Eduardo Lourenco & the Relationship Between Portugal & Europe

Found an interesting passage online from Berkley University from Tito.C.Cunha about Eduardo Lourenco, the "quintessential Portuguese essayist." Below is a passage regarding Lourenco's views about Portuguese identity. Have a read...
E. Lourenço stresses the existence among the Portuguese of a "European imaginary" created by the Greeks, which frames European cultural identity in all the European space. The other great cornerstone of European identity, Christianity, makes Portugal an integral part of the European historical and cultural community that old Europe is made of.

As for America, meaning the USA, Lourenço hesitates between seeing its imaginary as almost a prolongation of the European imaginary or with an imaginary of its own "that is becoming an universal imaginary," namely through cinema, because "in America there is the whole world."

Europe, and Portugal with it, is like a civilization of disquietude. Not because of the "same" but of the "other" within. Besides, Europe's imaginary birth turns around a mythology of unquietness, remaining nameless about its own identity.

Turning to Portugal, he argues that his native land has always had a very strong cultural identity but suffered from a lack of external recognition. Portugal was a homogeneous country for too long. In language, religion, and ethnicity, nothing changed. Europe, on the other hand, experienced constant change, from continuous civil war to growing diversity and differences, incorporating "the other" into European culture. Portugal had to experience this "other" from afar. Knowledge of the other was indirect, something we heard of. According to Lourenço, this ancient Portuguese hyper-identity is also at the root of a certain European universality, precisely because of that looking in the distance. It is also something of the past. European integration brought otherness to proximity...that multicultural otherness that America knows so well. As he states "in less than 30 years, the view that Europe has of Portugal and Spain and our view of Europe has changed radically."

Lourenço finishes with a cautious note, writing: "It would be good that we, Portuguese and Spaniards, that were for centuries in and out of the space where the idea of universality was played, as if the idea of singularity should be sacrificed, continue to remember what our most brilliant cultural minds lived as a desert crossing. Our "new identity" inside Europe cannot do without this experience. It is a part of our memory and we are a part of it."