Perry Anderson - Brazil Apart 1964-2019

By the same author

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19642019

Perry Anderson

First published by Verso 2019

Perry Anderson 2019

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-794-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-796-8 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-795-1 (UK EBK)

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

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For Roberto and Grecia
&
In memory of Carmute

The genesis of this book derives from a larger project, a study of the political life of the major powers of the world, and the emergent inter-state system that they have started to form in the twenty-first century. I began thinking and writing about these in the early nineties; publishing in due course books on Europe and on India. My intention was then to complete the design by bringing together work on the United States, Russia, China and Brazil, of which I had been producing instalments, in a single volume. After finishing the section on Brazil early this year, I was asked by a publisher in So Paulo if it could be translated as a stand-alone book there. On agreeing to this, I came to the conclusion that it made sense to do the same with the original. There were, I decided, both subjective and objective reasons for decanting Brazil from the analytic vessel I previously had in mind.

On the subjective side, my relationship to the country sets it apart in the group of states about which I was writing. Brazil was the first and only foreign country in which I livedas opposed to visitinguntil I was fifty. I was in my twenties, a time when experience is typically more vivid, impressions and connexions go deeper, than in later years. Arriving in Rio in the autumn of 1966, with little knowledge and still less wherewithal to research recent Brazilian history, I returned to London in the spring of 1967, prospects of becoming a Brazilianist lapsing in the student turbulence of 1968. So not a long time to get to know another society. But enough, in this case, to form life-long friendships and fascinations, and a stronger affection for the country, in many ways, than for any other. I was fortunate in the timing of my season in Brazil, for it came in a brief interval between the installation of the military dictatorship in 1964 and its full repressive hardening in 1968, a phase when freedom of speech and print, of screen and stage, had not yet been cancelled, and political opposition could find public expression. In that short-lived interim, the cultural and intellectual energies of the radical ferment which the coup of 1964 intervened to suppress were, if anything, heightened by the electric tensions of resistance to the regime in place. The atmosphere of those months was unforgettable.

When the crack-down of the Fifth Institutional Act of the dictatorship came at the end of 1968, militants taking up arms against it, others driven into exile, memories and contacts remained. Vladimir Herzog, the one Brazilian I knew slightly before going there, who provided me with my only introductions in the country, was tortured and killed by the regime in 1975, his death a watershed in the history of the dictatorship. Among those who escaped, not a few made their way to France. In London, working at New Left Review, the Brazilian intellectual colony in Paris was nearby. One of the earliest books this imprint produced was the work of a founder of the VPR guerrillas, today a scholar Invited to an international conference in Braslia in 1979, I went to the country again soon after exiles were allowed to return, as the dictatorship was preparing its soft landing into a democracy forbidden to investigate its crimes or question its legitimacy. Since then Ive gone there often enough, the chapters of this book marking some of the occasions, each of them a political turning-point, when Ive done so. What all this has meant is that the forms of my writing on Brazil are sufficiently distinct to warrant separate publication. Texture and tone differ.

On the objective side, Brazil is also a case apart in the gallery of leading states across the world. With the fifth-largest land-mass and population, and now the second-highest per capita income of the BRICs, it is unquestionably a major power, looming larger in its continent than any other in the world except the United States in North America. But history and geography have also made it more isolated and self-contained than any other state of comparable magnitude. In South America, language divides it from every other country. In a region of republics long before Europe achieved these as a norm, it alone formed an empire, lasting nearly a century. Until recent times, dense rainforest, desolate scrub and impassable marsh separated its vast interior from every neighbouring state save on its narrow southernmost border. Culturally and psychologically, Brazilian society in large measure turned its back on the Hispanic world surrounding it to the west, looking away to Europe, and latterly up to the United States. But the South Atlantic is a long way from the North not meant provincialism, in any ordinary sense of the word. The country forms too big a universe on its own, in which any number of creative minds can find full absorption with its own problems, without need to look much farther afield, for that. But a national culture that remains so largely sufficient to itself as the natural horizon of thought is, for better or worse, not unlike a nineteenth-century exception in this one.

A further, politically more decisive, determinant separates Brazil from its peers in the Northern hemisphere. It is a major but not a Great Power, since it does not possess the armed forcesheer military weight: troops, tanks, carriers, aircraft, missileswhich continues to define that status, and would qualify it for the rank. Under their own flags, all the other contenders for it have fought wars since 1945: China in Korea, India and Vietnam; Russia in Afghanistan and the Caucasus; Europe in the Balkans and Middle East; India in Bengal, Ceylon and Kashmir; the United States in the Far East, the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa and the Caribbean. Brazil has not. Its army is puny compared with the might of these states. On the other hand, unlike in any of them, it constitutes a central political power within the country. What it lacks in external throw-weight, it makes up for in domestic strike-capacity. Not aggression abroad, but repression at home has been its great vocation. This is the configuration which frames the period explored in the pages to come.