GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRACY: AN INTERVIEW WITH FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO BY HEINZ R. SONNTAG
[Newsletter Editors' Note: We are fortunate to have for the website the full text of a dialogue between two prominent Latin American political sociologists. Heinz R. Sonntag interviews Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who served two terms as Brazil's president until 2002, after also having served as Senator, Foreign Minister and Finance Minister, and having helped found the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). Cardoso is also known as the renowned Brazilian sociologist credited with being one of the first authors to theorize "dependency." Sonntag is a retired Professor of Sociology at the Central University of Venezuela and former director of its Center for Development Studies - CENDES, and author of several books, including a forthcoming book on social exclusion in comparative perspective. This is the complete text of the full interview that took place at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, on October 19th, 2003. We wish to thank Ted Goertzel, Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, for his help in translating the interview. ]
The friendship between Fernando Henrique Cardoso and myself dates to 1966, when we spent three days together at the University of Muenster during his visit to the then Federal Republic of Germany, after the military regime of his country had expelled him from his post as professor of sociology of the University of São Paulo. We have kept in touch all these years, within the context of the social scientific community of the Latin America and the Caribbean. During his term as president, personal circumstances made it possible for us to see and write each other. When he came to Brown University in October of 2003 we came in face-to-face contact for the first time since 1998, and intellectually and affectively it was as if the five years in between hadn't existed. The dialogue that follows continues our discussions since those distant years in Germany.
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