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1
Introduction
At the opening of the General Debate of the 59th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2004, former Brazilian president Lula (Luiz Inácio da Silva) asserted: “the path to lasting peace must encompass a new political and economic international order, one that extends to all countries real opportunities for economic and social development” (Da Silva, 2004, p. 2). Lula’s speech has been received by many as an expression of a larger phenomenon, namely, “an emerging South-South coalition strategy” (Grey, 2009, p. 95) aimed at “affecting changes in international decision making”. His emphasis on tackling inequality and his call for a more democratic world order fit perfectly the expectation that the rise of emerging powers would “occasion a shift […] favoring redistribution between the states of the North and South” (Stephen, 2013, p. 309). Lula reiterated his “life-long commitment to those silenced by inequality, hunger and hopelessness”, citing Franz Fanon on the legacy of the colonial past that determined the kind of freedom decolonization could offer to these people: “If you so desire, take it: the freedom to starve” (Da Silva, 2004, p. 1; Burges, 2013, p. 581). Addressing an audience of 191 nation-states, Lula reminded them that 125 countries, including Brazil, had been subjected in the past to the oppression of a few powers that represented less than 2% of the global territorial space. He acknowledged advancements towards a postcolonial democratic order, but he also expressed his view that the present configuration of international institutions still hinders a greater participation of the ‘Global South’ in the global economy and in global political debates.
The predominant strategy of Brazil’s foreign policy that took shape during the first mandate of president Lula (2002–2006) was to emphasize South-South cooperation, the establishment of new relations with non-traditional partners, and the formation of coalitions with other developing states. A widely disseminated interpretation of this shift to the ‘global South’ is that Brazil’s diversification of trade partners and alliances with developing countries were an attempt to reduce the asymmetries vis-à-vis the United States and the European Union while becoming part of an anti-hegemonic force (Sotero & Armijo, 2007; Vigevani & Cepaluni, 2007, 2009; Cervo, 2010; De Almeida, 2010; Roett, 2010; De Lima & Hirst, 2006; Dos Santos, 2011).
As a result of Brazil’s greater participation in the global economy, measured mainly by the solid performance of the Brazilian economy during the 2008 financial crisis and as a result of its strong and early recovery, a more preeminent role for the country in the delineation of the global governance architecture was not only accepted, but also expected (Cervo, 2010; De Almeida, 2010; Carrasco & Williams, 2012; Burges, 2013). For about 10 years, analysts were enthusiastic about the indicators of Brazil’s journey toward the fulfillment of its promised future. In 2003, the country has emerged into a leadership position among the newly formed coalition of developing countries within the World Trade Organization (WTO), the commercial G20. Brazil has also been heard at the financial G20, an institution that in 2009 had become a major multilateral forum for debates on global financial governance. As a member of the group BRIC (acronym that refers to Brazil, Russia, India, China, later transformed into BRICS with the inclusion of South Africa in 2011), formalized in 2010, Brazil has witnessed improved bargaining power in multilateral fora. For the first time, a Brazilian became the leader of one of the key bodies of the Bretton Woods system, with Roberto Azevêdo appointed in 2013 as the director general of the WTO. At the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Brazil was able to pay in full its obligations amounting to US$15.46 billion in 2006 (IMF, 2006, p. 9), and started to advocate a reform of the decision-making structure, considered obsolete because it no longer reflected the distribution of economic power across the globe. And, finally, at the United Nations (UN), in 2004, Brazil joined Japan, India, and Germany in a campaign for a reform of the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC), reiterating their claim that the new global geopolitical reality called for new institutional structures and a redistribution of roles in the international game (Burges, 2013; Imber, 2006).
It was in this context of exacerbated optimism about the prospects of a different and less asymmetric global future that Brazil became the subject of several studies (see Brainard & Martinez-Díaz, 2009; Fishlow, 2011; Rohter, 2010; Roett, 2010; Sachs, Wilheim, & Pinheiro, 2009) and much media speculation on the prospects and conditions of its newly acquired position in global politics. 1 Brazil was said to no longer be condemned to the position of “the country of the future” (Eakin, 2013, p. 221). A different representation of Brazil as a ‘global player’ and possibly “the country of the present” started to emerge and be reinforced by analyses portraying Brazil and other economies in the so-called ‘global South’ as the new drivers of the world economy (Zoellick, 2010). Brazil was discursively positioned in a new political space and was granted a new temporal dimension. It was said to be climbing up both to the global stage and toward the future, 2 a place and a time from where Lula could promise to challenge the current international institutional and normative frameworks in favor of a less asymmetric and more inclusive world order.
Most claims that Brazil’s time had finally arrived often go hand-in-hand with the recognition by politicians and analysts of Brazil’s new differentiated geopolitical position at the time. Both the claims about the new temporal dimension in which Brazil was being placed and the claims about Brazil’s greater influence in international politics derived their authority mainly from data related to Brazil’s political and economic performance. The easy association between power/authority, future, and economic capability in these discourses is part of what I problematize. This book exposes the symbiosis between discourses of power, authority, and legitimacy in international relations (primarily concerned with states’ visibility and geopolitical positionings in international politics) and discourses of temporality (primarily concerned with the way states are positioned in relation to historical frameworks and/or expectations of the future) that enables an understanding of Brazil as an international actor that can be positioned along a temporal spectrum (past, present, or future), but also according to a spatial or territorial dialectic of visible versus invisible political space on an international scale.
The examination of Brazil’s temporal and spatial positionings or representations implied in the notion of Brazil’s emergence to the global stage cannot be detached from broader processes and discourses within which this ‘phenomenon’ took place. Future and power, concepts that are embedded in these narratives about the country’s status in the beginning of the twenty-first century, do not have an absolute or inherent meaning. They make sense when attached to particular representations of Brazil in relation to other types of representation.
Besides Brazil’s economic indicators and increased bargaining power in the institutions mentioned above, the new position of Brazil as a global player was also corroborated by Brazil’s ‘successes’ in other fields. Brazil’s ability and willingness to start assuming, in 2004, a leadership role in United Nations missions under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which qualifies those missions as military interventions that do not require the consent of the parties, has been seen as a major and necessary shift in Brazil’s foreign policy, one that could help the country shape its image as a global player (Kenkel, 2013; Amorim, 2005). In 2014, Brazil was said to have eradicated extreme poverty and did not feature on the UN World Hunger Map, for the first time since the annual reports started to be published (FAO, IFAD, & WFP, 2014). Adding to these ‘achievements’, the selection of Rio de Janeiro to host the Olympic Games after a competitive bidding process with other ‘global cities’, such as Chicago, Madrid, and Tokyo, was described by Lula as a final recognition that Brazil had become a global ‘first-class citizen’ (Da Silva, 2009).
While these events placing ‘Brazil on a global stage’ initially inspired a number of publications on this topic, this book is not concerned with the phenomenon of ‘Brazil’s emergence’ per se or ‘Brazil’s failure to hold the new status’. It does not aim to add voice to the debate, predominant in the literature on Brazilian studies or Latin American Studies, on the most accurate delineations of the country’s past trajectories or explanations and prospects on Brazil’s rise and fall as a global player. Rather, it aims to investigate what has been taken for granted by many analysts and politicians, namely, the discursive and non-discursive conditions that enabled the proliferation and circulation of narratives and representations about the new status of the country, and about Brazil’s potential to intervene against the asymmetries of the global order. This book is at once an account of the narratives about the position of Brazil in the twenty-first century, and an exploration of what the ‘appearance’ of what we call ‘Brazil’ in this particular temporal and spatial ‘place’ entails. As such, this book intends as a contribution to old and new conversations on the production of geopolitical knowledge (Ó Tuathail, 1986, 1996), the conditions for representation in international politics (Shapiro, 1988), the narrativity and textuality of politics (Der Derian & Shapiro, 1989; Campbell, 1988), stateness and performativity (Jeffrey, 2013; McConnell, 2016), the hierarchization of difference (Inayatullah & Blaney, 2004), and on the relevance of looking at the dynamics of temporality and subjectivity in world politics (Aghatangelou & Killian, 2016; Solomon, 2013). It draws inspiration, in various degrees, from a number of disciplines and sub-fields, such as, International Relations, Critical Development Studies, Critical and Feminist Geopolitics, Historiography, and Anthropology.
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s mode of inquiry, this work is primarily concerned with questions such as, “how have we become what we are, and what are the possibilities of becoming ‘other’?” (Tamboukou, 1999, p. 215). The current state of affairs I look at is one in which it has been possible to speak of transformations in the world order that, for a period of time, involved Brazil ‘coming to the future’ and pushing forward with reforms of the international institutional and normative framework. How are conditions and processes for the representation of Brazil as a country coming to the future or as an emergent and falling actor on the global stage articulated and performed? What does it take for one to get ‘there’? What can these conditions and processes reveal in terms of spatiotemporal boundaries and possibilities for new subjectivities and practices?
In the next sections, I briefly review some aspects of the discourses about ‘Brazil’s emergence to the global stage’, and I start to lay out the theoretical framework informing this analysis. First, I review existing representations of the world and world politics that inspire this work. Second, I analyze the importance of studying world politics as a matter of discourse, and of exploring ontological claims in traditional theoretical accounts of world politics that have been forgotten or ignored in the context of discourses of globalization and deterritorialization common to late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century international politics. Finally, I discuss how particular representations of the world and world politics shape the way the topic ‘Brazil’s emergence’ has been defined.
Brazil’s emergence to the global stage
Given its continental size, the fifth largest population of the world, a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of US$2,25 trillion 3 that elevated the country to the fifth position in the world’s ranking in 2013, its biodiversity, and the stability with regards to its borders, Brazil is frequently presented as naturally endowed with the resources to assume a role as a ‘big’ country in the shaping of the international order (Lafer, 2000, p. 208; De Lima, 2005, p. 21).
Despite its historical memberships and its participation in global fora, the recent debate about the emergence of Brazil as a global player was sustained by a representation of the country as one that could manage a strong domestic economy and promote an agenda of South-South cooperation, even during a world economic crisis that affected most of the top economies in the world. One condition that seems to be taken for granted is that the path to the future, where the status of global player was waiting for Brazil to take, was necessarily paved with economic development measures. In this sense, the narrative about Brazil’s future is fused with mantras about Brazil’s development.
Brazil’s own conceptualization of sovereignty and the understanding of its external vulnerabilities have always been associated with economic development (De Lima & Hirst, 2006, p. 22). This explains that development has always been a top priority in the economic, political, and diplomatic agendas of the country. Dependency theorists, mostly dissident voices speaking from exile in the 1960s and 1970s, already recognized the problems of the developmentalist ‘raison d’état’ in Brazil and other countries in South America. In the 70s, Cardoso and Faletto (1979) 4 argued:
The basic ideology of the state is fundamentally ‘developmentalism’. In view of the explicit ends of economic growth and national grandeur, the exploitation of workers, if not openly defended by the state, is justified by the argument that the tightening of belts is necessary ‘at the moment’ so that ‘in the future’ the results of this economy may be redistributed.
(p. 215)
Despite the critical interpretations of development disseminated from Latin America to academic circles all over the world more than 40 years ago, Brazil’s domestic agenda and foreign policy have remained dominated by the ideal of a future that has to be achieved through development. 5 Considering Brazil’s historical background of participation in international institutions, and other cycles of accelerated economic growth and stagnation the country has been through, what some scholars argue that have distinguished the ‘emergence’ during the last decade is a combination of economic growth, an anti-imperialistic positioning (at least discursively) of a center-left government, and the reduction of inequality within the country. The alignment of economic development, the “reorientat...
