Portugal

Image from Wikimedia

Countries often have a vignette that encapsulates their understanding of their own history. For Americans, it's fording your prairie schooner over the Big Blue River. For the British, it's Phileas Fogg, certain in his ability to circumnavigate the globe with nothing more than a pocketful of Pound Sterling, a handlebar moustache and a firm attitude [pdf]. For the Spanish, it's Pizarro going buck wild in South America.

The equivalent symbol of the Portuguese golden age is Vasco Da Gama, pitching up on the shores of Malabar with a trunk full of merchandise and a prepared spiel about exciting business opportunities.

Image from wikipedia

At this time Portugal was really good at seafaring: I mean, super-good. In fact:

Portugal fact: That gold symbol on the flag is an armillary sphere.

I'll admit that I have a fairly shaky grasp of Portuguese history after the time that the rest of Europe cottoned on to the colonialism game. For example, I didn't know that Portugal had a fascist dictatorship, and I certainly didn't know it lasted until the nineteen-god-damned-seventies. To put that another way, when my dad started school, there were Western European countries that were literal, actual, secret-police, paramilitary gangs, Mussolini-but-not-as-historical fascist dictatorships.

The Carnation Revolution seems to be a pretty heartening precedent for the Arab Spring, since Portugal is now very democractic, very free, and overall a pretty good place to live (and yes, I will keep linking to that site until you all visit it).

It also has my favourite-named World leader: José Sócrates.

Image by Jose Sena Goulao

Socrates is very much on the bubble for keeping his job. I'm going back to my ancestral homelands for the bank holiday, so we'll take a look at the people trying to knock him off next week, before the actual election on Sunday.