From Imperial Nationalism in the Portuguese Estado Novo to the Organization Causa Identitária: Right-Wing Groupuscules in Portugal and Their Ideological Lines

This chapter deals with the arrival of Identitarian ethnonationalist ideas in Portugal. It is divided, basically, into two parts. The first is about the small groupuscules in the Portuguese far-right still during Estado Novo (right-wing dictatorship, 1926–1974), and some decades afterwards. In the 1960s, and 1970s, Estado Novo experienced the existence of small organizations of the extreme right that combined Imperial Patriotism with European ethnonationalism. They defended the Empire in Africa and Asia, but at the same time leaned toward a literature turned to a Europe closed in itself: A Europe that supposedly should not colonize any people in the world, although it should not open its borders to non-Europeans as well. The second part of the chapter contains a description of the splitting apart of such tendencies. That is, from the 1980s on, groups started to appear that defended only Imperial Patriotism or only European ethnonationalism. This culminated in the creation of Causa Identitária (Identitarian Cause), in the 2000s. Old extreme right and Imperial Patriotism rivalized with the new extreme right. This web of conflicts constituted the embryo toward the nowadays Portuguese groupuscular right. Actually, the current groupuscular right still shows the pattern which came up in the late 1980s, namely, organizations exclusively ethnonationalist, pan-European versus organizations exclusively imperial patriotic, lusotropicalist.