I guess I'm supposed to accept this because you say so.
No, it was the conclusion of a somewhat detailed (given the available space of forum posts) rundown on the current state of the global economy. "Seventh greatest economy" is not an accolade that garners attention - not so long ago, Italy was the world's eighth largest economy. Mexico was the twelfth. The UK and France were third and fourth. India is currently third, yet even that gets little attention compared with the US, China and the EU (which as a bloc has the world's largest economy, but is not a single country).
Brazil doubled its economic performance between the 1960s and the 1990s - but has shown no such progress since then. The short-lived biofuels boom may be over. As analysts who look into these things have said:
"There are, however, numerous obstacles to Brazil reaching superpower status. According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, recognising Brazil's current economic strength is “not the same as [saying] it will become the economic superpower [anytime soon].”[19] Similarly, energy analyst Mark Burger writes that Brazil, in general, will improve its energy situation, but not to the point of being an energy superpower.[20]
The much higher rate of crime in the country compared to all the other potential superpowers, stubbornly high levels of income and education inequality, social polarization, and the future of the much less developed northern regions of the country remain concerns.[citation needed]
Furthermore, a country needs to achieve great power status first, before becoming a superpower, and it could be disputed whether Brazil currently qualifies as a great power."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_superpowers
More positive analyses cited in the same article suggest that Brazil had a head start over India and China due to its longer history of established, developed institutions and of "positive development" - however both countries have surged ahead while Brazil has not, to the point that it's awarded critiques like those I cited earlier from Forbes. Unlike India, Brazil has not established a clear niche for itself in the global economy; I'm not aware that it has anything equivalent to India's high-tech industry as a selling point. It's still reliant mainly on agrarian products such as soybean.
As for the idea of South American states in a leadership role, granted it's absolutist to claim it will "never" happen, but in a timescale relevant to, say, Civ (with its end date in 2050) it plainly won't. The Southern Hemisphere continents are dominated by developing countries, and mostly poor ones. Being the dominant power in South America is plainly not equivalent, by a long way, to being the dominant power in North America or in Asia. Brazil is no more a superpower for being South America's leading power than South Africa is a superpower for being Africa's, or than Australia is a superpower for being Australasia's. Brazil lacks China's economic clout, and it lacks America's linguistic dominance or its strong political relationships with other major powers. America isn't the global superpower because America in isolation has a lot of money, it's the superpower because its alliances allow it to exert huge influence on international relations.
None of this is intended to discredit any of Brazil's accomplishments, and from a vantage point within South America it undoubtedly looks like a major world power, but that relies on a somewhat myopic and oversimplified view of the way global politics works. As I noted above, the EU is currently the world's largest single economy - however despite that it doesn't yet have the political relevance of the United States or, increasingly, of China. Japan has long been one of the world's top economies, but it's tended to pursue a somewhat isolationist policy on the world stage that has given it less political power in its own right than one might expect. Prior to Angela Merkel's tenure, France represented the European Union more than Europe's economic powerhouse Germany.
Even if Brazil were to make the economic headway needed to climb close to the top in the foreseeable future, and it's not at all clear how it could achieve that, it has neither the political connections nor cultural influence to leverage that power.
Funny, that seems to be the opposite of what I took "globalised" to mean.
"Globalisation" refers to the homogenisation of the world as a whole as the cultural influence of one or a small number of cultures becomes dominant - yes, that does appear to be the reverse of your understanding of it. For example:
"Sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as:
...all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalisation
I'm sorry that you feel that way.
Granted, I was using an extreme example for effect (plainly Brazil's place relative to the US is far more prominent than Lithuania's relative to Germany), but the principle remains valid - dominant societies receive attention by virtue of the fact they are dominant. Those that tend to be neglected in views of global power politics tend to be the ones that simply aren't major players in those politics.
Except in the case of the US, amirite?
I already covered this, and do so in more detail in response to the bizarre misunderstanding of what constitutes "influence" you quote below.
In short, however, there isn't any feasible way that the US can be dismissed as having had no influence on the development of modern society - its culture and cultural icons permeate much of the world, without its contribution to 20th Century politics governance across large portions of the planet would be very different, and American-led dissemination of technology has led to originally non-American technologies, from cinema and television to the internet and mobile phones becoming global phenomena so pervasive they define the way much of the modern world works, in just the same way as the European inventions of moveable type and breech-loading mechanisms transformed originally Chinese innovations into such globally dominant technologies as the printing press and gunpowder warfare.
It seems they just needed to showcase the tourism system. Not the best way to do it, I agree, but tell me, do you think the game's developers "struggled to think of any credible way of representing Germany in the context of a Civ game" because they gave Germany a UA that allows them to convert barbarians?
This isn't an equivalent situation. Everyone looking at the German UA knows what it represents, and no one disputes that it reflects a real period of German history. The issue arises with trying to determine whether that is the best way to reflect a society with a several-thousand-year history with at least three major incarnations.
The issue with the Brazilian UA is that it doesn't represent Brazil at any period of its history, not just that a bad period was chosen as the primary focus; the name provides a loose link, but is a ridiculous fit for the UA (which was pointed out on the BNW "New Civs" thread as a better UA for a civ like Italy). The UI provides a benefit conceptually linked to something the Brazilians produced for export, and gained no benefit from themselves. It's not at all clear why Brazilian WWII soldiers would be associated with generating a golden age.
I suggest you read that post. I have no desire to repeat things that have already been stated earlier on the thread.
When those things are complete nonsense, I can see why. Influence has nothing to do with "who invented what", it's about how a particular society has affected the development of others and of world civilisation as a whole. I don't think anyone would claim that, because Adam Smith was Scottish, the dominance of modern capitalism (which, incidentally, in the predominantly American form found in most of the world bears little relation to Adam Smith's beliefs) is a triumph of Scottish cultural imperialism. As I noted earlier, the Chinese invented gunpowder weapons - but they did not disseminate them widely. Even Japan obtained firearms first from the Europeans, despite the far greater proximity of China.
Take "Freedom" as that poster mentioned. No, not an American idea, not disseminated originally in the modern world by America (Napoleon and the British Empire take a lot of credit for that), and in most social issues related to suffrage (among them slavery, voting rights for women, most gay rights, and emancipation for blacks) the country is typically a couple of decades - and sometimes further - behind Western Europe.
But consider what the modern world would look like without America heavily pushing the
idea of freedom in the mid-20th Century. Without American sponsorship, and in the case of Korea and parts of Central America American military intervention, many smaller nations would have turned to communism during the Cold War. Without American involvement in WWII, the result would probably have been a Soviet occupation of Berlin, maybe with no capitalist West Germany at all and with the remaining Western European powers unable to recover from the war without American financial aid, leaving the Soviet Union as the dominant global power and its influence on the development of later 20th Century political systems correspondingly enhanced. It may even have been that without America Germany would have won the war, since although Germany was on the defensive by the time the Americans entered the European theatre in force, without their economic support and supplies earlier in the war the Allies may never have fought Hitler to a standstill.
Technology? Just look at the internet. It's far from too early to be sure that this has had a world-changing impact - on social interactions, on global exchange, on the way the business world works. The original foundations of the internet may have been developed by a British researcher based in Switzerland, but it was the Americans who turned it into a public-access system and exported it, the Americans are the reason English is the internet's global language, and the internet's master servers are in American hands.
But all of these are somewhat incidental to the thing that really shapes civilisation at the level of the people who comprise it: culture. American cultural achievements have been immense - from the dominance of American musical styles and clothing in the 20th Century to American cinema. television and popular literature, and to the cultural influence of American science and technology such as the space shuttle, the moon landings, the discovery of Pluto, and such scientific theories as the Big Bang. Just as one example, the guitar is now a globally recognised symbol of music generically, and in most cases is depicted as an electric guitar - a 1940s American invention that propelled a previously moderately obscure Spanish folk instrument to superstardom and a world-recognised cultural symbol. Brazil has had no widespread cultural impact to compare to the rock 'n' roll era
alone, if you were to ignore every other American cultural development of the last century. It would probably be pushing it to identify a single Brazilian product with the world-recognition of Star Trek or The Simpsons.
Yes, exploitation of the native peoples occurred in Brazil, as it did in the US and in Australia, and it was just as wrong there as in the US and Australia. But I wonder how you judge that it was somehow "worse" in Brazil than in either of those countries. That seems to be a qualitative, not a quantitative judgment, and a highly subjective one.
There's a very practical reason for that judgment: rubber. The methods employed in exploiting indigenous people in the Brazilian rubber boom were of almost unparallelled brutality. Detail is rather unnecessary here - read sources such as this recent potted history:
http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Rivers-Amazon-John-Hemming/dp/0500288208
I also doubt that many Aborigines, Native Americans, and African Americans would agree with you. Speaking of "abolition of slavery", it's not as if the lives of African Americans were greatly improved after slavery was abolished in the US.
No one's tried claiming that the US' key accomplishment was the development of an equitable multicultural society. You can't claim, as you have, that the key defining feature of Brazil is its multiculturalism and then wave away all evidence that Brazil's multiculturalism is poorly-developed compared with many other modern states.
Sigh. This discussion is getting tiresome. It's also pointless because it seems that everyone has a different definition of civilization. I simply choose the more inclusive one. The more civs to play, the better.
"The more civs to play, the better" works as an argument if we were in danger of running short of civs to include without stretching the definition. This isn't the case by any means. When you still have a large suite to choose from, the question "Why should Brazil be one of those civs?" remains pertinent, and all the moreso when the Brazil included bears no clear relationship to anything particularly Brazilian.
I agree that Brazil's uniques could definitely be improved, but that is an entirely different matter from whether there should be a Brazil in the game at all.
It's far from "entirely different". As already mentioned by another poster, the key decision when you include a civ should be "can we do something interesting with it?" The name of the civ can always be selected later if necessary, if there's a good idea floating around that deserves to be used. Ultimately, many abilities can be reasonably given to any of a large number of potential civilisations.
