O Nordeste e a tríade descoberta, laboratório e planejamento : o papel da intelectualidade

Abstract

Since its occupation in the 16th century, the territory corresponding to the Northeast has been a pioneering area in the implementation of actions overseen by the various forms of State through which it passed. This research discusses the process of northeastern development under a triad: discovery, laboratory, and planning — grounded in the thought, socioeconomic analyses, and public policy proposals of a northeastern intelligentsia active on the national and international stage throughout the 20th century. The mission of thinking Brazil and the Northeast fell to northeasterners forged by the social sciences since the Regionalist movement and by the state technostructure in the context of the origins of developmentalism. Northeastern intellectuals transformed their territory into an object of study by addressing regional specificities and inter-regional and intra-regional relations, drawing on a broader vision of the challenges to be overcome and viable solutions. The region took shape as an experimental laboratory from the very establishment of its main economic activity — the sugarcane agroindustry — which incorporated the latifundium as a foundational condition for its operation. The Northeast became a laboratory by inaugurating welfare measures to mitigate the effects of droughts, initiatives to harness hydroelectric potential for energy generation, and, ultimately, regional planning for the implementation of developmentalism in the northeastern region. The regional legacy of economic development established through historical evolution worsened over time, driving the expansion of regional inequalities and extreme underdevelopment within an already underdeveloped country. The interests at stake in the Regional Question cut across the northeastern agrarian oligarchies, the bourgeoisie of the Northeast and the Center-South immersed in their profits and allied with a political class that reproduced the interests of the dominant classes — alongside a State that, in order to maintain its sovereignty, needed to strike a political pact with those classes. There was no effective political effort toward transforming the northeastern socioeconomic structure that had been consolidated by the late 1950s, when a confluence of sociopolitical factors emerged that could threaten national sovereignty and developmentalism. In this context, northeastern intellectuals became protagonists in the formulation of effective public policies aimed at transforming regional reality through a shift in the paradigm that had stigmatized the Northeast and its population over the course of four centuries.