Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities (on nationalism) - David Polansky (Foreign Policy)

The Greatest Book on Nationalism Keeps Being Misread

“Imagined Communities” is far weirder than you remember.

 

By David Polansky, a political theorist and research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

FOREIGN POLICY, JANUARY 7, 2024, 7:00 AM

 

There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s classic horror-comedy Evil Dead II in which the protagonist saws off his own zombified hand and traps it under a copy of A Farewell to Arms. This is an intentional joke, but a similar titular misreading has haunted another 1980s classic: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

Due to a combination of the title’s pithiness and its well-established place on college syllabi, few works of social science have been so widely misunderstood. It is in that rarified genre of books more written about than read (officially known as the “Fukuyama Club”). For many readers appear to have taken the title literally, supposing that he treated nations as somehow fictional. His actual thesis, however, was more subtle. For Anderson, nationalism is imagined rather than imaginary — though too many readers only noted the first part.

He recognizes, in other words, that nations are historical creations rather than natural expressions of some authentic pre-political identity, but he does not assume this invalidates them. Thus (to take examples with particular contemporary relevance), Zionism is both a late 19th-century invention and a reality for Israeli citizens. Palestinian nationalism is both a derivation of a larger modern movement of Arab nationalism and the source of a recognizable collective identity. Nagorno-Karabakh acquired new (and mutually exclusive) significance for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, without thereby being any less consequential. All of these and more are real and meaningful, even when their historical claims are convenient.

And yet, being widely misread is still a greater legacy than most scholars can boast. And, indeed, the work’s scholarly footprint is substantial; four decades out, it remains one of the most-cited works in all the social sciences, and more to the point it is “by far the most cited text in the study of nationalism.” This is probably less an indication of widespread commitment to Anderson’s specific theses regarding the role of print capitalism or the role of New World states in the development of nationalism and more a testament to the way his book, and its title, came to stand in for a larger intellectual shift in the study of nationalism.

In the wake of the nationalist furies unleashed by the end of the Cold War, we are perhaps more sharply aware now of the themes of Imagined Communities than its contemporary readers were. But why more than two centuries into the age of nationalism and decades after the first wave of decolonization, when the study of nationalism only saw an efflorescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s? Anderson himself notes in a much-cited remark that “unlike most other isms, nationalism [had] never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers.”

The book’s shaped the study of nationalism—but it did so in a way that was sui generis. This quintessential work of modern social science is in fact quite nonrepresentative of the discipline. It proceeds unsystematically, veering into highly poetic digressions throughout, from literary references to autobiographical details. In fact, Anderson’s influential account of nationalism is ultimately poetic both in the sense that he emphasizes the role of language and literature in the formation of nations and in the sense that his own arguments themselves take poetic forms. That makes it, unlike many of its peers, remarkably readable—and has no doubt contributed to its shelf life.

Its distinctiveness surely owes something to its author. In a fascinating posthumous essay, Anderson noted how his imagination was spurred one day at Cornell from overhearing Allan Bloom in full pomp remark how the ancient Greeks had no concept of “power” as we understand it, which subsequently set him off on his own study of that theme in Javanese culture.

Several of Anderson’s qualities are on display here, all of which shape the book. One is his ability to make unexpected intellectual connections across domains and cultures. Another is his strong historical sense—what the great classicist Peter Brown calls a historicized imagination. The last is his strong orientation toward Southeast Asia, a region to which he remained devoted for much of his life. In a nice bit of biographical caesura, though Anderson was barred for decades from visiting Indonesia owing to a critical analysis of Gen. Suharto’s coup, he spent much of his retirement there, ultimately dying in Java in 2015.

This last might not be remarkable for a historian or professor of “area studies,” but it was for a time unique among scholars of nationalism, who tended to focus on its development in early modern Europe, more or less in parallel with the literature on the rise of the modern state. Anderson’s approach thus stood out even during a time of broader revisionism when it came to the study of nationalism.

Even beyond his wider geographical ambit, his practical experience with how waning colonial systems gave way to elite-shaping national consciousnesses in places like Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines accorded his work a real sense of how nationalism actually emerged. Unlike more analytical works, Anderson’s work seemed to ask—to paraphrase a famous philosophy paper—what is it like to be a nationalist?

Some background is probably in order here. Part of what drove this movement to study nationalism anew was the apprehension that nations and nationalism were, in fact, modern creations, and that nationalism was something stranger and more complex than merely the political expression of a supposedly authentic pre-political nation. This view, labeled “modernist,” was set against the so-called perennialists, at least some of whom were themselves galvanized to develop their own theories in response to the modernist challenge (the usual caveats that this brief description greatly oversimplifies the scholarly debates apply).

Yet Anderson’s relationship to this group was always somewhat ambiguous. Anderson accepts the modernist view, he does not therefore assign it a pejorative slant or deny its validity—he explicitly distinguishes himself from his near-contemporary Ernest Gellner, whose own treatment emphasized the inherent falseness of nationalism.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

 

But the modernist in him also celebrates nationalism for its instrumental role in the process of decolonization. Here, his particular engagement with Southeast Asia dovetailed with his left-wing political sympathies. This may in fact be the most striking thing for a reader encountering it today—even in the later revised editions: how much of Anderson’s considerations play out within the context of Marxism.

His thought was steeped in Marxism, though his treatment was never dogmatic. To begin with, honesty compelled him to take seriously the national conflicts that he saw erupting between Marxist nations.

In this he resembles his brother, the historian and social critic Perry Anderson, whose trenchant commentary still graces issues of the London Review of Books. It is difficult for us at the other end of history to recall (assuming we were there in the first place) the overwhelming presence of Marxist ideas at the time, but much of the show Anderson puts on makes more sense when viewed in light of his intended audience (though Marxist ideas are hardly absent from academia today, they no longer enjoy the hegemony they once held over entire areas of study). It may seem bizarre to us now, but Anderson was at the time fighting a bit of an uphill battle to demonstrate that national identities, however recent, were not less real or consequential than the movements of capital or material production that were and are the chief preoccupations of Marxists.

Anderson himself takes a largely benign view of such movements without sharing the internal perspective of those working from within them (that they are participating in the formal establishment of an authentic pre-existing social identity). How, then, does he expect us to judge their successes or failures? The implicit answer, I think—particularly given Anderson’s Marxist leanings—is to look to the material well-being of the real people that a given nation purports to represent. There, the record has been mixed, from the bloody methods of decolonization in places like Algeria and Vietnam to the fratricidal viciousness by which former neighbors decoupled themselves during the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the extraordinary economic achievement of pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere cannot be decoupled from the social cohesion that nationalism provides. Anderson himself thus characterizes nationalism’s legacy as “Janus-headed.”

As I write this, the enduring conflict between two opposed nationalisms in the Levant has erupted again into terrible violence. Imagining a beneficent nationalism seems harder than ever. Perhaps for this reason, many outsiders have increasingly embraced a binational solution to the conflict—a kind of nationalism without nationalism—regardless of the actual preferences of the protagonists. And when confronted with such visible evidence of nationalism’s hard edge—the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7, or the Israel Defense Force’s ongoing shelling of Gaza—it is understandable that many would blanch at what it really entails.

And it is similarly understandable that one may ask in the face of this and so many other conflicts—from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and Pakistan to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and beyond—just what people get from nationalism. Why do they imagine this and not some other form of community? One answer is that at the level of practical reality, the nation provides the form for the ordinary liberal goods we enjoy. In another classic of modern social science, Seeing Like a State, James Scott described the state as “the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.” Something like this is true of nationalism as well: that for all its capacity for violence, it also makes possible the bounded community within which we gain protections of individual rights and welfare benefits and security.

Anderson goes beyond this, however; his view of nations is not just instrumental. And perhaps for this reason the language we use to describe these conflicts today is very much his language. Hence the use of mythologized histories to legitimize territorial claims. And hence also the attempts to force the Israel-Palestine conflict into the framework of decolonization, in which a righteous emerging nationalism confronts a system of oppressive domination.

But what happens when two authentic nationalisms compete for the same territory? And while we may speak of the self-sacrificing love the nation inspires, what makes these sacrifices worthwhile in the end? The poetic resonances of Anderson’s treatment of nationalism have been widely recognized—but even poetry has its limits.

David Polansky is a political theorist who writes on geopolitics and the history of political thought. He is currently a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

READ MORE ON INDONESIA | ISRAEL | NATIONALISM

 

 

 

The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism - Thomas J. Bollyky and Chad P. Bown (Foreign Affairs)

The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism

Only Cooperation Can End the Pandemic

By Thomas J. Bollyky and Chad P. Bown 

Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020

A coronavirus researcher in Singapore, March 2020

Joseph Campbell / Reuters

Trump administration officials have compared the global allocation of vaccines against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 to oxygen masks dropping inside a depressurizing airplane. “You put on your own first, and then we want to help others as quickly as possible,” Peter Marks, a senior official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who oversaw the initial phases of vaccine development for the U.S. government, said during a panel discussion in June. The major difference, of course, is that airplane oxygen masks do not drop only in first class—which is the equivalent of what will happen when vaccines eventually become available if governments delay providing access to them to people in other countries.

By early July, there were 160 candidate vaccines against the new coronavirus in development, with 21 in clinical trials. Although it will be months, at least, before one or more of those candidates has been proved to be safe and effective and is ready to be delivered, countries that manufacture vaccines (and wealthy ones that do not) are already competing to lock in early access. And to judge from the way governments have acted during the current pandemic and past outbreaks, it seems highly likely that such behavior will persist. Absent an international, enforceable commitment to distribute vaccines globally in an equitable and rational way, leaders will instead prioritize taking care of their own populations over slowing the spread of COVID-19 elsewhere or helping protect essential health-care workers and highly vulnerable populations in other countries.

That sort of “vaccine nationalism,” or a “my country first” approach to allocation, will have profound and far-reaching consequences. Without global coordination, countries may bid against one another, driving up the price of vaccines and related materials. Supplies of proven vaccines will be limited initially even in some rich countries, but the greatest suffering will be in low- and middle-income countries. Such places will be forced to watch as their wealthier counterparts deplete supplies and will have to wait months (or longer) for their replenishment. In the interim, health-care workers and billions of elderly and other high-risk inhabitants in poorer countries will go unprotected, which will extend the pandemic, increase its death toll, and imperil already fragile health-care systems and economies. In their quest to obtain vaccines, countries without access to the initial stock will search for any form of leverage they can find, including blocking exports of critical vaccine components, which will lead to the breakdown of supply chains for raw ingredients, syringes, and vials. Desperate governments may also strike short-term deals for vaccines with adverse consequences for their long-term economic, diplomatic, and strategic interests. The result will be not only needless economic and humanitarian hardship but also intense resentment against vaccine-hoarding countries, which will imperil the kind of international cooperation that will be necessary to tackle future outbreaks—not to mention other pressing challenges, such as climate change and nuclear proliferation.

It is not too late for global cooperation to prevail over global dysfunction, but it will require states and their political leaders to change course. What the world needs is an enforceable COVID-19 vaccine trade and investment agreement that would alleviate the fears of leaders in vaccine-producing countries, who worry that sharing their output would make it harder to look after their own populations. Such an agreement could be forged and fostered by existing institutions and systems. And it would not require any novel enforcement mechanisms: the dynamics of vaccine manufacturing and global trade generally create layers of interdependence, which would encourage participants to live up to their commitments. What it would require, however, is leadership on the part of a majority of vaccine-manufacturing countries—including, ideally, the United States.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

The goal of a vaccine is to raise an immune response so that when a vaccinated person is exposed to the virus, the immune system takes control of the pathogen and the person does not get infected or sick. The vaccine candidates against COVID-19 must be proved to be safe and effective first in animal studies, then in small trials in healthy volunteers, and finally in large trials in representative groups of people, including the elderly, the sick, and the young.

Most of the candidates currently in the pipeline will fail. If one or more vaccines are proved to be safe and effective at preventing infection and a large enough share of a population gets vaccinated, the number of susceptible individuals will fall to the point where the coronavirus will not be able to spread. That population-wide protection, or “herd immunity,” would benefit everyone, whether vaccinated or not.

It is not clear yet whether achieving herd immunity will be possible with this coronavirus. A COVID-19 vaccine may prove to be more like the vaccines that protect against influenza: a critical public health tool that reduces the risk of contracting the disease, experiencing its most severe symptoms, and dying from it, but that does not completely prevent the spread of the virus. Nevertheless, given the potential of vaccines to end or contain the most deadly pandemic in a century, world leaders as varied as French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres have referred to them as global public goods—a resource to be made available to all, with the use of a vaccine in one country not interfering with its use in another.

At least initially, however, that will not be the reality. During the period when global supplies of COVID-19 vaccines remain limited, providing them to some people will necessarily delay access for others. That bottleneck will prevent any vaccine from becoming a truly global public good.

It is not too late for global cooperation to prevail over global dysfunction.

Vaccine manufacturing is an expensive, complex process, in which even subtle changes may alter the purity, safety, or efficacy of the final product. That is why regulators license not just the finished vaccine but each stage of production and each facility where it occurs. Making a vaccine involves purifying raw ingredients; formulating and adding stabilizers, preservatives, and adjuvants (substances that increase the immune response); and packaging doses into vials or syringes. A few dozen companies all over the world can carry out that last step, known as “fill and finish.” And far fewer can handle the quality-controlled manufacture of active ingredients—especially for more novel, sophisticated vaccines, whose production has been dominated historically by just four large multinational firms based in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Roughly a dozen other companies now have some ability to manufacture such vaccines at scale, including a few large outfits, such as the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest producer of vaccines. But most are small manufacturers that would be unable to produce billions of doses.

Further complicating the picture is that some of today’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates are based on emerging technologies that have never before been licensed. Scaling up production and ensuring timely approvals for these novel vaccines will be challenging, even for rich countries with experienced regulators. All of this suggests that the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines will be limited to a handful of countries.

And even after vaccines are ready, a number of factors might delay their availability to nonmanufacturing states. Authorities in producing countries might insist on vaccinating large numbers of people in their own populations before sharing a vaccine with other countries. There might also turn out to be technical limits on the volume of doses and related vaccine materials that companies can produce each day. And poor countries might not have adequate systems to deliver and administer whatever vaccines they do manage to get.

During that inevitable period of delay, there will be many losers, especially poorer countries. But some rich countries will suffer, too, including those that sought to develop and manufacture their own vaccines but bet exclusively on the wrong candidates. By rejecting cooperation with others, those countries will have gambled their national health on hyped views of their own exceptionalism.

And even “winning” countries will needlessly suffer in the absence of an enforceable scheme to share proven vaccines. If health systems collapse under the strain of the pandemic and foreign consumers are ill or dying, there will be less global demand for export-dependent industries in rich countries, such as aircraft or automobiles. If foreign workers are under lockdown and cannot do their jobs, cross-border supply chains will be disrupted, and even countries with vaccine supplies will be deprived of the imported parts and services they need to keep their economies moving.

PAGING DR. HOBBES

Forecasts project that the coronavirus pandemic could kill 40 million people and reduce global economic output by $12.5 trillion by the end of 2021. Ending this pandemic as soon as possible is in everyone’s interest. Yet in most capitals, appeals for a global approach have gone unheeded.

In fact, the early months of the pandemic involved a decided shift in the wrong direction. In the face of global shortages, first China; then France, Germany, and the European Union; and finally the United States hoarded supplies of respirators, surgical masks, and gloves for their own hospital workers’ use. Overall, more than 70 countries plus the European Union imposed export controls on local supplies of personal protective equipment, ventilators, or medicines during the first four months of the pandemic. That group includes most of the countries where potential COVID-19 vaccines are being manufactured.

Such hoarding is not new. A vaccine was developed in just seven months for the 2009 pandemic of the influenza A virus H1N1, also known as swine flu, which killed as many as 284,000 people globally. But wealthy countries bought up virtually all the supplies of the vaccine. After the World Health Organization appealed for donations, Australia, Canada, the United States, and six other countries agreed to share ten percent of their vaccines with poorer countries, but only after determining that their remaining supplies would be sufficient to meet domestic needs.

Vaccine allocation resembles the classic game theory problem known as “the prisoner’s dilemma.”

Nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations have adopted two limited strategies to reduce the risk of such vaccine nationalism in the case of COVID-19. First, CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the nongovernmental vaccine partnership known as Gavi, and other donors have developed plans to shorten the queue for vaccines by investing early in the manufacturing and distribution capacity for promising candidates, even before their safety and efficacy have been established. The hope is that doing so will reduce delays in ramping up supplies in poor countries. This approach is sensible but competes with better-resourced national initiatives to pool scientific expertise and augment manufacturing capacity. What is more, shortening the queue in this manner may exclude middle-income countries such as Pakistan, South Africa, and most Latin American states, which do not meet the criteria for receiving donor assistance. It would also fail to address the fact that the governments of manufacturing countries might seize more vaccine stocks than they need, regardless of the suffering elsewhere.

An alternative approach is to try to eliminate the queue altogether. More than a dozen countries and philanthropies in initial pledges of $8 billion to the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, an initiative dedicated to the rapid development and equitable deployment of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for COVID-19. The ACT Accelerator, however, has so far failed to attract major vaccine-manufacturing states, including the United States and India. In the United States, the Trump administration has instead devoted nearly $10 billion to Operation Warp Speed, a program designed to deliver hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines by January 2021—but only to Americans. Meanwhile, Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, has stated that “at least initially,” any vaccine the company produces will go to India’s 1.3 billion people. Other vaccine developers have made similar statements, pledging that host governments or advanced purchasers will get the early doses if supplies are limited.

Given the lack of confidence that any cooperative effort would be able to overcome such obstacles, more and more countries have tried to secure their own supplies. France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands formed the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance to jointly negotiate with vaccine developers and producers. That alliance is now part of a larger European Commission effort to negotiate with manufacturers on behalf of EU member states to arrange for advance contracts and to reserve doses of promising candidates. In May, Xi told attendees at the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, that if Beijing succeeds in developing a vaccine, it will share the results with the world, but he did not say when. In June, Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, expressed skepticism about that claim and told The Wall Street Journal that he expects that the Chinese government will use its vaccines “predominantly for the very large populace of China.” This summer, the United States bought up virtually all the supplies of remdesivir, one of the first drugs proven to work against COVID-19, leaving none for the United Kingdom, the EU,  or most of the rest of the world for three months.

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

Global cooperation on vaccine allocation would be the most efficient way to disrupt the spread of the virus. It would also spur economies, avoid supply chain disruptions, and prevent unnecessary geopolitical conflict. Yet if all other vaccine-manufacturing countries are being nationalists, no one will have an incentive to buck the trend. In this respect, vaccine allocation resembles the classic game theory problem known as “the prisoner’s dilemma”—and countries are very much acting like the proverbial prisoner.

“If we have learned anything from the coronavirus and swine flu H1N1 epidemic of 2009,” said Peter Navarro, the globalization skeptic whom President Donald Trump appointed in March to lead the U.S. supply chain response to COVID-19, “it is that we cannot necessarily depend on other countries, even close allies, to supply us with needed items, from face masks to vaccines.” Navarro has done his best to make sure everyone else learns this lesson, as well: shortly after he made that statement, the White House slapped export restrictions on U.S.-manufactured surgical masks, respirators, and gloves, including to many poor countries.

By failing to develop a plan to coordinate the mass manufacture and distribution of vaccines, many governments—including the U.S. government—are writing off the potential for global cooperation. Such cooperation remains possible, but it would require a large number of countries to make an enforceable commitment to sharing in order to overcome leaders’ fears of domestic opposition.

The time horizon for most political leaders is short, especially for those facing an imminent election. Many remain unconvinced that voters would understand that the long-term health and economic consequences of the coronavirus spreading unabated abroad are greater than the immediate threat posed by their or their loved ones’ having to wait to be vaccinated at home. And to politicians, the potential for opposition at home may seem like a bigger risk than outrage abroad over their hoarding supplies, especially if it is for a limited time and other countries are seen as likely to do the same.

French President Emmanuel Macron tours a vaccine laboratory in June 2020

Laurent Cipriani / Reuters

Fortunately, there are ways to weaken this disincentive to cooperate. First, politicians might be more willing to forgo immunizing their entire populations in order to share vaccines with other countries if there were reliable research indicating the number and allocation of doses needed to achieve critical public health objectives at home—such as protecting health-care workers, military personnel, and nursing home staffs; reducing the spread to the elderly and other vulnerable populations; and breaking transmission chains. Having that information would allow elected leaders to pledge to share vaccine supplies with other countries only if they have enough at home to reach those goals. This type of research has long been part of national planning for immunization campaigns. It has revealed, for example, that because influenza vaccines inducea relatively weak immune response in the elderly, older people are much better protected if the vaccination of children, who are the chief spreaders, is prioritized. Such research does not yet exist for COVID-19 but should be part of the expedited clinical trials that companies are currently conducting for vaccine candidates.

A framework agreement on vaccine sharing would also be more likely to succeed if it were undertaken through an established international forum and linked to preventing the export bans and seizures that have disrupted COVID-19-related medical supply chains. Baby steps toward such an agreement have already been taken by a working group of G-20 trade ministers, but that effort needs to be expanded to include public health officials. The result should be a COVID-19 vaccine trade and investment agreement, which should include an investment fund to purchase vaccines in advance and allocate them, once they have been proved to be safe and effective, on the basis of public health need rather than the size of any individual country’s purse. Governments would pay into the investment fund on a subscription basis, with escalating, nonrefundable payments tied to the number of vaccine doses they secured and other milestones of progress. Participation of the poorest countries should be heavily subsidized or free. Such an agreement could leverage the international organizations that already exist for the purchase and distribution of vaccines and medications for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The agreement should include an enforceable commitment on the part of participating countries to not place export restrictions on supplies of vaccines and related materials destined for other participating countries.

The agreement could stipulate that if a minimum number of vaccine-producing countries did not participate, it would not enter into force, reducing the risk to early signatories. Some manufacturers would be hesitant to submit to a global allocation plan unless the participating governments committed to indemnification, allowed the use of product liability insurance, or agreed to a capped injury-compensation program to mitigate the manufacturers’ risk. Linking the agreement to existing networks of regulators, such as the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities, might help ease such concerns and would also help create a more transparent pathway to the licensing of vaccines, instill global confidence, reduce development costs, and expedite access in less remunerative markets.

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW CAN HURT (AND HELP) YOU

Even if policymakers can be convinced about the benefits of sharing, cooperation will remain a nonstarter if there is nothing to prevent countries from reneging on an agreement and seizing local supplies of a vaccine once it has been proved to be safe and effective. Cooperation will ensue only when countries are convinced that it can be enforced.

The key thing to understand is that allocating COVID-19 vaccines will not be a one-off experience: multiple safe and effective vaccines may eventually emerge, each with different strengths and benefits. If one country were to deny others access to an early vaccine, those other countries could be expected to reciprocate by withholding potentially more effective vaccines they might develop later. And game theory makes clear that, even for the most selfish players, incentives for cooperation improve when the game is repeated and players can credibly threaten quick and effective punishment for cheating.

Which vaccine turns out to be most effective may vary by the target patient population and setting. Some may be more suitable for children or for places with limited refrigeration. Yet because the various vaccine candidates still in development require different ingredients and different types of manufacturing facilities, no one country, not even the United States, will be able to build all the facilities that may later prove useful.

Today’s vaccine supply chains are unavoidably global.

Today’s vaccine supply chains are also unavoidably global. The country lucky enough to manufacture the first proven vaccine is unlikely to have all the inputs necessary to scale up and sustain production. For example, a number of vaccine candidates use the same adjuvant, a substance produced from a natural compound extracted from the Chilean soapbark tree. This compound comes mostly from Chile and is processed in Sweden. Although Chile and Sweden do not manufacture vaccines, they would be able to rely on their control of the limited supply of this input to ensure access to the eventual output. Vaccine supply chains abound with such situations. Because the science has not settled on which vaccine will work best, it is impossible to fully anticipate and thus prepare for all the needed inputs.

The Trump administration, as well as some in Congress, has blamed the United States’ failure to produce vast supplies of everything it needs to respond to COVID-19 on “dependency.” But when it comes to creating an enforceable international vaccine agreement, complex cross-border supply chains are a feature, not a bug. Even countries without vaccine-manufacturing capacity can credibly threaten to hold up input supplies to the United States or other vaccine-manufacturing countries if they engage in vaccine nationalism.

The Trump administration was reminded of this dynamic in April, when the president invoked the Defense Production Act and threatened to ban exports to Canada and Mexico of respirators made by 3M. Had Trump followed through, Canada could have retaliated by halting exports of hospital-grade pulp that U.S. companies needed to produce surgical masks and gowns. Or Canada could have stopped Canadian nurses and hospital workers from crossing the border into Michigan, where they were desperately needed to treat American patients. Mexico, for its part, could have cut off the supply of motors and other components that U.S. companies needed to make ventilators. The White House seemed unaware of these potential vulnerabilities. Once it got up to speed, the administration backed off.

Of course, the Trump administration should have already learned that trading partners—even historical allies—are willing and able to swiftly and effectively retaliate against one another if someone breaks an agreement. In early 2018, this was apparently an unknown—at least to Navarro. Explaining why Trump was planning to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, Navarro reassured Americans: “I don’t believe there is any country in the world that is going to retaliate,” he declared. After Trump imposed the duties, Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, along with China, Russia, and Turkey, all immediately retaliated. The EU went through a similar learning experience in March. The European Commission originally imposed a broad set of export restrictions on personal protective equipment. It was forced to quickly scale them back after realizing that cutting off non-EU members, such as Norway and Switzerland, could imperil the flow of parts that companies based in the EU needed to supply the EU's own member states with medical supplies.

American and European policymakers now understand—or at least should understand—that what they don’t know about cross-border flows can hurt them. Paradoxically, this lack of information may help convince skeptical policymakers to maintain the interdependence needed to fight the pandemic. Not knowing what they don’t know reduces the risk that governments will renege on a deal tomorrow that is in their own best interest to sign on to today.

THE POWER OF FOMO

When the oxygen masks drop in a depressurizing plane, they drop at the same time in every part of the plane because time is of the essence and because that is the best way to ensure the safety of all onboard. The same is true of the global, equitable allocation of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19.

Vaccine nationalism is not just morally and ethically reprehensible: it is contrary to every country’s economic, strategic, and health interests. If rich, powerful countries choose that path, there will be no winners—ultimately, every country will be a loser. The world is not doomed to learn this the hard way, however. All the necessary tools exist to forge an agreement that would encourage cooperation and limit the appeal of shortsighted “my country first” approaches.

But time is running out: the closer the world gets to the day when the first proven vaccines emerge, the less time there is to set up an equitable, enforceable system for allocating them. As a first step, a coalition of political leaders from countries representing at least 50 percent of global vaccine-manufacturing capacity must get together and instruct their public health officials and trade ministers to get out of their silos and work together. Combining forces, they should hammer out a short-term agreement that articulates the conditions for sharing, including with the legions of poorer, nonmanufacturing countries, and makes clear what would happen to participants who subsequently reneged and undertook vaccine nationalism. Such a step would get the ball rolling and convince even more of the manufacturing countries to sign on. The fear of missing out on vaccine access, in the event their countries’ own vaccine candidates fail, may be what it takes to pressure even today’s most reluctant leaders to cooperate.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-07-27/vaccine-nationalism-pandemic

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Libertarians Forged an Alliance With Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Was It a Deal With the Devil? - Jim Epstein (Reason)

BRAZIL

Libertarians Forged an Alliance With Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Was It a Deal With the Devil?

Free market reformers and authoritarian nationalists battle it out to reshape Brazil. 

JIM EPSTEIN | FROM THE JULY 2019 ISSUE

ReASON, FREE MARKETS, FREE MINDS

https://reason.com/2019/06/01/deal-with-the-devil

On the morning of March 14, 2016, in a tiny office in Rio de Janeiro, a libertarian businessman named Winston Ling met with Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing congressman running a longshot campaign to be president of Brazil. Some of Ling's closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil's libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition.

Three years later, Bolsonaro is president. Ludwig von Mises scholars, free market think tankers, and even anarcho-capitalists now occupy top-level positions in his administration, where they hope to slash the government bureaucracy of the nation ranked as the absolute worst by the World Economic Forum in the category of "burden of government regulation"—a country that goes beyond regulating the number of hours that workers spend on the job to micromanaging the size and make of the punch clocks used to record their arrivals and departures. "I'm losing all my guys to government," says Hélio Beltrão, founder and president of the Brazilian Mises Institute, with a grin.

But other prominent libertarians are outraged over their former comrades' willingness to ally themselves with a politician The Intercept has called "the most extreme and repellent face of a resurgent, evangelical-driven right-wing attempt to drag the country backwards by decades."

Bolsonaro is not a libertarian; in many ways he is sharply un-libertarian. He has been working to make it easier for police to kill civilians with impunity. He has repeatedly praised the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He has flatly declared himself "in favor of torture." And in 2002 he said, "If I see two men kissing in the street, I will hit them."

"It shows that their commitment to individual liberty is actually not that strong," says Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, a libertarian columnist at Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper. They want "a more authoritarian style of government that can bring about their economic policies more easily."

Ling argues that the country didn't have time to entertain fantasies of a truly principled free market politician rising to power. In 2016, when he met with Bolsonaro, the leftist Workers Party had controlled the presidency for 13 years. Brazil's unemployment rate was approaching 12 percent, and the economy had contracted by more than 3 percent the prior year. "For me this was life or death," he says. "I truly believed if someone else were elected president, Brazil would go down."

The beginning of Bolsonaro's presidency has been chaotic. The free marketeers have made some significant progress in cutting red tape but must also contend with powerful special interests that want to maintain the status quo. Concern is growing that their participation in Bolsonaro's administration will damage the libertarian movement and help the Workers Party win back credibility. If Bolsonaro fails to meaningfully liberalize the economy, says Pedro Ferreira, a co-founder of the libertarian Free Brazil Movement, "we're going to be in a lot of trouble."

A Troublesome Alliance

Jair Bolsonaro is best understood as "Trump without the success in business," says Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a Brazilian political scientist, career diplomat, and prominent pro-market intellectual. "He's a populist, nationalist, xenophobe, [and] misogynist."

A former Army captain with an undistinguished military career, Bolsonaro served 27 years in the National Congress before he was elected president, passing just two minor bills during his entire tenure.

He was best known for his incendiary public comments. In a 2011 interview, he told Playboy that he would be "incapable of loving a homosexual son," preferring that a gay child "die in an accident." In 2016, he said the "biggest mistake" of the dictatorship that used to rule Brazil "was to torture and not to kill." In March, he asked the nation's armed forces to commemorate the 55th anniversary of that coup.

In his first months in office, Bolsonaro's most substantive policy proposal has been a draconian anti-crime package that includes more lenient treatment of police officers who kill while on duty.

Police shootings have been shockingly rampant in the country for a while. In 2017, law enforcement killed 5,144 civilians, or 14 people per day. In March 2018, two former Rio de Janeiro police officers were arrested on charges of murdering Marielle Franco, an openly gay city council member, by shooting her in the head with a submachine gun. According to Human Rights Watch, extrajudicial executions by cops are common. In 2003, Bolsonaro said that "as long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, those death squads, in my opinion, are very welcome."

Yet Bolsonaro also has an uncanny ability to connect with voters, which is what drew Winston Ling's attention. "Every time he came to a city, there was a huge number of people at the airport," the businessman recalls.

The 63-year-old Ling is a founding figure in Brazil's libertarian movement—or movimento liberal, since the Portuguese word liberal has retained its classical meaning—who helped establish two prominent think tanks in the 1980s. He and his siblings co-own a handful of companies started by their Chinese immigrant father, who made a fortune in the soybean and petrochemical industries.

At their initial meeting in 2016, Ling gave Bolsonaro a half-hour tutorial on the Austrian school of free market economics and left him with two books, Frédéric Bastiat's The Law and Mises' Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. (He chose those two, he recalls, because they're "thin and easy to read"—and "politicians don't read.") He also offered to help Bolsonaro assemble a "council" of free market economists to join his campaign.

Bolsonaro accepted the offer, so Ling flew home to Shanghai and started working through his Rolodex. "Nobody wanted to meet him," Ling recalls, because of Bolsonaro's reputation as a populist firebrand and a homophobe. Then Ling got in touch with Paulo Guedes, who was "immediately very enthusiastic."

A respected economist who earned a Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Chicago, Guedes has spent most of his career in finance. On November 13, 2017, he and Bolsonaro had a five-hour meeting at a Sheraton Hotel in Rio. Guedes set the ground rules: He would consider working with Bolsonaro only if given "carte blanche" over economic affairs. After winning the presidency in October 2018, Bolsonaro made Guedes "super minister," putting him in charge of a new Ministry of Economy that consolidated the government's departments of finance, planning, industry, and commerce. Guedes then appointed a group of young libertarians to high-level roles within the new department.

Guedes' brief experience in politics 30 years ago may have discouraged him from working with candidates who are more like-minded but have little chance of electoral success. In 1989, he helped craft the economic platform of Guilherme Afif Domingos, who ran for president on the Liberal Party ticket. They put forward a proposal that Brazil privatize every state-owned company and then use the revenue to wipe out the federal debt. Domingos came in sixth. "And so Brazil became a paradise for rent seekers and hell for entrepreneurs," Guedes later told Piauí magazine.

Guedes' openness to working with Bolsonaro may also derive in part from the efforts of the "Chicago boys," a group of free market economists (trained at Guedes' alma mater) who had helped guide Chile's economy under the dictator Augusto Pinochet beginning in the 1970s. Guedes had no direct involvement with this cohort, but he held a teaching job at the University of Chile in the early '80s, and he has expressed admiration for its economic impact. Thanks to the Chicago boys, Pinochet lifted price controls, slashed red tape, sold off state-owned companies, eased occupational licensing rules, and launched a quasi-private pension system.

The Chicago boys' agenda was derailed in 1982, when an ill-advised fixed exchange rate produced an economic crisis, but in the long run their reforms worked as intended. After the restoration of a democratic government in 1989, Chileans voted to continue their program of market liberalism. Three decades of spectacular growth followed. From 1987 to 2017, Chile's gross domestic product (GDP) grew ninefold and its poverty rate declined from 11.7 percent to 0.7 percent.

Of course, Pinochet also overthrew a democratically elected president, censored the press, murdered an estimated 3,200 citizens, and tortured many more. He was willing to back many of the reformers' ideas about economic liberty, but he violated other liberties in abhorrent ways.

Guedes' defenders argue that there's a fundamental difference between his work with Bolsonaro and the morally dubious alliance struck by the Chicago boys. Bolsonaro is "working within the democratic institutions of Brazil," says Diogo Costa, a political scientist with a high-level position at the Ministry of Economy who has worked at the libertarian Cato Institute and Atlas Economic Research Foundation. "I don't think [Guedes] would agree to sign on to a project that violated more fundamental principles."

Some fear, on the other hand, that Bolsonaro will gradually erode those democratic institutions. His administration "is engaged in a constant war against every single institution that could serve as an opposition to his power," says Fonseca, the libertarian Folha de S.Paulo columnist.

Pedro Menezes, a 25-year-old libertarian who writes for Gazeta do Povo and InfoMoney, has compared Bolsonaro to Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader of Venezuela, who dismantled institutional constraints on his power after being elected. Menezes is particularly troubled by Bolsonaro's suggestion that he would consider packing the supreme court and lowering its mandatory retirement age, enabling him to appoint more justices.

Menezes decided to distance himself from his country's libertarian movement after attending an October 22, 2016 event in São Paulo that was organized by the free market Leadership Training Institute. Bolsonaro, a longshot candidate at the time, was invited on stage to join in a dialogue with a group of prominent libertarians. A large contingent of his supporters showed up, baiting the audience with chants of "Ustra! Ustra! Ustra!"—a reference to the notorious Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, an army colonel who had arrested and tortured dissidents during the military regime.

Bolsonaro made outrageous comments during the event, according to Menezes, but his co-panelists treated him respectfully anyway. "I was so pissed I left in the middle," he says. "It was this transformational moment for me."

Other libertarian-leaning groups have kept their distance from Brazil's new president. Partido Novo, a political party founded in 2011, backed the more orthodox libertarian candidate João Amoêdo in the 2018 election. And the young political movement Livres, which used to be part of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), broke off in January 2018, when Bolsonaro took over the larger group.

In an essay explaining his vote to separate from the PSL, the political scientist Costa wrote that "when populism enters through the window, freedom goes out the door." But after Bolsonaro won the election and Costa was offered his position in the Ministry of Economy, he took it. "If I had to work [directly] under people who didn't share my vision and values and were committed to a different agenda," he says, "I wouldn't have" accepted.

Brazil's most influential libertarian organization is the Free Brazil Movement, which helped organize massive street protests in 2015 calling for the impeachment of Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff. (She was removed from office on August 31, 2016.) The group initially resisted supporting Bolsonaro in the 2018 election and tried to "build up more reasonable people," says Ferreira, the organization's co-founder. But Brazilians "wanted the more extreme option." After debating the issue internally, the group allied itself with Bolsonaro toward the end of his campaign.

It was a "dire" situation, Ferreira argues, because if Bolsonaro had lost, the Workers Party would have regained the presidency. And so the group launched what it called the "Patriotic Journey," sending its key representative to Brazil's northeast region to convince voters that Workers Party policies would damage their way of life.

The movement's charismatic spokesman, 23-year-old Kim Kataguiri, was elected to Congress in 2018, becoming the second youngest Brazilian currently serving. One of his first actions was to organize a 48-member "free market caucus" to support Guedes' agenda. But now that Bolsonaro is in office, Kataguiri and his group have started criticizing the president when he violates their principles. In April, after Bolsonaro threatened to cancel a planned hike in gas prices to appease the truck drivers union, Free Brazil Movement co-founder Renan Santos compared him to former left-wing President Rousseff and called him "a truck driver's bitch" on Twitter.

Paranoid Nationalism

Bolsonaro's inner circle has embraced the one aspect of libertarianism that overlaps with its own ethos: opposition to socialism. But the critique is articulated in the language of a paranoid right-wing nationalism. In August 2018, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president's son, met with former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon in New York City, announcing on Twitter that they were joining forces to fight "against cultural Marxism." After his father was elected, Eduardo became the South American representative of Bannon's "The Movement," a project to promote populism and a nationalist agenda. "The greatest Brazilian philosopher alive," according to Eduardo, is Olavo de Carvalho, a pipe-smoking septuagenarian who lectures on YouTube about the alleged dangers of globalism, feminism, and Islam, and who once claimed that Pepsi is sweetened with the cells of aborted fetuses.

Carvalho, who lives in Virginia, attended a dinner party at Bannon's house in Washington, D.C., in January. His host expressed concern that "the face of Chicago"—meaning Guedes—could derail the nationalist agenda in Brazil. Carvalho reportedly denied that this would happen. When Bolsonaro made a trip to Washington, D.C., in March to meet with Trump, he attended a dinner at the Brazilian embassy and was seated between Bannon and Carvalho.

Bolsonaro's foreign affairs minister (a position comparable to the American secretary of state) is Ernesto Araújo, a Carvalho disciple who believes the current administration will reverse the spiritual corruption caused by "a left-wing agenda" that includes "gender ideology" and "the taking over of the Catholic Church by Marxist ideology (with its attendant promotion of birth control)." Bolsonaro's first education minister was a Carvalho recommendation, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, who proposed an Orwellian rewrite of school textbooks, mandating that they refer to Brazil's military dictatorship as a "democratic regime of force." After a disastrous three months, Bolsonaro replaced him with another Carvalho recommendation, conspiracy theorist Abraham Weintraub, who has suggested that the introduction of crack cocaine in Brazil was a left-wing plot.

But the biggest threat to Paulo Guedes' free market agenda, according to the political scientist Almeida, might not be Carvalho or Araújo or Bannon. It's the "industrialists of São Paulo" and the "agriculturalists of Mato Grosso"—crony capitalists with an economic stake in protectionism and regulation, who will wield influence in Congress to resist his policies. "I'm not sure how long Paulo Guedes will [tolerate] the defeats he'll endure in this government," Almeida says.

Starting Small

Bolsonaro is already demonstrating an unwillingness to risk political capital on meaningful reforms that hurt entrenched interests. But there's cause for optimism that the new radicals in Brasília (the nation's capital city) can cut red tape in significant ways. In April, the president signed a sweeping bill to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses. It exempts companies engaged in "low-risk" activities from licensing requirements, mandates that the government establish deadlines for responding to permit requests, and loosens the rules around initial public offerings, among other things. As a provisional decree, it went into immediate effect, but it will be invalidated if Congress doesn't confirm it within 120 days.

Many of the Ministry of Economy's initiatives don't require congressional approval. For example: Attorney André Ramos, a self-described anarcho-capitalist who now directs the Department of Business Registry and Integration, has helped craft a proposal to make it easier to register a company in Brazil, further streamlining a process that was already improved dramatically by a digital government initiative predating Bolsonaro. In 2018, according to the World Bank, it took an average of 20.5 days to start a new business in the country—way down from 82.5 days the prior year. But there's a long distance to go: In Chile, it takes just six days.

In a speech this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bolsonaro set the goal of moving Brazil into the top 50 in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index over the next four years. (Its current ranking is 109 out of 190.) Fulfilling that mandate falls largely to Paulo Uebel, the Ministry of Economy's 40-year-old "special secretary of debureaucratization, management, and digital government," who oversees a staff of 1,200.

Uebel, who has held leadership positions at several libertarian think tanks, says his goal is to "simplify the lives of Brazilians" and to make the government stop "micromanaging the life of the entrepreneur." He's starting with the small stuff. If reformers go up against powerful special interests right away, Uebel says, "we're probably going to lose."

Kataguiri, now in Congress, agrees. "We'll be able to approve some reforms, but these groups are very powerful," he says. He expects "small and medium" successes, but nothing of the magnitude that "us [classical] liberals would like."

As an example of the sort of changes his team is starting with, Uebel says he wants to eliminate the rules governing the size and functionality of the punch clocks that private sector employers are required to use when tracking workers' hours. "Only two or three companies in Brazil provide this kind of punch clock," Uebel says, and they lack political clout. More significant reforms, such as eliminating controls on workers' hours—i.e., the restrictions that require a punch clock in the first place—would require a constitutional amendment that is highly unlikely to pass right now.

Uebel also plans to revise "over a thousand" federal procedures that currently require face-to-face meetings with government bureaucrats, allowing Brazilians to take care of more things online.

So what happens to the thousands of federal employees who would be replaced by websites if Uebel gets his way? They'll remain on the payroll, because the authority to cut superfluous staff would require changing the constitution. Still, Uebel says he can thin the ranks through attrition.

Theoretically, the constitution does give the government authority to fire federal workers for poor performance, but Congress must first establish a legal framework for doing so. The Ministry of Economy will be working with lawmakers to craft such a bill, according to Wagner Lenhart, an attorney—and co-author of a book about Mises—who is now the "secretary of people management." But legislation of this sort is sure to face enormous opposition from labor unions. Lenhart and Costa, who now heads Brazil's Federal School of Public Administration, will also be pushing to substitute automatic promotion of government employees with a merit-based system.

What Next?

During the campaign, Bolsonaro deferred to Guedes on most questions related to economic policy. "In truth, I know nothing about the economy," the president confessed to one reporter. "This is the difference between [Bolsonaro] and Trump," says Ling. "The guy who thinks he knows everything will never be a libertarian."

But a few months into his presidency, Bolsonaro is already overruling Guedes for political expediency. Tariffs in Brazil average 8.6 percent, or 17 times the Chilean rate; in the World Bank's 2019 Doing Business survey, Brazil ranked 106 out of 190 on trade across borders. Brazil's president has the authority to slash tariffs without congressional approval, and in February his administration announced an agreement with Mexico that liberalized the trade in light commercial automobiles. But Bolsonaro has also raised tariffs on powdered milk, announcing on Twitter that "everyone has won, in particular, the consumers of Brazil."

Even before he was elected, Bolsonaro was citing the need for "responsible trade" and sympathizing with the "difficulties" that Brazilian companies face. Broad tariff reductions seem unlikely.

Guedes' first major priority is to restructure Brazil's fiscally insolvent pension system, which, because of an aging population, is projected to consume a staggering 26 percent of GDP by 2050. Standard & Poor's downgraded Brazil's credit rating last year based on its failure to pass pension reform: The system allows beneficiaries to retire at an average age of 58 and favors the better-off. The bottom 40 percent of the population gets just 18 percent of the paid benefits.

Guedes and Kataguiri are pushing for a unified system similar to Chile's sistema previsional, which would replace the current intergenerational Ponzi scheme with an arrangement in which workers contribute to private savings accounts. The government would still provide a baseline benefit for those who are too poor to contribute, and current beneficiaries would be grandfathered into the old system.

But will it pass? The negotiations underway in Congress have been chaotic, and in April, Kataguiri was losing faith. "My outlook for the future," he told The New York Times, is that "we won't approve the pension reform, we will slip into a recession, and the government will be left hemorrhaging."

Kataguiri's souring outlook reflects the Free Brazil Movement's shifting stance toward Bolsonaro. Ferreira, the group's co-founder, reflects on simpler times when the Workers Party was in power and the group could be purely oppositional, explaining to its followers that "left-wing ideas were responsible for the [economic] crisis." Now that the group is publicly associated with the president, it will be a public relations crisis for libertarians if his policies fail. "The left wing is going to come back at us," says Ferreira. They could respond by pointing out that Bolsonaro isn't really representative of their views, "but that's really hard convincing to do."

If Guedes succeeds more broadly, it could bring reductions in poverty and strong overall growth analogous to what the Chicago boys engineered in Chile. But it will come at a cost. The alliance that began three years ago on the initiative of Winston Ling, desperate to save Brazil from its worst economic crisis in modern history, was instrumental in electing a populist president who is doing significant damage to civil liberties. Brazil needs economic freedom, but it needs human rights too.