Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil - Essay Example

Frances Hagopian, in his book Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil, wrote about the political change during the military regime of 1964-85 and the transition to democracy. “Military regime in Brazil brought significant force to bear to support the cause of change”. Beginning in Brazil in 1964, militaries staged coups not to transfer power to rival civilian factions – the traditional pattern – but to rule directly. Although the intentions were eventually to return to their countries to civilian rule (albeit with no timetables for doing so), Frances defined Brazil as regime not merely of transition but of transformation. By reorganizing economic and political life, by depoliticizing the state and weakening the capacity of society to make demands of it, they expected to create modified, more “workable” democracies, ones less vulnerable to future recurrences of economic and political chaos (p. 2). During the 1970s and the early 1980s, a consensus among observers of Brazilian politics held that the military regime would be difficult to dislodge because it saw taking power not as something for its own sake but as a mission to restructure society, and that it was supported in this quest by the industrialists and businessmen, the leaders of the new elite. Political scientists pointed to the “new professionalism” of Brazil’s Superior War College; Frances argued that the root of Brazilian authoritarianism was a response to Brazil’s condition of external dependency (p. 7). When the armed forces moved to step back from power in the 1980s, scholar reevaluated their stance, arguing that the military had been less monolithic that earlier imagined. Other credited opponents of the military government with sensing that the “patrimonial state” had been weaker than supposed, and that the liberal-representative traditions had been suppressed but not eradicated (p. 8). The military had preserved the trappings of democracy, and this, in turn, had kept the hopes for a return to civil society alive. In 1984-85, tens of millions Brazilians took to the streets demanding direct presidential elections and a return to democratic practices that Brazil had not seen for twenty years (p. 9). The return of civilian rule brought back into power the old power brokers who, in turn, ran up what Frances Hagopian terms “a staggering debt during a spree of wild clientelism in the late 1980s and early 1990s (p. 13). Yet despite these bumps along the way, by the mid-1990s signs of positive change were evident. The landslide election of social democrat Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the presidency in October 1994 buoyed financial markets and produced a wave of long-term optimism (p. 8). Many progressive who had initially had favoured the candidacy of the Workers’ Party’s Luis Inacio da Silva (Lula) defected to Cardoso’s camp as the voting neared. The new president, a brilliant sociologist and former finance minister who, while manacled and hooded, had heard the cries of friends being tortured in a Sao Paulo prison during the dictatorship, and who had spent four years in exile in Chile, France, and the United States, in the words of Frances Hagopian (p. 9). The composition of state cabinets, according to Frances, was only temporarily and not significantly altered from the precoup period, when most cabinet secretaries rose because of family connections or through political channels. In the state of Minas Gerais, after the regime change, the participation in the state cabinet of “technocrats” – economists, engineers, and other persons technically qualified for their posts by their education or job experience – increased, peaked in the years from 1971 to 1975 at 55 percent, and then declined (p. 23). Politicians per se were once again rewarded for party service and their vote-drawing ability in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when 64 percent of state cabinet appointees were drawn from the ranks of elected officeholders. A sustained and definitive displacement of politicians by technocratic elite did not occur during the military regime, and no new patterns of elite recruitment were established that outlasted military rule (p. 24). Far from having being neutralized politically and dislodged from the state in the postcoup authoritarian system, many prominent figures of traditional Minas politics before the 1964 coup fared quite well in circumstances of military governance. Two-fifths of the precoup political elite served in the executive branch of state government after the regime change, another 15 per cent in state and federal legislatures and in the top echelons of the pregovernment ARENA party, and when the field of potential “political survivors” is narrowed to reflect demographic change (ten members of the elite died before 1974), the political survival rate of the precoup elite rises to two-thirds (p. 40). The political elite, moreover, was and remains largely a traditional elite. Virtually three-fourths of the postcoup state cabinet members, lieutenant governors, and mayors of the state capital can be classified as traditional: they had an “oligarchical heritage” (were descended from one of twenty-seven “governing families” of the state), or older relatives in politics, or had organized an “oligarchical” political party (p. 42). The view of the state and state-society relations embedded in most political analyses of Brazilian authoritarianism and the long regime transition that clings to a national focus, equate the state with the military – and views the state and society as separate entities that under authoritarianism did not intersect – inadequately explains how and why the political project of the military came to be revised. Such a focus reveals that the Brazilian state, a federal state with significant strength in the government, was not a state that if seized merely at the top could be molded to transform social and political organization as readily as its resources could be marshaled to produce growth. Its historic strength interest and attached these to itself in a dependent fashion. The use of torture by military rulers could not substitute for these historical mediations to society. How a military regime organizes consent, or fails to, depends in great part on the configuration of state-society relations it inherits. In Brazil, Frances described, traditional politics cast the project of Brazilian military adrift, threw a life raft to the military regime struggling to stay afloat, and finally brought the military back to shore on its own terms. The Brazilian military could not operate existing channels of mediation, exercise state domination single-handedly, or structure new ones. When forced to revert the best anti-class formula it had available contain social conflict – patronage – it discovered that neither it nor its technocratic handmaidens had any political-organizational structures of their own through which to channel pork to substitute for oligarchical parties; the military could not draw electoral gain from dispensing state patronage; and it had no other basis upon which to organize consent. It needed to champion a political elite. As virtually the only group that could operate state clientelism on a grand scale in Brazil and secure the electoral victories needed to legitimize military rule, the traditional political elite was the military’s best option to prevent the radicalization of the polity and the development of class – and interest-based politics. The military was unable even to sponsor a new political elite more to its liking because in such a clientelistic system in which representation and state outputs were organized and distributed according to the login of clientelism, traditional political elites benefited from the incumbency in an authoritarian regime that restricted political competition. They contested elections during authoritarian rule with the advantage of already established networks in place in an electoral game in which alliances and coalitions were precluded from shifting, and elite turnover was hence dimished. When important segments of the political class cooperated with military dictators to preserve their own positions in the state, as transpired in Brazil, it was possible for this alliance to collaborate during the transition as well. The survival of traditional politics and traditional political elites, abetted by the authoritarian regime that had initially hoped to be their executioner, had profound consequences for the Brazilian transition to democracy. Reference Frances Hagopian. (1996). Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil. Cambridge University Press Read More