American Geographical Society

Amazonia and the Politics of Geopolitics Author(s): Ronald A. Foresta Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 128-142 Published by: American Geographical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215427 Accessed: 19/07/2009 17:21
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AMAZONIA

AND THE POLITICS

OF GEOPOLITICS

RONALD A. FORESTA Since 1964, geopolitical doctrine and other political considerations have competed in shaping Brazilian policy for Amazonia. Early in the period, the military government employed geopolitics as the basis of Amazonian development but then downplayed geopolitics when its maxims failed to provide necessary progress. More recently, the successor civilian government, with no ideological commitment to geopolitics, has pursued Amazonian policies shaped by geopolitics to keep the military harmlessly occupied in a remote region of the country. The case of Brazil suggests that although geopolitics overtly stresses broad national interests, partisan politics can figure strongly in its employ.
ABSTRACT.

role of geopolitics in recent Amazonian development provides important insights on how geopolitics interacts with a nation's political life. Geopolitical doctrine was a key part of the Brazilian military's ideology, and the military government that ruled from 1964 to 1985 placed that doctrine at the center of the national political arena. Much Brazilian geopolitical writing focused on Amazonia and viewed the region as the key to the Brazilian future. Yet many other elements of Brazilian public life, including developmentalism, regional equalization, authoritarianism, and democratic resistance, also had an Amazonian dimension (Foresta 1991) and competed with geopolitics in informing Amazonian policy. How the competition played out reveals much about geopolitics as an element in the political life of a modern nation-state. DOCTRINE BRAZILIAN GEOPOLITICAL Brazilian thinking about the future of the country followed two distinct paths in the late nineteenth century. One was explicitly spatial. When the century began, the interiors of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Eurasia were largely domains known only to tribal peoples. By the last decades of the century, these interiors were being transformed into vast, settled regions of commercial agriculture, with the change propelling the states that contained them, such as the United States, Australia, and the Russian Empire, to power and prosperity. Brazilians assumed that their future as well was to be found in the continental interior. Many held that by shifting the heartland from the coast to the interior, Brazil would forge a strong sense of national identity and gain the power that a nation of its size deserved (Meira Mattos 1975, 41-49). The second path emerged from positivism, which envisioned an affluent, scientific, rational future achieved by social planning and beneficial author-

The

* DR. FORESTAis a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-1420.

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itarianism. That canon of thought had a strong influence throughout South America (Burns 1982, 132), but its effect on Brazilian intellectual life was extraordinary. The corruption and shortsighted politics of the era contrasted starkly with the exalted ideal of public life espoused by positivism (Haring 1968, 138-141). The Brazilian military of the late nineteenth century fashioned a sense of its place in national life from those two perspectives. The military vigorously embraced positivism, because it saw itself as the only institution in the pluralistic milieu of late-nineteenth-century Brazil with the discipline and selflessness to provide the benevolent authoritarianism that positivism favored. One nineteenth-century Brazilian observed that young officers were more familiar with the teachings of Comte than with conventional military subjects like ballistics and tactics (Haring 1968, 140). Although the popularity of positivism as an explicit doctrine declined in the early twentieth century, the attitudes it encouraged in the military about its own role in national life remained deeply ingrained. The military also shared the vision of the inland empire. The view of the interior as the key to the national future, combined with the tentativeness of Brazil's actual occupation of its western and northern territories, produced an undercurrent of national paranoia (Sternberg 1987). Brazil's neighbors and the great powers of the northern hemisphere were presumed to covet the region and its putative riches. The military had to defend the region and, with it, Brazil's future. Writers associated with the Brazilian military fused the indigenous vision of an inland empire with geopolitical ideas emanating from Europe into a distinctly Brazilian school of geopolitics in the 1920s and 1930s. Strongly influenced by the writings of Friedrich Ratzel (1897) and Rudolf Kjellen (1917), Mario Travassos (1935) and Everardo Backheuser (1926, 1952) stated what were to become the basic motifs (Hepple 1986): an organismlike interpretation of the Brazilian nation-state, an image of its long frontiers as flexible diaphragms rather than fixed boundaries, and a sense that a rising Brazil needed to bring more territory under its effective control to deepen its sense of nationhood. Travassos was also influenced by the thinking of Halford Mackinder (1904) and envisioned the Amazon basin as the South American equivalent of the Eurasian heartland. Brazil had to develop eastwest axes of settlement to secure the heartland before its neighbors did. Only through this interior thrust could Brazil fulfill what Travassos called its "continental destiny." Brazilian geopolitics also tapped positivist thought about benevolent authoritarianism. Geopolitical writers assumed that the interior could be conquered only if Brazil was under a government capable of marshaling and applying national resources with exceptional single-mindedness. Nery da Fonseca (1940) contended that Brazil could become a great power in twenty years under an efficient and determined government.

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The evolution of geopolitical thought in other South American countries followed a similar course. South American geopolitical writers were concerned with defending territorialclaims, especially to the little-explored lands in the continental interior, and saw the future of their countries as dependent on the expansion of the national ecumene into these areas. These writers usually perceived the military as the key instruments of national well-being. Whereas geopolitics went into decline in Europe after World War II, it remained vigorous in South America. In Brazil, prewar theoreticians remained active, and younger writers, foremost among them Golbery do Couto e Silva, emerged to continue and update the tradition. Couto e Silva (1957) was centrally concerned with Amazonia, which he saw as the core of the South American heartland. He stressed that although Brazil had gained sovereignty over much of the Amazon basin through diplomacy, the area would never be securely Brazilian unless fully occupied and integrated into national life. He perceived the world as a darkly competitive place. There was no middle ground for Brazil when it came to Amazonia; it could develop the region and secure grandeza(national greatness), or it could lose the region and, with it, Brazil's grand destiny. The Brazilian military continued to nurture the positivist component of its ideology. During the 1950s, Brazilian military thinkers elaborated the doctrine of seguranqay desenvolvimento(security and development), which held that national security and therefore the purview of the military extended beyond traditional defense considerations to the creation of a strong economy and a stable state (Hepple 1986).The doctrine of seguranSay desenvolvimento and the Brazilian geopolitical tradition were reticulately linked in the writings of Couto e Silva, who argued that only through the development of a modern economy would Brazilhave the resources to carry out the geopolitical agenda (Couto e Silva 1967; Selcher 1977). The post-World War II ideology of the Brazilian military was fashioned and disseminated at the Escola Superior de Guerra (National War College), founded in 1949 to train upper-level officers and selected civilians to perform executive and advisory functions in the Brazilian state. Most postwar geopolitical writers taught at the college, which promoted a centralized, goaloriented, security-conscious state and an expansive interpretation of the military's role in national life. Most of Brazil's general officers were graduates of the school and had been bathed in its doctrines by the early 1960s (Schneider 1971, 244). Disturbed by the spreading chaos of the Goulart presidency and fearing a leftist takeover, the military staged a coup d'etat in 1964. It settled into power and remained there for more than twenty years. The coup brought geopolitical doctrine and its forgers close to the center of the national political arena. Couto e Silva became an important figure in the military government as director of the powerful National Intelligence Service and as a close advisor to the president. General Meira Mattos, his younger associate and successor

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as the leading Brazilian geopolitical writer, played an active role in the coup and became an important member of the officer corps.
POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF AMAZON GEOPOLITICS

The geopolitical doctrines of the Brazilian military were merely unexpressed idea sets before it came to power, and praxis never had the opportunity to illuminate the contradictions that those doctrines might have contained. Furthermore, the doctrines sprang from two distinct fonts, which heightened the possibility of internal contradiction. The military in power also faced the complex and ever-changing task of administering the country, which raised the likelihood of problems for which its doctrines offered inadequate guidance or none at all. These conditions of doctrine and power greatly complicated the relationship between the military and geopolitical thought in Brazil (Hepple 1986). The military, nonetheless, quickly put its geopolitical doctrines into practice, especially with regard to Amazonia. In 1966, the government launched Operation Amazonia, the very name of which reflected military-style thinking and the goal-oriented aggressiveness of Brazilian geopolitical doctrine. The initiative aimed at increasing the region's population and forcing the pulse of its economy. Under the program, roads linking Amazonia to the rest of the country were upgraded and new ones were begun. A new development agency, the Superintendency for Amazon Development, and a new regional-development bank, the Bank of Amazonia, were established. Tax exemptions for investments in Amazonia were instituted. The city of Manaus was declared a free-trade zone. Even before the military launched Operation Amazonia, however, it began to put the positivist, focused-state side of its ideology into practice by centralizing economic decision-making and transforming the federal administration into a technocratic, development-promoting instrument (Schneider 1971). The ministries of planning and finance were turned into superministries and were given extensive budgets and policy control over the other ministries. Under the watchful eye of the military, these superministries put into practice many of the then-accepted international doctrines of development: assertion of strong state leadership of a capitalist economy, concentration on industrialization as the engine of modernization, cultivation of foreign investment, and promotion of exports, especially manufactured ones. The economists and technocrats to whom the generals had delegated the management of the national economy did not necessarily share the geopolitical perspective of the military leadership. Driven by prevailing doctrines of economic development, they favored investing in the regions with the greatest capacity to turn capital into efficient production, that is, the urbanized and relatively affluent southern parts of the country. They saw Amazonia as lacking the infrastructure for quick growth. Its low population density and remoteness from the national centers of industry prevented adequate

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returns on investments, especially in the distant western and northern parts of the region. They saw Amazonia's role in national growth as a secondary, supporting one: its raw materials would supply the industries of the south and earn foreign exchange (Kleinpenning 1977; Stone 1985, 84-85). In line with this perspective, top Brazilian economic planners encouraged foreign businessmen to invest in large resource-extraction projects in Amazonia. Daniel Ludwig committed to the massive Jari project in 1967, and the discovery of the Carajasiron-ore deposits that same year gave Amazonia another attraction for foreign investors. Thus, although the first years of the military regime were characterized by an intensification of federal development activity in Amazonia, the role of the region in building the national future remained unresolved, which reflected the contradiction at the center of the military vision of the national future. The contradiction-fed tensions about Amazonia produced a policy debate that spilled from the closed chambers of the junta in the late 1960s (Flynn 1979, 425-430). Afonso de Albuquerque Lima, a senior officer and the interior minister, opposed the concentration of development efforts in the south, with the argument that it exacerbated regional differences and left Amazoniaexposed to foreign designs. The development that had occurred in Amazonia, he contended, did not favor the national interest as seen through the lens of geopolitics. The incentive-driven growth of Amazonian cities and areas of commercial agriculture on the eastern and southern fringes of the region had left the interior and frontier areas dangerously underpopulated. Albuquerque Lima took a stand against the foreign-financed extraction projects, which he saw as loosening Brazil's grip on the region. He argued that Amazonia must be fully settled and made part of the national ecumene with domestic, not foreign, resources. He summed up his position with the phrase "integrar para nao entregar" (integrate the region or lose it). The federal government and the armed forces were seriously divided on the issues Albuquerque Lima raised, which ultimately hinged on whether to ignore or respect the imperatives of geopolitics. Several important figures in the government and many junior officers supported him. The technocratic establishment, which held that diverting capital from areas where it would produce maximum returns and cutting off the flow of foreign funds would dampen national growth, solidly opposed him. The debate caught the military on the two prongs of its own ideology. The issue was decided against Albuquerque Lima, who was forced from office. General Emilio Medici, the new president, excluded officers identified with Albuquerque Lima's views from the inner circle of power. Partly as a concession to the geopolitical perspective, however, Medici unveiled the National Integration Plan (PIN) in 1970. PIN called for the construction of the Transamazon Highway, running from northeastern Brazil westward across the heart of Brazilian Amazonia, and another highway from Cuiaba in Mato Grosso to Santarem on the banks of the Amazon in western Para

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1 \/-'

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i NORTHERN PERIMETER

SantarIn

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ittii :?i'~~'~~"".::V

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PIN Pioneering Highways Other Main Amazon Highways

FIG. 1.-PIN

PIN Initial Zone of Influence

highways and area of influence.

(Fig. 1). A network of feeder roads would be constructed from these highways, and large agrarian colonies would be established along them. A hierarchy of central places would be created ex nihilo to serve the developing regions, and landless peasants from the overpopulated northeast would be encouraged to migrate to the newly opened lands. Within five years, farms for 100,000 families would be provided; within ten years perhaps as many as a million. The Land Redistribution Program (PROTERRA) was established in 1971 to complement PIN by financing the acquisition of large landholdings for redistribution to small farmers on the frontier. The following year, PIN's overall budget was increased 40 percent, and a third pioneering road, the Northern Perimeter Highway, which would run just south of the northern border, was announced. PIN's planning documents urged placing the stamp of Brazilian settlement so firmly on Amazonia that Brazilian sovereignty would never be contested (Fearnside 1984, 47). PIN went poorly. In 1974, with only a few thousand colonists settled and many of them already failing, the project was canceled. The failure reflected badly on the geopolitical tradition. Like their earlier European counterparts, Brazilian geopolitical writers thought in sweeping terms. They envisioned vast developing regions spanning, indeed, ignoring, rivers, mountains, and other physical obstacles. They favored grand historical analogy over marshaling detailed proof; other continental interiors had been successfully settled during the nineteenth century, they contended, so in the twentieth

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century it was South America's turn. They had an ebullient but unplumbed faith in applied science, which Meira Mattos (1980, 147) asserted had broken "the tyranny of geography." Their level of argument did not lend them to scrutinize the failure of earlier organized settlements in Amazonia. Geopolitical writers had casually assumed that the causes of these failures, whatever they were, could be overcome by an act of national will. Geopolitical thinkers did not concern themselves with the specifics of the resource base on which Amazonian development must depend. They conveniently fell back on old myths of Amazonian riches, and let it go at that. Several factors seem to have contributed to the failure of PIN. Many colonists had farming skills inappropriate for the region. Access to credit, markets, and professional advice was inadequate. Conflicts between settlers and speculators were rife (Bunker 1979; Moran 1983; Stone 1985). Most important, however, seem to have been unrealistic expectations for the region itself. Detailed soil-fertility studies were seldom prepared before the agricultural colonies were situated, and as a result many were located on poor soils (Moran 1981, 109, 219-21). Nor were careful cost-benefit studies common; it was simply assumed, for example, that the roads associated with the project would prompt whatever levels of economic activity were needed to cover costs (Ministry of Transportation 1970), but they seldom did. In short, PIN seems to have foundered on exactly the details that geopolitics overlooked. Even as PIN was failing, Brazil progressed toward the greatness foreseen by its visionaries. Gross national product (GNP) doubled between 1967 and 1974, the years of vigorous growth called the miracle. By the mid-1970s, Brazil had emerged as the undisputed political and economic leader of South America. Brazil gained a new measure of international respect and came to "bask ... warmly in the sun of international finance and business approval" (Flynn 1979, 454). Brazil became an exemplar of progress in the developing world. After a decade of practical testing, the geopolitical paradigm seemed wrong in every particular. Brazil's new prosperity rested on industrialization and the modernization of agriculture in the long-settled and urbanized southern regions. Prosperity had accompanied increased trade and contact with the outside world, not involution. The value of Brazil's exports expanded at an average annual rate of 27 percent between 1968 and 1973. Amazonia's contribution to the new prosperity was minimal: the six northern states and territories contained only 4.2 percent of the Brazilian population in 1977, a rise of 0.4 percent compared with the previous decade; regional productivity per capita stood at less than 60 percent of the national average. The attempt to open Amazonia to the kind of pioneering that had tamed other continental interiors in the nineteenth century had been a drag on the national economy, not its engine. Although the mystique of an Amazon empire lingered in the media and the popular imagination, a very different picture of Amazonia's potential

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Manaus

MARAJO " MARAJO ALTAMIRA TAPAJOS ALTAMRA f ^ CARAJAS ,^ PRE-AMAZONIAN 1MARANHAO MAH

JURUA-SOLIMOES
0 ARIPUANA

ARAGUAIA-TOCANTINS

oACRE ,-.
-

^..-.
'.

,JURUENA RONDONIA
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XINGU-ARAGUAIA

0Cuiaba

0OBrasilia

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BRAZIL O
[ Calha Norte Zone of Operations

Concentrations Military POLAMAZONIA Development Pole

FIG. 2.-POLAMAZONIA

development poles and Calha Norte zone of operations.

was emerging from soil sampling, mineral prospecting, and aerial surveying by the 1970s. Scattered mineral deposits, including bauxite, iron ore, tin, and gold, and some areas of good soil were set in a regional matrix of poor soils and modest prospects. A uniformly settled Amazon in the stamp of the prosperous rural regions of the south now appeared unlikely. The new, more modest picture of Amazonia's potential was the foundation of the Second Plan for Amazonia (PDAM II). Scheduled to run from 1975 to 1979, the plan had at its heart the POLAMAZONIA program, which would maximize Amazonia's contribution to the national product through development of primary industries in fifteen selected areas (Fig. 2; Table I). The most expensive pole would focus on the enormous iron-ore deposits of Serra dos Carajas; another would center on large bauxite deposits along the Rio Trombetas. PDAM II was at best geopolitically neutral. Although it would bring people to Amazonia, it would concentrate them, leaving most of the region a demographic void. It would increase the economic pulse of the region, but it would rely heavily on foreign investments in doing so. Agriculture was a component of the plans, but for the most part it would be large-scale, capital-intensive agriculture concentrating on exports or serving the mass markets of the south, not the grass-roots pioneering that lay at the heart of the geopolitical vision. In fact, such pioneering was now actively discouraged in all but a few areas of Amazonia (Schmink 1982).

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW GEOPOLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY

Quite apart from being a false guide to national development, by the mid-1970s the Brazilian geopolitical tradition seemed like an outmoded basis for foreign policy. With its implication that the country would achieve greatness only if it secured the continental interior before one of its neighbors did, Brazilian geopolitics gave national prosperity the defining attribute of a private good: what was appropriated by one country was not available to another. This lent a competitive cast to Brazil's relationship with its neighbors, and rivalries for the interior became a cornerstone of Brazilian continental policy. Brazil's relations with the Andean countries especially were marked by mistrust regarding Amazonia. It was natural that the rapid economic growth of Brazil heightened the fears of its neighbors. A senior Peruvian military officer noted that Brazil was "like the United States a hundred years ago as it expands to the Pacific, and Peru is California" (Child 1985, 36). Venezuelan President Caldera attempted to form an alliance of Spanishspeaking countries to counter Brazilian expansionism, and Venezuelan efforts to develop its southern region had largely the same end (Bond 1980).
TABLEI-POLAMAZONIA
POLE

DEVELOPMENT POLES
ECONOMIC FOCUS

Xingu-Araguaia Ranching, beef processing Iron extraction Carajas Araguaia-Tocantins Ranching, mineral extraction, hydroelectricity production Trombetas Aluminum extraction Commercial farming (coffee, pepper, sugarcane) Altamira Pre-Amazonian Maranhao Ranching Commercial farming, tin extraction Rond6nia Rubber production Acre Juria-Solim6es Forestry Roraima Ranching, beef processing Tapaj6s Long-cycle crops, ranching, hydroelectricity production Amapa Fishing, forestry, manganese extraction Commercial farming, ranching Juruena Mineral extraction, forestry Aripuana Maraj6 Ranching, forestry, rubber production Source:Superintendency of Amazon Development 1979.

The economic miracle changed the calculus of Brazilian foreign policy. Having far outdistanced its neighbors in economic strength, Brazil had the self-assurance to discard its view of them as rivals. Cooperation rather than rivalry now seemed to promise higher yields; Brazil wanted access to its neighbors' markets and aspired to lead them en bloc in global politics (Roett 1984, 200). Even Brazilian geopolitical writers tried to adjust to this new selfassurance (Meira Mattos 1975; Olivera Lima 1975) and proposed Amazonian development as an international rather than strictly Brazilian endeavor. Meira Mattos envisioned vast development nodes spanning international boundaries, each dotted with cities, laced with roads and connected to population centers on the periphery of the basin.

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Brazilian diplomacy responded to this new foreign-policy thinking with efforts to forge Brazil's neighbors into a coterie of trading partners and political allies. The promotion of a treaty pledging all Amazonian countries to cooperate in management of the region was a key element of those efforts (Medina 1980). The neighbors were wary of the initiative, because relations had been competitive for too long. When Brazilian President Geisel and Bolivian President Suarez signed a pact pledging economic cooperation in 1974, students rioted in La Paz and Bolivian opposition politicians denounced it as a capitulation to Brazilian expansionism. The new strain of Brazilian geopolitical writing hardly put fears to rest: it mentioned cooperation but left no doubt as to the primacy of Brazil (Kelly 1984). Intense diplomatic efforts persuaded Brazil's neighbors to consider an Amazonian pact, but the draft of the agreement submitted by Brazil raised old fears. It echoed the Brazilian geopolitical tradition in its emphasis on defense and security. Clauses referring to regional economic integration and joint resources exploitation contained the newer integrationist themes in Brazilian geopolitics and sounded equally unsettling (Medina 1980). To allay these fears, Brazil needed a wholly different rationale for Amazonian cooperation, so diplomats negotiating the pact seized on environmental protection. Collective defense and regional development were downplayed in the new draft, and cooperation in protecting nature in the basin became prominent. The shift was successful: the Treaty of Amazon Cooperation was signed by the Amazonian countries in July 1978. With this treaty, Brazil set its international ambitions in a benign context far removed from geopolitics and cast an image of maturity and responsibility.
LATENT FUNCTIONS OF GEOPOLITICS

Brazilian geopolitics was excessively literal in its interpretation of the relationship between space and power, so development policies based on it ignored the important physical realities of Amazonia and failed. Its paranoid, aggressive qualities set the tone for a foreign policy that was counterproductive in a political environment where cooperation was increasingly valued. The failure of geopolitics to satisfy either domestic or foreign policy imperatives led to its eclipse by the late 1970s. Younger foreign-service and military officers discarded geopolitical theory, and even the curriculum of the Escola Superior de Guerra, the font of Brazilian geopolitical doctrine, deemphasized it. Brazilian geopolitical doctrine survived its failures and returned in force, albeit in a new form, as an element of national policy. In 1985, the year Brazil fully restored civilian government, the Calha Norte (Northern Trough) Project was unveiled. The product of the military-dominated National Security Council and a high-level interministerial working group, the project intended to secure the country's hold on its northern Amazon marches (Sanders 1987-88). The project was set in a government-manufactured at-

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mosphere of paranoia: it was justified on the basis of internal disorder in the neighboring countries, conflicting territorial claims, especially those of Guyana and Venezuela, and the possibility that unspecified east-west antagonisms might find their way into northern South America and loosen Brazil's grip on the region. The plan was accompanied by governmentinspired stories in the press about foreign missionaries working to turn the region into a huge, international Indian reserve. The Calha Norte Project envisioned a greatly increased military presence in a wide zone along the northern frontier and a forced pace of development to tie northern Amazonia more securely to the national economy. The project was still in effect at the beginning of the 1990s, incongruously set against more progressive actions like the establishment of protected natural areas and the expulsion of gold miners from Indian lands. Why were the old, discarded geopolitical approaches rejuvenated? One reason, perhaps, was that geopolitical ideology had become an instrument of institutional self-justification. The military's ideology had been forged during republican times, when the military was one of many interests and institutions clustered at the center of the national political arena, each wanting greater power and access to state resources. As the defender of Brazil's interior-based future and the instrument of its rational, progressive future, the military demanded a privileged position in the political order. The Brazilian military's geopolitical and positivist-inspired doctrines continued to serve these organizational ends well for most of the twentieth century. They were a basis for esprit in the military. They laid an ambitious claim to national resources for the military and to pride of place in the political order. Creating political space for ambition, sustaining a sense of self-importance, and resonating with prevailing public values, not verifiable correctness or internal consistency, were important in serving these institutional goals. Once the military was in power and its senior officer corps became an executive cadre with a purview that extended to the nation as a whole, logical inconsistencies and disjunction between doctrine and verifiable reality mattered a great deal. Its doctrines no longer had to argue for an expanded role or pride of place for the military in national affairs; the military had now seized both. Rather, geopolitics had to serve as a blueprint for economic growth. To be effective, the military government had to be accepted by the other elites and by much of the nation at large, but having overthrown a duly elected civilian government, it had no claims to legitimacy on constitutional grounds. Its claims therefore had to be based on the delivery of material benefits (Wesson and Fleischer 1983, 25). In short, the traditional geopolitical doctrines did not meet the needs of the military in power if they did not keep their promise of national prosperity. Instead, economic advance based in the southern heartland, not the conquest of the interior, brought a new sense of confidence and a new, proud place in the world order to Brazil and a legitimacy to its government.

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The reestablishment of democracy in the 1980s changed the roles of the main participants in Brazilian national politics. The democratic forces, previously repressed by the military, returned to power, and the military returned to the barracks and the wings of power for the first time in two decades. With this change in roles, the military and the democratic forces faced complementary challenges. The former had to find a satisfying niche for itself in the newly redemocratized, civilian-led nation. The latter had to keep the military, whose latent power remained formidable (Schneider 1991, 374), from becoming so dissatisfied with its reduced, apolitical role that it would attempt to retake the reins of government. The two strains of the military's traditional ideology, the geopolitical and the positivist, though mutually reinforcing, made somewhat different statements about the military's place in national life and consequently differed in their usefulness in different political circumstances. The positivist strain was compatible only with an authoritarian state under the direction of the military. It was, in fact, a thinly veiled argument for military control of the state. To be sure, the geopolitical strain had political biases: geopolitical writers envisioned their schemes of interior conquest carried out under authoritarian governments with the strength to marshal national will and resources for the task. Nevertheless, the geopolitical strain, unlike the positivist, was not inherently incompatible with a pluralist, democratic state in which the military was one of many focuses of power. The military could defend the interior base of future greatness under any type of government. It was therefore in the interest of both the new civilian government and the military to stress the geopolitical rather than positivist perspective on the latter's role in national life. In sum, the primary requirement of military doctrine was now exactly the opposite of what it was when the military was in power; the doctrine had to confer status and sense of institutional purpose, not successfully guide national policy. The great irony of this shift was well expressed in the Calha Norte Project. Whereas Amazonia's perceived centrality to the national future was one of the cornerstones of Brazilian geopolitical doctrine, it was the remoteness of the northern Amazonian frontier from the national ecumene and the relative unimportance to national well-being that now made it an ideal place to give vent to geopolitical thinking and thus to serve as a sink for military energies that might otherwise go into political misadventures.
CONCLUSION

No one case can provide a fully ramified theory of geopolitical expression. Yet the recent Brazilian experience does offer some generalizing insights capable of bearing the weight of prediction and theory. First, geopolitics as an idea set should not be exclusively associated with any specific historical era. Although the grand panoply of European history forged geopolitics, the Brazilian experience showed that geopolitics was capable of using whatever

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intellectual material the modern era offered in keeping its value referents current. Students of geopolitics have emphasized the degree to which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century geopolitical doctrine rested on many of the worst intellectual canards of the era, including geographical determinism, inappropriate organismic and sociological analogy, racial stereotyping, and teleological reasoning. Yet South American geopolitical doctrine remained vigorous in the late twentieth century, long after its original intellectual props were discredited. In the case of Brazil, it underwent a revival even after its lack of realism had led to manifest policy failure. All of this suggests that geopolitical expression is probably best understood in the context of immediate political environments. Geopolitical doctrine is a useful if specialized political instrument. It will be removed from the shelf of ideas about statecraft when some player deems it useful. Geopolitics will express itself in state agendas or policies when such expression serves the interests of those with the power to set agendas and policies. It will be returned to the shelf when its employ or espousal is no longer deemed useful by any important players. Even if a systematic understanding of geopolitical expression must accumulate casewise and inductively, the Brazilian case presents some useful guides to the analysis. First, the elements in the state responsible for territorial defense or acquisition, such as militaries, security agencies, defense contractors, and their dependents, will most commonly be the permanent repositories of geopolitical doctrine. The grounding of geopolitical doctrine in territory legitimizes their mission, budgets, and profits. But the degree to which such elements carry and give vent to geopolitical doctrine depends on immediate political circumstances. The postwar militaries of western Europe, locked into the NATO alliance and the broad parameters of Soviet containment policies, found it difficult to maintain geopolitical doctrine in their institutional cultures, much less give expression to it. The militaries of South America, less secure in their national political systems, but also less constrained by them, made geopolitical doctrine a key part of their institutional cultures and forced its occasional expression in policy. Second, because the tone of geopolitics is inherently aggressive, it is likely to find expression in national policy when tensions with neighbors are high and the rewards of cooperation seem modest or beyond reach. When cooperation is ascendant, geopolitical doctrine becomes inconvenient and is retired. Third, because geopolitics tends toward a spatial literalism that is seldom fully confluent with reality, it is likely to come to the fore when realism is not an especially important criterion. Examples include periods when demagoguery, the politics of symbolism, or the accommodation of competing political factions takes precedence over the need to deliver material benefits to broad groups in the body politic, or when absence of any possibility of material progress forces a displacement of notions of the commonweal into jingoistic and spatially literal forms.

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Fourth, because national politics can be very fluid at the level at which geopolitics finds purchase, circumstances favorable to its espousal can quickly coalesce. This fluidity also makes the advocacy of geopolitical doctrines opportune to different players at different times. This fluidity makes it difficult to predict, in the long term, the alliances that will form behind geopolitical doctrine. Finally, if these conclusions about geopolitical doctrine and its expression are correct, geopolitics will not soon disappear from the corpus of ideas about statecraft. Rather, they will move into and out of fashion, changing their stripes as they adapt to new political circumstances and intellectual currents. Such doctrines will continue to manifest themselves episodically in national policy around the world, even if cooperation becomes one of the hallmarks of the post-cold-war international order. The political uses of geopolitics are too many and too valuable to make its permanent abandonment likely.
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