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The Brazilian Report on Civil Society
1. Civil Society in Brazil
2. Mapping
3. Case Studies
Ana Cláudia Teixeira Chaves, Carla Almeida Silva and Evelina Dagnino
Civil Society in Brazil
The aim of this paper is to review, in a succinct way, some fundamental processes that underlay the constitution of civil society in Brazil during the past few decades. As these processes deeply marked the relations between civil society and the Brazilian State, their analysis is paramount to understand the contemporary dynamics of civil society , which is discussed in the last part of the paper.
Brazilian recent political history has been shaped by three important turn of events: 1) The Revolution of 1930, which inaugurated a process of conservative modernization in which the State came to play a fundamental role in the installation of industrial capitalism and in the organization of society itself. From 1930 to 1945, under the leadership of Getúlio Vargas, a truly national, authoritarian, centralized and interventionist State constituted the leading force behind national development. The relations between the State and civil society were structured along corporatist lines and the political organization of social sectors put under State tutelage and control, setting the bases for the populist arrangement which predominated from 1946, when the democratic regime was reestablished, to 1964; 2) the period of military authoritarian rule, which followed the 1964 coup d'état and restricted civil liberties and democratic institutions, repressing the political expression of opposing social sectors; 3) the transition to democracy (which roughly comprises the period which begins in the mid-seventies until the late eighties), marked by the gradual strenghtening of civil society and by the emergence of different social movements that, by forming an opposition to the military regime, tried to establish new parameters for the relations between State and civil society and the reestablishment of democracy.
In the 90's, which can be characterized by a plural and active civil society in which, under the impact of the neo-liberal adjustment, the main debate evolves around different visions of democracy and citizenship, and by the attempt by civil society to consolidate the participation channels opened with democratization.
The discussion of these different processes and its implications for the configuration of civil society in Brazil, will be preceded by an introduction examining some fundamental traits of our culture which have underlay such a configuration and which help to understand the difficulties involved in consolidating Brazilian democracy.
INTRODUCTION
When focusing on Brazilian society as an object of analysis, what first meets the eye is the fact that it is deeply marked by great social differences. These differences are expressed by the well-known statistics of the various socio-economic indicators.[i] However, as pointed out by a number of analysts, Brazilian poverty is far from being a state which is related only to economic conditions. It is equally related to a condition of political and social submission (SALES, 1994). As part of the authoritarian, hierarchical social ordering of Brazilian society, to be poor means not only to endure economic and material deprivation but to be submitted to cultural rules that convey a complete lack of recognition of poor people as subjects, bearers of rights. In what Telles (1993) called the incivility embedded in our society, poverty is a sign of inferiority, a way of being in which individuals lose their ability to exercise their rights. This cultural deprivation imposed by the absolute absence of rights, which ultimately expresses itself as a suppression of human dignity, then becomes constitutive of material deprivation and political exclusion.
"Brazilian society is one in which economic inequality and extreme levels of poverty have been only the most visible aspects of the unequal and hierarchical organization of social relations as a whole, what can be called a social authoritarianism. Class, race and gender differences constitute the main bases for a social classification that historically pervaded Brazilian culture, establishing different categories of people hierarchically disposed in their respective "places" in society "(Dagnino, 1998:47). As a particular mode of social ordering, social authoritarianism relies on an authoritarian culture that precludes the consolidation of a truly democratic society, where all individuals are recognized as subjects bearers of rights in the public sphere.
Any study that proposes to analyse civil society in Brazil, its relationship with the State, its role in the building of the public sphere, of citizenship and of democracy, must to some extent deal with the historical roots that laid the foundation for these inequalities that, going beyond the economic, constitute references for our patterns of sociability and political organization. These roots are related to the specific way in which, throughout a history marked by an oligarchic conception of politics, private interests have taken precedence over public interests. Finally, these roots have built a culture where notions of "command and subservience" (SALES,1994) - which have always constituted obstacles to the exercise of citizenship - mediated the relations both within society and between the latter and State power.
The first Brazilian sociologists, when analyzing the colonial period, already pointed out the
predominance of rural dominion over the city as a fundamental mark in our social formation. HOLANDA (1989) showed how the rural properties appeared to be "complete organisms", as if each property were "a republic". In these rural domains, the authority of the father and master of the lands was tyrannical and indisputable. This model of authority was so powerful that it was transferred to the public domain, permeating all dimensions of Brazilian society and supplying the parameter by means of which were formed the ideas of power, respectability, obedience and cohesion on which our sociability is founded
What is more, it was based on these references that the notion of public authority was constituted in Brazil. It will be this man from the countryside, whose best representative was the landowner (fazendeiro) who left his rural solitude, after the Proclamation of Independence, to govern the country (VIANNA, 1987).
Holanda suggests that the State that is the result of this ruralism represents a continuity of the patriarchal family, and not a departure, a transgression from it. Devoid of this separation between family and State, public and private, the men who held public office did not build differentiated parameters for their actions in the ambits of the public and private spheres.
This lack of separation between the spheres can be better perceived through the analysis of coronelismo that LEAL identifies in the First Republic.[ii] By dint of the domination and the influence that the coronel, as the landowner, held over the rural workers, he secured the necessary votes for a given political force to win the elections. As a counterpart, political power based on these votes guaranteed the continuity and strengthening of the coronel's prestige, to the extent in which he was able to obtain benefits for his region from elected politicians. According to Leal, coronelismo thus represented an incursion of private power into public power. There were no transparent public criteria, upon which public actions are founded . Rather they were based on commitments established by private interests, where what counted were the principles of "the giving of one's word, honor, personal prestige", references from the private and not the public sphere. From this basic lack of distinction between private and public spheres emerge the well-known characteristics that make up the political game in Brazil, ruled by favoritism, clientelism and paternalism.
According to Sales: "We shall find this coronelista commitment, dressed up in new forms and with new actors, in the most diverse contexts of the relations of power that persisted beyond the First Republic and even beyond territorial dominion [...]" (SALES,1994: 33). Based on the pervasiveness of the patterns of coronelismo, Sales develops the idea that in Brazil, a culture of donation (cultura da dádiva) was built, where the most elemental rights that constitute civil citizenship did not reach the Brazilian people as rights, but as a favors from the powerful. In other words, these rights were mediated by the relations of command and subservience, established between the people and those who held the power to make these donations. The author goes on to say that: "This culture of donation outlived the private dominion of the colonial estates and sugar plantations, it outlived the abolition of slavery, it expressed itself in a particular way in the coronelista commitment and survived up to the present day." (SALES, 1994: 26). In this way, the origins of our citizenship were defined through a notion of citizenship as concession (cidadania concedida), where rights are perceived as a donation, a notion which still remains current for large sectors of society . It is for this reason that the author states: "[...] it could be said that in our country either you give orders or you plead. In the very meaning of these two verbs lies the most profound significance of our culture of command and subservience" (SALES, 1994: 27).
The absence of a notion of rights as public parameters of social interaction underlies the exclusion and inequality that have been constitutive of Brazilian society throughout its history. This is the main reason behind the fact that the redefinition of citizenship is such a recurrent reference in the current struggle for the deepening and extension of democracy. Although there is a symbolic dispute around the term, which is expressed in the various meanings it has assumed, for a significant number of social sectors the redefinition of the notion of citizenship --built upon the "right to have rights"-- points in the direction of a more egalitarian society at all its levels, based on the recognition of its members as subjects bearers of rights, including that of participating effectively in relevant decision-making processes.
In this sense, such a redefinition indicates that citizenship is no longer confined within the limits of the relationship with the State or between the State and the individual. Rather, a citizenship based on the "right to have rights" is also being perceived as a principle able to reorganize social relations within civil society itself, founding new, more egalitarian, forms of sociability. The recognition of individuals as citizens bearers of rights at all levels of social relations entails not only economic and political transformations but an intellectual and moral reform, to use a Gramscian term. Thus, significant sectors of civil society emphasize today the need for radical cultural changes as a constitutive element in the building of democracy in Brazil.
An additional related reference in the struggles to redefine and consolidate democracy taking place in Brazil today refers to the constitution of public spaces. In our recent history, as it will be seen in the discussion that follows, the historically rooted lack of distinction between private and public spheres was coupled with a lack of distinction between the public sphere and the State domain, as the latter managed to put the process of political organization of civil society under its control and tutelage. Thus, the struggle for democracy implies, for a significant part of civil society, the creation of spaces of debate, negotiation and deliberation that are not monopolized or controlled by the State but rather represent channels of political expression of the different interests present in civil society. In these terms, democratization would require not only the de-privatization of the State, eliminating the privileged access of private interests to the agenda and the decisions of the State, but also the building of a capacity within civil society to affect such agenda and to participate effectively in such decisions, conferring them a truly public character.
Those historical traits are being reinforced by more recent neo-liberal developments, where an alluring integration to the market is being presented as citizenship and where private interests are increasingly reinforced as parameters for all social practices, obscuring the public, ethical dimension of social life (Telles, 1994, Dagnino, 1998). Thus, the constitution of public spaces, bringing together interlocutors with different interests, may provide democratically regulated spaces for the administration of conflicts and the building of consensus and may become spaces for the construction of a truly public dimension in Brazilian society, distinct from the regulation produced either by the strict logic of the State or of the Market.
While constituting spaces of exchange and debate, such spaces potentially require and strenghten the learning and consolidation of a "culture of rights" through the active exercise of citizenship. As the condition for the very existence of these spaces is precisely their open (public) character, they challenge the exclusionary character of Brazilian society and reinforce the basic claims of the redefinition of citizenship that became widespread among excluded sectors of civil society: “the recognition of the other as subject bearer of rights “and “the right to have rights”.
1. MODERNIZATION FROM ABOVE: RESTRUCTURING THE STATE AND ORGANIZING SOCIETY
In 1930, the domination of regional agro-exporting oligarchies of the states of S.Paulo and Minas Gerais, who had taken turns in power during the First Republic, is interrupted by the movement known in Brazilian history as the Revolution of '30, that led Getúlio Vargas to power. [iii] This revolution signified the end of an Oligarchic State, founded on great agrarian property and economically directed towards the export market, and the beginning of the constitution of a State that establishes itself "as the organizing nucleus of society and the lever in the building of industrial capitalism in the country"(SALLUM JR, 1996: 44).
The Revolution of 1930 inaugurated a process of conservative modernization (also referred to as the Prussian way) in which the State came to play a fundamental role in the installation of industrial capitalism and in the organization of society itself. From 1930 to 1945, under the leadership of Getúlio Vargas, a truly national, authoritarian, centralized and interventionist State was the leading force behind national development. In addition, the relations between the State and civil society were structured along corporatist lines and the political organization of social sectors put under State tutelage and control. Most of the changes implemented during the Vargas' years took place from 1937 to 1945, when liberal democratic institutions were suppressed and an authoritarian regime, known as the Estado Novo, was installed under Vargas' command. As the political incorporation of the working classes became an important political asset for the government, authoritarianism became entangled with populism. Formal democracy was reestablished in 1945, and Vargas came back as an elected president in 1950, opening a clearly populist regime, which survived to his death in 1954 and lasted until 1964 , when the military took over through a coup d'état.