ABSTRACT
The definition of Portugal as a semi-colonial country and the demand for nationalization of the anti-colonial movements in Portuguese Africa were important steps towards the nationalization of the anti-imperialist communist strategy. The idea of Portugal's backwardness was pronounced in intellectual and political debates associated with several ideological currents throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Portugal's position within the current stage of imperialism was initially defined in Lenin's founding text, Imperialism—the Highest Stage of Capitalism. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Portuguese Communist Party had a determinedly anti-colonialist posture, but this was about to change. During the 1950s, as US cultural industries became more competitive in the post-war years, an increasing hostility to American mass culture was expressed by Portuguese and other European communists. The Portuguese delegation ended up parading in two groups, one representing Portugal and the other representing Mozambique, therefore indicating a national distinction.
