Welfare amid dictatorship and democracy : disabled war veterans, colonialism, and the end of empire : Portugal, 1961-1976

Abstract

The 1974 Carnation Revolution unfolded in Portugal half a century ago. The ‘bloodless’ revolution marked the end of nearly fifty years of dictatorial rule in Portugal, and the end of five centuries of Portuguese imperial history, the last thirteen of which had been defined by war in the African colonies. The Colonial War ‘created’ thousands of disabled veterans, the central protagonists of this thesis. For these men, the Carnation Revolution represented not only the end of the war, but a critical opportunity to gain a voice and rights. Whereas the Estado Novo regime had refused them proper welfare support for the entirety of the war, the move towards democracy meant not only the chance to secure better welfare provisions, but also to establish new ideas about disability. By focusing on the period from 1961 to 1976, this thesis investigates how disabled veterans’ welfare changed between shifting political regimes, emphasising how the two regimes’ divergent political ideas and ideologies translated into different welfare schemes for veterans. Complementing this top-down perspective, the thesis further explores how disabled veterans and their associations engaged with changing regimes on the ground and played an active role themselves in enacting change. Not all disabled veterans benefitted from change in the same way, however. As this dissertation demonstrates, the Mozambican, Angolan and Guinean veterans who fought on the Portuguese side during the colonial war were not entitled to the new democratic regime’s welfare provisions. Either because they ‘lost’ their Portuguese nationality or because they were not evacuated during the decolonisation processes, these men were discriminated against when compared to their white comrades. This difference in treatment demonstrates that the benefits of the Portuguese democratic political transition did not extend to the colonial sphere and that long-standing unequal colonial relations were prolonged beyond the metropolitan regime shift. This dissertation is placed at the intersection of different historiographical fields that are seldom put together: colonial history, histories of disability and of veterancy, gender history and Portuguese political and social history. In this sense, the thesis is a new and nuanced contribution to the history of the Portuguese democratic transition, colonialism and the end of empire, moving away from triumphalist political narratives and a lingering metropolitan myopia. It does so by critically revisiting these histories, and placing the analytical focus on the welfare of an overlooked group of actors who lived through and engaged with the most consequential transformations in contemporary Portugal.