Portugal's international situation

Abstract

The main event of this century, where Portugal's position in the world was concerned, was the exhaustion of the national secular strategic concept marked by the revolution on 25 April 1974, which decided to renounce sovereignty of all the country's colonial territories. As part of the process that had begun at the end of the Second World War, the problem of the Portuguese border became more complex: its geographical border was limited to its peninsular border, with an accentuated tendency to extend to northern Africa, and particularly to Morocco; its economic border, evolving into a political border, was transferred to the border of the European Union; and its cultural border found a specific definition in the creation of the CPLP - Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries. These different borders do not coincide, which means that traditional diplomacies have to be redefined and the membership of large communities that this fact involves requires a diplomacy that is coherent with the different strategic concepts involved and especially with each member of the CPLP, that belongs to different large communities. The effort involved requires the presence of dialogue, cooperation and decision in the trans-state bodies, seeking a new national strategic concept that has not yet been formulated. It so happens that, in the large economic and political area of the European Union, Portugal is considered peripheral, but in the relations between the different large communities it has the position of a border country articulating between the European pillar and the American pillar in the Atlantic Alliance, between the Atlantic Alliance and the North African corridor, and between the North Atlantic and South Atlantic. In this last one, Brazil has to deal with coordinating its continental and maritime status, in which the latter is particularly important because of the new sovereignties on the Atlantic coast of Africa. This effort requires an evaluation of the relationship between the possible resources and answers, which tends to place the country in the category of an exiguous state in the new classification of powers. This logically means discussing the evolution of classical sovereignty to a new concept of service sovereignty, which can be required of all states on the basis of the globalisation of their dependencies and interdependencies and of the globalism of international managements.