I would also like to say how pleased I am to be here at Oxford University, which is ever-present in the imagination of so many generations of Europeans. Its history belongs to the valuable heritage of Europe and the world

It is in fact in places like this that we understand that European construction – undoubtedly the most outstanding fact of the last fifty years – only makes sense because our nations – Portugal and the United Kingdom being two of the oldest in Europe – share a common legacy and a heritage of principles and values that over the centuries they have helped make richer, stronger and more varied.

Lastly, I would especially like to extend greetings to the Portuguese students here today. I have already had the pleasure of exchanging some points of view with them and hearing their impressions and concerns but also – I am pleased to underline – their satisfaction at being here at this University.

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I was delighted to accept President Sir Robert Gareth’s invitation to attend the annual session in commemoration of Isaiah Berlin, the illustrious founder of this College.

About Isaiah Berlin whom, curiously, Virginia Woolf described as looking like a “swarthy Portuguese Jew”, I think we should retain the effort he made, in a century marked by totalitarianisms, to understand and meditate on his era; to form a view of the conditions that hamper individual and collective freedom or the circumstances that rather help it along; finally, to formulate a theory of justice and pluralism.

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with his theories the man who brings us together today was an outstanding person who interpreted the history of his time with rare lucidity and a profound knowledge of Europe, its cultures and its peoples. His legacy to us is therefore a living example for all those like me who hold political responsibilities in this difficult beginning of the century.

That is why I have decided to talk to you about “Portugal and Europe and the Routes of Change”. And the reason is that I believe that the scope of Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism is clearly illustrated with the example of my country’s recent history, when the revolution paved the way for the democratisation and modernisation of society, alternating experiences, changes and transformations. Because Berlin’s crucial distinction between two concepts of freedom allows us, possibly from a more philosophical perspective, to interpret the difficulties facing Portugal with the construction of a more just society and in the hard task of articulating freedom and social justice. Lastly, because a quick glance at the contemporary destination of Portugal and of the construction of the European Union at the crossroads where we now find ourselves might, by evoking the thinking of Isaiah Berlin, gain new momentum and vision.

Not being a philosopher or an historian of ideas I would never dare venture on this difficult but fascinating exercise, beloved of so many of you, of reinterpreting Isaiah Berlin. This is why I merely propose in my presentation to evoke the framework of the changes produced in Portugal by the 1974 revolution in the last three decades. I will then briefly look at Portugal’s European option. I will do it frankly and openly but leave you the challenge of calling up Isaiah Berlin’s thinking.

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Let us begin by going back in Portuguese time.

As you know, Marcelo Caetano’s irresolute attempts to open up the political regime, following Salazar’s removal due to ill-health, failed completely. In 1974 Portugal continued to labour under the asphyxiating yoke of an almost fifty years old dictatorship. We lived in a country with no future: on the one hand the Armed Forces had been embroiled since 1961 in a colonial war covering extensive fronts in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. On the other, the nation found itself in a punishing diplomatic isolation that went contrary to its history.

Whilst this was the political panorama of a blocked society it is worth rapidly underlining some of the aspects that characterised it in other fields.

We should first of all remember the scenario of emigration. Traditionally, Portugal had always been the source of great migratory flows along the transatlantic route in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular bearing on Brazil, its main destination. From the 1960s onwards the flow of Portuguese emigration increased substantially, mainly towards the developed countries of Europe, such as France and Germany. It is thought that between 1960 and the eve of the April 1974 revolution approximately 2 million potentially active persons (just under one-fifth of the resident population at the time) emigrated.

Another important aspect when we look at Portugal from a distance of 30 years concerns the patterns of distribution of wealth and incidence of poverty. The numbers are blindingly clear: it is estimated that 43% of Portuguese families lived below the poverty line in 1974.

As I must be brief I will move on to one last descriptive characteristic of Portugal in the mid-seventies. I refer to the relation of the population with education, as this too is enlightening, not only concerning our structural weaknesses at the time democracy was restored but also about the country’s difficulties of development, which still persist to this day. In those days, one in four Portuguese over the age of 10 was illiterate, and the proportion of people with a degree or attending higher education was about 1.5% of the entire resident population. On the other hand, sociological information on opportunities for social mobility revealed abnormally high levels of class-based selection at that time in access to secondary and above all university education.

This, then, was the country that opened its eyes in disbelief on the liberating morning of 25 April 1974, whose immediate political consequences are well known: the restoration of fundamental civic liberties, the organisation of a political framework of representative democracy centred on parties, the end of the colonial war and the independence of the colonies, the country’s full participation in the main international political forums and the approval of a democratic Constitution by an overwhelming majority.

It was a time of fast-moving change. Understandably, of course, the process of building the rule of law and by extension the foundation work of the welfare and social protection system, would be considerably influenced in their contents, form and times of maturation by the strong popular movement that went hand in hand with the political rupture. It should be remembered, however, that the period was also strongly marked by exogenous constraints. In this regard, I recall that the international economic situation in the seventies was marked by an oil crisis that disrupted the main bases of world economic order. In those conditions it is hardly surprising that the decade following 25 April 1974 was a turbulent time in Portugal. This was, in fact, a period of profound institutional readjustments during which representative democracy was consolidated but the country’s economic and political influence, following the end of the colonial Empire, reduced to its former Iberian borders.

During this phase the State performed important interventions in the productive economic apparatus (the highlight being the nationalisation of the most influential economic and financial groups of the dictatorship), and an agrarian reform that was accompanied by great social upheaval in the south. It was also during this time that two adjustment programmes were carried out by the International Monetary Fund with its well-known methodological intransigence.

At the end of the decade, when Portugal moved towards the institutional model of the rule of law, the factors of instability in Portuguese society were not extinguished. Some concerned in-depth social changes which I will attempt to outline a little further on; others are, once again, inseparable from exogenous constraints.

On this subject I will very briefly recall that due to requirements of our accession to the European Community, Portugal underwent from 1985 onwards a vast privatisation programme of nationalised companies and the reduction of the State in the productive apparatus. This was a politically significant effort that went hand in hand with certain in-depth reforms in the institutional framework regulating the economy and employment.

Thinking about the last decade in Portuguese life, however, we must register other equally important exogenous challenges. I refer, within the context of enlargement of the Union and intensification of global competition, to the demands of nominal convergence made by Maastricht Treaty and the model of budgetary discipline of the Stability and Growth Pact, leading to no doubt essential disciplines that nevertheless restricted the organisation of a welfare state and job-creating economic policies.

Having briefly identified the major outlines of the framework of Portuguese society in its thirty years of democratic life, how can I now, equally briefly, describe the in-depth social changes I mentioned above?

To try to show how deep they were it might be useful to start this inventory by briefly mentioning demographic changes.

In the short period of three decades Portugal underwent a veritable demographic mutation. This was due to fertility rates that, initially and in comparative terms were abnormally high, but fell in the last years to near European levels. In turn, nowadays the ageing rates at the top and base reveal figures (particularly from the perspective of sustaining the social security systems) that are as worrying as those of the aged populations of central Europe.

And here we should look at another aspect, which is the evolution of our migratory patterns. In a very short period of time Portugal received and peacefully absorbed, following decolonisation, a large number of displaced persons from the former colonial territories estimated at over half a million. This fact, allied to the almost total slowdown in emigration, brought the demographic decline to a halt. What was, however, most surprising in the light of traditional demographic trends was undoubtedly Portugal’s transformation into a host country for immigrants who at first came from the former African colonies and then, particularly in the mid-nineties, from Eastern European countries and Brazil.

That is why we are now confronting a concrete social problem of integrating a contingent of immigrants that represents at least 4% of the population and 8-9% of total employment. This is a remarkable change of perspective that for the first time raises new and urgent issues.

To understand better what has changed and what has been maintained in Portugal in the last decades, we must also look at the influence of the trends of this demographic evolution on the transformation of the country’s economic and productive structures and of these two on the patterns of occupation on the national territory.

Firstly, I will make an initial observation: although Portugal did not experience a sudden process of technological modernisation or agricultural reconversion, the fact is that we moved from a situation where more than one-third of the total population was employed in the primary sector in 1970, to about 12% in 2002 (about 5% of the active population). Industrial employment, which had remained stationary during the 80s, is already in decline, whilst tertiary employment, which is lower in proportion and level of skills than the European average, has become the most important share of the employed population (almost 54%).

The fact is that, excluding a few geographically defined zones with modernised, competitive farming, there are extensive areas of the country, particularly inland, where family-run farms still persist. These are often situations representing a part-time occupation that has no aid from the Common Agricultural Policy, and low levels of productivity, linked increasingly to disturbing processes of demographic and economic devitalisation. Many people, myself included, believe that farming’s economic and social importance may re-emerge, this time however under the form of socially enhanced services in the area, for instance, of protection of the environment and the landscape and of social proximity networks. In this area, protecting and developing Portugal’s forested heritage will be a decisive step.

Another statement: the thirty years of democracy have not enabled us to reduce the development asymmetries that characterise the national territory. In this regard, the coastal/inland dichotomy with a strong demographic polarisation in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Oporto represents an important dualism in the model of Portuguese development. However, there has been some change in these trends, that should not be ignored. In the last two decades, in fact, we have witnessed the consolidation of average-sized urban areas in the geographical interior of the country. This actually promotes some innovation and diversification of the economic activities in regions that were formerly confined to outdated farming methods. It is a process that at nationwide scale has slendered some of the inequalities of development but has not yet managed to contradict the tendency of devitalisation of part of the rural world, which I mentioned earlier.

However, the coastal area of Portugal has also seen the emergence of economic and social peripheries. Whether due to poorly diversified productive activities, lack of proper accessibilities, a build-up of problems of low skills in the older local populations or perhaps through entrepreneurial fragilities – the fact is that there are still many rural areas that are confronted by real vicious circles of under-development. Here, local and central administrations confront major challenges in terms of justice and a strategic decision in the allocation of resources.

Moving on now to personal qualifications, two of the most important legacies of the 25 April were undoubtedly the law extending compulsory schooling to all children and the strong increase in the attendance rates in higher learning. These should be highlighted as they are responsible for changes in behaviour and attitudes that have an important bearing on relations with culture, participation in economic organisation and public life, openness to the information society and the knowledge economy, and so on. However, we are still a long way from finding a solution to the problems still facing Portuguese society in the area of education and training. The most urgent - and the one which, from my point of view, makes us continue to consider quality schooling for all as an absolute national priority – is linked to the levels of failure rates in schools and early leaving that must be urgently corrected.

Yet another observation in this field: it has been noticed in Portugal, and is common to other societies, that the young female population is the leading protagonist and beneficiary of investment in education. I will use this point as the pretext to single out one of the most discreet and emancipating transformations permitted by the democratisation of Portuguese society – women’s emergence in the job market. The rates of female participation in the job market having increased in only three decades from comparatively low figures to numbers that in most cases exceed those of most European countries, we must perforce acknowledge that we are in the presence of a real “revolution”. It is a change that is reflected first of all in the sphere of jobs and careers but mainly in the systems of values, in the network of affections, in the patterns of family behaviour and in the forms of socialisation of the younger generations. As with other revolutions this one is not without its problems and it requires judicious institutional adjustments. But together with extended access to schooling it is certainly one of the best outcomes of the 1974 revolution.

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As a result of these changes I have briefly described, the social composition of the Portuguese population or, as one used to say, its class structure, has altered significantly in the last thirty years.

In addition to the loss of statistical importance and the marked decline in the share of the farming class, as schooling progressed in this country we have witnessed a gradual increase in the number of people employed in tertiary activities and working in technical or management positions. They are what is sometimes called the new middle classes, which now occupy the most important position, statistically, in the Portuguese class structure and may irreversibly have overtaken the universe of industrial workers.

In the face of such a sensitive and fast alteration in the structure of classes and their respective protagonisms, it is hardly surprising that the processes of inter-generational social mobility in contemporary Portugal should be equally sudden. This in turn generates contradictions and dissonances both in terms of family and relational ties and in terms of the members of each fraction of a class, and its sometimes diffuse manifestations are projected in the personal and collective dynamics underway in Portuguese society, often perplexing to external observers.

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In closing this brief overview of the transformations in Portuguese society in the last decades I think we should return to the figures on economic growth before and after the Revolution.

Whilst it is a fact that the average growth rate of GDP per capita between 1973 and 2000 did not exceed 2.7% per year, nevertheless it was higher than the European average, which stood at 1.9% per year. This positive impression of how Portugal – albeit with substantial Community aid, it is only fair to remember – managed to confront the difficulties due to a democratisation process occurring under an unfavourable international context, is corroborated by observing the behaviour of the Human Development Index – the well-known synthetic indicator published annually by the UNDP. It tells us that of the EU countries at 15 in the last quarter of the 20th century, Portugal was the one that converged the most in relation to the average values of the Union.

Whilst revealing on the one hand the Portuguese capacity to confront major challenges, the positive assessment of the evolution of the Portuguese economy and society should not allow us to forget the difficulties experienced in the last years, which were reflected precisely in the deterioration of the mentioned indicators. Therefore, the way in which the Stability and Growth Pact is now looked at is positive, for a country like Portugal which, for the historical reasons I mentioned, does not yet enjoy a sufficiently well-structured welfare and social protection system.

I do believe that by making the Stability and Growth Pact more flexible, Europe is taking an important step forward in giving new impetus to the project known as the Lisbon Strategy and for a more suitable development of the European economy.

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The restoration of democracy in April 1974 also led to another decisive change, this time in the field of foreign policy. Portugal joined what was then the EEC, and so opened a path that had been forbidden to us, although we were founding members of the OECD and EFTA.

The European option was one of the structuring decisions of the new Portuguese regime. It was Portugal’s strategic reply to the change in its international position following decolonisation. Through our participation in the European integration project we consolidated our democratic transition, reinforced the rule of law and developed a market economy. The country opened up and became modernised, the Portuguese recovered their self-esteem and learned to take a fresh look at their history and their culture. By opting for Europe Portugal adopted a new political, economic and social paradigm whilst this decision also replaced the traditional lines of its foreign policy and allowed the country to gain added external projection.

I insist, therefore, on the word mutation to characterise the new Portuguese diplomatic era. Without turning its back on the Atlantic (for centuries an important area of priority in our external action, and here I also recall our old alliance with Great Britain that illustrates it so well), Portugal returned to its European source, concentrating the essence of its policy on active, committed participation in the integration process, whilst giving Europe a new face. Some years on, in addition to being Portuguese, we are proud to be avowedly European in the sense that we belong to a community of destiny.

Today we maintain privileged ties with Portuguese-speaking countries and can rejoice in the fact that we have stabilised, or decolonised if you like, our relations with them! In fact, joining the EEC made this evolution possible and we have become a useful partner in Europe for and a privileged European interlocutor with Portuguese-speaking countries that are now grouped in a politically structured community with 200 million citizens. We should also underline that the European option wrought equally remarkable alterations in the quality of our bilateral relations with the international community and most particularly with Spain, a country that for well-known historic and geostrategical reasons assumes considerable importance in our foreign policy.

Lastly, I think it might be useful to underline that, contradicting the fears of some of our partners in the Community, the accession of Portugal and Spain in 1986 was a success that rather than diluting the Community dynamics, helped renew and strengthen the European integration process.

Actually I am deeply convinced that the accession of Greece, Portugal and Spain was decisive to consolidate the European identity based on a pluralist democracy, the rule of law and the market economy. It was a course that would be vital in helping the democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and its participation in the common European project.

We might also add that Portugal’s accession in particular provided Europe with an enlarged Atlantic flank that was essential to safeguard the balance between the European family. At the same time, the integration of the Iberian countries brought a new framework to the European Union’s external relations, another geopolitical weight and a different understanding, as both States have invaluable historical experience of and a privileged relationship with the countries of Latin America and Africa.

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Having closed its long-lasting imperial cycle Portugal’s return to Europe enabled it to more clearly see how the identity of the Portuguese and their capacity to overcome crises had been modelled by the historical experiences gained along the routes of its caravels.

We have also learnt much from our European option. Firstly, if we had not joined a Community based on a space of regional unification our country’s independence of decision and external affirmation, in particular in the priority areas of relationships, would be much reduced. At the same time, in the present context of globalisation and increased internationalisation of the economy, our socioeconomic weaknesses prior to accession are a good illustration of the extreme difficulty – even impossibility – of otherwise confronting the challenges of modernisation and progress. Finally, the current web of new and diffuse threats affecting the start of this millennium, worsened in the Portuguese case by a particularly exposed geographical situation, leaves no doubts as to the rightness of the strategic decision to attempt to ensure the country’s safety and defence through the disciplines of solidarity of the European project.

I have often repeated this with secure conviction: both for the Portuguese and for others, Europe is today a condition of effective independence. It is within the framework of European integration that we are better able to guarantee the security, development and freedom that are the attributes of sovereignty. It is within this European framework that we can more efficiently resolve the problems and hardships we are experiencing, protect our interests and continue to feel increasingly Portuguese, whilst simultaneously and proudly more European.

I am well aware that these are times of doubt on our continent, of hesitation even, concerning the virtues of the project that links us today. And this is another reason to affirm, based on our clear national experience, that it is my personal conviction but one shared by many, that Europe will occupy the position demanded by its historic responsibilities for the urgent construction of a more just world within a union of solidarity, in the fulfilment of freely negotiated objectives and in agreed sharing of sovereignty.