In Part I, we reflected on how Nogueira emerged as a key political figure in Portugal from unlikely origins. Part II now presents how his turbulent career, driven by his creative and energetic mind, unfolded in unpredictable times.
Omnia pro Imperio
Though his nomination as Minister was initially met with scepticism by the regime’s most right-wing sectors, Nogueira was a committed believer in the policies that he would help put in motion. Indeed, despite not being a ‘classical Salazarist,’ Nogueira’s thought and priorities were by now almost entirely aligned with Salazar’s: Portugal’s fate as an independent State was to be decided in the jungles of Africa. A dire sense of national insecurity permeated their actions. The painful awareness of Portugal’s fragility, of its limited resources, and a growing fear of Spanish ambition, led both men to conclude that only with the strength it derived from its overseas possessions could Portugal be preserved. Such pessimism was integral to each man’s Weltanschauung. Perhaps even more than Salazar, whose mindset was, at origin, Catholic and legalistic, Nogueira was an unrepentant realist. For him, power alone—not the law—was the currency of international relations. This, the Minister believed, is why there was no alternative policy to be contemplated: because any other would, as he put it, “condemn Portugal to eternal modesty and an irrelevant international role,” the consequence of which could, one day, be “to risk the independence of the Mainland itself.” This was the time for momentous decisions: if Portugal was to safeguard her liberty in the decades and centuries to come, then the struggle for Africa was one it could not lose. Victory there was the supreme national objective.
But Nogueira was also a firm believer in Portugal as a model of civilisation. He was, indeed, a passionate anti-racist. For its critics, the Salazar government’s adoption of Gilberto Freyre’s theory of Lusotropicalism might have been a cynical ploy, an attempt to mask Portuguese colonialism under an illusion of racial equality. Whatever one’s views on the matter, however, the fact remains that Nogueira, like so many of his generation, believed the future would be shaped by great nations or blocs of nations, and that ethnically pluralistic polities—empires—were culturally and civilisationally superior to homogeneous ones. He saw Portugal as a pioneer in this great historical process; for him, Portugal’s construction of multiracial, religiously Catholic, and culturally Latin societies in Africa and Brazil made it a pioneer, as well as an example for the world to follow. Empire, as a political and cultural construct, was Lisbon’s vocation and raison d’être. But empire was also, to him, a remedy to particularism and conflict, a facilitator in the sharing of goods and ideas, and, thus, the inevitable solution for the future of Mankind. In this, his views were close to those of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi—paradoxically, one of the fathers of the pan-European movement that Nogueira so heartily opposed.
A naive superpower
Despite being first and foremost a nationalist, Nogueira was also a believer in the West. Just as he saw Portugal’s African territories as indispensable to Portuguese power and independence, he had thought much the same for France and her holdings on the continent. According to him, Africa was essential for the viability of Europe as an independent centre of influence; without the resource-rich, demographically-dynamic expanses to the south, European countries would have little hope of holding their ground against geopolitical giants such as the U.S., Russia, and, one day, China and India. From Washington’s point of view, Nogueira believed, it should have been clear that staying in Africa was Europe’s sole way of remaining relevant—and useful—in the battle against communism. American failure to comprehend this point exasperated him. He didn’t blame Washington for ruthlessly pursuing its interests. He saw America, he said, as an “idealistic and mercantile empire,” not different in substance from the “economic imperialism of the British,” the “bourgeois imperialism of the French” or the “ideological and territorial imperialism of the Russians.” Washington should be expected to look after itself, just like any other power. Instead, what angered him in U.S. policy was its apparent immaturity.
In his Secret Memorial, published around a month after his death, the great statesman wrote extensively about the United States. He argued that America’s “long term policy goals” were too often subverted by concerns that were “limited and short-sighted.” Washington seemed to him an unreliable ally, “too young” to have found a “stable” policy, inconstant in its purposes and disloyal in its means. He explicitly complains about the excessive influence of party politics on American foreign policy. The U.S. seemed “divided against itself,” he said, torn between the two opposing doctrines of “Republican isolationism” and “Democratic interventionism.” In the first case, U.S. policy was defined by “political pressure,” “commercial aggressiveness,” and “the control of economic and financial positions beneficial to the United States.” Democratic interventionism, meanwhile, “despite its self-proclaimed pacifism and claims of international cooperation,” was in fact “expansionist,” and based on “military means to impose America’s will.” Thus, he continued, when “the Republicans were in charge, the United States tended to be more respectful of appearances, treaties, even of good manners and the susceptibilities of others,” while with the Democrats “American positions are more brutal, even implacable, with the U.S. not hesitating to threaten force and use it whenever necessary.” Again, Nogueira may surprise readers of his material today with his remarkably prescient commentary.
Gaullisme à la portugaise
The belief that American naiveté made it an inadequate leader for the Western bloc was to guide much of Portugal’s international strategy in the 1960s. President Kennedy’s 1961 ultimatum to Lisbon had left bitter memories and reinforced the regime’s long-standing scepticism towards America’s ability to properly interpret and defend common Western interests. Nogueira’s answer was to develop a Gaullisme à la portugaise: unwavering in its Western affiliation but also fiercely nationalistic, independent, and critical of Washington.
This was an uneven match, but not one Nogueira would shy away from. The essence of his strategy was that Portugal avoided “the unanimous hostility of real powers.” Instead of automatic allegiance to any of the leading States, his program was to navigate their differences, eliminate vulnerabilities, and extend Portugal’s freedom of action to the greatest possible degree. In keeping with his worldview, this was to be done with little regard for ideological considerations, which he believed to be little more than a crude mask for State interest.
His primary concern was that Lisbon found alternatives to American power, within and outside the West. To pressure the Americans into a more Portugal-friendly stance, Lisbon would refuse the immediate renewal of the 1944 agreement that had legalised U.S. military presence in the crucially important Lajes Air Base, in the Azorean Archipelago. American presence was not terminated; Nogueira feared Washington could react to any eviction order by simply occupying the islands. It was, however, intentionally left in a legal limbo that would only be resolved when the Republican administration of Richard Nixon, much more amicable to Portuguese interests, came to power. Meanwhile, Nogueira’s desire to counteract U.S. military influence would lead to the installation, by 1964, of French and German military bases in Portuguese territory. For Portugal, this policy would prove to be of great use: not only was Washington kept in check, but Lisbon had gained two crucially important suppliers of matériel for the war effort in Africa.
Nogueira’s geopolitical heterodoxy would go further. Already in 1950, a few short months after Generalissimo Chiang Kai Chek’s retreat to Taiwan and Mao’s victory in the Civil War, Nogueira had argued for Lisbon’s diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic as the sole legitimate government of China. He foresaw the Sino-Soviet Split, still 11 years into the future, by writing of “the old rivalry between Russia and China which will, sooner or later, come to surface;” China, it seemed to him, was destined to form an anti-Russian alliance with the Western powers. When his prophecies of intra-communist conflict finally came to pass, he saw the emerging tripolar—and, increasingly, multipolar—world order of the 1960s as bringing both challenges and opportunities. With Nehru’s India sounding the drums of war over Goa, the ever-pragmatic diplomat would explore the idea of installing Chinese naval bases and other facilities in the province in order to dissuade an Indian attack. Though this plan failed, Nogueira remained a believer in the idea of using China to balance Soviet power. In 1964, after France’s de Gaulle recognised Communist China, Nogueira again tried his luck. Salazar approved the project. But, again, to no avail: the attempt, in which the famous American journalist Edgar Snow played a leading role, went nowhere. In his Secret Memorial, the diplomat blames “the far-right”—that is, the more conservative sectors of the regime—for disrupting what could otherwise have been a major political coup.
There are other, even more spectacular, examples of this ‘Gaullisme à la portugaise.’ Following Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, in 1959, Portugal, much to America’s irritation, defiantly refused to break relations with the island nation. And, in 1966, Lisbon surprised the world by taking part in Havana’s ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-colonialist’ Tricontinental Conference. Lisbon’s unexpected stance allowed for further attempts at diplomatic normalisation with the Eastern Bloc. Nogueira launched economic relations with Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. By the mid-1960s, his Foreign Ministry would attempt the reactivation of diplomatic ties with Tito’s Yugoslavia; and, in 1968, he would go to the point of studying a possible reestablishment of relations with the Soviet Union. An aide to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited the Portuguese capital to discuss the matter. In both cases, Nogueira’s overtures were defeated intramuros by less open minded sectors of the Lisbon elite.
After government
When, in 1968, a stroke forced Salazar to abandon government, Nogueira was one of the leading contenders for the succession. His adamant, passionate, and efficacious defence of Portugal’s war effort in Africa had paradoxically made him a hero to those same right-wing groups that had once feared him. His mindset had evolved, too: the circumstances of the war had hardened the liberalism of his younger years into a dynamic and forward-looking, but now increasingly authoritarian, conservative nationalism. Despite their support, President Américo Thomaz would, instead, pick Marcello Alves Caetano as Salazar’s dauphin. The Foreign Minister saw Caetano as too politically indecisive and European in outlook to be able to protect the country’s overseas empire. Disappointed and increasingly pessimistic, he abandoned office a year later.
As predicted by Nogueira, Marcello Caetano proved a wobbly and ineffective leader. The régime fell apart just six years after Salazar’s departure—and, with it, the dream of a pluricontinental and multiracial Portugal. Before the downfall, sensing it ever closer, Nogueira remained at the service of his country, both in business and in the Câmara Corporativa, the upper chamber of parliament. There, he advocated for the deepening of the Luso-Brazilian Commonwealth, a structure created by Salazar and Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas in the 1950s. Intended as a quasi-confederation, it had never been properly consolidated. Nogueira saw this renewed Lusitanian axis as embodying Portugal’s destiny, praising its “geopolitical potential,” and the possible “influence of 100 million people acting with parallel purposes” in “vast areas of America, Africa, and Europe, with its resources, its strategic positions, its ports, and its contacts with other peoples.” These grandiose projects, of course, were not to be. History took a different turn.
After the 1974 revolution that put an end to the Estado Novo, Nogueira was arrested by the new left-wing authorities. The move was purely vindictive; he had been involved in no counter-revolutionary activity of note. Like thousands of other Portuguese, he was incarcerated by men who considered themselves liberators. There, he suffered a stroke, after which he was allowed to go into exile in London. It was in Britain that he published his greatest work: a monumental, six volume biography of Salazar.
Nogueira only returned to Portugal in 1981. By then, the worst excesses of the Revolution were long in the past, and the country, now a parliamentary democracy, was well on the way towards integration with Europe. He opposed Portugal’s European turn with the same coherence he had always shown either in government or as a diplomat. His arguments that any project to federalise Europe would inevitably clash with the continent’s diversity of traditions and interests, and that the EU would lead to Portugal’s economic absorption by its larger Spanish neighbour, have not yet lost relevance. But, above all, his stubborn realism, irrevocable patriotism, and ability to navigate the complexities of the quasi-multipolar world of the 1960s are of great interest today. As the global balance of power shifts to the West’s disadvantage, a break with the illusions of ideology and a return to the pitiless objectivity of Realpolitik seem increasingly in order. In that regard, Alberto Franco Nogueira’s century of lessons may still have much to teach us all.
