Estado Novo (Portugal)

The Estado Novo, the New State, was the corporatist Portuguese regime that ruled from 1933 to 1974, a single-party and multi-continental country by its own definition. Born of the 1926 coup against the unstable First Republic, the National Dictatorship settled into Salazar's presidency of the Council from 1932, illness removing him in 1968 for Caetano, who liberalised the economy and pushed European integration; historians count both phases as the Second Republic. Opposed to communism, socialism, syndicalism, liberalism and anti-colonialism alike, the regime preached order, Catholic corporatism and empire on a platform of stability: Portugal was one pluricontinental nation from Lisbon to Angola and Mozambique, civilizing mission and all. Marshall money came in 1948, Portugal founded the OEEC, joined EFTA markets and GATT in 1962, and the colonies stayed Portuguese while the world decolonized, until the Carnation Revolution of left-wing officers in Lisbon on 25 April 1974 closed the forty-one year state.