Brazil In The International System

The Rise Of A Middle Power

Wayne A. Selcher

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429728471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years, Brazil has grown greatly in international status, and all indications are that it will continue to do so. The authors of this book evaluate Brazil from a "Brazil in the world" viewpoint, placing the country in the current international system in relation to its capabilities, effects, and interest positions. On the basis of their co

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Brazilian Foreign Relations in the Twentieth Century

Frank D. McCann

Underlying the history of Brazilian foreign relations has been an effort to use foreign policy to achieve recognition of national greatness. The methods, indeed the intermediate goals, have changed with time and circumstance, but the ultimate objective of grandeza nacional, or national grandeur, has endured. Throughout the imperial period (1822-1889), the European monarchies looked upon the Brazilian empire as a tropical oddity, while the American republics regarded it with either suspicion or indifference. In the twentieth century suspicion became paramount among its neighbors, while the powers tended to treat Brazil as an economic or political pawn that could be dealt with according to their needs. Brazilians sought to mitigate the suspicion and worked to have the powers take Brazil seriously and admit it to their ranks. The concern with national prestige is a keystone of Brazilian policy, its other characteristics clustering about it.

Continuities in the Colonial Administration and the First Republic

Brazil's colonial heritage included, in rough outline, the present national territory. There was little need to demarcate the nearly 10,000 miles of frontier until this century when population began to spread into the continent's interior. Still, the successful conclusion of negotiations, arbitrations, and military maneuverings employed to draw exact boundaries without major conflict was a remarkable achievement that stands as testament to the brilliance of Foreign Minister Jose Maria da Silva Paranhos, the Baron of Rio Branco, who set the tone and direction of twentieth century Brazilian policy.

Linked to the policy of secure frontiers was that of seeking to prevent Brazil's neighbors, especially in the Rio de la Plata, from forming a coalition against it. This required maintaining the status quo in the equations of power among its neighbors. For the most part this has meant keeping Argentina in check and preventing it from achieving its dream of reconstructing the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. It has also led to intimate involvement in the internal politics and economies of Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay and to an informal but consistent alliance with Chile. This policy of division, of keeping its neighbors disunified, reaches back into the last century. Involvements in the civil war in Argentina (1852) and in the war against Paraguay (1865-1870) were in support of it. Ambassador Heitor Lyra's 1951 observation that Argentina is "the nerve point of our foreign policy" holds true to the present.¹ Recent efforts toward neighborly cooperation in the Amazon and with the Andean countries and in energy development in the Rio de la Plata are only a seeming departure from the rule, developed in the course of negotiations over the frontiers, that Brazil should never sit down with more than one neighbor at a time, in the belief that the Spanish-speakers would join forces against the Brazilians. This rule encouraged Brazilians to seek an alliance with the United States to offset potential isolation among the Spanish-speakers. In the Amazonian and Andean situations Brazil has carefully developed bilateral understandings before moving to the stage of multilateral agreement. Its approach to Pan-Americanism was conditioned by the belief that hemispheric unity, with its accompanying legal mechanisms for preventing and containing armed conflict, would lessen the possibility of anti-Brazilian coalitions.

Diplomatic efforts in support of economic development are another element of continuity in Brazilian foreign policy. The nature and perception of development have changed since Brazilian diplomats worked to fend off British suppression of the slave trade in the first half of the last century, or, later on, to assist Paulista planters to obtain European immigrant workers. In the twentieth century they sought to defend coffee and cacao markets, developed complicated subterfuges in the 1930s to maintain trade with antagonistic powers, and supported industrialization from the 1940s onward. Of course, in socioeconomic terms the segments of society influencing and benefiting from this diplomacy changed composition over the decades as the economy slowly shifted from a total colonial-style export orientation to an increasing internal-market orientation, but in broad terms that seems less significant than the tendency to provide diplomatic support for the economy.

Still, examination of the socioeconomic and regional backgrounds of Brazilian diplomats over the decades shows that they were consistently drawn from the dominant elites of each era and that they represented the interests and attitudes of those elites. Under the empire, fifteen out of forty-two foreign ministers came from Bahia, while with the republic and the shift in the focus of power from the Northeast to the Center-South, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro became common sources of foreign ministers and diplomats. There may have been psychosocial as well as economic and political reasons for the regional elites' interest in diplomacy. Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro were heavily Africanized, and yet their elites tended to reject the reality around them and to function instead in an imaginary white, Latin society. As Jose Honório Rodrigues has suggested, the foreign ministry and diplomatic service was an ideal environment in which to create a false reality, where French could replace Portuguese, where judicial procedures and international topics could shut out the illiterate, dark-skinned world about the elites. Even the office furniture of the Itamaraty was deliberately imported from England.² The expression para inglês ver (for the English to see), the creation of a European facade to cover the reality of Brazil, flowed from a mind-set in which the whitening of Brazil was a basic desire.³

Their shame at the darkness around them made the elites feel inferior to Europeans, so the diplomats tried to convince their European colleagues that Brazil was a new country with a society in formation. Yet, strangely enough, until the 1930s European travelers would comment that they felt more comfortable there than in Argentina or the United States exactly because the society appeared older, more rooted, more hierarchical. The idea of newness has been joined since the 1950s with notions of internal expansion and economic development to project an image of dynamism that seems to put aside any sense of inferiority.

Because foreign policy has been the creature of a restricted segment of society, it has tended to preserve its underlying characteristics. There is a consistent tradition of legalism, of juridical solutions, in part due to the law school training of many diplomats and in part due to Brazil's military weakness that prevented recourse to arms. Also there is the tradition of nonpartisanship; foreign policy was not normally a political football. This latter was less the result of a conscious policy than of the historical circumstance of rule by restricted elites, whose interests were more complementary than competitive, and the consequent lack of competitive, representative government.

The Rio Branco era (1902-1912) was more than a period in which the frontier lines were fixed. The breadth of the baron's vision set the tone for the following decades. Clearly the boundaries were essential for determining exactly where Brazil began and ended, but even more important than the series of successful negotiations and arbitrations themselves was that they served to alert the powers that Brazil was drawing lines over which they were not to intrude—this during the heyday of imperialism when Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean had been forced under European or U.S. flags. The baron urged reform of the Brazilian army and navy because he understood that without military preparedness territorial claims could not be sustained. To this end, he and General Hermes da Fonseca (president, 1910-1914) sent young, reform-minded officers to train with the Imperial German Army. And to enhance Brazil's prestige, the baron convinced Rome of the wisdom of conferring the first Latin American cardinalate (1905) on the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro.

In the economic sphere Brazil was in an awkward position. The principal customer for its coffee was the United States, but Great Britain held its 1898 "Funding Loan" note (between 1883 and 1914 Brazil had borrowed over $120 million, of which it still owed over $100 million in 1925). British banks financed international commercial exchange, and down to 1930 British investors accounted for 53 percent of total foreign investment in Brazil. Rio Branco and his successors sought to set temporal and physical limits to dependency by diffusing it among the powers. Encouraging closer economic and political ties with the United States provided a hedge against the British, and eventually, in the first Vargas period (1930-1945), would allow a shift from the London to the New York financial orbit. The military ties with Germany involved purchases of expensive field equipment that encouraged trade relations. In that era of infrastructure building, the purchase of foreign-made machines and equipment was seen as a necessary stage of internal economic development. Rio Branco saw this diffused dependency as temporary; once developed, Brazil would achieve full independence.

Participation in the Pan-American movement and the Hague conferences had the objective of increasing Brazilian prestige to lessen the possibility of imperialist attacks and of creating an image of independent action that would inspire national confidence. By standing with the United States in its Caribbean adventures and by arguing for acceptance of arbitration in the settlement of disputes, Brazil at once sought to protect itself from similar U.S. abuse, to convince its neighbors that the United States was allied with Brazil, and that Brazil would not threaten them militarily.

Rio Branco's lengthy chancellorship provided the basis for what would be henceforth nodded to as the Itamaraty tradition, but not all administrations understood it; some confused its tactical elements—dependence on foreign loans and investment, Pan-Americanism, and alliance with the United States—with its strategic substance—the pursuit of independence and national greatness.

World War I found Brazil in a quandary. Its officer corps had been partially reinvigorated and Germanized; its troops used German drills to train with their Mauser rifles, while at Vila Militar outside Rio the very kitchens were German in style and equipment. Yet economics, the U.S. decision for war, and German submarine attacks on Brazilian merchantships pushed Brazil into the conflict on the side of the Allies in 1917. Though Brazil mobilized, it lacked the ability to place units on line in Europe quickly, so its war was limited to naval demonstrations, the supply of some medical personnel, and the exploits of a few officers who served with the French forces.

The peace, however, provided opportunities. At Versailles, Woodrow Wilson embraced the newly elected Brazilian president, Epitácio Pessoa (1919-1922), exchanged correspondence with him, and sent him home on a U.S. warship. For a short while it seemed as if Brazil and the United States would form a New World team in the League of Nations. Unhappily, Wilson failed to convince the Senate and so Pessoa led Brazil into the League alone. There Brazil was consistently elected to one of the Council's nonpermanent seats and its diplomats played active roles in League business, enhancing Itamaraty's image. In Geneva the Brazilians' legalistic mentality served them well, but ability alone was not sufficient to overcome European resistance to Brazilian pretensions to permanent Council membership. In 1926, when Germany joined the League and received a permanent seat, Brazil withdrew, partly in protest, partly from wounded national pride.

In the Western Hemisphere, the Pan-American conferences provided their own form of frustration. At the end of 1922 the Arthur Bernardes (1922-1926) administration, wishing to cut its military expenditures in order to balance the budget, had invited Argentina and Chile to discuss mutual arms reduction prior to the upcoming inter-American conference in Santiago. Argentina had declined, claiming a lack of time to prepare, while Chile had accepted. The Argentines felt squeezed and their press launched a propaganda campaign painting Brazil as a militaristic country with hegemonic designs on the continent. Argentina had remained neutral during the recent war, betting on a German victory. Its military officers had looked on with irritation and suspicion while Brazil had established obligatory military service, reorganized its army, constructed new training areas and barracks, purchased modern weapons, and contracted to obtain a French military mission. The Bernardes administration saw its good intentions placing Brazil in the uncomfortable position of having to defend its military program, not only to Argentina and Chile, but before all the American republics. The Brazilian army's report on the conference observed that "the Brazilian delegation encountered a deliberately prepared hostile milieu in Santiago" thanks to "Argentine propaganda." The report accused the Argentine government of using "Brazilian armaments" as a device to squeeze arms funding out of its congress and to weaken the position Brazil had developed in the League of Nations.⁴

Though Brazil wished to be regarded as "the most powerful state in South America," the U.S. military attaché reported that "a war of aggression would not meet with popular favor, nor is the Brazilian army prepared to take the field against an organized force."⁵ Even so, seeing the French and Americans advising the Brazilians in the reorganization and modernization of their army and navy had to have an unsettling effect on the Argentines. Tension between Argentina and Brazil and continuous maneuvering for superior positions of influence in the buffer states of Paraguay and Uruguay were, and are, characteristic of their relations. For this reason a third of the Brazilian army has been traditionally stationed in Rio Grande do Sul.

These experiences did not encourage Brazilian faith in a rigid Pan-Americanism. In the League of Nations Brazil opposed creation of regional arbitration and security pacts, arguing somewhat deceptively that an unshakable peace reigned in the Americas. Rather, it favored worldwide pacts because expanded Western Hemisphere ties to other co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Charts
• Foreword
• The Contributors
• 1. Brazilian Foreign Relations in the Twentieth Century
• 2. Brazil in the World: A Ranking Analysis of Capability and Status Measures
• 3. Brazilian Military Power: A Capability Analysis
• 4. Translating Brazil's Economic Potential into International Influence
• 5. Brazil's Relations with the Northern Tier Countries of South America
• 6. Brazil and the Southern Cone
• 7. Brazil and West Germany: A Model for First World-Third World Relations?
• 8. African-Brazilian Relations: A Reconsideration
• 9. Brazil and India as Third World Middle Powers
• Index