Over the last thirty years, São Miguel has been the island contributing most significantly to the revenues of the Autonomous Region, while simultaneously receiving the largest share of investment. Yet it is also the island that receives the least in proportion to the wealth it generates. Even acknowledging that two to three fifths of the regional budget derive from the Portuguese State and the European Union, this equation still remains.

Considering its demographic weight of 52%, its role as generator of wealth at 65%, and its share of expenditure and investment at 55%, São Miguel constitutes the only true net contributor within the archipelago. Terceira approaches equilibrium, while the remaining islands are beneficiaries, or strongly so. Although São Miguel appears to receive less, its operational structure absorbs the largest portion of the regional budget due to the hospital system, the educational network, the greater concentration of public employees and regional administration, SATA, the highest economic concentration, and the headquarters of regional projects in Ponta Delgada. In other words, everything points toward an island that functions as the support structure of autonomy itself.

But this perception is illusory. São Miguel possesses this economic projection only because it exists within political autonomy. Without autonomy, São Miguel would become an enormous problem for itself. The substantial investment directed toward the island projects and amplifies its demographic magnitude. This is evident, for example, in the EDA, which was created as a regional system despite being founded upon a colossal debt that could scarcely be concealed, and which today constitutes a fundamental asset for the island’s industry and economy. SATA was created as a regional company intended to guarantee the circulation of populations throughout the archipelago, yet it evolved into an exclusive nerve center concentrated in Ponta Delgada. Public administration was conceived to facilitate the lives of citizens, but gradually transformed itself into an administrative mechanism for attracting investment into the island’s economy, while the remaining islands accumulate enormous difficulties of access and content themselves with crumbs distributed through participatory budgets. Even the road system of São Miguel resembles a nativity scene when compared with the road networks of the other islands.

The same illusion emerges in the example of Terceira. The island possesses a rare characteristic within the archipelago: extensive continuous plains of high agro-industrial quality. Yet because of the decline and underutilization of the Lajes military base, if one cannot definitively state that the island lost more than two billion euros over these decades, one can nevertheless affirm that it lost industrial parks and centers, tourism density, real estate valorization, and employment opportunities. When one adds the recent centralization of the inter-island flight system in São Miguel — producing direct annual regional costs estimated at twenty million euros, in addition to environmental consequences — it becomes evident that Terceira contributes substantially to the regional whole without receiving investment equivalent to that enjoyed by São Miguel.

Yet all of this, once again, is illusory.

Autonomy is a model of governance situated above municipalities and below the State so that the archipelago-citizen may achieve better results — not merely economic results, because the economy belongs to society; not the enrichment of population elites, because that constitutes illicit exploitation; but rather the improvement of the quality of life of the populations themselves. Autonomy was never intended as a mechanism through which larger islands could live at the expense of smaller ones. It was conceived as a special instrument for harmonious development, enabling islanders to proceed with their own hands, through their own laws, governments, projects, and policies, toward a solidarity-based happiness among insular peoples.

Autonomy was created with a single purpose: to provide islanders with the means to produce better happiness, better citizenship, and better democratic participation through direct knowledge of their own archipelagic and oceanic condition. This principle emerged organically from Azorean political history. In the great identity landmarks of Portuguese nationhood, the islands sought to preserve the hope of a better world by refusing foreign domination, and history ultimately proved that instinct correct. The birth of administrative modernity in Portugal, inaugurated with the Constitution of 1822, recognized the Azores not as overseas territories but as adjacent islands — regional spaces belonging organically to the nation itself. The district municipal experience that extended from that era until the Carnation Revolution became the very identity workshop of contemporary autonomy.

The islands were governed with a certain degree of autonomy, but always under the authority of dominant commercial elites. It was only with constitutional and democratic autonomy that the islands came to be governed in freedom and universality through democratic governments, particularly until the decade of the 1990s. After that period, however, significant transformations occurred: the Statute abandoned the concept of the three urban centers, one of the defining traits of Azorean political identity and regional balance; the constitutional principle of harmonious development — fundamentally political in nature — was replaced by the concept of balanced development, an essentially economic formulation; and from this shift emerged the various forms of centralization now experienced in daily life across the archipelago.

The autonomy that was once harmonious became artificial and deceptive. São Miguel deserves recognition for helping sustain modern autonomy, yet it does so without the essential mortar of political society: solidarity among populations. Furthermore, it does so without respecting an autonomy that belongs to islands collectively, rather than to narrow insular self-interest. Human history offers a clear lesson: when solidarity disappears, everything begins to collapse. Hence the wisdom of the popular saying — whoever wants everything may ultimately lose everything.

Translated by Diniz Borges