Portugal is living through a strange, sickly period; submerged in so many problems that it drowns in an embarrassing lack of worldliness. The weeks bounce between political scandals — now in Education and Internal Administration — and the eternal football debate, which reeks and tastes bad, growing ever more rotten and corrupt. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to fill the screen; but hardly anyone truly pays attention anymore, as always happens with what exhausts and becomes too much.
The Government sells a paradise nobody knows the location of; the opposition buys into a narrative of hell, which isn’t real either; the people reveal their poorest, most tense and nervous side. In truth, nobody really knows what’s happening in Macau, in China, or in the world at large; even though everyone senses that’s where growth and relevance are being built.
Especially since, in the United States, there is a cartoonish president; childish, perhaps — certainly dangerous — who fires off trade wars as readily as missiles of iron and fire; or issues obscure orders during a World Cup that expose for all to see the corruption and influence-peddling that today define the elites of the self-proclaimed free and democratic world.
It isn’t easy… in this climate, to speak of the Lusophone world, of the Greater Bay Area… of the world at large and China’s particular relevance. So why insist? Because History also teaches us that it is precisely when a country buries itself in the dark room that it most needs the light that, in this case, flickers in the East. The Portuguese soul carries an expansionist past; and the debate that today finds no room in the media is exactly the one that could tear open new horizons.
Beyond hollow nationalisms and the daily hysteria, there is a debate to be had between the dead-end of Eurocentrism — and its Atlantic dependency — and the older, richer history of navigation through the Global South. What is certain is that Portugal’s solution does not lie in navel-gazing depression; that much is easy to see.
In that moment of light, drawing ever closer precisely because it’s ever more necessary, Portugal will first notice whoever proves most capable of stepping forward. And that is the stage on which Macau must perform. It isn’t about standing on tiptoe; it’s about lifting its head, rehearsing the role of actor on the stage of the great powers; completing the catharsis from colonized village to the grand gateway of China.
Seen from the inside out, Macau today has less soul and less horizon than its mission demands; it must reverse that. Because seen from the outside in, it is obvious to the Lusophone world in general, and to Portugal in particular, that the future runs through the East. So whoever has the skill, or the fortune, to hold the channels History has handed them, has only two options: use them, or use them.
Everything else is nothing but ideological illusion and the froth curtain of passing days. Portugal is distracted, it’s true; but it will truly have to wake up. Because reality leaves it no choice.
