I read somewhere that Portugal is a country that has been in steady decline for the last four centuries. Allow me to correct that view. Portugal is a country that has been in steady decline for the last eight centuries, essentially ever since its birth. Being in steady decline is part of our nature. If success were to happen to us, say, by accident, we would lose our identity. Every Portuguese struggles with this reality. The Portuguese intelligentsia is constantly analyzing the causes of our poverty and misfortune, oscillating between a paralyzing pessimism and a miraculous solution that will fix the country and the people within a generation’s time. It is not surprising that we have turned into a bipolar and self-delusional nation. The thesis I adopt here borrows very little from genetics. The Portuguese are culturally streamlined for failure. No one knows precisely why it is so, but it is inescapable.

Portugal had its first national hero centuries before we became a nation. This is not unusual, but it’s a revealing start. Meet Viriato (179–139 B.C.), a warrior chieftain of a tribe (the “Lusitanos”) from the western Iberian Peninsula, who held off the Roman invasion for several years. Viriato was so good at throwing stones from cliffs at the Roman Legions and in using guerrilla tactics that he had to be murdered in bed by three of his own people, who had been bribed by the local centurion. When Hollywood runs out of the most obvious epics, they will immortalize Viriato on the big screen. Portugal will then lobby to choose a star that is Portuguese enough. Mark Ruffalo or Danny De Vito? Tough choice. Viriato gave us national pride. From the Romans, in turn, we got a unified language, industries, military roads, bridges, administrative centers, and a religion, when Rome converted to Christianity in the fourth century A.D.

Our second hero was the founder of the nation, Afonso Henriques (1109–1185 A.D.), son of the crusader-knight Henry, and Teresa, the illegitimate and favorite daughter of Alfonso VI, king of León. In 1096 A.D. Henry received from Alfonso VI a hereditary title to the province of Portucale (roughly, today’s north of Portugal). By then that land was a sort of buffer zone between Christian and Muslim territory. Muslims had moved to the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century A.D., after the Germanic invasion that contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire. Henry was a loyal vassal to Alfonso VI, but upon the king’s death and the civil war that ensued between Galician, Castillian, Aragonese, and Leonese barons, he wisely remained neutral and abandoned his feudal obligations. After his death, his wife Teresa pursued this policy but when the Leonese Alfonso VII ascended to the throne, he forced Teresa to pay homage to the kingdom of Léon and Castilla. The nobles of Portucale, however, who had learned to appreciate their independence, rebelled against Alfonso VII and implicitly, Teresa. They were guided by Afonso Henriques, who had armed himself as a knight and managed to defeat his mother’s army. He would ultimately become an acclaimed and self-made king, by fighting the Muslims in the South and containing Alfonso´s march on Portugal.

I do not intend to bother you further by extending the list of Portuguese heroes, but Afonso Henriques’ accomplishments were worth mentioning on two grounds. First, gaining independence from our big and only neighboring kingdom (today´s Spain), left a wound that future wars and a Spanish occupation of the country from 1580 to 1640 A.D. did not help to heal. Modern relations between Portugal and Spain are excellent, that is, we no longer fear them and they continue to ignore us, a fact that our collective ego does not allow us to appreciate fully. Nevertheless, discussions over the control of the rate of streamflow in Portugal’s main rivers (unfortunately they all flow from Spain) or a mere soccer match are sufficient to unmask this hidden and mostly unidirectional tension between the two nations.

Secondly, although Afonso´s rebellion against his mother was purely political and less Freudian (hélas, his father had died) than I would like to think, it set the tone for centuries of betrayal, politically motivated marriages, illegitimate descendants, quasi-idiotic heirs to the throne, and a lethargic noble class; in short: a display of pure European monarchy. Luckily we became a Republic in 1910, but soon we smoothly transitioned to a dictatorship that lasted half a century, most of which ruled by Salazar (1898-1970). In 1974 a military coup d’état put an end to the dictatorship and eventually paved our way to “the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”

Today, Portugal has about 10 million people living within its borders and there are sizable Portuguese communities in France, the US, Brazil, Venezuela, and South Africa. The country is homogenous in terms of religion, ethnicity, and language, and there are no serious separatist claims, not even from the Azores and Madeira islands, two small and beautiful Portuguese archipelagoes cast away in the Atlantic ocean. Between 1886 and 1966, Portugal lost an estimated 2.6 million people to emigration, more than any West European country except Ireland. In the last two decades this understandable tendency to abandon the country has slowed down and has been counteracted by a flow of immigrants in search of labor from Brazil, countries of the former USSR, and Africa; 400,000 immigrants live today in Portugal. We have made considerable social and economic progress in the last 30 years. For instance, literacy levels have improved and this skill is widely used by the male population to read the sports press. A key event that triggered a number of structural changes in the country was our entry into the EEC (today’s European Union) in 1986. European money financed a number of projects and gave us a decent roadway. Still, a recurring topic in any discussion by and about the Portuguese is the need for a “change of mentality.” No one knows exactly what this is supposed to mean and how it can be done, but we all agree that it will be more difficult to achieve than building a few kilometers of highway.

The Portuguese discoveries remain to this day our greatest accomplishment. They were, however, a burden too heavy to carry. In fact, they still are. Let’s start with the word ‘discoveries’ and its two obvious problems. It is striking that two independent and similar actions, equally valid in merit, are judged differently by history, depending solely on when they occurred. “Who did what first” is an obsession well known to scientists but, unlike science, history can be rewritten to a large part just by playing with the dates. Thus, it is just a matter of time until someone comes up with the thesis that Brazil was not discovered by Cabral in 1500, but centuries before by the Vikings (who, apparently, got to North America before Columbus), or by the Chinese, even earlier, or by extra terrestrials, no one knows precisely when but presumably before anyone else. The second problem with the word ‘discoveries’ is that it is an example of eurocentrism and hidden paternalism (euphemistically speaking). Consider this: the Portuguese were the first Europeans to get to Japan, but even the Portuguese would not dare to say that we discovered Japan. Notice however how we talk about the arrival of Cabral to Brazil: we always refer to the discovery of Brazil as if the land was devoid of indigenous populations. This being said, what Portuguese sailors accomplished during the fourteen and fifteenth centuries was outstanding. Historians and intellectuals in Portugal should just agree, that what is difficult to explain is not why we were unable to rise to that level again, but simply how we did it in the first place.

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