O local e o regional na construção da cidadania: algumas reflexões sobre o liberalismo português

Abstract

The process of implanting liberalism in Portugal represents, in a way, an attempt to consolidate multiple realities, regional and local, in something more homogeneous. From a polyhedral reality, marked, to a greater or lesser degree, by local autonomies and by regional particularisms, the liberal State tries to move towards a political and administrative organization that intends to be rational and monolithic, derived from a political center that defines lines, rights and common duties. Municipalities and regions would integrate into an abstract national whole, like pieces of a puzzle, and individuals, previously organized in multiple ways (in orders, corporations, family networks), would become citizens, in theory equal before the law. But this idea of homogenization is, to a large extent, apparent: the local resistance to the center, evident in the Portuguese example at various times in the first half of the 19th century, and the various proposals for alternative political models, based on the virtuous examples of the local autonomies of the ancient world and medievality, which never really leave the field of political debate, show precisely that the attempt at rational uniformity carried out by the liberals is not as linear as it might at first appear. How are the new spatial and administrative realities related to the experience of res publica by citizens? What is the relevance of the local and regional dimension in this process? And how do these reflections intersect with the question of citizenship itself and how it was conceived in the concrete context of the first half of the Portuguese 19th century?