Former President of Brazil
Fernando Henrique Cardoso was President of the Federative Republic of Brazil for two successive mandates (from 01/01/1995 to 31/12/2002), winning both elections in the first round by an absolute majority.
Among his more recent functions, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was Chairman of the Club of Madrid from and co-Chairman of the Inter-American Dialogue (2003/06). He is a member of the High-Level Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor. He is also Professor “at large” at Brown University, Providence, and holder of the “Cultures of the South” chair at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. He recently presided over the United Nations Panel of Eminent Persons on the relationship between this organization and civil society as well as the UNCTAD Panel of Eminent Persons on Enhancing the Development Role and the Impact of that Organization. He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1931. He is married and has three children.
A sociologist trained at the University of São Paulo, he emerged since the late 1960s as one of the most influential figures in the analysis of large-scale social change, international development, dependency, democracy, and state reform. Building on this successful intellectual and academic career, Cardoso became deeply involved in Brazil’s struggle for democracy to overcome the authoritarian military regime (1964-1985). Elected Senator in 1982, he was a founding member of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). He served as Minister of Foreign Relations in 1992-93 and Minister of Finance in 1993-94.
Former Professor Catedrático of Political Science, to-day Professor Emeritus, at the University of São Paulo, he served as Associate Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and visiting professor at the Collège de France and at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He taught at Cambridge as Simon Bolivar Professor, and at the Universities of Stanford and California at Berkeley. Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he received “Honoris Causa” degrees from Rutgers (the State University of New Jersey) as well as from the Universities of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana), Central of Caracas (Venezuela), Chile, Porto and Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), the Free University of Berlin (Germany), Lumière Lyon 2 (France), Bologna (Italy), Cambridge, Oxford and London (UK), Nitra (Slovaquia), Moscow (Russia), Jerusalem (Israel), and Sofia (Japan). Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received many honours such as the “Prince of Asturias Award of International Cooperation 2000”, the UNDP’s 2002 inaugural “Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution to Human Development” and the “J. William Fullbright Prize for International Understanding” (2003).
His main works in English include his recently published memoir, The Accidental President of Brazil (2006), Dependency and Development in Latin America (with E. Faletto, 1979) and Charting a New Course: The Politics of Globalization and Social Tansformation (2001, M.Font editor). He is also a participating author in São Paulo: Growth and Poverty (et allii, 1978), The New Global Economy in the Information Age (with M. Carnoy, M. Castells and S.S. Cohen, 1993), and essays in books such as: Elites in Latin America (M.S. Lipset & A. Solari, 1967), Authoritarian Brazil (A. Stepan, 1973), Structures and Dependency (F. Bonilla & R. Girling, 1973), The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (D. Collier, 1979), Sociology of “Developing Societies” (H. Alavi & T. Shanin, 1982), Toward a Just World Order (R. Falk, S.S. Kim & S.H. Mendlovitz, 1982), Transitions from Authoritarian Rules. Prospects for Democracy (G. O’Donnell, P.C. Schmitter & L. Whitehead, 1986), Democratizing Brazil (A. Stepan, 1989), Social Democracy in Latin America (M.Vellinga, 1993), The International Political Economy and the Developing Countries (S. Haggard, 1995).
