Brazil

The Federative Republic of Brazil is the most populous and prosperous state in the world. Possessing one of the longest histories of European settlement, over the course of the past five centuries Brazil has survived successive periods of foreign rule, international and civil war, and political instability to become the largest political force in the South American Community, perhaps the richest and most dynamic economy in the world, and almost as influential on international popular culture as France.

Unlike elsewhere in South America, in the 15th century Brazil was not home to any particularly large or complex culture group. Instead, early in the 15th century the territory of modern Brazil was home to perhaps as many as five million Native Americans, of Tupi-Guaraní linguistic stock. Beginning in the 1530's, Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese, as part of their establishment of a worldwide trading empire. As elsewhere in the Americas, the Native American populations were decimated by Eurasian diseases and genocidal patterns of enslavement. As the Native American population of Brazil decreased, increasingly large numbers of slaves from Africa were imported. Eventually, a unique Afro-Brazilian culture was created, centred primarily in the Northeast, home to vast sugar-cane plantations run under slavery.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Portuguese began a determined push into the Brazilian interior. The bandeirante expeditions that left São Paulo combined the exploitation of the Native American populations with authentic missions exploration and colonization. Gold was discovered in Minas Gerais and the Mato Grosso at the turn of the 18th century, transforming Brazil almost beyond recognition: Not only did the gold rush enough European immigrants to southern Brazil to allow the South to dominate the Northeast, but Brazilian gold supported the fragile Portuguese economy. At the same time, Brazilians resented their practical exclusion from government, and Portuguese control over Brazilian trade. In 1788, a conspiracy known as the Inconfidência Mineira attempted to establish Brazil as an independent state. Though the conspirators were crushed by the Portuguese crown before they could do the crown harm, Brazilian nationalism had been born.

Remarkably, and in contrast to Spanish South America, Brazil achieved independence peacefully. The French invasion of Portugal in 1807 led to the evacuation of the Portuguese king to Rio de Janerio by the British army. The seven subsequent years established Rio de Janerio as the capital of the Portuguese empire, while Brazil was forcibly opened to British trade. Even after Portugal's liberation, the legacy of this period of Brazilian independence from Lisbon made Brazilian independence inevitable. In 1822, Dom Pedro, son of the Portuguese king, declared the independence of Brazil from the Portuguese empire. After some minor clashes in the Northeast, Portugal wisely let Brazil maintain its independence.

The first two decades of Brazilian independence were marked by considerable instability. Unlike the neighbouring post-independence republics of South America, Brazil had achieved independence as a unified state, despite its vastly greater size and diverse regional and ethnic populations. In the 1830's, ambitious local politicians and disenchanted military commanders joined forces in a series of bloody rebellions against central authority.

By far the most serious of these rebellions was the Cabanagem Rebellion, which broke out in eastern Amazonia in August of 1835. The Afro-Brazilian, Indian, and mixed-blood settlers of the region strongly resented the dominance of the wealthy white elites of Belém, and in the summer of 1835, they revolted against Imperial authority. The white population was slaughtered, and a revolutionary secessionist government declared. In October of 1835, a French ship loaded with French-manufactured guns, intended for the Imperial garrison, arrived at the port of Bélem. In the age before rapid transatlantic communications, no one in France had yet heard of the Cabanagem Rebellion, and so the crew was entirely unprepared for the rebel raid that resulted in the taking of the ship, the seizure of the weapons, and their own massacre. When news of this atrocity arrived in Paris, the outraged French government of Louis-Philippe I dispatched the French fleet to blockade the Amazonian coast, and to conduct raids against the rebels on land. The arrival of the French fleet at the mouth of the Amazon in April of 1836 outraged the Imperial court. Caught up in baroque dynastic politics, courtiers encouraged the Brazilian government to adopt a hostile tone towards the French and their intervention force. After the French destroyed the rebels in the lower Amazon, the Imperial Court insultingly demanded that the French transfer control of their Amazonian forces to Brazil. When France refused, Brazil attacked French soldiers based east of Bélem. France followed with a declaration of war against Brazil.

The Franco-Brazilian War was an unmitigated disaster for Brazil. In the space of two years, despite British anger, the French managed to eliminate the Brazilian presence in Amazonia, and was on the verge of raiding Recife and Salvador when British pressure finally forced the two combatants to begin peace negotiations. The final peace treaty, signed in 1839, forced Brazil to cede to France the entire expanse of the Amazonia, almost to Goias and the Mato Grosso.

Towards the end of the Franco-Brazilian War, many slaves living on plantations in the coastal regions of the Northeast engaged in revolts against their owners. Even though the Brazilian army was able to easily suppress the unarmed slaves, it managed to wreak terrible destruction on the plantation system. Further, France joined with the British in blockading the West African coast against slave traders, knowingly cutting Brazil off from its only source of more slaves. The conservative aristocracy of the Northeast had already been upset by the reluctant war-making policies of the Imperial Court; the Imperial Court's destruction of the foundation of the Northeastern economy further radicalized the aristocrats.

As mutual condemnations between the Northeast and the Imperial Court grew in number and ferocity, the possibilities of an armed conflict seemed increasingly more likely. In the summer of 1842, a clash between Northeastern and Imperial militia units led to the outbreak of the Brazilian Civil War. In the first few months of the war, the Northeastern armies had begun to sweep south through Minas Gerais towards Rio de Janerio. By October, the Emperor and his Court were desperate enough to call on the more liberal aristocrats and free settlers for support. In December of 1842, after the defeat of the Northeastern armies outside Belo Horizonte, the Emperor felt secure enough to issue the famous Christmas Declaration, that liberated all of the slaves in all those states in the Northeast which joined in the rebellion. Although it took two more years of fighting to crush the Northeastern aristocrats, by 1844 the civil war had been won by the Imperial forces.

There was no question of a reversion to the old pre-1836 imperial practices. The Imperial regime had consciously destroyed the main forces of conservatism at the same time that it made alliances with any number of liberal causes. The formal 1845 liberation of the slaves of the Northeast was soon followed by a plan for the graduated emancipation of slaves elsewhere in Brazil. By the 1850's, it became clear that Imperial Brazil was following the enlightened liberal policies of the reformed Argentine, Chilean, and Uruguayan republics. A parliament, based on universal adult male suffrage in the French tradition, was established in Rio de Janerio in 1851. The Federal Assembly quickly began to intrude upon Imperial prerogatives, establishing a constitutional monarchy through its inveterate policy-making. At the same time, the contemporary closure of the United States to European emigrants caused millions of Europeans -- particularly Germans, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, and Britons -- to settle in Brazil, particularly in the fertile southern states. Thanks to the talents of these immigrants and Brazil's continuing commitment to liberalism, Brazil -- particularly its southern and southeastern states, up to and including Minas Gerais -- quickly became one of the wealthiest and most liberal regions of the world.

Beginning in the 1870's, though, the Empress Isabel, her unpopular French husband the Comte d'Eu, and the Imperial Court began to move towards a more conservative and repressive regime, marked by Brazil's highly unpopular participation in the bloody War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay in the mid-1860's. Northeastern Brazil, trapped in an archaic plantation agricultural economy and ruled by resentful conservative aristocrats lording it over the Afro-Brazilian majority, was reconciled to this conservative imperial regime. In 1881, though, the southern states united and deposed the Imperial family; in a referendum the next year, a bare majority of the Brazilian electorate voted to transform Brazil into a federal republic. Although the House of Orleans e Bragança remained a prominent feature in Brazilian politics, as time passed the fact of the Brazilian republic was acceptable to most of the unreconciled population and to the newly-dominant southern states. Pro-monarchist sentiment survived only in the white oligarchies of the northeastern states, still clinging to its previous grandeur as their lives were transformed beyond recognition by Brazil's peaceful revolution.

For the first half-century of its existence, the Brazilian Republic was tumultuous. At the state level, individual state governments jealously maintained their autonomy from the federal state. By the early 20th century, a division of Brazilian states between wealthy and independent regions with large numbers of immigrants, mainly in the south, and poor regions dependent on federal government aid, mainly in the north. A wide variety of political parties contested power, ranging from the conservative Catholic Party to the left-wing Radicals and Socialists. Although central Brazil -- led by Minas Gerais and Rio de Janerio -- remained politically quiescent, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul led a national coalition of Radicals and Socialists, while the Northeast remained outstandingly conservative and pro-clerical. As time progressed, industrialization and immigration began to make the liberal states even more powerful within the Brazilian framework, making the Northeast nothing more troublesome than a neglected hinterland while inspiring political radicalism elsewhere in Brazil. The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul was one of the first political entities in the world to grant women the vote (1893), for instance, while producers' and consumers' cooperatives spread in both rural agricultural colonies and modern industrial cities. On occasion, this ferment could result in severe political instability; in the poorer working-class slums of São Paulo revolutionary anarchism enjoyed alarming popularity and contributed to a series of terrorist attacks that culminated in the 1904 assassination of President Goulart. All considered, Brazil remained astonishingly stable given the tremendous changes.

Despite occasional hopes of revanchism, Amazonia -- now the French colony of Guyana -- remained under French rule. By the 1870's, a program of sponsored immigration and the systematic draining of swampland in the Mato Grosso had largely tamed that state. As Mato Grosso was transformed into a domesticated region of Brazil, Brazilians began to look for another frontier. In 1889, Brazil acquired such a frontier, when it purchased from Portugal the African colonies of São Tomé e Principle and Angola. This extension of Brazil across the South Atlantic is usually taken to signal Brazil's emergence as a Great Power.

Over the past two generations, Brazil had managed the difficult transition from a poor, underpopulated, and unstable colonial hinterland into a rich and well-integrated modern state. Like Japan and Egypt, Brazil began to count for a great deal in international councils, such as the 1901 Peace Conference in The Hague. Unlike Japan or Egypt, though, Brazil's careful governing classes resisted the pressure of the military towards foreign alliances and foreign wars. Some rivalry with Argentina over mutual claims to South American leadership existed, but stopped well short of armed conflict. Brazil likewise avoided entanglement in Europe's competing alliance systems and in the First World War. Only in the last months of the war did Brazil join the Allies in declaring war against Germany and dispatch the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to fight on the Western Front.

In the post-First World War world, Brazil was a newly-influential state. As a member of the victorious alliance, Brazil was a founding member of the League of Nations, and due to its sheer size and its considerable sophistication, it became one of the seven permanent members of the Supreme Council of the League. This low-cost but prestigious victory in the international arena marked the beginning of the triumphant decade of the 1920's. In that decade, the processes of modernity -- urbanization, industrialization, improving standards of education and health care, cultural development -- accelerated sharply as a true mass culture was being created in Brazil. Rio de Janerio joined Paris, London, and New York as major Atlantic centres, with its avant-garde literary and artistic movements, and with its favela concerts of Afro-Brazilian musics. For the first time, Brazilian popular culture began to exert a wider influence on the wider world. At the same time, Brazilian foreign-policy experts quietly prepared for Brazil's emergence as the dominant power in the Southern Hemisphere, as a land power in the South American continent and a sea power in the South Atlantic Ocean.

At the end of the 1920's, though, the Great Depression arrived in Brazil. Brazil suffered particularly, due to its dangerous combination of a young and vulnerable industrial sector with a large population of peasant farmers in the Northeast. Arguably, only the United States suffered more. Almost two million Northeastern farmers abandoned their drought-stricken fields for favelas elsewhere in Brazil, while unemployment in Brazil's industrial cities reached almost 30% in two years. In 1932, in the midst of economic collapse, the Christian Democrat Joao Giorgio Antabuste was elected as President. Unlike his opponents, Antabuste had a strong vision of Brazil as a modernized nation-state, as a social democracy guided by the same Keynesian economics that had already begun to prevail in parts of western Europe and the Southern Cone, and as an active partner in the League of Nations and in a possible future South American community. Slowly, over the course of the 1930's, Brazil recovered its economic health, at the same time that new social welfare measures had begun to improve the living conditions of the Brazilian population. Many Brazilians hoped that their country would be left untouched by the growing threat of European war.

From the moment that the Second World War broke out in Europe, though, Brazil was drawn into the conflict. As the predominant industrial state in South America, and the single largest member state in the entire League, Brazil was a vital arsenal for the League in case of a Nazi or Soviet invasion of a League member-state. Throughout 1941 and 1942, Brazilian units reinforced the Allies' defense lines in the Italian and Yugoslav Alps. As a consequence, Brazilian forces bore the initial weight of the German advances south towards the Adriatic. As Brazilians proudly watched on, their forces absorbed the German offensive and launched a counter-offensive into Austria. Following the defeat of the Nazis, Brazil was given a zone of joint occupation in Austria with Italy. At a cost of one hundred fifty thousand dead, Brazil had saved Italy from the full force of Nazi might, and had irrevocably inserted itself into world affairs.

After a brief post-Second World War recession, Brazil began the famous economic boom of the quaranta gloriosos, the forty-year-long period of continuing improvements in living standards. In the 1940's and 1950's, though, Brazil was faced by the problems of the Northeast and of Angola, linked together by the new civil rights movement. In 1950, people primarily of Afro-Brazilian descent made up only 27% of the total Brazilian population, but constituted outright majorities in many of the states of the Northeast. Including native Africans and Afro-Brazilian immigrants, blacks made up more than 90% of the Angolan population. Yet in both the Northeast and in Angola, blacks were deprived of the exercise of their full civil rights, whether by violent and reactionary aristocratic elites or by an arbitrary colonial administration. Afro-Brazilians simply wanted civil rights in their homeland, while Angolans wanted nothing less than independence for their homeland, yet both found themselves united in a common struggle.

The Catholic Church soon took up the standard of the Civil Rights movement, inspired by the new doctrines issued from Rome that commanded aid to the oppressed. Many white Brazilians were shocked by the obvious popularity of the Civil Rights and the Angolan independence movements amongst non-whites under Brazilian rule, and by the role of the Church in organizing their struggle. In Angola, the colonial administration barely avoided armed confrontation with more militant separatists. In the Northeast, some members of the white elite resorted to organizing a campaign of assaults and murders against Civil Rights leaders. Protests from Brazilian liberals and foreign observers at the treatment of Afro-Brazilian and Angolan protesters at first shocked Brazilians, who were unaccustomed to foreign criticism of their domestic policies. Gradually, though, the bravery of the protesters and the unswerving support of the Catholic Church of both movements began to overcome this shock, and concessions began to be made. In 1956, the Federal Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, formally incorporating the principles of the 1947 League Declaration on Human Rights into the Brazilian constitution, and federal troops forced the democratization of the Northeast. In 1961, Angola peacefully gained independence from its foreign colonizer, managing a smooth transition without any mass exodus of Brazilian colonists. As painful as these political decisions were, in the end the willingness of Brazilians to accept these changes was taken as proof of Brazil's maturity.

The 1960's and the 1970's were heady decades for Brazil. The 1960's marked the beginning of Brazil's global cultural influence, known as the 'Brazilian invasion'. Although Brazilian literature, art, and music had acquired a niche market outside Brazil as early as the 1920's, only in the 1960's did foreign audiences elsewhere in the world begin to show an interest in Brazilian culture. Visual artists and writers from Brazil acquired the highest of reputations in Europe and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere on the basis of their shocking new modernism, but musicians played by far the most predominant role in Brazil's cultural explosion. Until the 1960's, the traditional French-styled chanson had remained the predominant genre of the popular music song. Brazilian music -- profoundly shaped by Afro-Brazilians, heavily rhythmic, and lyrically exciting -- captured the attention of teenagers and young adults all around the world. Singer/songwriters like Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento achieved worldwide renown, singing in Portuguese as well as in French, and spawning imitators around the world. To an extent, the new worldwide interest in Brazilian culture can be put down to simple xenophilia, or to a cultural manifestation of the growing power of Brazil, manifested worldwide both in the rapid expansion of Portuguese-language classes and in Nascimento's latest Top Ten hit. Still, there remained a core of integrity that attracted people simply because of its sheer creative excellence. Despite occasional bouts of unpopularity among cultural nationalists around the world, Brazilian culture has retained its influence; indeed, it may even have surpassed French culture as a worldwide source of inspiration. Certainly the growth to prominence of liberation theology in the Roman Catholic and Southern Hemisphere Protestant churches was inspired substantially by Brazilian theologians.

At the same time that Brazilian culture gained worldwide influence, new demographic trends led to the globalization of the Brazilian population. In the two decades following the Second World War, Brazil became the single most popular destination for immigrants in the wider world. At first, the immigrants were mainly European, particularly from northern Europe and Portugal. Beginning in the 1960's, though, emigration from Europe had dropped off sharply as European living standards rose dramatically. Gradually, Brazil began to remove immigration quotas from its new partners in the South American Community and from the Third World. By the 1970's, hundreds of thousands of immigrants came in annually from such regions as the Andes, southern Africa, the Middle East, and Korea, transforming the ethnic makeup of Brazil's major cities. As Brazil gradually acquired one of the most diverse populations in the world, Brazilians became even more confident about the fundamental attractiveness of their culture.

In the late 1970's, Brazilian national pride was capped by its growing technological prowess. The successful landing and return of a team of three Brazilian cosmonauts on the Moon in 1972, launched from the Antabuste Memorial Space Centre on a Brazilian-made rocket, captivated the world audience and demonstrated Brazil's technological prowess. Later in the decade, Brazil took the lead in South America in adopting the latest technologies, building the skeleton of a national segment of the Euronet by 1979 and completing a TGV line stretching from the Uruguayan border near Porto Alegre in the south to Belo Horizonte in the north. Brazil acquired a reputation as a country that worked; arguably, it was the single most important country in the entire world, and it certainly ranked as the most important country in the entire Southern Hemisphere..

As a Southern Hemisphere country, Brazil was little-touched by the effects of the Third World War. The Brazilian ABM network destroyed the few missiles launched at Brazil, and its agricultural self-sufficiency prevented Brazilians from experiencing the mass famines that prevailed in the Northern Hemisphere and even southern Africa. Despite this, the Brazilian economy was naturally devastated by the aftereffects of the War, as trading partners in Asia and North America simply disappeared and other partners simply couldn't afford Brazilian products. In the two years after 1982, the Brazilian economy collapsed by one-third, inflicting mass poverty on a nation accustomed to constant prosperity. Only in 1990 did the Brazilian economy regain its 1982 levels of production, while Brazil's economy idled until the mid-1990's, as it waited for its trading partners to catch up to it. When its trading partners did catch up, the Brazilian economy initiated a new round of global economic expansion.

In the last years of the 1990's, Brazil managed to ride out the economic shocks that accompanied first contact with the ITA with remarkable ease. More than almost anywhere else in the world, the large and sophisticated Brazilian economy proved more than ready to deal with the interworld economy as an equal. As the largest state in South America, Brazil has received a disproportionate share of the foreign investment that has entered Tripartite Alliance Earth, while it, in turn, has begun to increase its influence off-world. Brazil has joined the other major states of Tripartite Alliance Earth in staking out claims to off-world colonial territories, at the same time that it contributes to the construction of an effective post-ITA League of Nations. The sharp economic disparities between the rich south and relatively underdeveloped north continue to be a worrisome problem, but so long as the north continues to converge and Afro-Brazilians are integrated more firmly into the Brazilian nation it shouldn't be a particularly threatening problem. There seems little doubt that as the 21st century progresses, Brazil will continue to lead Tripartite Alliance Earth.