On the 50th anniversary of 25 April 1974

This year and this month mark another anniversary of the coup d'état/revolution of 25 April 1974. As a historian (professor at FLUC and researcher at CEIS20/UC) and as a citizen, I think this is an excellent opportunity to reflect on some very relevant questions about the past and the present/future. I would like to highlight the importance of categories such as democracy and human rights, multilateralism and international organisations/sub-continental integration processes, Keynesianism and regulated globalisation, restoring environmental balances and saving non-renewable natural resources, development and combating extreme inequalities, universalism/multiculturalism and combating forms of discrimination.

I would also like to stress the relevance of alternative or opposing categories, which are once again very much in vogue today. I refer in particular to the concepts of populist and authoritarian government or dictatorship (authoritarian and/or totalitarian), nationalism, unilateralism and asymmetrical bilateral relations; monetarism or corporatism or collectivism and neo-liberal globalisation or protectionism; the squandering of ecological balances and non-renewable natural resources; economic growth or a return to mythical pasts; the reproduction of forms of inequality and discrimination; the rejection of multiculturalism and identitarianism.

As a historian, I argue that the role of historiography and other social sciences is to propose reconstructions and analyses that are as objective as possible, namely of the transformations and continuities that took place between April 1974 and April 1976 or January 1986 – including 28 September 1974, 11 March 1975, the elections to the Constituent Assembly on 25 April 1975, 25 November 1975, the approval of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic on 2 April 1976, the first parliamentary elections on 25 April 1976; the First Republic; the Military Dictatorship and the Estado Novo; the independence of most of the then Non-Self Governing Territories; the global context of the “Age of Fascism” and the Cold War.

Ponta Grossa (PR, BR), 19 April 2024

João Paulo Avelãs Nunes

(SH/DHEEAA/FL/UC e CEIS20/UC)