Month: August 2011

Brazil doesn’t have think tanks in the sense that we have them in the U.S. Brazilian scholars of politics and society are generally linked to universities, the media or political parties. But there are some that do what think tanks do. During my recent visits to São Paulo & Rio, I visited a few of the organizations that perform the think tank function.

Before going on, it might be a good idea to admit that the concept of a think tank is not well defined and in the U.S. as in Brazil they overlap & share personnel with universities and the media. Think tanks in the U.S. would include institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Brookings or RAND. RAND was set up to advise the military. Maybe the reason Brazil doesn’t have such a defined network of think tanks is because it doesn’t have a big military establishment that can consume and pay for expert advice. A second generation of think tanks emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, occupied chiefly by conservatives who felt that their ideas were viewed with little enthusiasm in traditional universities. Probably the most famous of these is the Heritage Foundation. In reaction to this, think tanks developed on the more liberal side. 

Think tanks develop and elaborate ideas that are often adopted by government, firms and in society generally. They provide options an intellectual framework for policy. They also provide a home for thinkers and former officials when they are out of favor or power. Most successful think tanks have few actual employees but lots of associates and contributors.

Fundação Getulio Vargas (often just called FGV) comes close to being a think tank, although it remains primarily a school that grants degrees.  The headquarters is in Rio and there is a branch in Brasilia. The FGV business school in São Paulo (Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo -FGV – EAESP) was established in 1954 in cooperation with Michigan State University. The business school is responsible for a lot of the think tank sort of research that is published in Brazil.  

25% of Brazil’s top business leaders are graduates of FGV-EAESP. And FGV-EAESP is extremely well connected with Brazil’s most successful businesses. Businesses sponsor programs, chairs and wings of their building. In return they get their names and often their products in front of Brazil’s future leading executives and some of the current ones, since in addition to traditional student FGV-EAESP is extensively involved in short term training and courses of executive MBAs. 

FGV welcomes cooperation with American institutions and they have been seeing a lot more of their representatives in recent years.  Universities and firms from Europe & the U.S. are starting to understand that they need a “Brazil strategy” and they are rushing to make up for lost time. What FGV wants are real partnerships, where both sides give and get.  What they don’t want is the kind of one way street where an American or European institution sends down its professors and students for a semester of “Brazilian experience” w/o much contact with Brazilians. This, unfortunately, has been a pattern for many semester abroad programs. FGV doesn’t need this kind of thing. But they are interested in true partnerships and very interested in visits by notable U.S. experts who want to share their knowledge while learning about Brazil. 

We talked a little about the lack of Brazil experts among Americans. Brazil is the biggest and most important country in South America, culturally, economically and temperamentally very different from its neighbors, yet it is too often treated as a sub-set of Spanish speaking Latin America. It is not sufficient to be an expert in Latin America.  Speaking Spanish helps understanding Portuguese, but they are obviously not the same language and the overlap is more limited than many people think.  

Another think tank experience visit was at CEBRI in Rio. This is a smaller operation. We talked about Brazil’s new place in the world and referred to the Council of Foreign Relations report about Brazil.  Everybody agreed that the U.S. and Brazil should develop a more mature relationship of mutual respect and partnership. They liked the word partnership. They also pointed to the problem that Americans have of thinking of Brazil as a subset of Spanish America. Although most Brazilians can understand Spanish quite well, they don’t like to hear it from Americans. It is probably better to speak in English in many cases. The U.S. needs to develop a bigger body of experts that know Brazil, know Portuguese and know better the difference between Brazil and its neighbors. 

I finished off my almost-think-tank tour with the Institute of International Relations at PUC. This is housed in the university (PUC) but participants have aspirations to be more. They have developed a “nucleus” to study the BRICS.  I asked what “BRICS” really meant, since I could think of nothing that they BRICS had in common except a cool name thought up by an analyst at Goldman-Sachs a few years ago.  They laughed and told me that Walter Russell Mead had asked similar questions. It seems to be an American thing. Nevertheless, there are few commonalities except that they were all developing countries and not Western Europe or the U.S. Being BRICS, if nothing else, provide a forum for the various countries to get together and being in the convenient group amplifies their voices. In the longer term, however, cooperation depends on common interests or at least common aspirations.

I am not sure that Brazil NEEDS think tanks along American lines, but I am reasonably certain that the country will develop them sooner rather than later. Think tanks fill a niche in the American, and increasingly the world.  As I alluded above, in the U.S they provide independent, if often ideologically tinged, analysis.  Their analysis is demanded in the marketplace of ideas. It will be useful to politicians and business people who can pay for or at least support the infrastructure needed to create the ideas.

My picture is from the board room at Banespa. It was not a think tank, but it was the symbol of consolidated and deliberate power.

Race is a complicated issue. There is nothing genetically true about race and categorizations based on appearance are always going to be wrong.   Racial classifications are an entirely cultural construction.  In Brazil, estimations of race were long made on appearance alone.  It is possible for brothers to be members of different races and one family might have people called black, white and various colors between.

There is currently a big debate here about quotas based on race for university admissions. We had (and still have) conflicts about this in the U.S., where we have more clearly defined groups. I don’t really know how they determine group membership in Brazil, but I expect that self-identification as a person of African descent will increase among those who could claim multiple ancestries.  As I said, there is no biological basis for race; it is a strictly cultural choice.

For many years Brazilians often emphasized their own and their country’s European heritage. There are areas of the country inhabited by decedents Germans, Italians or Poles that look like Europe in almost every way, except for the palm trees. Brazil also has the biggest community of Japanese outside Japan and lots of people from the Levant. But African heritage is a big part of Brazil’s cultural and physical makeup and in recent years there has been more emphasis on this.

States such as Bahia are especially known for their African heritage, but you can find contributions of Africa all over Brazil. In São Paulo I went to visit Afro-Brazilian museum and talk to its founding spirit and artistic director Emanoel de Araújo.

Emanoel is a truly interesting guy. We invited him to the U.S. back in 1975 as part of our international visitor program and he told me that the visit changed his life. He came to understand much better that the African diaspora was similar all over the Atlantic-America and that the African cultures of their origins were worthy of admiration and study.

The museum is built around this concept. You start with African art and artifacts that show the excellence & sophistication of great African civilizations. The exhibits next show Africans in the new world. Of course, the subject of slavery cannot be ignored, but the exhibits are more about overcoming the effects of oppression than about the oppression itself. They show the slaves as competent individuals with important skills that built Brazil.  Among the slaves were skilled carpenters, masons, blacksmiths and artists. Their work is celebrated. In addition, Deputy Artistic Director Ana Lucia Lopes told me that Africans had brought important skills and products with them. For example, the strains of rice grown in colonial Brazil came principally from Africa, not Asia.  Africans knew how to cultivate these crops and essentially brought this sort of agriculture to Brazil. 

The contributions of Africans might seem obvious, but are often submerged in a dominant narrative that Africans supplied mostly unskilled hard labor and that the finer things were planned and managed by Portuguese colonialists. This is just not right.  The colonists came in small numbers and they relied on first Native American and later Africa labor AND skills. Brazil, like the U.S., is the result of these multiple influences.

The rest of the museum is filled with interesting things from Brazil’s current or recent culture or current events.  The picture second from the top shows “promessas”. These are relics given as homage to a saint in return for helping alleviate a problem.  The carving indicted the part of the body or the thing that was affected. So if somebody has a headache, he would carve a head. Some people have broken bones. You see lots of hands and legs.  A lot of times, the person is generally sick, so you get the whole person. These were made of wood. Ana Lucia told me that many are also made of wax, which is easier to mold, but they don’t last as long. I took a picture because I just couldn’t tell what it was until I heard explanations. Among the other current events exhibits is one on our President. President Obama is popular in Brazil and the Afro-Brazilian museum featured an exhibit called “From King to Obama.” 

I spent a couple hours at the museum and could have spent a lot more talking to Ana Lucia & Emanoel but I had a dinner with the President of the University of Nebraska and had to run. Whoever nominated Emanoel for the IVP program was prescient. It has paid dividends over and over again. Besides the obvious, physical evidence of the museum, Emanoel still loves the United States. Despite our own persistent problems with race, Emanoel sees our country as an example for others to follow.

I constantly bore people by repeating that public diplomacy is a lot less about information and a lot more about relationships. But I repeat it because it is true and I don’t want to let us fall into the trap of thinking we have done our jobs when we pass along some information. We need to work through people. The example of Emanoel shows how effective, sustainable and long-lasting this can be.

One of the challenges we have when talking about law with experts in most other countries is that the American system is fundamentally different. A big part of our system is common law. Among our 50 states, only Louisiana has a code law heritage, based on the Napoleonic Code, in force in Louisiana when Thomas Jefferson bought the place from France in 1803. 

Common law has the disadvantage of being unclear, since it relies on experience. This flexibility is also its strength. Common law can be pragmatic; it relies on experience and judgment of generations working with real world problems. Most other countries, including Brazil, base their law on codes. There is convergence, as our system comes to rely more on legislation.

But we still value precedents in deciding cases, judges usually have discretion in applying the law and juries can and do bring their own interpretation of the cases to bear. As some of the judges at the São Paulo State Appeals Court explained to me, this is not how it works in Brazil. In Brazil, as in other code law countries, the law is supposed to anticipate all eventualities and the job of the judges is to apply the law.  Of course, this is not as easy as looking in the books, but the big difference is application versus interpretation.  

Another big differences is juries. Brazil uses Juries only in homicide cases. In other cases, lawyers represent clients, but they argue before trained judges & are considered more as servants of the state or the law than of individual clients.

Although Brazil has states, like the U.S., the states do not have the independence in law as they do in the U.S.  In Brazil, laws apply across the country and lawyers are regulated on the federal, not the state level. One of my interlocutors explained the difference. In the United States, the states preceded the federal government and they created the Union. The Union, in its inception at least, was a servant of the states and American states retain much of their autonomy. Brazil was an empire. Provinces existed, but not states. With the establishment of the Republic, states were created and they have characters of their own, but the Brazilian government preceded the Brazilian states and the central government created them.

It is often hard for Americans to understand what the centralization means in Brazil as it is hard for Brazilians to understand what our greater decentralization means in the U.S.

We often use the same terms and symbols (look at the courtroom and the depiction of Justice and you see the same things as you would in the U.S.); we don’t perceive that they mean different things. As I wrote in a previous post, our Brazilian friends sometimes misunderstand the fact that our states and their universities are not managed by the federal government, so they cannot make an agreement with the federal authorities that will hold true in all the states.

In the case of an appeals court, where I visited, however, the differences are not as significant, since an American appeals court also has the duty of applying the relevant law. Still, there is not a court that corresponds to a state supreme court in the U.S. 

I understand, BTW, that I am in over my head on this, since I have no legal background. I am giving an interpretation of what they told me. I welcome any comments that might clarify or correct my work. 

I also visited the school for prosecutors at the Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo. This was a fairly big operation. Speaking of applicable law, the school is working on a conference to study American law concerning fraud and asked our support to bring American experts. The result of this conference is supposed to be a proposal for a law to be put before the Brazilian Congress to make frauds in securities more difficult to perpetrate and easier to prosecute, a worthy goal. 

Law is complicated and we have to let the experts do the thinking about the details, but is important to a free people that law is simple enough for the average guy to know whether he is doing right or wrong. The thing I always liked about having a strong dose of common law included in our rules was that it is a check on the otherwise uncontrolled rule of experts. When law becomes too complicated for the people to understand, at least in a general way, it has just become too complicated. I think we can all share that experience.

I mentioned the impact of the various permutations of the “Law & Order” franchise. Whether or not they always get everything exactly right, it is a good educational show for Americans and many Americans … and Brazilians understand law through this simplified prism. There is a “Law & Order UK” which highlights some of the differences between U.S. and UK procedures, even thought UK is also a common law country.  “Law & Order” as well as the LA and Special Victims are available on Brazilian TV and my lawyer friends said they liked the shows. I need a “Law & Order – Brazil”.