Language matters: security discourse and civil-military relations
in post-ditadura Brazil
Kai Michael Kenkel
Centre of International Relations
Liu Institute for Global Issues
University of British Columbia
6476 NW Marine Drive
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z2 Canada
Tel.: +1 604 822 3135
Fax: +1 604 822 6966
E-mail: [email protected]
Prepared for presentation at the 47th Annual Convention of the International Studies
Association, 22-25 March 2006, San Diego, USA
Language matters: security discourse and civil-military relations in post-ditadura
Brazil
It is critically important to examine silences.
—Alfred Stepan—
Whoever controls language, controls power. The lesson of George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four rings no less true in today’s real political world. How discourses are framed, and
terms defined, has a powerful effect on the outcomes of policymaking processes in polities
recovering from military rule. This effect is in some cases so strong that even institutional
change and political adaptation cannot fully counter the influence of embedded language. In
the world of policy, no other stakes are as high as when the term being defined is “national
security”; no lens focusses as clearly on this fact as the issue of civil-military relations.
The present study illustrates how this works in practice, using the example of a society in
transition from military rule to democracy: Brazil. Military rule allows armed forces to
determine in a lasting way the very language in which national debates on defense issues are
conducted. This language, replete with connotations conferred in autocratic surroundings,
survives the transition to democratic government. The earlier meanings attached to the
vocabulary of security—and their ramifications for civilian control—continue to define the
parameters of the defense debate in the post-transitional era. New institutional arrangements
for civilian control—often taken as a guarantor of civilian supremacy—therefore cannot
fully counteract military dominance of security discourse. By extension, their promise as
vehicles for civilian policy control remains unfulfilled.
This study begins by briefly outlining the dominant proposition that equates formal
institutions with civilian political control. It goes on to challenge that notion, arguing that
policy outcomes are a more effective measure of civil-military relations. The investigation
1
seeks to demonstrate that these outcomes do not reflect civilian supremacy and that this is a
result of unabated military ascendancy over the language of security. The structure of the
case study reflects this; it discusses first the historical role of the armed forces in Brazil and
how it is reflected in institutional arrangements. The focus then moves to the discursive
legacy of military intervention in Brazilian politics and the establishment of discursive
dominance.
This sets the stage for a look at the first attempts at policymaking under the flawed 1988
Constitution; these are shown to reflect the paralysis imposed by the discursive impotence of
attempts to move beyond military dominated language. The effect of institutional change is
then taken under direct observation: policy outcomes after the creation of the Ministry of
Defence in 1999 are contrasted with those preceding this development. This illustrates the
continuity of policy content despite specific institutional changes. Finally, the analysis offers
some conclusions about the broader theoretical implications of the Brazilian case regarding
the importance of discursive control for effective civilian control in post-transition societies.
Methodology
The analysis presented in this article derives from research conducted within the
framework of a doctoral dissertation. The data for the Brazilian case study, which is one of
three, are qualitative in nature and were collected over a period of five months in Brazil. The
core consists of numerous interviews with key policymakers as well as Brazilian security
academics. Those interviewed included uniformed and civilian employees of the Ministry of
Defence, instructors from within the military educational system, active and retired flag-rank
military officers, career diplomats and other representatives of the Ministry of External
Relations, and the country’s top academic experts on defense issues.
2
The research is further based upon content analysis of a large number of official Brazilian
defense policy documents and doctrinal manuals, many of which remain confidential. The
state of the discipline in Brazil is such that many academic findings on military issues in
Brazil are still unpublished to this day; recorded interviews remain the preferred source of
information.
Civilian control: institutions and discourse
Militaries in new democracies are able to minimize their loss of policymaking influence in
new democratic settings by continuing to set the vocabulary of security; this works even in
the face of new institutions explicitly designed to establish civilian supremacy. A further
contributing factor is the effect of military rule on civil society’s ability to participate
effectively in the defense debate. In most societies emerging from military rule, civilian
competence in security matters is predictably limited as a result of a state monopoly on the
knowledge and resources required to attain such competence. The “knowledge vacuum” that
ensues reinforces the persistence of military doctrine, and even significant increases in
formal control do not reduce military dominance of the threat definition process. The
problem is expressed succinctly by David Pion-Berlin:
[c]ivilians share some of the blame because they turn their backs on the conduct
of these operations for lack of expertise and trust in their own judgments…
Civilian governments must empower themselves with defense knowledge so that
they can earn the confidence of their commanding officers. …within these
democratic systems elected leaders have yet to demonstrate enough interest or
competence in military affairs.1
Following transitions from military to democratic rule, the ensuing degree of civilian
control over the armed forces is often measured in terms of the prerogatives the military are
1
David Pion-Berlin, “Introduction, ” in Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, ed. David PionBerlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 12.
3
able to retain under the new democratic dispensation.2 The most straightforward way of
quantifying these prerogatives is through a focus on the institutions of democratic control.
Certain bureaucratic arrangements and legal frameworks are considered to enhance civilian
supremacy:
[i]nstitutionalizing democratic control also requires creating a legal and
organizational framework for the exercise of civilian control: organization and
staffing of a civilian-led Ministry of Defense, the creation of the appropriate
committees in the Congress to exercise legislative oversight, establishing the
legal norms under which the armed forces will operate within the democratic
regime, and providing institutional channels for managing conflicts between
civilian and military authorities.3
However, the creation of such institutions—particularly a Ministry of Defense and also
parliamentary committees—does not of itself suffice to bring about effective civilian control
of defense policy outcomes. Policy influence is a considerably more effective measure of
whether a military establishment has subordinated itself to civilian authority.4 This article
argues that policy outcomes are more likely to be determined by prevalent discourses of
security than by institutional arrangements5. If the prevalent language of security within the
Ministry of Defence—the assumed primary guarantor of a strong civilian role in
policymaking—is still that set by the armed forces during autocratic rule, the end result
(policy outcomes) will remain the same. This means that without discursive change,
institutional change will not bring about substantive change in policy outcomes and thus in
effective measures of civilian control. The key concept is what has been termed here
“discursive dominance”.
The classic discussion of military prerogatives is in Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 94-97; these were later refined in Jorge Zaverucha, “The Degree of
Military Political Autonomy during the Spanish, Argentine and Brazilian Transitions,” Journal of Latin American Studies
25, 2 (1993), 286-298.
3 J. Samuel Fitch, The armed forces and democracy in Latin America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 41.
4 Ibid., 37; Douglas Bland, “A Unified Theory of Civil-Military Relations,” Armed Forces & Society 26, 1 (1999), 18.
5 On military establishments in the threat definition process, see David Mares, “Civil-Military Relations, Democracy, and
the Regional Neighborhood,” in Civil-Military Relations: Building Democracy and Regional Security in Latin America, Southern
Asia, and Central Europe, ed. David Mares (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 9-16.
2
4
During military rule, armed forces are able to establish a monopoly on competence in
defense affairs which carries over into the democratic era. Alfred Stepan explains this
succinctly, all the while pointing out the key role of institutions, though he mediates this
through their discursive role:
[t]he absence of a civilian-controlled Ministry of Defense… means that at the
level of the state, and even of political society, there are almost no civilian
specialists on military affairs who are not direct employees of a military-led
ministry. The successful retention by the military of their prerogatives in this
area has directly sustained their comparative mastery vis-à-vis civilians over both
strategic and technical defense issues. This makes the creation of an effective
model of civilian control difficult.6
This “comparative mastery” takes the form of substantive ownership of the vocabulary
used to discuss matters of national security. Turning to the example, used here as well, of the
Brazilian Higher War College (Escola Superior de Guerra—ESG), Stepan points out that
A closer textual analysis of the ESG discourse allows us not only to see how
national security theorists had appropriated much of the critical vocabulary of
civil society in the abertura but also to locate this vocabulary within a larger ESG
canon so that the latent critical power of the vocabulary was neutralized.7
As long as the ESG doctrine remained unchanged, it persisted as the
hierarchically legitimated discourse used to indoctrinate officers at all levels of
military socialization.8
Discursive dominance, such as that exercised in the democratic era by the Brazilian
military, is characterized by a dialectical uniformity of expression across the spectrum of
recognized experts on defense issues and a correlated “homogenization” of thinking in
accordance with a doctrine propagated by the military. Through a mutually reinforcing
process, expert status is granted in accordance with conformity to the prevailing doctrine;
the prevailing status of the doctrine is enhanced through its ongoing dissemination by
experts anointed in this way.
Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 106.
Ibid., 50.
8 Ibid., 53 (footnote 18).
6
7
5
Once discursive dominance has been established under a new institutional arrangement,
active marginalization tactics are used, beyond the discursive realm, to maintain the
formative status of that discourse. Within this cycle, processes of professional socialization
consciously reinforce this dominance: military promotions, for example, depend on officers’
traversing a military academy where success depends on the internalization of the official
discourse. The critical initial mass for this process of mutual reinforcement comes about
when military discourse becomes that of the state and civil society through the abrogation of
other discourses under military rule.
A history of military intervention
Strong military prerogatives are a continuation of a long-standing tradition of intervention
by the Army in particular in Brazilian politics. The Army’s constant shadow presence has
deep historical roots that are both material and ideological. The Army played a fundamental
role in the physical consolidation of the modern Brazilian state, particularly in the remote
Amazonian region, where it often represented the only state presence. This presence was
reinforced by the provision of infrastructure such as roads, telegraph lines and hospitals,9
and a program of economic development for these areas.10
The Army's role in the development of Brazilian nationalism and national identity is
equally central. Forged in the Triple Alliance War and the 1899 rebellion and civil war, the
Army’s traditional view of itself is as the true expression of Brazilian national identity11 A
French Mission militaire brought notions of the modernizing role of the military, both
Hunter, “State and Soldier,” 20; Elizabeth Allen, “Calha Norte: Military Development in Brazilian Amazônia” (Glasgow:
Centre for Amazonian Studies and Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Glasgow, 1990), 1.
10 On the importance of Amazonia, see Daniel Zirker and Marvin Henberg, “Amazonia: Democracy, ecology, and Brazilian
military prerogatives in the 1990s,” Armed Forces & Society 20, 2 (1994), 259-281.
11 On Latin American militaries’ self-perception as expressions of nationhood, and the question of loyalty to the nation
(patria) versus to the state, see Brian Loveman, “Historical Foundations of Civil-Military Relations in Spanish America,”
in Pion-Berlin ed., Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, 260-261.
9
6
technologically and ideologically. 12 These experiences have historically led the Brazilian Army
to pursue an interventionist policy towards the political governance of the country,
culminating in the coup and ensuing military government.
In 1964, Brazil’s armed forces overthrew leftist President João Goulart and instituted a
military dictatorship. With respect to its influence on the vocabulary of security, the military
regime followed a fundamentally reactionary course. The influence of the United States,
mediated through the Cold War context, particularly the American military mission (194860), instilled in the military rulers a staunchly anti-Communist and anti-leftist political
agenda. The core mechanism providing ideological justification for the military regime’s
repressive policies was the National Security Doctrine13. This body of thought was strongly
inspired by counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism literature developed in the United
States. Developed in and propagated by the Brazilian Armed Forces’ own corporate
educational system, the National Security Doctrine continues to set the parameters of
democratic-era Brazilian security language.
By the end of the ditadura in 1985, the stigma on military issues stemming from the
government’s human rights abuses, and the legacy of the US-inspired National Security
Doctrine used to justify them, had brought about a profound civilian absence from the arena
of national defense. Correspondingly, there was a comprehensive lack of civilian expertise
and an attendant military “monopoly on competence”. So reluctant were civilian
policymakers to concern themselves with this area that even though the first democratic
On the lasting legacies of the European and United States military missions in Latin America, see inter alia Frederick M.
Nunn, “Foreign Influences on the South American Military: Professionalization and Politicization,” in The Soldier and the
State in South America: Essays in Civil-Military Relations, ed. Patricio Silva (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 13-37.
13 On the DSN, see David Pion-Berlin, “Latin American National Security Doctrines: Hard- and Softline Themes,” Armed
Forces & Society 15, 3 (1989), 411-429 and Joseph Comblin, “La Doctrina de la Seguridad Nacional”, Mensaje 25 (1976),
96-104.
12
7
Constitution was adopted in 1988, the country only issued its first significant defense policy
statement in 1996 and did not create a Ministry of Defense until 1999.
The Brazilian Armed Forces’ dominance of the defense arena extended well into the
democratic era, both institutionally and in terms of discourse. Specifically, military
prerogatives at the end of the ditadura included six Ministerial Cabinet posts occupied by
active-duty officers.14 In a 1993 article, Jorge Zaverucha criticized the degree of democratic
control in the immediate aftermath of the Brazilian transition; his view of the state of affairs
in this area remains characteristically pessimistic nine years later.15
The institutional landscape of civil-military relations in Brazil today is shaped by the first
democratic Constitution, adopted in 1988. Due to the negotiated character of the transition
back to civilian rule and the strong position they enjoyed during its course, the armed forces
were able to maintain considerable institutional privileges under the civilian regime.16 The
1988 Constitution concentrates significant power in the hands of the executive branch, to
the detriment of the legislative. The corollary to this imbalance is that the Brazilian
Parliament’s impact on military matters borders on insignificance;17 even observers from the
military establishment criticize the apathy of Brazilian lawmakers.18
These are the three service branch Ministries, the military cabinet (Casa Militar), the Armed Forces General Staff, and the
National Intelligence Service.
15 Jorge Zaverucha, “Degree of Military Political Autonomy”; Jorge Zaverucha, “(Des)Controle Civil sobre os Militares no
governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso”. Paper presented at the Conference on Research and Education in Defense and
Security Studies (REDES 2002), August 7–10, 2002, Brasilia, Brazil. All REDES papers are available on the website of
the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at http://www.ndu.edu/chds/redes2002/apapers.htm. See Martins and
Zirker, “Identity Crisis,” 147-8 on the persistence of military prerogatives in the immediate post-ditadura period.
16 Hunter, Eroding Military Influence, 32-36; Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 93-114; João R. Martins Filho and Daniel
Zirker, “The Brazilian Military Under Cardoso: Overcoming the Identity Crisis”, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World
Affairs 42, 3 (2000), 147-148; Fitch, Armed Forces, 160; Felipe Agüero, "Institutions, Transitions, and Bargaining," in
Pion-Berlin ed., Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, 197-8.
17 Clóvis Brigagão and Domício Proença Júnior, Concertação Múltipla: Inserção Internacional de Segurança do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro:
Livraria Francisco Alves Editora, 2002), 137.
18 Afonso Barbosa, “Visão Militar sobre a Inserção Internacional de Segurança do Brasil”. In Brasil e o Mundo: Novas Visões,
eds. Clóvis Brigagão and Domício Proença Júnior (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Francisco Alves Editora, 2002), 123. At the
time of writing Barbosa was the Commandant of the Escola de Guerra Naval (Naval War College). Wendy Hunter
explains that often parliamentary apathy is due to incentive structures in the Brazilian political system that serve to
dissuade lawmakers from intervening in military issues due to high patronage costs and low electoral returns. See
Hunter, Eroding Military Influence, 15-16.
14
8
The President of the Republic has extensive powers to legislate by decree, as well as other
means to circumvent or render legally unnecessary parliamentary oversight. A large majority
of legislation regarding the armed forces has been made in this fashion, including ironically
that establishing the Ministry of Defense. The increased weight of the executive branch was
conducive to military influence, as this was where the influence of the military establishment
was concentrated.
The military’s preponderant role became a liability when the civilian democratic regime
sought to modernize its defense policy in the changed post-Cold War environment. The first
serious efforts came under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, beginning in 1995; the result was a
vague document entitled the National Defense Policy (Política de Defesa Nacional). This text,
issued in 1996, served primarily to bring together the various previously uncoordinated
executive branch viewpoints; it is widely recognized as an inadequate basis for
implementable policy.
After a five-year gestation period, Brazil finally established a Ministry of Defense in 1999.
This institution was explicitly intended as a means of shoring up civilian policy supremacy in
the military arena. Its early efforts to institutionalize a role for civil society in modernizing
national defense policy met with strong resistance from some quarters in the armed forces.
These early moments provide the clearest examples of the lasting legacy of military
discursive dominance.
The discourse of security in Brazil: the military educational system and the
National Security Doctrine
Bearing in mind that policy outcomes are a key indicator of civilian control, Clóvis
9
Brigagão and Domício Proença Júnior highlight one of the most nefarious results of the
above situation, a dangerous division of labor in dealing with defense issues:
Diplomats and the military tend to reduce the discussion to technical and
operational questions, viewed from a corporative perspective. Academics transit
through the topic of peace and security in normative fashion, disregarding the
concrete functioning and operation of the institutions that are directly involved.
They end up dealing with the question by means of the abstract enunciation of
goals or the institution of legislative or juridical mechanisms. The result is that
no-one bears responsibility for the unification (concatenação) of political goals,
diplomatic initiatives and the concrete structure of the armed forces, and, even
less, for the formulation of strategies.19
This dichotomy of military technicalism—proffered in the name of professional
expertise—and the embryonic state of civilian discourse is the result of the abiding ubiquity
of the National Security Doctrine. The impasse results from three main factors. The first is
the strength of the military’s corporate educational system as compared to civilian
alternatives 20. The second is the stigma placed on military matters by the human rights
abuses committed under the ditadura; this association has shunted civilian efforts away from
military topics. A final factor, which finds relevance once the entrenched discourse must be
maintained in the democratic era, second consists of the marginalizing tactics used by that
system, especially the High War College sitting at its apex, to establish the discursive
dominance of the DSN by installing its vocabulary as the only acceptable language for
discussing security.
Brazil’s military education system is highly developed; each branch has its own separate
network of professional training schools. Their structure is roughly equal across the service
branches. Of the three Forces, the Army has the most solid and extensive teaching system,
Clóvis Brigagão and Domício Proença Júnior, “Apresentação”. In Brasil e o Mundo: Novas Visões, 10-11. Emphasis in the
original. Brigagão and Proença, Concertação Múltipla, 35-37. Please not that unless otherwise noted, all translations are
free translations by the author from the original Brazilian Portuguese.
20 For a comprehensive study of the role of academics in security policy formulation in Brazil, see Kai Michael Kenkel,
Whispering to the Prince: Academic experts and national security policy formulation in Brazil, South Africa and Canada, (Ph.D. thesis,
Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, 2005), 75-135. This chapter also discusses the military educational
system, its doctrine and the development of the academic discipline of security studies in Brazil.
19
10
consisting of almost 50 schools and academies.21 At the apex of the system sits the Escola
Superior de Guerra (ESG) or Higher War College, the only inter-service academy. Modeled
after the U.S. National War College, ESG still clearly shows the signs of the institutional
arrangements its founding officers encountered during their post-war training in the United
States22 and the positivist traditions instilled by the French Mission militaire.23
ESG’s main function has been to establish discursive dominance: that is, to develop and
propagate the National Security Doctrine, and to install it as the optic through which matters
of national security and military import are discussed in Brazil24. A key component of this
mission is to extend the sway of the Doctrine’s vocabulary beyond the sphere of the military
schools. Therefore, although it is an eminently military institution, a notable percentage of
ESG’s students are civilians. According to Alexandre Barros, this aligns with the school’s
function as a training center for an elite chosen to implement the military’s project for the
development of Brazil:
The military had developed inside their corporation a project which involved
civilians and military [sic] in the continual building of the nation state. However,
the civilian side of this group was incapable—as defined by the military—both
in quality and in quantity, to perform many of the tasks the military felt that had
to be performed, thus forcing the military to rationalize their stay in power for at
least some time, while the elite which the military were training achieved the
required degree of “maturity”, again as defined by the military.25
Alfred Stepan’s interpretation of ESG’s role within the military establishment applies
equally to the military’s view of its role in the civilian world:
the ESG performed a central function within the Brazilian military. Precisely
because the Brazilian military valued doctrinal order and subjected its members
Presentation by General-de-Divisão Paulo César de Castro at the Seminário Política de Defesa para o Século XXI, Câmara dos
Deputados, Brasília, Brazil, 21 August 2002.
22 Alexandre de Souza Costa Barros, The Brazilian military: professional socialization, political performance and state building. (Ph. D.
thesis, University of Chicago, 1978), 172; Alfred Stepan, “The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military
Role Expansion,” in Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future, ed. Alfred Stepan (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1973), 54.
23 Barros, Brazilian military, 82; see also Domício Proença Júnior and Eugênio Diniz, Política de defesa no Brasil: Uma análise
crítica (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1998), 44-45.
24 See Stepan, “New Professionalism”, 57-59.
25 Barros, Brazilian military, 169.
21
11
to a systematic socialization process at all levels of its schooling system, they had
a requirement for one institution constantly to systematize, update, and
disseminate the official doctrine of national security and development. The ESG
had this task. Thus, although not a center or initiative, it was the authorized
source of military ideology for the military as institution.26
The goal of ESG’s activities, embodied in the National Security Doctrine, was the
operative keystone of discursive dominance: the homogenization of thinking on security
matters within the community of thinkers on the subject within Brazil.27 This sentiment was
expressed by President Geisel to the 1975 ESG class:
At the beginning of the course we have a completely heterogeneous group,
and in progression it reaches homogeneity by means of the common base,
which is the doctrine which establishes working methods to join for national
security the efforts and ideas of people from different sectors.28
The means utilized by ESG in pursuing this mission were the creation of the Doutrina de
Segurança Nacional and the various efforts undertaken over the years to assert its discursive
dominance. By its very nomenclature—based on the pursuit of goals termed “Permanent
National Objectives”—the DSN seeks to establish itself as the only valid security discourse:
By classifying an objective as national and permanent, one creates a situation
in which discordance is not only the distinct position of a citizen interested in
coming up with alternative solutions for his country: it is treason against the
Fatherland. With this, divergence of opinion is de-legitimised and conflict
demonised, thereby annihilating the possibility of democratic cohabitation with
the differences inherent in a complex society.29
The Doctrine laid the foundations for human rights abuses by the military government in
its treatment of the question of internal aggression. In particular, agencies such as National
Intelligence Service (SNI) were able to claim that their operational methods were in
accordance with what was called for in the doctrine.30 A further problem, specifically with
Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 47.
Hunter, Eroding Military Influence, 32; Iris Walquiria Campos, “Defesa Nacional,” in A Era FHC: um balanço, eds. Bolívar
Lamounier and Rubens Figueiredo (São Paulo: Cultura Editores Associados, 2002), 474-477.
28 Quoted in Wayne Selcher, “The National Security Doctrine and Policies of the Brazilian Government,” Military Issues
Research Memorandum (Carlisle Barracks: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1977), 5.
29 Proença and Diniz, Política de defesa no Brasil, 38. Emphasis in the original.
30 Ibid., 56-57.
26
27
12
regard to the democratic control of the armed forces, is the equality the Doctrine establishes
between its four “expressions of National Power”. Specifically, as Proença points out, the
military “expression” is not subordinated to the political “expression” of power, and thus is
not effectively subordinated to it.31
Proença notes that civil society is alienated from military and defense issues due to the
moral legacy of military rule and the way the subject is taught at university. Civil society,
according to Proença, lacks the information and technical structures to be active in defense
issues; this, he asserts, is similarly true of civilian defense policymakers. The military, on the
other hand, while claiming a monopoly on competence on military issues, are alienated from
effective debate by an inability to deal with such questions except in strictly “technicoprofessional” terms. Uniformed planners thus lack an informed perspective as to the
political consequences of military decisionmaking.32
Proença considers the effect of ESG doctrine on the way in which military issues are
discussed in Brazil to have been devastating:
W]e are experiencing the continuation of a situation which disqualifies both
civilians and the military, and which further faces, on the path to its articulation,
the diffuse obstacle of the ESG doctrine. The civilians see themselves restricted
to an understanding which is entirely divorced from the reality of military
practice and theory as taught in the country’s war colleges. The military risk
losing sight of the instrumental function of their institutions and their own
corporate raison d’être. And the privileged space of the highest school of politicostrategic studies engenders the continuation of a double divorce: between society
and the armed forces, and between the knowledges of the [military schools] and
the [civilian universities]. In this way the distance between the armed forces and
society is reified, with the DSN serving more to disorient than to assist those
who base themselves on its constructs.33
Domício Proença Júnior, “Uma Visão da Defesa Nacional no Governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso,” Consultancy
Report note during publishing of A Era FHC: um balanço, 3.
32 Ibid., pp. 2-3.
33 Ibid., p. 4.
31
13
This situation was exacerbated by the exalted nature of ESG as the highest military
school. The academy became increasingly isolated as its special position made its leaders
loath to open to outside input:
This dynamic of theoretical and methodological re-adaptation was marked by
two salient characteristics. First, such movements were always undertaken from
the inside of ESG, and always bore the mark of principles and conceptions that
had an original ESG profile. Thus the circle of production and transmission of
knowledge and perceptions of reality—marked by some form of internal
control—closed, be it due to their own doctrinal limits and/or the impositions
established by the teaching method, with the aim of tying the discussions and
analyses in to the theoretical maxims of the school in the most efficient way.34
ESG was nevertheless successful in its primary mission: in the words of a former
instructor at the Army Command and General Staff College (ECEME), “to control and
make uniform the language of security”35. In this pursuit, one academic noted that “no
civilian institute or university could hope to compete with it in effectiveness”.36 Efforts to
revamp security policy today must be seen against this backdrop of explicitly brought about
military dominance of the language used to discuss matters of national defense.
First steps towards a democratic defense policy: 1994-1999
The reactive nature of policymaking in Brazil leads to a notoriously lethargic pace of
reform. The defense policy reforms of the late 1990s were the delayed result of the end of
the Cold War37 and the creation of Mercosul in 1995. The nature of these changes led to very
different policy goals on either side of the military-civilian divide. Civilian policymakers saw
this period of uncertainty as an opportunity to assert greater policy control. The military
José Luiz Niemeyer dos Santos Filho, “Busca-se a segurança, planeja-se a defesa: uma introdução à (re)discussão dos
conceitos de segurança e de defesa nacional na realidade brasileira ontem e hoje,” Paper presented at the Conference on
Research and Education in Defense and Security Studies (REDES 2002), August 7–10, 2002, Brasilia, Brazil. p. 5.
Emphasis mine.
35 Interview with Sergio Dias da Costa Aita, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 27 August 2002.
36 Selcher, National Security Doctrine, 4.
37 Martins and Zirker, “Identity Crisis,” 144.
34
14
establishment, deprived of its traditional missions and mired in an identity crisis38, sought to
develop as rapidly as possible a new set of missions allowing it to stave off a decline in its
policy influence.
Alexandre Fuccille highlights that uncertainty among soldiers derived primarily from
preoccupation with finding a new mission regarding internal security39 similar to earlier ones
underpinned by the National Security Doctrine. The specter of an “internal enemy” served
the purpose of perpetuating the military’s self-perceived role as a poder moderador. Some
analysts noted an initial rise of hardline nationalist discourse in public statements by military
leaders, which appears to have faded with favourable treatment under the government of
Fernando Henrique Cardoso.40
As noted, the two primary stimuli for policy change were the end of the Cold War and
the establishment of Mercosul. As Fuccille points out, the collapse of communism
effectively invalidated two of the three dominant operational hypotheses in Brazilian military
planning at the time. While the threat of regional conflict—having been minimal to begin
with—waned in the face of increasing economic integration, global and (internal) subversive
conflict entirely lost credibility as conflict hypotheses.41 Among these three scenarios, the
subversive “internal enemy” created the most serious problem for civilian policy control. It
not only directly challenged democratic governance by viewing the populace as a potential
enemy, but further served as the justification for the military’s interventionist role in politics.
Its disappearance as an accepted rationale in security planning placed the armed forces’
See the synoptic chapter in Luís Alexandre Fuccille, As forças armadas e a temática interna no Brasil contemporâneo: uma análise da
construção de missões de ordem e segurança internas no período pós-guerra fria (M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal de São Carlos,
1999), 10-22; the chapter on the military identity crisis in Eliézer Rizzo de Oliveira, De Geisel a Collor: Forças Armadas,
Transição e Democracia (Campinas: Papirus Editora, 1994) and Martins and Zirker, “Identity Crisis.”
39 Fuccille, temática interna, 13-14.
40 Martins and Zirker, “Identity Crisis,” 143.
41 Fuccille, temática interna, 11.
38
15
legitimate sphere of action definitively outside Brazil’s borders and ended the directly
interventionist aspect of the military’s role as a “moderating power”:
The nature of threats facing the region is important in justifying which roles
and missions the military plays. The end of the Cold War and the widespread
disappearance of guerrilla insurgencies and their external sponsors have largely
invalidated internal security missions for Latin America’s armed forces.42
The advent of Mercosur removed Argentina from the list of plausible threats, requiring
the military to adopt other external threat scenarios if it wanted to justify its prestige and
privilege. This, and the desire to maintain a presence within the country’s borders, led to a
focus on both internal missions such as drug trafficking and transnational crime, and on
instability in Colombia as a potential source of threat to Brazil. Both approaches grafted
neatly onto the military’s strong position in Amazonia, which became a renewed focus for
strategists in uniform.43
The first serious efforts to develop a national defense policy—beyond that produced
exclusively within the individual service branches—began in 1994. The result was the Política
de Defesa Nacional (National Defense Policy—PDN). This document, though a large step in
the direction of declaratory policy, quickly proved insufficient.
The 1996 National Defense Policy
Much of the preparatory work for the 1996 PDN was done within the Secretariat for
Strategic Affairs (Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos—SAE), a successor organization to the
notorious National Intelligence Service. In 1993, several meetings were held within SAE to
discuss the country's future security policy. Around this time, weekly co-ordination meetings,
chiefly on the country's South American strategy and international security issues, began to
42
43
Hunter, “State and Soldier,” 3.
Brigagão and Proença, Concertação Múltipla, 62.
16
be convened by Ambassador José Viegas Filho (who later became Defense Minister from
2003 to 2004) in the Foreign Ministry.44
The SAE meetings eventually increased in frequency; 1994 was an election year, in which
Itamar Franco ceded the Presidency for Fernando Henrique Cardoso's first mandate. In
response to an article by an influential academic45, SAE researcher Thomaz Guedes da Costa
wrote a policy paper in which he pointed out the immediate need for a declaratory policy
document outlining directives and a clear national defense policy.46
Flores called a meeting at which Costa's paper was used as a starting point for broader
discussions on the country's defense policy needs. Based on these discussions, an InterMinisterial Working Group was convened to lay the foundations for a policy document. By
September 1994 this group—composed of mid-career representatives of the three armed
Forces, SAE, the Armed Forces General Staff and the Foreign Ministry—had produced a
document entitled Bases para uma política de defesa (Foundations for a Defense Policy). As its
title implies, this document was solely intended to provide the basic guidelines for a
declaratory document. As such, it brought together for the first time the viewpoints of all of
the relevant government institutions, but did not go beyond an initial cataloguing and
synthesis of viewpoints.47
Presented with the document three months before he was to leave office, President
Franco left the task of acting on it to his successor, Cardoso. An administrative
reorganization led to a delay of two years in the defense program discussion and four years’
lag in the creation of the Ministry of Defense. Cardoso created another Working Group—
this time at the level of general officers or equivalents, consisting of eight members and
Interview with Prof. Thomaz Guedes da Costa, Washngton, D.C., 3 September 2002.
Geraldo Lesbat Cavagnari Filho, “Alguns subsídios para definição da segurança nacional,” Premissas 6 (1994), 24-46.
46 Interview with Prof. Thomaz Guedes da Costa, 3 September 2002.
47 Ibid.
44
45
17
including the Civilian Household (Casa Civil) and Casa Militar—which began to discuss the
need for a defense policy document. The Navy's representative, Admiral Miguel Ângelo
Davena, pointed out that such a document already existed. It is in this slight misstatement
that many of the problems surrounding the 1996 PDN are grounded.48
The “Foundations” document—intended only as a basic starting point for the policy
development process—was adopted verbatim as the 1996 Política de Defesa Nacional. The words
“Bases para uma” were simply dropped and this first, quite basic document used
inappropriately as a declaratory policy document. This led to harsh criticism of the document
as inadequate and to an immediate revival of cries for a new document following the
creation of the Ministry of Defense in 1999.49 The PDN is not suited as a measure of the
state of the debate on security issues in Brazilian civil society, as it was produced without
input from outside the executive branch. However, as the product of a working group with a
mixed civilian and uniformed composition, the PDN does reflect both new and old thinking.
It retains much of the geopolitically-based reasoning of the National Security Doctrine—and
its preoccupation with the Amazon Basin—but notably refrains from extending the purview
of the Armed Forces inside the country’s borders.
What is innovative about the PDN is its establishment of a defensive force posture for
Brazil. The entry of non-offensive defense into parlance marks a departure from traditional
Brazilian strategy50, and it is not without its detractors.51 Due to its history and vague nature
as, in essence, a catalogue of first approaches to a unified strategy by various government
organs, the PDN was not suited as the basis for concrete defense policy. Thus, once sworn
Ibid.
Ibid.
50 Interview with Prof. Eliézer Rizzo de Oliveira, Campinas, Brazil, 27 June 2002; Interview with Alexandre Fuccille,
Campinas, Brazil, 1 July 2002.
51 Geraldo Lesbat Cavagnari Filho, “Subsídios para revisão da Política de Defesa Nacional”. Suggestions submitted to the
Ministry of Defence, Brasília, as a member of the “Comissão de Notáveis [Experts’ Commission],” 30 June 2000.
48
49
18
into his second term and with the new unified Defense Ministry in place, Cardoso tasked the
new Ministry with establishing a viable defense policy more independent of the previous
strategic calculus.
Institutional change: the creation of the Ministry of Defense
The defense policymaking landscape shifted dramatically with the creation of the Ministry
of Defense (MD) in 1999, both in terms of responsibility for policymaking and of civilian
involvement. Brazil is one of the last countries in the world to submit its Armed Forces to
the control of a unified Ministry of Defense; this alone is a testament to the autonomy
accorded the Armed Forces fully a decade after the adoption of a democratic Constitution.
Cardoso proposed the creation of a Ministry of Defense very rapidly upon taking office in
1994, and commissioned the Armed Forces General Staff to conduct a feasibility study.52
The creation of a Ministry of Defense encountered considerable initial resistance from the
separate branches of the armed forces, especially the Navy, although all three eventually
conceded the inevitability of such a move and came round to support the idea fully in public.
The General Staff study concluded that of 179 countries evaluated, only 23 did not possess a
unified Ministry of Defense, and of these, only three were of sufficient military stature to
warrant the creation of one.53
Brazil's three Singular Forces maintained their own Ministries until 1999, allowing their
influential Commanders direct access to the President of the Republic—no small prerogative
in Brazil's presidentialist system of government. Furthermore, each service branch developed
52
53
See Oliveira, Democracia e Defesa Nacional, 140-150.
Campos, “Defesa Nacional,” 460; Luís Alexandre Fuccille, “A criação do Ministério da Defesa no Brasil: inovação e
continuidade”. Paper presented at the Conference on Research and Education in Defense and Security Studies
(REDES 2002), August 7–10, 2002, Brasilia, Brazil. 2; Eliézer Rizzo de Oliveira, “Brasil. O Ministério da Defesa: a
implantação da autoridade”. Paper presented at the Conference on Research and Education in Defense and Security
Studies (REDES 2002), August 7–10, 2002, Brasília, Brazil, 10.
19
its own independent policy; the Armed Forces General Staff did not possess a coordination
function as in many other states. Not surprisingly, the General Staff's studies suggested that
a Defense Ministry be placed alongside the extant military ministries, maintaining the
established prerogatives at the same level. The study listed nine reasons why the creation of a
Defense Ministry was superfluous; these betrayed a total lack of comprehension of the
motivations behind the democratic control of armed forces.54 Cardoso quickly rejected these
proposals and instituted yet another Working Group the composition of which itself left
much to be desired in terms of civil-military relations. Coordinated by the head of the Casa
Civil, the group included the three military branch Ministers, the Foreign Minister, as well as
the Heads of the Armed Forces General Staff, the Military Household, and SAE.55
Ultimately, the three branch ministries were extinguished and the Commanders of each
service branch placed directly under the Minister of Defense. The Force Commanders
remain powerful, although there is considerable debate as to the extent of the prerogatives
they have de facto been able to retain.56 The Armed Forces General Staff was given a new
function and re-christened the Defense General Staff (Estado-Maior da Defesa—EMD). The
Intelligence portfolio ceased to be a Cabinet post57 and was placed under the oversight of the
Office for Institutional Security (Gabinete de Segurança Institucional—GSI), which succeeded the
Military Household as a Cabinet-level organ of the Presidency. The head of that office is
now the only uniformed member of the Cabinet.
On 1 January 1999, Cardoso nominated a regional politician, Élcio Álvares, Extraordinary
Minister for Defense. Ambassador Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg, a career diplomat with
Oliveira, REDES, 8-9.
Oliveira, REDES, 14; Oliveira and Soares, “Brasil,” 112.
56 This disagreement was carried out, for example, between Oliveira and Fuccille—then respectively a Professor and his
Ph.D. student at the prestigious Núcleo de Estudos Estratgicos at the University of Campinas—during their
presentations of their papers, cited above, at the panel on the Brazilian Ministry of Defence at the REDES conference
in Brasília in August 2002. Oliveira has since retired; Fuccille has gone on to work in the Ministry of Defense.
57 See Martins and Zirker, “Identity Crisis,” 144.
54
55
20
considerable experience in the defense arena gained during his time as head of SAE, was
rejected by the military due to parochial rivalries with the Foreign Ministry.58 Álvares'
mission was to oversee the establishment of the Defense Ministry, which was not to be
instituted officially until 10 June of that year. Due to a political scandal, Álvares' tenure in the
position was short; he was replaced by the former Attorney-General of the Republic,
Geraldo Magela de la Cruz Quintão, in January 2000.
Despite Cardoso's desire to fill the post of Minister of Defense with a civilian expert on
defense issues, both Álvares and Quintão were complete newcomers to the subject, a
situation criticized by many observers. While Quintão’s successor José Viegas had some
grounding in matters of defense, the current office-holder, Vice President José Alencar, is
again a defense neophyte, which adds to the problems facing the Ministry with respect to its
institutional strengthening.
Chief among the Ministry’s tasks, given the current situation of mission uncertainty
within the military and the urgent need for consolidation, is the crafting of a revised National
Defense Policy. The Ministry’s Division of National Defense Policy did not hesitate to begin
this process and began a search for assistance from civil society in 2000. The secondary goals
of this effort were to carve out the Ministry’s competencies vis-à-vis other governmental
bodies and to secure its budget. A mid-level career diplomat was seconded to act as special
advisor to Quintão and oversee this process.
This advisor set about examining the writings of the Brazilian academic security studies
community and taking recommendations as to which other experts might be called upon.
Once his selection had been made, it consisted of a group comprised of eight academics, six
58
On the subordination of defense policy to foreign policy—a strategy very consistently followed by civlian policymakers in
Brazil—in the Argentine context see David Pion-Berlin, “Civil-Military Circumvention: How Argentine State
Institutions Compensate for a Weakened Chain of Command,” in Pion-Berlin ed., Civil-Military Relations in Latin
America: New Analytical Perspectives, 151-154.
21
military officers (all retired except for one), five career diplomats, two politicians, and one
journalist. This group was known as the Comissão de Notáveis or Experts’ Commission.
Together with input from each of the service branches as well as elements within the
Ministry of Defense, the papers received from the Experts were distilled into a document
designed to serve as the cornerstone of efforts to create new policies, entitled Modernização do
Sistema de Defesa Nacional (Modernization of the National Defense System). This document is
considered confidential, is not publicly accessible, and had not received Ministerial approval
as of Spring 2005.
The policy process was centered once again on a further Working Group, this one
comprised of flag-rank representatives of the three Forces, as well as delegates from each of
the subdivisions of the Ministry, the Defense General Staff, and the Minister’s (civilian)
Special Advisors. Most members of the group were active-duty officers, though a small
number of them were civilians.59
The head of the Ministry’s policymaking division at the time assessed the normative
content of the ensuing document as follows:
Obviously there was a lot of reaction to the initial proposals, given the
conservative position of the military establishment. … At the end we had a
result that I would classify as possible in the given situation, but which goes only
halfway towards a more daring and creative project. At least in one area we
scored a victory; the approach to security was transformed into a multidimensional task, removing it from the exclusive responsibility of the Armed
Forces.60
Who wins out? Discourse, institutions and defence policy in Brazil:
marginalization and confusion
59
60
Interview with Rudibert Kilian Júnior and Gunther Rudzit, Brasília, Brazil, 22 August 2002.
E-mail from Rudibert Kilian Júnior, received 2 September 2002.
22
Beyond legal-institutional structures, the 1988 Constitution made an attempt to reverse
the all-inclusive discursive logic of security grounded in the National Security Doctrine. The
term segurança (security) was stricken from legal usage and no mention made of it in the
document. In public parlance the term has largely been replaced by defesa (defense)61. The
shift from segurança to defesa has effectively removed non-military issues from the military
ambit; issues such as internal security have been, at least de jure, removed from the armed
forces’ purview.
De facto, however—and here we return to the main claim underlying this analysis—the
effectiveness of this shift, together with the new institutional arrangements that accompanied
it—is strongly hampered by the unabated pervasiveness of the previous security language.
For example, the shift from internal to external threats embodied by segurança and defesa in
fact retains the sectorialisation of the security concept established in the DSN. Militarisation
and demilitarisation of certain security fields are placed on a dangerously similar conceptual
footing.
Terminological confusion
Perhaps the most pervasive discursive legacy of the DSN is exactly its definition of the
meanings of and relationship between the notions of “security” and “defense”. An extremely
widely-held notion in both uniformed and civilian security circles in Brazil is General Lyra
Tavares’ 1966 formulation that “security is a state of being, while defense is an act—directly
tied to a given type of characterized and measured threat.”62 ESG founder Castelo Branco
outlined the conceptual relationship between the two more clearly one year later:
61
62
The same holds true in the Argentine context; see Fitch, 112.
Brazil, Escola Superior de Guerra, Fundamentos da Doutrina (Rio de Janeiro: Escola Superior de Guerra, 1981), 206.
23
[t]he traditional concept of national defense places more emphasis on the
military aspects of security, and, by correlation, on problems of external
aggression. The notion of security is more inclusive. It comprises, so to speak,
the comprehensive defense of institutions, incorporating, for this purpose, the
psycho-social aspects, the preservation of development and internal political
stability; beyond this, the concept of security, much more explicitly than that of
defense, takes into account internal aggression, in the form of infiltration and
ideological subversion.63
The ongoing terminological confusion concerning the definition of defense and security
favors the continued predominance of the military standpoint in the security discourse. The
terms segurança and defesa have a strong stigma attached to them in non-military circles in
Portuguese usage. To this day,
Psychologically, intellectuals are inclined to view their colleagues who are
dedicated to topics such as military history, civil-military relations, and related
issues, as “infiltrated” or “reactionaries of the right”, despite the fact of many of
the latter having suffered in their own flesh and blood the repression inherent to
military dictatorships. On the other hand, or perhaps as a consequence, the
academy closed itself to these issues, withdrawing from them epistemic dignity.
This conduct permitted the militaries to continue to exercise their monopoly
over thinking on such eminently civilian issues as strategy, defense and security.64
For some intellectuals, the pendulum has swung too strongly in the other direction, and
they decry what they perceive as the negation by their colleagues of any role for the armed
forces in Brazilian society.65 Whatever their views on the subject, there is near unanimity
among leading Brazilian security scholars that there is a stigma on the term “security” as a
result of their strong condemnation of repression committed while in government.66
Marginalization
Ibid, 207.
Héctor Luis Saint-Pierre, “Os Estudos Estratégicos Na Academia: Análise De Um Grupo Binacional”. Paper presented at
the Conference on Research and Education in Defense and Security Studies (REDES
2001), Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, May 22–25, 2001, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., 2.
65 Proença and Diniz, Política de defesa no Brasil, p. 28.
66 Interviews with Prof. Eliézer Rizzo de Oliveira, 27 June and 1 July 2002; Interview with Coronel (ref.) Geraldo Lesbat
Cavagnari Filho, Campinas, Brazil, 1 July 2002; Interview with Prof. Shiguenoli Miyamoto, Campinas, Brazil, 27 June
2002; Interview with Priscila Antunes, Campinas, Brazil, 27 June 2002; Interview with Prof. Clóvis Brigagão, Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, 1 August 2002; Interview with Prof. René Armand Dreifuss, 19 July 2002; Interview with Prof. Thomaz
Guedes da Costa, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., 3 September 2002.
63
64
24
Proponents of a military monopoly over the security discourse have used three main
tactics67 to maintain the exclusion of civilian security analysts. The first move is to
appropriate for themselves of the role of “securitising actor” for the Brazilian nation and/or
state, claiming to speak in the name of Brazil and its “needs”.68 A second tactic consists of
publicly questioning the expertise, experience, and specialized knowledge of civilians as
compared to analysts from within the military. Finally, the Doctrine’s proponents
marginalize competing discourses by claiming their own political/ideological objectivity with
respect to dealing with the armed forces and military issues while accusing other discourses
of bias.
One retired general claimed that “the academics in civil society need to develop the
capacity to bring their debate up to the higher level of that within the military; they will
gladly have the barracks doors opened to them once they are competent.”69 Another direct claim
was formulated by a then-student at the Army Command and General Staff School
(ECEME) in A Defesa Nacional. This is Brazil's only journal dealing explicitly with defense
issues; as an ECEME journal it is in essence a vehicle for the proliferation of the armed
forces’ viewpoint and thus often of ESG doctrine. The author points out the incompatibility
of academic notions with the true necessities of running the country in an article that
manages to include in a short space all three of the marginalising tactics mentioned above.70
Neither the armed forces nor the large and influential body of ESG alumni can usefully
be portrayed as monolithic, however; one ESG alumnus places the onus of the lack of
Alfred Stepan discusses similar discursive moves as “techniques of neutralization” in Rethinking Military Politics, 50-51.
On securitising actors, see Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: a new framework for analysis (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 1998), 40-42.
69 Presentation by Gen. Valmir Fonseca Azevedo Pereira at the Conference on Research and Education in Defense and
Security Studies (REDES 2002), August 9, 2002, Brasília, Brazil. Emphasis mine.
70 Sergio Paulo Muniz Costa, “As elites, os intelectuais e os militares,” A Defesa Nacional 759 (1993), 42.
67
68
25
information circulating in the civilian security community squarely on the shoulders of the
armed forces themselves:
The Nation's civil segment is comprehensively under-informed about the real
conditions of the Armed Forces. A real ignorance exists, on the part of society
as a whole, about the quality and quantity of military equipment and arms in use
in Brazil. […]
In large part, those responsible for this disinformation are the Armed Forces
themselves, who create a false image and remain hermetically closed to the
discussion of certain issues, often alleging the inexistence outside of the military
segment of interlocutors capable of understanding them.71
These marginalizing tactics have succeeded in producing a situation in which the Brazilian
Armed Forces, despite the strengthening of the institutions of civilian control, continue to
determine the very language that frames the security debate in Brazil. Although defense
policy is now made in a civilian-led Ministry of Defense, there are strong indicators of the
ongoing dominance of priorities reflecting the military standpoint grounded in the DSN.
The creation of the Ministry of Defence has yet to produce civilian-dominated determination
of defense policy outcomes. Though the armed forces lost institutional influence over the
governing process, they were able to retain both an internal role and budgetary privileges,
through discursive dominance, by refocusing their mission on the Amazon Basin.
The military’s plans to increase its role in Amazonia came to fruition with the
inauguration in 2002 of the SIVAM (Sistema de Vigilância da Amazônia—Amazonian
Surveillance System).72 A system of radars and intervention forces ostensibly designed to
combat drug trafficking and monitor the spillover of the Colombian civil war into Brazilian
territory, SIVAM’s high profile highlights the success of the armed forces in returning the
Delano Teixeira Menezes, “A Necessidade de uma Política de Defesa,” Parcerias Estratégicas 5 (1998), 117. Note that the
term “segment” is itself associated with the vocabulary of the DSN.
72 Martins and Zirker discuss in detail the continuing role of the military in the Amazon; “Identity Crisis,” pp. 160-163.
71
26
Amazon to prominence in current Brazilian defense decisionmaking.73 This continued focus
on the Amazon is a clear continuation of a ditadura-era military focus into the democratic era
despite the presence of new decision-making bodies designed to mitigate this type of policy
outcome.
The formerly entirely independent Escola Superior de Guerra has been subordinated to a
newly-created Division of Studies and Cooperation (Divisão de Estudos e de Cooperação—
SECO) within the Ministry of Defence. SECO’s mission is precisely to foster dialogue with
civil society—academics in particular—and to increase specialized knowledge of defense
matters both within and outside the Ministry. The Ministry has organized a series of open
debates with civilian experts and initiated a thorough-going process of revamping Brazilian
security policy on the basis of the results of that interaction, as well as the traditional policy
bureaucracy.
Conclusions
The above analysis shows the ineffectiveness of new institutions alone in curbing military
autonomy with respect to policy outcomes; these latter, however, are the most effective
measure of civilian control. The Brazilian case illustrates how this situation can be ascribed
to a failure on the part of civilian policymakers to neutralize the discursive dominance of the
military establishment, and to a lack of expertise on defense issues within civil society.
Recent policy documents continue either to be the product of stymied formulations
73
See, inter alia, Thomaz Guedes da Costa, “Brazil’s SIVAM: As It Monitors the Amazon, Will It Fulfill Its Human Security
Promise?,” Environmental Change & Security Project Report 7 (2001), 47-58; Humberto José Lourenção, “O Sistema de
Vigilância da Amazônia (SIVAM) e a Defesa Nacional,” A Defesa Nacional 784 (1999), 93-105; Humberto José
Lourenção, “A defesa nacional e a Amazônia: o projeto Sivam”. Paper presented at at the Conference on Research and
Education in Defense and Security Studies (REDES 2002), August 9, 2002, Brasília, Brazil; and Michael S. Oswald, The
Broadening of “Security” for Brazilian Amazônia? The SIPAM/SIVAM Project and the Politics of National Security in Democratic
Brazil (M.A. Thesis, University of New Mexico, 1995).
27
processes or to reflect the continued usage of security terminology replete with connotations
that favor military autonomy and intervention.
The broader implications of this finding—particularly in the South American ambit—
follow political events on the ground. The latest era of military dictatorships came to an end
a generation ago, and today’s focus, both theoretically and in practice, is on evaluating the
quality of civil-military relations under the democratic regimes that have followed the
“abertura”. The present discussion of discursive practices in the Brazilian context clearly
shows that ongoing military discursive dominance undermines civilian control in posttransitional democracies.
Desirable civil-military relations “cannot be simply defined as the absence of military
intervention. Avoidance of coups is not the same as civilian control”74. The next frontier is
the content of policy itself: measures of civilian policy control must now also focus on what
is being said during the policy process, alongside the traditional focus on who is sitting at the
table. If the discursive boundaries of the policy debate remain unchanged, it is immaterial
whether those who formulate the resulting policies are wearing pinstripes or camouflage, as
there is likely to be little difference in the end result.
The essence of the democratic imperative is that the government reflects the will and
capacity of the people. If competence is not built up within civil society and the security
discourse opened, institutions designed to assert civilian control will remain empty vessels. It
is incumbent upon those institutions, particularly Ministries of Defense and parliamentary
oversight committees, to take a leading role in interacting with civilian defense experts. A
lack of civilian competence, coupled with formally instituted civilian supremacy, risks
bringing about a dangerous vacuum in the direction of national security policy.
74
Pion-Berlin, “Introduction”, 11.
28
Institutions are clearly the necessary first step in putting limits on military autonomy;
without substantive changes to the content of policy and discussion, however, over the long
term these bodies risk becoming Trojan horses for continued military domination in the
defence arena. The Brazilian experience suggests that overcoming military discursive
dominance is one key step in establishing long-term civilian control over policy content in
post-transition societies. South Africa is one such society that has seen success in adopting a
strategy of conscious discursive change. Brazilian policymakers appear to have grasped this
lesson very clearly and moved rapidly and decisively to implement it.
The recent additions to the purview of the Ministry of Defence, and the substantive
subordination of ESG, point in this direction. The road ahead is a long and uphill one—
there remain strong discursive practices yet to confront. Nevertheless, the conclusion that
Brazil’s policymakers have seen the importance of engagement with civil society, and the
creation of a new vocabulary of security, provides a heartening example for other countries
emerging from transitions to democracy.
29