The images of President Jorge Sampaio in Dili on May 20, 2002 next to a victorious Xanana Gusmão, guerrilla fighter and former political prisoner destined to become East Timor’s first head of state, still move many people today, who remember the suffering remembering the former Portuguese colony during the Indonesian occupation, but what seemed like the miracle of independence – and the Timorese are even the most Catholic people in the world – was born from the sum of armed struggle and diplomatic action in search of a referendum. And in the latter, Portugal played a fundamental role, as was well reflected in the presentation, a few days ago, of the third and final part of Portugal Multilateral, at a ceremony held at the Palácio das Necessidades in Lisbon, where the opening intervention fell to the Minister of Affairs Foreigners, João Gomes Cravinho.
“If multilateralism was ephemeral during the First Republic and faltered during the Estado Novo, democracy made multilateralism a central axis of Portuguese foreign policy. To the old Lisbon-Madrid-London/Washington bilateral triangle it added the NATO-EU triangle multilateralism -CPLP. To this has been added the United Nations in all its different dimensions (presence in the Security Council, peace operations and the great victory of Portuguese diplomacy in democracy, namely the independence of East Timor). of which it is part,” explains Nuno Severiano Teixeira, professor at Universidade Nova and director of the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI), who was one of the coordinators of the work. Former Interior and Defense Minister Severiano Teixeira signs, in addition to the entry on the UN, the text that opens the first part entitled “Multilateral Portugal: essay on multilateralism in Portuguese foreign policy”, in which he emphasizes that since Congress Vienna in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Portugal was present in the various phases of building the multilateral system, but it was only in the period after 1974 that it achieved real results, thanks to an international credibility that helped, for example, in the election of António Guterres as Secretary-General of the United Nations in 2017.
Alice Cunha was also involved in coordinating the work, signing the entry dedicated to the European Union. Commenting on the importance of these three volumes, the professor of International Relations at Nova and researcher at IPRI emphasizes to DN that “the history of Portugal is based on many foreign policy decisions. The three volumes of the Portuguese Multilateral Dictionary explore a of the axes of Portuguese foreign policy – the multilateral axis – demonstrating the diversity of international organizations to which the country belongs and what its participation in each of them has been.In addition to demonstrating the importance of several of these organizations to national interests, reveals the reach of others and presents others less known. It is the work to be consulted to get to know multilateralism in Portugal”.
Several authors have contributed to this dictionary, such as Susana Peralta, who wrote about the World Bank, Guilherme de Oliveira Martins (Council of Europe), Luciano Amaral (IMF), Ana Paula Laborinho (OEI), Vasco Becker-Weinberg (Organization Marítima Internacional ) , Luís Nuno Rodrigues (UNESCO), Carlos Gaspar (NATO), Maria Francisca Saraiva (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) or José Manuel Pureza (TPI). It was up to Maria Inês Queiroz to write the entry dedicated to the International Telecommunication Union, “the first permanent international organization”, which Portugal had in 1865 at its creation, then named International Telegraphic Union.
The work, edited by Almedina, was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and former minister Augusto Santos Silva signed the foreword, the first two volumes of which will be published in 2021. The coordinators already have a new project: Portugal Bilateral.
Source: DN
