Negotiating Foreign Policy on the Domestic Front: Non-state Actors and Portuguese Colonialism

In the late 1960s, as African governments began to single out Switzerland’s connections with the white minority regimes of Southern Africa, protest also grew on the domestic front. Activist groups that developed out of the ‘1968’ student movement and religious circles started to raise their voices against Portuguese colonialism and what was perceived as the Swiss government’s complicity with a racist regime involved in a violent colonial war. These actors were part of a transnational protest network. In the late 1960s, student movements in Western Europe and the US took up the issue of the unequal relations between the global North and the global South, proclaiming their solidarity with the peoples of the Third World. At the same time, some churches and religious actors, inspired by liberation theology, were increasingly engaged in political issues and started to criticise contemporary paternalistic approaches to development aid. Students, peace activists, intellectuals, radical leftist groups, and religious organisations formed a variety of solidarity movements with the Third World. The armed struggles of liberation movements in the global South motivated and sometimes radicalised these solidarity groups, and served as inspiration for a more general resistance against the capitalist system.1 In this context of growing mobilisation for Third World issues, the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, at the head of a colonial empire, was an ideal target. Influenced by student protests against the wars in Vietnam and Biafra, numerous activist groups were created in Switzerland between 1967 and 1970. Although their aims and activities differed, they were united by their moral protest against injustice in the world. In their search for the causes of the unequal development of the North and the South, most activists focused on the responsibility of their own society. They aimed to inform people in Switzerland about the situation in the Third World and convince them of the need to break with the contemporary policies of industrialised countries that created structures of dependency in the global South.2 The Swiss government’s role in the stabilisation of the Portuguese colonial empire was discussed as part of the broader critical analysis of North–South relations. This included