On July 17, 1996, the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) was officially established: an organization created to promote bilateral relations between Portuguese-speaking nations around the world. Initially, the new organization, headquartered in Lisbon, had seven member states: Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe. Later, Timor-Leste joined, which became independent from Indonesia in 2002. Then, in 2014, it was the turn of Equatorial Guinea, which became a full member of the Community, after having been an observer country for a long time.
Almost 30 years after its birth, the clp today has 9 member states and 32 observers: Mauritius, Senegal, Georgia, Japan, Namibia, Turkey, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Uruguay, Andorra, Argentina, Chile, France, Italy , Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Serbia, Canada, Greece, India, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Qatar, Spain, Peru, Romania and the United States. Reflecting growing interest in this organization, Morocco, Swaziland and Ukraine have also requested observer status. The same status in the UN General Assembly was granted to the CPLP on October 26, 1999.
In addition to promoting political and diplomatic cooperation between its members, the Community also aims to strengthen international presence and cooperation in areas such as economy, education and defense. In particular, Member States are discussing the creation of peacekeeping forces. The prerequisites for joining the CPLP do not require the candidate country to be Portuguese-speaking or to have a Portuguese-speaking minority within it. However, it is mandatory that the country has diplomatic relations with one or more members of the organization and that its universities teach Portuguese.
For Portugal, April 25th is a monument. A symbolic date. A watershed that, in 1974, marked not only the turning point between the end of the dictatorship and the birth of democracy, but also the collapse of colonialism and the definitive success of the struggles for the independence of the so-called Portuguese “overseas provinces”, namely in Africa. «It is a founding moment in the country’s history, in such a way that today no one — except a small minority — dares to question it or publicly contest it», tells L’Osservatore Romano Fernando Tavares Pimenta, historian and researcher from the Atlantic History Studies Center-Alberto Vieira, from Madeira.
The notes of “Grândola, Vila Morena”, a song by Zeca Afonso dedicated to the proletarian movement, until then banned by censorship, which on the morning of April 25th gave La to the revolution, and the carnations stuck in cannons and rifles, run the risk of being trivialized and becoming photograms to be stored nostalgically in the trunk of a romantic memory. Instead, “something singular and unique really happened that day, as what had begun as a military coup d’état by some particular captains — the “April captains” — fed up with the Salazar regime of the “Estado Novo”, which saw Marcelo Caetano in power since 1968, it transformed almost immediately into a peaceful popular revolution: they wanted an end to the dictatorship and an end to the ongoing wars in Portuguese African colonies, and the “liberated” people spontaneously took to the streets supporting the military’s action. » gathered in the Armed Forces Movement (Mfa). «It was not, therefore, the power of weapons», wrote Franco Lorenzoni, correspondent in the country in 1974-1975, «that overthrew Portuguese fascism, but the explicit renunciation of their use by the military, which allowed the population to show solidarity with that revolt and finally conquer freedom and democracy».
After these successes came party pluralism and the construction of a social and social protection system similar to other Western European countries, «a civilizational achievement», says Pimenta. Because all of this also allowed a large part of the population to escape backwardness: «Unfortunately, we were in the condition of a rich state in a very impoverished country (in the 60s and 70s, around 1.5 million people left Portugal to escape the poverty) and, to give an example, with the highest infant mortality rate on the continent. There was a great desire to change economic and social structures».
At the same time, however, in a certain way, the “carnation revolution” is also a consequence of the process of anti-colonial struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. «It can be safely said that April 25th would not have existed without the wars for African independence, which progressively wore down, exhausted and impoverished the country, and, on the other hand, that day was crucial for African countries to achieve what they wanted. who had been fighting since 1961″, he highlights.
The attention of the Catholic Church was also significant at the time. The audience that Paulo saw granted in 1970 to the leaders of the anti-colonial struggle, the Guinean Amílcar Cabral, the Mozambican Marcelino dos Santos and the Angolan António Agostinho Neto. But «it is worth mentioning above all the monitoring role it played in the period that followed, namely the construction of liberal democratic structures of European and Western origin in Portugal, and the social development of African countries».
The words of President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who a few days before the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution expressed himself in favor of a type of compensation “to the countries that suffered from the transatlantic slave trade”, are today sparking controversy in the Portuguese political world .
The proposal was immediately blocked by the center-right executive, invested in early April under the leadership of Luís Montenegro, leader of the “Aliança Democrática” coalition: in a statement taken up by Reuters, the Government explained that there was “no process or program of specific actions” to pay reparations and stressed that he intended to “deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on the reconciliation of brotherly peoples.” These positions taken, explained Pimenta, «touch very delicate ground and always run the risk of generating tensions if they are done in a generalized manner. However, distinctions must be made; we cannot run the risk of simplifying. Firstly, colonialism — which developed between the centuries xv It is xx — is different from slavery itself, which was legally abolished in the former Portuguese empire during the 19th century. xix . Second: the colonial experience was not the same everywhere, having assumed different specificities in various territories. Third: these are questions that must also be explored in depth from the point of view of historical research, before being shared, perhaps by specifically studying ways of compensating those who actually suffered violence or massacres. Finally, I would add, today there may be more fruitful forms of cooperation at an economic, social, cultural and political level aimed at development, in dialogue with local communities, as, among other things, is already largely the case in the Community of Countries of Portuguese language (CPLP). Within it, there are processes that go beyond simple diplomatic relations: between Portugal and the former overseas provinces there is a very different degree of collaboration than what happens, for example, between other Western European countries and their former colonies». A specificity in which Lisbon intends to continue investing.
Roberto Paglialonga
