1.

Reflect on the changes in Brazil’s political system during Fernando Henrique

Cardoso’s lifetime. How has the evolution of Brazil’s political system helped the country
become more prosperous and a bigger player in the global economy?
2. Consider the changes in Brazil from the perspective of a company looking at the risk
level associated with investing in the country. What do companies look for when they
make investment decisions? Why is it so important to a country like Brazil to have a
stable and transparent political system? What impact does this have on a country’s ability
to attract foreign direct investment?
3. In your opinion, why did Fernando Cardoso place such a high level of importance on
developing global ties with rest of the world? Why were these ties so important to the
future of Brazil?
4. What can other countries learn from Brazil? What do you think lies ahead for the
country over the next decade?
CASE STUDY
Brazil has now become the world’s sixth largest economy, a giant energy with a
booming manufacturing sector and growing middle class, in short, an economic and
democratic power very much on the rise, and decidedly not the nation Fernando Henrique
Cardoso was born into.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Brazilian President, was born in 1931. At that
time, Brazil had only one paved route linking Rio with one of the province. Brazil was
quite apart from the world. It was quite isolated from the core. They were considered at
the periphery, the poor periphery of the world.
Cardoso, now 81, would become one of the chief architects of Brazil’s rise. As both
as a scholar – he was first a leading thinker on issues of race and development and has
authored or co-written more than 30 books – and then as a political figure serving as the
country’s finance minister and then as president for 2 terms from 1995 to 2002. He
oversaw the elimination of runaway inflation, opened up markets and instituted social
programs that helped lunch the country on its present path.
- FHC: Why should we be to be as stagnant as an underdeveloped country? I think
this is not realistic. It will be possible to promote policies to implement a better
economy and to move up the Brazilian economy and to become much more part of
the global system.
It was this rare combination of scholar and politician that the U.S. Library of
Congress cited recently in awarding Cardoso the pretigious Kluge Prize, which the
Library likens to a Nobel for the Humanities and Social Sciences. And, indeed, Cardoso
says he started out as a young sociologist in the 1960s with ambitious goals.
- FHC: I would like to change the world, or if not the world, at least to improve the
Brazilian situation.
His early research helped explode myths on a subject as thorny in Brazil as in the US:
Race.
- FHC: The idea was officially that Brazil could be qualified as a racial democracy.
Well, it was a myth. We had racial prejudice. We never had, by law, segregation,
but Brazil imported 10 times more slaves than America. So we have an enormous
population of black people. But the idea of democracy, racial democracy, was
simultaneously a myth and an aspiration. Brazil society, they would have a more
democratic kind of relationship between blacks and whites. And step by step, we
are building up a more open society, a more flexible and more – also more
democratic with respect to race relations.
- Jeffrey Brown: The other part of your scholarship that gained you so much
attention was challenging this idea that Brazil would always be a dependent
nation, it would always be on the outside. What did you see that made you want to
challenge that idea?
- FHC: To me, it was clear that there is an enormous difference within the
periphery. And countries like Brazil or Argentina or Mexico, were already
becoming industrialized and they were establishing ties with global markets. I had
no idea of what was really occuring, the globalization process. We have no words.
- JB: So the issue is how does a country like Brazil find its way in this globalizing
market?
- FHC: That’s right. That was the main question. How to keep going democracy,
more freedom, capacity of people to organize and also to respect contracts, to
increase investment, to have good governance.
Brazil’s lack of democracy, in fact, led to the turning point in Cardoso’s life. Military
dictatorships forced him first into exile and then returning to Brazil to lose his academic
position. By the 1970s, he had grown more politically active, eventually becoming what
he likes to term “an accidental President”. Cardoso left the presidency in 2002, prevented
by law from seeking a third term. Victory by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva marked an
important moment for Brazilian democracy, the first time in more than 40 years that one
elected civilian president passed power to another. Lula, though leading a rival and more
leftist party, kept many of Cardoso’s policies and reforms in place, as has his successor,
the current president, Dilma Rousseff. Today, Cardoso sees continuing challenges and
problems for his country, but also much progress.
- FHC: If I look back when I remember I was a child in Rio, on Copacabana Beach,
with all the hills in Rio, but also a very backward country. And now I can see
much more dynamic society in Brazil. Now we have democracy. Now we have
people asking for more. Now we have protests. Now we have the free press. Now
we have the universities. Now we have contacts across the globe. My God, it was
an enormous progress.