Lisbon rising: Urban social movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–75

By Pedro Ramos Pinto

Lisbon rising explores the role of a widespread urban social movement in the revolutionary process that accompanied Portugal’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy. It is the first in-depth study of the widest urban movement of the European post-war period, an event that shook the balance of Cold War politics by threatening the possibility of revolution in Western Europe.

Using hitherto unknown sources produced by movement organisations themselves, it challenges long-established views of civil society in Southern Europe as weak, arguing that popular movements had an important and autonomous role in the process that led to democratisation, inviting us to rethink the history and theories of transitions in the region in ways that account for popular agency.

Lisbon rising will be of interest not only to students of twentieth-century European history, but across disciplines to students of democratisation, social movements and citizenship in political science and sociology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526103062

Pedro Ramos Pinto

Pedro Ramos Pinto is Lecturer in International Economic History at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Trinity Hall

Book preview

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Introduction

The Carnation Revolution revisited

The Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75 was a critical juncture in the second half of the European twentieth century, the first in a series of authoritarian collapses that would bring the whole of western and central Europe into liberal democracy. For those following the events in Portugal over those two years, however, the so-called Revolution of the Carnations was also many other things. For the first time in almost half a century the possibility of a real popular revolution was felt in the West. Events in Portugal shook the balance of Cold War politics with the possibility of socialism in western Europe, and gave rise to aspirations of new forms of direct democracy that ignited high hopes on the left throughout the continent. Alongside land and factory occupations across the country, the unexpected emergence of a grassroots movement of the poor in Portugal’s cities was one of the aspects of the revolution that most excited contemporary observers, holding out the promise of a truly popular and socialist democracy. This urban social movement engaged many thousands in democratic neighbourhood assemblies deciding the fate of the city, built houses, roads, schools and hospitals and occupied thousands of apartments. To this day, while it remains for many a symbol of the possibilities of grassroots democracy, little is known about how this movement appeared, what role it played in the Revolution of the Carnations, and why it disappeared after 1975.

Since 1926 Portugal had suffered under one of Europe’s longestlasting authoritarian regimes and, despite rumblings of discontent from the 1960s onwards (in the form of student protest or an incipient strike movement) few expected what seemed like an acquiescent population to take to politics with such determination. The dictatorship was not brought down by a groundswell of popular mobilization. Instead, its end came at the hands of a group of junior military officers intent on bringing to an end the 13-year war against liberation movements in Portugal’s African colonies. While the captains’ plot of 25 April 1974 encountered little resistance from a tired and deflated regime, it still came as a surprise to the military and to opposition politicians who had laboured in clandestinity, how quickly the population burst onto the scene, cheering and supporting the plotters and storming the most symbolic buildings of the deposed regime.

This was not a momentary exuberant celebration: through a period of nineteen months not only were the remnants of the dictatorship swept away, but Portugal also experienced what felt like a state of permanent social, economic and political revolution. Traditional social strictures dictating sexual and personal ethics were challenged, hierarchies of power in workplaces, cities and villages were turned upside down, the economy was largely nationalised, voters massed to the polls to chose between a range of political systems, and turned up to almost daily street demonstrations and parades.

Yet by November 1975 the revolution had lost steam. A quick military operation disarmed the more radicalised sections of the army, who had spearheaded the drive to create a revolutionary regime. While in April 1974 the people had rushed to the street in support of the military coup, just nineteen months later few or none did so. The slow construction of a liberal democracy that followed was finally completed in 1982 when the military at last relinquished its political role, giving place to a regime that resembled those who Portugal sought to join in the European Community. By the mid-1980s the Portuguese political system looked very much like that of a ‘consolidated’ western democracy, ruled by alternating centrist parties that monopolised systems of representation, and witnessing levels of political disengagement and electoral abstention almost identical to those of most other countries on the continent.¹ The heady days of the revolutionary period seemed very far away.

The contrast between a supposedly anaemic public sphere in today’s Portugal and the remarkable levels of popular political participation of the transition period has contributed to the construction of narratives that underplay the impact of the latter. The contentious, at times even violent, nature of the Portuguese path to democracy has been underplayed in both the collective and academic memory of those two tumultuous years.² As Kenneth Maxwell noted, current political debate in Portugal rests on a degree of obfuscation of the deep divisions that ran through the revolutionary period, what he terms a ‘flattening out’ of a lumpy, contentious process.³ Such representations have served to crystallise the portrayal of popular movements in the period as either an irrelevant sideshow, or as a foundation myth used to critique the political system that emerged afterwards. The former view dismisses it as an extraordinary occurrence, an outpouring of youthful enthusiasm ultimately irrelevant for the creation of a ‘European’ democracy, society and economy. For others, the era has assumed an almost mythical status as a moment ‘when everything seemed possible and each felt the destiny of the country was also in their hands’, but whose defeat replaced hope with apathy.⁴

This polarisation of historical memory was brought to the surface in 2004 during the commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1974 coup, when the government, then led by the centre-right, created a new slogan – ‘April is Evolution’ – de-emphasising the revolutionary character of the period and looking to focus instead on economic and social modernisation. This prompted a reaction from the left which included a campaign to deface the official commemoration posters so they would read ‘April is (R)Evolution’, as well as rivers of ink debating the meaning and place of the revolution in contemporary Portuguese society. Revealingly, however, even many of those who criticised the conservative view tended to speak of the revolution in ways that removed a sense of collective agency from the moment, using passive verb constructions such as ‘the Revolution was made’, or ‘democracy arrived’.⁵

In essence, both the right’s ‘evolutionary’ perspective, and the left’s emphasis on broad abstractions served to remove the people as an actor and agent, and of conflict from the discussion and memorialisation of the revolution. This omission is a result of the near-hegemony of political parties on the Portuguese public sphere, for whom these accounts serve as legitimating strategies. The moderate parties who came to form the central axis of the establishment, the Socialist Party (PS) and the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) set about dismantling the idea that there had been anything like broad-based popular movement embodying the possibility of different society.⁶ Arguing that a great deal of the mobilisation of those years was little more than the result of manipulation by small revolutionary groups, the moderates cited the support they received in the elections of 1975 as the real source of popular legitimacy.⁷ Wary of forms of political participation they had little connection to, the moderates sought to paint the popular movements as unrepresentative and an irrelevance to the process. This served the purpose of sustaining the moderate parties’ self-projection as the sole progenitors of democracy and, later, helped deal with social protest during the difficult economic environment of the late 1970s.

The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), in turn, defines the revolution as the creation of ‘an advanced democracy on the road to socialism’ – not, note, socialism itself.⁸ But while it often refers to the popular mobilisations of 1974–75, it portrays them as synonymous with the party itself, allowing it to claim the role of only legitimate representative of the working class, and defender of the social rights that it considers the ‘conquests of the revolution’. This strategy has been particularly important as the party finds itself in competition with a political coalition to its left, emerging from a combination of far-left organisations and who also emphasises similar themes.⁹

The omissions of competing ‘political memories’ of the revolution are, in many ways, reflected in the academic analysis of the period. In part, this is a result of the fact that much of this analysis was produced by scholars who were themselves participants in the revolutionary process – and this is the case not only with Portuguese nationals, but also the work of engagé political scientists and sociologists who travelled to Portugal in this period. But the relative neglect of investigation of the role of popular movements in the Portuguese Revolution is also the result of the interpretative models of democratisation and revolution that came to dominate the social sciences in the later 1970s and 1980s, models which tended to relegate collective actors to the condition of a sideshow. Authors approaching these subjects from a Marxist perspective focused on macroeconomic and class processes, where autonomous popular agency was deemed to play little or no role, and need little study. For Nicos Poulantzas, or in the closer analysis of Matias Ferreira, Portugal’s partly industrialised economy had not yet produced a ‘class-for-itself’ imbued with the history and experience of class struggle; instead, an ‘immature’ popular movement was unable to mount a revolutionary challenge.¹⁰ In turn, radical Marxists idealised popular movements as the harbingers of revolution, but accused the Communist Party and its allies in the military of betraying them and failing to provide revolutionary leadership.¹¹ For Eisfeld, the Carnation Revolution wilted as the contending political parties were ‘too successful’ in manipulating the grassroots to conquer state power. Real devolution of power, which in his opinion could have channelled mobilisation towards building a real socialist democracy, was never a priority.¹² Bill Lomax, although more positive regarding autonomy of the popular movement, echoed the interpretation of manipulation by suggesting that the voluntarism of parts of the left had inflated the revolutionary potential of the popular movement, whose role in 1974–75 was, in his opinion, ‘largely illusory and epiphenomenal’.¹³

A handful of more balanced, homegrown, academic reflections on the revolutionary process did appear in the 1980s, raising a number of questions about the origins and relationship between popular movements, other political actors, and the Portuguese Revolution.¹⁴ But the questions they raised were overlooked by an emerging new paradigm in the study of transitions to democracy. Just as the Portuguese dictatorship was coming to an end, scholarship focusing on political transformation was experiencing a shift in perspective. Building on Dankwart Rustow’s critique of structural models of transition, a new approach to democratisation broke away from the determinism of modernisation theory and its teleology of necessary steps and conditions.¹⁵ This critique was encouraged by what appeared to be a ‘wave’ of democratisation sweeping across countries – starting with Portugal in 1974 – with substantially different economic structures, political trajectories and cultural contexts.¹⁶ The emerging paradigm of democratisation, clearly influenced by the nature of the process in Spain, saw transitions as open-ended political processes, where choice is available to political actors and outcomes are uncertain rather than predetermined. Because of this emphasis on political choice and strategy, this approach often led to a preoccupation with the role of political elites as the key social actors of democratisation. In these analyses, the skills and virtú of leaders could make or unmake democracies in almost any circumstances, while the role of collective actors was at best subordinate. Despite the very visible presence of ordinary people in the political arena during the Portuguese transition, political scientists of the ‘transitology’ school argued them away from explaining democratisation. In their influential work, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, O’Donnell and Schmitter, gave an equivocal role to the ‘popular upsurge’: while it is said to perform the ‘crucial role of pushing … transition further than it would otherwise have gone’, it is also something that needs to be contained and controlled in order for countries to democratise successfully.¹⁷ This was the case in Portugal where, they argued, the explosion of participation pushed the transition far beyond liberalisation and towards socialism, but not through its own agency, rather as the result of the MFA’s ‘choreography’ of civil society, creating a situation which required skilful leadership to steer the democratic course.¹⁸ Building on these observations, a generation of scholarship repeatedly painted the role of popular movements (in Portugal and elsewhere) in essentially negative terms.¹⁹

While the ‘elitist’ school of democratisation became largely dominant in western political science, by the 1990s dissenting voices at the fringes and in other disciplines began suggesting alternative models. Buoyed by the renewed interest in the possibilities of mass action brought about by the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe, social scientists began exploring the role of collective actors in conditioning the choices and options available to political elites, arguing that collective actors can have a critical role in frustrating attempts to renew the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, with widespread protest not just signalling disagreement, but creating a ‘climate of ungovernability’ which increases the cost of repression and pushes elites to the negotiating table.²⁰ In comparative historical sociology, Rueschmeyer, Stephens and Stephens developed second-generation structural accounts which qualified, but still supported, class-based accounts of democratisation in the long run.²¹ Other authors raised objections to transitology’s endogenous or ‘internalist’ model of political change whose focus on the decisions of political leaders were said to hide broader factors leading to the breakdown of consensus within authoritarian regimes and to the dynamic relationship between supposed ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’.²² As Sidney Tarrow noted, elites do make choices, but so does the mass public, and focusing solely on the former leaves out the ‘infinitely varied and highly problematic politics of transition processes, in which elites, and masses, institutions and newly formed organisations interact in the context of social and institutional structures’.²³ The challenge, as set by Tarrow, is to question the role of collective actors beyond their ‘destabilising’ function – already recognised by O’Donnell and Schmitter – investigating if, how and when their actions contribute independently to the construction of new political systems. Their interaction with elites, and the elasticity of moments of transition in coping with vigorous mobilisation was highlighted by Nancy Bermeo, whose ‘myths of moderation’ argument turned Schmitter and O’Donnell’s argument on its head by suggesting that rather than a danger to democratisation, a ‘hot family feud’ in the form of contentious, polarised and active mobilisation can create the conditions for a bargained settlement between supporters of authoritarianism and pro-democracy leaders.²⁴

Despite important criticisms, and a growing recognition of the need to develop more encompassing studies of democratisation, many of those who attempt to bring collective actors to the discussion suffer from a one-sidedness that mirrors those of the elite perspective: there have often been ‘bottom-up’ as well as ‘top-down’ studies, but as Joe Foweraker noted, few have attempted to provide a model that integrates both.²⁵ So while the part played by collective actors is generally acknowledged in principle, in practice few studies set out to examine the complex interactions between multiple types of actors variably positioned in the political arena. Even where they do, the range of actors considered is often limited: in Ruth Berins Collier’s landmark comparative work on southern Europe and Latin America, labour and class-derived actors are assumed to be the key collective agents – the underlying assumption being that social class determines political interests.²⁶ This narrow view of popular politics ignores the extent to which collective actors of all kinds, including but not limited to social movements and political parties, encompass complex political and social identities and interests – ethnic, religious, etc. – that may, or may not, intersect with those of class.²⁷

If anything, the scholarship on Portuguese democratisation suffers from these faults to a rather extreme degree. A number of studies have looked at the role of the labour movement in opposition, but while strikes and other forms of union action were clearly a central factor in the dynamics of destabilisation of the dictatorship, so were other forms of mobilisation, which have only recently become the object of systematic study.²⁸ The final years of the dictatorship saw opposition to the regime broaden out from the committed few of the underground communist party and the traditional republican opposition to encompass new groups, issues and forms of action. These included a growing student movement, groups linked to progressive sectors of the Catholic Church or even the exercise of ‘exit’ in the form of a growing exodus of young men avoiding conscription.²⁹ However, while it is increasingly clear that these movements contributed to the delegitimisation of the regime, its end came not at their hands, but at those of the junior ranks of the professional military, whose insurrection on 25 April 1974 brought an end to forty-eight years of dictatorial rule. The dictatorship’s elites were removed from power overnight through the coup de grace delivered by a military exhausted by a thirteen-year war and united by corporate grievances against its political leaders.³⁰ There were no negotiations, no pacts, no deals.

As a consequence, the Portuguese case has contours that differ from most of the episodes of democratisation addressed in the literature. Between April 1974 and the end of November 1975, the ‘transition game’ in Portugal was not played between supporters of the dictatorship and a pro-democracy opposition, but between multiple power groups proposing competing futures. Here, if anywhere, actors of various kinds – elites, grassroots, unions, residents, farmers, students, parties, soldiers – were embroiled in a process much more complex than a unified ‘popular upsurge’ against authoritarianism: they were engaged in the creation of an altogether new country, politically speaking. Although almost all claimed democracy as their objective, they defined it through different – and often mutually exclusive – adjectives. According to who one listened to, the Portuguese were struggling to become a modern, European, socialist, Christian, liberal, social or people’s democracy. The Portuguese process was complex, yet the focus of the scholarship remains tilted towards the study of elite actors, and often reduces the question choice between authoritarianism and democracy. In between anti-authoritarian protest and the institutional politics of the consolidation of Portuguese democracy after 1975, the role of a broad range of popular collective actors in the much more fluid and contentious period of transition has been largely neglected.

Some recent research has begun to explore this complexity. Diego Palacios Cerezales’ recent overview of popular mobilisations in the Portuguese Revolution serves to remind us of the centrality of contentious collective action during the period of transition, including right-wing popular mobilisation and political violence, highlighting the diversity of interests, objectives, strategies and trajectories of collective actors that previous scholarship has tended to amalgamate into a homogenous, if ill-defined, ‘popular movement’.³¹ Alongside (and often ahead of) traditional union organisation, factories and business across Portugal witnessed a mushrooming of autonomous workplace-based committees, which produced one of the most extensive instances of workers’ control in western Europe. At different points between 1974 and 1979, more than 900 firms were taken over by their employees – and at the end of that period, over 700 remained in workers’ hands.³² In rural areas, peasant wage-labourers embarked on the largest process of land seizures witnessed in western Europe – a process that has received a little more attention but where much is still to be done.³³

A further, and equally substantive aspect of popular politics in the revolutionary period were the urban social movements that are the subject of this book, and whose importance, both in numerical as in political terms, has been neglected.

In terms of breadth and numbers of participants, the urban movement was one of the key forms of popular participation during the revolutionary period. In Lisbon alone, during the first four months of the revolution, nineteen neighbourhoods created comissões de moradores (residents’ commissions). They were formed following public meetings in shantytowns or social housing neighbourhoods which brought together hundreds and in some cases thousands of local residents to discuss shared problems and aspirations and to elect representative executives. In late April and early May of 1974, thousands of people who had previously lived in shacks or in bedsits seized hundreds of apartments under construction in various parts of the city.

By the mid-summer of 1974 the urban movement was so powerful that the provisional authorities found themselves having to recognise their mobilisation and negotiate with residents, rather than repress and prevent the seizure of houses. In response the provisional authorities enacted two measures that promised a dramatic transformation of the way in which cities were governed in Portugal – a shantytown rebuilding programme and a new Rental Law. Drawing on ideas of community participatory development and the energy of a young cohort of urban planners, social workers and architects, the Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local (Mobile Local Support Service), or SAAL for short, supported shantytowns who had created representative commissions by assigning them teams of technical experts to advise and support in the planning and building of cooperative housing. Resident-run cooperatives were to have significant input and oversight of the design and execution of new neighbourhoods, looking to invert traditional relations of authority between state officials and the poor. The participation of architects who would later gain international renown – including Siza Vieira and Souto de Moura – and the success of some of the cooperatives has made the SAAL one of the better known aspects of the urban experience of the period.³⁴ The Rental Law, enacted in response to the movement’s demands for a solution to the housing deficit, meant that the state could take control of the allocation of vacant property to those without a home. Over the course of several months this was expanded to the extent that by April 1975 many neighbourhood committees had gained control of the management of vacant private property.

Such wide-ranging interventions show the centrality of the urban question in the revolutionary period, and accompanied the growth of the urban movement into a significant political force. In early 1975 residents’ commissions across Portuguese cities began congregating and forming umbrella organisations, such as the Inter-Comissões dos Bairros de Lata e Pobres de Lisboa (Inter-commissions of the Shantytowns and Poor Neighbourhoods of Lisbon) which claimed to represent tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.

As the revolution increased its pace, particularly after the failed right-wing coup of March 1975, the urban movement continued to grow, with new neighbourhood committees were created almost every day. In the spring of 1975 a further large wave of housing occupations reaching into thousands of vacant privately owned homes took place and new, seemingly more radical umbrella organisations appeared, including Lisbon’s Comissões Revolucionárias Autónomas de Moradores e Ocupantes (Autonomous and Revolutionary Commissions of Residents and Occupiers). On 17 May 1975, simultaneous demonstrations were organised by the urban movement in cities across the country, one of the largest public mobilisations of the period which some (admittedly sympathetic) sources put at 100,000 strong in Lisbon alone.

As well as organising the seizure of vacant property and presenting their claims for housing, healthcare, transport, schools and childcare facilities in their neighbourhoods, residents’ committees also often took matters into their own hands by organising collectively managed facilities, providing services such as childcare, building playgrounds or laundries, or community clubs for residents. By the summer of 1975, the urban movement was without doubt one of the most direct ways in which ordinary citizens engaged with the new politics of the revolution, through open-air assemblies, demonstrations, reading their pamphlets or attending the festivals organised by them as cities celebrated their patron saints during the month of June. In Lisbon alone, a tally of newspaper and official sources reveals that at least 166 different residents’ committees were created in a city with a population of around 800,000.

As the different factions vying for control of the country confronted their alternative visions for the future of the country, the urban movement became further involved in the broader political conflict of the revolutionary period. Some of the radical alternatives on the table put the kind of grassroots participatory democracy being enacted in the neighbourhoods at the heart of revolutionary political blueprints: in its ‘People-MFA Alliance Manifesto’, published in July 1975, the more radical wings of the MFA proposed a form of council socialism which would see local popular organisations such as residents’ commissions given extensive powers in a structure overseen by a revolutionary military, and directly appealed to ‘residents, workers and soldiers’ to unite in completing the revolution – a call which was seemingly heeded by a not insignificant part of the movement. The urban movement thus went from being a vehicle of political participation in the politics of the revolution to becoming for some a central tenet of the ‘real’ revolution itself, and essential part of an alternative to Soviet-style centralised socialism, so called ‘Popular Power’ socialism.

Following the moderate victory of November 1975 and the ‘normalisation’ of politics that the first constitutional governments sought to impose, the urban movement seems to disappear from the public scene. Mentions to the residents’ commissions become fewer and further between – yet, it is difficult to say what precisely happened to the enthusiasm and mobilising capacity of grassroots organisations. Did they crumble, along with the house of cards that was the ‘popular power’ movement, giving credence to those who see the popular mobilisation of the revolution as little more than an orchestration of the revolutionary left? Alternatively, were they coercively demobilised, as the provisional government regained control of the instruments of government and the forces of law and order?

Despite its obvious importance as a form of political participation, very few studies have looked at the urban movement in any depth. Hemmed in by ideological approaches and a temporal strait-jacket that runs only from the 25 April 1974 to the 25 November 1975, we know very little about how the movement emerged, developed, and (if at all) disappeared. The aim of this book is to revisit the urban movement by reconstructing its origins and trajectory in Lisbon and its role in the Portuguese Revolution as a means to to re-evaluate the political dynamics of the Portuguese Revolution and transition to democracy.

Urban social movements in the Portuguese Revolution

Only a few decades on, very little of what remains in public and academic consciousness about the urban movement seems to come from the people who made it happen. This silence hinders any attempt to try to reconsider the movement and its relation to the politics of the revolutionary period, particularly in three key areas. Firstly, we still know relatively little about how and why the movement appeared: was it the result of the short-term political conjuncture of the revolutionary period, or is it connected to deeper, more long-lasting processes of social transformation? Secondly, what was it a movement of, and for? How did its participants see themselves and its objectives, what were its mobilising identities and ambitions? Was it a working-class revolutionary movement that proposed and enacted an alternative model of a more democratic and egalitarian society? Or was it the puppet of a far-left minority who brought the country dangerously close to civil war? And, thirdly, how are we to explain its seemingly rapid demise around November 1975? Was the urban movement defeated by the moderate seizure of power, or do we need to search for alternative explanations, such as ‘protest fatigue’ or even ‘bureaucratisation’? Only by answering these questions can we address the bigger picture and begin to frame new ways of connecting such wide collective mobilisations to the overall political process of the Portuguese Revolution.

At first sight, given the poverty of urban conditions in 1970s Portugal, the appearance of a movement demanding more and better housing for the city’s poor, as well as improved public services in healthcare, education and transport, seems unsurprising. However, a longer view soon reveals that the appearance of these topics as issues of political contention, and of the use of morador (resident) as a mobilising identity, were anything but given. Authors on the left and on the right share the view that the popular upsurge that followed the April 1974 coup was the result of a range of social problems that fuelled simmering resentment during the final years of the dictatorship, a ‘pressure cooker’ of social tension that was released by the 25 April coup.³⁵ In such accounts, urban poverty, lack of housing and amenities, in short, ‘objective problems’ – the results of contradictions of the capitalist system for some, the products of rapid modernisation for others – are a sufficient explanation for the mobilisation of the urban poor, and the question becomes when would urban squalor erupt into political mobilisation, not if.³⁶ The when question is often resolved by pointing to the removal of the dictatorship’s repressive apparatus with the April coup, and to the opportunity afforded by the divisions between transitional political elites that hampered the normal exercise of political power. This argument recurs in different forms across the literature: so, for Downs, ‘the development of urban social movements is part of a change in the general balance of class forces’, to the extent that the mobilising issues (‘simply the most basic problems of the neighbourhood’) become secondary to the conditions of mobilisation.³⁷ Similarly, for Cerezales, the initial wave of housing occupations shortly after the coup took place after residents confirmed the incapacity of the policy to maintain regular functioning of law and order – only subsequently did a ‘social movement’ develop by building on these actions.³⁸

There is no doubt that the disintegration of coercive power of the state that followed the 25 April coup allowed the emergence of popular movements of the period. But the removal of barriers and constraints to mobilisation is only one side of the story – opportunities do not, at least in the first instance, create the social actors that may (or may not) mobilise to take advantage of them. If on one hand social actors are constituted through their actions, and the movement did not emerge fully formed, on the other they cannot be reduced to the spontaneous actions of opportunistic individuals. It was not just occupations, but also petitions, meetings and delegations that were organised in neighbourhoods across Portuguese cities in the days after the coup – all essentially collective political mobilisations that suggest a commonly held belief that certain categories of goods were rights to which the claimants were entitled to. This means that they had to draw on shared ideas about what such rights were and who was responsible for delivering on them, while mobilisation had to be based on some form of common identity, drawing on pre-existing networks.³⁹ All this points to a longer timeframe through which urban identities and ideas about urban citizenship developed. Yet, the existing literature takes a largely ahistorical perspective on the urban movements, leaving the question of political values and mobilisation resources unproblematised. It assumes that urban conditions were directly translated into political values and interests, and projected identities (most often class identities) onto the movement. In doing so, it regards the urban social as ex-tempore phenomena detached from longer historical processes and political traditions. This premise has never been questioned and, in my opinion, leads us to mis-understand the nature of the urban movement, and a failure to properly account for its appeal, its trajectory and its influence on the Portuguese transition to democracy.

The importance of the ‘urban question’ as a broader political issue in 1974–75 was to a large extent the result, not the condition, of the mobilisation of the urban movement. After all, urban poverty and poor living conditions are not unusual, while powerful and wide-ranging social movements of the poor are rare, even in countries where opportunity structures are ‘open’. And a longer historical outlook makes clear that urban immiseration, shantytowns and overcrowding were by no means new phenomena. At least since the mid-nineteenth-century, Lisbon had experienced a degree of urban squalor common to industrialising cities across Europe. The historical novelty of 1974–75 was not the extent of such problems, but the political movement that took them as its central issue. Its claims were also original in so far as they regarded housing and urban services as social rights of citizenship, that is, as goods that the state was duty-bound to provide to the poor by virtue of their condition of citizens.