Bruno Cardoso Reis

This article looks at the Portuguese reaction to an increasingly numerous and hostile anti-colonial majority in the United Nations (UN), the central international norm-setting organization after 1945. More specifically I will focus on the persistence of a Portuguese policy of denying colonialism, that is, of formally declaring that Portugal was not a colonial empire but rather a unitary state with territories in different continents. Why would Portugal stick to this position for almost two decades, in the face of widespread scepticism and hostility from within a UN increasingly dominated by an anti-colonial stance — formally in the shape of General Assembly resolution 1542, of 1960 — that accused Portugal of being a colonial empire while refusing to accept this reality, and given the inevitable consequences of an emerging international norm of decolonization? 1 Belgium also endured growing hostility at the UN for a long period. It faced a rising tide of anti-colonialism from 1946, as a founding member of the UN. In fact, even a speedy but messy decolonization of the Belgian Congo in 1960 did not put an end to criticism by the anti-colonial bloc at the UN of the neo-colonial relationship between Belgium and the Congo in general, and Katanga in particular, which presented a new target for criticism by the Afro-Asian bloc. This seems to indicate that confrontation of a state with the UN could be expected when there was a clash between normative change at the global level and core guidelines, 'constitutive' norms at the national level. 2 This was the case regardless of regime type, authoritarian in the case of Portugal, parliamentary democracy in the case of Belgium. It also shows that a number of facilitating conditions were necessary in allowing prolonged resistance to international norms, of which two stand out: 1 The question of whether or not Portugal was a colonial empire is still a matter of some political controversy in Portugal. I follow a mainstream academic definition by Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986): an empire exists whenever 'the effective sovereignty' of dependent peripheral territories is exercised by 'the dominant metropole' that 'exerts political control over the internal and external policy' of the former (p. 12). 2 Theo Farrell, Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener, 2005), pp. 8–9.

RElAçõES INtERNACIONAIS JUNHO: 2011 30 150 enquadra com padrões mais genéricos, sendo que esta sua preocupação muito acentuada com uma cronologia específica tem vantagens mas também desvantagens analíticas. Os historiadores não se preocupam ...

Malgré l'indéniable influence sociale du catholicisme au Portugal, son rôle politique dans le champ politique reste limité. Divisé et ballotté, depuis le XIX siècle, par les velléités laïcardes des républicains mais aussi par la volonté d'un Salazar de Pinstrumentaliser, il n'a jamais pu ...

Licenciado e mestre em História (Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa). Tem o mestrado em Historical Studies pela Universidade de Cambridge (2003). É doutor em Segurança Internacional (War Studies, King's College) desde 2008, ea sua tese sob o título Big Armies and Small Wars ...

JN> Penso que sim. Penso que tem funcionado relativamente bem. É óbvio que a China está, neste momento, muito bem integrada na economia mundial. Apoiámos a sua adesão à Organização Mundial do Comércio. Mas a China também sabe que, se tentar tornar-se ...