It is perhaps difficult for the man of 2023 to trust the wisdom of politicians. Not too long ago, a majority of European nations could, regardless of political affiliation, economic system, or geopolitical alignment, count as their leaders men of some discernible merit. From de Gaulle to Churchill, from Salazar and Adenauer to Tito and Gromyko, at the helm of the continent there stood, more often than not, statesmen who still deserve to be studied and discussed. That this stands in such stark contrast with our own age goes a long way to explaining Europe’s sorry state today.
Alberto Franco Nogueira, Portuguese minister of foreign affairs between 1961 and ’69, stands among that now lost class of great European statesmen. A towering and curious intellect, the national—and international—upheavals of the 20th century took him from the left-wing milieu of his youth to the unlikely position of chief diplomat of the Salazar government. But Nogueira was more than a man of his time. His implacable realism and remarkable foresight make him useful today, when Europe, like the Portugal of the 1960s, finds itself besieged by greater powers and forced to rethink her global role.
An unlikely profile
Franco Nogueira was born in Vila Franca de Xira, not far from Lisbon. The son of middle-class parents, he read Law at Lisbon University. He was an unremarkable student. Legal matters generally bored him; Nogueira was much keener on history, politics, and literature. This last subject remained his mightiest passion even after the young man was accepted into the Necessidades, Portugal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 1941. An avid reader, his early years suggested a promising career as a literary critic. His critiques were as politically unbiased as Nogueira was himself. He became a friend of Fernando Castro Soromenho, a neo-realist novelist who, being opposed to Oliveira Salazar’s government, would later go into exile in the United States. His literary preferences were decidedly with the Left: Steinbeck, Malraux, Graciliano, Gide. But, even as a republican, left-leaning young man, Franco Nogueira’s committed nationalism was already evident—perhaps more aesthetical than doctrinarian, but present nonetheless.
Portugal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a seclusive, ritualised institution: aristocratic, affected, often eccentric. It was—and is—a rare haven for the country’s disenfranchised traditional elites; a last, solitary keep of die-hard pomposity. Nogueira, of course, was none of the sort. He found the hyper-formalism and rigid hierarchy of diplomatic life abhorrent: to the chagrin of many of his colleagues, he was acerbic, even iconoclastic. And, unlike so many among the Estado Novo’s recently-assembled bureaucratic machine, this was a man of no pedigree and no obvious right-wing credentials: he wasn’t a Catholic, or at least not in any meaningful, spiritual sense; he wasn’t a monarchist; he had not, in his youth, been seduced by any of the quasi-fascist movements of the day, such as Francisco Rolão Preto’s Blueshirts. He had no clear connection to any of the conservative factions that had, in the late 1920s, conspired to bring down the liberal Republic and establish Salazar’s régime. These unlikely origins would haunt him for much of his career.
Nogueira was determined to become odder still. In 1946, he arrived in a defeated, still smouldering Japan. That was to be his first diplomatic mission abroad. And it was there, among the still fresh horrors of war, that the young man would marry his life-long wife, Mrs. Vera Wang. She was a remarkable woman. Of Portuguese and Chinese descent, Wang’s marriage to a Portuguese diplomat raised more than a few eyebrows in Lisbon. Although she was the daughter of a Kuomintang diplomat, gossip at Necessidades was that Vera was a Communist. She was not, of course, and Salazar himself signed on the wedding.
Years later, while speaking in Oxford to explain Portugal’s reluctance to abandon its African territories, an ‘anti-colonialist’ African gentleman disputed Portuguese claims of multiracialism by telling Nogueira that, if he was indeed not a racist, then perhaps he should find himself a black wife. The diplomat, much amused, answered with trademark nimbleness: he “could not,” unfortunately, “because he was already very happily married with a Chinese lady instead.” The room was in uproar, and the young provocateur vanished into the crowd.
The love of the state
In a country where geopolitics was never taken particularly seriously, Nogueira’s thoroughly state-centric worldview was a rarity. The nation, for him, was the supreme political reality. Only with the national community as mediator could men find room for themselves within humanity at large; only contextualised by tribal specificity, integrated in that old family of shared smiles and common tears, could they truly be human. Nations were natural, organic, almost living creatures. Like individuals, they had personalities, traumas, and long-lasting objectives; their behaviour was always rational, even when brutal. It follows, thus, that international relations are essentially about the struggle of nations for resources and space in a fierce, Hobbesian battle of all against all. For him, this struggle was the mighty wind that moved the ship of history.
This merciless form of realism may be out of fashion today, but it need not surprise us that it was so embraced by a man who shared his formative years with the grand drama of World War II. What lofty idealism could, indeed, have survived the horrors of that period? As a distant, sheltered witness to Europe’s suicide, Nogueira spent the early years of his diplomatic career analysing the disaster. His Relatórios Anuais (yearly reports) include two particularly remarkable texts: “Subsidy for a critical synthesis of German political imperialism” (1943) and “Theory of an Empire: a short synthesis of Russian foreign policy” (1945). In them, the young diplomat presents foreign policy as fundamentally impersonal: independent from those who craft and apply it, and untouchable by ideology or personal preference. Instead, to Nogueira, the conduct of nations is but a slave to the iron laws of geography and the past. Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and all the other great warlords of the day were, to him, the mere executors of their nations’ inescapable policy.
What this geopolitical determinism means, in Nogueira’s thought, is that foreign policy is primarily about continuity. His view was that, be it with the Nazis, the Weimar Republic’s Stresemann, or Bismarck at the helm, German grand strategy had always been constrained by the same difficulties and objectives: that is, dominating Eastern Europe, and avoiding encroachment by the two great powers either side, namely France to the west and Russian to the east. Had he lived to see it, he would, no doubt, have interpreted the excitement of post-Cold War Germany for the eastward expansion of the European Union, all the way to the former Soviet border, in much the same way.
The curse of geography
His ‘Theory of an Empire,’ an analysis of Russian foreign policy over the centuries, stands out today as particularly timely. For Nogueira, there was no such thing as ‘Soviet’ Russia. There was only Russia—an old, permanent geopolitical reality with old, permanent geopolitical goals. From a historical, grand strategic point of view, it was not Stalin’s unique brand of ruthlessness that truly mattered. Whether run by Tsars or the Soviets, Peter I or Lenin, the German Catherine the Great or a certain ex-seminarian from the depths of rural Georgia, Russia remained an ethnically diverse, northern Eurasian empire of reduced sea access and little in the way of natural defences. In that work, he draws attention to medieval Russia’s early days as a polycentric, decentralised polity; to Mongol domination as the price of this division; and to Muscovite autocratic centralism as its historical remedy. He does not blame Russia for being what it is. For him, power politics was a science like any other: he was concerned with understanding, not with moralising.
The solemn proclamations of Communism had little impact over Russian foreign policy, he thought. It could be that the Moscow of the Soviets spoke the language of internationalism, but that was little more than a ploy—a careful lie designed to confuse, to obfuscate, and to justify. The Third International—like the Third Rome—was a poem of ideology serving the hard prose of power. Yet, behind the incense and liturgy of the new Leninist faith, Stalin’s Russia still yearned for the same palpable objectives it always had: to break free from its sea blockade in the Baltic and Black Seas, to control their coasts and straits, to project power into the Polish plain, and fortify her heartland through acquiring large buffers in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus. When, in 1940, Stalin moved to annex the Baltic States, that appeared to the Portuguese diplomat as a repetition of Ivan IV’s policies in the Livonian Wars, finally brought to fruition by Peter’s conquests in the Great Northern War. Would he, too, have seen the great European war of our age as Vladimir Putin following in the footsteps of Ekaterina Velikaya by marching on Crimea and cementing Russia’s hold over the Black Sea? As he wrote about Stalin, “what is at stake is not the personality of the Muscovite dictator or, indeed, [the issue of] party doctrine; it is the collective personality of the Russian people. Russia is not imperialistic because it is communist; it is imperialistic because it is Russia.” Perhaps Nogueira would have noticed how the current master of the Kremlin makes a point of receiving foreign dignitaries under a towering statue of Russia’s famous German Empress—and smiled.
Minister at last
Nogueira became Minister of Foreign Affairs at the dawn of an acute national crisis. By 1961, Harold McMillan’s “Wind of Change” had reached Lisbon. The global anti-colonial movement, which had seen India achieve independence from Britain and bitter struggles for secession in French Algeria and Indochina, finally spread to Portugal’s far-flung empire. For the Portuguese government, this was an annus horribilis: a series of risings in Angola rapidly escalated into a war that would, in years to come, ignite also Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. In December, Goa, a small territory that had been Portuguese since the 16th century, was invaded and annexed by India’s Nehru. Though it shattered New Delhi’s reputation for pacifism, Khrushchev supported the move; London and Washington, meanwhile, preferred to ignore the matter.
Although Portugal had been a NATO founding member, President Kennedy denied Lisbon any support. Rather, Washington presented it with an ultimatum: publicly announce Portugal’s readiness to leave Africa on short notice, or face America’s resolute opposition. Salazar received this stern warning from the mouth of the American ambassador; when he finished, the old statesman answered, undisturbed: “Is that all? Good day.” This further excited American fury: the U.S. would then proceed to support an anti-Salazar coup led by his defence Minister, General Júlio Botelho Moniz. When this also failed, the Kennedy administration’s attitude became openly hostile, and from then on, America funded and armed the anti-Lisbon guerrillas in Africa, publicly criticising Portugal at the UN and other international fora, and imposing restrictions on the usage of U.S.-made weaponry by the Portuguese Armed Forces. This state of affairs continued until the election of Richard Nixon in 1969.
In Lisbon, having held his ground, Oliveira Salazar turned towards consolidating his position within the régime—while making the country ready for a multifront, long war of attrition. It was in this context that Nogueira, once a republican, left-leaning intellectual, came to lead the diplomatic apparatus of the Estado Novo. Now the Political Director of the Necessidades, Nogueira was recommended to Salazar by Foreign Minister Marcello Duarte Mathias. The choice was met with apprehension in Lisbon’s conservative circles. José Soares da Fonseca—who, seven years later, would support Nogueira as successor to Salazar—was horrified by what he thought was a dangerous bet on a man of objectionably “liberal tendencies,” lacking in “nationalist upbringing,” and “insufficiently close to the President of the Council’s worldview.” Salazar summoned Nogueira nonetheless, offered him the Ministry, and put forward two crucial questions: Did Nogueira agree with the government’s African and foreign policies? And did he believe Portugal had the resources to successfully apply them? Nogueira’s reply was to the positive in both instances. For the rest of the decade, the diplomatic front would be his to command.
In Part II, we’ll consider how Nogueira’s career as foreign minister took off, considerably shaping the future of his country.
