| I | D | E | E | S |
Follow us 
|
CAT ESP |
Social democratic politics have had a hard time for several decades. At their peak in the late 1980s, parties or coalitions led by social democratic parties governed 12 of the then 15 EU countries. The situation nowadays is very different and, according to the polls, in the coming EU Parliament elections, populist and right-wing parties are going to be the winners. There may therefore be good reason to rethink which type of social democratic policies have been successful or have failed during the roughly 100 years socialist parties have been serious contenders for political power. The question is whether there…
“The Portuguese Revolution placed the country at the centre of the international political stage. For a year and a half, it became an unstable element in the world’s bipolar political organisation. After […] decades of Portuguese democracy, we must recognise that the significance of what happened on 25 April 1974 was not only important domestically.” The April Revolution had a number of significant effects on the international stage. Firstly, the collapse of the dictatorship marked the end of the colonial war and the start of decolonisation, which, together with democratisation, provided the opportunity for closer relations with the European Communities,…
At the end of 2023, Javier Milei won the presidential elections in Argentina, confirming what has been detected elsewhere: the chronic inability of democratic systems to provide solutions to people’s problems benefits anti-establishment candidates. Notably, his extremism managed to captivate a significant proportion of younger voters, who glimpsed hope in his devastating discourse. However, what this youth support reveals transcends the country’s borders: national specificities cannot be ignored, but they interact with international factors and global communication channels that create a common ground that young Argentineans share with the young people of other countries. This is a generation shaped in…
Obituaries of democracy People have been talking about the life and death of democracy for many years and its death has been announced almost as many times as that of God or man. And in recent years, an increasing number of books have been published warning us of its demise: the languishing state of democracies is blamed variously on the voters, on the people who are elected, on new technologies, or on inefficiency or lack of rationality, among other reasons. Democracy is not immutable and some of its versions (the Athenian democracy, the Roman Empire or the Republic of Venice)…
The Portuguese transition to democracy must be analysed bearing in mind the international circumstances in which it took place. By the early 1970s, the Cold War had acquired a different shape. No longer were the two superpowers exclusively dominant in their sphere of influence and we might even say that their strength was diminishing. This allowed for the ascendance of other powers, within the two blocs, that did not directly question the authority of each superpower, but rather contributed to make the plurality within each bloc more visible. In the Western bloc, the United States was particularly weakened by the…
Against Portugal’s international isolation Forty years after the coup d’état of 28 May 1926, which brought the military dictatorship to power in Portugal, the leader of Portuguese Socialist Action (ASP), Mário Soares, drafted a petition addressed to the President of the Republic, in which he stated: “Through the fault of the Government alone, Portugal is becoming less and less a European country. The economic expansion of Western Europe (which has benefited even countries like Yugoslavia or Greece) has barely touched us. Because our economic and political system is repugnant to the dominant conceptions in Western Europe”. For the general secretary…
Europe prides itself on being the cradle of democracy, but history throws up a more nuanced picture. Although the nations of Europe top all democracy indexes at present, the worst atrocities committed in human history were perpetrated by the regime of Adolf Hitler, which came to power through free elections. The defeat of Nazi Germany did not liberate the whole of Europe from autocratic regimes, however. A large part of Southern Europe remained under fascist rule for many years, while most of Eastern Europe was part of the communist Soviet bloc. The democratic renaissance that began five decades ago went…
On 25 April 1975, Portugal witnessed a historic turning point as it conducted its inaugural elections under universal suffrage. The electorate participated in selecting the Constituent Assembly, entrusted solely with the drafting of a new democratic constitution. These elections – often described as founding elections – served as the cornerstone of Portuguese democracy, yielding outcomes that defied expectations, maybe due in part to the strategies employed during the campaign. Mobilising voters and influencing their choices presented unique challenges during this pivotal period. Firstly, most political parties running in the election had only recently emerged, lacking solid grassroots support. Except for…
It is nothing particularly new to assert that we are in the midst of an epochal change. The foundations of the world that emerged from the cataclysm of the Second World War are no longer firm. The institutions that have been the backbone of the international system since 1945 are exposed both to the erosion of time and their rebuttal by old and new powers with regional or global ambitions. However, reforming the international system today is very complicated: there is no single nation with sufficient power and legitimacy to impose a new international order, nor is it feasible to…
Every transition alludes to a change process. Transitions, even without needing to add political, refer to the regime change processes towards representative democracies that many countries, previously ruled under all manner of dictatorships, have undergone from 1974 onwards, when the process started with Portugal and Greece. After the liberal revolutions that took place from the 17th to 19th centuries, and the democratisations and re-democratisations that occurred after the Second World War – whether linked to decolonisation processes or the military defeat of fascism – the 1970s marked the commencement of a third wave of democratisations. The geographical setting of this…
When the military coup by the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) took place on 25 April 1974, thereby beginning Portugal’s transition to democracy, there were surprisingly no reactions from any representatives of the Western countries. However, the world was in the middle of the Cold War, and divided into two blocs, and one of those blocs included the countries of NATO, of which Portugal was a member. The final years of the dictatorship in Portugal, during which Marcelo Caetano served as the country’s prime minister between 27 September 1968 and 25 April 1974, roughly coincided with Richard Nixon’s presidency in the…
“The concept of crisis has become the fundamental mode of interpreting historical time” Reinhart Koselleck The Carnation Revolution of 1974 marked the beginning of a period of political transition in southern Europe that led to the almost simultaneous disappearance of the last autocratic regimes in Portugal, Greece and Spain. These events were part of what Huntington dubbed the “third wave of democratisation” . The question raised in the present article is whether this wave of democratisation, facilitated by the easing of Cold War tensions or détente, was part of a more profound transformation that repositioned the tectonic plates of the…
The challenge for democracies in the 20th century: the quantity and quality of electoral competition Fifty years ago, the world’s third wave of democratisation started with the Carnation Revolution. The first wave, between 1828 and 1926, brought universal suffrage to some thirty countries in Europe and America. And the second wave, after the Allied victory in the Second World War, expanded democracy to countries where there had been totalitarian regimes or which had been occupied by such regimes. From Japan to Germany, political freedom began to be conjugated in many different languages. But the really big wave was the one…
Many Catalans that voted in the polemic referendum of 1 October 2017 waved a red carnation, the lyrical banner of the Portuguese revolution of 25 April 1974. The Portuguese media echoed this symbolic coincidence, pointing out that, in one polling station, the then president of the Government of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, had raised the revolutionary flower of a far-off April in Portugal. What did those Catalan carnations mean? And what meaning can those red Portuguese carnations hold for Catalonia today, fifty years on from the Carnation Revolution? The wish to be Portugal Portugal is, for many Catalans, an enchanted mirror…
On 25 April 1974, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) occupied strategic locations in the city of Lisbon and staged a coup d’état that, in less than 24 hours, toppled the long-lasting Portuguese dictatorship. The population, which was following the events through the MFA’s radio bulletins, took to the streets to quickly join the military and celebrated with euphoria the success of the Regime End operation and the conquest of freedom. At that time, Portugal was an “anachronistic” country, as the historian António Reis recalls. Condemned by the United Nations, the war in Africa against the liberation movements had been dragging…
Compared with other democracies of southern Europe, the main feature of the democratisation of Portugal during the 1970s was that the rupture with the previous authoritarian regime took place simultaneously with a state crisis. With a transition marked by a radical but unclear attempt to completely eradicate the legacy of authoritarianism, which in turn became an added legacy for the consolidation of democracy, the regime change process triggered a severe crisis of state following the military coup of 1974. The simultaneous occurrence of democratisation and decolonisation processes was the most important aspect of this crisis. The decolonisation issue was the…
Although the mass media often frames quantum computing as a revolution, in essence it is an extension of the enduring human endeavour to speed up information transfer and enhance its density. This journey began with pictographic data carved into cave walls by ancient civilizations, and then evolved to the use of paper, enabling written information to be transported by pigeons or horses. Information also transitioned from pictograms to alphabets, producing a higher density encoding of information. Similarly, the invention of fonts augmented the speed of information creation and replication beyond handwriting. The most substantial shift, however, emerged with the telegraph,…
What is quantum simulation? Quantum computing has undergone dramatic developments in recent years. The new computing paradigm exploits the properties of quantum mechanics to perform calculations that are very complicated, if not impossible, to carry out using computers following the rules of classical physics. However, some formidable challenges will need to be overcome before we have at our disposal quantum computers that work in a similar way to the classical computers we are used to; that is, computers that are universal (can tackle any problem), digital, and can self-correct for errors arising in the calculations to ensure the quality of…
Market forecasts place quantum technologies at the centre of economic growth in the next decade. McKinsey, for instance, predicts that the impact of quantum computing alone will reach $1.3 trillion by 2035, with financial services and the chemical industry expected to reap the greatest benefits. Quantum technologies rely on the principles of quantum mechanics and offer unprecedented levels of performance that could enable breakthroughs in scientific research, industrial applications and national security. However, quantum technologies also pose significant challenges and risks. For example, while still in an experimental stage, research suggests that quantum computers will be able to break 1…
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of…
Communication is an essential element of our society. We all communicate with each other by sending information in the form of signals that can be easily generated and detected. For example, most of the data traffic that sustains the Internet today travels along optical fibres in the form of binary digits (bits) in sequences of zeros and ones known as bit strings. These bit strings are formed of pulses of photons – elementary particles of light – whose properties can be described with classical physics theory. Photons are ideal Where a single photon is contained in a pulse, this becomes…
“That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” That is what the Nobel Physics Laureate Richard Feynman said to Daniel Hills when the latter told him that he wanted to start a company to build a computer with a million processors operating in parallel. Driven by his fascination for working on the “dopiest” ideas proposed to him, Feynman spent a period at MIT with Hillis’ team in the summer of 1983 to build the prototype of the Connection Machine, one of the first supercomputers. Not all companies have the good fortune to have a Physics Laureate designing their algorithms…
One might ask why the second quantum revolution should be important in Africa. Does the continent not have more pressing issues to deal with? Health, sanitation, water, disease control, malnutrition, roads and infrastructure development, electrification, conflict management, to name but a few. The simple answer is that, just as the first quantum revolution brought many developments to the world in terms of technological advances such as in electronics, the second quantum revolution promises, and is already delivering, benefits around the world, of which Africa is a significant part (18%). Certainly, the second quantum revolution is not all about quantum computing,…
Information is a key concept in our society that has a direct impact on our daily lives: from the time we get up until we go to bed, thousands of messages are exchanged via internet or mobile data networks, together with thousands of operations of varying complexity run on a variety of information processing devices, from supercomputers to the mobile phones we carry in our pockets. The changes made by information to how we live, both individually and as a community, have been so profound that our society is often known as the information society. The importance and impact of…
Quantum sensing and metrology is one of the four canonical pillars of quantum technology, alongside quantum computation, quantum simulation, and quantum communication. Sensing is the measurement of the fleeting phenomena that surround us, the extension of our natural senses by technological means. Metrology is usually defined as “the science of measurement”, a name that conceals more than it reveals. As we shall see, metrology is both an ancient practice implicated in the rise and fall of civilizations, and a technology at the cutting edge of current research. In recent decades, sensing and metrology have made increasing use of quantum physics,…
After a first quantum revolution that has had major transformative effects on our civilisation in recent decades, science today is fully immersed in what is known as the second quantum revolution. As pointed out by the coordinators of the monograph Quantum: a revolution that will change the world? Anna Sanpera and Lluís Torner, whom I would like to thank for their efforts, the effects of this second revolution on the technologies of the future are as yet unknown. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when physicists of the stature of Albert Einstein and Max Planck were taking the…
As a composer who has been engaging with quantum physicists for the past four years, I experience a sense of unease when I hear the term quantum art. Like many others prefixed with “quantum”, the term has become increasingly popular in recent times. So ubiquitous has it become that even a frying pan I recently purchased bore a label proclaiming its use of “quantum technology”. Unfortunately, the definition of quantum technology has been stretched beyond its scientific meaning, leading to an array of imprecise and sometimes misleading uses of the term. In the arts, where definitions are continually revised and…
Quantum technologies have the potential to revolutionise various industry segments through its unprecedented capabilities in high-performance supercomputing, unconditionally secure communications, and ultraprecise sensing. At the forefront of this transformation are quantum start-ups, driving innovation and commercialisation in the field. These entrepreneurial ventures are attracting significant investments to fuel research and development efforts, while seeking robust patent protection to safeguard their intellectual property. In this article, we will explore the world of quantum start-ups, delve into the landscape of quantum investments, and analyse the significance of quantum patents in driving growth and competitiveness in this exciting field. The rise of quantum…
The world is always being confronted with new challenges and problems. The anthropocentric vision of the universe, so strongly rooted in our society for centuries, starts to fray at the seams as soon some of its consequences are seen. At the time of writing, we are well aware of some of the challenges: we observe – with horror – the effects of climate change; we are aware of the destruction of biodiversity, gender bias, the need to guarantee clean water for everyone, energy waste, the use of fake news… And we look for solutions within our reach: social, economic, philosophical,…
The cosmos What is the universe like, in its most basic and fundamental aspects? Well, we all know that the way material things behave, on the most microscopic levels, is odd, to say the least. Quantum mechanics tells us that the smallest things that make up the matter we see around us sometimes act like tiny particles with well-defined locations. At other times, though, they act like some kind of wave phenomenon, spread out in space. Moreover, they behave unpredictably, sometimes making “quantum jumps” from one state to the other. But setting matter and how it behaves to one side…