In Transforming Brazil, Rafael Ioris focuses on the 1950s, a period that has long captured the imagination of scholars working on Brazil's postwar history. There was the political drama of Getúlio Vargas's return to the presidency, his suicide in August 1954 and the closely contested 1955 election won by Juscelino Kubitschek, who promised to make the country progress 50 years in his five-year term. The political tension only grew in the late 1950s and early 1960s, ultimately leading to the 1964 military coup, and Ioris wants his book to help illuminate the causes of that extreme polarisation. He argues that at the heart of the conflict were different conceptions of development. That Brazil needed to develop was consensus across the political spectrum, but there was less agreement on how exactly and for whom. To shed light on the competing visions for development, Ioris devotes two chapters to the broader context of the debate and four chapters to specific actors with distinct expectations for Brazil's development push.
The first chapter provides background on the historical origins of the ‘developmentalist experiment of the 1950s’ (p. 221) and offers an overview of the main initiatives. Chapter 2 discusses the connections between the domestic development discourse and Brazil's foreign policy to argue that many political actors viewed the two as inherently linked in the context of the Cold War. The third chapter focuses on the Kubitschek government's main development agency, the Council for Development, and its core development policy, the Targets Plan, aimed at strengthening the energy and transportation infrastructure and expanding basic industry, with token investments in agriculture and education. Chapter 4 highlights the role of the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB), a government-funded academic centre that generated a more nationalist strand of development thought often critical of the government's reliance on foreign capital. Chapter 5 highlights the position of the business community as expressed in publications of its major trade associations, a take on development generally more committed to the capitalist logic and thus focused on economic growth as the best measure of success. The last chapter uses the case of the metalworkers and their grievances about the increasing cost of living to illustrate how labour organisations viewed the development policies pursued by the Kubitschek government.
Overall, the book illuminates the wide spectrum of interpretations and meanings that scholars, policy-makers and directly affected socio-political groups assigned to the term ‘development’. The reader gains a good sense of the lines of debate and eventual disagreement between the different interests, manifest in the contentious politics of the early 1960s and the 1964 military coup. In particular, Ioris highlights the fault line between a more strictly nationalist developmentalism, advocated by some members of ISEB and the labour movement, and actors more willing to allow for a strong involvement of foreign capital, such as parts of the business community and the Council for Development. Ioris never presents any of these positions as monolithic, however. It is one of the book's strengths to remind the reader that each of the actors (the JK government, ISEB, the business community, and industrial labour) represented a spectrum of development thought. To illustrate that variety of development thought, Ioris has read widely and combines that secondary reading with carefully selected episodes gleaned from his archival research.
Maybe the most frustrating aspect of Transforming Brazil is the lack of an over-arching narrative strategy appropriate for 200 + page book. The chapters read as if they were written more as self-standing essays than as parts of a greater whole. Each chapter covers the entire time period and cross-references discussions that are the focus of other chapters, which makes for excessive overlap and a constant sense of déjà lu. As a result, the analysis is much less specific and therefore less novel than it could have been. Add to this lengthy digressions on subjects only peripherally related to development (for example the discussion of SESI, pp. 161–4) and a writing-style reminiscent of old-school Brazilian social science, and it is easy for the reader to lose track of the argument.
The book is rather difficult to categorise. Ioris contributes to the growing field of the history of development, but this is not an intellectual history of development thought in the 1950s. Much of his primary and secondary material would be essential to write such a history, but he does not engage the economic concepts systematically enough to offer new insights on that front. Ioris is more interested in the politics of the development discourse, and he offers two main observations. The first is that Kubitschek's vision of development was neither strongly nationalist nor very different from that of his predecessor Getúlio Vargas. This is not a surprising or profoundly revisionist claim. Ioris's second observation is that the sharpening divide between those Brazilians who expected development policy to deliver greater welfare for all and those who were satisfied with GDP growth ‘provoked the final destabilisation of the democratic political system’ in the early 1960s. To historians familiar with Brazil's mid-twentieth century, that is not a surprising claim, either, but Ioris is right to suggest that the dynamic of political polarisation in those years deserves further study and to place the development debate at the centre of that dynamic.
One wishes Ioris would have been more explicit about the issue at the heart of the growing tension over development priorities, namely the question of whether and how to address the country's massive inequalities. The book alludes to this issue on numerous occasions, for example when it acknowledges that the benefits of the Targets Plan largely went to those already well off. However, Ioris never makes regional and class-based socio-economic disparities an analytical focus, which limits the insights that he can hope to gain from the close reading of his sources. Once we ask what specific actors meant when they used the term ‘development’ and how that reflected their core assumptions about the current and desirable future state of Brazil's society and economy, we can get a better sense why seemingly small differences in development discourse resulted in such stark political polarisation. To move beyond simplistic notions of a struggle between elites and the people, we will have to pay closer attention to the Cold War context and provide a more discerning analysis of the economic thought, social biases, and class interests that informed the actors in those tense political times. While Ioris's books falls short in some of those respects, he moves the discussion in the right direction and lays important groundwork for a much-needed history of development in postwar Brazil.
