Portugal - past and present

Maybe it is just the people I talk to in Portugal, but one of the interesting things about the place is how it is situated between past and present, Europe and the Portuguese-speaking countries that are its former colonies, many identities and options. I am working with people exploring the current awareness of Lusophone heritage in several countries, as well as doing a methods seminar for young tech types in a multimedia MA who can't wait to spring into modern Europe.

You see a lot of reminders of Portugal's glorious past, like this statue of a 1600s era soldier who guards the breakfast room in my hotel. Most European countries are rediscovering their glorious pasts, many--like France--have always had that front and center anyway. But Portugal is somewhat unique in being a very small country with an outsize role in colonizing the world at a certain point, because they had both the technology and the national will to push into the world a bit before other European powers, decades before Columbus. They first presented their new role in the 1400s as pushing a crusade into Africa to take the Moors' resources away from them. Gradually they turned that into something different and helped invent imperialism and colonial- ism, a rather ambivalent heritage. Like Spain, they took enough trade, gold and money out of the Americas (and in the Portuguese case, India, Indonesia and Japan), to build a lot of lovely cathedrals, like this one, the Catedral da Sé, in Porto.

One positive aspect of all that colonial devastation and exploitation was creation of a new global space for communication and culture, the Portuguese- speaking or Lusophone world, shared by Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique,Cabo Verde, East Timor, etc. Hundreds of millions of very otherwise diverse people brought together, to some degree, by language and cultural heritage. There is still a lot of interest in that world here, but a lot of people, particularly the younger ones, would prefer to look toward their place in a dynamic, expanding European economic and cultural scene. In some ways, it is a false dichotomy, both the Lusophone world, linked to the past, and the prospect of greater integration into Europe, are and probably should be layers of a complex Portuguese identity and future plans. But it is interesting to sense the tensions between the two.