ABSTRACT
Introduction As indicated in the first chapter, a central theme of this study as a whole will be the importance of political choice in determining the trajectory of the Brazilian informatics policy and constructing the associated levels of state autonomy. The choices that produced the trajectory of the policy, however, although not rigidly determined by the structural characteristics of the strategic universe within which they were made, were clearly conditioned by that strategic universe. Indeed, throughout the subsequent chapters, the narrative of the trajectory of the policy will be presented as an interplay between the constraints and opportunities created by the strategic universe on the one hand and the political choices made within that changing context on the other hand. Some background on the Brazilian context, then, is essential for the reader unfamiliar with Brazilian political economy. Therefore, in the first section of this second chapter, an introduction to the Brazilian strategic universe that forms the context of policy choices will be provided. That introduction will take the form of an historical overview of the economic and political relationship between the Brazilian state and Brazilian society since the onset of Brazilian industrialization. Special attention will be given first to the variety and sequence of strategies that the Brazilian state has employed over the last century or so in its efforts to promote national industries prior to launching of the informatics policy in the early 1970s. Against this background, the informatics policy can be seen in many ways as both a continuation of previous strategies and as an important and aggressive departure from previous strategies. Second, an analysis of the character of the Brazilian state apparatus will be sketched to provide a sense of the opportunities and obstacles that it provided for the small group of activists who pioneered the informatics policy. Following this historical overview, the second section of this chapter will provide a fairly detailed discussion of the political and economic features of the contemporary strategic universe within which the first phase of the informatics policy was constructed in the early and mid-1970s. This will serve as a specific introduction to the analytical narrative of Chapter 3.
