The Long Twentieth Century in Portuguese: An Age Pending to One Extreme

The Carnation Revolution and the military coup that ousted President João Goulart are among the major historical events spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to our days within a continuum of distinct political regimes and movements in Portugal and in Brazil. Beyond acknowledging how the long colonial past, the Portuguese language, and the institutional adoption of Gilberto Freyre’s concept of luso-tropicalism profoundly relate these two lusophone societies, this article employs an approach based on the multilinear evolutionary social theory to examine how both countries have had their own dictatorial, para-fascist regimes under the name New State, and fascist and traditionalist movements bearing the name integralism. This article draws upon the work of Eric Hobsbawm, who scrutinised how distinct countries across the world turned to the extremes of the political spectrum in what he called “the short twentieth century”, to investigate how the above-mentioned continuum in Portugal and Brazil instead exposes alternating temporal blocks of a struggle for political power won either by democrats and liberal-conservatives or by traditionalists and fascists. This configuration would thus indicate an age marked not by extremes as in Hobsbawm’s analysis, but by one specific extreme, that is, the political struggle ranging from the centre to the extreme right. The article also analyses recent significant political and social transformations, directly related to the failures of capitalism, which could suggest a further shift to the extreme right in these countries, deepening what this study proposes as “the long twentieth century in Portuguese”.