In studying language policy, it is not enough to look at central government management, but also at the influence of managers at levels ranging from the family to international organizations. Actual cases reveal that there are also non-linguistic forces such as demography, war, civil strife, and economic breakdowns which have major effects. This paper summarizes a study of the Portuguese empire and its aftermath. The empire enforced the hegemony of Portuguese as the civilizing force that would remedy deficits in conquered peoples. Because settlers were usually males, intermarriage with local women or slaves was common. However, colonial policy and acceptance by the leaders of independence movements as a unifying language, recognizing the benefits of elite closure, meant that postcolonial successor states kept Portuguese as the language of instruction and government, and did not use indigenous languages. Civil strife, warfare, corruption, and economic breakdown after independence prevented the improvement of education in many cases. Thus, while Portuguese provided access to an international language and served as the unifying symbol for Lusophone organizations, it was at the cost of the stigmatization of indigenous languages and left a social gap between the urban elite and the rural citizens limited to local languages.