Shortly after the November 2, 2004 United States election, Brazilian Senator Cristovam Buarque paid a visit to Brazil’s former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso at Brown University, where the latter is a visiting professor.  What follows is a translated excerpt from a recording made of their interview.

CRISTOVAM BUARQUE:  Is social thought stalled while scientific thought is advancing?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO:  This change happened very rapidly.  It wasn’t only technology.  Also in the relationships between people.  The structure of society was altered.  And the thinkers did not register how much it was being altered. 

And now there was a shock there in Spain.  I saw some research by [U.S. sociologist] Manuel Castells saying that there in Catalonia, at least, the final surge was made by the youngest.  Using what they call “torpedoes.”  Brief messages by electronic means. 

Public opinion changes like this, suddenly.  As if there had been a short circuit.  A mechanism exists allowing you to determine people’s reaction in real time.  The political parties are going to have to organize for this.

CRISTOVAM:  Isn’t this going to be the end of political leadership?  The politicians are going to be dragged along by public opinion.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  That’s the way public opinion is; it changes rapidly.  Many years ago, when I was president of the International Society of Sociology, I held a meeting of sociologists in India.  In the 1980s, I was a senator. 

That association was composed basically of Europeans and North Americans.  Then I said, “Let’s meet in India.”  And we met in India.  My speech at the end of my mandate was about social change.  I stated, “We are in a very interesting world because none of our theories of change takes into account how the world changes, politics changes, society changes. 

“The great line of change was the Marxist theory of change, with class conflict, economic crisis, some foreseeable change.  Or else the Functionalist Theory, change by small increments in a certain direction.  Perhaps the two might work depending upon the moment.  But, now,” I said, “the change would be different.” 

Why did I write that?  I was in Paris in May of ’68.   I saw what happened there.  There was what I called a “short circuit.”  Which means that modern society, which appears to be well organized, suddenly suffers a short circuit. 

In February of 1968, I had lunch, as I did every Wednesday, with [Brazilian economist] Celso Furtado, [Brazilian sociologist] Luciano Martins, and [current Brazilian Minister of the Controller-General’s office] Waldir Pires. 

We got together every Wednesday.  One of those Wednesdays [Brazilian politician] Paulo de Tarso Santos was also there.  He was your predecessor in the government of Brasília.  And Paulo was not someone who was informed about France. 

We were; earlier I had studied in France and now I was a professor.  Don’t even mention Celso; he was an expert on France.  And Celso, so much wiser than we, explained, “Nothing is going to happen here.”  This, in February of 1968. 

“A degree of rationality has been achieved here that eliminates risks.  What’s going on now is a debate about salaries.  Only, the union has as much research as the government; then they’re going negotiate and arrive at an understanding.” 

Well, in that epoch it was said that the difference between [French President Charles] de Gaulle and Louis XIV was that de Gaulle could walk down the street and be applauded, while Louis XIV was jeered.  That they were equal.  Another Roi Soleil.  Well, three months later, everything almost fell apart.

CRISTOVAM:  I heard something similar from [Brazilian anthropologist] Darcy Ribeiro about Chile.  In August 1973, a month before the coup, we met in Peru, in the apartment where he was living.  I went with my brother Sérgio, who was exiled in Chile and wanted to leave because he thought there was going to be a coup.  Darcy said, “There’s no danger.  Chile is a well-organized society.”  A month later…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  I was in Chile.  In August I was in Chile.  I went to Chile in July of 1973; I worked in Cepal [the Economic Commission for Latin America].  But I had the opposite impression.  Why?  Because I had already undergone the experience of Brazil and of France. 

I said, “This here is going to come to a halt.”  One day I was having dinner with a great Argentine sociologist named Gino Germani, who was the greatest Argentine sociologist of that time.  Dining in a restaurant there in Chile called Da Carla that I liked a lot.  And [Chilean President Salvador] Allende was speaking on the radio; suddenly there was a blackout.  Why?  Because they were boycotting a transmission tower. 

I said to Ruth, “I want to return to Brazil because something’s going to happen here.”  A little later, [former Brazilian Minister of Culture Francisco] Welffort was there and we went to dinner in the home of [current Chilean President] Ricardo Lagos, who was my neighbor. 

Ricardo had been named ambassador to Moscow by Allende.  And so we went to dinner:  me, Welffort, Ricardo, his wife Luisa, and Clodomiro Almeida.  Almeida at that time was [the Chilean] Minister of the Exterior; he had been Minister of Defense. 

That was at the end of August.  Almeida did not stop pacing from side to side.  After dinner, he asked, “When is it that you are going to leave?  Perhaps, I don’t know if there’s time, you will be witnesses to the turning of a page of history.”

CRISTOVAM:  The turn he imagined was to the left?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  No, to the right.  Lagos never even went to Moscow.  So that you can see how difficult those things are. Allende had confidence in [Augusto] Pinochet.

CRISTOVAM:  He named him commander of the army.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  He named him commander.  It’s difficult, therefore, to perceive when the thing is going to turn.

CRISTOVAM:  But the people who talk about the end of history suppose that there are not going to be more short circuits.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  They’re wrong.  There can be a short circuit.  What characterizes a short circuit is its unexpectedness.  It’s the same thing with the markets.  There are moments when you think that there’s no risk, but then comes the unexpected.  Risk is something that you can calculate.  The 11th of September [1973] created a total change.  It was unexpected.  And it caused a short circuit; it provoked a change.

CRISTOVAM:  But in that epoch, France, Chile, Brazil in 1964, there was a debate over ideas.  Today we don’t see…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  In France there certainly was that debate…  But what was debated in France?  The debate was a great shock to me because I was arriving from Chile in 1967.  And in that epoch Chile was not Allende; it was Guevara.  Che Guevara had been killed. 

I had written the book Dependência e Desenvolvimento (Dependency and Development in Latin America) in that epoch.  They had killed Guevara, who was the prospect of the revolution in Latin America.  Well, everything referred to the class struggle and imperialism. 

In France, the debate was a different one.  It was existential.  It was a question of sexual freedom; it was forbidding forbidding.  There was no reference to either class or imperialism.  And what attracted my attention in the streets of Paris in those immense demonstrations was that people were carrying black anarchist flags and singing “The Internationale,” which begins, “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation.”  All of them fatties! (Laughter) 

I took [Brazilian historian] Mário Pedrosa with [Brazilian sociologist] Luciano Martins to Nanterre to attend a student debate.  In the midst of the strike.  They opened the school to the workers and in they came from the surrounding areas.  And the workers didn’t understand a thing.  What was being discussed had nothing to do with them. 

Afterwards there was a strike in the Renault industry; that was, indeed, a workers’ struggle.  I mean to say that the short circuit occurred due to an educational reason:  they wanted to make a change in the educational system; the Nanterre professors were reactionaries; they didn’t want…

CRISTOVAM:  The Marxist theories didn’t work to explain…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Anything.  Not a thing.  Afterwards there was a short circuit.  But society has structure.  You can see that it doesn’t change suddenly because it has things, forces, that serve as restrictions.  That dialectic between the unexpected and the structure is what is interesting to see in present-day society.  And there’s no theory for this. 

Perhaps the Chaos Theory, which is basically the theory of the unexpected.  I think that we have to begin to get used to the expected.  Today more than ever because of those modern means with the unexpected…  And how do you conceptualize this in a discipline like social sciences that wants to make everything begin with regularities and cause and effect?

CRISTOVAM:   What were the great unexpected occurrences during your lifetime?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Well, for me, the military coup of 1964 in Brazil was unexpected.

CRISTOVAM:  But in the world, which occurrences surprised you with the greatest dose of the unexpected during your lifetime?  Which major short circuits did you witness?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  1968 in France was certainly unexpected, the World Trade Center bombing was certainly unexpected.  I was there in Brazil and that morning I was going to receive the people from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation.  And I was in the residential apartment on the second floor of the Alvorada Presidential Palace, when Ana Tavares phoned, “They’re bombing the World Trade Center!”  I turned on the television and saw that business. At first I wasn’t even able to understand.  But it was the second bombing there.

CRISTOVAM:  The fall of the Berlin Wall was also unexpected.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Berlin also.  There’s a very beautiful article by [U.S. economist Alberto O.] Hirschmann; I think it’s in his memoirs.  It’s a lovely article about the Berlin Wall.  He talks about what happened, how it was the opposite of what was expected.  And, clearly, the world has always been like that. 

Who knows, when you have the taking of the Winter Palace.  There are always occurrences like that.  Phenomena happen suddenly, precipitating a preexisting tendency.  But when it comes to the short circuit there is absolutely no tendency.  Suddenly, it simply occurs.

CRISTOVAM:  Weren’t your election and Lula’s unexpected occurrences?  The Left coming to power?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Totally.  A book came out…  I’ll show it to you…  It’s called O sapo e o príncipe [The frog and the prince].  It’s by Paulo Markun and it’s about Lula and me.  (Fernando Henrique displays the cover of the book and continues.)  The other day Lula said something about this:  “See there?  I’m always doing the heavy lifting and he’s not.”

CRISTOVAM:  Besides the Left arriving in power being a surprise, isn’t it also a surprise that we arrived without a new proposal for the people?  We arrived on the coattails of the Right.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE: The surprise wasn’t in arriving.  It was arriving in two ways….  (Laughter)  Why?  Because the world had changed a great deal.   And the so-called Left did not change.  It gets elected and the discussion goes, “Ah, Lula is going over to the other side.  Fernando Henrique went over to the other side.” 

You get elected, as Lula did, with all his political experience and there’s no way to put it into practice.  Because the world has changed.  The world has changed, hasn’t it?  It changed a great deal, profoundly.  Which does not mean that there is no tendency for it to continue changing.

CRISTOVAM:  Do you suppose that this lack of a thinking Left that we’re experiencing in Brazil is a phenomenon happening all over the world?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  It’s general… It’s general…  In France it happened with [former French Prime Minister Lionel] Jospin.  Then, when will what the Italians call agiornamento [updating] be done?  It’s difficult to do… 

[British Prime Minister Tony] Blair, [former Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science] Anthony Giddens, later you see that no sort of agiornamento occurred because there was a lack of power to do what is possible to do. 

What is possible to do?  It is in the area of justice and of society.  The Left today is more about guaranteeing rights and giving equality, more voice.  That much more than controlling the means of production.  For the classic Left the idea is that:  collectively controlling the means of production.  But there’s no way to… 

The classic Left wanted that and the Communist Left, control of the State by one party.  Today, I think that progressive thought is much stronger in the civil society, isn’t it?  And trying to open the way to participation with the objective of giving equal opportunities.  And the Left was often showing its age in the sense that it wanted to still think that the State and the party are going to bring about the change.

CRISTOVAM:  Now the idea of the State is that of the Soviet Left.  Marx saw the State in a different way…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Marx was much more progressive.  Where Marx never was very specific was in the theory of revolution.  Where he was specific was in the analysis of capitalism. 

But, even there, make note of the following:  how is it that we were trained?  Wasn’t it in the idea of exploitation?  The exploitation of man by man.  Today, the worst problem is that of those human beings who don’t even serve to be exploited; they are the “marginalized.”  That are no longer even an army of reserve…

CRISTOVAM:  They’re discardable…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Discardable…Discarded!  The system treats them as irrelevant.  It’s tragic.  We’re living in a world where you have an immense mass that is irrelevant for the formation of wealth…  And that was not thought about that way…

CRISTOVAM:  And what is our proposal for those people?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  That’s the problem.  You know that earlier when I spoke to you about the book Occidentalism:  The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies [by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit] I made a reference to Frantz Fanon who wrote Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth). 

This had nothing to do with traditional Marxist thought that always held the excluded, Les Damnés de la Terre, in contempt.  To use the language that Marx used in economy, “Les faux frais de la production,” the costs of false production.  Engels had a horror of the peasant class…

CRISTOVAM:  So did Stalin…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  So did Stalin…  It was the “rural idiocy.”  So then Mao expressed the opposite position…  That, after all, is a retrogression from the Marxist point of view.  Les Damnés de la Terre are who are going to make the revolution and let’s have equality.  And let’s kill off the city because the city is a source of evils. 

In Marxist theory, the city is just the opposite:  it’s the cradle of liberty.  They also came to invent the evil that is the countryside.  The countryside is where it’s going to happen…  Once again that ended.  Today no one thinks in terms of Mao Ze-dong. 

Well, what then is the expectation that you can have?  It’s necessary to have a highly asymmetrical globalization that disperses those people, but that, on the other hand, is provoking, via immigration, the fear of the undeveloped, isn’t it?  It’s a situation of fear, of fear itself.  The extreme is the fear of the Muslims.

CRISTOVAM:  Of all the “dispossessed,” right?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:   Fear of the damnés…  If you see the Muslims as damnés, the fear is substantive today.  Because the Muslims, some Muslims, some that became terrorists, have the capacity to use that modern thing and strike a blow here and there in the heart of the system. 

They exploded the train in Spain with a cellular telephone, didn’t they?  And they blew up the twin towers by knowing how to pilot a plane.  Using the arms of the modern world for destruction.

CRISTOVAM:  When you speak of Frantz Fanon, we could list 10, 15, 20 names of that epoch.  Now there are no names of intellectuals thinking differently.  The counter culture has died.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Today it doesn’t exist…

CRISTOVAM:  Wouldn’t it be probable for an alternative way of thinking to come out of Brazil?  Because in Brazil the damnés de la terre vote, demand a new way of thinking and new proposals.  In Europe the immigrants do not vote. 

They can close the frontier in Europe to the dispossessed.  Brazil can’t close the frontier to its dispossessed.  Because of this, our intellectual indigence is even greater than in the rich countries, don’t you think?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  In Europe they have forgotten the frontier but not totally.  Nor in the United States, where they need those people as a workforce.  The tragedy of that world there and here is that they need to let some people enter and they’re still afraid of those who enter. 

From the point of view of those here, they have to let the Latinos enter; they’re “not so dangerous.”  They’re Christians, Occidentals.  In Europe it’s not that way.  In Europe they are dealing with Muslims and Africans, people who frighten the Europeans enormously. 

In Brazil, it’s something else entirely.  Because in Brazil, in spite of everything, we do not have that type of cultural difference.  You don’t have people generating a value that’s totally contrary to the dominant one.  They are all, grosso modo, Catholics, Occidentals, poor.  Aren’t they? 

They speak the same language.  They are more equal to the integrated and what they want is to be integrated themselves.  Isn’t that right?  They are not in a proposal to destroy that society for cultural or religious reasons…  What they’re wanting is to be integrated…

CRISTOVAM:  What did you think of the results of the U.S. election?

FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Here in the United States, I followed the campaign…  I followed the primaries; I participated in the American Democratic convention; I went there; I took part in a round table discussion with [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton in Boston…  In Cambridge, actually… 

I stayed to watch what they were doing and at first I was very alarmed because they weren’t saying anything… It was in the debates that [Democratic candidate John] Kerry finally said something.  And that’s when they managed to have a polemic.  They didn’t even manage to discuss if the war was just or unjust; it was whether the President was leading well or if he was efficient or not…

Isn’t that right?  [President George W.] Bush tried to situate the conflict by attacking Iraq and not bin Laden.  Why?  It didn’t stick…   Patriotism is in the war.  Kerry had to attack on the side of incompetence…  Who is the best Command in Chief? 

He tried to present the social question:  “You, Mr. Bush, are governing for the rich and I am going to govern for the others, for the middle class.”  And what did Bush do?  He did not respond.  He let everything revolve around a question that, let’s say, is not even in play.  Who was the best Command in Chief, right? 

He won as if he were the best Command in Chief and added religion to this for a society that is afraid because of September 11.…  What they call “moral values” here and what there in Brazil we would call “backwardness”:  against gay marriage, against scientific research.  In short, all those antiquated values with a religious tint.  And that’s what won here…

CRISTOVAM:  In the lecture we just attended, [former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights] Mary Robinson said that until last week she saw Bush as the incarnation of evil and the United States as something different from him.  With the election, it all came together.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  To a certain point.  Because, in truth, this is a complex society.  Half and half.  The difference is that you have a curious map in the USA:  taking New England, California, and New York, everything is blue, the color of the Democrats.  And the red American half they call “Jesusland.” 

Here there is a Jesusland that is religious, in the sense of ideology, not spiritual belief, of ideological backwardness that is great, but you also have the other side…

CRISTOVAM:  Just like one thousand years ago.  Christianity versus Islam.  The time of the Crusades.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  We are returning a little to the Crusades.  But the language is the same.  Several times Bush has said, “We are being guided by the hand of God.”

CRISTOVAM:  The same phrase that bin Laden always uses…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  The same thing, the same phrase.  It means…  One sees the other as an enemy.  Democracy remains in the middle of that.  Democracy is “how to compromise” [spoken in English], something that was difficult to understand in Brazil. 

Alliance, negotiation, all that was seen as if it were betraying the ideal.  Which means to say, in democracy you have to have a predisposition to accept the other.  When you fundamentalize and radicalize, you don’t have that anymore.  That’s where the space of democracy disappears.

CRISTOVAM:  You can be isolated in the idea but in politics you have to conciliate...

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  That’s another interesting point:  how can you keep your values at the same time that you’re creating conditions so that those values will permit you to work and not so that they will paralyze everything? 

When the value is that sort of fundamentalism, there’s only one solution:  it’s killing the other.  Eliminating the other.  Winning from the other.  You have no road that leads to saying, “Let’s build a road so that I can advance more than he.  Let’s build a common road.” . . . 

I think that the fundamental thing, returning to what I was saying before, about change in the contemporary world is changing opinion.  And, because of that, this election in the USA was grave because American public opinion lacked the strength to change. 

It changed a little.  Perhaps it did not encounter expression of the need for change in someone because in the beginning Kerry had difficulties in gaining acceptance.  But the fact is that it did not succeed in changing.  And today’s globalized world depends a lot upon change here in the USA. 

The other day I said here, “The election for president of the USA is going to be a universal vote, not only of those in the USA because the decision of the President affects everyone.”  Which means, it’s a complicated business.

CRISTOVAM:  But it’s not only here. Democracy was invented when the power of the Chief of State was restricted and lasted only a short time.  Today, any president can make decisions that have repercussions all over the world. 

Can you imagine a Caribbean island permitting a bank to launder narco-traffic money?  Or a base for terrorists making nuclear arms?  And the president is elected with the votes of his or her population.  Democracy can no longer be restricted to only one country.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  But, that is a great problem at the global level having to do with the nation-state.  Which means, democracy was a thing made within the nation.  And it created the State.  The nation-states.  Today, you can no longer govern only from the perspective of the nation-state.  It doesn’t work.  You can’t solve the problems of the environment like that. 

CRISTOVAM:  Not to mention thinking in the short-term between two elections…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  Not to mention in four years…  You won’t resolve terrorism, or drug trafficking, or criminality, which is also using modern instruments.  It’s not only the progressive side that uses modern instruments, what I called in that document for the UN, “uncivil society”…

CRISTOVAM:  The Devil also likes electronics…

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  The Devil also likes electronics.  That’s how it is with electronics, it’s not only God..  God and the Devil (Laughter).  Well, then how do you deal with those environmental problems within the nation-state?  It doesn’t work. 

On the other hand, how do you make those states, above all the more powerful ones, give up a little of their sovereignty?  Now here in the USA, sovereignty is not even discussed; they’re only discussing the sovereignty of others.  They want to have the right to interfere in other countries, of unilateralism…

CRISTOVAM:  The solution would be international moral rules, for arms, for the environment.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE:  No one resists.  This business of preventive war is something crazy.  It’s the opposite of a world organized in a civilized manner.  It’s barbarism; it’s a Hobbesian world. 

Not even Hobbesian because there in the Hobbesian world it’s the struggle of everyone against everyone and here it’s one against everyone.  And none of the others has the strength to confront this one. 

Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage – www.cristovam.com.br – and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov.br.

Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome - LinJerome@cs.com.

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