Walking around Lisbon as I had the chance to do on my way to FE this year, it seems hard to imagine that just 50 years ago this free, open, tolerant, and democratic country was firmly gripped in the iron hand of hard-right nationalist dictatorship, cast in the same mould as Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy.

Under the Estado Novo dictatorship of the mid-20th century, Portugal claimed that its colonial possessions were integral parts of Portugal, and were therefore not subject to the decolonisation taking place in the rest of the world following the Second World War. This theory is known as pluricontinentalism, and it culminated in a conflict known today as the Portuguese Colonial War: 13 years of bloody conflict across all of Portugal colonial possessions in Africa: Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. Despite pressure from the USA and indirect intervention from the Soviet Union (at a time when if both the US and USSR were against you, you were probably doing something wrong), the Portuguese dictatorship poured men and equipment into sub-Saharan Africa to keep their dream of empire alive. That dream ended only with the Carnation Revolution in 1974, instigated by disgruntled officers within the Armed Forces, which toppled the dictatorship and put Portugal on the path to liberal democracy, and by 1975 had granted independence to all its colonial holdings bar Macau (which would be ceded to China in 1999).

This memorial, on the bank of the Tagus River, stands to commemorate those who paid the ultimate price for the desires of older men. Wars far from their homes in hopeless, nightmarish conditions, ostensibly to maintain the integrity of their nation and to defend their way of life, but in reality to prop up a fantasy of empire.

Hey, Мистер Путин, sound familiar?