The transformation of Portuguese society: the role of Europeanization

Scholars of contemporary Portugal have alternately described Portuguese society and its political economy as ‘modern’ (Pinto 1998), ‘incompletely modern’ (Machado and Costa 2000), ‘semi-peripheral’ (Santos 1993b), typically European (Magone 1997; Corkill 1999; Syrett 2002; Royo and Manuel 2003), and even ‘a country like any other’ (Barreto and Pontes 2007). While there may be debate about the relative success of Portugal’s convergence with European norms in every social, political and economic domain, there is no doubting the country’s singularly rapid transformation over the past fifty years. In this chapter we focus on three policy areas, namely family and gender relations, migration, and the welfare state. We chose these three policy areas for their ability to illustrate the vast but uneven convergence of Portugal with Europe in the past fifty years. First, however, we need to explain the selection of our starting date. Our analysis starts in 1960, a full twenty-five years before Portugal’s formal entry into the European Economic Community. Following Barreto (2003), we argue that 1960 represents the beginning of many of the structural transformations of contemporary Portuguese society. Portugal joined the European Free Trade Association in 1960, ushering in an era of foreign investment, industrialization, and rapid economic growth. Mass tourism, most of it from the wealthier European countries, also developed rapidly in the 1960s, bringing cultural contact in its wake. Similarly, it is in this period that emigration flows from Portugal shifted from the Americas and Africa as the predominant destinations to Europe, further enhancing contact with European norms. Finally, 1961 marked the beginning of the disastrous colonial wars, thus ushering in the end of empire and the fall of the authoritarian regime.