Life’s Riches - Prof Luciano Amaral

Throughout its history, Portugal has been through various existential crises, that is, crises that threaten its survival as an independent political entity.
There seems to be a pattern that makes these crises come around every 200 years. At the moment, we’re going through a crisis of this kind, related with our membership of the European Union’s Economic and Monetary Union. In previous crises, Portugal was always able to survive, despite many difficulties.
One thing that has made the appearance of these crises easier is the existence of rentier elites which prefer links to the outside world to those with Portugal. Despite everything, the country has managed to resist them.