Dear all,
Thank you in advance for reading my paper and for any comments, which I’m sure will be very important in order to review it. A version of this article was previously submitted and rejected by a journal, without helpful feedback. I choose to share with you a previous version of the article I submitted, which is less ‘neat’ and elaborated, but with more data. I decided this because I thought it is more interesting to show and discuss with you the information I collected and the basic idea I developed around it rather than a more ‘finished’ paper. This is why I’m sure it will be simpler and more interesting to work on ‘rough material’ than on a more structured text.
Guya.
Guya Accornero
PhD Historical Sociology
Centre of Research and Studies in Sociology – Lisbon University Institute
The ‘Authoritarian Paradox’
Militants’ Trajectories in Portugal from Dictatorship to Democracy
Abstract
This article analyses the long-term consequences of political engagement on the life of Portuguese militants who mobilized against the Estado Novo authoritarian regime between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. Considering political engagement as a form of secondary socialization, I reconstruct the life trajectories of militants – mainly students – of the radical left, using open questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The aim is to understand how secondary socialization occurred, and how this experience changed according to the changes at a political level. On the other hand, I analyse the long-term consequences of political engagement on the political and life trajectories of militants across three different institutional settings: an authoritarian regime (until 1974), a revolutionary process (1975-1975) and a democracy (from 1976 onwards). Following the life courses of these people from 1967 until 2015, this research provides two primary evidences. On the one hand, it shows that repression under an authoritarian regime dramatically limits the possibilities to reinvest the activist’s skills, to conceive and foster family and friendship and to engage in a professional career, turning the political engagement into “the only game in town”. On the other hand, militants tend to leave political engagement at the end of the democratization process, when the institutional change creates the conditions to reinvest resources and skills acquired during their militancy and engage in other life projects.
Key-words:
Militants’ trajectories, authoritarianism, regime-change, political disengagement, political socialization.
Introduction
This article analyses the long-term consequences of political engagement on the life of Portuguese people who mobilized against the Estado Novo authoritarian regime between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. Starting their engagement during the last phase of the dictatorship, the political trajectories of these former activists took place across three different institutional settings: an authoritarian regime (until 1974), a revolutionary process (1975-1975) and a democracy (from 1976 onwards). Following the life courses of these people until nowadays, this research has two key questions. Firstly, it studies the way that political activism in authoritarian scenarios affects the militants’ trajectory and biography, in the short and long term. Secondly, it aims to analyse how the institutional context influences the form, contents and networks of militancy.
In order to carry out the analysis I adopt the conceptual framework of “militant trajectory”. This analytical instrument is particularly suitable to understanding the different phases of the militants’ engagement and disengagement in relation to the institutional dimension, as well as the consequences of activism, on their biographical paths. The interactionist framework in which the concept of “militant trajectory” situates itself is described by Florence Joshua in this way: “The action is learned in a procedural way, as the result of the interaction between an individual history and a structural context. The notion also underlines the role of different actors who interact around the trajectory […] Following this meaning, the notion of trajectory also considers the militancy as both a collective and an individual social activity and it refers to the actor (and to the way in which he manages his engagement) and to the militant group” (Joshua 2007: 28). In this sense, political engagement is seen as a “long-lasting social activity articulated by phases of joining, commitment, and defection” (Fillieule 2010: 4).
Social movement scholars have rarely studied the political participation effects on the life of militants.[1] Rather, research to date has tended to focus on the pre-existing conditions which lead to engagement and recruitment processes. A path-breaking case-study on the long-term effects of activism on the matrimonial, political and professional trajectories of former militants is Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer (1988). At the moment, it is particularly French political sociology that is developing this field of research, with studies on the biographical consequences of different kinds of political engagement such as communist (Leclerq 2012) feminist (Masclet 2015), 1968 movement (Pagis 2011). Moreover, there are no studies which consider militant trajectories in countries that experienced phases of rapid institutional changes, as was the case in Portugal, Greece[2] and Spain.
Until recent years, studies on disengagement processes were also rare. In fact, if disengagement as one of the possible effects of repression was largely addressed,[3] other factors related to the disengagement process did not attract equal attention from social movement researchers.[4]More recently, as stressed by Lorenzo Bosi and Donatella della Porta, ‘there has been an increased focus on disengagement from political violence at the micro […] and meso levels […] which has partially remedied previous scientific neglect of the topic’ (Bosi and della Porta 2015: 81). These studies mainly focus on disengagement from political violence and terroristic organizations in democratic countries (Cronin 2009; Weinber 2012, Bosi and della Porta 2015), and it seemsmore difficult to find similar analysis in authoritarian context or following democratic transitions.
Disengagement processes could be analysed from different points of view. The micro-level considers elements like the biographical disposition of militants, their political convictions and attitudes. The meso-level is mainly related to relational dimensions, such as group dynamics and, in some cases, the degree of competition among different participant networks (political organization, family, professional milieu). The macro-level is related to the institutional setting, where changes could affect the engagement and disengagement processes.
Given the above, in this article I consider political engagement as a form of secondary socialization, which generates or modifies dispositions to act and think. The research was above all developed based on open questionnaires and interviews. The former militants interviewed or who answered the questionnaires all belonged to the Portuguese student movement against the Estado Novo regime. They started to engage between 1967 and 1974, during the twilight years of the regime, just before the coup d’état of 25 April 1974 which unleashed the revolutionary period. Many of them, after having initially joined the student movement, primarily as members or leaders of legal entities such as the Students’ Association, then followed a militant path into radical and clandestine political groups, in most cases of the Maoist extreme left. Some of the former students of the sample also experienced a more radical form of militancy, having lived underground for several months or years, in some cases even under illegal circumstances abroad.
In order to prevent any personalisation of the choice of the former students, I created a database of all the students arrested by the political police (PIDE – International and State Defence Police) between 1967 and 1974. This preliminary work was carried out based on the corresponding police files and was used to monitor the variation patterns of student arrests during the final years of the regime, as well as the dispersion of other factors such as the age and gender of these students. This data is important to gain an overall panorama of the students who were active during those years, for the purpose of comparison with my sample of former students.
The next step was to search the internet in order to contact these people. Of the 488 students detained by the police during the period under review, I was able to collect 25 life stories, approximately 1 student in 20, 18 through open questionnaires and 7 through semi-structured interviews. The advantage of this method of preliminary collection of contact details is that it allowed me to reach former militants who, in the most cases, had never been interviewed and who, in many cases, had entirely abandoned any form of political or public activity and are therefore mostly “unknown”.
The article shows that repression under an authoritarian regime dramatically affects the militant’s life, mainly limiting the possibilities to reinvest the activist’s skills, to conceive and foster family and friendship and to engage in a professional career. Even if the main aim of these regimes is to demobilize opponents, paradoxically these conditions actually have the effect of perpetuating their engagement, turning it into “the only game in town”. The article provides evidence that indicates this is also the main reason why the majority of these militants leave political engagement at the end of the revolutionary process, when the institutional change creates the possibility to reinvest resources and skills acquired during their militancy and to engage in other life projects.
The Student Movement in the Late Estado Novo
The Portuguese regime referred to as the Estado Novo was institutionalized in 1933 by António de Oliviera Salazar, along the lines of European fascism (Costa Pinto and Kallis 2014; Ivani 2008). Although some modifications were implemented following the Second World War, under pressure of the new European context, these were mere window-dressing. Any form of political participation other than through the channels of the regime – single party, national syndicate, youth organisations, for example – was illegal (Patriarca 1995; Schmitter 1999). The persecution of objectors was fiercely pursued, above all through the political police, the special courts, political prisons and detention camps (Palacios Cerezales 2011; Accornero 2013a and 2014).
From 1961 onwards, Portugal opened battlefields on various fronts – Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique – against the independence movements which began to arise in the colonies. By the early 1970s, the war was absorbing almost a third of the State budget and channelled 280,000 soldiers in Africa, becoming one of the primary issues of the student mobilization (Bermeo 2007; Cardina 2010; Accornero 2013b and 2016). In 1968, António Salazar had to be replaced as prime minister, following an accident. He was succeeded by Marcelo Caetano, who embarked on a period of opening known as the “Marcelist spring”. Some freedom of the unions was introduced, a modernising university reform was pushed through, the arbitrariness of the political police was reduced and some political liberty permitted, albeit always under the sphere of the single party, the National Union. This period was, however, brief and ephemeral, and as of the early 1970s the repression showed renewed exacerbation, the political doors that had opened were closed and the colonial war effort intensified further.
From this time onwards, and also in the scenario of Marcelist liberalisation, the movement took up different features, the academic claims gave way to open criticism of the regime, no longer just based on its educational policy but widening out to reach its authoritarian nature, repression and the colonial war. A key moment in this process was the first demonstration against the Vietnam War, organised in Lisbon during February 1968, which represented the student movement’s commitment against the Portuguese colonial war, symbolically associated to the war carried out by the USA. From the early 1970s onwards, under the influence of the panoply of far-left organisations, especially Maoist, which had emerged in the meantime, part of the student movement undertook even more radical positions (Cardina 2011; Accornero 2013a and 2016).
During these years, the most critical event of the student agitation were the murder, in October 1973 by the political police, of the student Ribeiro dos Santos in the midst of a meeting at the Higher Education Institute of Economics and Finance (ISCEF). This homicide and the following funeral are recalled by many former students as the turning point in their definitive acceptance of the radical ideas, especially as many students were arrested during the demonstrations and confrontations with the police that occurred during the funeral (Palacios Cerezales 2009).
These more radical attitudes no longer considered the implantation of a ´bourgeois’ democracy as the ultimate goal of the struggle, they started to adopt revolutionary language – above all with Marxist-Leninist references, but also based on Trotsky and Che Guevara – and a more radical repertoire of action. In this way, in terms of ideologies, claims and repertoire of action, the Portuguese student movement was at that time pretty much in line with its contemporaries in other European countries. On the other hand, it is clear that any type of political activism – from the most moderate right up to the most revolutionary – was illegal, and this had obvious consequences on the form of engagement, as well as in terms of its effects on the life of the militants.
Following the end of the 1960s, student activity was no longer reduced to the action openly developed by the student associations. As legal entities representing the students, whose boards were elected through general voting by the entire student community, the student associations were an exception in the Salazarist corporativist structure, and may be considered the only space of participation outside the regime’s institutions, and indeed a space of effective representation and autonomy. Although frequently subject to the regime’s repression, they performed a key role in the embryonic development of militancy.
Having been, from the very beginning, fundamental resources for student mobilization – especially based on academic claims – the associations also started to be ‘used’, in a more veiled form, by the radical groups that emerged in the universities as vehicles for the development of their activities, such as the printing of propaganda, meeting places, centres of ‘cooptation’ of new militants, etc. Frequently, upon arrival at university, a student’s entrance into the association was the primary form of ‘initiation’ to militancy, which in many cases represented a bridge to joining underground groups of the radical left.
Indicative of the process of students’ radicalisation at the end of the regime is the fact that the number of arrested students increased greatly over the final years of the regime. While the total number of political prisoners during the period of 1956-1974 was 7,339, the total number of students who were arrested in this same period was 939, corresponding to around 13%, with an average of around 50 students imprisoned per year. In 1973, 208 students were arrested, representing four times more than the annual average of the previous years. In 1973[5]students numbered over half of all political prisoners. This means that, by the end of the regime, students represented the social category most affected by the repression, which is even more significant considering that in Portuguese society this involved a fairly small group of people.
The extension of the student turmoil to secondary school was also significant, which is evident in the fact that 24% of the students arrested in 1973 were aged less than 19 years old, while this percentage was merely 7% in 1962 (Accornero 2013a, 2013b and 2016). Indeed, many of the former students considered in this study were minors at the time of their incarceration.
Finally, it is important to highlight the relevant increase in the number of women among the arrested students. While in 1962 – another moment of intense student agitation – 13 of the total 122 students imprisoned were women, i.e. around 10%, in 1973 they numbered 43 out of 208, corresponding to around 20%, i.e. double their previous number. Of the total students arrested between 1956 and 1966, 45 were women, i.e. around 4.5%. Of the total number of students arrested between 1967 – 488 – there are 101 women, corresponding to some 20%. Among the 25 former students who have answered the questionnaire or been interviewed, 5 are women, representing 20%, the equivalent the average of the period under review.
On 25 April 1974 the Estado Novo was overthrown by a peaceful military coup led by officers of Armed Forces Movements (MFA). The turbulent period which followed, nominated as the Processo Revolucionário em Curso (Revolutionary Process Underway, PREC), was characterized by intense conflict between opposing political forces (mainly the extreme left, the extreme right and the conservatives), as attempted coups and counter coups, massive social mobilization, and the occupation of lands, factories and media headquarters (Palacios Cerezales 2003; Accornero 2013b and 2016,; Ramos Pinto 2013).
Robert Fishman (2011) considers that the social revolution post-25 April caused a cultural renewal and a partial inversion of the social hierarchy, which would have favoured the rooting of democratic practices, making Portuguese society more inclusive and open, he said, than, for instance, Spain. Similar effects of a revolutionary transition on the development of Portuguese civil society are also detected by Tiago Fernandes, who stresses that “The model of civil societypresent in Portugal is much closer to the ideal of participatory democracy,whereas Spain has a more demobilized civil society” (Fernandes 2014: 2), and explains this difference with the different type of transition experienced inthe two countries.
In fact, the strong social mobilization played a crucial role in contributing as much to a major break with the authoritarian past – the rapid dissolution of authoritarian institutions, purges and political trials – as to the implementation of important social reforms. In spite of these conditions, a general process of demobilization can be observed in post-revolutionary Portugal. Levels of political participation, both conventional and unconventional,started to decrease just at the moment in which Portuguese citizens gained the right to carry out political activity freely (Magalhães 2005).