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The Scramble for Africa Reloaded? Portugal, European Colonial Claims and the Distribution of Colonies in the 1930s

Part of: Contemporary European History Prize Winners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2020

Márcia Gonçalves Open the ORCID record for Márcia Gonçalves [Opens in a new window]
Márcia Gonçalves*
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Institute of Contemporary History – NOVA FCSH, Av. Berna, 26 C 1069–061 Lisbon, Portugal
*
marcia.goncalves@eui.eu
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Abstract

Situating itself at the crossroads of colonial history, international history and European history, this article examines the movement for colonial appeasement and the redistribution of African colonies in the 1930s from a frequently overlooked viewpoint: Portugal and its empire. Even though Portugal was not a principal actor in the discussion of colonial redistribution, the Portuguese empire was placed at the centre of these debates as a subject to be discussed. The article demonstrates that the great powers’ perception of Portugal as an inadequate colonial power was central to their strategy of colonial redistribution in an international context that espoused guarantees of territorial integrity to great and small states alike. In addition, it shows how Portugal entered the debate on colonial appeasement to promote a rhetoric of victimisation and bolster support for the dictatorship.

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The Contemporary European History Prize
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Contemporary European History , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 2 - 15
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

On 29 January 1937 the head of the Portuguese government, António de Oliveira Salazar, released a long official note to the press. Salazar aimed to put an end to the ‘expansion of fake news’ in the foreign press.Footnote 1 The previous month, both the Swiss New Basel Newspaper (Neue Basler Zeitung) and the French The Times (Le Temps) had informed their readers that Portugal was negotiating the handover of Angola to Germany.Footnote 2 Portuguese diplomats had quickly refuted the claims.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, rumours persisted and grew in detail in the following weeks. By the time Salazar's note appeared in the press it had been reported that Portugal would lease Angola to a German chartered company for ninety-nine years, keeping only nominal sovereignty over the colony. The Portuguese dictator had an emphatic message for ‘those who attack us and raise rumours about our colonies’: ‘we will not sell, we will not lease, we will not lend, we will not share our colonies. . . . Our constitutional laws do not allow it; and, if these laws did not exist, our national consciousness would not allow it.’Footnote 4

Rumours involving an upcoming sale or lease of one or more Portuguese colonies had been appearing in European, American and South African newspapers since the early 1930s and would continue to emerge until the outbreak of the Second World War. Along with the erosion of democratic institutions, the radicalisation of expansionist discourses in authoritarian regimes and the collapse of international disarmament efforts, the 1930s witnessed growing demands for a redistribution of colonial territory. The impact of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 precipitated a severe worldwide economic depression. As European colonial powers turned to their empires to facilitate their reconstruction and rebalance metropolitan budgets, the glaring distinction between countries with colonies and those without put an additional strain on international relations. In a geopolitical scene dominated by great European powers and the rivalries between them, Portugal remained a peripheral country, small in both size and importance. Yet, in the early 1930s Portugal had the world's third largest colonial empire, behind only the United Kingdom and France, occupying a significant area of Africa in addition to some smaller colonies in Asia.

As European rivalries grew more intense, the idea that the scramble for Africa had not come to an end with the First World War began to take shape in Portugal. In this article I explore how the rumours about the Portuguese empire related to wider debates on the redistribution of colonial resources and plans for colonial appeasement. British and French strategies of seeking out diplomatic compromises and concessions to avoid resorting to an armed conflict with Germany during the 1930s have attracted a great deal of attention on the part of historians and political scientists alike.Footnote 5 However, colonial appeasement has not been a central topic in this discussion. Wm. Roger Louis and Andrew Crozier are the exceptions, but their investigations are centred on the British perspective and both analyses are built on exclusively British sources.Footnote 6 Their approaches offer an invaluable understanding of the diplomatic traces of colonial appeasement, but they say little about the reception and impact of colonial appeasement beyond the circles of high diplomacy. Recently Susan Pedersen has explored the extraordinary level of public attention that colonial appeasement attracted at the time in her study of the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission. Pedersen shows how British and French statesmen's plans to offer Hitler a colony in Africa contributed to the failure of the interwar internationalist project on which the League was based by discrediting it in the eyes of the European liberal elites.Footnote 7 This article aims to complement these approaches by shifting the focus away from the great European powers and the internationalist movement; instead, it will look at colonial appeasement and redistribution of colonial resources from a marginal viewpoint.

The point of departure of my analysis is Portugal and the Portuguese empire. Situating itself at the crossroads of colonial history, international history and European history, this article will show how the European crisis of the 1930s that culminated in the outbreak of the Second World War cannot be fully understood without paying attention to its entanglement with imperial order. I will begin by briefly introducing the international framework of the renewed interest in African partitioning, placing it within the wider context of inter-European rivalries and internationalisation of imperial debates before the Second World War. Then, I will demonstrate that, even though Portugal was not a principal actor in the discussion of colonial redistribution, the Portuguese Empire was placed at the centre of these debates as a subject to be discussed. Finally, I will turn to the Portuguese response to rumours about colonial appeasement projects to show how they were exploited for nationalistic purposes in Portugal.

‘Everybody Wants Colonies’

On 21 December 1938 the leading article of the well-known and widely circulated Portuguese newspaper Daily News (Diário de Notícias) carried the provocative title ‘Everybody Wants Colonies’. It was a harsh criticism of countries that were – in the author's words – ‘hungry for colonies’: Mussolini had taken over Ethiopia by force, the question of the restitution of former German colonies had moved on considerably and, it was argued, everybody felt entitled to become a colonial power.Footnote 8

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia had taken place in October 1935. Italian colonial ambitions had been revived during the First World War. Italy's entry into the war on the side of the Entente powers had been negotiated in 1915 on extremely advantageous terms for the Italians. Anticipating the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, it was agreed that Italy would obtain Trentino-South Tyrol, as well as territories on the shores of the Adriatic Sea and the Turkish Mediterranean coast. The 1915 Treaty of London further stated that, should France and the United Kingdom increase their colonial territories in Africa at the expense of Germany, Italy could claim some equitable compensation.Footnote 9 However, the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 fell short of delivering the Italians’ expected result. The US president Woodrow Wilson made clear that his country was not bound by secret agreements and that Italian claims violated his guiding principle of self-determination.Footnote 10 In the end Italy received Trentino-South Tyrol and a share of the German reparations, but the plan to expand Italy's territory along the Adriatic coast never came to fruition and their aspirations in Africa were dashed. The idea of ‘mutilated victory’ (vittoria mutilata) gained momentum: Italy had not only been humiliated by its allies but also deprived of important economic resources and confined to a small territory that was insufficient for its growing population.Footnote 11 Capitalising on the widespread popular disappointment, Mussolini rose to power in 1922 with a promise to restore Italy's former might and the glory of the Roman Empire.Footnote 12

In the face of strong resistance to their claims in the Adriatic, Italian delegates did not push their African interests at the Paris Peace Conference, even though Germany was forced to renounce all its rights to its colonies and France and the United Kingdom were the greatest beneficiaries. In accordance with President Wilson's envisioned anti-annexationist peace, the former colonies were transformed into mandates of the League of Nations and placed under the administration of the Allied powers; however, these territories were not to be annexed nor be seen as spoils of war.Footnote 13 Their transfer of power from Germany to the League of Nations was not justified on the grounds of Germany's defeat but rather on the basis that the Germans had proven unfit to colonise due to their brutality as a colonial power. Materials gathered by the British authorities in South West Africa were essential to build the case against German colonialism during the peace negotiations.Footnote 14 Contesting the idea of German unfitness – which the last governor of German East Africa, Heinrich Schnee, later dubbed the ‘colonial guilt lie’ (Koloniale Schuldlüge) – was at the heart of the emergent colonial revisionist movement.Footnote 15 Despite not being a movement with a widespread popular base, advocates for the return of the overseas colonies could be found across most political parties represented in parliament in the Weimar Republic and many joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s.Footnote 16 Even though the reclamation of former Prussian and Habsburg territories in Europe was prioritised, colonial claims were not forgotten after 1933. After his rise to power Hitler was reported to have announced that ‘as for our colonies overseas, we have certainly not renounced our colonial aspirations: there is a large quantity of products which Germany must get from the tropics, and we need colonies just as badly as any other Power’.Footnote 17 After the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 public pronouncements on colonial restitution were reiterated and German colonialist organisations were absorbed into the renewed Nazi Party's Reich Colonial League (Reichskolonialbund).Footnote 18 As its leader, Franz Ritter von Epp, summed up when asked for an authoritative statement of the German point of view regarding the ‘colonial problem’, ‘the demand for the return of former colonial territories is a matter of right’ and ‘Germany's juridical and moral demands for colonial justice’ ought to be satisfied.Footnote 19

The legal and moral grounds for the restitution of former colonies invoked by German colonial revisionists were not met with hostility in Portugal. The mocking tone in Diário de Notícias's criticism of ‘colonial entitlement’ was directed at a different target: Poland. In September 1936 the Polish minister of Foreign Affairs, Colonel Józef Beck, pleaded to the assembly of the League of Nations for an international solution for his country's lack of access to raw materials and its overpopulation. The Polish representatives also requested membership to the League's Permanent Mandates Commission, which supervised the mandatory powers’ administration in the mandated territories. Even though Colonel Beck would later argue that the intention was not to involve Poland in ‘the dangerous game of colonial ambitions’,Footnote 20 the lobby for Poland's colonial expansion was very active during the interwar period.Footnote 21 Like Italy and Germany, Poland adopted the language of scarcity of raw materials and population pressures when attempting to justify the need for territorial expansion. Unlike the future Axis powers, Poland looked for a solution within the League of Nations. But Polish colonial claims were looked upon with apprehension in Portugal. It was feared that, by disguising its colonial claims as ‘claims for territories rich in raw materials in which to place their surplus agricultural population’, Poland was ‘dangerously magnifying the issue’: the appropriation of the language of internationalism made these claims acceptable and could revive the discussion of the problem of colonial raw materials in the ‘Great Hall of Geneva’.Footnote 22

The Problem of Raw Materials

By the time Italian troops were amassing at the Ethiopian border, British Foreign Minister Samuel Hoare began to suggest that the assembly of the League of Nations launch an enquiry into the problem of colonial raw materials. His government, he said, was convinced that the problem of colonial demands was ‘economic rather than political and territorial’, being motivated by the fear of exclusion or monopoly in the access to essential colonial raw materials. Therefore, it was necessary to ensure the fair distribution of such resources in order to prevent war.Footnote 23 A resolution to create a committee to study ‘the question of equal commercial access for all nations to certain raw materials’ was adopted in 1936.Footnote 24 As has been noted, the stress on ‘commercial access’ excluded any consideration of territorial claims.Footnote 25 Yet, for the Portuguese government the League of Nations was already going too far.

During his intervention at the annual meeting of the League's assembly in 1936 the Portuguese minister of Foreign Affairs, Armindo Monteiro, insisted that believing European economic pressures could be solved through international agreements to facilitate the access of colonial raw materials was an illusion. Emphasising that Portugal had five centuries of colonial experience, Monteiro claimed that he could attest to the fact that Africa was not the land of opportunities that many imagined and the League was looking for solutions in the wrong place.Footnote 26 For the Committee on Raw Materials, the Portuguese government appointed Tomás Fernandes, an economic expert within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a former Reparation Commission delegate. The Portuguese strategy became clear during the first meeting in March 1937, as Fernandes tried to convince the committee that the investigation should not be limited to raw materials of colonial origin but instead also include coal, petroleum, iron, copper and other raw materials essential to modern economies that Portugal was compelled to import, even though it was a colonial power.Footnote 27

To understand the Portuguese concern with the League of Nations’ enquiry into raw materials, it is necessary to place it within the wider debates on the extension of the mandate system and the creation of alternative forms of international colonial administration. In June 1932 the secretary-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Luís Teixeira de Sampaio, had already warned of the perils of ‘the aspirations of other colonial powers and the propaganda of the idea of internationalisation, which [appears] more or less disguised under the name of cooperation for the African territories’.Footnote 28 As early as September 1930 Teixeira de Sampaio had expressed similar concerns regarding the French minister of Foreign Affairs's proposal for the creation of a European Federal Union discussed at the League of Nations. Although Teixeira de Sampaio was not convinced that Aristide Briand's plan would succeed, he was wary of pan-European movements and the possible impact of ‘the so-called Europeanisation’ of colonial affairs.Footnote 29 It is important to note that Count Coudenhove-Kalergi's International Pan-European Union, which was founded in 1924, had grown in popularity among European elites. Its programme demanded the ‘systematic exploration of the European economic colony of West Africa (French Africa, Libya, the Belgian Congo, Angola) as a European resource’.Footnote 30 With the intensification of colonial demands in the mid-1930s, anxiety about the International Pan-European Union increased. Elaborating on the minutes of the Fourth Paneuropean Congress's committee on colonial affairs, the Portuguese minister in Vienna concluded that ‘this Pan-European Union can only be dangerous as a propaganda vehicle for certain ideas and aspirations’.Footnote 31 But, as an intergovernmental organisation, the League of Nations could take action to put these ideas and aspirations into effect.

In short, the Portuguese government worried not only about the League's enquiry into raw materials in and of itself, but also that it could open a Pandora's box by triggering new investigations and encouraging the discussion on international cooperation in Africa. Their fears turned out to be right. As Susan Pedersen has noted, from 1935 onwards an increasing number of studies called attention to the imbalance of access to colonial raw materials and how this related to the maintenance of peace.Footnote 32 In the United Kingdom, both the National Peace Council's Committee on Economic and Colonial Questions and the British Labour Party's Committee on Imperial Questions favoured the extension of the mandate system and their administration by an international commission, rather than by nations appointed by the League of Nations to administer them on the League's behalf.Footnote 33 This idea was discussed during the Tenth International Studies Conference held by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, in Paris, in the summer of 1937.Footnote 34 Even though the League of Nations’ committee concluded that the problem of access to colonial raw materials was one to be solved by the adoption of the Open Door Trade Policy in its final report in September 1937, among the solutions proposed during the first meeting in March was also the transformation of all colonies into mandated territories and the transfer of their administration to an international authority.Footnote 35 In Portugal, such plans were deemed an internationalist or socialist stratagem: while fearing that they could hurt the interests of the Portuguese right-wing dictatorship more than the governments of other nations, it was generally believed that neither British public opinion nor British conservative statesmen would accept such a solution.Footnote 36

Yet, by January 1938 the Conservative British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was convinced that no satisfactory agreement with Germany was possible without some colonial concessions. Chamberlain came up with a plan to address the question of Germany's scarcity of raw materials and overpopulation that would open ‘an entirely new chapter in the history of African colonial development’.Footnote 37 His proposal was to carve out a large block in Africa to be administered within an expanded system of international control, in which Germany would participate. The block was to be created by drawing two lines across the continent: the northern line would run roughly to the south of the Sahara, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, and the southern line would run roughly to the south of Portuguese Angola, the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika and Portuguese Mozambique. In short, the portion to be offered to Germany would be mainly comprised of Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola, while France and the United Kingdom would keep their colonies and mandated territories.Footnote 38 Chamberlain was not the first to suggest settling European powers’ demands for colonies by transferring part of the Portuguese colonial empire to the so-called ‘have-not’ nations. On the contrary, the idea had been in discussion since colonial demands began attracting public attention and interest.

An Anomaly of Modern History: The Portuguese Empire in Question

On Thursday 23 March 1933 the French newspaper The Paris Echo (L’Écho de Paris) reported that Mussolini had proposed that the Portuguese colonies be divided between Germany and Italy during the Four Power Pact talks with the British Premier, Ramsay MacDonald.Footnote 39 According to this French daily, only as a result of pressure from the British foreign minister had the topic of colonial redistribution been removed from the final text. For the Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary in Brussels, it was undoubtedly an invention of the press. He argued that the media in the countries that had benefited from the distribution of colonial mandates after the First World War were trying to turn public opinion against Italy; by doing so, they intended to discredit any request for the revision of colonial distribution that Italy might issue in the future.Footnote 40 Yet, at the Portuguese embassy in Rome and in the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lisbon the rumours about Italy's interest in the distribution of Portuguese colonies were read with suspicion.Footnote 41

Portuguese diplomats in Italy were convinced that Rome was already building the case for colonial distribution – and was doing so on the back of Portugal. From 1931 onwards unflattering articles about the Portuguese colonies had appeared in Italian colonial propaganda journals, namely in the official The Overseas (L'Oltremare) and the privately-owned The Colonial Action (L'Azione Coloniale). The content of all these articles is strikingly similar.Footnote 42 In a nutshell: the Portuguese had an immense colonial empire that offered essential raw materials and valuable opportunities for European emigration; however, Portugal did not have the necessary capital or people to fulfil its role as a colonising nation and, as a consequence, its neglected colonies remained underdeveloped. Either implicitly or explicitly, the representation of Portuguese colonialism in Italian colonial propaganda journals called attention to the unfairness of the existing colonial partition.

The Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary in Poland was also convinced that the Polish government was encouraging a media campaign against Portuguese colonisation. In the early 1930s both private and governmental propaganda initiatives had promoted Angola's natural resources in Poland and encouraged Polish emigration to the Portuguese colony.Footnote 43 After Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, the intensity of colonial propaganda in Poland pushed the Portuguese diplomatic corps to attend a far greater number of conferences and public events in order to assess the potential threat to Portugal's interests. Minister César de Sousa Mendes feared the increasingly aggressive rhetoric and strategy adopted by the Polish Colonial and Maritime League, even though Portugal was not named in the conferences and other public meetings they organised.Footnote 44 However, claims that Portugal was neither experiencing other European powers’ economic pressures for colonial possessions nor had the human and material resources necessary to colonise them had become common in the press.Footnote 45 César de Sousa Mendes was also concerned with Polish-Jewish immigration to Portugal and the Portuguese colonies. In July 1936 he had been approached by officers of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the establishment of a Jewish territory within Angola's borders.Footnote 46 Plans for the creation of large Jewish settlements in the colony were not unprecedented, having been proposed by both the Universal Israelite Alliance (Alliance Israelite Universelle) in 1886 and the Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO) in 1910s.Footnote 47 After the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) in 1938, the idea was revived and Jewish organisations approached the Portuguese government in Lisbon and at the Portuguese embassy in the United Kingdom. Both the minister of the colonies and the ambassador in London shared fears that the Jewish population could not be assimilated and would become an element of disturbance in Angola, which César de Sousa Mendes had already articulated in 1936.Footnote 48

From Berlin, the Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary did not report the findings of a media campaign against Portuguese colonisation in the press in the same manner as his counterparts in Rome and Warsaw. For Alberto de Veiga Simões it had been clear from the start that Hitler had little interest in colonial expansion to Africa and that German demands for the restitution of the former colonies were a distracting manoeuvre to hide his true aim: ‘the restoration of Germaness (Deutschtum) in Europe’.Footnote 49 Nevertheless, an array of rumours regarding Germany's interest in the Portuguese colonies appeared in the international press, especially from 1935 until the outbreak of the Second World War. For instance, in late 1935 the New York Times's correspondent in London wrote that ‘there is substantial basis for believing that early in the approaching year Germany will officially demand restoration to the galaxy of colonial powers’. He then went on to state that, according to rumour, the Portuguese colonies would be – in whole or in part – transferred to Germany, since Portugal had already agreed with the United Kingdom to renounce its rights over the territories.Footnote 50 As late as 1939 Salazar was still asking the Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington to make sure that President Roosevelt did not believe the rumours suggesting that Portugal would accept ceding any of its colonies.Footnote 51 Among the many examples of such rumoursFootnote 52 was the news that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador at large in London, and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had discussed the transfer of Angola and Mozambique on the occasion of the signature of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935.Footnote 53 In addition, the Union of South Africa's minister of Defence, Oswald Pirow's, autumn 1938 European tour gave rise to yet more rumours. Known for his pro-Germanism and his stance against the return of German South West Africa (now a mandate administered by the Union of South Africa as an integral portion of its territory), Pirow stopped in Lisbon before visiting London and Berlin, which the international press described as a mission to negotiate a transfer of Angola to Germany with the Portuguese Government.Footnote 54

Lord Halifax's trip to Berlin in 1937 also riled up the international press. The British press argued that Hitler would not abandon Germany's demand for the return of its former colonies in West Africa (Togo and Cameroon) but was willing to consider ceding its claims to Tanganyika in exchange for a reasonable compensation comprised of a block containing parts of the Belgian Congo and Angola to be administered as a League of Nations’ mandate. According to The Evening Standard this idea had not been presented to Halifax by Hitler himself but instead by the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht.Footnote 55 Based on Halifax's account presented during a meeting with British and French officials in London, the rumour was true.Footnote 56 The British Foreign Office was already aware that Schacht thought that what Germany really needed was a territory like Angola, if it could in fact be acquired from Portugal.Footnote 57 But Schacht had earned a firm international reputation as an advocate of German colonial needs in public circles, too, claiming that returning colonies was essential for solving Germany's problem of access to crucial supplies of raw materials and fresh markets for its industries. In this regard it is worth noting his article in Foreign Affairs in January 1937, especially its alarming conclusion: ‘the German colonial problem is not a problem of imperialism. It is not a mere problem of prestige. It is simply and solely a problem of economic existence. Precisely for that reason the future of European peace depends upon it.’Footnote 58

It is also worth noting that the same Foreign Affairs issue included an article entitled ‘The Future of Portugal's Colonies’. For its author, Robert Gale Woolbert, ‘one of the anomalies of modern history is the survival of Portugal as an important colonial Power’.Footnote 59 He went on to point out that ‘Portugal lacks the capital, the man power and the energy to develop her colonies’. He concluded that it would be difficult for Portugal to ‘prove that she herself needs or is able to fully utilise the resources of her extensive colonial domain’ should a redistribution of African colonies take place in the future.Footnote 60 In many respects this article, authored by Woolbert, an American Professor of History, and published in the magazine of an influential internationalist institution like the Council on Foreign Relations, resembles the articles found in Italian and Polish magazines or newspapers at the time their authoritarian governments were putting forward their demand for colonies.

This is an important point. The international debate on the fairness of colonial distribution and the necessity of rebalancing the allocation of colonial resources in the modern world and the international examination of Portuguese colonialism were two strands of the same discussion; moreover, the latter was crucial for legitimising the former. In exposing Portugal's limitations these debates did not merely expose the inadequacy of available material resources and people to colonise vast overseas territories, they also exposed the inadequacy of the Portuguese colonial practices, which were not appropriate to the modern world. As the British Daily Express explained to its readers, the Portuguese had learned little about colonisation during its many centuries as a colonial power: in Portuguese Africa, the standard of living was so low that Africans would benefit from being ruled by anyone other than the Portuguese.Footnote 61

The League of Nations, as Mark Mazower has noted, made a major contribution to redefining Europe's relations with the colonial world after the First World War: even though colonial powers rejected their colonies’ self-determination, carrying on with colonial rule along nineteenth-century lines had become unacceptable to the international public.Footnote 62 Despite the colonial powers’ strong opposition, the principle of international scrutiny and accountability introduced by the League – and, in particular, by its Permanent Mandates Commission – had changed the way imperial affairs were discussed in the interwar period. The civilising mission was no longer exclusively a concern of the colonising nations but instead part of an international programme of tutelage that transcended national boundaries and had been brought into public consciousness.Footnote 63 The Permanent Mandates Commission had been created to supervise the mandatory powers’ administration, but it became a space for a broader discussion and comparison of different systems of colonial administration. In short, it became the forum through which the terms of good colonising practices, as well as the methods to adopt them beyond the mandatory system, were defined.Footnote 64 Portugal's colonising practices were not in compliance with the accepted standards of good colonial governance. The Portuguese had earned a bad reputation as colonisers within the League of Nations’ bodies, in particular regarding the labour conditions that were being offered to Africans in the Portuguese colonial territories. The discussions on ‘native’ labour in the Portuguese Empire at the League's Temporary Slavery Commission and during the International Labour Organisation's work sessions for the Forced Labour Convention had been followed and reported on by the international press, reviving and reinforcing the negative image left by the highly publicised Portuguese ‘slave cocoa’ controversy in the first decade of the twentieth century, as the ‘blood rubber’ scandal had done to the Congo Free State under Leopold II.Footnote 65

The League of Nations implemented the principle of international scrutiny and accountability of imperial affairs and fomented their discussion with international public opinion. By doing so the League ended up providing the means to make colonial appeasement plans look acceptable to many. First, it offered a new political language of colonial internationalism in which national interests could be reframed as supra-national ones and the transfer of territory from a colonial power to another could be retooled as a shared trust of civilisation. Moreover, the international scrutiny of good versus bad colonial governance provided additional legitimacy to plans of redistributing colonial territories, underpinning a narrative of the rescue of the colonies and their backward peoples from the hands of colonial powers that were not perceived as capable of fulfilling their mission.

The Portuguese Nationalist Response

While they were unable to put an end to the rumours about the Portuguese empire circulating in the international media, Portuguese diplomatic representatives urged foreign governments to take measures to deny them and to control the newspapers that spread them.Footnote 66 However, in Portugal a censored and state controlled press – including titles published by the official colonial propaganda agency itself – amplified these same rumours, fuelling a heated conversation about international attacks on the Portuguese Empire's integrity. To understand this paradox it is important to keep in mind that, while the international consequences of a future redistribution of colonial territories to satisfy Germany's colonial demands were a matter of concern, at home the discussion of colonial appeasement plans represented an unrivalled opportunity for bolstering the regime's authoritarian nationalism. It is possible to identify three main ways in which colonial appeasement was exploited for domestic purposes in Portugal: to promote national unity in face of a foreign threat, to praise the Portuguese dictatorship and to highlight the divide between Portugal and the other European colonial powers.

First, the uproar in the national press caused by references to the existence of international proposals for the ‘robbery’ or ‘despoil’ of the Portuguese empire aimed to generate internal cohesion against a perceived external enemy. Even though it was stressed that the foreign rumours were completely unfounded and the United Kingdom would not disrespect its alliance with Portugal, they were often placed in the wider context of a dangerous internationalisation of colonial affairs that dated back to the Berlin Conference of 1884–5.Footnote 67 The argument was that the scramble for Africa had never ended and that historically Portugal had been the main victim of actual and attempted crooked schemes. In addition to the Berlin Conference, in which Portuguese historical claims based on priority of discovery and travel in the Congo had been dashed, Anglo–German negotiations for the partition of Portuguese colonial possessions in 1898 and 1912 were also remembered in order to reinforce a rhetoric of victimisation.Footnote 68 Although these conventions were secret, the posthumous publication of the German minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince von Bülow's, memoirs in 1898 had confirmed their existence in the early 1930s.Footnote 69 Repeated references to past Anglo–German negotiations seemed to be at odds with the vehement denial of current British colonial appeasement intentions: if the United Kingdom had betrayed its oldest ally in the past, why would it be any different this time? The answer lies in a second function served by colonial appeasement rumours.

Rumours about the Portuguese colonies were also a golden opportunity to express approval and admiration for Salazar's policies. For once they were used to justify the need to control the press, equating free media with fake news and thus legitimising censorship in order to protect public opinion. But, more importantly, they were used to rave about Salazar's success in balancing the national budget through the adoption of strict austerity policies. Salazar had targeted the longstanding Portuguese national debt as soon as he took office as Minister of Finance in 1928, quickly being lauded as ‘the saviour of Portugal’ by admirers both in Portugal and abroad.Footnote 70 This narrative became especially useful with the appearance of rumours about colonial distribution. The Anglo–German agreements in both 1898 and 1912 had as conditions that the two countries would aid Portugal financially and that its colonies would serve as a guarantee for loans that Portugal would most likely fail to pay back.Footnote 71 Already in 1931 Salazar had publicly made references to Bülow's Memoirs, using the Anglo–German negotiations over the Portuguese colonies as a reminder of how the Portuguese financial crisis during the parliamentary regimes that preceded the military coup had been used abroad to legitimise ‘spoliation plans’.Footnote 72

Finally, the third domestic use of the rumours was to emphasise the divide between Portugal and the other colonial powers, revisiting myths of Portuguese exceptionalism. The crucial point of differentiation that was repeated in the national press was that, unlike the other colonial powers, Portugal had not ‘discovered colonies quietly in the offices of [their] chancelleries’.Footnote 73 Instead, Portugal's colonial empire had been heroically discovered and conquered – the result of a five-centuries-long collective effort of the Portuguese people –, and the empires of the other European states could not have been constructed without Portugal's earlier achievements.Footnote 74 While the ‘new’ European colonial nations were driven by a desire for economic gains, the Portuguese empire, it was argued in the national press, was a sacred heritage and colonisation had become an inherent part of the Portuguese national spirit.Footnote 75 As a result, Portugal could not accept compensation for any part of its empire: the colonies and the metropole had become one. In the words of the Portuguese minister of the Colonies in a 1935 interview, ‘our colonies, as our metropolitan provinces, form a whole: they are the Portuguese overseas provinces’.Footnote 76

To be sure, even though claims that Portugal had overseas provinces rather than colonies appeared often in the reactions to the rumours about the redistribution of Portuguese colonies, there was no formal change in their designation until the 1951 constitutional revision. Moreover, it is important to note that the ideas associated with the myth of Portuguese exceptionalism were not born in Salazar's dictatorship, let alone as a response to colonial appeasement rumours.Footnote 77 Pre-existing discourses of national identity understood in terms of empire were appropriated and consolidated during the regime, being at the heart of its nationalist discourse;Footnote 78 by keeping imperial nationalism on the first pages of the mainstream press, the rumours helped popularise it. It was in the context of the proliferation of rumours about the Portuguese colonies that a Portuguese chief of state made an official visit to Portuguese Africa for the first time. President Carmona's tours to Angola and São Tomé and Principe in 1938, as well as to Cape Verde and Mozambique the following year, were converted into major propaganda events to bolster the bonds of empire and affirm Portuguese sovereignty over the colonies. The presidential voyage, as stated in the official announcement in 1938, ‘represents the principle of national unity that has always informed our overseas action’.Footnote 79

Furthermore, the proliferation of news about the redistribution of African colonies triggered debates on the need to intensify Portuguese settlement and investment in order to counter allegations that Portugal did not have the human and financial resources necessary to remain among the colonial powers of the twentieth century.Footnote 80 A noteworthy example of this renewed interest was the organisation of the First Economic Conference of the Portuguese Colonial Empire, a governmental initiative that took place in Lisbon in June 1936.Footnote 81 In the previous year the new law for national economic reconstitution had stressed the importance of colonial development as a key element for the new Portuguese economic policy, alongside national security and metropolitan infrastructural development.Footnote 82 While significant developmentalist policies designed for the colonies only took place after the Second World War, timid colonial development plans were devised for Mozambique and Angola in 1937 and 1938, respectively.Footnote 83

Conclusion

Germany rejected the offer to administer an African colony within an expanded system of international control and hence Chamberlain's 1938 plan never moved beyond the realm of ideas. To fully understand an idea, we must situate it within the circumstances of its production, not overlooking what its author intended to accomplish. The motivation of statesmen and intellectuals that discussed, either in public or in the secrecy of cabinet/intergovernmental meetings, the transfer of a piece of Africa to Germany was very obvious: despite having invoked the Germans’ brutality against Africans to force Germany to forfeit all of its colonial possessions back in 1919, ‘colonial appeasers’ wanted to preserve peace in Europe. Literature on colonial appeasement has also made clear why neither the United Kingdom nor France were willing to return any of the former German colonies and instead looked for an alternative solution, mainly at the expense of Belgium's and Portugal's colonial empires. What approaches that favour an analysis of colonial appeasement from the great powers’ perspective have failed to address is how the idea had become legitimate in an international context that espoused guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

By shifting our gaze away from the great powers, this article has shown that Chamberlain's plan arose out of a context of existing discussion and debate that normalised handling over the Portuguese possessions to another power. Throughout the 1930s there was a pervasive image in which Portugal stood apart from the other colonial powers, not only due to its lack of resources for developing and occupying their vast African possessions but also because of its old-fashioned methods in dealing with colonised peoples and in administrating the colonial territories. In a context of aggravated European rivalries and claims for access to colonial resources, that image made it possible to couch the idea of appeasing Germany at the expense of the Portuguese empire in a language of modernity, progress and ethical superiority. In short, as Salazar rightly feared, the rumours about the Portuguese colonies prepared international public opinion to accept ‘solutions that would have been inadmissible in other circumstances’.Footnote 84

Moreover, by looking at the movement for colonial appeasement from the viewpoint of a ‘marginal’ European power like Portugal and moving beyond the diplomatic records of the great powers, this article has challenged the view that this movement had little impact. Even though plans for redistribution of the African colonies were not implemented in the 1930s, the fear that it would take place and affect the Portuguese empire energised not only debates on colonial administration in Portugal but also an ardent rhetoric that fostered an imperially constituted notion of national identity. In this rhetoric, too, there was a pervasive image in which Portugal stood apart from the other colonial powers: alone, against the modern ‘piracy in tails and white gloves’ of the scramble for Africa, now reloaded with the respectable interwar language of internationalism.Footnote 85

Acknowledgments

This article builds on a chapter of my doctoral thesis funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Grant SFRH/BD/60340/2009) and the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supervised by Professor Sebastian Conrad and Dr Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo. Christoph Kalter's precious suggestions on a preliminary version of this text were crucial to developing my argument. I would also like to thank the Contemporary European History editorial team and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback. A final mention is due to Diana Anselmo and Samuël Coghe, who kindly put their home institutions’ excellent library resources at my disposal while I was writing this article.

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