If this were a change that could be reduced in essence to its purely technical and communicational dimensions, then the President of the Republic might perhaps merely highlight the spectacularity of its more obvious achievements.

It so happens that the time we have spent already in direct contact with the effects of the new technological order leaves no doubt concerning the importance – which I dare to consider civilizational – of the social transformations to which it is associated.

To mention no more than some of the more obvious fields, how can we ignore for instance that, with informationalism, working methods and models have radically changed in all economic and entrepreneurial activities, whether in the area of strategic decisions or in purely technical operations?

How can we fail to understand that the flexible globalisation of the financial markets which was enabled and constantly encouraged by the digital revolution nowadays has a direct influence on the job security of most workers around the world, on patterns of mobility of populations and on the geography of famine and disease?

How can we fail to consider the impact of the Internet and real time communication means on the rearrangement of routines, group solidarities, cultural practices and the aspirations of the younger generations?

How can we fail to notice, for example, that informationalism has touched with great precision the systems of values, beliefs and representations with which we guide our actions and learn to think about ourselves and others?

And would it not be true to say that the political mobilisation around major causes of planetary dimension appears to be evolving in direct relation to access to global information networks?

Finally, is it not quite obvious already that today, neither artistic creation nor more elaborate scientific debate can live without the memory storage capacity and the data transmission speed of the new technologies?

People will therefore understand that someone like me, who has spent over forty years vigorously defending the exercise of fundamental civil liberties and questioning the concrete possibilities of democracy itself becoming democratised, may have wished as President of the Republic to discuss in some depth the opportunities of improving democratic life and civic participation presented by the new technologies.

This concern was the cause for the debate that I promoted some years ago in this same place, on the incidences of the information technology revolution on the quality of democratic systems.

I would like to underline the fact that, then, we decided jointly to problematize the new and the old media and, on the pretext of the electronic democracy, the Internet and generalised access to the new ICT’s, to resume the old problems of relations between the political and the media arenas that confront all democracies.

In societies in transition, such as the Portuguese, more than in other national contexts, it is important to frame the movement of technical and economic modernisation within the sphere of the historical and social determinations in which it arises. These determinations are often, in fact, the source of inertia, paradoxical configurations or truly new forms that it would be advisable not to dilute in the field of the major emerging trends.

Now, in a country that has only lately acquired political democracy and liberalisation of the media and is some distance from achieving consistent self-regulating platforms in the institutional areas in question, it would make no sense to attempt to foresee these possibilities of deepening democracy by electronic and digital means without considering and problematizing the field of conventional social communication.

It is this same methodological precaution that has made me not wish to face the issues of technological development and entrepreneurial innovation in Portugal without at the same time paying the requisite attention both to the specificity of our productive tissue, namely its weight on the so-called traditional industries, the small and very small enterprises, the informal economy and the pre-Taylorite technical and organisational models, and to the weighty deficits of literacy, experimental culture and innovation that are rooted in Portuguese society.

Concerning this last point I should add the following. Whilst it is true that this non-decontextualized approach to development and innovation has protected me from excessively naïve visions about the possibilities of changing the economy and society with technological impulses concentrated in time, it is also true that it has brought me surprising founts of optimism. I refer, for example, to the discovery that in Portugal there have been remarkably successful experiences in the organised dissemination of new technologies, ongoing training, generalised innovation and sustained growth in levels of competitiveness in traditional industrial sectors facing fierce international competition and in areas with no history of entrepreneurial association. I am particularly delighted to have been able to shed some light on these experiences in the context of initiatives I have dedicated to the problems of technological modernisation and entrepreneurial innovation in my country.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

For someone like me who has, shall we say, the constitutional duty not to close his eyes or his mind to the social processes that have more deeply marked the daily life and limited the existential horizons of my fellow citizens, making an attempt to understand informationalism, the knowledge economy and the network society and where they are taking us is mainly an indisputable duty of my office.

The rate at which these phenomena develop is so hair-raising, however, and analysts’ efforts to find suitable interpretations for what is going on so intense that fulfilling the duty of awareness and understanding of what is changing around us is not easy to combine with my other tasks and obligations.

To stop and think, preferably in the company of those better prepared to reflect on the solid theoretical and empirical fundaments on the future of society is, under such conditions, no more than elementary common sense.

And that is what I decided to do some months ago: stop and think about the constraints and opportunities available to Portuguese society in a global context. To do this I relied on the support – which I consider a great privilege – provided by Professor Manuel Castells, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and renowned theoreticians of social change in the digital era.

I am convinced that during the next two days it will be possible, given the quality of the national and foreign experts present, to hear the latest views of the main trends in the evolution to a network society without forgetting that such views are achieved in different countries and fields of social life along quite different rhythms and patterns.

Having completed his monumental work entitled “The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture”, Professor Manuel Castells in collaboration with Professor Pekka Himanen, who has also honoured us with his presence, researched the Finnish model of transition to informationalism and the network society.

In addition to its faultless presentation, this research was felicitous in expressively revealing that as with the transition to the industrial revolution in times gone by, so the move into the information society and its successful integration in the world economy can be achieved on the basis of different histories and cultures according to distinct institutional combinations, and reach equally varied forms of social organisation.
In a clear contrast with the paradigmatic models of the information society of Silicon Valley or Singapore, the Finnish case shows among other characteristics those derived from the presence in society of a strong welfare State and the no less marked affirmation of its own culture, language and identity. Finland, which enjoys high standards of social cohesion, a broadly negotiated labour relations regulatory system, strong incentives for training and experimentation in the informational area and sustained State intervention in creating infrastructural conditions to diversify and expand the economy, Finland, as I was saying, is a good example of how a country with limited resources can in the short space of two decades overcome difficult economic crises and join the group of the more competitive information societies.

I would be naïf if I said that the analyses and debates that will fill the two days of this seminar are going to provide us with precise practical indications on how to speed up Portuguese transition to the society of informational networks. Given the subjects under discussion I am nevertheless convinced that when we leave here we will be much better equipped to pursue some significant work in this respect.

When reflecting as we must, it is important not to forget certain traits of Portuguese society.

The most disturbing in my view is the low schooling and literacy levels of the Portuguese population. In thirty years of democratic life we have made important progress in generalising elementary schooling, whilst the proportion of young people going into higher education today bears no comparison with the situation during the dictatorship. However, school failure and early school leaving are still at high levels, placing Portugal in a particularly unfavourable position in international comparisons on literacy, access to secondary schooling and qualification of the working population. As regards lifelong training – another aspect of the educational system – the diagnosis is no more optimistic: in fact, together with the literal or functional illiteracy of so many of our adults, the signs pointing to a demand for qualifying job training are particularly feeble.

Faced with this scenario the questions I honestly feel I should ask are: with such serious shortages in basic training and school capital endowments, what is the point and the effectiveness of concentrating resources on apprenticeships and training programmes specifically geared to the demands of informationalism? Is it possible and politically acceptable to skip over some stages on the pretext that the younger generations are relatively well equipped to join the informational networks? Or, in terms of human resources qualifications, does our commitment to excellence lead necessarily today to unacceptable exclusions in a society in transition such as the Portuguese one?

I will now move on to a second drawback related with the subject under discussion – one that is connected with the low levels of cohesion (well below the European standards) that characterise Portuguese social training.

In his works and contrary to some critics’ insinuations, Professor Manuel Castells has never neglected the excluding tendencies associated with economic globalisation and the transition to the informational economy and society. He did it quite expressively in the analyses he proposed on generic labour/self-programmable labour, demonstrating to what extent these processes can contain the seeds of long-term unemployment or of irreversible segmentations in the job market. Part of the exemplary nature of the Finnish case is, in turn, attributed precisely to the particular efficacy of the welfare state in containing the above-mentioned excluding tendencies.

Now, in Portuguese society, which shows fairly unequal patterns of income distribution, the institutional edifice of social protection which was in essence built up after the onset of democracy, still lacks the degree of consistency required by systematic control of precarization and marginalisation associated with technological modernisation. Knowing, on the other hand, that we are prevented from achieving significant improvements in our welfare model because of the discipline of the Stability and Growth Pact, are we not facing difficulties that will be hard to overcome?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Statistics on access to the new information and communication technologies and to the opening to the global networks show that, as in so many other fields, the Portuguese situation reveals considerable delays and deficits, although these are less visible in the younger generations.

Given what I have said above on the characteristics of my country, I am not convinced that the problem can be resolved with a headstrong approach centred on a restricted number of aspects directly garnered from the figures and indicators in question. Neither do I subscribe to the idea that we are condemned to do nothing to enter the network society and the knowledge economy until we have eradicated all other structural obstacles to development.

Under these circumstances I venture to ask: Which way should we go? To which resources and sectors should we give priority? Which steps, if any, can we skip? What examples should we adopt as our reference? What fractures should we avoid? What schedules should we impose on ourselves?

In this address, which I hope has been neither excessive nor misplaced, I have left some thoughts on the difficulties that a society such as the Portuguese must confront at the dramatic and influential turning point facing us today. Political leaders and Portuguese citizens must be the fundamental agents of this turning point. I believe, however, in my capacity as President of the Republic, that the terms of the dilemmas to be faced will be better consolidated if we can all have access to reliable knowledge and information concerning the available alternatives. The extremely high quality of the speakers at this seminar assures me that in the next two days we will indeed be able to access these alternatives under remarkable conditions of quantity and quality.

I will end, then, by extending my greetings and heartfelt thanks to our illustrious speakers and all other participants for kindly accepting my invitation and above all for the lessons that they will be leaving with us.