ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of ideology in legitimizing empires and imperial rule. It argues that understanding the role of ideology is essential not only to understand how empires and imperial rule have been maintained, but also in order to account for the curious fact that empires sometimes seem to outlast themselves. The chapter also focuses on the efforts to legitimize Portuguese imperial rule during 1950–1975. It considers the justification of the Portuguese imperialism in the postwar period. This was the theory of Lusotropicalism. During the first part of the twentieth century, Portuguese imperialism had been justified with reference to the racial superiority of the Portuguese, and their obligation to carry out a “civilizing mission” in the colonies. Thus, Lusotropicalism provided the Salazar regime with the conceptual and rhetorical resources necessary to legitimize imperial rule both domestically and internationally in a world in which this form of rule was quickly becoming obsolete, not to say absurd.
