António Sardinha and his Ibero-American connections

Abstract

António Sardinha (1887–1925), the master of Portuguese Integralismo Lusitano, was not a historian. However, he played a decisive role in the construction of a Portuguese historical traditionalist narrative. He was a blunt critic of liberalism and democracy, which he considered socially solvent. He saw the nation as an organic, natural and spiritual whole that precedes and forms the individual. His political discourse was part of a tradition of European counter-revolutionary thought and configures a traditionalist, counter-revolutionary and ethnic nationalism, alternative to the republican political nationalization programme. How could this traditionalist nationalism, opposed to cosmopolitanism, praise a universalist attitude? During his exile in Spain (1919–1921), Sardinha developed a pan-Hispanist theory, which was instrumental in setting up an idea of modernity of tradition that could build a new future of greatness. This theory was favourably received by conservative sectors of the Madrid intelligentsia as well as among South American intellectuals. However, pan-Hispanism was far from being consensual in the Portuguese political panorama.