (2000), “Gonçalo Mendes Ramires, prazeiro na Zambézia”, in Beatriz

Berrini (ed.), A ilustre Casa de Ramires / Cem anos. São Paulo: EDUC, 9-15.

Serpos, Noureini Tidjani (1987), Aspects de la critique africaine. Paris: SILEX.

Tavares, Ana Paula (1998), O sangue da buganvília: Crônicas. Praia-Mindelo: Centro Cultural

Português.

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87

Vieira, José Luandino (1987), João Vêncio: Os seus amores. Lisboa: Edições 70.

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Publicações Europa-América.

NOTES

*. Article published in RCCS 73 (December 2005).

ABSTRACTS

Based on an overview of Afro-Luso-Brazilian literary productions, this article discusses the issue

of the Portuguese language, its expansion and the web of differences it harbours. To achieve this

wider goal, the article addresses two symbolic constructs which ultimately supplement each

other when more ample linguistic constructs are taken into consideration. Firstly, the spotlight

is cast on the issue of Lusism, read as an identitary construction which, within the Portuguese

artistic-verbal space of creation, initially cast itself euphorically and then was problematised to

such an extent that it often became dysphoric. This is followed by a discussion of Lusophony, read,

with Eduardo Lourenço, as a “mythology” which takes on meaning only if account is taken of

existing identifications among the various intercontinental speakers of the language, on the one

hand, and on the other, of the diversities which profoundly differentiate them.

INDEX

Keywords: Portuguese-language literatures, Portuguese language, lusism, lusophony, identity

construction

AUTHORS

LAURA CAVALCANTE PADILHA

Fluminense Federal University, Brazil


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On the Question of Aufhebung:Baudelaire, Bataille and Sartre*

Françoise Meltzer

For Ziva Ben-Porat

1 One of the major symptoms of modernity and what for lack of a better term we call

“post-modernity” seems to be a rapt concern with notions of the dialectic.1 Left far

behind is the usual triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Hegel, of course, is largely to be

thanked for confusing things. In his Phenomenology, Hegel leaves things very murky by

continually postponing synthesis (with the promise of eventual Geist, or spirit) and

instead using the infamous term Aufhebung. From the German verb aufheben, the noun

means to preserve or lift up. Thus the dialectic in Hegel is not synthesized, but

continually lifted up to a new series of conflicting forces or antinomies. There lurks

here a potential promise of sorts: preserving and lifting up a given dialectic into a new

one belies a teleology of transcendence. Indeed, such a goal is explicit with Hegel’s

Geist. The problem is, of course, that the dialectic becomes crucial for the likes of Marx,

Feuerbach, Adorno, Benjamin and so on, where transcendence is at least overtly

rejected. What is the implication of Aufhebung in such a context? Why does it become

an issue in certain late modern/early postmodern texts?

2 There is a remainder of sorts about the Aufhebung – something that needs closer

examination. The Aufhebung, for example, is rejected by both Jean-Paul Sartre and his

contemporary, Georges Bataille, but for very different reasons. Indeed, a close look at

the argument between the two puts the Aufhebung at the center of the discordance.

What is at stake, given what Aufhebung seems to promise, is the idea and place of

transcendence. Such a notion is rejected by both Bataille and Sartre, at least on the face

of it. Sartre because he is a Marxist and existentialist for whom transcendence smacks

of religion. Bataille because life must be faced in the horror of the void.

3 Bataille decides that in one important respect, he is like Baudelaire. Bataille believes

that, like the poet, he wants what is understood as impossible: that is, he seeks a

simultaneity of contrary experiences – hama, as Derrida reminds us that Aristotle puts


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it in the Anaximander Fragment. The ‘now,’ as Derrida continues to note in the voice of

Aristotle, cannot coexist with another now. And yet this impossible “co-maintenance of

several present nows” (Derrida, 1982: 55) is what Baudelaire can be said to experience,

and Bataille can certainly be said to seek. Baudelaire and Bataille will formulate

antinomies whose co-existence is by definition impossible and yet irrevocable. They

want the antinomies of the dialectic endlessly at discordance. Such a problem of logic is

what Derrida (again) will call, with respect to Bataille, a “Hegelianism without reserve.”

Bataille, Derrida maintains in that essay, is not undergoing “inner experience” (a

reference to Bataille’s book of the same title) at all, but rather “the ‘impossible’” which

is a “torment.” There is no interior for the subject in Bataille, Derrida continues,

because there is no presence, only an impossible. And there is for Bataille no exterior,

Derrida continues, except “in the modes of non-relation, secrecy and rupture”

(Derrida, 1978: 272).2

4 The attempt to maintain two nows is an impossible possibility whose name, says

Derrida, is time. Such a gesture is what largely characterizes Bataille’s project, and

what often motivates Baudelaire’s as well. In both, the historical situation motivates a

willed crisis – a rupture – and that crisis is evident in the impossible logic of antimony,

or of two simultaneous “nows.” Bataille’s antimonies continue and exceed (in the

disturbing sense of the term) Baudelaire’s. Sartre of course, lives in the same historical

upheaval as Bataille; but Sartre refuses to enter into the double vision of Baudelaire, or

to give credence to Bataille’s economy of excess.

5 The triangulation Baudelaire-Sartre-Bataille, and the disagreements that ensue

between the latter two provide, as I have noted, an opportunity for getting at a

significant divergence in modernity, a divergence which begins with the Aufhebung and

the role of antinomies. More importantly, however, this divergence marks not only

differing notions of transcendence, history, the dialectic and so on. The deviation of

opinion between Sartre and Bataille on these issues signals, I will argue, the place

where postmodernity begins and takes leave of any modernist, contemporary thought

(like Sartre’s) that refuses to follow.

1. Baudelaire

6 Baudelaire lives in a singular situation. The first modern poet to read the city as text,

he inhabits the urban life in the time of high capitalism. The crowds of the city

suddenly have a goal (to and from work; what the French call boulot-métro-dodo);

Baudelaire as flâneur does not. He stands, in more ways than one, willfully outside the

crowd, moving in nonchalant patterns (as against the goal-oriented flow of the crowd),

enjoying an anonymity and isolation from the masses. In his essay “Les Foules,”

(echoing Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” which Baudelaire had just translated), he

writes, “Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and productive

poet” (1968: 243).3 Equal and convertible terms indeed, opposites though they may be.

7 There are times when Baudelaire revels in such opposites, and plays lustily with what

for other mere mortals is open contradiction. “Les Foules” is one such text. Other texts,

however, such as “l’Horloge,” rail against the contradiction of time, for example, in a

manner that insists on its antinomies: time crushes by going slowly: three thousand six

hundred times an hour, the second whispers, “Remember.” “Je suis Autrefois” says the

clock, and adds “Remember” again in English, French and Spanish (its metal throat,


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says the poet, speaks all languages). Remember, the poet adds, because “the abyss is

always thirsty” and “it is too late” (ibid.: 76-77). Both realizations – the hideous

slowness of time and, conversely, time’s gone-in-a-flash quality – exist simultaneously

for the poet; two “nows.” The very impossibility of their co-existence makes for the

horror of time, and the force of the poem. (We remember Derrida’s point that to

attempt maintaining two nows is an impossible possibility whose name is time). In his

Journaux intimes Baudelaire writes, “At every moment we are crushed by the idea and

sensation of time.” And he adds, creating another opposition, “There are only two ways

of escaping from this nightmare – in order to forget it: pleasure and work. Pleasure

exhausts us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose” (ibid.: 1266).

8 The problem, however, as the life and texts of Baudelaire attest, is that the presence of

two terms preclude choice. They are always, irrevocably, there. Or there is a choice

which, as Georges Bataille makes clear, merely reinforces its opposite without

annihilating the first term. There is an opposition in favor of Good, notes Bataille

reading the poet, but it is an impossible resolution. He adds that Baudelaire chose God

as he did Work, in a completely nominal way, “in order to belong to Satan.” Baudelaire

could not decide, Bataille continues, “whether the opposition was his own, within

himself (between pleasure and work) or external (between God and the devil).” “As a

child I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings,” writes Baudelaire in a passage that

Bataille will cite, “the horror of life,” Baudelaire continues, “and the ecstasy of life”

(Bataille, 1957: 42). And there is Baudelaire’s famous remark that man, at all times and

at every moment is possessed by two simultaneous postulations: one toward God, the

other toward Satan. Bataille traces a triple series of antinomies here: between pleasure

and work; between the Good and Satan; and a third coupling that encompasses the

other two: the inner (work/pleasure) versus the outer (God/Satan). Baudelaire, Bataille

tells us, is even unable to discern what is inner and what outer.

9 It is not by accident that Bataille focuses on this particular problem in Baudelaire given

that it is a problem he shares with the poet; indeed a problem in which Bataille will

exceed Baudelaire. But let us look now to another point Bataille makes (which prepares

the argument with Sartre): Baudelaire, writes Bataille, is living the relationship

between production and expenditure in history. Baudelaire’s experience is in history,

not individual (Bataille, 1957: 42). The unparalleled tension which I have noted in the

poet’s work, and which Sartre comments on in his own reading, is for Bataille the result

of “a material tension imposed historically, from without.” If Derrida is right, that there

is no interior for the subject in Bataille except as non-relation, secrecy and rupture –

then this might explain why Bataille reads opposition in Baudelaire as imposed by

history, from without. But this cannot, as we see, be a complete explanation. For

Bataille is clear that Baudelaire’s problem is a society caught in a material tension of

history. That society, like the individual, is forced to choose between the concerns for

the future and the present instant. Bataille, having first noted that Baudelaire does not

know the difference between inner and outer in this context, decides that the poet does

not realize that it is history that is pressing in upon him from the outside. The society

around Les fleurs du mal is claiming success and satisfaction as the primary goals;

capitalism is its credo.

10 Baudelaire, however, is clearly dissatisfied with satisfaction.4 For to be useful is

disgusting for Baudelaire, because it is the heart of the bourgeois ethos.5 Sartre notes

complacently that to choose Evil is to uphold Good. Bataille complicates this approach:


91

for Baudelaire, denial of the Good is, in Bataille’s words, a denial of the future and

therefore anti-capitalism. The poet’s scorn for utilitarianism is a syllogism of sorts: to

be useful is to be a good bourgeois who turns his back on the horrors of history

(perpetrated by his own class) for the sake of a future dedicated to increasing wealth.

Therefore, to refuse the Good in this sense, and to refuse the future, is to repudiate

bourgeois morality and its hypocrisy. Evil becomes a better Good.

11 The failed revolution of 1848 did much to create the irremediable presence of an

impossible series of antimonies for Baudelaire. And Barthes (in Writing Degree Zero) is

right that the tenses chosen by fiction writers after ’48 betray, not only social class, but

the relation to history as well. Because if ’48 did nothing else, it increased the

exfoliation of class begun by the “real” revolution of 1789. It is this new society that

Baudelaire had wanted to help shatter; ’48 built a new world on the foundations of a

complete bourgeois triumph, producing an anathema: a republic based (as Georges

Sand was to put it) on the suppression and murder of the working class. The self-

satisfaction of that class in the wake of ’48 is thus unacceptable for ethical thinkers.

Many writers of the period refuse, in other words, to forget. Bourgeois society, writes

Bataille, introduces a fundamental change. And he adds, “From Charles Baudelaire’s

birth to his death,” Europe undergoes a metamorphosis long in preparation. The

civilized world is now founded “on the primacy of the morrow, that is on capitalist

accumulation” (Bataille, 1957: 44). For those who, like Baudelaire, do not wish to follow,

apathy, passivity and disillusionment (as Lukacs has amply pointed out) seem the

inevitable choices.

12 Baudelaire’s poetry posits antinomies not only for compelling personal, biographical

reasons, then. The clashing of opposites in his work, the unredeemable (his word)

contradictions that risk explosion at any moment, are (to return to Bataille’s words),

history pressing in. But where is in? The doubleness which Baudelaire traces in so

many of his poems seems to trace as well the emptying out of subjectivity in the face of

industrialization. “Emptying out” such that it is no longer clear where “out” is

emptying from. In much of the poetry of Baudelaire, we see “up” and “down” replacing

inside and outside. Subjectivity, in other words – at least the subject as he understood

himself before revolution – has become a concept all unclear.

13 The encounter itself in Baudelaire suffers from antinomy – whether it be that with the

poor (where the gaze dominates), with beauty (as in “Harmonie du soir”), with the past

(“Andromaque, je pense à vous”); with places dreamed of but never attained

(“L’invitation au voyage”); even with the divine, as in “Correspondances,” where ritual

is reinscribed but the accent is on loss. And then there are, as I have noted, the eternal

above and the endless below. So, for example, the world is a dictionary of hieroglyphics

mirroring the higher realm, but we cannot read the dictionary. The “joy of descent,” as

Baudelaire puts it, leads to the gouffre (the abyss), le néant (nothingness), le vide

(emptiness) – a terrifying vide of bottomless promise.

14 The point here is not to enter into the infamous binaries that have so motivated

deconstructive and other critical theories in the last decades – binaries which, as

Levinas has often noted, lead only to changing positions and collapsing the same into

the same. On the contrary: my point is to affirm that Baudelaire’s oppositions are

irredeemable because this is his way of experiencing modernity and its Weltsraum. The

strident tension, the mental anguish and cacophony which the presence of two

opposing “now’s” cause the poet, are frequently described and experienced by him as a


92

need for rupture. “Anywhere out of the world,” he pleads in an English title. “I will

accept even death if it is something at least new,” he writes in a prose poem.

15 If for Walter Benjamin, the Fleurs du mal registers a breakdown, the loss of aura and the

ensuing shock, for Baudelaire himself modernity is comprised of the eternal and the

fleeting at the same time. One thinks, for example, of the famous poem “A une passante,”

in which a passing woman in mourning fleetingly meets the poet’s gaze (in a moment

concretizing epiphany, since it is produced by the illumination of a lightening bolt)

(Baudelaire, 1968: 88). It is a busy city street, and she is part of the crowd, he is the

observing flâneur. The poem ends, famously, with the words, “O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô

toi qui le savais!” An always-too-late, because the eternal is never begun, only as if

remembered. Halfway between Pascal (with his two infinities) and Kierkegaard (with

his notion of trembling), in Baudelaire the poetic subject is overwhelmed by the empty

parts of the city under demolition which seem to echo the absence of God, the

irrevocability of evil, the resulting failure of encounter.

16 Contradiction is Baudelaire’s duty, and explosive laughter erupts from him, as he puts

it, “without a smile.” “There is always something which breaks, which destroys itself,”

he writes in one of his journals. The antinomies are preserved and forced together to

the point of atomic fission, for in Baudelaire the contradictions of modernity are

inscribed in every conceivable realm: social, political, literary, aesthetic, architectural,

personal, philological, technological (the daguerreotype, with its prolonged staring,

writes the poet, destroys the gaze); theological (what is original sin if not the proof of

man’s misery and grandeur for the poet?), ontological – the list is endless. Modernity is

precisely the presence of two “now’s” at the same time – an impossibility which

memory and the present, like the double room, force into an endless palimpsest of

recurrence (like the eagle eating Prometheus’s liver, which regenerates eternally).

Moreover, the co-maintenance of antinomies is what blurs the understanding of where

the borders of subjectivity lie for Baudelaire: where is inside and where outside when

the very terms co-exist in a constant state of destabilization? What does it mean to turn

the subject inside out onto the modern city, a city that is under constant construction?

This might be called both the willed project and the tragedy of Baudelaire. It is in this

sense that history presses in on him.

17 The unsatisfactory for Baudelaire is then “agonizingly attractive” – satisfying, in other

words. The refusal to work is validated by what both Bataille and Sartre understand as

the “transcendence of obligation.” But Bataille argues, contra Sartre, that this is not an

individual error in Baudelaire. Sartre, writes Bataille, thinks he has successfully

condemned Baudelaire, and shown the “puerile” aspect of his attitude (Bataille, 1957:

161). Sartre thinks Baudelaire’s problems can be explained by the death of his father

when the poet was six; by his mother’s remarriage to a man Baudelaire loathed; by the

ensuing loss of his adored mother. Sartre’s book-long introduction to Baudelaire,

Bataille notes tersely, is less the work of a critic than it is that of a “moral judge, to

whom it is important to know and affirm that Baudelaire is to be condemned” (ibid.:

163). Baudelaire, Sartre has concluded in his judgment, chose to “exist for himself as he

was for others.” Baudelaire chooses the notion of his own “nature,” and after that gives

up liberty. He is therefore, in Sartrean terms, inauthentic. It is to be noted here that

much of what Sartre finds to condemn in Baudelaire he will also condemn in Bataille.

18 Bataille retorts with vigor to Sartre’s analysis: the unparalleled tension in the poet’s

work, and “the fullness with which [it] has invaded the modern mind,” Bataille writes,


93

cannot be explained by his personal errors, but by “the historically determined

expectation to which these errors corresponded” (ibid.: 42). It is not only individual

necessity which is expressed in Les fleurs du mal; the poems themselves are also the

result, as we have noted, of pressure from without (ibid.: 43). To wit: the poems were

written in a society which no longer sustained the primacy of the future in conjunction

with a nominal, sacred present (through what Bataille calls festivity: feasts, sacrifices,

an immutable notion of the Good). The new society forming in Baudelaire’s day is “a

capitalist society in full swing,” one which chooses the dams of the industrial age over

the lakes of Versailles (and similarly has Haussman build boulevards in Paris to insure

against the barricades of the future). If the present has no sacred, it is because its only

purpose is to pave the way to the future.

19 There is an irony here, of course. Bataille, the anarchist of sorts, the economist of

excess, the theoretician of violence, scholar and self-proclaimed practitioner of

sacrifice – Bataille hypostatizes rupture in Baudelaire as caused by a historical

situation: capitalist culture destroys the ancien régime’s sense of time and memory, and

makes productivity its sole virtue. Sartre, the Marxist (still, in this period) who does

not believe in the Freudian unconscious, explains Baudelaire on biographical,

psychological grounds and condemns him on existential ones.

20 For Bataille then, it is the tension in French society around 1848 which mirrors the

tension within the poet. We can call this an identification of sorts; Bataille will have the

same response to the cataclysmic events in his own day. In the wake of such political

and social upheaval, where does the “inside” of the subject lie? How can he know? Part

of the response, I am arguing, in Baudelaire at least, is to echo the external chaos in a

poetry and poetics of antinomy. Here too, Bataille identifies. Indeed, the epigraph for

his response to Sartre on Baudelaire makes an ontology of antinomy, as it were,

fundamental: “Man cannot love himself completely unless he condemns himself.”6 The

definition of man for Sartre is he-who-seeks-liberty in a moral, existential universe; he

who is condemned to be free. For Bataille, man is defined by a submission to an

interdiction, and the simultaneous insistence upon transgression. Sartre is “closed to

this truth”; Bataille, like Baudelaire, is convinced by it (Bataille, 1957: 161). Already,

then, we see the difference between Bataille and Sartre in the notion of morality, of the

very definition of the human, and in antimony as the unacceptable (Sartre) and the

indispensable (Bataille).

2. Sartre’s experience of Inner Experience

21 Sartre reviewed Bataille’s Inner Experience in February 1943, in Cahiers du sud.7 It is

forty‑five pages long, which is a rather lengthy manner of calling a book bad. The

review has been recently called a “great literary misunderstanding,” in the tradition

for example of Gide’s failure to recognize Proust’s genius, or Balzac’s misjudgment of

Stendhal.8 But “great literary misunderstanding” is not quite accurate, for Sartre’s

review is literary only in its initial concerns, and a misunderstanding only if that term

is equated with something like the will-not-to-know (which, it will be remembered, is a

notion of Nietzsche’s). The debate is first to do with philosophy: with the role of

literature in the academy and the ensuing assumptions about knowledge. It is as well,

secondly, a flexing of Sartre’s position of expertise: “Monsieur Bataille” (as Sartre

consistently refers to him) does not understand Jaspers and is confused about


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Heidegger. He uses ipseity wrong because he reads Heidegger in Corbin’s translation.

Indeed, Bataille “ne comprend pas la philosophie” (Sartre, 1947: 156). Thirdly, the

review is an argument about language. For Sartre language remains an instrument—

useful, reliable, cooperative. Alain (philosopher and famed teacher – of Simone Weil,

e.g.) – Alain, writes Sartre, is an important contemporary philosopher who “has

confidence in words” (ibid.: 148). What is Bataille doing with his “slippery sentences”

and mixtures of poetry and prose?

22 Bataille is the heir of Baudelaire and Mallarmé in that Bataille’s texts try to exceed

language itself and constantly remark on the irony of using language to describe its

ineluctable insufficiency. Sartre, a rationalist in this area, is more baffled than

admiring. For him, as he makes quite clear in “Un nouveau mystique,” language is a

tool to be honed, to be well-marshaled (adequate, rational, etc.). Though Sartre situates

Bataille’s work in the tradition of the essay, with Pascal and Montaigne, Bataille’s use of

language is for Sartre nothing less than a horror: “One guesses,” he writes of Bataille’s

style, “that this plastic, fused matter, with its abrupt solidifications which liquefy as

soon as one touches them […] could not be accommodated to ordinary language.” Or:

“the style progresses by strangling itself, tying itself into knots” (ibid.: 146). Bataille

writes by sacrificing words as bloodily as possible, adds Sartre in some disbelief, and he

shares with Camus a hatred of discourse and of language. It is no wonder, then, that

Sartre alludes admiringly, and with relief, to Voltaire – the doyen of linguistic clarity

and ease.

23 Fourthly and above all, however, Sartre’s review is an attack on Bataille’s interest in the

sacred. Yes, writes Sartre, Bataille agrees with Nietzsche that God is dead. But not only

has Bataille survived the death of God, God himself has somehow survived his own

death as well. At least, that is how Sartre sees it. Bataille says he is trying to create a

new religion without a god, but Sartre smells a rat: God, as Simone Weil was to put it, is

hiding behind the furniture.

24 This brings us to the notion of the sacred, which lies at the heart of Sartre’s problem

with Bataille. In his later essay on Manet (1955), Bataille gives his definition of the

sacred. It is “that which, being only beyond meaning, is more than meaning.” What

Bataille sees in Manet’s paintings is the “shipwreck of the subject” – that moment when

subjectivity is killed (Bataille, 1983: 69). But, as Michel Surya points out in his

remarkable biography of Bataille, what interests Bataille is not so much the dead

subject as the subject in the process of disappearing. In the words of Surya, the having-

been-put-to-death of the subject fascinates Bataille more than its proclaimed death (as

that which is finished). Bataille wants a haunting, the liminality of death at its moment

of occurrence (Surya, 2002: 471-72). And so Sartre is right: God subsists as a haunting in

Bataille. But Bataille wants this haunting, this ghost of death after death itself; Sartre

does not, for he sees in it nothing more than the transcendental returned through the

back door.

25 For Bataille, the force of the sacred, the heterogeneous, is fundamental to all social life.

The “religious” has been largely forgotten and needs by scientific method (the

influence here is of course Durkheim) to be reinstated. For Sartre, this is Bataille’s

biggest error: to imagine studying an unknowable negativity by means of a scientific

method, and in the names of Durkheim and Mauss! Durkheim, writes Sartre, is surely

rolling over in his grave. And here perhaps we can get at the heart of the matter.

Bataille’s notion of the sacred is akin to the vanishing of the subject, to the break as he


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sees it in representation itself, to the absent-presence (as we used to say) of an already-

dead God, to that which can bring being beyond meaning and beyond subjectivity. And

Sartre? Significantly, when Sartre calls his book Saint Genet, he is doing more than

evoking the play “The True Saint Genet” by Rotrou (1646). As there is a sacred for

Bataille, there is sainthood for Sartre. But what is meant by “saint” for Sartre is most

revealing. Obviously, he cannot mean it in any but an atheistic sense. By “saint,” Sartre

means that Genet is a pariah, but one who assumes his exclusion; takes a glorious

responsibility for it. Genet behaves against the norm and against convention (that

world which Sartre calls that of the salauds).

26 There lurks a double-edged meaning when Sartre refers to Inner Experience as a “martyr

essay.” On the one hand, he faults Bataille for a style which has yet to find itself but is

rife with agony, hideous passion, narrative promiscuity, and a hatred of discourse.

“Look at my ulcers and wounds,” the essay seems to say. On the other hand, Bataille is

in many ways himself a pariah and, like Genet, against bourgeois norm and convention.9 Religious terminology multiplies in Sartre’s lexicon here. Inner Experience, he notes

sardonically, reads like a combination of the Gospels and Baudelaire’s “l’Invitation au

voyage.” A combination, one assumes Sartre means, of conveying “The Truth” and

fantasizing about a voyage of exotic/erotic possibilities that will clearly never be

undertaken. And so, of course, Bataille is the founder of a new mysticism.

27 Genet, in contrast, is a “saint” for Sartre: he is the pariah, the one who is excluded by

society. We note here the opposing symmetry between Sartre and Bataille (though the

latter considered Sartre’s Saint Genet his greatest work). For Bataille, the sacred is that

which is transubjective, which celebrates in fact the disappearance of the subject in a

transcendence of silence, as Sartre calls it. For Sartre on the other hand, sainthood is

precisely that singularity which, authentic, assumes responsibility for its own history

and at the same time chooses (in this case) crime. It is not because Genet was inevitably

led to crime that he chooses a life of crime, notes Sartre: pre-determinism, no matter

the cause, erases man’s liberty and his singularity. Meanwhile, it is precisely such

“erasure” that Bataille seeks. This is a fundamental difference in the notion of being

between the two.

28 Finally, however, things are even more serious. If Bataille, as Sartre puts it, wants “to

exist completely and instantly” (tout entier et tout de suite), it must be because for

Bataille there is no possibility (even if there were a point) of choosing, no freedom for

creating essence. This is because Bataille is unable to understand that the ego (le moi) is

temporal, that it needs time to realize itself. In vain does Bataille tell us that the ego is

in shreds, comprised of instants, writes Sartre. He concludes: “for the time of interior

experience is not made up of instants.” No doubt Sartre is in part responding to a well-

intended footnote by Bataille in his article entitled, as it happens, “The Sacred”

(Bataille, 1985). There Bataille writes of Sufi mysticism as describing the dangerous

power of instants: they are like swords, cutting at the roots of both the future and past.

“the moral character of the sacred is reflected in this violent representation,” notes

Bataille (ibid.: 245). Having elided mysticism, the sacred and the instant, Bataille then

moves to Sartre for his example: La Nausée speaks of the importance of the instant “in a

significant way.” Sartre cannot have been happy with this interpretation, for it allies

him with the erasure of history. (Of course we know that Sartre later rejected much of

his own novel…) “Un nouveau mystique” provides Sartre with an occasion to articulate

his position with respect to what are for him three areas worthy, at the very least, of


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extreme suspicion: mysticism, the sacred and the instant. They all smell, of course, of

the transcendental.

29 Sartre’s conclusion is as condescending as was the opening of his review: At the outset,

he wonders if the whole of Inner Experience is no more than a long commentary on

Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur, as Camus had suggested to Sartre. At the end he

decides that Bataille needs serious psychoanalysis – but not, he hastens to add, of the

Freudian variety. Despite this dismissive ending, there is a great deal at stake here:

Monsieur Bataille, Sartre concludes, introduces the transcendental into the immanent –

not a minor point. Two further issues are equally at issue: first, the notion of

subjectivity; second, the danger Bataille’s universalizing thought poses to historicity.

As to the first (the subject), we have noted that for Sartre Bataille’s problem is that he

understands the ego as an external object, as something that does not belong to the

subject. (This is also, one might note, the reproach Sartre makes of the Freudian

unconscious). It is worth noting therefore, that we see in Sartre a certain tenacity with

respect to the singularity of the individual. As to the second issue, the danger of this

kind of mystical thinking, Sartre is clear. Bataille’s thought is totalitarian because it is

not analytic and because it swallows up history. It is inauthentic because it proclaims

the death of God but refuses atheism. Most importantly for our purposes here, Bataille

(says Sartre) considers man himself an irresolvable contradiction (Sartre, 1947: 154).

Bataille thus follows the footsteps of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Jaspers in believing

that some conflicts cannot be solved. He therefore removes synthesis from the Hegelian

trinity, says Sartre, and substitutes tragedy for the dialectic. Why tragedy? Because

Bataille wants, in fact, two nows: he “takes upon himself two contradictory points of

view simultaneously” (ibid.: 162).

30 With Bataille, the antinomies move dangerously even closer – indeed, one might say

that they are forced into confrontation. In Baudelaire, we see the ecstasy of poetry and

the abyss of spleen – a stance which produces, as Jean-Pierre Richard has noted, two

abysses (the sky and the depths). These are simultaneous, battling forces in the poet’s

soul. Whereas Baudelaire vests the clash of antinomies in the poet’s psyche, Bataille

inscribes contradictory forces on the body. For example, his infamous “pineal eye,” the

slit on the top of every human’s head. This slit is the scopic and mental analog of the

anus, and Bataille calls it “the jesuve” (a combination, among other things, of Jesu,

Vesuvius, and “Je”) (Bataille, 1985: 73‑78). It is the manifestation, and not the synthesis,

of Bataille’s violent antinomies.

31 The sun – a central image in Bataille – also insists on antinomy. The sun gives light and

sight. But the same sun also blinds if looked at directly and destroys life (rotting

corpses, notes Bataille). And if Baudelaire is obsessed by the eyes of the poor, their

gaze, Bataille is famously obsessed with “the eye” tout court. His blind, syphilitic father

clearly inspired the emphasis on the pineal eye, the slit eye, the Story of the Eye, and so

on. Yet we need not perform the error on Bataille that he believed Sartre was

committing on Baudelaire: like that poet, Bataille’s work too is imprinted by the

pressure of history and is not purely the result of a single mind and its psychology.

32 It might be well to recall here that Bataille attended the Kojève seminars on Hegel in

the 1930s (and Sartre, unlike most intellectuals of the day, did not). Bataille wrote

several essays analyzing the dialectic. Whereas he was strongly Hegelian in 1937, by

1944 he was willfully less so. History, we can agree, intervened. Clearly affected by

Kojève’s reading, Bataille comes to believe that the Hegelian dialectic begins with the


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struggle for recognition, and remains too much within it. What becomes an issue for

Bataille is the status of negativity within the dialectic. What can be the recognition of

negativity, when radical otherness is continually elided? As Bataille, puts it, Minerva’s

owl arrives when night has fallen; so too, the philosopher always arrives when it is too

late.

33 Like Baudelaire, then, for Bataille it is always already too late. It is as if the political and

conceptual upheaval that is modernity, with its wars of technology, have produced an

always already which is still too late in coming. If Hegel saw Napoleon as the Zeitgeist

on horseback, Baudelaire has no heroes except at times Satan and Lucifer. Bataille, as

Caillois was to note, has only Satan; he has lost even Lucifer.

34 For what lacks in the modern world for Bataille is the sacred – not the sacred of

organized religion, but a sacred having to do with ritual and communion. Until the late

thirties, Bataille genuinely believed that the societies he created, secret and public,

could reinstate a sense of the sacred and of community in modern life. With the war,

and with the beginnings of his illness however, he becomes disillusioned. Modernity is

such that everyday life cannot be resacralized. Whereas Benjamin will posit shock as

the recognition of the aura’s demise under modernity, Bataille chooses to express the

loss through the more violent juxtaposition of willed and simultaneous “now’s”; of the

incompatible. Roger Caillois called this Bataille’s will to tragedy (Nietzschean allusion

intended), and in this Callois agreed with Sartre’s assessment.

* * * * *

35 Bataille’s quest for community, for that which puts the subject itself at risk, for rupture

– these are aspects of a new thought for Sartre. He understands such thought as a

sneaky reinscription of Aufhebung, and rejects it as such. The apparent ease with which

Sartre rejects Inner Experience may in fact betray, in light of his subsequent work, a

temptation toward the very transcendent tendencies of which he accuses Bataille. To

reject the Aufhebung, after all, is a different proposition. In any case, Sartre will

maintain (to the end of his life) an ardent belief in human freedom, in the usefulness of

language, in human choice, responsibility, and singularity. “Un nouveau mystique,”

then, may be seen as a seminal text marking the fork in the road between modernism

and its heir: a postmodernism impatient with any sovereign subject and suspicious if

not dismissive of any notion of human freedom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland (1977), Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill

& Wang, 1977 [1953].

Bataille, Georges (1957), “Baudelaire,” La littérature et le mal. Paris: Gallimard. English trans. “A

Perfect Silence of the Will,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Charles Baudelaire: Modern Critical Views. New

York: Chelsea House, 1987.


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Bataille, Georges (1983), Manet. Genève: Skira.

Bataille, Georges (1985), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39. Edited, translated and with an

introduction by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bataille, Georges (1987), “A Perfect Silence of the Will,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Charles Baudelaire:

Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House.

Baudelaire, Charles (1968), Baudelaire: Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Y.G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois.

Paris: Gallimard.

Derrida, Jacques (1978), “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,”

Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1982), “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” Margins of

Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldstein, Jan (2005), “Of Marksmanship and Marx: Reflections on the Linguistic Construction of

Class in Some Recent Historical Scholarship,” Modern Intellectual History, 2(1), 87-107.

Heimonet, Jean-Michel (1996), “Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism,” Diacritics, 26(2),

59-73.

Hollywood, Amy (2002), Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jay, Martin (2005), Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal

Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Meltzer, Françoise (2002), “Rupture and the Limits of Reading,” Romanic Review, 93(1-2).

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1946), Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1947), “Un nouveau mystique,” Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, 143-88.

Surya, Michel (2002), Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. Trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and

Michael Richardson. London/New York: Verso.

NOTES

*. Article published in RCCS 75 (October 2006).

1. Versions of this essay have been presented in Portugal at the Universities of Coimbra, Lisbon

and Porto. This essay has benefited enormously from the discussions that ensued. I wish to

express here my gratitude to my generous hosts at all three institutions, and to thank as well the

students who attended the lectures.

2. See also Martin Jay’s reading (2005: 366-381 ff), and particularly his discussion of the notion of

experience in Bataille.

3. This and all other translations from Baudelaire are mine.

4. Sartre, 1946. For a full discussion of this argument between Sartre and Bataille, seeMeltzer,

2002: 63-6 ff.

5. For a useful study of the complex class delineations in nineteenth-century France, see Jan

Goldstein, 2005.

6. “L’Homme ne peut s’aimer jusqu’au bout s’il ne se condamne” (Bataille, 1957: 27).

7. The text, “Un nouveau mystique,” is reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I (1947).

8. See, e.g. Heimonet, 1996: 59-73. Caroline Blinder has noted that Sartre’s critique of Bataille in

question here “paradoxically repeats and redefines itself in Bataille’s ‘La Morale de Miller’”


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(Blinder, unpublished ms.). Bataille was a member of Henry Miller’s “Defense Committee,”

fighting to protect Miller from the legal action threatened in 1946 by Daniel Parker, the self-

proclaimed President of the “Cartel d’actions socials et morales.” Parker wanted to charge Miller

with obscenity for Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. Bataille wrote an essay in

the first issue of Critique, which he founded, on the “Affaire Miller.” Blinder rightly notes that

Bataille’s essay on Miller is in fact a continuation of his disagreement with Sartre over the role of

literature; a disagreement which begins with Sartre’s “Un nouveau mystique.” See especially

Amy Hollywood’s excellent discussion of “Un nouveau mystique,” in her Sensible Ecstasy (2002:

29-35 ff).

9. But as Surya and others remind us, Bataille frequently published under pseudonyms and felt

that his reputation as an archivist of medieval manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale had to

be protected. But there are of course also more metaphysical reasons: Bataille wanted to write in

order to erase his name. See Surya, 2002: 88-92.

ABSTRACTS

This essay looks at Sartre’s rather nasty 1943 essay on Bataille, “Un nouveau mystique,” and the

further argument between the two writers on Baudelaire. Sartre accuses Bataille, in the latter’s

Inner Experience, of introducing the “transcendent into the immanent”; of externalizing the ego,

such that human responsibility is elided; of leading, with its fascination with ritual, sacrifice and

community, to totalitarianism; of swallowing up history. Sartre uses Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung

from the Phenomenology as the focus of his critique: Bataille, Sartre argues, removes synthesis

from Hegel’s trinity of thesis/antithesis/synthesis (Aufhebung) and puts tragedy in the place of

the dialectic. This argument about the role of Aufhebung and the dialectic thus raises all the

issues fundamental to what was to be called postmodernism: the role and sovereignty of

subjectivity, the possibility of the sacred, the use of language, human freedom, the role of history

in textual production, the individual as against the community, and the reasons for rejecting the

possibility of a transcendental.

INDEX

Keywords: Aufhebung, modernity, postmodernity, Hegel, Baudelaire, Sartre, Bataille

AUTHOR

FRANÇOISE MELTZER

The University of Chicago, USA


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Governance and the EuropeanEducation Area: RegulatingEducation and Visions for the‘Europe’ Project*

Fátima Antunes


EDITOR'S NOTE



1. Introduction

1 The decision-making field in education has undergone profound transformations in the

past few years: on the one hand, it has become broader and more complex, including

modalities and actors of the supranational (and subnational) space; on the other hand,

it is now curtailed and emptied at the national level and where some areas are

concerned, in which process and procedures, legitimate decision-making entities,

spaces and fora have been circumvented, surpassed, ignored or reactivated under a

different status, notably as spheres for ratifying, developing or implementing the

options and decisions made at supranational levels.

2 The starting gun went off and we now find ourselves in a process taking us far from the

decision-making models, forms and processes which we considered to be typical of

pluralist Western democracies, built up over decades within national territories and

political systems, namely the European: negotiation with legitimate representatives of

social partners, more or less broad public debate, political debate – prior and inherent

to any decision-making, whether parliamentary or otherwise – among the different


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political groups, party political or other, have been absent, or highly diminished, in

recent important decisions. I refer here to the so-called Bologna Process and the

Education & Training 2010 Programme, the latter further including the Bruges-Copenhagen

Process.

3 Impacting more or less immediately, with greater or lesser effects, these different

constellations of options and political decisions, mostly or exclusively involved the

Education Ministers and/or Heads of State and of government who drew up and/or

approved statements, measures, programmes and action lines. In the more recent

stages of the Bologna Process, debates and working groups have included the

participation of European associations of higher education institutions and student

unions, with teachers and researchers having been entirely excluded up to the fourth

Ministerial Conference held on 19 and 20 May 2005 in Bergen, Norway. As will be shown

below, this new architecture and new cast in the field of education is not removed from

the deliberately sought effect of deregulation (through the summary and extra-legal

elimination of democratic controls inherent to the political processes set up in the

national systems), produced by the expeditious, weakly institutionalised Ad-hoc

Processes for intergovernmental political decision-making based on voluntary

adherence (cf. Antunes, 2005a; 2005b).

4 Thus, although the political cycle can still be analysed as comprising traditional arenas

of action – the context of influence, the context of policy text production and the context of

practice (cf. Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992) – it now involves very different processes and

actors.1

2. The agenda for education: Constitution andcontents

5 With a view to studying this phenomenon, which re-directs the process of education

policy‑making towards a supranational level, I will call upon a distinction put forward

by Roger Dale between the “politics of education” and “education politics.” From an

analytical point of view, we may consider the supranational agenda for education in

accordance with these two planes: “the processes and structures through which [an

agenda for education] is created” (drawing up the agenda, defining objectives, issues,

priorities); and “the processes whereby this agenda is translated into problems and

issues” (the contents of the agenda) (Dale, 1994: 35) and developed “by means of

(re)structuring education institutions, processes and practices” (Antunes, 2004: 40). As

a first step, I will concentrate on the plane of the constitution of the agenda for

education, as it is currently being developed in the regional bloc which includes

Portugal, the European Union, and on the quasi-continental intergovernmental

political platforms in which the EU countries and institutions are incorporated, such as

the so-called Bologna Process (and the Bruges/Copenhagen Process). Then, I will put

forward an understanding of how this agenda translates into problems and issues that

embody a content for the restructuring of education. Thus, according to the above

analytical proposal, my focus will be those elements that represent the context of

influence and the context of policy text production.


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2.1. Desired effects: Aligning education in Europe

6 Roger Dale (2005) proposes that we apprehend the relations between the nature, the

role and place of the State in Westernised countries and the processes of globalisation,

bearing in mind the direct, indirect and collateral “effects”2 of these dynamics. Taking

the second of these latter categories, emphasis is placed on the fact that the indirect

effects of globalisation on the governance of education include those consequences

which, while not being specifically sought for, nevertheless deeply alter education

systems. These phenomena are rooted in three developments: (i) “neoliberal

constitutionalisation” (its institutionalisation within the governments and political-

economic systems of several countries through treaties, accords and multilateral

conventions – for example, the set of measures known as the Washington Consensus,

the setting up of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and of the General Agreement on

Trade in Services (GATS), the European Monetary System, New Public Management);

(ii) the progressive broadening of the “network state” and the setting up of

supranational political-economic bodies (at regional or other levels) such as the

European Union or the World Trade Organisation; (iii) the globalisation of production.

The effects of these dynamics make themselves felt most acutely in changes in both the

pattern and the scale of governance, setting up a globally structured agenda for education

(Dale, 2000; 2005: 57-59; Antunes, 2001; 2004).

7 Thus, Dale proposes that, for instance, analysis of the policies involved in the

promotion of privatisation of, choice in, and markets for education should be done

within the frame of an approach which examines the politics of education, querying the

way educational resources and benefits are allocated (Dale, 1997a; 1997b). From this

point of view, what is at stake is the pattern of governance in education, defined by a

given combination of the dimensions of governance (activities: funding, provision,

regulation, property; social forms of social coordination: the State, the market, the

community, the family; scale: supranational, national, subnational) (Dale 1997a; 2005).

In this sense, it is hypothetically possible to find different patterns of governance in the

field of education.

8 Given its importance and multiple connotations, I will attempt to outline the

theoretical‑semantic field of the concept of regulation, since it is here that the

problematics under discussion largely focus, find their inspiration or references. Thus,

based on the theory of the French Regulation School, I will define the mode of regulation

as the network of institutions which favour the congruence of individual and collective

behaviour and mediate social conflicts, succeeding in producing conditions for

stabilisation (always temporary and dynamic, albeit prolonged) of a given regime of

accumulation (cf. Boyer, 1987: 54-5; 1997: 3; Aglietta, 1997: 412, 429); therefore, it

represents “a set of mediations which maintain the distortions produced by the

accumulation of capital at limits compatible with social cohesion within nations” (cf.

Aglietta, 1997: 412). In this sense, regulation may be understood as a set of activities

tending toward stabilisation and institutionalisation, temporary, dynamic, but

prolonged. For Roger Dale, regulation signifies, in the context of education, activities of

control, i.e. activities defining the framework for the provision of education services

which the State undertakes through policies and legal sanctions (Dale, 1997a: 277).

Although this formulation suggests that regulation is an exclusive attribute of the

State, it is nevertheless possible to admit that other bodies or entities likewise play a


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role here in areas defined, and possibly delegated by, the State. Regulation thus entails

defining standards and rules that make up the framework within which institutions

operate (Dale, 1997a).3 Roger Dale has, however, argued that the State did not retain

control over regulation, but rather set itself up as a “regulator of last resort,” that is, it

has kept “authority” and “responsibility” for the governance of education, although it

does not control the ways in which the activities concerned are coordinated (Dale,

2005: 67).

9 For Barroso, “in a complex social system (such as the education system) there is a

plurality of regulation sources, objectives and modalities depending on the diversity of

actors involved (their positions, interests and strategies).” Thus, “the coordination, the

equilibrium or the transformation of the educational system result from the

interaction of the multiple regulatory devices” (Barroso, 2003: 10). This author discerns

three regulatory modalities based on different alliances among pivotal actors in the

educational field: bureaucratic regulation, built up over the duration of the process of

educational system development, which corresponds to an alliance between the State

and teachers; market-based regulation, visible in many, mainly English‑speaking,

countries, from the 1980s onwards, which involves an alliance between the State and

parents, particularly those of middle-class status; community-based regulation, essayed

in processes developed at local level, for example, in Portugal over the past few years,

which is based on alliances between teachers and families (Barroso, 2003: 11-2).

10 I will, therefore, consider regulation in the field of education as: (i) the set of

mechanisms set off to produce congruence of individual and collective behaviours and

to mediate social conflicts, as well as to limit the distortions which might threaten

social cohesion, including especially (ii) the definition of standards and rules that set

up the framework for institutional functioning.

11 According to Dale, the nature and the meaning of regulation have changed over the

past few years: on the one hand, there has been a shift from what has been perceived as

a rule-governed form of regulation, which operates ex ante, through the inputs – that is, the

conditions (norms, directions, resources, policies, etc.) provided to the educational

system – to a goal-governed form of regulation, which operates ex post, grounded on

certain outputs of the system (Dale 1997a: 279; 2005). But the change has now

apparently reached another level, where the basis of regulation resides in the outcomes

determined for the system. Thus, the results required of the functioning of educational

systems must be translated into immediate performances/ products/outputs displayed

by schools and by which they will be evaluated. Dale argues that the supranational

agenda for education and training has already reached this latter form of regulation

and that evaluations such as PISA illustrate this mechanism for controlling outcomes.4

12 On the other hand, in accord with the analysis which signals the emergence and

importance of the Articulating State (Santos, 1998; Antunes, 2001), Dale spells out a shift

in the role of the State, from control of regulation to authority over regulation. As also

argued by Santos (1998), it is now in charge of meta-regulation, that is, of defining the

contexts, conditions and parameters for negotiating and confronting social interests; in

other words, it must take on the task of setting up the rules of the game and be

ultimately accountable for the failures and abuses of regulation (Dale, 2005).


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2.1.1. Bologna, deregulation and alignment

13 Some of the most important changes in the governance of education have been

advanced by means of three strategies: deregulation, juridification and New Public

Management (Dale, 1997a). The supranational agenda that has been developed through

European-scale processes, with the European Union and the Commission’s strong lead

and support, consists largely of advancing these dynamics. Deregulation aims to

remove barriers and obstacles to the free circulation of a given product or service and

to consumer choice. This entails eliminating existing forms of control, of a bureaucratic

(contests, etc.) or a democratic nature (multilateral entities, representative bodies),

perceived as threats to the liberalising programme. Typically, deregulation liquefies

political-geographical and territorial frontiers in order to maximise exchange value,

and thus enhance the power embodied in economic and cultural capital and/or

individual and collective status.

14 The programme currently running in tandem with the so-called Bologna Process

includes a sui generis facet of deregulation that attempts to eliminate national

specificities and autonomy, replacing them with a rigid supranational regulation. In

effect, conditions generally sought through deregulation programmes (free circulation,

competitiveness and choice of a given product) are in this case supported by means of a

most muscular and stringent programme formatting courses and degrees. As in other

areas, this entails a two-pronged process: removal of barriers threatening liberalisation

objectives (singularities, political-cultural and institutional ties and resources) and the

imposition of new parameters that are compatible with this aim. Amaral and Magalhães

point precisely to this risk of de-characterisation and uniformisation, convincingly

basing their argument on less trumpeted developments such as the suggestion for

designing European core programmes or curricula (Amaral and Magalhães, 2004: 88).

15 According to Dale (1997a), one of the most significant changes has taken place at the

level of pattern of regulation. European countries are leaving behind that which was their

typical orientation of State intervention, whether directly, or by means of legislation,

to take up the more typically American model of handing over a substantial part of

these functions to entities which purport to be independent in the sense that they do

not have ties (for instance, at contract level) with any of the regulated parties (see, in

Portugal, the months-long paralysis of the body responsible for regulating the health

sector or the authority which regulates competition). Thus, the predicted

establishment, at European and national level, of evaluation, quality assurance and

accreditation agencies, namely in the fields of vocational education and training and of

higher education, is the step required for the transition to this regulatory pattern

closely copied from the American market organisation model.

16 The restructuring of the cultural, political and social nature of certain spheres of

collective life by enshrining in law the directions and constraints which take on certain

partial interests as constitutive elements of the community itself, and as such

imperative in their very substance, represents the process of expressive and extensive

juridification of social life (cf. Dale 1997a: 278; Santos, 1998: 27-8). This development

withdraws ample areas from the dynamics of representation, management and

negotiation of interests and of political confrontation and conflict; in this sense, it is

part of the wider process of the limitation of democracy, as an attempt to deal with the

growing demands and claims of populations without unsustainable loss of legitimacy


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(the creation of the European Central Bank and of the Stability and Growth Pact are

well-known examples of such a strategy, of which the so-called Bologna Process is a

simulacrum displaying peculiar features and consequences).

17 Juridification is absent from the dynamics surrounding the Education & Training 2010

Programme, while in the so-called Bologna Process we witness a political agreement –

at ministerial level and with the force of an intergovernmental conference and

declaration, the latter being presented internally, and in many cases perceived, by the

majority of political actors as a binding State commitment, with legal force and,

therefore, of an imperative nature – which is translated into legal texts and, finally,

imbued with legal force, reached at the end of the process, even if invoked from the

start. I would suggest that this is a sui generis process, in which the effects of de facto

juridification precede and generate a process of juridification in law: a commitment

(purportedly carrying the force of legal legitimacy) is invoked in order to justify

bypassing established political procedures within national democratic systems, which

are carried out merely to lend legal cover to prior decisions understood as definitive.

18 This type of (ex post) juridification, bringing real consequences, is, as has already often

been signalled, a manifestation of the so-called democratic deficit which characterises

processes, institutions and political systems in Europe/the European Union (see, for

example, Santos, 1995: 286). Several voices have raised the issue of the attempt to

silence and prevent dissent, replacing debates and discussion documents with

celebratory events and proclamations (see Amaral and Magalhães, 2004) that concur

with this “exclusive and excluding” “bipolar model” which characterises “the new

architecture and the new cast of actors in the field of education” in the European

context (Antunes, 2004; 2005b).

19 The emphasis (typically inspired by the edicts of New Public Management) on

accountability – to the European Council, the European Commission (in the case of the

Education & Training 2010 Programme) and the Follow-up Group (in the case of the

Bologna Process) – suggests the development of different trajectories within the same

dynamic. In the first case, there is a sharp emphasis on achieving explicit and

measurable results on the part of education and training systems, which is analogous to

the obsession with accountability in terms of results to the governing entities of the

Programme and not to its users.

20 In the second case, we still witness a form of goal-governed regulation, although in this

phase goals are not yet expressed in terms of results obtained by education systems.

However, the implementation of the action lines defined at the regular meetings that

take place during the Ministerial Conferences is minutely monitored, with requests

being made for national reports, requests for information addressed to the responsible

bodies and the drawing up of multiple reports presenting performance indicators,

achievement graphs, scorecards, comparative performance lists and tables – in sum, an

impressive production of control instruments, procedures and methodologies on the

part of extra-national bodies, contrasting stridently with the virtual lack of follow-up,

accountability to, or even regard for the actors, groups or categories involved in the

field of action, who carry out institutional and national educational missions, functions

and policies day after day.5

21 In like manner, if we analyse the Education & Training 2010 Programme, there has been

a persistent concern since 1999 with concrete future objectives,6 later defined for the

educational and training systems of the signatory States (numbering 31 since January


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2003). To achieve these objectives, reference parameters for education and training

were set up and “reference levels of European average performance” defined in respect

of five parameters to be put in place “as an instrument to monitor implementation” of

the programme (cf. European Commission, 2002; Education, Youth and Culture Council,

2003: 7). Thus, the method for putting in place the policy/programme includes as a

crucial element the definition of procedures for controlling its degree of success. This

logic derives from the option taken in favour of resolving “political deadlocks through

recourse to technical instruments” and through re-directing “political issues to the

more diffuse domain of governance,” where “indicators and benchmarks, regulatory

agencies, expert networks, mutual accountability, partnership accords, best practice

exchanges” rule (Nóvoa, 2005: 199).

22 The indirect effects of globalisation processes in the governance of education are

openly visible in some of the most important ongoing dynamics in the supranational

context, notably in the above-mentioned Education & Training 2010 Programme and

the Bologna Process. The developments I have analysed, such as “the

constitutionalisation of the neoliberal project,” the broadening of areas and the

intensifying of the frequency with which States act according to the “network state”

model, represent the source from which spring diverse moments and facets of these

processes. We thus find projects for change in the regulation (and, therefore, in the

governance) of education, both in respect of dividing and combining the scales in which

they are embedded, and in the pattern of governance and of regulation: in this way,

supranational entities take on given activities (the definition of the pattern and form of

regulation, of the systems’ objectives, of results and of control modalities and

procedures), whereas national and local levels are naturally expected to put in place

political measures and processes which follow the supranational agenda. Again with

regard to the regulation pattern, and namely where the Bologna Process is concerned,

the General Agreement on Trade in Services appears to be on the horizon, as is the

internal services market of the European Union, and both serve as inspiration for an

approximation to the North-American market regulation model, through the creation

of devices and bodies which head regulation (such as quality assurance and

accreditation systems and agencies). On the other hand, the goal-governed form of

regulation has gained ground and impact, a development which can clearly be seen in

the management processes of social and educational change currently under way with

respect to the different sectors of the educational systems concerned.

2.2. Aligning education in Europe: Meanings, instruments andprojects

23 If we analyse the supranational agenda for education now on the plane of education

politics, we can consider “the processes whereby this agenda is translated into problems

and issues” (the content of the agenda) (Dale, 1994: 35) and is developed “through the

(re)structuring of educational institutions, processes and practices” (Antunes, 2004:

40).

2.2.1. Probable meanings: The market and cosmopolitanism

24 Taking as reference points the ten action lines defined in the Bologna (1999), Prague

(2001) and Berlin (2003) declarations,7 we can identify five categories that relate to


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diverging directions for the project of erecting the European Education Area(s) (in

higher education and research). What these European projects consist of is open to

debate; however, they appear to point to a diluting of several frontiers between

systems, institutions, spaces and trajectories. I believe, however, that this diluting of

frontiers marks processes which are highly differentiated and ambivalent, that it

testifies to phenomena displaying contradictory directions, with significantly different

origins, degrees of intensity and consequences. Thus, both the setting up of a market

grounded on more exacting or minimalist regulation, and the deepening of cooperation

or even the erecting of a European form of cosmopolitanism in the educational field

present themselves as possible directions, albeit not equally probable, of the

developments proposed and set under way. In this manner, the ten action lines can be

grouped under the following categories: mobility; convergence; regulation;

cooperation/cosmopolitanism; the market.8 As we can see, this brief outline of the

action lines suggests the potential ambiguity of these directions. The case of

convergence provides a particularly apt illustration: if cooperation among European

higher education institutions is encouraged with a view to erecting a cosmopolitan

scientific-cultural space, it is dispensable; if, on the contrary, the agenda is dominated

by the establishment of a competitive market, it is an unavoidable goal.9 Thus, the

scenario I have outlined suggests and reinforces the interpretation that creating

conditions for competition among economic-political institutions and spaces

determines the nature and rhythm of the Bologna Process (see, among others, Amaral

and Magalhães, 2004; Neave, 2004).

2.2.2. A new trilogy: Quality assurance, accreditation, recognition

25 The Bergen Conference of Ministers defined three major policy development areas

directed at achieving the goals agreed upon for 2005-2007, presented as “key

characteristics of the structure of the EHEA” (cf. The European Higher Education Area –

Achieving the Goals, pg. 6). Thus, the intense activity taking place in erecting a new

regulation framework in which institutions operate (Dale, 1997a) involves: a) a

converging model grounded on the definition of a measurement unit (the European

credit) used in the area of vocational training and in higher education, which allows

similar or matching standards to be defined for a large number of courses, diplomas

and institutions; b) defining a single system of degrees which may display minimal

variations, nevertheless countered by the suggestion of a preferred Anglo-Saxon

version of 3+2 years, or 180+120 European credits, for the first two cycles; c) the

endeavour to establish evaluation, quality assurance and accreditation systems

grounded on bodies and procedures to be articulated at both national and

transnational level (cf. Antunes, 2005b).10

26 The central position taken by standardising, codifying and measuring operations in the

learning process (the ubiquity of European credits, as a measuring unit, and of

outcomes as codification and standardisation of learning) heightens the suspicion that

the direction of this process will result first and foremost from the commercial, rather

than essentially cultural, exchanges thus made possible. Quality, transparency and

comparability, as key aims of the European Higher Education Area, are terms divested

of cultural density, incapable of describing, expressing or mobilising cultural

exchanges and fertilizations which are mutually desired and enriching, in consonance

with a project committed to cooperation and cosmopolitanism. Establishing a


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measuring unit claiming eventually to become a universal translation of educational

and learning processes threatens to slide quickly from the outline of a caricature to a

dangerous and powerful means of emptying and impoverishing the complexity of

educational dynamics and of intercultural relations. In this sense, the prospect of a

(global) casino culture, based on commercial exchanges in learning processes which, as

Bernstein argues, circulate without ever affecting subjects (Bernstein, 1998), appears as

the ever more likely horizon as a result of developments and courses of action at

present effectively in place.

27 For their part, the systems of quality assurance represent, according to some

specialists, a new evaluative and normative stratum between institutions and

administration, whose “strategic goal” is to “inject the principle of competition

between individual universities,” representing an expression of that “curious European

paradox” which consisted of the State “injecting the market principle into higher

education” (Neave, 2004: 8, 9; Afonso, 1998: 76).

28 Still according to other scholars, the accreditation model adopted in the context of the

USA higher education system, currently undergoing a crisis and the target of wide-

ranging critiques, appears to be the object of emulation selected to be included in the

so-called Bologna Process. The US model of accreditation is congruent with a higher

education system in which “the market plays a dominant role, while the federal

government is absent from the system’s regulation,” and has been the object of

persistent attempts to make it appear consensual in official documents, despite the fact

that such proposals have been greeted by heads and representatives of institutions

with opposition, controversy and discord (see Amaral and Magalhães, 2004: 89-94).

Thus, according to Amaral, combining regulation by “defining ‘outcomes’ subject by

subject” with “European accreditation systems will create an intolerable and stifling

bureaucracy” (Amaral, 2004: 6).

29 The trilogy of instruments (quality assurance, standards and guidelines, recognition

and accreditation) which we find in the making within the context of the Bologna

Process, is associated, in the Bergen Ministerial Conference programme, to the creation

of a new reality which is the provision of education services across borders. This entails

preparing Europe for this expanding universe, in which education is a component of

the service sector whose governance is in the process of mutating. In the Bergen

document, the change in the pattern and scale of governance are presented as givens (a

pattern of governance in which the State is not a central protagonist, in which the

market becomes an important, if not the major, element of social coordination, in

which supply and regulation encompass the supranational level); what is being debated

is the form and the pattern of regulation, in the above-mentioned senses. Alternatives

appear as circumscribed between, on the one hand, the construction of a consolidated

structure of regulation grounded on the three pillars of quality assurance,

accreditation and recognition, and, on the other hand, a minimalist form of regulation

determined by the requirements of the workings of the market and grounded on the

interactions and agreements ensuing from this process. Thus, the view is held that

creating a “common quality base” in the European context is “a prerequisite for the

European Higher Education Area,” that quality assurance is part of the “responsibility

[of] the individual institutions,” that recognition concerns “individuals and their need

for portable qualifications,” and that accreditation establishes “a common set of

norms.” The statement of “the need for a quality consensus” is combined with a call for


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a “global recognition system” and its associated challenges and risks: (i) management

and protection of national educational policies; (ii) the sustained assurance of quality in

education in regard to “commercial providers who are reluctant to accept

responsibility for the educational environment they inhabit”; and (iii) the globalised

trade in higher education services, which has “already become a significant segment of

world service trade,” so that “in the GATS context many are concerned about the fact

that issues of quality in education might be ignored and pushed to the margins.”

30 In this context, we find depoliticised and non-discussed options (education is a service

whose nature allows it to be integrated in the set of services which are being fully

liberalised; the global education market will continue to expand; in this context,

regulation should rest on the pillars of quality assurance, recognition and

accreditation), as well as seasoned debates and grounded choices: politically sustained

and legitimated supranational education regulation has clearly been adopted as an

alternative to regulation forms determined by the workings, interests and forces of the

market, incapable of safeguarding “the special of quality aspects of education –

specifically the interests of the weaker countries that are the potential victims of low-

quality and/or for-profit education across borders” (Conference Programme, 2005: 9,

10).

31 As remarked by Mathisen (2005: 16, 17),

One may argue that the UNESCO conventions could constitute an alternative legalframework to GATS in higher education. The conventions are legally bindinginstruments that have been ratified by over 100 member states covering everyregion of the world. […] The fundamental difference between the GATS and UNESCOlies in their purpose, the first promotes higher education trade liberalization forpurposes of profit; the UNESCO Conventions are concluded with the intention ofadvancing internationalization of higher education.

32 The mix adopted for this new regulation framework includes a rule-governed form of

regulation (harmonising the credit system and the degree system) which operates ex

ante, as well as a goal- and outcome-governed form of regulation, with ex post control (the

evaluative stratum of quality assurance systems). The possible, and foreseeably most

likely, widespread adoption of forms of accreditation at the European level (Amaral and

Magalhães, 2004), or even at national level, will strengthen the normative power of

such intermediary bodies with regard to the options made for the management and

functioning of institutions. These are liable to deepen the impact of mercantile and

competitive rationales in the sector and reduce to a minimum the values, logic and

powers associated with academic work.

33 I argue that the Bologna Process sets off the erecting of a new regulatory framework in

the higher education system; I further suggest that building up the European internal

market, spotlit by the polemical Bolkestein Directive and the General Agreement on

Trade in Services, represent horizons directing the options concerned. The

convergence around a system of degrees, the establishment of common guidelines and

standards for quality assurance systems and of common norms for degree recognition

suggest that we are faced with the creation of conditions both for the removal of

controls and features (of a democratic and bureaucratic nature) which prevent free

circulation, competitiveness and choice between courses and institutions (deregulation),

as well as for the setting up of rules and parameters under which institutions operate

(re-regulation), which are compatible with creating a market eventually invested with a

demanding form of regulation. The change in the State’s role is being completed in the


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context of the fledgling European Higher Education Area. As highlighted above, in this

framework, it appears to be up to the public political authorities, States or inter- and

supra-State bodies, to carry out meta-regulation, that is, setting the rules of the game

and assuming ultimate responsibility, in view of the failure and abuses of regulation

(Santos, 1998; Dale, 2005).

2.2.2.1. Bologna times: Echoes of days going by

34 In Portugal, the restructuring of the degree system has been ongoing since 2004. Its

first stage has been irregular and marked by fits and starts, with minimalist

involvement on the part of institutions, their bodies and actors, under explicit pressure

from the relevant authorities as regards the urgency of the measures to be taken, and

with sparse public echoes with respect to a political process based on performing the

obligatory rituals of information and consultation.11 The reform which hopefully will

thus be put in place will achieve the success which can be produced from the lack of

knowledge, the lack of understanding, the distancing and the adherence deliberately

wrought during the course of the few years of its gestation.

35 More recently, the development of the set of measures agreed upon in Bergen was

publicly presented at the end of 2005 by the Minister for Science, Technology and

Higher Education, Mariano Gago, who announced the following: (i) “a global evaluation

of the higher education system and of the policies concerned,” to be carried out by the

OECD; (ii) “the evaluation of ongoing processes and practices of quality assurance,

accreditation and assessment of higher education,” to be effected by the European

Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA); the latter is expected to

produce “recommendations that will lead to the establishment of a national system for

accreditation and of practices which dovetail with the standards and directives for

quality assurance in the European higher education area”; (iii) “a voluntary programme

of international assessment of Portuguese establishments of higher education, at public

and private university and polytechnic level, and their respective units,” to be carried

out by the European University Association (EUA) in cooperation with the European

Association of Institutions in Higher Education (EURASHE).

36 The legal text that enshrines these measures testifies vividly to the concerns,

assumptions and directions that guide this set of options. It is a matter of preparing the

country for “the challenges inherent to quality assurance, ability to meet

requirements, and international competitiveness within the sphere of higher

education,” an understanding confirmed at various stages, as illustrated by the

discussion of “strategies” and “scenarios” with respect to quality assurance in light of

the “remarkable growth in recent years in the field of transnational education and in

what has been designated as new education modalities: distance learning programmes,

university branch campuses, franchises, among others” (Resolution no. 484/2006 [2nd

Series]: 333, 332 336]. However, since the future emerges as plural and carries within it

a multiplicity of possible, or even probable, directions, we are in need of public

information and debate – at national, parliamentary, and institutional level – on the

horizons, alternatives, scenarios and implications of the choices made by the

Portuguese government. We also need to know more about the reasons behind the

government’s concerns and options, since the paucity of information gleaned from the

legal text regarding the grounds that legitimise the decision made merely clarifies the

nature of the political practice in place.


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37 In early 2006, institutions were faced with the possibility of immediate completion of

certain stages of the process of aligning higher education with the Bologna model.

Approval of the legislation altering the Basic Law of the Educational System in the

Portuguese Parliament (in mid-2005) was then followed by an exceptionally speedy

process of regulation and implementation, which resulted in about six hundred

proposals for course restructuring being handed in to the Directorate-General for

Higher Education, up to 31 March, with a view to registering adaptation to Bologna or

requesting authorisation for running courses, based on a Decree-Law dated 24 March

and on technical directives published thereafter. Attempting to glean echoes of this

period in the media, what is striking is the paradoxical feeling of vertigo and normalcy

emanating from the reports produced. With respect to the Process, we find

considerations that run the gamut from euphoric-expectant adherence to dysphoric-

resigned quasi-laments. These reactions, however, tended to concentrate on the more

immediate contours of the reformulation of the degree system or the much-invoked

pedagogic reorientation, hyperbolically called by some the Bologna paradigm.12

38 In truth, the references which emerged in the public arena centred around a few

aspects of the Process: (i) its multiple agendas, from the most explicit, regarding

mobility, employability, competitiveness, to the concealed but ubiquitous issue of

funding; (ii) the political process developed in Portugal; (iii) the perversion of the

objectives or the scope of the reform; (iv) the foreseeable consequences (positive or

negative) for students.

39 Those responsible for higher education institutions often invoke this double agenda,

underscoring especially the first facet I mentioned, although they have also called

attention to the penalising effects of the much-feared reduction in resources. Faced

with the vertigo that prevailed throughout the entire process of adaptation to Bologna at

the beginning of 2006, some contested the style in which the Minister in charge acted:

“This way of working is not in keeping with the normal functioning of a law-based

State,” accused Luciano de Almeida, Chair of the Coordinating Council for Polytechnic

Institutes (CCISP)”;13 headlines and opinion pieces published in the press also

foregrounded the alienation of students and society in general from the whole process.

Revisiting these opinions highlights the reiterated occurrence of such developments,

which reproduce and amplify in the national and institutional space the continued,

insidious corrosion of the substance of democracy, notably in the area of policy-making

and development.

40 Other opinions tended tersely to stress that conditions on offer in Portugal for putting

Bologna in place risked converting it into a missed opportunity: be it, on the one hand,

because priority was given to the production of results for external and internal display

as regards the reformulation of courses,14 or, on the other, because the Ministry seemed

to have little inclination to provide the necessary support and resources to enable the

institutions to undertake the reform (FenProf, 2006: 4-5). A glimpse can be caught in

this reading that a high price would be exacted in the immediate future for these

options.

41 Lastly, the press also registered feelings of apprehension and pessimism on the part of

students, who were totally or partially kept in the dark, and who above all expressed

concern and insecurity as to the value of Bologna training and diplomas: “There’ll be

more and more people graduating and it’s going to be more difficult to find a job”


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(Académico, no. 20, pg. 3); “Less time to study, less preparation, fewer job openings”

(Público, 24 March 2006, pg. 22).

42 This brief account of the climate of opinion in which the adaptation of higher

education courses to Bologna has been taking place, can at present only lead us to raise

questions: why have so many institutions eagerly mobilised to be at the frontline of

Bologna courses, in such precarious conditions and with no backing for their efforts?

What are the consequences, now and in the times to come? How much longer will we

still be debating Bologna in this circular and opaque continuum ranging from euphoria

to dysphoria, from expectant adherence to disenchanted critique, without asking those

who make the decisions about the grounds and meanings of their decisions?15

2.2.3. Projects for education in the European Union

2.2.3.1. Useful visions: The European Education Area and lifelong education

43 Nóvoa singles out quality and lifelong learning as the two themes that redundantly run

through the Education & Training 2010 Programme and organise its three strategic

objectives: “improving the quality and effectiveness of education and training systems

in the EU”; “facilitating the access of all to education and training systems”; “opening

up education and training systems to the wider world.” On the one hand, as

underscored above, we find the association between quality-evaluation and

comparability as a way of defining policies. On the other, access for all is intimately

linked with the multiplying of means and modalities in education and training and with

the assumption that employability depends on each individual’s capacity for valorising

him/herself as a human resource and as human capital. Opening up to the wider world

includes a number of items which point either to the world of work, or to mobility and

cooperation inside and outside the space of the European Union (Nóvoa, 2005: 215-222).

We can thus recognise the stamp of two vast projects in which the planned educational

policies are included: the European Education Area and lifelong education/learning.

44 I have been outlining an understanding of the contours and scope of these two flagship

projects that have emerged in the context of the European Union. Seduction and

ambivalence, which have represented the very core of these projects, have already

been highlighted, as well as some fundamental meanings that appear to coagulate a

large part of their potentialities (Antunes, 2005b). Thus, we are faced with probable

trajectories involving the rupture, erosion, absorption, perhaps the replacement of

current national educational systems, with the institutional consistency, coherence and

permanence which we attach to them, and of the school and biographical trajectories

as we know them. The incompleteness, the selectivity and the bias of such

developments are continually laid bare by processes and facts that unfold before our

eyes. In this way, indefinition, miscegenation and turbulence of contours are currently

insurmountable terms to designate certain dimensions of educational institutions,

while others remain as grimly policed and pronounced as ever. Following this reading, I

place great value, as a theoretical-methodological warning and inspiration, on

Bernstein’s suggestion that the meanings of social change should be sought in the

relations between the frontiers which are brought down, those that end up

strengthened and those that erupt (Bernstein, 1998). From this perspective, the

liquefying of some of the contours of the educational system goes together with its

internal fragmentation and with the crystallising of other segmentations, limits and


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territories, sketching what I have been pondering as a school of variable geometry

(Antunes, 2004).

45 In any event, it is important to recall that the relations between education and training,

between education/training and work, and between production and education/training

systems have been marked by instability, uncertainty, overlapping and miscegenation

over the course of several decades, but this does not preclude recent developments

from having taken on significant importance. Individualisation and privatisation,

individual accountability and State disaccountability have been the directions most

often associated with the lifelong education/learning project (see, for instance, Lima,

2003; Nóvoa, 2005). Available analyses tend to show some, already accumulated,

consistency and much hesitation and uncertainty. Thus, consonant with the stated

readings, the project of lifelong learning has been interpreted either as the

embodiment of a new pact between the State and civil society – with the former

distancing itself from sustaining social welfare and with the latter taking on a more

pronounced role in certain areas (Field, 2000) – or as testifying to a new attribution of

responsibilities and risks with regard to education (the State takes charge of initial

education, employers the vocational training of their employees, and individuals take

on the quota of lifelong learning) (Hake, 2005). From another perspective, Hake argues

that lifelong learning has become the “societal, organizational and individual”

condition for survival in this period of late modernity because of the globalisation of

access to communication and knowledge, the de‑traditionalisation of social life, the

institutionalisation of reflexivity (Giddens, 2000) – as an application of knowledge to

every aspect of social life – and the emergence of the risk society deriving from the

change, uncertainty, ambivalence and ambiguity of collective life in our time (Beck,

1992). Hake also points out that, both in North-America and Europe, there seems to be

an assumption that “knowledge and skills to enhance employability are now available

to every individual consumer in the globalized market place through open and distance

learning”; he states, nevertheless, that new “exclusionary social allocation

mechanisms” have emerged, evincing “the development of significant risk situations”

which “affect the opportunities” of significant social groups “to participate in

education and training” (Hake, 2005: 5, 6, 14, 10).

46 A new paradigm of lifelong learning does not necessarily have to take on these

contours (17);16 there are developments and initiatives that follow different, and more

promising, goals and trends, bearing in mind social development and the deepening of

citizenship. However, the European Union’s directions, proposals and programmes

tend to be characterised by the guidelines and by the ambivalence to which I have

pointed. The flagship-projects for instituting a European Education Area and

establishing lifelong learning entail a challenge which is without guaranteed returns or

results: the reconfiguration, at a territorial level, of the institutional model, of the

biographical trajectories and of the education paradigm, reinventing and consolidating

its nature as a distributive and democratic social and cultural politics (and practice).

2.2.3.2. The quest for ‘Europe’. A common space, a destination community, a citizen-

subject: New legitimising myths?

47 Among other scholars, Martin Lawn presents a reading of the political object and

process constituted by the European Education Area that underscores its vital link to

the project of erecting ‘Europe’ as a political entity. Thus, for Lawn, carrying out this


114

design represents “a strategy of governance,” “a mission” and “a distinctive form of

meaning-production”; according to some analyses, a new form of governance is to be

ushered in, free from State and national structures and institutions, and modelled on

the interactions between groups of experts, professionals, politicians and technical

staff, lacking “a constitutional position, a legislative legality, a fixed place of work or a

regulated civic or business mission.” We are faced with the attempt to generate an

identity for Europe through the creation of a fluid and opaque form of governance

which jointly shapes lifelong learning, citizenship and the knowledge economy. The

assertion of this “visionary discourse” breaks with institutional and national

frameworks to link up with the individual, associating education, work and citizenship

(Lawn, 2003: 330, 335, 332; Lawn and Lingard, 2002: 292).

48 Other authors stress the creation of the “Europe-Nation” and of “a common

educational space” as a hybrid process combining both a persistent and “pragmatic

approach,” whose effects are more visible in the everyday lives of Europeans, and an

“identitary approach,” characterised by ideas and intentions of a heroic cast. According

to these authors, the European Education Space is thus characterised by a more

operational facet that involves measures, programmes and designs (methods,

objectives, time frames, comparison instruments, reference levels, procedures,

mobility-enhancing devices), as well as by a more symbolic facet (the values, the

common cultural heritage, the construction of the European citizen) (Nóvoa, 2005:

200-3). Yet others see in the flagship project of the European Education Area the

building up of an entity – grounded on knowledge, on citizenship based on shared

common values, and on belonging to a common cultural and social space – congruent

with the “internal market,” and, to that extent, higher education and knowledge would

tend to be treated as goods within that space (Karlsen, 2005: 3-4).

49 On the other hand, according to Lawn (2003), the lifelong learning programme appears

to be decisively “useful” for delineating the European Education Area. This author

holds that this political banner is at the heart of this project, since it embodies the

trend to minimise formal, institutional influences, procedures and rules and relocate

emphasis onto learners and issues of performance and comparison. The outline thus

appears of the mutual involvement of (“lightened up,” “plural,” discontinuous,

“densely populated”) forms of governance and of learning, weaving a link of necessity

and symmetry between physical, social and symbolic territorial planning and the

creation of subjects. As if learning – re-signified as an individual need and

responsibility, located in learners, retaining feeble and multiform institutional links –

could play the leading role, for ‘Europe’ as a political object and project, in this strategy

and mode of connection, considering the relevance that education (as a public good and

responsibility, located in interactions with the other, the collective, the community,

with a strong institutional embeddedness) had for the establishment of nation-states.

According to Lawn, the lifelong learning programme restructures the field of

education, seen as a transmission of knowledge, organised in reference to the national

space, through specialised institutions that are specifically adapted to this purpose. The

educational field now becomes broader, including multiple functions, it is centred on

the learner and focuses on performance and comparison. In this sense, Lawn seems to

suggest that lifelong learning and the European Education Area take on the contours of

new legitimising myths (Ramirez and Boli, 1987) and buttress political-cultural artefacts

emerging beyond the borders of nations and States. However, scepticism seems to be


115

the order of the day as to the possibility of these flagship projects becoming pathways

and reserves for resources capable of engendering forms of governance, identity

features, and sources of meaning to create ‘Europe’ (Lawn, 2003: 335).

3. Indirect effects: The European Education Area/Market and lifelong learning

50 The “indirect effects” of the dynamics of globalisation in the field of education are

manifold and patently visible both in the reconfiguring of education governance and in

the mutations in the process of drawing up educational policies. The politics of

education (drawing up the agenda), as it can be gleaned from analysing the Bologna

Process and the Education & Training 2010 Programme, suggests a strong congruence,

if not a bond, with the setting up of the European Union internal market of services and

the development of GATS, as well as with the principles and rules of New Public

Management, developments which are associated with the process of “neoliberal

constitutionalisation.” Setting up the European Education/Higher Education Area as a

privileged strategy for responding to and advancing social and educational change, is

the engine of the current endeavours to achieve the competitive integration of the

‘Europe’ bloc in the world. In this context, a globally structured agenda is under

development through changes concerning:

the pattern of governance – combining scales (supranational, national, subnational), namely

for regulation activity;

the form of governance – a pattern and form of regulation compatible with market social

coordination, especially with regard to higher education and the Bologna Process, but also

to vocational education and training and to the so-called Copenhagen Process, included in

the Education & Training 2010 Programme.17

51 This trajectory involves pronounced forms of democratic deficit, whereby little by little

the field of public political decision-making has been reconstructed over the

intervening years. The Education & Training 2010 Programme, and especially the

Bologna Process, are clear examples of how nowadays the process of educational policy

development is distancing itself immeasurably, in its form, direction and substance,

from what we might still consider as being the principles of democracy

(representativity, legitimacy, negotiation, etc.) to become illustrations of what one

analyst writes: “Held against the benchmark of representative democracy, the Union

shows a deplorable tendency to place legitimacy where there is no power, and power

where there is a lack of legitimacy” (Nestor, 2004: 131). Thus, over the past few years,

we have seen the following developments: a) new institutional arrangements, which are

more or less feeble and/or ad hoc, and markedly supranational, now comprising the

contexts of influence and of production of policy texts; b) the (summary and extra-

legal) reconstitution of the range of interests involved, of their forms of organisation and

expression, of the spaces and rules of their engagement, influence and negotiation; c)

the tendency to reduce the influence of national and subnational actors and interests to

the carrying out of policies.

52 The lack of connection between legitimacy and power, to which I have pointed,

currently represents a fundamental challenge to representative democracies, and is a

prominent feature of the so-called new politics and/or new governance. Even if not

necessarily sharing the same theoretical-political views in their analyses, specialists

i.

ii.


116

coincide in underscoring the dramatic changes in the processes of policy-making, as

well as the discretionary nature of participation criteria and issues of transparency and

public accountability (Burns, 2004: 154ff.; Santos, 2005: 13-23).

53 The very real impossibility of knowing in a timely fashion what the measures are which

will shape the socio-political setting in the immediate future in order to make sense of

it, represents the most vivid experience we have had of the dizzying changes cascading

down which now lend greater depth to this “silent revolution in the field of education”

(Newsletter, 2003), a situation we unconsciously tend to naturalise.

54 With regard to education politics – that is, the contents of the agenda for education, the

problems and issues thematised which point to the restructuring of educational

institutions, processes and practices – we find, where the Bologna Process is concerned,

a set of action lines whose features reinforce the interpretation that the development

of relations of cooperation and cosmopolitanism is far from representing an important

aspect of the initiative, which presents itself rather, as I have endeavoured to argue, as

profoundly linked to competition between institutions and socio-economic spaces.

Analysing the measures announced for 2005‑2007 shows that work continues on

putting in place a regulatory framework congruent with the liberalisation of the sector,

able to potentiate competition between institutions and courses and, further, to set

rules, standards and parameters for the organising and running of the systems,

possibly seeking to safeguard a demanding form of regulation. This emerging

regulatory framework rests on a trilogy of instruments directed at providing education

services across borders, reinforcing the relevant evaluative stratum: (i) systems of

quality assurance; (ii) recognition of degrees and periods of study; and (iii)

accreditation. The changed role of the State (of public political authority) is thus made

clear, reserving ultimate responsibility for and authority over regulation, but

transferring direct exercise and control of same to other entities and actors (for

example, evaluation, certification and accreditation agencies).

55 The European flagship projects for building a European Education Area and putting in

place lifelong learning are characterised by various ambiguities and ambivalences,

which prominently betray the emphasis on individualisation of social and economic

issues, a new pact between the State and civil society with a sharply-defined

distribution of risks and responsibilities between public authority and individuals as

regards education and social welfare. We are perhaps witnessing the attempt to

engender – by means of these projects – new legitimising myths capable of sustaining

political-cultural artefacts beyond nations and States. The desire to envelop in the same

sweep the planning of the physical, social and symbolic territory and the creation of

subjects appears to be at the core of these projects. Some analysts doubt that these

flagship projects will constitute pathways and reserves of resources capable of

generating forms of governance, identity features and sources of meaning in creating

‘Europe’.


117

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NOTES

*. Article published in RCCS 75 (October 2006).

1. The context of influence represents the arena where the multiple interests of different actors

and entities mobilise to mark out the definition and the purposes of education; the discourses

and concepts on which education policy will be grounded take shape at this level. The context of

policy text production has a close, though often difficult, relationship with the former: on the one

hand, these texts set out to express policy, at times officially, at others in more informal ways; on

the other, they do so by using a language which seeks to base itself on a purportedly general

public good. Thus, the commitment to and the clash between different values, principles and

interests, as well as the incoherence and inconsistency within and between texts are the salient

mark of this second arena of action. The context of practice re-creates policy by interpretation, by

the conflict between divergent readings, and by the interaction of these processes with the

history, experiences and established practices that shape the contexts which policies address. It

is the actors and the social relations active in this sphere that construct the more or less selective

appropriations which shape policy in action (cf. Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992: 19-23).

2. The term “effects” registers how these processes tend to be experienced by persons at a

national level. However, the author highlights the idea that these are not dynamics which affect

States as entities and political actors; on the contrary, they are one of the categories of actors

that are most visibly and actively involved and interested in, as well as committed to, the

promotion of globalising processes. The direct effects of ongoing globalising processes are

intentional/requested/wished for; predictable and specific; indirect effects are wished for,

predictable and non-specific; collateral effects are not wished for, non-specific, but predictable

(Dale, 2005).

3. Dale develops his argument based on Hood (1995) and Majone (1990).

4. This is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), developed by the OECD

from 2000 in order to measure the skills of 15-year-olds; the aim is not to evaluate knowledge

gained from schooling, but performance when faced with tasks, defined by OECD technical staff

as demonstrating important skills. The first PISA evaluations, in 2000, covered a sample of 15-

year-olds in 43 countries (28 of which were OECD members) and focused primarily on reading

literacy; PISA-2003 focused mainly on the areas of mathematics and sciences and involved 41

countries (cf. OECD, 2001; Cussó and D’Amico, 2005; http://www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,

en_32252351_32236225_1_1_1_1_1,00.html).


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http://www.bologna-berlin2003.de/pdf/Communique1.pdf




http://www.bologna-bergen2005.no/Docs/00-Main_doc/010519PRAGUE_COMMUNIQUE.%20PDF








http://www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,%20en_32252351_32236225_1_1_1_1_1,00.html




5. Just to give a rough idea of the monitoring data produced for the May 2005 Ministerial

Conference, in Bergen, the following can be listed: (i) national reports drawn up for the Bologna

Follow-up Group (BFUG); (ii) From Berlin to Bergen, the General Report of the BFUG; (iii) Bologna

Process Stocktaking, a report produced by the working group set up by the BFUG; (iv) Trends IV:

European Universities Implementing Bologna, a report drawn up under the European University

Association; (v) Focus on the Structure of Higher Education in Europe, a document drawn up by the

Eurydice network covering the 40 countries which signed up to the Bologna Process; (vi) The

Black Book of the Bologna Process, a report prepared by ESIB, the body which represents national

Student Unions in Europe (to access these documents, see http://bologna-bergen2005no/).

6. The Stockholm European Council of 23/24 March 2000 adopted the Report from the Education

Council to the European Council on The Concrete Future Objectives of Education and Training Systems,

which defines “three concrete strategic objectives” and thirteen associated objectives to be

pursued by means of political cooperation, using an “open method of co-ordination” (cf.

Comissão Europeia, 2002).

7. See the following documents: Bologna Declaration (1999). Joint Declaration of the European

Ministers of Education Convened in Bologna on 19 June 1999, at http://www.bologna-

bergen2005.no/Docs/00-Main_doc/990719BOLOGNA_DECLARATION.PDF (consulted on 22 June

2009); Towards the European Higher Education Area, Communiqué of the Meeting of European Ministers in

Charge of Higher Education in Prague on 19 May 2001 at http://www.bologna-bergen2005.no/Docs/

00-Main_doc/010519PRAGUE_COMMUNIQUE.PDF (consulted on 22 June 2009); “Realising the

European Higher Education Area,” Communiqué of the Conference of Ministers responsible for Higher

Education in Berlin on 19 September 2003, at http://www.bologna-bergen2005.no/Docs/00-

Main_doc/030919Berlin_Communique.PDF (consulted on 22 June 2009).

8. The action lines defined for the Bologna Process are as follows: 1. Adoption of a system of

easily readable and comparable degrees; 2. Adoption of a system essentially based on two cycles;

3. Establishment of a system of credits; 4. Promotion of mobility; 5. Promotion of European

cooperation in quality assurance; 6. Promotion of the European dimension in higher education; 7.

Lifelong learning; 8. Higher Education institutions and students; 9. Promotion of attractiveness of

the European Higher Education Area; 10. Doctoral studies and the synergy between the European

Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Research Area (ERA).

It should be pointed out that official documents tersely state that the social dimension of higher

education (an action line put forward and repeatedly requested by the National Unions of

Students in Europe as a consulting member in this process) is to be understood as an overarching

or transversal action line, with no additional explanation being provided for its concrete

application. (cf. Work programme 2003-2005 for the Bologna Follow-Up Group, 24 March 2004,

http://www.aic.lv/ace/ace_disk/Bologna/maindoc/BFUG_workprogramme2003-05.pdf)

9. A typology of “policy rationales and approaches to cross-border education,” drawn up by the

OECD, presents four modalities: (i) mutual understanding (carrying a long history, of which the

Socrates-Erasmus programmes promoted by the European Union are, among other, presented as

examples; (ii) skilled migration; (iii) revenue generation; (iv) capacity building (these approaches,

which emerged in the 1990s, have a strong economic emphasis) (cf. OECD, 2004: 4-5)

10. Andreas Fejes argues that the Bologna Process is a standardising technique (of which the

European Credit Transfer System [ECTS] and the supplement to the diploma are part) associated


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http://bologna-bergen2005no/

http://bologna-bergen2005no/

http://www.bologna-bergen2005.no/Docs/00-Main_doc/990719BOLOGNA_DECLARATION.PDF




http://www.bologna-bergen2005.no/Docs/00-Main_doc/010519PRAGUE_COMMUNIQUE.PDF




http://www.bologna-bergen2005.no/Docs/00-Main_doc/030919Berlin_Communique.PDF






to the technique for determining objectives, both representing modes of governing, i.e. of

constituting and managing subjects (universities, nations, states, citizens) (Fejes, 2005: 14 e ss.).

11. See, for example, umjornal, 2 July 2004, pg. 7: “The Rector [of Minho University, Guimarães

Rodrigues] states that the Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education appointed a

working group from the different areas of knowledge without consulting the rectors, who were

not informed of the matter.” Público, 9 November 2005, pg. 28, also reported that “Beira Interior

students call into question the implementation of Bologna,” contesting the fact that some

teachers were applying rules of assessment that “have not yet been approved by the Senate, and

which are based on the Bologna Declaration.” On 24 January 2006, pg. 22, the same newspaper

reported that “On 11th January, the Minister Mariano Gago summoned the main partners in order

to hand over three Decree-Law proposals, the documents required to regulate the Bologna

Process. The Minister allowed less than two weeks for the partners to discuss and submit their

views.”

12. Some of the terms and expressions I have italicised (adaptation to the Bologna model, paradigm,

Bologna training or courses) repeat references used in legal texts and/or press releases, whether

quoting the main actors involved, or reporters. I use these terms to underscore what appears to

be the official and widespread understanding of the developments concerned (cf. Decree-Law

74/2006, of 24 March).

13. The quotation is to be found in the following (con)text: “On the 13th, the Minister for Science,

Technology and Higher Education sent out a document, marked as urgent, containing the

proposals for norms to organise the files on registration of changes in courses and new degrees.

The Ministry expected replies from schools to be forthcoming two days later. A difficult deadline

to meet, since these have to convene several bodies in order to analyse the proposals. Two weeks

later, the norms have not yet been published in the Diário da República [the official journal of

Portugal], which means that schools prepared the files without knowing whether the law will be

the same as the proposal” (Público, 31 March 2006, pg. 26).

14. “If we add to the formal act of law approval the hitherto unheard-of exacerbated urgency

conveyed by the Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education, in seeking adaptation to

the new legal framework, it is easy to understand the drifting of the process as regards its main

objectives. Accepting this drifting, there is nothing left to do. Everything has been done”

(Peixoto, 2006: 11).

15. A student newspaper reported on a demonstration by Coimbra University students outside

the Parliament building on 23 March 2006. According to this report, “The target of the protests

was always the Government, for not providing conclusive explanations on the repercussions that

the reform may have on academic life – “No one answers us, Portugal is adrift,” protested the

Union leader. [...] The banners bore messages such as “No to Bologna, yes to education” and

“Against privatisation and elitization of education”’ (Mundo Académico, 27 March 2006, pg. 3).

16. I will not discuss here the distinctive meaning of the concepts of lifelong education and lifelong

learning, not because such a discussion would be irrelevant, but because, on the one hand, there

are authors and languages (French, for instance) in which the expression used is éducation tout au

long de la vie (see, for example, Nóvoa, 2005) and, on the other, this discussion has been developed

by other analysts (see, for example, Lima, 2003).

17. I espouse the view that the form of governance derives from the (combination of) existing or

dominant form(s) (the State, the market, the community, the family) by means of which the

different activities (and scales) of governance are socially coordinated (see Dale, 1997a; 2005).


124

ABSTRACTS

The “indirect effects” of the dynamics of globalisation in the field of education are visible both in

the changes in the process of designing education policies and in the reconfiguration of

education governance. Thus, where the Bologna Process is concerned, what seems to be on the

agenda is a convergence with the model of market regulation, through the creation of

mechanisms and bodies such as quality assurance and accreditation systems and agencies. In

addition, the form of regulation determined by objectives represents a decisive development in

processes of management of social and educational change in different sectors of education

systems. The flagship-project of constructing a European Education Area and the lifelong

learning paradigm appear to partake of the new legitimising myths that derive from the desire to

envelop in the same sweep the planning of the physical, social and symbolic territory and the

creation of subjects.

INDEX

Keywords: globalisation, education policies, governance, regulation, Bologna process, European

Education Area

AUTHORS

FÁTIMA ANTUNES

University of Minho, Portugal


125

Different as Only We Can Be.Portuguese LGBT Associations inThree Movements*

António Fernando Cascais


EDITOR'S NOTE



Queer criticism cannot help but slide towards

diva-ism. I humbly admit and acknowledge it,

honnêteté intellectuelle oblige. From the

opulence of Loren (yes, that Sofia, nothing to do

with the Byzantinery of Hagia Sofia), I inherited

my grace, and from the valorous Dietrich (that

Marlene, the one and only), like me always ready

to ask what has become of the flowers, I derive

my patronymic. Moi? No more closet. As queer as

they make them. No more closet. Out.

Sophya Critich, in Tratado dos maus objectos

(work in progress)

1 This article focuses on the way in which the specific character of the Portuguese social

formation has determined and manifested itself in the socio-genesis of the history of

the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender association movement (LGBT) over the past

three decades. The thoughts presented here should be viewed as preliminary – and,

therefore, subject to critical review – to further research, of necessity to be broadened

and deepened, on the role and meaning of association-building in the history, culture

and identity of the Portuguese LGBT community.


126

1. On the eve of associations

2 Although the community had long before set itself up, there was no organized gay,

lesbian, bisexual or transgender association movement in Portugal before the

Revolution of 25 April 1974. The lack of democratic freedoms precluded such events,

and these freedoms are essential, albeit not the only prerequisites, for the emergence

of associations. In and of itself, the mere creation of formal, legal-political rights, such

as freedom of association and freedom of speech, was not enough to foster the

emergence of autonomous, lasting movements. These would take approximately a

further two decades to materialize. Furthermore, the movement’s socio-genesis

followed the usual pattern to be found in Europe, and particularly in the South, arising

from within the traditions and material resources of the emancipatory heritage of the

left.

3 While still under the dictatorship, opposition parties never included gay and lesbian

emancipation in their agenda. Sexuality was included only as a lateral issue, especially

within the wider context of what was then known as the “Woman Question,” though

from the almost exclusive viewpoint of work and labour issues, and later within the

context of what was understood as the “Youth Question,” introduced mainly by student

movements. Indeed, the scarce instances of receptiveness to the gay and lesbian

movement came from a number of intellectuals and younger-generation students (not,

however, from opposition veterans, especially those linked to the Communist Party),

who had witnessed it directly while living in exile abroad. Similarly, the participation

in political opposition activities of individuals, some of whom public figures, who were

openly out or assumed to be gay or lesbian (and there were such persons) in no way

meant that the generically anti-fascist, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist (in markedly

Marxist sectors) agenda was sufficiently open to admit, not even within the confines of

their “Cultural Question,” any fanciful notion of gay and lesbian emancipation. Indeed,

the Portuguese left was, to a very large extent, oblivious to the cultural changes that

were occurring in other countries during the 1960s and 1970s, and that were essential

for the renewal of European left-wing sectors.

4 After the 1974 revolution, Portugal’s severe developmental backwardness only

contributed to funnelling political action into building a social State, which, if for no

other reason, reduced to a minimum the space for other types of social demand,

making it also precarious and constantly under threat. Political concerns were so very

other that a wall of incomprehension met the sparse echoes of gay and lesbian

emancipation on the part of the radical left in May 1968 France. In the same way, or

even more so, the Stonewall revolt of 19691 received no coverage whatsoever; the same

applies to the beginnings of the current gay and lesbian movement in the USA. Besides,

this had already inherited the homophile association tradition. From the point of view

of associations (rather than the cultural viewpoint, since the homophile argument was

used in António Botto’s defence), this phase was completely unknown in Portugal, and

associations only emerged in this country at a time when the gay and lesbian

movement had already experienced a long evolutionary process in North-American and

Northern-European countries, and was thus devoid of the self-reflective dimension it

had acquired in those countries.


127

5 It is relevant to compare the Portuguese context with that of its neighbour, Spain, in

the period of transition to democracy (Mira, 2004: 421-425). In Spain, there were

embryonic, clandestine gay associations during the last years of the dictatorship,

embedded in the anti-Franco opposition and precipitated by a heightening of

repression as a consequence of the Law of Danger and Social Rehabilitation passed in

1970. In addition, the Spanish gay and lesbian movement was closely associated to the

renewal and cultural effervescence of the political, autonomy-seeking movements in

Catalonia, as also happened, although to a lesser extent, in the Basque Country. This

explains why the movement was later supported and encouraged by the governments

of the Autonomous Communities. This meant that it was recognized as having a

cultural capital and historical, social and political credibility, and this would allow it to

affirm and establish itself early on in the democratic regime. This fact was completely

unknown in post-revolution Portuguese society.

6 There was in Portugal nothing resembling such a left-wing political culture, receptive

to gay and lesbian emancipation, that could be expected to incorporate the main gay

and lesbian demands into its own agenda sooner or later. It is precisely at this stage

that Portuguese history began a parting of the ways with regard to that of Spain, which

with rapidly grew closer to the advanced stage of Northern-European societies.

Nevertheless, the first political manifestations of the Portuguese gay and lesbian

movements could not but emerge in a clearly left-wing spectrum, although, for that

very same reason, bearing intrinsic ambiguities, i.e., taking as a model for political and

cultural reference a sector which initially rejected it.

2. A composition in three movements

7 In fact, a rough sketch can be drawn of a period of three stages of LGBT associations in

Portugal, with the proviso that there are no rigid demarcation lines separating them:

the first, from 1974 to 1990, can be divided into two phases, one preceding, the other

following the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in Portugal; the second, between

1990-1991 and 1995-1997; and the third, from 1997 to the present day. The most

pronounced break is that which separates the first two periods from the more recent

one. Schematically outlined, these are:

1974-1990 – first period (with a pivotal moment in the mid-1980s)

1990-1991 – transitional period displaying mixed features

1991-1994 – second period

1995-1997 – transitional period displaying mixed features

1997 to the present day – third period.

2.1. Primo – Largo

8 The first expressions of an embryonic gay and lesbian movement came as a result of

initiatives taken by a small number of individuals, who decidedly identified with left-

wing sectors, though dissociated from party and trade union organizations, where gay

and lesbian identities and demands found no receptiveness, and thus no opportunity

for expression. It would have been completely impossible, as in fact it was, to garner for

their cause the dynamics of intervention of left-wing sectors, which condescendingly


128

discounted the contents of their demands or went so far as to refuse any form of

autonomous affirmation whatsoever. To a very large extent, the parties on the left

retained archaic structures moulded over the course of years of opposition to a

dictatorial regime whose action was focused on maintaining the structural

backwardness of the country, as well as its own role as an intermediary in world

relations, as the colonial power that it was. The left-wing parties and trade unions,

especially the Communist Party, endowed with an organised structure allowing them to

take root straight away and to acquire far-reaching influence, defined themselves in

relation to rural traditionalism and 19th century industrialism and directly inherited a

neo-realist culture that, as Eduardo Lourenço (1978) noted, conveyed an idealising

populist image of the Portuguese people that prolonged and went so far as to reinforce

the nationalism of the so-called Estado Novo [New State].

9 In the light of the prevailing historical-materialist model of the class struggle as a

motor of history leading to the socialist society, the “Homosexual Question” could only

truly be clarified in a classless society of the future. Meanwhile, the idea of a gay and

lesbian struggle was, at best, perceived as divisive, since it distracted workers and

militants from the fundamental objectives of their struggle, playing the enemy’s game

and rendering them vulnerable to it. It was also viewed as demoralising, since it would

use up the energy needed for the revolutionary transformation of society, of which the

proletariat was the vanguard. The struggle of gays and lesbians thus appeared as

essentially demobilising, carrying ultra-minority status and with no repercussions or

benefit for broader struggles imbued with general social and political value, a petit-

bourgeois and/or leftist illusion. In the worst case (but very widespread) scenario,

same-sex matters were viewed as an eloquent manifestation of bourgeois decadence

and gays and lesbians as class enemies.

10 Same-sex relations were even seen as a Nazi practice, and thus political perversion was

conflated with sexual perversion: such was the case of the stereotype applied to the

leather population. This, however, lays bare a further, insurmountable problem for the

assimilation of gay and lesbian emancipation, which is the incommensurable nature of

revolutionary discourse and the same-sex erotic lexicon in general, not simply the

leather or other type (Cascais, 2003b). Indeed, from the viewpoint of revolutionary

morality, which mythified the figure of the immaculate proletarian, the zenith of the

manly virtues, the gay man was merely intelligible as the antithesis of the above. Any

affirmation of sexuality was perceived as equalling the sumptuary excesses of the

bourgeoisie, unbridled consumerism and the waste associated with a culture of social

parasitism. This was incompatible with the frugality and restraint imposed by the

discipline of work and production, and in every way contrary to proletarian asceticism,

which was no more than a reproduction of Roman Catholic asceticism in secular form.

Besides, and in addition to the subterranean connection with the latter, would-be

revolutionary moral authority also ended up turning the prevailing heterosexism and

homophobia (critical terms which did not exist at the time, and hence were

unintelligible) into a virtue, thus reproducing and reinforcing them.

11 Taking a broader view, the demand for an identitary difference appeared suspect to the

foundational egalitarianism of left-wing thought grounded on an Enlightenment

matrix, which Marxism merely reinforced, and viewed as a matter that equivocally

confounded the classic binary separation between the public and the private spheres.

This was all the more so as the “Homosexual Question” (with its deplorable echoes of


129

the “Jewish Question”) was treated merely as a matter for legal regulation, and

completely diluted in the generic and non-specific granting of more or fewer rights,

freedoms and guarantees to citizens in general, irrespective of their sexual orientation

– a completely unknown term at the time but which, in marking an irreducible

specificity, is still today a source of scandal to all those who, from one end of the

political spectrum to the other, regard demands for rights as calls for abusive

privileges. Thus it is that, on the one hand, the outright pursuit of bourgeois

respectability by the democratic left also did not foster an alternative to the

(im)possibility of expressing gay and lesbian emancipation. On the other hand, on the

rare occasions when this was aired in some publications linked to the radical left, it was

invariably placed within the context of the “liberation of everyday life” and the

“transformation of life,” stripped of precise political content. Interestingly enough, or

perhaps not, it is in this latter context that Portugal first saw debates on the

medicalisation of homosexuality and deviance, on medicine’s and psychiatry’s social

control role, as well as on the contesting of prevailing medical paradigms. This was a

first challenge to the scientific culture of the Portuguese left-wing spheres, still under

the sway of positivist republicanism and sharing every existing stereotyped

representation of same-sex relations, not only with the rest of the political spectrum

and society at large, but also with the University, which, at a time much preceding the

emergence of gender, lesbian, gay and queer studies on the Portuguese academic

landscape, was almost completely impervious to the airing of these matters. Similarly,

it is a well-known fact that Portuguese feminism was unwilling to integrate lesbians in

its emancipatory project (it must be stressed that “lesbian” was perceived as an insult

at a time when women saw themselves as “female homosexuals” and men as “male

homosexuals”), as is always reiterated by lesbians and as feminists finally admitted.

These positions have recently been summed up by Amaral and Moita (2004: 101).

12 Thus, an absolutely decisive fact during this period was that gays and lesbians were

inert prey and silent victims of social and political, cultural, media and scientific

representations; the object rather than the subjects of discourse, as Michel Foucault

brilliantly demonstrated (1977). Even when interviewed, it was invariably to turn them

into raw material for biographical illustrations of prevailing social opinions and

representations. The sole exception of the time was Guilherme de Melo, whose case was

widely publicized, and is thus worthy of note, not just because nobody else had “come

out,” but because he was the first to do so in the name of a collective body – “gays” –

even though such a collective had been virtually invisible until then. Both his

supporters and detractors were confronted by the absence of the sole interlocutors

directly concerned, gay and lesbian movements, then virtually non-existent or lacking

expression, with few exceptions, ephemeral for the most part. Such was the case of the

Homosexual Movement for Revolutionary Action (MHAR), created as early as May 1974,

which did not survive the public reaction of General Galvão de Melo, a member of the

Military Junta for National Salvation, who soon became the mouthpiece within the

Junta of right-wing reaction to the revolution.

13 This situation, in which the gay and lesbian movement was inassimilable by the

political forces of the left, remained even after the latter’s influence began to wane

within Portuguese society. It was in this context, further characterised by the fact that

many young, political party gay militants became definitively disenchanted with the

chances of their organisations opening up, that the Revolutionary Homosexual

Collective appeared in 1980 (CHOR). This organisation succeeded in gathering together


130

a few hundred persons at its inaugural session held at the head office of Culturona, an

organisation devoted to cultural events, where the Collective was formed and on whose

precarious support it counted. However, the Collective did not long survive it, having

made its last public appearance in the Meetings: “Being (homo)sexual,” hosted in 1982 by

the National Culture Centre, where the first text of theoretical reflection on the

movement in Portugal was presented (Cascais, 1983).

14 My extended emphasis on what was, at the time, the emancipatory discourse of the left

has to do with the fact that it was the only one available for gay and lesbian self-

expression (although it was by no means the only one with which to express same-sex

orientation). However, it also raised insurmountable difficulties to such expression,

which could only be overcome by means of a radical reformulation. On the theoretical

plane, Michel Foucault played a major role in ‘de-Marx-ifying’ emancipatory language,

but the reception of Foucaultian thought in Portugal at the time (Cascais, 1988, 1994)

was restricted to rare academic circles and never had any direct influence on

Portuguese LGBT associations. They only began to assimilate it superficially and by

indirect routes much later, when the first gay, lesbian and queer studies began to

appear (Cascais, 2004). In fact, this reformulation, which is far from being over in

Portugal, coincided, in its early stages, with Portugal’s entry into the European

Community, under the premiership of Cavaco Silva, and with the outbreak of the AIDS

epidemic. Obviously it was also, inevitably, the result of the LGBT association

movement and one of its achievements.

15 The first phase of this movement goes from 1974 to 1991, the year that saw the

emergence of the first lasting association, the Revolutionary Socialist Party’s

Homosexual Working Group (GTH). Nonetheless, its pivotal moment occurred in the

mid-1980s, when all of the above-mentioned events took place, a moment which divides

the first phase of LGBT associations into two periods, the first of which I have already

described. Beyond the fact that the gay and lesbian association movement was non-

existent – an aspect shared with the feminist movement (Amaral and Moita, 2004: 101)

and which must be viewed in the context of the general waning of the euphoric phase

of civic and cultural association movements (outside the strictly party-political sphere)

– from 1982 onwards, an atmosphere of widespread ebbing began to make itself felt in

an ever more pervasive manner, despite the (mainly symbolic) fact that the Criminal

Code of that year decriminalised homosexuality (the previous law had long since

stopped to be enforced). The most visible traces of post-1974 gay life in Lisbon virtually

disappeared. This city, which had the only gay bars in business at the time and

numerous meeting places, had become a reference for gay men and lesbians who

flocked there from all over the country. A considerable mass of people was beginning to

settle in Lisbon on a permanent basis, and the city saw the gestation of forms of

sociability which would become one of the cornerstones of a community as such.

Outside Lisbon, the scarce public visibility of gays and lesbians vanished completely.

Far beyond any virulent manifestations of homophobic intolerance, the economic and

social crisis contributed decisively to widespread disenchantment with traditional

forms of political participation, but also, at the same time, to dissuading from civic

activities which were too far removed from everyday concerns.

16 As the date drew near for Portugal’s entry into the European Union, made official in

1986, a climate of expectations was generated with regard to access to European givens,

not simply in terms of human progress indicators, but also – and in a vividly clear and


131

tangible form among gay men and lesbians – in terms of cultural and legal givens, by

the prospect of transposing more advanced legislation to the Portuguese legal system

(Santos, 2005: 145, 176). In any event, this is a characteristic of semiperipheral societies

such as the Portuguese. From 1987 on, the Cavaco Silva governments further

contributed to confirming and intensifying expectations with respect to overcoming

Portuguese structural backwardness, but also resulted in moving left-wing forces into

defensive positions and confirmed the need to rethink their concepts and their

practices. This fact – and it is of the utmost importance to acknowledge this – rendered

them more permeable, at a first stage, to issues such as gay and lesbian emancipation,

and much later provided space for its supporters within left-wing political parties (the

Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Left-Wing Bloc). Nevertheless, the so-

called “leaden years,” which had intensified from the first warnings of the AIDS

epidemic, worsened with the news of the first cases of the syndrome in Portugal, so

much so that the death of António Variações, in 1986, was experienced as a collective

tragedy befalling the gay community.

2.2. Secondo – Andante con Moto

17 The AIDS epidemic was a threshold in the emergence of LGBT associations in Portugal,

a generally acknowledged fact confirmed by Almeida (2004: 251), Cascais (1997: 23-24)

and Santos (2005: 99-102), but it must be studied in depth. In the US, societal response

to AIDS was shaped by the fight against the epidemic organised within gay

communities, those most affected by it, at least initially, and also those best prepared

as a result of an already considerable and substantial past in terms of community

organisation and political struggle. This model, typical of central societies, spread to

countries with a tradition of associations and of organised communities, and allowed

for reaction to the backlash which came as a result of the initial impact of AIDS. In

Portugal, exactly the opposite happened. It was in organising the fight against AIDS

that associations were created, and there is little cause to speak of a backlash, as there

was little or no ground to give up, nor were there opposing forces against which to

resist in defence of acquired rights. The Portuguese association movement and, in

general, the visibility of a gay community – which finds in it one of its pillars (and

which, therefore, is not complete without it) – gained strength within the broader

process of the fight against the AIDS epidemic. It began to include itself in this

dynamics, using it to great advantage before it was able to become autonomous. It is to

this extent that the socio-genesis of gay associations in Portugal confirms the

semiperipheral situation of the Portuguese social formation, initially theorised by

Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1992, 1996) following up on Immanuel Wallerstein, and

whose application to the LGBT community was made by Ana Cristina Santos (2005).

Besides, the emergence of gay associations within the context of the fight against the

epidemic is not exclusive to Portugal; it is rather common to and typical of other

semiperipheral societies.

18 In Portugal, from early on, gay participation could be seen in NGOs combating AIDS, but

these were the outcome of initiatives taken by elite groups of health experts and

professionals, by psychologists and the occasional public figure. This situation was not

entirely without cost, given that the double membership of some gay association

leaders in these NGOs gave rise initially to a certain number of situations imbued with

ambiguity and conflict of interests whenever somewhat paternalistic attitudes on the


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part of NGOs led to interference in association politics. We are dealing here with a

model of civic participation which has been well known at least since Tocqueville, who

described the way reformist initiatives and political intervention in general sprang in

Europe from enlightened elites (political, economic, social and cultural), who behaved

as representatives of third parties who had delegated their own interests to them,

whether formally or tacitly. In contradistinction, in the grassroots model prevailing in

the US, the protagonists were associations of anonymous citizens actually representing

themselves by electing their delegates from among their peers.

19 In Portugal, the discourse of the fight against AIDS was headed by third parties with no

links to the gay community, namely by the medical class, whose authority, both

scientific and social, remained intact. The fight against discrimination against HIV-

positive individuals and the sick uniformly stressed the common good, without taking

on the role of mouthpiece for their special interests and without even referring to them

explicitly, rather diluting them in the broader context of human and citizenship rights.

Besides, the time it took for the epidemic to be clinically diagnosed in Portugal made it

possible, especially where the medical profession, as also the political caste and the

media were concerned, not to repeat the ravages caused elsewhere by the initial

categorisation, later revised, of “groups at risk,” the ranks of which were swelled by

gay men.

20 All this contributed towards dissociating the fight against AIDS from emancipatory gay

discourse, which in the end contributed towards its acceptance and to preparing the

initially neutral reaction to the association movement, whose stance in Portugal was

never as radical as that of groups such as ACT-UP. It further contributed to the concept

of prevention as a social responsibility, held by many sectors of Portuguese society,

beyond the medical profession, from political power structures to NGOs and the media,

and to concerns with political correctness, until then almost unheard of with regard to

gays. This resulted in a kind of official acknowledgement of the existence of a gay and

lesbian community and a quasi-sanctioning of its sexual behaviours – a visibility and

sanction whose importance can also be measured by the outraged reactions of certain

bodies such as the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Although no less virulent, the latter’s

doctrinal positions thus became subject to public criticism, to reiterated challenges,

and the Church was placed at permanent risk of entrenchment in defensive and rigid

attitudes, generally perceived as fundamentalist and fanatical. Indeed, the homophobia

and heterosexism traditionally to be found in Portuguese society were in equal

measure met head-on and silenced for the first time by an authoritative discourse

conveyed in the fight against AIDS. Finally, the emerging association movement could

thus avail itself of a capital of respectability – i.e. as a credible interlocutor – which it

would not otherwise have gained and which lent it an emancipatory dynamics that has

remained essentially uninterrupted to this day. Furthermore, this dynamics reduced

the room for manoeuvre, public receptiveness and efficacy of its enemies, who,

nonetheless, remained, but were only able to flex their muscles again from the moment

when the association movement raised other banners with enough strength to defend

these appropriately, which did not really happen before 1997. From the point of view of

the time frame I presented at the beginning of this article, the process I have been

describing takes us approximately from the emergence of the AIDS epidemic until

1990-1991, when the lesbian magazine Organa and the Homosexual Working Group were


133

founded. I take this as an arbitrary milestone that concludes the process of the initial

impact of AIDS on the community.

21 Not for a moment should the AIDS epidemic be understood as being only the kairos

moment for Portuguese gay (and LGBT) associations. This unique opportunity took its

toll in blood with an extensive martyrology, whose importance has never been fully

appreciated by the social science research of a country possessing a mythic-religious

heritage as does Portugal and on which I am unable to dwell here. Viewed very

superficially, I would suggest that this is a phenomenon that, par excellence, deprives

adversaries of arguments in a culture, such as the Portuguese, in which public

statements of conviction have less to do with doctrinaire debate and rational

argumentation than with heroic example-setting (with its counterpart, aesthetic

seduction). Paradoxically, or perhaps not entirely, this is a factor (in addition to others

cited) that possibly explains the peculiar way in which Portugal witnessed phenomena

of such magnitude and of such profound repercussions elsewhere (especially in the US),

such as discrimination against HIV-positive individuals and the sick, victim blaming, or

the health scare which always accrues to moral scare. Perhaps too succinctly and

subject to later, in-depth study, I would further suggest that the features of Portuguese

society’s traditional homophobia became quantitatively more pronounced in tone and

in intensity, but remained qualitatively unaltered. In other words, the terms of the

anti-gay and lesbian battery of arguments remained essentially the same, and nothing

resembling the wave of persecution in the immediate aftermath of the AIDS epidemic

occurred here. On the other hand, this confirms the archaic features of Portuguese

society: the gay community had not moved beyond the traditional stage of

marginalisation (it was not acknowledged as equal, or even as a valid interlocutor),

objectification (it had no control over the social representations produced about it and

was not the subject of public affirmation or action), invisibility (it was stripped of self-

expression, of representatives, and no relevant persons or events were associated to it)

and resignation (it only adjusted, as an imperative for survival, to the marginal and

clandestine situation to which it was relegated). This also meant that, for the gay

community, the AIDS epidemic worked as a type of outing, both of individuals in and of

themselves (when affected by the disease) and of the community in general.

Association-building was the core of the community’s response to the challenge

embodied in such an outing. The AIDS epidemic afforded gays (and later the LGBT

community) the opportunity to rise up against ancient oppression. Indeed, after the

first impact of the AIDS epidemic in Portugal (between 1984-1986 and 1990-1991), the

maturing process of association-building, as a reaction to the above impact, occurred

approximately between 1990-1991 and 1995-1997, and took on crucial importance in

the time frame I have proposed. It was during these years (between 1990 and 1997) that

the transformation I have described took place. The years 1990-91 and 1995-1997 were

years of transition between the periods coming immediately before and immediately

after, during which – respectively – features of the preceding period are maintained

and features of the subsequent period begin to appear. And it was the first time that an

agonistic situation – in which a hegemonic pole crushed the dominated pole to such a

degree that the very existence of the confrontation could be denied by the former –

found a resolution favourable to the gay community in Portugal, since the tragic

episode of a similar confrontation in 20th century Portuguese history, that which

opposed António Botto and Judith Teixeira (and, surely, Fernando Pessoa) to the

homophobia of the Estado Novo (Cascais, 2003a).


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22 Directly affected by AIDS, the gay community was at the same time the one that was

most changed by it. As it happens, in the central countries, the epidemic contributed to

precipitate a fundamental change of strategy: from a struggle for sexual citizenship

centred on the demand for rights regarding practical conduct (rights to sexual activity,

to pleasure, to the body) and identity (the right to self-definition, to expression, to self-

fulfilment) to a struggle for sexual citizenship underscoring rights with regard to

relationships (the right to consent, to free choice, to institutional acknowledgement of

relationships, such as domestic partnerships and marriage, and related rights such as

medically assisted pregnancy and adoption). At the same time, at least a further three

relevant changes took place in Portugal: a shift from predominantly essentialist

argumentation to a constructionist emphasis in the approach to identities, peaking in

queer thought; a critique of the hegemony of gay identity and subsequent inner

fracturing of the community through the separatist affirmation, firstly, of lesbian

identity and, close on its heels, of bisexual and transgender identity (giving rise to the

current LGBT jargon, whose pertinence I will not analyse here); a change in the

affirmation of difference, of the community’s irreducibility and singularity – which

finds its highest expression in the ghetto as a type of self-discriminating “liberated

zone,” following the US ethnic model (which would later be exported to the rest of the

world) – to a logic of growing integration of specific gay, lesbian, bisexual and

transgendered lifestyles. This aimed at crumbling the more or less rigid frontiers

between the ghetto and the larger society, but, as Foucault long before diagnosed, it is

also more difficult than entrenchment in the ghetto. From the alternative lifestyles

which can only germinate in the ghetto, that is to say, an alternative in difference, we

shift to an alternative in integration, in equality, in parity and in indifference. Such is

the case of marriage and adoption, which for gays and lesbians signify building a

lifestyle grounded on remaking what Anthony Giddens (1993) called the pure

relationship. However, this only became possible as a result of a long process of

building identities and consolidating LGBT communities, which only happened in

Portugal in a superficial way.

23 The association movement in Portugal emerges within this context of a shift in culture

and identities in international LGBT communities, but, as can easily be seen, with

understandable difficulties in assimilating it. We have now arrived at the last period,

which began to take shape in the years 1995-1997, a triennium of transition which

retained features of the preceding phase and which has been fully constituted from the

latter date to the present time.

2.3. Terzo – Allegro ma non troppo e grazioso

24 Within the time frame I have established, which has primarily a heuristic value, the

only clearly perceptible exception was the Homosexual Working Group, whose early

stages are far closer to the spirit of MHAR (Homosexual Movement for Revolutionary

Action) and CHOR (Revolutionary Homosexual Collective) than to post-1995

associations. However, it was clearly different from these two organisations inasmuch

as it emerged within a political party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which was

initially influenced by Trotskyist ideology. The history of the Homosexual Working

Group, which would become firstly the LGBT Group embedded in the Left-Wing Bloc,

when the Revolutionary Socialist Party entered this political party, and later the Pink

Panthers – Front to Combat Homophobia (2004), now independent of party political


135

structures, significantly illustrates two interconnected facts: first, that gay and lesbian

emancipation had been for a very long time ‘pushed’ towards the revolutionary left and

tended to express itself in the radical terms of outsider refusal of the system, due in

large measure to the impossibility or reluctance on the part of gays and lesbians in the

social, cultural and political elites to affirm themselves publicly as such; second, the

extent to which party membership or party political affinities were the nemesis of

association-building and a key reason for revising the emancipatory discourse I

referred to at the beginning, by virtue of the need to move beyond party political in-

itself-ism and of not alienating the LGBT community itself, which does not identify with

the defence of its interests in such terms.

25 Visibility and the consequences of association-building are precisely what constitutes,

in essence, the third and current phase, since 1995-1997, after which the LGBT

community is represented by its own members, becomes a historical subject endowed

with its own voice, and an interlocutor both vis-à-vis its allies and its opponents. These

are the years when associations burst forth: ILGA-Portugal, with the opening of its Gay

and Lesbian Community Centre (1997) in Lisbon, Opus Gay (1997) and Clube Safo (1996), as

well as Portugal.Gay.pt (1996), an internet-based organisation, Korpus magazine (1996),

the first publication to attain the longevity of a decade, the Lisbon Gay and Lesbian Film

Festival, with a similar longevity since its first edition in 1997, and the radio programme

Alternative Lives, since 1999, the unique occurrence of access to the media in the history

of Portuguese associations. Also during the course of these years, the left-wing party

political sphere represented in parliament and in local government finally became

receptive to the community’s demands, peaking in the period of João Soares’s term as

mayor of Lisbon. The overall receptiveness and even overt goodwill of some of the

media round off this favourable period, lasting at least until late 2004. It was in this

context that the first Pride Festival took place (1997) – later held in the emblematic

Lisbon Municipality Square – as well as the first Pride March (2000). The dynamics of

growth continued until at least 2002, when the first Pride Week was held, and led to the

creation of a number of other associations: Não te Prives [Don’t deprive yourself] – Group

for the Defence of Sexual Rights (2001), ex aequo Network (2003) directed towards young

LGBT between the ages of 16 and 30, @t – Association for the Study and Defence of Gender

Identity (2003), Grupo Lilás, and NÓS [Ourselves] – University Movement for Sexual Freedom,

between 2000 and 2003, Grupo Oeste Gay, between 2000 and 2005, and Coisas do Género

between 2001 and 2003, or even associations such as Muralha [The Wall] and the

Portuguese Association for Male Homosexuality (2006), which was essentially created as a

gesture of public demarcation from the LGBT movement.

26 The following points should be stressed: the expansion of the associations’ influence

beyond the large urban centres of Lisbon and Oporto, either through the activities they

promoted, or because they organised as networks; the internal differentiation of the

associations, of which the most prominent example is that of the ILGA Women’s Group

(1998), which later became the Group for Lesbian Intervention and Reflection (2000);

the capacity for hosting supranational events such as the 17th Annual Conference of the

International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth and Student Organisation

(2003) by the ex aequo Network; the 24th ILGA-Europe Annual Conference (2002) by Opus

Gay; the launch of the World Day for Combating Homophobia (2005), at which its

founder, Louis-Georges Tin, was present, an initiative of the association Janela Indiscreta

[Indiscreet Window], which in the meantime formally took over the organisation of the


136

Lisbon Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; the recognition of associations by national

representatives of world organisations such as the Women and LGBT Nucleus of the

Portuguese Section of Amnesty International, as well as the active participation of

national associations in international events such as the national edition of the

Women’s World March (2000) and the First Portuguese Social Forum (2003).

Articulation with academic reflection and research, although still rare, was successfully

attempted by Clube Safo, which co-organised the first Lesbian Workshops (2002) with

the Higher Institute for Applied Psychology; the first International Congress of Gay,

Lesbian and Queer Studies, “Cultures, Visibilities, Identities” (2005), was jointly

promoted by the association Janela Indiscreta, the Franco-Portuguese Institute and the

Centre for Communication and Language Studies of the New University of Lisbon; and a

number of initiatives were launched by Não te Prives in cooperation with the Centre for

Social Studies, Coimbra University. Last but not least, Portuguese LGBT associations

became prime interlocutors of party political organisations and governmental bodies in

what concerns the drafting of legislation, although they have had to counter the

condescension of the latter with the definition of their own agendas, of which a salient

example was the recent (2005) launch of the pro-marriage rights campaign.

27 Although this period displays a number of significant achievements on the part of the

LGBT association movement, namely in terms of legal rights, the convergence of LGBT

community interests and political-institutional interests was not uninterrupted, and

this means that those achievements are not irreversible. Indeed, the emancipatory

dynamics remains until the present time, but is confronted by two facts: association-

building has reached what seems to be a limit in growth; this, in turn, has coincided

with (but is not an effect of) the beginning of an anti-emancipatory reaction and of an

adverse political and media environment which configure a new agonistic situation,

not dissimilar to that which initially prompted it.

28 In the light of the questions raised by the current situation, the associations are faced

with a double necessity, as much cognitive as political: that of acquiring in-depth

knowledge of the community they represent or from which they sprang, with its

history, its identity, its culture, but also its internalised homophobia and the shape it

takes to the detriment of associations themselves, re-building its memory as a form of

resistance to non-participation (Gil, 2004), so fatal in Portuguese society and culture;

and that of recognising its detractors and enemies, both old and new, all the more so as

they henceforth define themselves in relation to its visibility and achievements.

3. Closing remarks

29 Associations were not built up overnight, not in Portugal, nor anywhere else. They did

not erupt onto a historical, social and cultural tabula rasa. In Portugal, associations, as

well as all the expressions of LGBT cultures and identities, are faced with a history of

oppression, denial and social control, which lent shape to the characteristics of the

Portuguese social formation that are adverse to them.

30 The first challenge facing gay, lesbian and queer theory, as well as the social and

human sciences, is to study associations, which still largely represent a true terra

incognita. The second, greater challenge is the rebuilding and recovering of the other

historical heritage to which the present LGBT communities are the direct heirs: gay and

lesbian cultural expressions, both erudite and popular, forms of sociability, the erotic


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lexicons and the modalities of “pleasure usages” which were sedimented historically.

The fruits of such work would represent an invaluable acquisition for the main actors

in LGBT associations in Portugal. Over the past four decades, the latter’s social history

constitutes the other major cognitive challenge towards which this article offers a first

contribution.

31 From it, we can conclude, briefly, that LGBT associations would simply not have been

possible before the establishment of a democratic regime in 1974, but the latter, on its

own, was not sufficient for their emergence, and it would take about three decades to

develop associations in the Portuguese semiperipheral society. The socio-genesis of the

LGBT movement followed the pattern common to Southern European countries,

developing from the traditions and the material resources of the emancipatory

heritage of the left. However, the incipient expressions of a gay and lesbian

organisation movement faced insurmountable barriers in attempting autonomous

organisation, openly stated political support and the inclusion of their interests in the

agendas of political parties and trade unions until the beginning of the 1990s.

32 The process of reformulating political discourse which finally made it possible for gay

and lesbian emancipation to become assimilable by these spheres ran parallel with, and

was conditioned by, the premiership of Cavaco Silva (absolute majority of the Social

Democrat Party in 1987), by the entry into the European Union (made official in 1986)

and by the AIDS epidemic (the first cases were detected in 1984-85). That is to say,

respectively, by the modernisation of left-wing parties and cultures (which assumed a

defensive stance), by the replacement of a revolutionary model for social change with

expectations for access to European economic, social and legal-political givens, and by

the inclusion of segments of the gay community directly affected by the AIDS epidemic,

who had nothing to lose, in the NGOs fighting AIDS, a process which lent them the

necessary dynamics and legitimacy.

33 LGBT associations in Portugal thus gained momentum within the context of a wider

process of anti-AIDS struggle, getting involved in it and taking advantage of it in a

remarkable way, until they were able to gain autonomy from it and build up their own

dynamics. To this extent, the socio-genesis of LGBT associations confirms the

semiperipheral position of Portuguese society. This situation explains why it was only

from the mid-1990s that Portuguese LGBT associations acquired a status identical to

that of its European and North-American counterparts, embodied in organisations

representative of the community itself, in social and media visibility, in credibility and

in the ability to put pressure on party-political organisations and State institutions, and

finally, in a political agenda of its own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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das Letras.


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Amaral, Ana Luísa; Moita, Gabriela (2004), “Como se faz (e se desfaz) o armário: Algumas

representações da homossexualidade no Portugal de hoje,” in António Fernando Cascais (ed.),

Indisciplinar a teoria. Estudos gays, lésbicos e queer. Lisbon: Fenda, 99-115.

Cascais, António Fernando (1983), “Como quem não quer a coisa,” Fenda (In)Finda, 7, 9-17.

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Sida por um fio. Lisbon: Editorial Vega, 7-25.

Cascais, António Fernando (2003a), “Portugal,” in Georges-Louis Tin (ed.), Dictionnaire de

l’homophobie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 328-330.

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Cultura e Tecnologia, 9. Available in http://www.interact.com.pt.

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queer,” in António Fernando Cascais (ed.), Indisciplinar a teoria. Estudos gays, lésbicos e queer. Lisbon:

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NOTES

*. Article published in RCCS 76 (December 2006).

1. Between 27 and 28 June 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village,

New York City. The clientele was comprised mostly of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered

persons, many of them from ethnic minorities. This raid was met with violent protest, ensuing in

urban riots over a period of days. This event triggered the growth of LGBT associations and

initiatives in many parts of the world, and since then Stonewall and the 28th of June have been

symbols of resistance to heteronormativity. More information on this subject is available on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots.


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http://www.interact.com.pt/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

ABSTRACTS

This paper centres on the way in which the specific character of the Portuguese social formation

has determined and manifested itself in the socio-genesis of LGBT associations in the last three

decades. It is possible to establish a three-stage time frame which has primarily a heuristic value:

the first stage, from 1974 to 1991, can be divided into two phases, before and after the

appearance of the AIDS epidemic in Portugal; the second, between 1990-1991 and 1995-1997; and

the third, from 1997 until now. The production of knowledge on LGBT associations has to be

interconnected with two further lines of enquiry: one on its old and new detractors and

opponents, and the other on the community which the associations represent and from which

they emerge, with a history, an identity and a culture that explain the reasons for adherence or

resistance to them.

INDEX

Keywords: LGBT movement, association-building, Portuguese social formation, AIDS epidemic,

gay and queer studies

AUTHORS

ANTÓNIO FERNANDO CASCAIS

New University of Lisbon, Portugal


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