Brazil on the Global Stage

Power, Ideas, and the Liberal International Order

Oliver Stuenkel, Matthew M. Taylor, Oliver Stuenkel, Matthew M. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349696666
  9781137491640
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137491657
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the past generation, Brazil has risen to become the seventh largest economy and fourth largest democracy in the world. Yet its rise challenges the conventional wisdom that capitalist democracies will necessarily converge to become faithful adherents of a US-led global liberal order. Indeed, Brazil demonstrates that middle powers, even those of a deeply democratic bent, may differ in their views of what democracy means on the global stage and how international relations should be conducted among sovereign nations. This volume explores Brazil's postures on specific aspects of foreign relations, including trade, foreign and environmental policy, humanitarian intervention, nuclear proliferation and South-South relations, among other topics. The authors argue from a variety of perspectives that, even as Brazil seeks greater integration and recognition, it also brings challenges to the status quo that are emblematic of the tensions accompanying the rise to prominence of a number of middlepowers in an increasingly multipolar world system.

CHAPTER 1

Brazil on the Global Stage: Origins and Consequences of Brazil’s Challenge to the Global Liberal Order

Oliver Stuenkel and Matthew M. Taylor

The global liberal order emerged triumphant from the Cold War, consolidated under the aegis of US power. But international institutions are increasingly under review, with a variety of nations challenging the implicit hierarchy of the global order, the dominant role of the United States within that order, and the essential foundations of global liberalism. Some challenges were widely anticipated: governments in China and Russia, for example, do not share the basic political tenets of the global liberal order, and China’s rise poses the most obvious long-term challenge to today’s US-led order.

A more curious case emerges from Brazil. In the past generation, Brazil has risen to become the seventh-largest economy and fourth-largest democracy in the world, yet its rise challenges the conventional wisdom that liberal capitalist democracies will necessarily converge to become faithful adherents of a US-led global liberal order. Indeed, Brazil demonstrates that middle powers, even those of a deeply democratic bent, may offer important challenges to the world order, differing in their views of what democracy means on the global stage, as well as to how international relations should be conducted among sovereign nations. As such, it is a powerful example of the potential challenges that middle powers—even the capitalist democracies among them—pose to the dominant patterns of international politics in the twenty-first century. Contrary to China’s more recognizable and clear-cut challenge, which has many parallels to the history of US contestation of British dominance in the nineteenth century, the role of middle powers such as Brazil is often less easily understood in the realist terms that dominate US foreign policy circles. Perhaps as a result, especially when they challenge US positions, Brazil’s foreign policy stances are often portrayed by frustrated Washington officials as quixotic and naïve, or ridiculed as puerile and petulant third-worldist jabs at a stereotypical Uncle Sam, intended only to win popular approval from a nationalistic and anti-American electorate. Washington policymakers often seem “to consider Brazil an interloper in world affairs, a nation that does not quite measure up to the status and power it has achieved and whose foreign policy judgments are often uninformed and misguided” (Hakim, 2014). While these perceptions may capture important elements of reality, this volume points to the fact that Brazilian foreign policy positions often have more enduring origins, embedded within a deeply held set of beliefs that together shape the country’s rational strategic perspective on the structure of power in the world today.

Brazil’s new role on the world stage has much to do with the country’s success in addressing its own domestic challenges under a succession of democratically elected presidents. Over the past three decades, Brazil has left behind its history of economic disarray, established a robust democracy, and begun to address its record-setting inequality. It has found paths past the hyperinflation and financial crises of the 1980s and 1990s, undertaken substantial institutional reforms to overhaul the gargantuan and inefficient public sector, and implemented highly regarded social policies. Even its recent stumbles can be seen in the positive light of democratic progress: the demonstrations that took hold in many Brazilian cities in 2013 and 2014 can largely be attributed to a growing middle class impatient with the pace of change and increasingly conscious of its political rights, a direct consequence of the important successes of the past generation. After the economic boom of the 2000s, the lackluster growth of recent years does not appear to have led to any significant diminution in national capabilities. Although the country continues to face dissatisfaction with the domestic status quo and a number of domestic challenges such as inequality, criminal violence, and corruption, the achievements of the past generation appear to have fostered an enduring intent to play a role on the world stage.

Under Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s presidency (1995–2002), the country began to cautiously look abroad to build a role as a pro-democracy actor in Latin America, with an emphasis on building relations with a host of governments in South America in ways that neither directly contested US dominance in the region, nor trespassed on Latin American partners’ sensitivities about their large lusophone neighbor. In the past twenty years, Brazil has played a crucial part in negotiating conflicts between its neighbors (e.g., Ecuador and Peru in 1995 and Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in 2008), as well as addressing political instability in the region (e.g., Bolivia 1995, 2000, 2006; Venezuela 2003–2004 and 2014; Paraguay 1996, 1999, 2000, 2012; Spanakos and Marques, 2014). In this quest for “consensual hegemony” in the region (Burges, 2009), Brazil has sought to preserve its legitimacy as a regional leader by appealing to notions of consensus and inclusion.

As Amitav Acharya (2013) has noted, Brazil is an “accomodationist” rather than a domineering regional power, but its power is nonetheless highly contested in the region, even as it seeks to use regional power as a launching pad for its global aspirations (Malamud, 2011). In its quest for “consensual hegemony,” especially within South America, it has faced tensions that are natural for a nation whose economic reach is expanding: the favored role of Brazilian companies in regional development initiatives has been questioned, the goals of its national development bank have been criticized, and Brazilian corporate assets in South America have been seized and, in some cases, nationalized (Friedman-Rudovsky, 2012). Meanwhile, Brazil faces a conundrum well-understood by longer-established powers: it is criticized when it fails to intervene or intervenes only tepidly in neighboring countries’ disputes (e.g., Venezuela’s internal crisis in 2013–2014), but also lambasted when it does take a stance (e.g., in diplomatic crises with Ecuador over Odebrecht’s work on a dam project in 2008; with Bolivia over the asylum given to an opposition senator in 2013). Its role as the predominant economy in the Mercosur (Common Market of the South) bloc, and the considerable effort it has put into preserving this customs union, has also forced it into often complex contortions. Mercosur has served, variously, as a way of resolving historical bilateral tensions with Argentina in the wake of authoritarian rule, as an instrument for promoting economic liberalization and integration when the four original member states were undertaking domestic economic reforms, as a foil to US-led efforts at a hemispheric free trade agreement, as a means of broadening Brazilian negotiating power in global trade negotiations, and most recently, as a means of constraining Bolivarian Venezuela’s most extreme aspirations for South America. These various instrumental uses of Mercosur mean that Brazil’s objectives are not always transparently obvious to the outside world, even when they have clear foreign policy motivations.

Particularly since Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency began in 2003, Brazil has also simultaneously engaged in strategic construction of a more robust international role that goes beyond South American regional initiatives and gives great pride of place to global South–South relations. Despite announced plans to build a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier, Brazil has largely eschewed military projection and instead relied largely on instruments of soft power to gain influence in world affairs (Saraiva, 2014, p. 64). Within the hemisphere, Brazil was joined by other Latin American nations in creating new institutions and groupings that meet some of the challenges posed by the increasingly antiquated system centered around the Organization of American States (OAS), which has been long-perceived by Latin Americans as predominantly focused on Washington’s hemispheric security concerns (Soares de Lima, 2013; Vigevani et al., 2013). Without seeking to abolish the OAS, or supplant it directly with a competing institution, Brazil has focused considerable effort on organizing South America as a region, most importantly through the creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), an effort aimed at reducing the role of the United States in regional affairs and in regional negotiations with other global actors (Spanakos and Marques, 2013).

Notably, Brazil also began to engage in areas outside of the country’s regional sphere of influence. In 2010, President Lula took the initiative with Turkey’s prime minister Erdogan to attempt to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. In 2011, Brazil took a lead role in the global debate about humanitarian intervention when it launched the concept of the “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP). More recently, President Rousseff placed Brazil in the center of the discussion about Internet governance by hosting a major international conference on the issue in April 2014. Brazil has also sought a bigger role in Africa and its trade with that continent has quintupled since the turn of the century, leading presidents Lula and Rousseff to assert Africa’s strategic importance to Brazil, to forgive nearly $1 billion in old debt, and to seek to export Brazilian agricultural know-how to the other side of the Atlantic.

Brazil has been able to play roles that leading powers cannot or do not wish to fulfill, obtaining support from both established powers and more peripheral nations based on its history of non-interventionism and perceived cultural openness, combined with its economic and demographic clout. Brazil has simultaneously gained international exposure in a variety of ways: as the host of world events like the 2014 Football World Cup and 2016 Olympics, selection of a Brazilian diplomat as director of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Armijo and Katada, 2014), and a successful push for a shift in voting rights and quotas within the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Brazil has seen success as a global leader on issues ranging from the Open Government Initiative (the transparency initiative Brazil codirects with the United States) to brokering backroom talks in the Colombian–Ecuadoran dispute of 2008 and leading the United Nations (UN) military force in Haiti for over a decade.

The past decade has also seen the nation’s designation as one of a group of rising powers, in a series of “emerging powers” initiatives with IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa), BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China), BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). In July 2014, Brazil hosted the Sixth BRICS Summit, which saw the creation of a new development bank and a BRICS contingency reserve agreement (CRA), which represent an important institutional manifestation of emerging powers’ desire to reform the global order. While it is too early to say what role these new institutions will play, they symbolize Brazil’s desire to reach beyond established US-led structures, but without resorting to the stale third-worldism that marked the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during the Cold War (Daudelin, 2013, p. 214). The BRICS and associated initiatives with large middle powers are frequently criticized for the absence of a common vision or coherent strategy, yet the rise of the BRICS forum in the midst of the 2008 global economic crisis opened a window of opportunity for reform, particularly within global financial institutions, and the grouping has found meaningful ways to challenge extant institutional structures that previously provided little room for the developing countries. Indeed, despite deeply differing interests and affinities among its members, and the natural limitations these impose on cooperation, over the past decade, the BRICS grouping has helped Brazil to elevate its international position and gain more political space and influence in multilateral forums (Sotero, 2013).

Of course, this is not to suggest that Brazil’s rise has been frictionless. Relations with the other big power in its hemisphere, the United States, have been tested in areas as varied as trade policy and intellectual property rights, in forums as diverse as the WTO and the UN, and in policies toward nations as different as Libya and Honduras. In 2013, Brazil became embroiled in a major diplomatic spat over US espionage against its government, companies, and citizens, driving bilateral relations to a low point. A scheduled state visit by Dilma Rousseff to Washington, the first by a Brazilian president in nearly two decades, was cancelled. One of the principal architects of a deliberate US policy of closer approximation to Brazil, Ambassador Thomas Shannon, returned from his posting in Brasília after enduring a series of seemingly calculated slights by his hosts. Late in 2013, after more than a decade of deliberation, the Brazilian government finally came to a decision on the $5 billion purchase of fighter jets for its air force, and it was widely believed in Washington, and gleefully circulated in Brasília, that Boeing fell from front-runner status as a consequence of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) alleged spying. The NSA’s espionage efforts, alongside other tensions in the bilateral relationship, meanwhile, suggested that Brazil’s new influence as a leading middle power has not gone unnoticed by the great powers.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s rising prominence has led many international observers, including many beyond Washington, to question its ability to play a constructive role on the international stage, both when it acts and when it fails to do so. Brazil’s silence on Russian intervention in Crimea and the Ukraine was criticized at home and abroad, demonstrating the tough choices that will confront a more internationally prominent Brazil. Similarly, as noted earlier, Brazil was criticized for being slow to act when demonstrations and conflict resurged in 2014 between Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and the opposition, leading the Brazilian government to justify its inaction by arguing that it needed to preserve its neutrality so as to maintain its role as a potential interlocutor. But passivity is not the only source of criticism: proactive stances also have their downsides. This was exemplified in the wake of the 2014 conflagration in Gaza, when Brazil became the first nation to withdraw its ambassador in Israel for consultations, followed by President Rousseff’s labeling of the conflict a “massacre.” In response, a spokesman of the Israeli foreign ministry was quick to label Brazil a “diplomatic dwarf” and note that its stance was full of “moral relativism” (comments that later led to an apology from Israel’s president to Rousseff).

Such complaints are new for Brazil, and will require some getting accustomed to, both for Brazilian policymakers and the Brazilian public at large, which has long been used to watching international affairs from a comfortable distance. Meanwhile, there is considerable variation in foreign policy across Brazilian presidencies. Despite their considerable policy differences, presidents Cardoso and Lula both actively sought and personally relished Brazil’s rising prominence on the global stage. President Rousseff has demonstrated less interest in foreign policy, despite important accomplishments. Notwithstanding these differences in personal and ideological stances in Brazilian foreign policy, however, the past thirty years of Brazilian democracy has brought important gains that mean that Brazil is an increasingly relevant player on the world stage, as a result of economic stabilization and inequality reductions; the blossoming of democracy and a normal, mundane politics with clear institutional rules; and a conscientious diplomatic offensive waged by Itamaraty, Brazil’s foreign ministry (Almeida and Diaz, 2009, pp. 229–235). Together, these factors contributed to Brazil’s emergence as one of the largest middle powers at a time when traditional powers face important challenges to their continued dominance.

This volume, which brings together scholars from institutions in both Brazil and the United States, explores the implications of Brazil’s rising international profile for global norms, and in particular, for the dominant global liberal order. The liberal international order is defined by open markets, international institutions, cooperative security, democratic community, collective problem solving, shared sovereignty over some issues, and the rule of law (Ikenberry, 2009). How do rising powers like Brazil, a country located on the periphery of both international institutions and the global distribution of power, seek to change their position in the present context of the internationalization of authority? How do they behave, react, and construct a discourse (Herz, 2010)? The authors in this volume argue from a variety of perspectives that as Brazil seeks grea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Brazil on the Global Stage: Origins and Consequences of Brazil’s Challenge to the Global Liberal Order
• 2 The Rhetoric and Reality of Brazil’s Multilateralism
• 3 The Brazilian Liberal Tradition and the Global Liberal Order
• 4 The Risks of Pragmatism: Brazil’s Relations with the United States and the International Security Order
• 5 For Liberalism without Hegemony: Brazil and the Rule of Non-Intervention
• 6 Brazil’s Ambivalent Challenge to Global Environmental Norms
• 7 Brazil and the Global Nuclear Order
• 8 Brazil’s Place in the Global Economy
• 9 Ever Wary of Liberalism: Brazilian Foreign Trade Policy from Bretton Woods to the G-20
• Afterword: Emerging Powers and the Future of the American-Led Liberal International Order
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index