Introduction
In George Orwell’s 1984, the main character, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth. Winston’s job is to literally revise the past, altering historical records to match the Party’s shifting ‘truths’. His work leads him to reflect on one of the Party’s slogans – ‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past’ – and its consequences: ‘Past events, it is argued [by the Party], have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.’ Orwell’s narrative takes place in a totalitarian dystopian context. Yet, some lessons can be carried onto much less extreme contexts. Even in full democracies and/or when there is no intention to distort the past, whoever is in the government has the unique power to determine which ‘pieces’ of the past are highlighted.
‘The past’ is political. What (and who) is studied, celebrated, or absent cannot be detached from politics, particularly when considering social groups and identities. This ontological position is a core feature of several academic fields, particularly those embracing a ‘critical’ position. Such is the case in History and Archaeology, whose primary focus is the past, but also among several social sciences, like Political Science, International Relations, Law, Economy, and Anthropology, not to mention those who engage in the emerging field of critical heritage studies.Footnote 1 All of them, albeit from different angles and with varying degrees, have shown how those with power can embrace the past – better yet, a version of the past – to sustain, increase, and justify their power in the present.
Heritage can serve as an anchor for studying the link between past and present from a political angle. In a simplified way, heritage involves recognising something from the past as valuable in the present and worthy of preservation for the future. Heritage, especially cultural heritage,Footnote 2 is ‘less a substance than a quality’.Footnote 3 It can be tangible, like a building, as well as ‘a cultural and social process, which engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present’.Footnote 4 Heritage ‘shapes our ideas about our past, present and future… it is concerned with the re-packaging of the past for some purpose in the present’.Footnote 5
All governments and identity-based groups select some elements of the past they wish to highlight as part of their heritage. However, the intentional political use of heritage has flourished more in some contexts than others. Such is the case of political ideologies and movements whose ethos is deeply attached to a strong group identity, like populism. In sum, heritage is something from the past seen as a continued expression of a certain group’s identity and must be conserved for the next generations.
This paper looks at the political use of heritage under populism. One key characteristic of populism is the separation of society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: ‘pure people’ versus ‘corrupt Elite’.Footnote 6 We are interested in populist leaders’ politicisation of the past: how heritage (broadly understood) is used to strengthen a particular understanding of the ‘pure people’, e.g. who they are, what they stand for, who their allies and enemies are. A growing body of work analyses the intersection of heritage with populism. Much has been written about heritage and populism. Yet, there is a visible lack of engagement with Global South empirical cases,Footnote 7 with Europe dominating the literature on this topic. Ethnonationalism resonates strongly with populist movements in Europe (including TurkeyFootnote 8) but not so much in countries heavily ‘built’ upon the extermination of Indigenous populations and large-scale extra-continental immigration. The (re)interpretation of the ‘true’ original population can be considerably murkier in the so-called ‘New World’. The European experience, notwithstanding its undeniable importance, should not be used as the sole empirical source for conceptualising heritage and populism. Thus, we add to this field by exploring an empirical investigation of a Global South case: the use of heritage by Brazil’s former President and radical right populist leader, Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022).
We rely on a qualitative analysis for our empirical case. We draw mainly from speeches and declarations made publicly by Bolsonaro and high-ranking cabinet members, focusing on their time in power. We aim to illustrate how the former president and his close inner circle articulated their vision of Brazil’s ‘real’ cultural heritage. We argue that heritage and identity were fundamental tools deployed by Bolsonaro to identify enemies at home and abroad, build a political coalition, and forge international alliances based on shared values and identities.Footnote 9 To do so, he rewrote history, replacing well-established academic consensus around the formation and development of Brazil’s society, economy, and political institutions with a broadly revisionist vision of the nation’s past, present, and future.
Our findings highlight three valuable points to IR scholars. First, populists’ reinterpretation of heritage can directly impact foreign policy, particularly on the thought process behind alliance shifting. Second, we point out how populists can use heritage to (re)define a vision of the ‘national interest’ that fits their agenda. Finally, our study shows how weaponised (and faulty) reinterpretations of history can create fictitious global power structures (perceived to be) threatening a country – in our empirical case, the supposedly ‘real’ threat of a Communist takeover of Brazil some 30 years after the end Cold War.
This paper is divided into five sections. Following this Introduction, the second section presents the conceptual background that connects cultural heritage and power, specifically vis-à-vis populism. We address the link between heritage and nostalgia (the emotional value that can be attached to the past) and how populists – especially politically right-wing, socially conservative populists – leverage power through heritage. We then tackle our empirical case in the following three sections, illustrating Bolsonaro’s use of heritage as (1) historical revisionism, (2) identity repositioning, and (3) as a justification for rethinking alliances in the international system. The fifth and final section concludes by teasing out what we believe to be key lessons from our conceptual and empirical analysis.
Heritage and populism: Weaponising the past
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Organization responsible for the World Heritage List, defines heritage as ‘our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations’.Footnote 10 Such legacy can be tangible – objects, buildings, natural sites – or intangible, encompassing ‘items’ like language or cultural practices. Heritage is different from ‘history’ or ‘the past’. Rather, it is a version of the past.Footnote 11 Heritage involves present choices about what elements of the past are considered valuable or not and should, therefore, be conserved for the future or discarded. More than ‘things’ of the past, heritage represents relationships with the past that are forged in the present.Footnote 12 This makes heritage inherently contested and contestable, i.e. naturally ‘dissonant’.Footnote 13
Alongside discussions of what heritage is, another important question is: whose heritage? UNESCO, for example, is interested in world heritage, but heritage is commonly used in connection to the valued past of ‘closed’ groups, e.g. nations, regions, religions, and ethnicities. Heritage (re)enforces an understanding that the group’s identity draws from longstanding traditions and values – as opposed to an artificial creation or a mere novelty. However, from a Constructivist standpoint, all collective identities are socially constructed. As Kwame Appiah elegantly states, these categories are the ‘lies that bind’.Footnote 14 Homogeneous national identities exist only in the imagination, constructed using national myths that imbued the nation ‘with a sense of timelessness’,Footnote 15 which dovetails with the understanding of nations as ‘imagined communities’.Footnote 16
Heritage helps establish a ‘collective social memory’Footnote 17 by ‘glueing’ together specific past/present/future collective narratives. A group’s identity ‘is not only its image of who it is now, but also who it has been in the past, and who its people hope it will be in the future’.Footnote 18 The desire to celebrate and preserve a group’s heritage is not inherently good or bad. Nonetheless, it inherently carries an element of exclusion by highlighting notions of in-group/out-group dynamics. This is one of the reasons why heritage is frequently praised among populists. To be clear, celebrating one’s heritage does not necessarily imply an embrace of exclusionary politics or a discriminatory worldview. Our point is that those wishing to promote an us-vs-them understanding of society – such as populists – have frequently used heritage as a tool to strengthen their cause. As such, ‘while heritage can unite, it can also divide’.Footnote 19
One reason heritage is so powerful is its intimate connection to nostalgia. Nostalgia is a ‘sentimental longing for the past’, carrying an underlying ‘complex, bittersweet, identity-based and social emotion’.Footnote 20 The nostalgic subject looks to the past to find and/or construct ‘sources of identity, agency, or community, that are felt lacking, blocked, subverted, or threatened in the present’.Footnote 21 The past is used in the process of (re)constructing identities, serving as ‘a useful instrument for people to understand who they are, where they come from and where they should be going’.Footnote 22 While nostalgia can positively affect individuals, collective nostalgia – a group’s longing for an idyllic past they once shared – can lead to negative outcomes.
The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters.Footnote 23
Research has shown that collective nostalgia, such as that attached to nationalism, is frequently used as a tool to foster rejection and exclusion of those considered to be outside of the group, such as immigrants.Footnote 24 Collective nostalgia – a common trope among radical right populists – is made to evoke feelings that life was better in the past, the so-called ‘good old days’, before the ‘others’ began to ruin it.Footnote 25 The nostalgic ‘mood’ is associated with ‘the loss of rural simplicity, traditional stability and cultural integration’,Footnote 26 with Schlesinger linking conservatism with the ‘politics of nostalgia’ back in 1955. Zygmunt BaumanFootnote 27 referred to such backwards-looking utopia as ‘retrotopia’: a utopic future based upon visions of a ‘lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past’. In this context, heritage serves as a ‘thing’ – e.g. an idea, a construction, an artefact, a cultural practice – used to evoke a deep emotional response from a group, tapping into a sense of loss and urgent need to address it ‘before it is too late’. Heritage embodies a group’s nostalgia over its ‘Golden Age’, despair over the present, and need to fight for its future glorious return – all of which are explicitly explored by populist narratives.Footnote 28
Populism, history, and heritage
Populism can be characterised by a Manichean division of society, where the (virtuous and pure) people fight to resist the (evil and corrupt) Elite.Footnote 29 These groups are presented as antagonistic and mutually exclusive, and the struggle is ultimately between good and evil. Populists define ‘the people’ by constructing ‘powerful myths that draw on a collective memory of an imagined past to define who belongs “to the people”’.Footnote 30 Such a worldview fosters a sense of collective narcissism: ‘an ingroup identification tied to an emotional investment in an unrealistic belief about the unparalleled greatness of an ingroup’.Footnote 31 It is associated with prejudice and negativity against outsiders, especially ‘outgroups with whom the ingroup shares a history of perceived mutual grievances and wrongdoings’.Footnote 32 The ‘real’ nation is singular – it has one history, one identity.Footnote 33 Unsurprisingly, collective narcissism has been found to be associated with support for national populist parties and policies and empowering extremists and populist politicians.Footnote 34
Populism only exists in (and with) the context of history.Footnote 35 Although populism can sit at any point along the political spectrum, radical right populists are particularly keen on warping history and heritage to fit into their nativist, conservative, and often reactionary narratives.Footnote 36 The ‘deep sense of nostalgia for the good old days’Footnote 37 is seen as an antidote against an ‘identity-destroying’ Elite and the (poor) immigrants they bring into the country, who morally corrupt the present by embracing ‘degenerate’ social values and weakening the ethnonational cohesion. Historical narratives ‘forged through the mystification of time’Footnote 38 help (re)design collective memories and lead to a ‘narrative of rebirth’ for the nation.Footnote 39 Narratives and memory also intersect with populism by speaking to ontological insecurity, i.e. one’s security in ‘being’ in the world.Footnote 40 A comforting narrative of the past to alleviate anxieties over the present serves as an entry point for populists, with their promises to regenerate the past.Footnote 41 Based on Maier,Footnote 42 TaşFootnote 43 argues that ‘despite ample variance and claims of uniqueness, national populisms share a common narrative template to recount and connect the past, present, and future’. Through historical narratives and ‘stories of peoplehood’Footnote 44 that (re)design collective memories, populists introduce moral frameworks to justify measures taken against ‘the evil Elite’.Footnote 45 These are examples of chronopolitics: a concept interested in the relationship between politics and time, i.e. the use of time/history for political purposes.Footnote 46
Another dimension of populist chronopolitics relates to a sense of urgency, using time as a strategy to amass support and implement policies ‘before it’s too late’. Not only must the nation’s (or a group’s) glorious past be protected, but it needs to be fiercely protected now, as there is a real and immediate crisis allegedly produced by the ‘Elite’. Not only crisis and urgency are common features of the populist performance,Footnote 47 but they also embody different sorts of conspiratorial thinking. When writing about what he called ‘the paranoid style’ in US politics, HofstadterFootnote 48 indicated that political paranoids typically see history as a product of a gigantic conspiracy: ‘[the paranoid] is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point; it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out’ (emphasis added). Recent research has found mostly strong correlations between being politically conservative and the likelihood of embracing conspiratorial worldviews, with ‘extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals’.Footnote 49 Populism, nostalgia, and heritage also intertwine in narratives of heroism and mythmaking.Footnote 50 Heroism drives collective aspirations and encourages an ‘individualistic desire for eternal consecration in a collective memory’, which, in turn, is an expression of shared heritage and a ‘celebration of singularity’.Footnote 51 Myths seek to create narratives defining a special identity, relying on cyclical stories highlighting heroism, decline, and regeneration.Footnote 52 The myth of regeneration has been fully embraced by populists of all ilk, who appropriate themselves with the mantle of redemption and ‘quasi-messianic’ promise of salvation.Footnote 53 In our empirical section, we will show that this cycle, originally proposed by SmithFootnote 54 and related to ethnonationalism, can also be adapted to populist non-ethnocentric narratives. This is because under populism, ‘people’ and ‘Elite’ are empty vessels: i.e. ‘different manifestations of populism have different views regarding who does belong and does not belong to both the people and the elite’.Footnote 55
Populists ‘offer their own, subjective and usually new and alternative topography of memory’, that is, their view of the historical ‘us’ and the historical ‘them’.Footnote 56 When right-wing populist movements in the ‘New World’ invoke ‘retrotopias’, the country’s original inhabitants are invariably absent. Instead, other collective identity markers, such as race, religion, and shared (conservative) beliefs, tend to replace ethnicity as the exclusionary markers.Footnote 57 Unsurprisingly, the choice of exclusionary marker(s) to set apart the ‘us’ and ‘them’ is reflected in how populists use/manipulate the group’s ‘founding moment’.Footnote 58 This is then reflected in what is chosen as exemplars of the group’s cultural heritage. In the case of ‘New World’ right-wing populists, this tends to be linked to the arrival of European colonisers, not the Indigenous populations, who, in many cases, had inhabited the land for thousands of years before the extra-continental arrivals. Thus, these populists might still try to capitalise on genealogical ancestry – as done by ‘traditional’ ethnonational right-wing populists in Europe – by drawing upon their European (albeit immigrant) lineage.Footnote 59
The conceptual elements discussed in this section provide the necessary framework to engage with our analysis of cultural heritage and populism under Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure as president of Brazil (2018–2022). We explore our empirical case in the next three sections. Each one illustrates how heritage (intersecting with nostalgia) was (re)worked to serve the conservative, right-wing populist agenda espoused by Bolsonaro and his administration. As noted in the ‘Introduction’ section, our focus reflects our interest in International Relations-related issues (broadly understood), wherein domestic politics are crucial to understanding a country’s foreign policy and how it wants to be seen by others in the international system.
Heritage as historical revisionism
This first empirical section examines the motivations and strategies driving Jair Bolsonaro to change Brazil’s official historical narrative vis-à-vis the time when the country was under military dictatorship (1964–1985) as a form of constructing a broad political base. Bolsonaro’s understanding of this period as positive dovetails well with the myth narratives mentioned by Bonacchi.Footnote 60 First, the heroism of the military and their ‘revolution’ – not coup – saved Brazil from Communism. Then, the decline of the country’s ‘real’ values, articulated in Bolsonaro’s presidential motto as ‘God, Nation, Family’. The corrupted and degenerate ‘Elite’ was to blame: a group made of ‘pro-Communist’ Leftists, academics and teachers in general, LGBTQ+community and sympathisers, so-called ‘globalists’, and ‘whining’ minorities, to name a few. Finally, Bolsonaro, whose middle name ‘Messias’ literally means messiah and whose followers nicknamed ‘mito’ drawing from the word ‘myth’ as a legendary/heroic figure, was to be the heroic leader embodying the hope of regeneration and making Brazil great again.
After the military period ended, scholars, journalists, and lawmakers made sure they documented and brought to light the truth: Brazil had gone through a long and brutal military dictatorship that censored media outlets, persecuted teachers and students, and imprisoned and tortured political dissidents. This was important not only to set a standard for Brazil’s democratic politics but also to honour the memory of those targeted by the military and whose perpetrators were largely left unpunished, thanks to a general amnesty enacted in 1979 by Brazil’s last dictator, João Figueiredo (1979–1985).Footnote 61 Brazil’s quest for historical justice after redemocratisation had a public and an institutional component. Social movements worked to fully display the regime’s horrifying true colours to the general public, which had been hidden, denied, and/or underplayed, and civil society groups began organising themselves to create new structures and pathways of political participation.
Many demands were incorporated into the newly established democratic institutions, particularly through the Constitution adopted in 1988 – which embodied several rights and principles in line with other democracies worldwide. However, government-led initiatives shedding light on crimes committed by the military would take longer to surface. A decade after Brazil’s democratic transition, the Cardoso administration launched two government commissions to address reparations to the victims of the military dictatorship. The commissions did not address punishment measures and were largely seen as a compromise with the status quo established by the 1979 Amnesty Law.Footnote 62 Overall, the military regime needed to be remembered, but the perpetrators of state-sponsored violence would not be held accountable.
Brazil did not have a real experience with transitional justice along its path towards redemocratisation as ‘the Brazilian state was passive towards human rights claims or even sabotaged them’.Footnote 63 Nonetheless, the years that preceded Bolsonaro’s rise to power were marked by a renewed attempt to denounce human rights abuses committed during the military regime. A National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade, CNV), proposed by Lula, was established by Rousseff in 2011. Unlike previous attempts at reparation, the CNV aimed to break the silence, denounce violence and fight impunity with no military oversight.Footnote 64 The military never hid their disgust at the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT), whose presidents sought to subvert the status quo regarding crimes committed during the dictatorship period, and decided to strike back.
Since becoming a congressman in 1991, Bolsonaro wanted to reclaim the military regime’s official history under a nostalgic lens: a Golden Era (albeit some occasional ‘excesses’) unjustly portrayed by the ‘Elite’. Bolsonaro was a former Army Captain whose constituents were primarily members of the Armed Forces pushed to the political sidelines after the dictatorship ended. As a lawmaker, Bolsonaro made countless speeches lauding military institutions and personalities and celebrating the 1964 coup as a ‘revolution’ allegedly needed to prevent Brazil from falling into Communist hands.Footnote 65 Parts of his revisionist ideas drew from Colonel Ustra, a notorious and convicted torturer of the regime, who was one of Bolsonaro’s declared heroes. Ustra’s book A Verdade Sufocada (‘The Suffocated Truth’) defending the military was Bolsonaro’s favourite bedside reading, according to his own account.Footnote 66
Until the mid-2010s, Bolsonaro had been a burlesque backbencher in Congress. After democratic consolidation, Brazilian conservative politicians were, at best, part of what became popularly known as an ‘ashamed right’.Footnote 67 Bolsonaro was popular among a niche of conservative and authoritarian voters in his home state of Rio de Janeiro. Outside of this bubble, he was met with contempt due to his open homophobia, racism, and praise for military rule. As Bolsonaro’s political ambitions grew, he expanded his revisionist efforts beyond the history of the military regime and began attacking the education system. By the early 2010s, he became the fiercest critic of the Workers’ Party’s education policies aimed at teaching sexual diversity and anti-racism in schools. His arguments echoed those put forth by Olavo de Carvalho, a very controversial ‘philosopher’ and pundit who had written books and op-eds denouncing so-called ‘cultural Marxism’, i.e. the corruption of culture and education by the Left. Carvalho was a converted traditionalist Catholic who blamed the military regime for letting universities, schools, and media be taken over by ‘Communist’ militants and their ideas. By cherry-picking Carvalho’s conspiratorial takes on the progressive threat against Brazilian society, Bolsonaro constructed a narrative that suited military officers, traditionalist Catholics, Evangelical Christians, conservatives, and economic liberals.
Bolsonaro’s openly revisionist ideas would eventually be the key to bringing together different constituencies around his political platform in the second half of the 2010s. After years of being the spokesman of military resentment, he began offering quick fixes to groups he believed could help him towards the path to the presidency. Bolsonaro denounced presidents Lula da Silva (2003–2011) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016) for their ‘ideological indoctrination’. In his speech celebrating the 1964 coup’s 50th anniversary, he declared: ‘[L]ook at today’s school curriculum, in which 30 million students are poisoned daily […] with books that condemn capitalism, free market, and private property, while praising socialism as the remedy to all evil’.Footnote 68 Siding with the country’s agribusiness sectors, he demonised Brazil’s peasant movement as part of a ‘Communist plot’ to rule Brazil and attacked Indigenous groups’ demands for secure land demarcation. At Brazil’s Independence Day parade in 2017, just a month before the presidential election, Bolsonaro rallied behind a flag of the Brazilian monarchy. If anti-Communism was the ideology that signalled to voters what they were fighting against, the memory of Imperial Brazil (1822–1889) pointed towards the country Bolsonaro wanted to build. This was recast not as the time of slavery, as teachers ‘erroneously’ described it, but, rather, as a time of order, economic liberties, and Christian dominance over the state and society. What could seem like a paradox – Brazil’s monarchy was toppled by the military in 1889 – was incorporated into Bolsonaro’s revisionist repertoire that struck a chord with his ‘nostalgic’ voters.
By the mid-2010s, Brazil’s economy was suffering, urban crime appeared out of control, trust in politics and politicians was in shambles, and over 30 years had passed since the military period had ended. The confluence of these factors facilitated Bolsonaro’s rise not despite his openly pro-military, authoritarian and hardline conservative rhetoric but rather because of it.Footnote 69 Based on retrotopia, Bolsonaro drew in an older generation who had been ashamed to openly say they supported the military dictatorship and convinced many voters who were too young to remember (or not even born at the time) that the period had been a ‘Golden Era’ of order and progress under unapologetically national, anti-Communist, Christian, and socially conservative rule.
Heritage as identity-repositioning
Cultural heritage is a ubiquitous feature of narratives outlining a country’s identity. It provides cognitive shortcuts to the feeling of collective nostalgia by highlighting particular ‘slices’ of a country’s past that can, consequentially, be leveraged for political purposes. This phenomenon is not exclusive to any point in the political Right–Left spectrum nor to a particular regime type (e.g. liberal-democratic, populist, authoritarian). Nonetheless, as posited in our conceptual section, radical right populists have shown a strong tendency to uphold a sanitised and reactionary past (a.k.a., a retrotopia) to justify exclusionary policies. This section shows that Jair Bolsonaro resorted to ‘mnemopolitics’ for two main purposes: (1) to leverage political support and (2) to redefine the very essence of what it meant to be Brazilian. He mobilized religious heritage as the mortar that brought different social groups together around a new/old identity that challenged some deep-seated truths that had traditionally been present in Brazilian politics. This included the idea of Brazil being a diverse and pluralist nation in terms of race, religion, and gender. Since the dominant identity became identified with policies advanced by the Workers’ Party administrations, its rejection (sometimes through authoritarian means) resonated greatly with voters who were moved by an increasing anti-Workers’ Party sentiment.Footnote 70
By the mid-2010s, Bolsonaro began moving away from sheer military nostalgia and embraced Brazil’s Christian heritage and identity. In 2014, after getting elected for his seventh term in Congress, he became increasingly more outspoken about the Bible, including supporting a draft bill to allow creationism to be taught in public schools. His religious turn began as a discreet alliance with Evangelical lawmakers and reached a new level in 2016, illustrated by his baptism in the Jordan River. Interestingly, he retained his Catholic identity despite stepping into the Pentecostal world, making him somewhat of a ‘Pan-Christian’ Footnote figure 71 whose mission was to reinstate Brazil’s Christian heritage. At an early presidential campaign rally, he declared: ‘Brazil is a Christian country… there is no such thing as a secular state.Footnote 72 Minorities must bow to the majority’.Footnote 73
After winning the 2018 elections, Bolsonaro highlighted his vision of a strongly religious-based Brazilian identity. In his first UN General Assembly speech in 2019, he said, ‘My country was very close to Socialism, which led us to a situation […] of uninterrupted attacks to the family and religious values that underpin our traditions’.Footnote 74 The following year at the UN, he was even more direct and forceful: ‘Brazil is a Christian and conservative country and has family as its foundation’.Footnote 75 Bolsonaro’s presidential motto was ‘God, Nation, Family’. The slogan represents the heart of Bolsonaro’s Christian nationalist and populist project, where the true people are ultimately defined by faith, not by law.Footnote 76 Besides its clear fascist undertones, it offered a vision of Brazil with only one God (Judeo-Christian), one nation (racially diverse but not ideologically plural), and one ‘acceptable’ family structure (hetero-cisnormative and patriarchal).
Bolsonaro also re-signified Brazil’s national identity by highlighting its Portuguese/European heritage as the source of the country’s true essence and fundamental values, purposefully ostracising its Indigenous and African roots. Once again, he drew his ideas from Olavo de Carvalho and other conservative intellectuals who argued that the ‘real’ Brazilian culture was European and Catholic and/or that these two elements were the most (if not only) valuable part of the country’s cultural heritage. On the day of Bolsonaro’s inauguration, Filipe Martins, one of Bolsonaro’s campaign strategists, later Special Advisor for International Affairs, and a devout student of Carvalho, tweeted: ‘The New Era is here. Everything is ours! Deus vult!’.Footnote 77 The Latin expression, meaning ‘God wills it!’, referenced a medieval battle cry dating back to the First Crusade – one of the many made by Martins and other Brazilian radical right ideologues – that had become a staple among radical right activists in the United States and Europe since the 2000s, drawing on a white, religious, and conservative heritage.Footnote 78 PacháFootnote 79 points out that the historical narrative that places Brazil as an integral part of the Christian and Western world has been present since the 19th century and has enjoyed continued social traction among conservatives, especially those in the radical right of the political spectrum.
This reactionary revisionism presents Brazil as Portugal’s highest achievement, emphasizing a historical continuity that casts white Brazilians as the true heirs to Europe. In this way, through a genetic view of history, the far-right frames Brazilian history as essentially linked to Portugal’s own imaginarily pure medieval past.Footnote 80
Given Brazil’s mixed-race background, Brazilian radical right narratives emphasise the country’s Judeo-Christian tradition rather than whiteness, although white-ish superiority is implied.Footnote 81 This religion-based heritage and concomitant religion-based exclusionary dynamic was a common theme during Bolsonaro’s tenure – an example of a broader phenomenon that connects Christian-based theocracy and radical right movements.Footnote 82 This was accompanied by the systematic attempt to publicly erasure the cultural heritage contributions from Indigenous and African communities to Brazilian society,Footnote 83 whose importance had been highlighted through education policies in the three decades before his tenure.
A systematic denial of the historical relevance and impact of slavery also marked Bolsonaro’s administration. In 2018, before the presidential election, Bolsonaro was asked about the role of affirmative action policies in repairing a historical debt with the Afro-Brazilian population and replied: ‘What debt? I have never enslaved anyone in my life […] The Portuguese did not even set foot in Africa. The blacks themselves handed over their own slaves’.Footnote 84 Bolsonaro’s distortion of history draws directly from Olavo de Carvalho’s ideas on race and culture. Carvalho believed Brazil’s black movement was simply a Communist plot played out by academics to instil ‘retrospective hatred’ in blacks against whites. For him (and Bolsonaro), Brazilian social scientists and historians ‘put all the blame on the “Judeo-Christian civilization”, precisely the only one that, throughout human history, did something in favour of enslaved races’.Footnote 85 Similarly, then-vice-president-elect Hamilton Mourão, a retired Army General, commented on the murder of a black man by a supermarket security guard on Brazil’s Black Awareness Day (‘Dia da Consciência Negra’), saying: ‘There is no racism in Brazil. This is something that [some] want to import, it does not exist here […]. I lived in the United States. There is racism there’.Footnote 86 Mourão’s claims reflected a long-standing narrative among political and military elites on Brazil’s ‘racial democracy’. According to this idea, first theorised by sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, whites, blacks, and Indigenous natives evolved into a harmonious coexistence, making Brazil the first truly miscegenated (mixed-race) nation. During the military dictatorship, the ‘racial democracy’ myth was mobilised as an element of social order, and black movements were criminalised and persecuted under claims that they were part of a broader Communist infiltration.Footnote 87
Once in power, Bolsonaro’s administration quickly moved to change policies that acknowledged the role and social status of Indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilians. It froze land demarcation for Indigenous peoples and quilombola communities, composed of direct descendants of fugitive slaves.Footnote 88 The government also slashed the mandates of the National Indian [sic] FoundationFootnote 89 and the Palmares Foundation,Footnote 90 aimed at promoting and preserving the cultural, social, and historical contribution of the black population in Brazil. In one of the most symbolic attempts at rewriting Brazil’s racial history, Sérgio Camargo (a black man), appointed by Bolsonaro to lead the Palmares Foundation, often expressed his desire to rename the institution to Princess Isabel Foundation as a tribute to the Brazilian monarch who signed the Abolition Law in 1888. For him, Zumbi dos Palmares, the 17th-century leader of Brazil’s largest quilombo and the national symbol of the centuries-long fight against slavery, was a false hero – ‘an icon of a “victimist” [sic], angry, and revanchist militancy’.Footnote 91
Bolsonaro and his administration’s policies seeking to erase the distinctive contributions of black and Indigenous groups pushed for a narrative of a multi-racial orderly society underpinned by Christianity. This narrative was part of the foundational myths of those who cultivated nostalgia towards both the Brazilian monarchy and the military regime—and ‘oddly’ brought them together. Bolsonaro and his associates tried to delegitimise state mechanisms of social justice that favoured minorities by erasing historical elements that did not fit the narrative. Countering radical right movements in Europe, for example, Bolsonaro projected a worldview where all Brazilians were the same regardless of their race, overlooking the social impact of racism (and overlapping class-based prejudice). By doing so, Bolsonaro tapped into Brazil’s openly fascist experience of Integralismo from the 1930s, whose movement praised both the country’s Christian heritage and its multi-racial background to project a unique national identity.Footnote 92 For example, on Black Awareness Day in 2020, he tweeted a summary of his vision vis-a-vis race in the country (never mentioning the celebration):
Brazil has a diverse culture, which is unique among nations. We are a miscegenated people. Whites, blacks, browns, and indigenous form the body and the spirit of a rich and wonderful people (…). There is no use in dividing the suffering of the Brazilian people into groups (…). Let us not be manipulated by political movements. As a man and as president, I am colour-blind: everyone has the same colour (…). Those who incite discord, fostering and fabricating conflict, threaten not only the nation, but our own history. They belong in the trash can!Footnote 93
These attacks on affirmative action policies and their progressive advocates were popular among (socially) conservatives and (economically) liberal circles. After launching his presidential campaign in 2017, Bolsonaro promised less state intervention in economic and social relations, including deregulating gun control and axing social justice policies (such as the Bolsa Família’s conditional cash transfer programme). On the symbolical level, this ‘economically liberal, socially conservative’ synthesis was a projection of an idealised Brazilian empire, whose 1824 Constitution represented the country’s ‘true’ origins. According to Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Bragança, a descendent of Brazil’s imperial family and congressman in 2018 on the Bolsonaro ticket, Brazil’s first (Imperial) Constitution of 1824 ‘reflected the lessons learned after 3,000 years of Western civilisation (…). By that time, Brazil was already an extremely diverse country, which did not prevent it from forging a document that allowed for the harmonious coexistence of different groups while unifying the territory around shared values’.Footnote 94 No word was said about the Imperial slave-based economy and exclusionary political system. The shared values alluded to the Catholic faith, the official religion of the Brazilian Empire, and the only non-secular Constitution in the country’s history.
Heritage as alliance-building
Bolsonaro administration’s efforts to build a new Brazilian identity were also marked by an attempt at rearranging Brazil’s international alliances. Moving away from the pragmatic and universalist approach to international affairs that characterised Brazilian foreign policy under previous administrations (including during the military regime), Bolsonaro opted for a small number of allies who were bound together by shared values and a common heritage. For instance, in Bolsonaro’s government platform from 2018, the section dedicated to foreign policy reads: ‘The structure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs needs to be at the service of values that have always been identified with the Brazilian people (…). We will no longer praise murderous dictatorships or attack important democracies such as the United States, Israel, and Italy’.Footnote 95 What seemed like a typically liberal dichotomy democracy/dictatorship, however, becomes more complex once compared to other campaign speeches and statements made after winning the election. By singling out the United States, Israel, and Italy, the most prominent Evangelical, Jewish, and Catholic nations, Bolsonaro hinted at religion and civilisation as his foreign policy’s key parameters. Therefore, it was consistent with his ‘civilisational populist’ approach to politics in general.Footnote 96
Bolsonaro’s alliance-building strategy hinged on the assumption that a major global revolution was underway, where nations progressively freed themselves from the so-called ‘globalist’ ideology. ‘Globalism’ is a master conspiracy theory that gained popularity among radical right groups initially in the United States.Footnote 97 It suggests the international system has been taken over by progressive ideas, born from the global movements of 1968 and spread across nations by capitalist billionaires and international organisations (like the United Nations), as a form of cultural revolution whose goal is to undermine the traditional ideas of family, nationalism, and religion.Footnote 98 Anti-globalism was an integral element of the culture war waged by radical right movements in Brazil and elsewhere, seeking ‘to replace the veil of cultural cosmopolitanism and liberal internationalism (which they often refer to as “Cultural Marxism”) with a celebration of jingoism and explicit western chauvinism’.Footnote 99 The common thread between socialist ideas and globalist practices has also allowed radical right movements to blur the divide between internal and external threats and to propose a return to the ‘Judeo-Christian roots’ as a form of defeating these enemies domestically and internationally.Footnote 100
Bolsonaro’s first foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, was one of the most vocal proponents of a civilisation-based foreign policy strategy. In 2017, even before Bolsonaro began to be taken seriously as a viable candidate, he wrote a controversial article in the official journal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In it, he claimed that Donald Trump was the only man who could save the West by destroying ‘globalism’ and regenerating the two pillars of Western civilisation: nationalism and Christianity.Footnote 101 Araújo was then just an obscure ambassador, and his piece, which received compliments from Olavo de Carvalho, is said to have been decisive for his eventual appointment as foreign minister. In his inaugural speech, Araújo insisted on the same civilisational approach: he spoke of the need to break with the past to ‘liberate Brazil’s foreign policy’ and lauded the efforts of countries like the United States, Hungary, Poland, Israel, and the ‘new Italy’ (then, under a radical right government) in the struggle for their homeland and their people’s values: ‘We will seek the partnerships and the alliances that allow us to arrive where we want to, we will not ask permission from the global order, whatever it is’.Footnote 102
Brazil’s alliances were conceived as part of a broader scheme to defeat the ‘enemies of civilisation’ and implement a new international order. The latter was to be composed of ethnopolitical communities better enabled to preserve their national and cultural identities, i.e. ‘civilisational multipolarity’.Footnote 103 Ethnoreligious pluralism, not cosmopolitanism, should be the driving force of world affairs. This reflected the radical right’s ‘immutable and immanent conceptualisation of culture’, based on the role of birth and history in identity politics,Footnote 104 and opened for the possibility of cooperation in the realm of mutual affirmation of national identities. Bolsonaro’s administration issued joint declarations with Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia on the fundamental importance of national identities. In the Hungarian case, both countries declared national identity as a fundamental human right and, in a clear attack on ‘globalism’, that ‘global or transnational issues cannot serve as a pretext for the imposition of policies detrimental to national institutions or that violate the national identity’.Footnote 105 Bolsonaro also evoked this in his first UN General Assembly speech: ‘We are not here to erase nationalities and sovereignties in the name of an abstract “global interest”. This is not the Global Interest organisation. It is the UN organisation. And so, it must remain!’.Footnote 106
Bolsonaro’s civilisation-based alliances also had consequential domestic implications. Issues like criminalising abortion or fighting the global persecution of Christians (under the guise of ‘Christophobia’) became common talking points of Bolsonaro’s administration, even though they involved problematic re-interpretations of history. Christians have never been persecuted in Brazil on religious grounds — to the contrary, fundamentalist Evangelical groups are often blamed for attacking African-based minority religions in the country. The legislation on the legal exceptions for abortion, which was never seriously questioned publicly up until a few years ago, dates back from the 1940s. Yet, Brazil’s presence in conservative-religious alliances such as the Alliance for Religious Freedom, which President Trump launched in 2019,Footnote 107 and the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus Declaration, undersigned by Brazil, the United States, Hungary, Egypt, Indonesia, and Uganda in 2020,Footnote 108 reveal Bolsonaro’s administration latching on to shared narratives in the international system about religious-conservative cultural heritage to garner legitimacy for their policies at home. Another bold (albeit frustrated) attempt at rewriting history was Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro’s proposal to make Communism illegal in Brazil, akin to Nazism (banned since 1989). In his justification of the bill, he mentioned the traumatic experiences of Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine in fighting both Communism and Nazism to claim that the public defence of either ideology in Brazil should be considered a crime.Footnote 109
Once again blurring the internal/external divide, Bolsonaro had a last-ditch attempt at playing the chronopolitical game in the context of the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence, in September 2022. The celebration took place a few weeks before national elections and it was marked by heavily symbolic elements. The embalmed heart of Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro I was brought from Portugal to Brazil to be given a reception akin to a head of state just before Independence Day, when Bolsonaro declared: ‘Two countries, bound together by history and by the heart (…). Ahead of us lies an eternity in freedom. God, nation, family! Long live Portugal, long live Brazil!’.Footnote 110 At the Independence rally, with the presence of a visibly uncomfortable president of Portugal, Bolsonaro took the opportunity to make a campaign speech: ‘Brazil, promised land. Brazil, a piece of paradise. Our goal? Eternal freedom (…). We are a predominantly Christian country that rejects the liberation of drugs, that rejects the legalisation of abortion, that does not admit gender ideology (…)’.Footnote 111 Under Bolsonaro’s administration, Independence Day became an opportunity for the radical right populist to emphasize a civilisational platform largely based on chronopolitical strategies that tapped into the past and used it to create a sense of crisis and urgency. However, despite all Bolsonaro’s efforts at rewriting history and re-signifying identity, he did not get re-elected. Over the last couple of years, the new administration’s main challenge has been to bring history back to the place it deserves.
Heritage and populism under Bolsonaro: Key lessons
In this final section, we conclude by reflecting upon lessons that can be drawn from our empirical case for the broader discussion on heritage and populism. For Bolsonaro and his followers, Brazil’s ‘real people’ and ‘real’ cultural heritage existed as two sides of the same coin: only the ‘real people’ know and defend the country’s ‘real’ heritage, and the country’s only ‘real’ heritage is the one embraced by the ‘real people’. Whomever and whatever falls outside of this self-contained arrangement should be discarded.
As in other countries, Bolsonaro’s discourse nostalgically appealed to a Golden Era when (supposedly) there was national harmony, the ‘real’ people were in power, and their righteous values guided the country’s leaders. What is slightly unique about his case is that he waxed poetic over two Golden Eras that, at first glance, do not fit together: Brazil’s military period (1964–1985) and Imperial Brazil (1822–1889). If cultural heritage is understood as an intersubjective construction, then a clear narrative can ‘glue’ these pieces together. In this context, the crafted collective social memory linking these two periods highlighted their shared features. From this heritage bricolage emerged times of order, when dissenters were justly silenced, and socially conservative values were not merely expected – they were the law. This collated retrotopia was marked by the screaming silence of certain voices, notably those involving Brazil’s African and Indigenous stories and histories, both set aside under the supposed idea of racial unity and to avoid disrupting national harmony.
The empirical case brings an awareness that while ethnocentric divisions are generally socially problematic due to their exclusionary ethos, their complete erasure can also be harmful depending on the context. It can deny the existence of identity-based discrimination — and structural inequalities attached to it – and justify inaction based on a false image of equality and fairness. This case dovetails with the embrace of a neoliberal logic of individualised ‘meritocracy’ where (supposedly) there are no social structures holding back individuals.Footnote 112 Therefore, if only individual agency matters, colonialism and slavery’s historical legacies do not matter, illustrating Riedel’s attention to populists’ propensity to redesign the ‘topography of memory’.Footnote 113
Bolsonaro’s case also highlights the malleability of chronopolitics. His rabid anti-Communist stance drew directly from when the military was in power: during the Cold War. Three full decades separated the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bolsonaro’s first year in tenure. However, this did not matter much for his articulation of McCarthy-inspired Red Scare present fears: the Cold War-based reality was not in the past but very much alive and present risk to Brazil. Immediate anti-Communist action was imperative, or the future of the country and its ‘real’ people would forever be lost to the secular, ‘globalist’, and degenerate ‘Elite’. Karl Marx’s rejection of Christianity (and all organised religion in general) made Communism – and, by default, anyone who could be labelled a Communist – a direct threat to Brazil’s Christian heritage. Such interpretation exemplifies how, under populism, the ‘people’ and ‘Elite’ are ‘empty vessels’. Like in the Turkish case, immigrants were not the source of threat to Brazil’s heritage. Rather, the others/Elite seeking to dismantle the country’s ‘real’ heritage were (Brazilian) secularists and socially progressive Christians – as seen in several protests made in churches against Catholic clergy during Bolsonaro’s tenure, including towards the Archbishop of São Paulo, whose liturgies were considered ‘Communist’.Footnote 114
Bolsonaro’s pivot towards countries with leaders sharing similar religious conservative values leads to important reflections on what constitutes the ‘national interest’ and how it is defined (i.e. based on what?). For example, it is hard to justify Brazil’s closeness to Poland and Hungary based on International Relations’ (neo)Realist, Marxist, or even Liberal perspectives. We believe that only a critical take, embracing elements like intersubjectivity and identity formation, can truly capture this change in direction.
Finally, we hope this piece serves as a springboard for further research on several remaining gaps concerning heritage and populism. This includes the need for in-depth analyses of the erasure of African and Indigenous heritage under Bolsonaro and more studies of heritage in Global South cases, particularly in Latin America, home to several populist leaders (not just populist parties). This region also has unexplored cases of Left-leaning populists, whose historical ‘anchors’ draw upon Indigenous groups and move away from European heritage.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525000233.
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