The existing historiography and social sciences’ literature on European integration southern expansion during the 1980s has tended to naturalise this political and social process. In the three cases, accession to Western liberal internationalism was presented as the natural opposition to the historical autocratic experiences. Despite the ongoing reification within official discourses, the democratic political elites introduced several changes in the ways of portraying national identity, assuring the ontological continuity of the nation across different hegemonic discursive regimes in the international scene. The central goal of this paper is to understand how Portuguese political elites potentiated an adaptation of national identity in order to make sense of the country’s integration into the liberal international order. Following a critical discourse analysis approach, the discursive and symbolic adaptations were organised into different repertoire tendencies. The research focused on political-diplomatic elites’ official discourses and on public discourses surrounding major events, between 1982 (first democratic constitutional revision) and 2004 (when Portuguese prime-minister Durão Barroso left government to become President of the European Commission). Broadly, it is argued that this repertoires sought to adapt the official national autobiography to new mnemonic landscapes emerging on the international scene, such as the naturalisation of neoliberalism, the hegemony of presentism, liberal globalisation, the end of real socialism and the consecration of liberal-capitalist democracy as the end of history. Consequently, the article identifies four main repertoires of adaptation in the official discourse of Portuguese political elites: (i) the re-reading of Portuguese imperial history as the beginning of modernity and globalisation; (ii) the second-life of lusotropicalism, rebranding the colonial experience as peaceful and benign, and claiming the Portuguese natural tendency to bridge-building; (iii) the profound change in the understanding of Portuguese Westernity and (iv) the pathologisation of the Portuguese revolutionary path to liberal democracy.

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memória,império,internacionalismo liberal,revolução,CNCDP,Mário Soares,Cavaco Silva,Expo98,Euro2004,Durão Barroso,identidade nacional,nação,autobiografia do estado,segurança ontológica

• Political Science - Social Sciences
• History and Archeology - Humanities
• Anthropology - Social Sciences