Portugal is, and always has been, a frontier. A frontier between the Atlantic and Europe, between the past that shapes it and the future that promises it, between what it produces and what it consumes, between what it dreams and what it is allowed to dream. Its peripheral condition, so often masked by triumphant Europeanism, has become a form of consented dependence, or, if you prefer, a kind of modernity supervised by the technocrats who swarm in the offices of the European Union institutions and where, to the satisfaction of some, one or another Portuguese person takes on political positions on a rotating basis and bends to the private interests that dominate in Brussels and Washington.

Accession to the European project was celebrated with pomp and circumstance as entry into a club of civilization and progress, but what was consolidated was a dependent modernization. Strategic decisions on energy, industry, agriculture, fisheries, and transportation were transferred outside national borders, and with them the possibility of deciding one’s own destiny.

Sovereignty, an almost profane word in contemporary political vocabulary, gave way to the management of funds, programs, and indicators that sustain the fiction of development. Portugal stopped producing the essential and started consuming the accessory, stopped planning for the future, and became an executor of European programs, with objectives designed in decision-making centers far removed from the national reality, whether continental or insular.

But the periphery is not just geopolitical. Within the country, there is another map, invisible and persistent, which draws the boundaries of exclusion, whether through the saturated coastline and the desertified interior, the capital that concentrates and centralizes, or the forgotten territories. Brussels decides, Lisbon too, but less and less so, while the rest of the mainland, particularly the interior and the Atlantic archipelagos, wait with outstretched hands for the leftovers.

Centralization, the legacy of a state that has never fully embraced its diversity, continues to reproduce inequalities and produce poor and excluded people. In the Azores, the ultra-peripheral condition has even more harmful effects, aggravated by a hesitant government torn between the satisfaction of personal political projects and the perpetuation of power for power’s sake, but, above all, ineffective and negligent in defending this distant, scattered territory and its long-suffering people, where some citizens continue to believe that remoteness is not a fatality and that social, economic, and territorial development and cohesion are not a mirage.

The peripheral condition, whether of the continent or of the island regions, is not, as already mentioned, a fatality; perhaps it is in this condition of being on the margins and at the margins that the possibility of a new center lies. The periphery, when recognized and accepted, can become a place of creation and awareness. Distance allows us to see what the center cannot see; scarcity gives rise to imagination; exclusion gives rise to the strength to propose other paths. It is from the margins that different futures are sometimes redrawn, so let us recover the sovereignty and autonomy to decide for ourselves, on the mainland, in the Azores, and in Madeira, so that we can free ourselves from the tutelage of governments beholden to the neoliberal consensus (cuts in education and health, sale of efficient public companies, loss of social rights, etc.), and, in its place, a patriotic government capable of breaking with the uniformity of the development model imposed by external agendas in a country as diverse as ours.

The apparent, or real, acceptance of this consensus, whose most visible result is the majority vote for parties aligned with neoliberalism, whatever their acronyms may be, is not the result of free discussion of ideas and public debate, but comes from a solid unity between various sectors of big capital, media corporations, and large companies that dominate the technology and innovation market, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Portugal needs to relearn how to be on the margins without resigning itself to the periphery. It is not a question of claiming the center, but of questioning it. A country that has always lived between worlds, between continents, between languages, between memories, can rediscover there the key to its sovereignty and autonomy. True modernity is not about following the dominant model, but about creating from difference and, above all, finding ways to break free from the neoliberal consensus which, although still well established, is beginning to show signs of exhaustion.

As long as it measures its success by the acceptance of others, whether through compliance with Stability and Growth Plans or other instruments that curtail sovereignty, Portugal will be only what the center allows it to be: a docile, useful, and disposable periphery. But if it understands that from the margins it can build a fairer world, more attentive to its roots and its human scale, then perhaps it will rediscover the meaning lost between treaties and unfulfilled promises. The periphery is not fatality, it is awareness.

Awareness of the place we occupy in the world and the way the world occupies us. It is the exercise of seeing the center with the distance necessary to understand it, without greed or subservience. It is from the margins that one can best perceive the design of power, its silences, its promises, and its deceptions. And perhaps Portugal needs, more than ever, to rediscover that peripheral lucidity that made it turn to the sea. And no, there is no nostalgia for the colonial past here, nor any neocolonial strategy. Quite the contrary, what I am referring to is cooperation and the establishment of multilateral relations with a polycentric world and abandoning a unidirectional relationship with the European Union that divides us.

Today, sailing is no longer about conquering the seas, it is about resisting the current. It is refusing the logic that turns citizens into consumers, communities into markets, and countries into logistics platforms. It is defending the dignity of work, the land that feeds us, the sea that sustains us, the culture that distinguishes and connects us.

Portugal does not need to compete with the center; it needs to rediscover its rhythm, its human compass, its fair scale, neither too small to humiliate itself nor too large to lose itself.

In the Atlantic island regions and in inland areas, in the villages that resist and in the schools that still teach how to think, there are seeds of this awareness. It is not rural nostalgia or reductive, reactionary nationalism; it is the understanding that the future cannot be imported; it must be cultivated. A country that knows how to look at itself, with the serenity of those who know their limits and the courage of those who refuse servility, can transform its margins into a beacon.

Perhaps this is the new centrality of Portugal, perhaps of Madeira and the Azores, that of a people who, even though peripheral, have never lost their sense of purpose. That of a country that does not need to ask permission to exist.

Because true sovereignty is not decreed, it is built, every day, in the way we think, produce, and dream.

And if one day we are once again able to dream with the same audacity with which we once set out, perhaps the periphery will cease to be a negative mark and return to being the place where the world reinvents itself.

Aníbal C. Pires is a poet and writer, columnist for several Azorean newspapers, and political activist. He resides on São Miguel Island, Azores.

Translated by Diniz Borges