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.1 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 São 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 lived—as opposed to visiting—until 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 of Lucretius and Spinoza.2 The first book to appear in English by Roberto Schwarz, Brazil’s foremost literary critic, would come from the same press.3 Invited to an international conference in Brasília 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 I’ve gone there often enough, the chapters of this book marking some of the occasions, each of them a political turning-point, when I’ve 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 Atlantic, and a geopolitical vacuum whose other shores have figured only as the source of slaves in the Brazilian past. Not even Portugal registers much in Brazil’s contemporary imagination or connexion; far less than Spain for its onetime colonies, from where so many leading writers have decamped to Madrid or Barcelona.4 The result is a national culture that remains, among its peers in the ranks of major powers, uniquely self-contained: without the links to its neighbours of a common Confucian past, in China; of the English language to the Anglosphere, in India; of centuries of intellectual and diplomatic interchange with Europe, in Russia; of the intimacy of Cold War bonding with the United States, in Europe. Only the US, behind its ocean moats and conviction of divine preference, approaches Brazil in its degree of introversion; in its case, however, leavened by immigrants from all over the world. Brazil too benefited greatly from these between the wars, who contributed much to its culture after them; but they have since ceased to arrive, sealing its enclosure. In no other nation-state today is there such unself-conscious thought of the country as a civilization entire unto itself—the locution a civilização brasileira by no means just a boastful appanage of the right, but a spontaneous expression of historians and publicists across the political spectrum to the left.5 This has 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 force—sheer military weight: troops, tanks, carriers, aircraft, missiles—which 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.
For in these years, Brazil was also the theatre of a socio-political drama without equivalent in any other major state. Everywhere else—in Europe, the United States, India, Russia, China—the trend of the times was towards a tightening of the grip of the rich over the poor, of capital over labour, and a widening of the gulf between them, in state and society: oligarchy in one form or another, neo-liberal or hybrid. In Brazil alone, there was for a time a movement in the other direction. The dozen years of rule by the Workers’ Party made Brazil, for the first time in its modern history, a country that mattered politically beyond its borders, as an example and potential inspiration to others. Not by accident for the first time too, a power that could play an independent role on the international stage. Neither at home nor abroad was performance ever unblemished. The limitations of what was attempted, and weaknesses of what was accomplished, are part of the account. But that it came to an end in the way that it did speaks for it, as well as against it: evidence that whatever else the PT in office had become, the degree of its departure from the rules of the period was insupportable to the traditional powers of the land. In 1964–68 one government judged too radical was overthrown by a military coup, installing a dictatorship. Half a century later, in 2016–18 another was overthrown by a parliamentary coup, installing a fervent admirer of the dictatorship in the presidency. In his government, there are now more military ministers than there were under the rule of the generals. The situation, and the regime, are not the same. But that the overall curve of history, from the beginning to the end of these fifty years, forms a parabola—one which gives its shape to the narrative, and title to the conclusion, of what follows—is plain.
I could and would never have written on Brazil without the conversation, advice and in many cases friendship, of those with whom I talked about the country over the years. Inexhaustively, but in particular: Maria do Carmo Campello de Souza, Mario Sergio Conti, Edgard Carone, Roberto Fragale, Elio Gaspari, Marcus Giraldes, Eduardo Kugelmas, Lena Lavinas, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Leôncio Martins Rodrigues, Conrado Hübner Mendes, Juliana Neuenschwander, Chico de Oliveira, Leda Paulani, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Marcio Pochmann, Emir Sader, André Singer, Luiz Eduardo Soares, Roberto Schwarz, Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos. None would have agreed with everything, in some cases perhaps anything, I’ve written about Brazil. But I learnt from all of them. None more than from my oldest friend in São Paulo, Roberto Schwarz, a literary critic whose political judgment stands by itself in his generation. Responsibility for errors is mine alone.
The first versions of chapters 1–5 appeared in the London Review of Books respectively on 24 November 1994; 12 December 2002; 31 March 2011; 21 April 2016; and 7 February 2019. Where they contain changes of opinion, as later events threw fresh light on earlier ones, I have left these unaltered, as part of the record; so too, overlaps in the narrative. The date below the title of each chapter refers to the time of its composition.