ABSTRACT
Introduction This study, an analytical history of Brazil’s Special Secretariat of Informatics1 (SEI) since the creation of its predecessor agency in the early 1970s to the end of the informatics market reserve in the early 1990s, is a case study of the origins and political evolution of the policy of a single bureaucratic complex within a single national state during a limited period of time. It is intended, however, as a contribution, not just to the study of Brazilian politics, but to the larger fields of comparative politics, international political economy, and political theory. In particular, it provides an analysis of the complex and sometimes surprising ways in which democratization, at the level of a regime, conditions political processes within the state at the level of individual policies without always necessarily making them more democratic. The way in which the highly protectionist policy eventually collapsed also sheds light on the relationship between political democratization and economic liberalization.2 Most directly and explicitly, though, this study addresses crucial theoretical issues raised in recent decades by debates over the appropriate manner to conceptualize and analyze the “state” in political, and especially political economic, analysis.3 Unlike most other state-conscious analyses, however, this study will also be deeply concerned with politics, with the impact of political institutions and processes on the evolution of the Brazilian state and its policies. In this focus on democratization and the state and their impact on reshaping Brazilian capitalism, this study also represents a contribution to the literature on “varieties of capitalism” (VOC) by detailing the political processes by which a country attempted to shift from one variety of capitalism to another in a key sector of its economy. The story of the policy itself is a dramatic one. From 1971 to the early 1990s Brazil developed a very ambitious, highly protectionist strategy for the computer industry and a wide range of related industries with the intention of building a technologically autonomous national industry, owned and controlled by Brazilians, and able to develop its own capacity to participate in world-class technological innovation. Beginning with the creation of a joint venture involving both Brazilian and foreign firms to produce minicomputers based on foreign designs, the policy would soon generate 100 percent Brazilian-owned companies producing
minicomputers designed in Brazil for the Brazilian market. When personal microcomputers came on the scene in the early 1980s, the Brazilians would prohibit the import of all foreign PCs and also completely exclude foreign companies from producing microcomputers on Brazilian soil. The PC clone market in Brazil would be reserved completely for Brazilian manufacturers. By the mid1980s, Brazil would join Japan and the United States as the only countries producing domestically more than 50 percent of all computer-related products consumed domestically. By the early 1990s, however, the policy would be largely abandoned in the face of its rising costs and the increasing technological backwardness it imposed upon Brazilian users compared to the dynamic international computer industry. Still, during the two decades the policy lasted, it would represent a remarkable effort to promote national technological capacity, and, even after its abandonment, the policy would permanently change the relationship of national and multinational capital in the Brazilian computer industry. The balance sheet of its achievements and failures would remain a controversial question. This study, however, is not primarily concerned with that balance sheet, with assessing whether or not the policy was in the end a wise or a quixotic strategy. Instead, this study focuses on the political processes involved in the construction and defense of the policy and the institutional frameworks within which it was formulated and executed. That history is as intriguing as the ambitious character of the policy itself, for it stretches across dramatic changes in the political and economic landscape of this era of Brazilian history that can be roughly divided into three major periods. For most of the first period, from 1971-1979, when the policy was first formulated, the Brazilian economy was in the midst of a major structural adjustment to the OPEC oil shock of 1974 that ended the dramatic boom period of rapid industrialization known as the “Brazilian miracle.” Politically, Brazil was experiencing a period of very gradual liberalization of the military regime that had been in place since 1964 and had just passed through its most repressive period. The fledgling informatics policy was being worked out by a small group of activists in an obscure agency within the civilian-run Ministry of Planning as a small part of a larger policy of aggressive import-substituting industrialization. As the policy evolved, however, it turned into a project to redesign the character of Brazilian capitalism by radically transforming the relationship between multinational informatics companies and national Brazilian producers. In the second period, from 1979-1985, the Brazilian economy was struggling with the impact of the second OPEC oil shock of 1978 and the onset of the external debt crisis, a period of deep recession, IMF-imposed austerity, and accelerating inflation. Politically, these years would see a semi-managed transition to civilian democracy guided at first by the military government and then imposed by popular political action and the tactical maneuvering of the civilian opposition parties. The informatics policy in these years would be captured by a new group of activists, led by military officers from the military intelligence service and subordinated to the military-dominated National Security Council. This new group became even more ambitious in its efforts to restructure the character of Brazilian capitalism.
