Apoie a candidatura do Jorge Pinto, o processo é rapidíssimo. Seguindo este link: jorgepinto2026.pt/assinar, e com a chave móvel digital, demora menos do que a ler este texto.

Europe has no shortage of libraries and yet there is no European Library. How can that be? An internet search reveals that until 2016 there was an inter-library service called The European Library, which was then merged into what we now call Europeana. Created in 2009 by a European Commission amazed by the potential of Google Books, Europeana is a long way from fulfilling that promise. It’s not a European library but rather an online repository of digital specimens from European national libraries. In higher education institutions, in departments of European studies, and in Florence at the European University Institute, there are good and sometimes excellent research collections that can be described as “European”, but they are not public libraries open to ordinary citizens in the middle of the bustling streets of our capitals – precisely what a European Library could aim to be. But wait a minute – couldn’t we say that any large library in Europe is a European library? In a sense, yes. The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are extraordinary libraries and they are in Europe. But they are, like many of the continent’s most important libraries, national libraries, which give themselves universal missions in the name of knowledge, or also because of their countries’ imperial pasts. Many national libraries were founded in the 19th century, precisely when today’s nation states were consolidating. They were created as part of explicitly national projects. They proved successful precisely because libraries are inclusive instruments for creating identity and civic spirit – Palaces for the People, as we saw in the previous column – that collected all the information available on the most advanced media at the time for the formation of citizenship and national elites. But these are not European Libraries as we might have invented them in the 20th century. What makes a European Library then? First, it should be a real building, several buildings in fact, at least one for each EU member state and, in time, perhaps even more. Online repositories are useful and practical, but they are distant and immaterial things. The “European idea” is already too abstract. For it to become tangible, it must be made of brick and mortar, a house you can enter and where the European Union (and other entities that want to join it by international treaty, such as candidate states) says “Come in, this is your house.” For identities need concrete realities on which to be based. A European Library needs to be more than what libraries were in the past; today, no good contemporary library is. In addition to a considerable collection of books and translations in at least all the EU languages, the legal deposit of all the publications of the European institutions, the collection of works directly or indirectly financed by EU money, a European Library should provide access to all kinds of digital collections, subscriptions to European and global academic presses and journals, sound, image and video broadcasting services – a wealth of culture, knowledge and science in the most diverse formats and media. What’s more, a European Library should be a meeting place. It should have studios and study rooms where working groups can hold meetings, record a podcast, or prepare for an event. Exhibition halls with temporary and travelling exhibitions; auditoriums with dedicated programming spanning across several countries at the same time. It could have a press room to host debates on current affairs in Europe, its countries and humanity as a whole. It could have an Erasmus Club where exchange students could meet. It could have an information centre for scientists applying for European funding projects and spaces for knowledge transfer. It could house the delegations (which already exist) of the institutions, enabling economies of scale. It would, of course, rely on local imagination and ingenuity. In Aarhus, the local library has a gong that plays a pleasant sound every time a baby is born in the city’s maternity hospital and its parents want to announce it to the world. Who knows what each collective of architects and programmers, from Lisbon to Vilnius, could come up with? The US Library of Congress was once just a small collection of a few hundred books in a forgotten room. Sometime in the 19th century, it was even consumed by a fire. Only gradually was it imbued with the project of becoming one of the largest libraries in the world. In the USA, the tradition was born that each former president could promote the founding of a “Presidential Library” as a civic and community symbol of presidential federalism (Obama is creating his on the South Side of Chicago). A European Library would be an analogous example, but more collective and inclusive. Perhaps shaking out to be the second phase of the New European Bauhaus project launched by President von der Leyen, the European Libraries in each member state would be a place of memory and imagination of the history and future of this continent, making much-discussed “European Project” tangible. The European Union, as we all know and complain about, has concentrated on what is often more complex and remote: food safety rules, phytosanitary procedures, customs duties, directives and regulations, and so on. Most of these things have a very real impact on our daily lives. But by the time they do, they have been rendered invisible. In its effort to depoliticise decisions in the name of technocracy, Europe won many small battles but is in danger of losing the biggest one, the hearts of its citizens. On the other hand, relatively minor realities (from a budgetary point of view) such as the Erasmus Programme act as great forges of European identity in the lives of younger generations. Like the inter-rail programme, these experiences are immersive, transforming the lives of the people who do them and opening up new horizons about their personal history while allowing them to understand – without imposing a standardised version – our collective history. But Erasmus and Interrail are decades old.

  Every 1 July, people in Portugal, Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries celebrate World Library Day by posting photos of libraries, bookshelves, books, reading, and, of course, permutations of any of these things and cats. World Library Day is a day to show affection for these supposedly unfashionable institutions. It’s also a day that doesn’t exist, although the people who celebrate it don’t know it. I came across this strange fact by almost making a political mistake that, I’m also almost certain, would have gone unnoticed. Last year I was about to table a resolution at Lisbon’s Town Hall, where I am an opposition councillor for the green-left party LIVRE, on the creation of a European library in the city. I had decided with our LIVRE Lisbon Town Hall team to table the resolution and publicise it on World Library Day, 1 July. With the date marked on our calendars and the day itself already being celebrated by hundreds of individuals and institutions, including publishing houses, bookshops, municipalities, and universities on both sides of the Atlantic, I decided at the last minute to do a final check. It was only then that I discovered, to my amazement, that there was no official indication whatsoever of there being a World Library Day on 1 July that had been decided by any of the usual international bodies: UNESCO, international librarian’s federations and the like. As I delved further, I stumbled upon a bulletin of the Portuguese Librarian’s Association where a meticulous librarian – aren’t they all – had puzzled at the same question and realised that World Library Day was a figment of our collective imagination in Portugal, created for no reason and supported by no historical event. I knew that there was a World Book Day on 23 April. It commemorates Cervantes’, Shakespeare’s and “the Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega’s deaths which all occurred on the same calendar day of 23 April 1616. Though because of a calendar reform, 23 April 1616 in England when Shakespeare died, was ten days before the same date in continental Europe, upon which Cervantes and “the Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega died. But nope, no World Library Day. A longer search on Twitter – a former social network that still existed last year – helped me crack the enigma of the World Library Day that didn’t exist. In the first years of that social network, there was no mention of World Library Day in either Portuguese or any other language. Then, in 2009, one small library on one island in the mid-Atlantic archipelago of the Azores – the Ribeira Grande Library from the island of São Miguel – organised an event for World Library Day. There were even some local newspaper articles and radio station segments about the initiative. That seems to have planted the seed. In the next few years, there were scarce mentions of World Library Day, but after 2011 things started to escalate: more people began to celebrate the day by posting on social media. Then institutions decided to do the same, not only in the Azores but increasingly in mainland Portugal. From there, World Library Day spread to other Portuguese-speaking countries, and even regions with linguistic and geographic affinities with Portugal, such as Spain’s Galicia. World Library Day was never a mass celebration, but a few hundred or even a thousand posts were enough to convince people like me that it existed – I regretted having checked as soon as I found out that it was an endearing piece of fake news. For good and bad, as we keep seeing in this column, politics needs memory and imagination. When memory and imagination are absent from public discourse, communities will anyhow conjure up memories and then remember what they’ve imagined. World Library Day spoke to the people who inadvertently invented it by commemorating a world of knowledge and caring, a world with time to read and cats to keep you company and distract you. The kind of time they would like to have more of. The affection shown by the public towards this innocent social network creation is a sign of a real longing for something that we used to have. It proves not just that we need a World Library Day but that we need more libraries. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg reminds us in his eponymous book, libraries are “palaces for the people”. Prime examples of civic infrastructure, like parks, museums, children’s playgrounds, concert halls, public gardens, swimming pools, and so on, this kind of infrastructure makes communities more inclusive and creates a better life for future generations. Because, as Klinenberg emphasises, it is not only common identities and narratives that bring us together but brick-and-mortar buildings. “Palaces for the people” are not simply built for pre-existing political communities, they create the people for which they are built. At the same time, “palaces for the people” is an expression coined by the famous Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. At the turn of the century, Carnegie established more than 2500 libraries in the USA and around the world. If his was a top-down project to build libraries as “palaces for the people”, perhaps today we can create “places by the people” that instead are participatory by design? In Europe, where talk of the “European project” and “European values” is particularly abstract and removed from everyday life, we would do well to have concrete and practical examples of what Europe can do for people – buildings you can enter, with objects that you can use, that bring the desirable future that Europe should be about to the present. Talking about a common European house when there’s no real house to be talked about (and when a huge housing crisis is affecting a great number of young people in Europe) is meaningless. If Europe is about something, it should be about building stuff – not just imaginary bridges and windows on euro banknotes. By the way, we tabled the resolution on the

Esta crónica, escrita antes de se saber o resultado das eleições espanholas, é sobre a viragem tática da extrema-direita europeia — um fenómeno que já se adivinhava há uma década e que eleições recentes, inclusive as de ontem têm vindo a confirmar, e mesmo a acelerar. Como muitas outras tendências na extrema-direita atual, um primeiro caso emblemático pode encontrar-se na Hungria de há dez anos atrás. Quando Viktor Orbán regressou ao poder, já radicalizado à direita pela sua experiência na oposição, ele poderia ter optado por um discurso anti-europeu comum, ou seja, propondo o fim da União Europeia ou pelo menos a saída da Hungria desta. Claro que por um lado não dava jeito a Orbán sair da UE porque precisava dos fundos europeus para distribuir pelos seus aliados — a sua própria família e amigos de infância tornaram-se dos mais ricos da Hungria graças aos fundos europeus. Mas o pragmatismo de Obras ia mais fundo e via mais longe: ele sempre achou, e foi dizendo, que melhor do que destruir a União Europeia seria controlá-la. A meio deste caminho, o Brexit matou as restantes ilusões na direita e na extrema-direita eurocética. Sair da União Europeia era demasiado custoso e complexo para o pouco ou nenhum benefício que daria. Marine Le Pen deixou de querer sair do euro, Giorgia Meloni suplantou Salvini com o abandono do discurso de confrontação com a UE e surgiram em Portugal e Espanha partidos em tudo iguais aos restantes partidos de extrema-direita da Europa ocidental, ou até mais extremistas do que estes, com uma exceção clara: não há neles vestígio de sugestão de que os países ibéricos se afastem da União Europeia. O discurso anti-europeu foi substituído com muito mais proveito pelo explorar das guerras culturais e o resultado foi algo equivalente ao que se passou em tempos com o Partido Republicano nos EUA: de “partido dos estados” nos períodos em que está na oposição passa a defensor do poderio do governo federal quando controla a Casa Branca. À esquerda a evolução foi diferente. Os partidos de centro-esquerda já eram pró-europeus no sentido cinzentão do termo (ou seja, institucionais, pró-Bruxelas e “bons alunos” como no nosso caso) e os partidos da esquerda verde europeia mais idealistas e europeístas no sentido de defenderem a democratização radical da UE. Mas partidos da esquerda eurocética (como em Portugal o PCP e crescentemente o BE) ficaram sem saber o que defender: se o fim do euro ou o completar da moeda única, se o fim da UE ou a saída unilateral desta, se o aprofundar da democracia na União ou os ataques ao “federalismo”. Sem saberem o que defenderem, acabaram optando por não ter uma linha clara sobre a Europa. Falar de outras coisas, esperando que o assunto passe. Mas a Europa não é um assunto que passe — provam-no a guerra, a crise financeira, a integração económica do continente, a globalização e o regresso da política de super-potências. Deixar o vácuo no lugar onde deveria estar um discurso sobre a Europa é garantir que esse vácuo seja ocupado por outros. Não tem conta as vezes que ouvi alguns amigos de esquerda queixar-se da maneira como Macron foi apresentado como garante do projeto europeu, por exemplo, sem nunca se darem conta de que ao baixarem os braços na luta pela Europa tinham praticamente abandonado o campo a centristas e liberais para que governassem. O resultado é o que se tem visto: o fim da barreira europeia tornou mais fáceis alianças entre o centro-direita e a extrema-direita europeia. À esquerda, a falta de um discurso sobre o que fazer na Europa tem dificultado as alianças e, pior do que isso, tornado mais difícil mobilizar o eleitorado progressista. Espanha, ontem, terá sido mais um dos exemplos dos riscos que essa falta de opção encerra: a política detesta o vácuo e a política europeia não é exceção.   (Crónica publicada no jornal Diário de Notícias, em 24 de julho de 2023)

This article is the second part of a digression on the relationship between memory and economic structures. The first part is a short story about your dearest memory and the money you did not know it was worth.  From the beginning and until the end, we are memory over time. That is the only way we can even start to make sense of ourselves – even more fundamental than that: this is the only way we can even think of an “I” or a “we”. I know that I am someone because – and only as long as – I wake up today aware of being the same entity I was yesterday. Because I have a memory of being myself yesterday, I can imagine being myself tomorrow. Memory is then at the basis of imagination, and therefore the attribution of meaning, identity, and agency. Memory is not only about the past, and there is nothing reactionary or conservative about valuing memory as the cornerstone of human culture and social organisation. “Historians imagine the past”, once wrote a great historian, Lewis Namier, “to remember the future”. But this is true of every single one of us. My memory is a retroactive imagination of myself, my imagination is an anticipated memory of myself. I know that I am a bit different than I was yesterday, and that tomorrow I will be different than today, but that, in a very deep sense, I remain the same person. Because my memories are my own and form the core of who I am. Memory tends to be overlooked by economic and social theorists with their language about wages and costs, loss and profit – the alleged building blocks of the economy, and the economy the supposed infrastructure of all the rest. Beliefs, feelings, identities, imagination, fear, anxiety, dreams – all that is supposed to be hazy and fuzzy stuff, the “superstructure”, the “epiphenomena”. What if it were the other way around? What if our true infrastructure lies in our cognitive retention capability and our social and economic interrelations arise out of memory and its offspring – meaning, identity and imagination? To find out, let’s head to Late Antiquity, and ask someone who produced the deepest and most complete explorations of the self until, at least, the Romantic period. A young Berber man, educated in a strange new religion, Manichaeism, decides to switch to another even stranger and newer religion, Christianity. His name is Augustine. From Hippo in present-day Algeria, he is more known today to millions of believers as Saint Augustine. His Confessionsare not only a significant theological text but the most detailed document we have about the course of a life and personal development from the 4th and 5th centuries, anywhere in the world. The first 10 books of the Confessions tell of Augustine’s upbringing, his doubts and mistakes, his penchant for carnal sin and his wish for spiritual improvement, including the famous “God, make me chaste, but not yet” (da mihi castitatem et continentam, sed noli modo) in Book VIII. It gets even more interesting. In Book X, Augustine realises that whatever he has been telling us, he has been telling from memory. That means memory must be an object of inquiry in itself. For without memory, there is no Augustine sense of himself as both an agent or a subject of interest, nor is there the Augustine search for God. For all the miracles of God, the most miraculous of all must therefore be our capacity to remember: “Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof? … men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with mine eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be, inwardly in my memory, and that, with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body each was impressed upon me.” Augustine is arriving at the most fundamental of fundamentals: how we are aware of our own existence and of our interrelation with the world. Not only do we know that “I am myself” because we remember, but we can only distinguish between ourselves and the world outside, and relate to it, because memory is there to organise our experience. What to fear, what gives us pleasure, what to avoid, what to repeat: memory is the mediator between ourselves and the world. But Augustine is not finished yet. For if memory is a retentive capability at the basis of our cognition, that retention can only be possible over time. So Augustine writes another book of his Confessions, the XI, on time itself, which includes what is probably his most famous quote: What then is time? … I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Here he explains how we are memory over time. Because without memory, there is no personhood, no agency, no possibility for us to be subjects of history. In my last column, I speculated on what would happen if memory was money – if we could give personal memories as collateral on a bank loan, and lose the emotional sense of them being ours when we defaulted. If this were possible, if personal memories could be encapsulated

O apego de muitos seguidores dos temas geopolíticos à ideia de “grandes poderes” vistos como entidades constantes e capazes de moldar a realidade à sua volta leva muita gente a uma posição na qual são forçados a permanentemente arranjar justificações retrospetivas para as ações ou omissões de Putin como se todas elas (ações ou omissões) fossem sempre jogadas de um estratega brilhante. Esse apego é aliás tão forte que até num fim de semana como o que acabámos de viver – com uma rebelião da milícia mercenária “Wagner” e o seu avanço rápido e sem oposição para Moscovo, com uma desistência à última hora do seu líder Prigozhin, a quem Putin acusara de traição na manhã de sábado para lhe oferecer uma amnistia na tardinha – há quem não tenha deixado de colocar a hipótese de estar perante uma encenação elaborada de Putin com o objetivo de colocar Prigozhin na Belarus e assim abrir mais uma frente na guerra com a Ucrânia. Em cada cavadela, mais uma estratégia brilhante. Para quê fazer simples quando se pode fazer complicado, não é? Pois é, nesse caso então me declaro simplório. Penso que teria sido muito mais brilhante para Putin não se enfiar num atoleiro no extremo ocidental do seu território quando tem uma extensão de doze fusos horários com enormes recursos naturais para desenvolver. Imagino que um Putin que não estivesse a desguarnecer o interior e o extremo-oriente do seu país em favor de uma guerra na Europa dificilmente cairia numa situação de vulnerabilidade em relação à China. Vou até mais longe e ponho-me a pensar que talvez nunca nenhum governante tenha tido tantos recursos para desenvolver o seu país como Putin e que se ele os tivesse utilizado a reforçar a Rússia do ponto de vista social, ambiental, cultural e científico estaria hoje numa situação muito melhor do que depois de décadas de investimento em expansionismo, propaganda e espionagem. Estando certo que o simplório sou eu e que as leituras sofisticadas são aquelas que tentam em cada fracasso ver uma jogada brilhante de Putin, reconforta-me ao menos saber que ali onde os amadores da geopolítica pontificam alguns historiadores têm acertado em algumas coisas cruciais desde o início desta crise do sistema internacional. Lembram-se quando nos diziam que era impossível haver invasão, poucos dias antes de 24 de fevereiro de 2022, porque o brilhantismo de Putin o impediria de cometer esse erro? (Claro que passado uns dias a explicação teve de mudar, mas passemos adiante). Entre historiadores houve quem tivesse lido o ensaio histórico de Putin no verão de 2021 e dito que uma guerra contra a própria existência da Ucrânia era uma possibilidade clara. E se essa guerra era uma possibilidade clara, e aconteceu mesmo, é porque a caracterização que podemos fazer da Federação Russa é a de uma potência em declínio, capaz de tomar este tipo de decisões temerárias para tentar inverter esse curso de declínio. Com tudo o que aconteceu nos últimos dois anos, o declínio ficou mais inevitável e espectacular. Mas não se enganem. Putin fez isto ao seu país e a si mesmo, recusando todas as alternativas mais construtivas. Não há espiral justificativa que mude essa realidade. (Artigo publicado no jornal Diário de Notícias, 26 de junho de 2023)

We all hold a memory, more powerful than all others, for which we are grateful. It doesn’t have to be an unusual or special memory. It’s simply a happy memory. And when we conjure it, the important part is not to recover the sequence of events that make it, but to relive the feeling we have of the feeling we once had. It could be the feeling, which we thought was long lost, of how our bones were light when we were little. Or of one night when we were in love and lay down on the grass looking at the stars, marveling at how immense the universe was. That’s it. Everyone has that memory. That memory is us. Now take that memory and walk into a bank. You are asking for a loan today. You walk into the bank branch, take a ticket, sit on a chair, and wait for your account manager to call you in. You carry with you the anxiety that people experience in this kind of situation. You are about to ask for money because you need it, all the while trying to pass on the assurance that you have money and don’t need it. Exchanging pleasantries with the account manager, who happens to be a very nice lady, you realise straight away that this is going to be easier than you thought. “How much do you need?”, she asks. You hazard a figure and immediately wonder, “Should I have asked for more? Less?” The account manager says, “Very well,” and starts fumbling with papers, entering data on her computer, and asking for additional information: how long would you need to repay it, how much would each repayment be, at what interest rate. She looks calm. These are good times for borrowing money. At one point, she asks what you can offer as collateral. “Collateral?”, you ask. Yes, collateral, a house, for example. “But I don’t own a house,” you say. “No problem,” she answers, “it doesn’t have to be a house. Do you own any land?” “No land either.” “In that case, it can be your car.” “But I don’t own a car.” “I see,” she says, “I’ll see what I can do.” There’s a silence. The account manager gets up, walks along a corridor with many doors and disappears through one of them for a few minutes. Meanwhile, you sit there, embarrassed by your condition as an individual without a house, land or car. You brace yourself for being turned down. But then she comes back holding a few pieces of paper and wearing a smile on her face. Her proposal is that you mortgage your memory in exchange for the money. “I beg your pardon?”, you ask, incredulous. She smiles and explains calmly that memories are worth money. All you need to do is pick one and sign this contract. Then you would close your eyes for thirty seconds while placing your index finger on a small electrode and think about that memory. It would then be stored on the bank’s database and act as a guarantee against the loan. While you try to recover from your incredulity, the bank manager approaches and asks if everything is ok. He repeats the same explanation, and then proposes an exercise: “Think of a memory,” he says. “An obvious, everyday, trivial memory.” “Any memory will do?” “Any at all. You’ve got one?” You nod. “Well, how much is that memory worth? How much would you like in exchange for it?” Then he turns to the account manager: “How much did our customer ask for?” She replies, “Ten thousand euros.” Then he turns to you: “How would you like twenty thousand euros for that memory?” You are unable to answer. He presses on: “How about thirty thousand?” You are sitting there thinking about your grandmother’s hug, and how the texture of her blouse’s linen collar felt against your neck. You feel a surge of indignation: “Look, I don’t understand what’s going on. Are you proposing to take one of my memories in exchange for money, is that it? So, my memory would then belong to the bank?” “No, not at all!” they reply with a broad smile, amused by your banking naivety. “Your memory will merely act as a banking guarantee. You would walk out of the bank today with your memory intact. It would only be transferred permanently to the bank in the event of a delay or default in the repayments.” You remain silent. “The bank requires a guarantee, you see, but the memory still belongs to you after the loan has been granted. So, what do you say?” – the smile returns – “will thirty thousand euros be enough to cover your needs?” After that, things precipitate very fast. You sign the contract, feeling the slightest of electric shocks as your finger touches the electrode, and walk out of the bank with a statement confirming that the money has been transferred to your account. You are troubled, but relieved. On the journey home, all through the bus ride, the metro ride, and the twenty-minute walk, you keep conjuring up that memory to make sure that you haven’t lost it, like when reaching for your pocket just to make sure your wallet hasn’t been stolen. The memory is, indeed, still there, intact, and even more detailed than before: the smells, the laughter, the feeling you had at that precise moment. When you get home, the first thing you do is sit down at the table and write it all down on a piece of paper, and then store it very carefully. (Article published in the Green European Journal, 1 June 2023)

On 25 April 1974 – 49 years ago – telexes and wire photos in newsrooms across the world started churning out texts and images from a half-forgotten country in the southwestern fringe of Europe. My country, Portugal, was then a 48-year-old dictatorship embroiled in a 13-year-long war in three of its five African colonies, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, as it struggled to block their independence. Opposition figures had been trying to overthrow the regime for decades. Many were in jail cells or had fled into exile. They had tried to call the world’s attention to Portugal but to no avail. In those days, the wire photo transmitters used by big news agencies would take around 10 minutes to scan a black-and-white photo and send it over the phone. What journalists across the world saw unfolding in Portugal was as unexpected and uplifting as one could imagine in those years consumed by the oil shock, inflation, and the Vietnam War. From Lisbon came images of a quite unusual revolution: peaceful young soldiers smiling, small kids sitting on the sidewalk waving at photographers, and flowers – lots of flowers, especially white and red carnations that flower-sellers and passers-by would put in the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles. The Portuguese Carnation Revolution was the last great revolution of the golden age of photojournalism – that lasted from the 1910s to the 1970s – and the first great revolution of the so-called “Third Wave of Democratisation”, as political scientists call it, that started in southern Europe in the early-70s (Portugal, Greece, Spain), spread to Latin America and Asia in the early and mid-1980s (Brazil, Argentina, Philippines, South Korea) and returned to Europe in the end of the 1980s and early 1990s in the east and the Soviet Union. I was two years old. The global impact of my country’s revolution eluded me, but the revolution was global in what it meant for us as kids. We grew up in a highly politicised country, where people would spend all day arguing about parties and leaders. Our cities were full of posters and possibility, and elections were movable feasts. By the end of 25 April 1974, Portuguese newspapers were printing extra editions stating boldly: “This newspaper has not been examined by any censorship commission”. People had raided the headquarters of the secret police. In the following days, all political prisoners were freed. It was a perfect day for my country. It still is. As the 20th century drew to a close and we entered the 21st, I began to sense a change in what politics was about. Politics became less and less about what new good things we could bring to the people and more and more about who could provide less: fewer taxes or fewer cuts, harsh austerity or austerity-lite. I cannot help but feel that this reversal is the source of our troubles. Either we find a way to set forward a new version of the “3 Ds” – democratise, develop and decolonise – that gives people a greater chance to flourish or more people will flounder into the frustration and despair where the authoritarians make hay. This will be published on the 49th anniversary of the revolution, I will probably be with many of those kids, walking down Avenida da Liberdade with thousands of other people, just savouring what we achieved together. Liberty is indeed not just an abstract notion; it is a feeling and instinct. On such days, it acquires almost corporeal reality. You can touch freedom and feel freedom embrace you. When I was a kid, politics was about what good things could happen next. For a while, we lived in our small ancestral village. 25 April was the day us kids would run around the village; we would get medals. In the summer, the municipal bus would pass by and take us to the bean-shaped swimming pool of a wealthy farm villa that people said had been owned by a secret police chief before the revolution. My dad and our neighbours founded a small land-owners cooperative and shared tractors and agricultural appliances. Later on, in the early 1980s, the mobile library visited the village, with its shelves mounted on the back of a cargo van. As Portugal entered the European Economic Community, we hopped into our own cargo van and crossed Europe to attend my brother’s wedding on the other side of the Iron Curtain (a good story, but for another day). The material revolution in 1974 had been built upon ideas sowed one year before in 1973, in the Congress of Democratic Opposition in the lovely city of Aveiro, situated by a lagoon and traversed by canals where gondola-like boats float. Before the police could repress the opposition and disband the peaceful debates they were engaged in, the ideas that became the basis for the revolution had crystallised around a very simple slogan. We call it the “three Ds”: democratizar, desenvolver, descolonizar – democratise, develop and decolonise. The three Ds never meant the same thing to everybody. The Communists and the Christian Democrats, the centre-left and the centre-right had different versions of what they could stand for, but they all subscribed to the three Ds. What a simple idea capable of being shared by a whole people and unfolded differently by each and every individual can mean for a country is quite simply transformational. All Portuguese persons of a certain age are products of that idea. For me and my siblings, the “three Ds” meant, most of all, education. Our parents had studied for three or four years in their childhood. We all got university degrees, with scholarships and virtually free tuition. From primary school to my PhD in Paris I never had to pay. I was always paid to study. (Article published in the Green European Journal, 25 April 2023)

In the end, Emma Goldman never said “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”, though it’s a great maxim and she could definitively have said it. What she did say was much more interesting. Her story begins when she arrives in New York City in 1889 as a 20-year-old with three countries, an authoritarian father, and a failed marriage behind her. She had few dollars in her pocket and carried an ideal in her mind — anarchism. She had been drawn to anarchism by example of the “Chicago Martyrs”, the labour organisers falsely accused and executed in 1886 for a bombing at Haymarket Square, where a crowd was gathered, demonstrating for the right to an eight-hour workday. She had a sewing machine that had been sent to New York City in advance — not a detail, but a tool for material autonomy and personal liberation. Back then, when marriage or becoming a server maid were two of the most common paths for women, the ability to operate a sewing machine gave a young woman like Emma Goldman the opportunity to earn just enough to rent a room in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and afford basic necessities. On her very first day in Manhattan, she found her first mentor, the actor and publicist Johann Most. At Sachs Café, the meeting place for Yiddish-speaking anarchist in Lower Manhattan, she met her future lover and lifelong friend, Alexander Berkman, during a late-night dinner during which he ate prodigious amounts of food. Shortly after that, Emma Goldman got herself a place to stay: “I found a room on Suffolk Street, not far from Sachs’s café. It was small and half-dark, but the price was only three dollars a month, and I engaged it”. And so began Emma Goldman’s real life, the one she described in her nearly thousand-page autobiography, Living My Life, one of the most fascinating books about the trajectory of youth at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century and their experimentations with anarchism, socialism, feminism, free love, freedom of expression. This work and Emma Goldman’s journal which she would rename Mother Earth were the beginnings of what we would come to call political ecology. Emma soon became active in anarchist immigrant circles, helping produce periodicals and making speeches (mostly in Yiddish in the beginning; gradually more in English). She was also having a great time; she was living with Alexander Berkman, whom she always called Sasha, and other friends, both male and female, in a communal apartment, going to the theatre, and enjoying the bohemian life. And that’s when it happened, as she tells in Living My Life: “At the dances, I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.” “I told him to mind his own business. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ”I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” This was the birth of her most famous phrase, the one she never said: “ If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” Emma Goldman’s reaction was not a belated response to the development of authoritarian socialism in the USSR which she came to know well when she lived there for two years between 1919 to 1920. She had listened in astonishment to Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks repeating that “freedom of speech is a bourgeois superstition” to her, who had been repeatedly imprisoned and then deported for exercising that very freedom of speech in the capitalist USA. The episode in which the famous apocryphal phrase was inspired happened more than 20 years before. It was more an early reaction to the propensity of progressive and revolutionary men to pontificate on the behaviour of their female coreligionists, a tendency that justified the birth of a properly feminist political theory, distinct from that of progressive male thinkers. More importantly, Emma Goldman did not express her fundamental creed in purely negative terms (not my revolution). Rather, she expresses it in a positive sense, as objects of political desire, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” This is perhaps one reason why Emma Goldman’s book is not taken as seriously as the thick political theory tomes of her contemporary male counterparts. Rather than dry, abstract argumentation, Living My Life is full of reflections on theatre and opera, literature and music, falling in and out of love. Emma Goldman not only describes the kind of revolution she does not want but also the kind of society to which one should aspire. It’s about things yes but also beauty and the liberation of potential — hence her use of this fascinating word, “radiant” — i.e., objects of political desire. Emma Goldman can be considered the last great feminist before modern feminism. In this sense she shares the fate of other 19th- and even 18th-century authors, such as Flora Tristán, Leonor da Fonseca Pimentel, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges. These women had in common not only their indomitable courage against persecution or their steadfastness in the face of social and political disapproval, including from their fellow revolutionaries. They understood that a just society is more than a society without injustice. A just society must be a desirable society, one where people can pursue their desires and collectively flourish. (Article published in the Green European Journal, 29 January 2023)