ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses why the Portuguese revolution of 1974–75 was, and was bound to become, somehow exemplary if not ‘paradigmatic’ of a particular phase of the history of the Cold War and international relations. It argues that Portugal, and its successful transition to democracy, was and became a paradigm – useful to understand and make sense also of the other democratic transitions of the mid-1970s – for at least three, strictly interrelated, reasons. The first was its international reverberations and global symbolic meaning and appeal. The second is that it was illustrative of the most fundamental contradiction of bipolar (i.e. US– Soviet) détente: of a conservative great power diplomatic game that aimed at preserving and even freezing the Cold War order in Europe, but that at the same time eroded the ideological underpinnings of that order. The third is that the Portuguese events were shaped by the constant, bidirectional interplay between the domestic and the international: between Cold War allegiances and national political actors, the European and global order on the one side and the Portuguese situation on the other.
