REGIONAL CONTRASTS
WITHIN A CONTINENTAL-SCALE STATE: BRAZIL Simon Schwartzman
Published as Chapter 6 of S. N. Eisenstadt and Stein
Rokkan, Building States and Nations, Sag Publications, 1973, vol.
II, pp.209-231. This chapter is a revised version of a paper presented in
the Social Sciences Research Council Seminar on Social Indicators of National
Development, Rio de Janeiro, May, 1972, and is part of a broader study of
the Brazilian political system in historical perspective. Earlier published
papers include "Representação e Cooptación Politica
no Brasil," Dados, Vol. 7,1971, and Desarrollo Económico,
Vol. 41, 1971; "Veinte Años de Democracia
Representativa en Brasil," Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencia
Politica, 1971; and "Desenvolvirnento e
Abertura Politica," Dados, Vol. 6, 1970. The emphasis has
always been in the theoretical perspective, rather than in factual data.
Excellent studies have recently come out on Brazilian regional history,
and they provide the indispensable empirical reference for my interpretations.
I am grateful to Antonio Octávio Cintra, Gláucio A. D. Soares, Gustavo Bayer,
and Peter McDonough for suggestions, comments, and criticism, with the usual
"no blame" clause. SIMON SCHWARTZMAN is Director of Research
at the Brazilian School of Public Administration of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation
in Rio de Janeiro. He has been engaged in cross-national research on problems
of social and political change, and he is the author of the forthcoming
book, Regional Cleavages and Political Patrimonialism in Brazil.
Summary
State and Society
Patrimonialism
and the growth of the State
Cleavages
in Patrimonial States
A
fourfold regionalization
Conclusion
Notes
If one wants to go deeper into the study of a given political system, one
should move from the analysis of the overall political system into the study
of regional differences and subsystems; and the larger the population and
geographical area covered by the national system, the more important this
analysis becomes: the closer and deeper we look into something we are trying
to understand, the better. The idea in this chapter however, goes much further
than that. The proposition is that the analysis of regional subsystems,
when properly performed, implies a profound theoretical shift of perspectives
in such a way that the kind of knowledge acquired is not simply "better"
than before, but qualitatively more adequate. The gain is not a simple matter
of added knowledge, but of a new way of understanding.
This notion of a new theoretical approach stemming from an analysis of regional
differentiations, with reference to the role of the state of Sao Paulo in
the Brazilian national system has already been indicated by Warren Dean.(1)
The idea was that it is impossible to consider São Paulo either as a "deviant"
case in the national picture, or as a representative one of a "more
advanced" stage of development in the country. Two facts suffice to
illustrate this point. One is the weakness of the national political parties
in the state of Sao Paulo during the 1945.1964 period, reflecting the relative
marginality of the country's economic center regarding the national party
system.(2) The other is the relative equilibrium
between the processes of urbanization and industrialization, which the state
underwent during this century. This condition differs markedly from urbanization
without industrialization in other metropolitan areas of the country. To
consider São Paulo a deviant case would explain away the historical role
of the most important area of the country in terms of its economy and population;
this action is obviously not acceptable. And there are no reasons to imagine
that the present metropolitan areas of the country such as Rio, Belo Horizonte,
Recife, and others, will eventually replicate the Paulista pattern of intensive
industrialization leading to a process of urban concentration.
Nor is São Paulo the only deviant case. The state of Rio Grande do Sul,
bordering Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, has historically played a political
role in the national system quite out of proportion to its size and economic
weight.(3)Rio Grande do Sul is not a region
of traditional politics based on local bonds and loyalties in a stagnant
economy, held to be by many as the core of traditional Brazilian politics;
it has never been a dominant economic pole, and was never the administrative
center of the country. On the contrary, it is a frontier state, thousands
of miles away from the country's capital, but this geographical marginality
seemed to have placed the state in the very center of national politics
from the beginning of the twentieth century on. The special role of Rio
de Janeiro as the seat of the national government is probably easier to
understand; the same applies to the state of Minas Gerais, which is closer
to evincing what traditional politics is supposed to be, in historical terms.
We have, in short, at least four main regional actors in the political system
which behave in quite different ways and have important but sometimes unexpected
impact on the national system: the economic center (São Paulo), the urban
and administrative center (Rio de Janeiro), the traditional countryside
(Minas Gerais), and the frontier state (Rio Grande do Sul). To describe
the theoretical framework of their interaction is the objective of this
chapter.(4)
STATE AND SOCIETY
Stein Rokkan has presented us with a highly sophisticated and complex framework
for the study of nation building and the development of political and party
cleavages in Western Europe.(5) It would probably be unwise to apply his whole
analytical framework directly to the study of the Brazilian political system;
but it will be essential to bear it in mind as we try to unfold the variables
that characterize Brazil's regional differences and national integration
process in a more inductive and, as it were, "natural" way.
The point of departure is the classic distinction between state and society.
It is well known today that there are substantial differences in the meanings
of the word "state" in the Anglo-Saxon and other intellectual
traditions; these differences reflect real historical differences, and explain
the relative "statelessness" of Anglo-Saxon political theory.
J, P. Nettl has argued in favor of using the "variable degree of stateness"
as a central variable in cross-national studies.(6)
Reinhardt Bendix, in an earlier paper, made a similar suggestion.(7)
The essential idea is that the state is not only a concept referring to
the integration and sovereignty of a given population in a given territory
- in which case the notion of different levels or degrees of stateness would
be meaningless - but is also a specific institution within a country which
not only performs the functions of boundary maintenance and sovereignty,
but can also be smaller or bigger, stronger or weaker, independent or controlled
by other social groups and institutions. In other words, there is here a
shift from a functional to a more structural perspective, that is, the state
is considered an institution endowed with a changing structure of its own.
Both Bendix and Nettl place these different conceptions of the state in
historical and theoretical perspectives. Bendix emphasizes the existence
of two main approaches in political theory since Machiavelli. The first
and older of these approaches is Machiavelli's own: he thought of political
facts and events as functions of the abilities and virtues of the political
leader, the prince. Generally speaking, this tradition leads to a perception
of the state as a unit that organizes the wills and aspirations of the society
as a whole, defining and working towards its goals. The ruler is not responsive
to the ruled, whereas the social structure seems to offer no resistance
to the prince: the only limitations to his will are his own fancy and wit.
This conception, of course, is an extreme that has the absolutist state
as its implicit empirical reference.
The other theoretical tradition stems from Rousseau: the power of the state
is delegated by the population and the state must act in accordance with
an explicit and well-limited social contract. The idea of a social contract
has an ideological and normative meaning, since it appeared in the struggle
against Absolutism; but it also has sociological value in that it is an
empirical statement on how politics is performed when social groups are
strong and the government is weak. The contractualist notion of the state
was equivalent to a Copernican revolution in political thought, leading
to a shift in perspective which in turn quite often led to the very annihilation
of the state as an autonomous variable worthy of the political analyst's
attention. As a matter of fact, in this extreme view, the state is nothing
but the locus through which the dominant groups or classes exercise their
will: it has no political texture of its own.
As seen through the criticism that Marx addresses to his Philosophy of
Law, (8) it is Hegel who opens the way
for the analysis of the relationships between the state and civil society
as separate and often contradictory structures. Hegel distinguishes between
civil society, which is the state of necessity, and the state, which represents
the general will, the unity of political life. More specifically, civil
society is for Hegel the "phenomenon" of the state, while the
state is the "idea" of society. The idea is incorporated in the
sovereign and the constitution, and the mediation between the idea and society
is performed by several intervening institutions, such as public opinion,
the representation of civilian groups in the state, the bureaucracy, and
so on.(9)
One of the main points of Marx's criticism is the stress he places on the
private character of bureaucracy. For Hegel, bureaucracy is the soul of
the state, and the private activities of civil servants perform a universal
function. In Marx's opinion, however, the bureaucrat ends up making this
universal function his private business. For Hegel, bureaucracy has as its
first assumption the autonomy and organization of civil society in private
corporations. The choice of civil servants and public authorities is conceived
as a mixed choice, initiated in the private sector and approved by the sovereign.
The fact is, says Marx, that this kind of penetration by civil society into
the state leads to nothing but the creation of another kind of private corporation,
the bureaucracy:
The corporations are the materialism of the bureaucracy, and
the bureaucracy is the spiritualism of the corporations; but the
corporation is the bureaucracy of civil society, and the bureaucracy
is the corporation of the state.
And later on:
The bureaucracy keeps in its power the being of the State,
the spiritual being of society: it is its private property. The
general spirit of the bureaucracy is its mystery; this mystery
is kept inside the bureaucracy by its hierarchy, and kept from the outside
because the bureaucracy has the characteristics of a private corporation.
To make the spirit of the State known to everybody is thus perceived by
the bureaucracy as a treason to its mystery. The principle of the bureaucratic
science is thus the authority, and the idolatry of authority
its sentiment. Kept within the bureaucracy, this spiritualism
becomes a sordid materialism, the materialism of passive obeisance,
of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed formal activities,
of fixed principles, ideas and traditions. For the bureaucrat taken as
an individual, the goals of the State become his private goal, which is
the hunting for higher positions, the push in the way up.(10)
This notion of a bureaucracy with private interests includes, of course,
the conception of the state as the political arm of a given social class,
but it is more general than that. Nettl discusses this notion in some length,
and shows how
Marx partially lost interest in the problem of the state when he moved intellectually
as well as physically from Europe to England and when, in writing Das
Kapital, he concentrated on the much more "English" analysis
of economic forces and consequent class relations rather than on the problems
of ideological consciousness and revolution in a state-dominated Europe.(11)
Bendix shows how Machiavelli himself recognized the existence of two types
of government, one carried on by "the Prince and his servants"
and the other by "the Prince and by Barons."(12).
While, in the first type, the prince is the only source of power, in the
latter there are rights of political influence that are obtained through
heritage and do not depend on the prince's favor. This second type of political
power characterizes a state of equilibrium between the central power and
what would later be called "civil society"; each has some autonomy
of decisions and initiative, and tries to limit and direct the behavior
of the other. The fact that the barons are just a tiny group of aristocrats
is less important, theoretically. than the notion that their sources of
power do not come from the prince.
Once this duality of power sources is established, it expands and differentiates
in several directions. What is important is the idea that this is not a
simple matter of functional differentiation, in which the state performs
the political functions of vertical authority and domination, while the
barons retain the horizontal functions of solidarity interest aggregation,
and articulation. What happens, in fact, is that aggregation and articulation
of private interests are carried on within the structures of authority,
while Systems of authority develop in the "private" sector of
society and reach towards the control of the state. The actual balance between
these two tendencies varies, and has to be determined empirically. The more
significant theoretical point here is that the characteristics of a given
state's structure cannot be fully deduced from the characteristics of its
civil society (or, in contemporary terms, its class structure), just as
society cannot be fully understood from the formal characteristics of its
governmental organization.
PATRIMONIALISM
AND THE GROWTH OF THE STATE
In the contractual model, the government does not have power of its own;
it acts by delegation and with resources provided by civil society. In fact,
as demonstrated in Marx's criticism of Hegel's Theory of Law, the
organization that performs this delegation develops private resources and
private interests. This development occurs when the state acts by delegation
of the whole society, as well as when it behaves more or less clearly as
"the instrument" of a given class. One of the reasons for this
occurrence is, of course, the sheer growth and differentiation of the government.
From the theoretical role of a simple gendarme and mediator, the stateless
state of the nineteenth century referred to by Nettl develops into a giant
that makes the simple interest group approach to political analysis little
more than an historical relic. E. E. Schattschneider stressed this point
very strongly:
While we were looking the other way, the government of the
United States became a global operation a decade or two ago. The budget
is about two hundred fifty times as large as it was seventy years ago...
In a purely formal sense we can say that the government of the United
States is the same one that was established in 1789-in about the same
way in which Henry Ford's bicycle repair shop is the same as the Ford
Motor Company today.(13)
What is more remarkable about the American system is not so much this development
in itself, as the fact that it did not lead to a more thorough annihilation
of independent power sources. American liberalism, according to one of its
critics, Theodore J. Lowi, means just the opposite, since it leads to the
privatization of the public sector.
Referring to the agricultural sector, for instance, Lowi sees it as an extreme
case of "private expropriation of public authority." "This
is the feudal pattern," he continues; "fusion of all statuses
and functions and governing through rigid but personalized fealties. In
modern dress, that was the corporatist way."(14)
The difference between this neocorporatism of the liberal state and the
corporative state as such is that, in the latter, the state 'behaves explicitly
and legitimately on behalf of a group that has control of the state apparatus
as the basis, rather than as the instrument, of its social, economic, and
political power.
The idea of economic power based on the state, and not the opposite (that
is, political power based on economic resources), is difficult to accept
in stateless political theories, and this difficulty helps to explain the
odyssey of the "Asian mode of production" in Marxian literature.(15)
As it appears in the relatively recently rediscovered Grundrisse,(16) this concept applies to some pre-capitalist
forms of economic organization, which are characterized by the partial or
total nonexistence of private property, or at least by the existence of
a predominant public sector in the economy:
Étant le véritable propriétaire et la véritable condition de
la propriété collective, l'unité peut elle-même sembler distincte et
au-dessus de la multitude des communautés particulières: l'individu est
alors, en fait, sans propriété.(17)
Marx distinguishes two subtypes of these pre-capitalist forms, one which
is generally based on the large-scale organization of rural economies, usually
through nationally integrated systems of water irrigation works, and others
based instead on urban centers, where:
La guerre est donc la grand tache collective, le grand travail
commun, exigés soit pour s'emparer des conditions matérielles d'existence,
soit pour défendre et perpétuer l'occupation.(18)
There is no need to go further into the expanding debate that still revolves
around the concept of "Asiatism." It is enough to keep in mind
that this type of economic and political organization does not fit the evolutionary
model that goes from slavery to serfdom to wage labor and capitalism, a
model in which the interest group politics concept belongs, and a model
that is more or less implicit in the stateless theories of social development.(19)
It is a fact that the Western States that attained high levels of development
during this century have more or less followed that pattern, and there is
a high correlation between a decentralized and feudal-like system in the
past and high economic development in this century. "Hydraulic societies,"
bureaucratic and centralized empires of the past, were way above medieval
Europe, according to almost any standards of development, but they did not
seem to be able to adapt themselves to modern industrial society, while
countries with a feudal past (the only one in Asia that comes close to it
being Japan) were much more able to adopt modern and efficient forms of
economic organization. Thus-contrary to what is sometimes held-feudalism
does not seem to have been a factor of underdevelopment, but on the contrary,
it was its absence, and the dominance of a bureaucratized and overgrown
state, which seemed to have been one of its determinants. Having arrived
late to a world developed through capitalist initiative, these countries
have only their own inflated states to bring them to the world of industrial
development.(20)
CLEAVAGES
IN PATRIMONIAL STATES
The concept of "patrimonialism" acquires its full characterization
in Max Weber, who refers to a type of traditional domination where the government
"is an extension of the ruler's household." It is essential to
recall that this concept is used as an alternative to another major type
of traditional domination, feudalism.(21)
There are a few characteristics of patrimonialism which lead more or less
directly to the political cleavages that are bound to appear in states with
this type of domination.
First, patrimonial states tend to be urban-based and to develop urban civilizations.
These urban centers can be either the capital of an empire, or a city-state
with trade and military interests abroad. These centers tend to have a sizable
floating population, and an aristocracy that has to be fitted somehow into
the governmental bureaucracy. The first political problom of patrimonial
states is keeping the urban masses content, and keeping the government jobs
open to the urban aristocracy.
Second, there is the classic tension between the ruler and its officers:
All patrimonial states of the past have involved a pattern
of decentralization that has been determined by the struggle for power
between the ruler and his retainers and officers.(22)
As the patrimonial realm grows, so grows the need to delegate power and
authority, and at the same time the feasibility of central control is reduced.
Moreover, retainers of patrimonial delegation tend to receive their posts
as political prebends, and to use them as their private property. When the
patrimonial state is based on military conquest and occupation, this pattern
leads to the development of private, or praetorian military bodies, which
have more loyalty to their own captains than to the ruler. When the patrimonial
state is based on agriculture, regional atomisation occurs and semi-autonomous
satraps emerge.
The third type involves a pattern of continuous belligerency between the
patrimonial state and other states at its borders. It is reasonable to suppose,
in fact, that military occupation and direct exploitation are simply extreme
cases of patrimonial military expansion. The history of the old empires,
including the Roman Empire, shows a clear pattern of expansion that includes,
first, military occupation, looting, and enslavement of part of the local
population and afterwards, the establishment of some kind of federation
between conqueror and conquered, very often maintaining the local ruling
class in its positions. The rationale for this arrangement is obvious, since
the maintenance of the local economic and political structure assures a
continuous flow of revenue towards the patrimonial state, through levies
and taxes of all kinds, which cannot be kept flowing in predatory conquests.
The maintenance of this kind of local autonomy means that some power remains
outside the state, and that tensions and conflicts are bound to arise.
A not altogether different situation occurs when some forms of autonomous
activity emerge within the patrimonial dominion, with or without the ruler's
consent and intention. One pattern here is the emergence of some industry
or agriculture for the foreign market, which is heavily taxed by the state.
The state stimulates this activity, but at the same time functions as a
parasite that limits and eventually kills autonomous activity. This situation
is different from the patrimonial state in the hydraulic type of society,
where the government plays an active role in the organization and administration
of the economy. Here, all the initiative comes from the private sphere,
and the role of the state is almost purely fiscal. In absolutist Europe,
this process was evidenced in the emergence of strong trade and industrial
centers, which paralleled the progressive decay of feudal power. Eventually,
it led to the emergence of bourgeois aspirations and values that brought
about the destruction of the patrimonial state. Actually, in his analysis
of Weber's theories on the emergence of legal rationality, Bendix shows
that
in western Europe patrimonial power eventually promoted the
formal rationality of law and administration, and this conflicts with
the tendency of patrimonial rulers to promote substantive justice and
personal favoritism.
This process is explained by Weber, as are other things, as a consequence
of the central government's need to restrain the power pretensions of vassals
and officeholders. This restraint was accomplished through the establishment
of a "centrally-controlled officialdom " and "in the struggle
against the entrenched position of the states, patrimonial rulers were frequently
supported by the rising bourgeoisie."(23)
It is clear from the foregoing discussion that patrimonialism of the Western
European kind, as it existed in the absolutist regimes, was very different
from other versions. The main difference lies in the fact that Western European
patrimonialism was strengthened together with the emergence of the bourgeoisie;
at the end of the process, the system of legal domination, inherited by
the absolutist regimes, was mostly contractual and most suited to modern
capitalism. It would certainly be possible to trace the differences between
state and stateless societies, suggested by Nettl, back to the varying balances
between bourgeois and patrimonial powers in the struggle against the remains
of the feudal, corporatist society. It is remarkable how Weber himself does
not seem to have elaborated on the structural conditions that could explain
the differences in legal rationality and authority between the Anglo-Saxon
and the continental European countries. These differences are minimal, nevertheless,
when compared with the states that changed from an original patrimonial
system to a modern centralized state without the mediation of a bourgeois
revolution. These states are certainly able to modernize and rationalize
their bureaucracies, but their power bases and political systems must necessarily
be quite different from those of the Western democracies. And these make
up, of course, the bulk of today's non-Western countries.
A FOURFOLD REGIONALIZATION
The previous discussion presents a theoretical framework for the interpretation
of the four types of Brazilian regions suggested at the beginning. The gap
between the theoretical discussion and the Brazilian case can now be covered
by showing how Brazilian regions belong to a more general type, a species
related to the historical presence of a patrimonial state.
That Portugal did not fit the classic European type of feudal
organization seems fairly established among historians:
[Portuguese] nobility, according to Antonio de Souza, never plunged its
roots in the countryside, nor had it ever had a civilizing, directive and
protective role for the local population; it was rather a parasite living
off the population and the central power.(24)
Power was concentrated in the House of Avis, and this fact helps to explain
the remarkable entrepreneurial push that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
Portugal showed. The centralized, bureaucratic, and patrimonial structure
of government was transplanted in Brazil, first with the establishment of
the General government in 1 548, and much later with the migration
of the whole Portuguese court to Rio in 1808.(25)
Made independent in 1822 by a member of the Portuguese royalty, the line
of continuity was never completely broken, and this fact is important for
an understanding of the stable institutionalization of the Brazilian government
during the colonial period, and later, in the second half of the nineteenth
century. It is worth noting that prior to the establishment of the General
Government in 1548, a system of feudal-like captaincies was promoted, without
success. These captaincies were to be transmitted from father to son, and
the Portuguese Crown had to buy one of them back when the General Government
was to be created.(26)The system of captaincies did not work out, the
historians say, but two of them enjoyed some success. One was Pernambuco,
where the sugar culture flourished as the colony's main product during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The other was São Vicente, later known
as the Province and State of São Paulo.
This brief overview sketches three of our main region types. One of these
is the government capital, which at first was Salvador, and later Rio de
Janeiro. This is the country's most modern area: it has more direct contact
with European life, and it's culture and consumption are more conspicuous.
This also tended to be an area of marginal population and underemployment.
According to the 1890 Census of Rio de Janeiro, for instance, about 50 percent
of its employees were of "domestic services" or had "undeclared
professions." Race was obviously a related factor since slavery had
been abolished only two years earlier. But the differences are not that
great: 76 percent of the blacks and 53 percent of the mulattoes were in
this group, but also 43 percent of the whites, which represented 62.5 percent
of the whole "employed" population.(27) This mass of marginal population was certainly
a nuisance for the elite that had to reckon with them occasionally when
they became restless.(28) Usually, however, Rio presented a picture of
popular politics and mass participation which had little to do with how
things were really decided. In this sense it did not differ much from the
other administrative capitals of nonindustrial societies. Its economic resources
were derived from trade and governmental employment, and its political life
was characterized by some degree of tension between the urban bureaucrats
and tradesmen on the one hand, and a dependent regional gentry on the other,
with occasional mobilization of the populace. Election turnout never went
above five percent of the total population before 1930; this fact gives
us the overall pattern of political participation.
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro can be broadly described
as a pre-industrial city. This concept was used by Gideon Sjoberg to characterize
the urban structures that developed, according to him, in feudal societies
where industrial development had not yet begun. In a footnote, Sjoberg tries
to reduce the difference between European and non-European pre-industrial
towns:
Henri Pirenne, in Medieval Cities, and others have noted
that European cities grew up in opposition to and were separate from the
greater society. But this thesis has been overstated for Medieval Europe.
Most industrial cities are integral parts of broader social structures.(29)
The main difficulty with the pre-industrial city notion is, of course, the
theory of unilinear development which it implies, and which takes the feudal
system as the sole predecessor of modern societies. This point is made in
a rebuttal to Sjoberg's book by Oliver C. Cox,(30)
who states that even in medieval Europe the cities developed outside the
feudal structure; Cox considers that Sjoberg's pre-industrial city notion
is little more than a residual concept.
Cox's criticism of Sjoberg's argument is convincing, but has little to offer
as an alternative. The best theoretical clue, not surprisingly, is to be
found in Max Weber, with his difference between occidental vs. oriental
city.(31) For him,
the residence of the ruler or of any administrative body being
the focal point for the whole country or region is the most important
feature in the structure and functioning of oriental cities.
In contrast, occidental cities are endowed with "corporate autonomy
and autocephaly."(32) The theoretical
consequences of these differences are manifold, and have to do with differences
in social stratification, the role of the army, the existence of autonomous
economic activities, education, and so on. These differences are not, of
course, a matter of geography, but have to do with the differences between
the patrimonial and the feudal variants of traditional domination. City
politics in Rio de Janeiro was most certainly "local," in the
sense that its bearing on national events was minimal; but the same cannot
be said of the politics of its elite, which was eminently national.
The second region is the so-called "traditional" reverse of the
bureaucratic and urban capital. Brazilian traditional regions have little
in common with what appears as traditionalism in the standard literature
on underdevelopment and modernization. This literature usually takes as
traditional those peasant or otherwise nonindustrial societies that suffer
the impact of modernization and industrialization.(33)
These traditional societies are supposedly in a primitive stage of social
and economic development, and the corresponding sociological literature
deals with the cultural, emotional, and social obstacles to modern values,
life-styles, and patterns of behavior.(34)
In Brazil, as in some other countries, traditional areas are not those that
have not modernized, but, on the contrary, tend to be areas that have had
a period of progress in the past, and then suffered a process of economic
decay. The old sugar culture area of the Northeast and the former mining
areas of Minas Gerais are probably the best example of Brazilian traditionalism:
both have a past of wealth and national economic preeminence. One of the
most obscure, but more interesting questions about Brazilian economic and
political history is what happens with these areas when they lose their
export capabilities and recede into the shadow of history.(35)
In the case of Minas Gerais, the exhaustion of the mining activities by
the second half of the eighteenth century left the province with the largest
population in the country, mostly centered in urban settlements, and with
no major economic activity of high profitability.(36)
The other thing that remained was, most probably, the bureaucratic structure
of the Portuguese administration, and this administration was certainly
the means through which the political vocation of the Minas Gerais elite
was born.
V. O. Key's Southern Politics is probably the best description of
a political system that survives a process of political decay-in this case,
the period after the South's defeat in the Civil War. (The eleven states
studied by Key are also those of the Southern Confederacy.) He shows that
these studies have at least one common trait with the Brazilian states of
the Old Republic, namely the one-party system. Key's analysis of the behavior
of Southern senators suggests a very consistent pattern: they unite whenever
the state's autonomy is at stake, whenever the racial status quo is threatened,
and whenever the national Democratic government needs their support. The
arrangement is fairly clear: the Southern Democrats support the government
in exchange for control in their own states. In spite of these well defined
patterns, Southern politics is usually "issueless," since even
the racial question tends not to be raised. One-party systems, oligarchic
control of the state political machinery, little popular participation,
large rural properties in a decaying economy-all these similarities with
traditional Minas Gerais are not purely coincidental. The main difference,
of course, is that while the Confederate states had been defeated by the
industrialized North, in Brazil the political hegemony of the industrial
center was never the case.(37)
The smallest unit in traditional politics of this kind is the local community
in the countryside, where the local chieftain (in Brazil, the coronel)
exerts his power. A sizeable portion of Brazilian political literature has
been devoted to examine the patterns of political traditionalism at the
grass roots.(38) The most successful theoretical attempts are
those that interpret local and regional political preeminence as a function
of the brokerage roles played by the political leaders among local, state,
and national governments.(39) It is important to note that this interpretation
does not imply that the control of the land, family ties, loyalties, and
personal allegiances did not have a role to play. All of these traditional
elements were certainly present in different degrees, but they worked in
a context of economic decay and predominance of bureaucratic government
at the state and national level.
The third region, represented by São Paulo, shows most important differences.
Since the very beginning of the country's history, the former captaincy
of São Vicente developed independently of central administration. São Vicente
was the first settlement that moved from the coast to the hinterland, in
open contradiction of the general settlement policy of the Portuguese Crown.(40)
The history of the expansion of São Vicente includes Indian hunting expeditions
that penetrated further and further south, resulting in a military clash
with the Spanish Jesuit Missions; expeditions in search of gold and gems,
until the clash over the mining areas with other immigrants from Rio and
the north during the Emboabas War;(41) and
a conspicuous absence of the Province of São Paulo from the first front
of national events until the explosion of the coffee plantation in the nineteenth
century.
This chapter is not the place for a history of the spectacular development
of São Paulo from the late nineteenth century onwards, nor for the area's
political role in the national picture. It is enough to recall that, after
the 1940 census, it was the largest Brazilian state in terms of population,
and it had for a long time been the main source of taxes for the central
government and the center of the country's industrialization. Politically,
São Paulo has been less important than its size and economic weight would
suggest; and, in 1932, it was the last Brazilian state to rise in arms against
the central government (42)
This pattern of relationships between administrative and economic centers
is not a Brazilian peculiarity; it is a more general phenomenon shared by
those countries that experienced some development in the setting up of a
strong patrimonial -like state.
Juan Linz finds in Spain the same paradox that we find in Brazil:
Paradoxically, in the recent history of Spain, the most developed
regions have felt alienated from the nation-state. Having "economic
power" and well-being, they felt, rightly or wrongly, deprived of
"political power."(43)
The differences between Madrid and Barcelona, as expressed in Table 1, are
strikingly similar to those we could find between Rio and São Paulo (see
Table 2).
Italy seems to be another case in point, with differences among the industrial
northern area, the urban and administrative center, and the rural south,
as can be seen in Table 3.
A. F. Organski is aware of the regional discontinuities in Italy, and links
the emergence of Fascism with them:
Some regions modernize faster and further than others because of
advantages in resources, available skills, communications with the outside world,
or other reasons. Some nations modernize politically and remain backward economically.
Other nations are highly urban before they are economically developed or politically
modern... In the degree of symmetry and the degree of continuity in the changes
of these three sets of variables (social, economic and political modernization)
lies a very large portion-certainly a major portion-of the explanation for the
appearance of fascist systems, the duration of their tenure, the variation in
fascist political attitudes and behavior, and the manner and timing of the termination
of the system.(44)
The assumption of unequal, but nevertheless unilinear development is probably
the main weakness of this notion. Indeed, if "no nation develops in
such a fashion that all regions and all aspects of national life keep in
step with all the rest," it remains to be explained why only a few
of these nations fall in the fascist pattern of political organization.
The fact is that the differences are not just a matter of varying regional
and functional rates of growth, but mostly a question of regional structural
differentiation that the imbalances of development reflect.
The fourth region is Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in the country.
Its history starts with the establishment of the Portuguese colony of Sacramento
at the border of the Rio de la Plata; an attack by the Spanish governor
of Buenos Aires followed almost immediately. During most of the eighteenth
century the region was the main point of friction between the Portuguese
and the Spanish empires in America. After Brazil's independence, the military
nature of the province remained because of the conflicts between Brazil
and Argentina concerning the control of what is today Uruguay, as well as
because of the separatist revolutionary movements in Rio Grande, which always
involved dealings with Argentine and Uruguayan rulers and caudillos.(45)
Stein Rokkan has captured an important aspect of European nation building
which to some extent parallels the process that Rio Grande underwent. He
shows essentially two types of city-states developing in Europe:
The Swiss and Dutch confederations were essentially defensive in character:
there was no strong conquest centre... but a network of strategically placed
cities willing to pool their resources in defense of their trading privileges.(46)
To these typical, occidental cities, he opposes another type, developed
"at the edges" of the Old Roman Empire. "Paradoxically,"
he says, "the history of Europe is one of centre formation at the periphery."
More specifically:
These power centers at the southeastern and northeastern corners
of the territories of the Roman Church built up crusading frontier empires
against the rival world region of the South. This helps to explain the
very close symbiosis of Church and State in these empires: the military
might of the State was a decisive instrument in the struggle for the expansion
of Western Christendom... The Iberian empires brought the same fervor
of orthodoxy across the ocean to the New World: the conquest of Latin
America produced an even stronger fusion of religious, political and economic
institutions.(47)
As in a system of Chinese boxes, Rio Grande seemed to have played in Brazil
the same role that Portugal and Spain did in Christian Europe: as a frontier
military outpost, it developed its own orthodoxy, Positivism-a peculiar
combination of military tradition and cattle-raising culture-and a strong
state oligarchy that gathered strength for the fights against the Spanish
and porteño enemy for autonomy regarding the Brazilian Empire. The region
was (and still is) the basis for the most important wing of the Brazilian
army, and furnished a sizeable part of its cadres. It played a very active
role in national politics since the creation of the Partido Republicano
Riograndense in 1822, during the military overthrow of the Empire in
1889, and thereafter. It came to national power in 1930 with Vargas, governor
of Rio Grande in behalf of the state boss, Borges de Medeiros; with Vargas,
the gauchos literally hitched their horses in the national capital.(48)Vargas
came to power again in 1950, Goulart in 1961, Costa e Silva and Medici after
1964: all these gaucho presidents testify to Rio Grande's remarkable vocation
for national power, either through its civilian or its military sons.
This outline is too short to account for other important aspects of Rio
Grande's role in Brazilian history. It would be important to take into account
the state's internal cleavages, and its special economic role as a supplier
of goods to the national market, as well as the importance that early European
migration to the state had on the development of a highly productive agricultural
system.(49) But the fact seems to remain
that Rio Grande's political role at the national level has much more to
do with its military, caudillo, revolutionary, and oligarchic traditions
than with the modern and European-like aspects of its economy and society.
CONCLUSION
Granting that the fourfold regionalization suggested here is relevant to
the study of Brazilian political history, one might still wonder about its
usefulness in the analysis of future outcomes in Brazilian politics.
The Brazilian political picture suffered a drastic change after 1945, with
the granting of political suffrage to the entire adult literate population.
The system of mass politics that emerged after 1945 was superimposed upon
the regional cleavages, creating a rather complex pattern that I analyze
elsewhere.(50) To the cleavage between the patrimonial and
the capitalist areas of national politics, and the cleavages among center,
periphery, and frontier in the patrimonial state, another cleavage, involving
issues of popular participation, was added. Basically, two dominant types
of political participation emerged: one along the Minas-Rio axis, the other
in the industrial areas of the country. The first was what can be called
a "co optation system," which was defined as a system of political
participation in which governmental positions are sought not so much as
resources for implementing sectoral interests, but rather as a means of
social mobility in themselves. The second was closer to the classic concept
of interest-group politics. There are rural and urban, as well as capitalist
and working-class cleavages in each of these systems, making the number
of possible combinations quite high. I believe that the regional context
for the emergence of mass politics in Brazil is an essential clue to the
understanding of this experience of representative democracy. if one intends
to go deeper than what the simple concepts of modernization, mobilization,
massification, or radicalization would allow.
Furthermore, the correct understanding of the 1945-1964 system is indispensable
if predictions about the political future of the country are to be made.
It is clear, for instance, that this discussion shows the naivete of expecting
a new party system to emerge in Brazil in terms of interest group representation.
The present restrictions on political activity in the country cannot be
taken as a simple consequence of the ideological preferences of the government;
rather they should be seen as the development of an historical tradition
of governmental centralization and weak autonomous organizations. This view
means that, if the restrictions on political participation and mobilization
are lifted, any workable political arrangement will have to be based on
newly created forms of political organization, more in accordance with the
realities of the country, and less as a function of the old-fashioned, interest-group
imagery. Once the search for these new forms begins, a correct view of the
history of political cleavages in the country will be indispensable.
NOTES
1. For the Role of São Paulo in the Brazilian political
and economic systems, especially before 1945, see Warren Dean, The Industrialization
of São Paulo, 1880-1945, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1969, and
my discussion in "Representação e Cooptação Politica no Brasil,"
Dados, Vol.7, 1971.
2. see Simon Schwartzman, "Veinte Años de Democracia
Representativa en Brasil," Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencia Politica,
Vol.11, No.1, April 1971.
3. For the role of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazilian regional
politics, see Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism,
1882-1930 Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1971. For a scholarly
account of the social and political fabric of Rio Grande do Sul in the nineteenth
century, see F. H. Cardoso, Capitalismo e Escravidão no Brasil Meridional,
São Paulo, Difusão Europeia do Livro, 1962.
4. It is important to notice that I am leaving Bahia
and Pernambuco out of the picture: these states were national political
and economic centers in the colonial period, but have suffered a marked
process of political "atimie." I am assuming that they fall in
the traditional pattern typified by Minas Gerais, but this assumption is
certainly a simplification that should only be accepted with caution.
5. Stein Rokkan, "Dimensions of State Formation
and Nation Building, A Possible Paradigm", in Charles Tilly (ed.),
The Formation of National States in Western Europe (forthcoming under
the sponsorship of the Committee on Comparative Politics, Social Science
Research Council); and "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter
Alignments: an Introduction" (with S. M. Lipset) in S. Rokkan and S.
M. Lipset, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, New York, Free Press,
1967. Charles Tilly has suggested an extemely interesting framework for
the analysis of Western European nation-building which is within the same
perspective. Cf. "Reflections on the History of European State making"
and "Postscript: Western State making and Theories of political Development",
in Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe.
6. See J. P. Nettl, "The State as a Conceptual Variable",
World Politics, Vol. XX, Nº 4, 1968, pp.559-92:
The relative "statelessness" of American social science coincides
with the relative statelessness of the United States, with the long period
during which the egalitarian and pluralistic society predicted with sensitive
fingertips by Tocqueville was becoming institutionalized over a vast continent.
One has only to read Lipset or Mitchell to see that an American socio-political
self examination simply leaves no room for any valid notion of state..
7. Reinhard Bendix, "Social Stratification and the
Political Community", in R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset (eds.), Class,
Status and Power, New York, Free Press, 1966.
8. G. W. Hegel, Principes de la Philosophie du Droit,
trans. by Andre Kaan, Paris, Gallimard, 1940, especially after p. 255.
9. I am following here the discussion of Jean Hippolite,
Études sur Marx et Hegel, Paris, Marcel Riviere, 1965, which refers
to the classic work of G. Luckacz on the young Hegel.
10. This extract is a free translation of the French
version of the "Critique de la Philosophie d'État de Hegel", in
K. Marx, Oeuvres Philosophiques, Vol. 4, Paris, Molitor, p.103.
11. See Nettl, op. cit., p. 572. The main reference
here is Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundation of Marxism, New York,
1962.
12. N. Machiavelli, The Prince, New York, Modern
Library, 1940, p.15, quoted by R. Bendix, Max Weber-An Intellectual Portrait,
New York, Doubleday, 1960, p. 360.
13. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People,
New York, Holt, 1966, pp. 116-17.
14. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism,
New York, Norton, 1969, p 102.
15. For a lengthy discussion of the concept and its
history and fate in the Marxist literature, cf. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental
Despotism, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1957, ch. 9.
16. This work was first published in Russia in 1939.
It was translated into French by Roger Dangeville, as Fondements de la
critique de l'Économie Politique, Paris, Anthropos, 1967. The reference
is from Vol.1, p.437.
17. Ibid., p. 439.
18. Ibid
19. This model is explicit in Engels' The Origin
of Family, Private Property and the State. See the discussion in Wittfogel,
op. cit., pp.382 ff.
20. Behind this thesis is, among other things, the debate
created by Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1966. Previous relevant works that lead to the same
notion include Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical
Perspective, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1962, and R.
Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry, New York, John Wiley, 1956,
which deals with the role of the state in the class relations of industrial
society. For a broader reference, see Simon Schwartzman, "Desenvolvimento
e Abertura Política," Dados, Vol.6, 1969, 36-41. l.
21. R. Bendix, Max Weber-An Intellectual Portrait,
New York, Doubleday, 1960, p.360.
Ibid.
22. ibid, p. 348.
23. Ibid., pp. 405-06.
24. Sergio Buarque de Holanda, ed, História Geral
da Civilização Brasileira, Vol. I, São Paulo, Difusão Européia do Livro,
1960, p.18 (my translation).
25. The main source for the analysis of Portuguese patrimonialism
in Brazil is Raymundo Faoro, Os Donos do Poder - Formação do Patronato
Politico Brasileiro, Porto Alegre, Editora Globo, 1958. For an overview
of Spanish patrimonialism, see Magali Sarfatti, Spanish Bureaucratic
Patrimonialism in America, Berkeley, Institute of International Studies,
University of California, 1966.
26. See Burns, A History of Brazil, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1970, p.24:
Those inalienable land grants transmitted by inheritance to the oldest son
brought to the New World some of the residues of feudalism long on the wane
in the Iberian peninsula.
27. Data recalculated from Herbert S. Klein, "The
Colored Freedmen in Brazilian Society," Journal of Social History,
Vol.3, No.1, 1969, p. 50. The original source is the Diretoria Geral de
Estatistica, Recenseamento Geral de 1890, Distrito Federal, Rio de
Janeiro, 1895, p. 416-21.
28. Rio has traditionally been the place for popular
mobilization on political issues. One of the most well-known examples is
the abolitionist campaign in the late nineteenth century; another was the
rebellion of the Rio population in 1904 against compulsory smallpox vaccination.
Edgar Carone gives a good example both of public proximity and public impotence
in political issues in a quotation from an eyewitness of the 1889 coup that
established the Republic:
For the time being, the Government is purely military, and
will remain this way . Theirs was the event, only theirs, because the
cooperation of the civilian element was almost non existent. The people
followed all that stupefied, surprised, without knowing what it meant.
Many believed that it was a military parade. It was something worth seeing,
the enthusiasm came later.
This extract is from a letter of Aristides Lobo, a newsman, quoted in Edgar
Carone, A Primeira República, São Paulo Difusão Europeia do Livro,
1969, p.288. (The translation is mine.)
29. Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-industrial City,
New York, Free Press, 1960.
30. Oliver C. Cox, "The Pre-industrial City Reconsidered,"
The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. V, 1964, p. 133-44.
31. Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. by Don
Martindale and G. Neuwith, New York, Free Press, 1958.
32. Vatro Murvaer, "Some Tentative Modifications
of Weber's Typology: Ocidental vs. Oriental City," Social Forces,
Vol.44, March 1966, pp. 381-89.
33. Classic references here are E. Banfield, The
Moral Basis of a Backward Society, New York, Free Press, 1958, and Daniel
Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, New York, Free Press,
1958. Implicit in Banfield's work is the assumption that, as people become
less backward, their frame of reference expands from "amoral-familism"
to "public regardiness." (The presence of public-regardiness in
the North American upper strata was tested, quite unsuccessfully, in J.
Q. Wilson and E. C. Banfield, "Public Regardiness as a Value Premise
in Voting Behavior," American Political Science Review, Vol.
58, No. 4, December 1964, pp.876-87.) Lerner's relevance in the sociology
of development also should not be minimized. According to Bendix, "the
great merit of Lerner's study consists in its candid use of Western modernization
as a model of global applicability" (R. Bendix, "Tradition and
Modernity Reconsidered," in Embattled Reason, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1970, p.250).
34. For instance, see Lucien Pye, Politics, Personality
and Nation Building, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1962.
35. This process of economic decay and the mechanisms
of adjustment are the subject of Antonio Barros de Castro, "A Herança
Regional do Desenvolvimento Brasileiro," Ensaios sobre a Economia
Brasileira, Vol.11, Rio de Janeiro, Forense, 1971. For an analysis of
the economic mechanisms behind the growing inequalities between the Northeast
and the Southwest of Brazil, see Nathaniel H. Leff, "Desenvolvimento
Econômico e Desigualdade Regional: Origens do Caso Brasileiro," Revista
Brasileira de Economia, Vol.26, No.1, January-March 1972.
36. In the 1872 census, 20.54 percent of the Brazilian
population was concentrated in Minas Gerais, as against 13.89 percent in
Bahia and 8.43 percent in São Paulo. São Paulo takes the lead only non the
1940 census, with 17.4 percent of the population compared to 16.4 percent
in Minas.
37. V. O. Key, Southern Politics, New York, Knopf,
1949, especially ch. 16, "Solidarity in the Senate."
38. For a review of this literature, see José Murilo
de Carvalho, "Estudos de Poder Local no Brasil," Revista Brasileira
de Estudos Politicos (Belo Horizonte), No. 25-26, June 1968, pp.231-48.Gláucio
Soares, in a forthcoming book on the 1945-64 period, has shown in a typology
of Brazilian grass-roots politics that the traditional coronel type of local
politics is just one kind of local power, more typical of Minas Gerais than
of São Paulo. Cf. Glaucio A. D. Soares, A Democracia que Passou mimeographed,
Brasilia, 1971.
39. The best theoretical interpretation of local politics
in traditional Brazil is certainly Antonio Octavio Cintra, "A Integração
do Processo Politico no Brasil Algumas hypothesis Inspiradas na Literatura,"
Revista de Administração Pública, (Rio de Janeiro, Fundação Getúlio
Vargas), Vol. 5, No.2, 1971.
40. "But São Paulo's case, where the colonos and
their descendants-white or mestiço-preferred the interior to the coast is,
in any case, an exception. In the rest of Brazil, for a long time, the rule
was to follow the classic settlement patterns of Portuguese colonizing activities
which had been dictated by mercantile convenience and by the African and
Asian experiences." Sergio Buarque de Holanda, História Geral da
Civilização Brasileira, Vol.1, pp. 129-30.
41. For a description of the Emboabas War against the
Paulista explorers in Minas Cerais around 1700, see Holanda, Ibid., pp.297-369.
42. After 1932, Minas Gerais rebelled twice against the central
government, once, through a "Manifesto dos Mineiros", against the Vargas
dictatorship, and later with the government of Magalhães Pinto against João Goulart
in 1964. In both cases, the central government was soon to be overthrown by the
army. The São Paulo Governor, Adhemar de Barros, also threatened to set his state
against Goulart in 1964; but this attempt was less consonant with the national
civil-military movement, and his own political survival was not maintained The
differences in pattern are significant.
43. Juan Linz, "The Eight Spains", in L. Merritt
and S. Rokkan, Comparing Nations, New Haven, Conn., Yale University
Press, 1966, p. 278 ff. See the tables comparing Brazil and Spain. Juan
Linz gives some "soft" data that cannot easily be reproduced for
Brazil. Alfred Stepan, nevertheless, makes an explicit parallel between
Madrid-Barcelona and Rio - São Paulo when referring to the recruitment of
cadets for Brazilian Military School. He shows that, in the 1964-66 period,
São Paulo had 18.3 percent of the Brazilian population, but only 8.26 percent
of the Army cadets, giving a ratio of about 5 to 10. The ratio
for Rio de Janeiro was 90 to 10, and for Rio Grande do Sul, 19 to 10. The
ratio for Rio Grande in an earlier period is much higher. Alfred Stepan,
The Military in Politics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971,
p. 38.
44. A. F. Organski, "Fascism and Modernization",
in S. D. Wolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism, New York, Vintage Books,
1969, pp. 19-41.
45. The best study on Rio Grande do Sul's political
history ion the twentieth century is certainly Joseph L. Love's Rio Grande
do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
1971. The Brazilian bibliography on the early period is quite extensive.
For a detailed account of the conflicts with the Spanish colonies since
the establishment of the Colonia de Sacramento. see Alcides Lima, História
Popular do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, O Globo, 1935.
46. Stein Rokkan. "Dimensions of State Formation
and Nation Building", op. cit.
47. Ibid.
48. For the relationships between the Rio Grande caudillos
and the army, see Sylvio Romero, O Castilhismo no Rio Grande do Sul,
Porto, 1912. J. Love gives a detailed account of the role of Rio Grande
in the "military question". that eventually led to the fall of
the Empire. He also reproduces a photo of the guachos hitching their horses
to the obelisk on Rio's Avenida Rio Branco on November 1, 1930.
49. For the economic role of Rio Grande as a supplier
of the internal market. see the section headed Herança Sul - O precoce desenvolvimento
Voltado para Dentro", in the chapter entitled "A Herança Regional
do Desenvolvimento Brasileiro", in Antonio Barros de Castro, Ensaios
sobre a Economia Brasileira, Vol. II, Rio de Janeiro, Forense, 1971.
50. S. Schwartzman, "Veinte Años de Democracia
Representativa en Brasil", op. cit.