ABSTRACT
In Portugal's long history as an independent polity—in what is probably the world's oldest nation-state—the decade of the 1970s will surely stand out as one of its most momentous. A key component of the strategy to depoliticize the military was to take it entirely out of public affairs and to remove its officers from further involvement in questions of political controversy. Despite the importance of the military in Portugal's transition to democracy, substantive research on civil-military relations is not easily located. In the Portuguese context the formal statement of the agreement to establish a democratic regime is the Constitution of 1976. The rapid movement of events during summer 1975, the plurality of civilian and military actors vying for leadership positions, and the way in which the international mass media zeroed in on Portugal as a social revolution in the making served to obscure a very important fact.
