Brazil: A Century of Change

Foreword

= vii = Jerry DávIla Foreword Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. This common refrain captures three basic sides of Brazilian identity: a sense of tremendous potential; anxiety about the country’s problems, particularly the problem of deep social inequality; and a sense that Brazil is in process—that change is constant. This book focuses on those challenges, examining patterns of change and continuity in the twentieth century. The contributors to this volume have all been involved in Brazil’s transition to democracy, either in policy making or in policy analysis. They represent an intellectual cross-section of Brazilian governance stretching from the first civilian government since military rule to the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They reflect an emerging consensus in diagnosing and defining potential solutions for Brazilian problems of economic, regional , and racial integration. This consensus is particularly remarkable because it spans the center-right governments of Sarney and Collor, the social democratic Cardoso government, and the leftist Lula government, despite a culture of intense political competition. Because of their leading academic and policy roles, there is no better group of observers than the contributors to this volume to comment on Brazil’s postdictatorship political consensus and on the unfinished challenge of unraveling the country’s inequalities. The authors offer a range of interpretations of Brazil’s potential, of its patterns of social exclusion, and of the means to manage the country’s transformation.These interpretations are revealing both because of the picture they draw of twentieth-century Brazil and because of the types of understanding they show about governance and public policy going into the twentyfirst century. Brazil faces an ongoing transition to democracy. Democratization does not mean simply that the generals have returned to the barracks and that civilian leaders have been elected. It also means that a society has been created in which rights are equally shared and in which all members of the society share an active ForeWorD = viii = responsibility for the functioning of public institutions. Enduring poverty, widespread violence (particularly directed at the poor), and the persistence of informal work arrangements (over half of Brazilian workers are in the informal sector, which includes street vendors and day laborers) are the major challenges in Brazil ’s redemocratization. Two of the ways in which Brazil is different from the United States stand out in this book. First, scholars and intellectuals play a much more prominent role in public policy, moving between university and government posts. Second, even those Brazilians most committed to free markets and to a limited role for the government believe that the state should play a strong (and sometimes a leading) role in mediating desirable social and economic goals. Nearly all the contributors to this volume have held senior positions in government. Four have been cabinet ministers; three have been federal institute or agency directors; one has been a governor and later a presidential candidate; several have been state secretaries; and several have held senior positions at the United Nations or in nongovernmental organizations. All emphasize the role of the state in their interpretations of problems and their analyses of solutions. The theme of this book is that Brazil has experienced significant changes in the twentieth century (involving industrialization, urbanization, the integration of previously isolated regions, and patterns of demographic change dominated by population movements) but also confronts historical continuity in the form of trenchant social inequalities. These inequalities are rooted in an arcane system of rural land tenure and production, in development policies that have privileged increases in production rather than distribution, in the patterns of dependent integration into the world economy, and in state planning that has focused on long-term change rather than on immediate social needs. Given the involvement of many of the contributors in either administering public policy or formulating the intellectual framework for redemocratization since military rule ended in 1985, beyond their scholarly merit, the essays in this volume offer considerable insight into the paradigms of governance and policy making in contemporary Brazil. The authors promote a reading of Brazilian society and of the role of public policy that incorporates a critique of the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s, and they assert a “neodevelopmentalist” vision defending the idea that the state should be active in managing patterns of economic growth with a mind to engineering greater social inclusion.This vision balances the neoliberal perception that the country needs to develop greater productivity and [18.221...