Status and the Rise of Brazil

Global Ambitions, Humanitarian Engagement and International Challenges

Paulo Esteves, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, Benjamin de Carvalho, Paulo Esteves, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, Benjamin de Carvalho

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030216597
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030216603
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the evolution of Brazilian foreign relations in the last fifteen years, with a focus on continuities and change. The volume tackles three sets of themes: diplomacy and diplomatic culture, international security and international development cooperation. Central to these themes is how they all relate to Brazil's international status, and its quest for higher standing. The authors draw on a wide variety of methodologies to grapple with the subject matter, from diplomatic history to international sociology and postcolonial studies. The result is a combination of different approaches that seek to account for the foreign relations of Brazil.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. Esteves et al. (eds.)Status and the Rise of Brazilhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21660-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Brazil’s Humanitarian Engagement and International Status

Benjamin de Carvalho¹ , Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert² and Paulo Esteves³

(1)

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Oslo, Norway

(2)

Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway

(3)

Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Benjamin de Carvalho (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert

Email: [email protected]

Paulo Esteves

End Abstract

Over the past 15 years, the rise of new powers is changing the international agenda, as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and other emerging powers seek to influence the conduct of multilateralism. The quest for influence is bringing these powers into fields and policy arenas previously reserved for traditional great powers. As a consequence, fields such as trade negotiations, development aid, and international peace and security are undergoing significant changes. These changes raise questions about the role of Brazil in particular. Brazil has adopted a role of leader for the Global South in trade negotiations, made the case for less conditionality and interference in what it sees as sovereign affairs, and involved itself significantly in changing the international peace and security agenda. In all these fields, Brazil has brought new ideas and commitments to the table. Yet, the drivers of specific Brazilian foreign policy engagements remain unclear. Specifically, the new policy areas in which emerging powers are engaging and Brazil’s shift from domestic to international engagement, and in this, its relations to its domestic constituencies, as well as to other rising powers and the established great powers, require a more sustained engagement.

Brazil has undergone significant changes over the past 15 years. At the dawn of the new millennium, Brazil was seen as a rising power, seeking to achieve greater influence on the global stage on par with other regional and global powers. The election of Lula propelled Brazil to the forefront of international affairs, with high ambitions for Brazil, and similarly high international expectations towards Brazil. Towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, Brazil joined the new BRICS constellation of so-called emerging powers, together with Russia, India, China and South Africa. Much of the debate surrounding the BRICS consisted of how these would change the balance of power internationally, with “emerging” powers definitely containing a notion of actors seeking to defy and challenge the current international order. Yet, 15 years after Brazil came out of an economic and financial crisis, preceding Lula’s first election in 2002, Brazil again went into a deep economic crisis in 2015, followed by a political crisis with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. While future directions for Brazil’s foreign policies and role internationally are hard to predict at this stage, it is an important moment to take stock of Brazil’s various forms of international engagements over the past 15 years.

What are the drivers of Brazilian foreign policy, and to what extent has it been motivated by concerns to achieve higher status on the international arena and in the eyes of other great powers? These are the overall questions this book seeks to address. Furthermore, the authors gathered here seek to shed light on the extent to which status concerns contributed to Brazil’s important global humanitarian involvement in the years 2003–2014. These questions are important, also beyond the confines of foreign policy analysis and humanitarian studies, as they help us understand how status drives international politics, and the forms this quest for status can take. More specifically, though, they go to the core of discussions about power, status and moral authority, which are of more recent origin (see de Carvalho and Neumann 2015; Neumann and de Carvalho 2015; Wohlforth et al. 2018).

Together, the chapters in this book stipulate the achievement of status as a key driver of Brazil’s global reach. While this places this book squarely within the burgeoning agenda on status in international relations (IR), this also opens up for new questions to be asked, with respect to both Brazil and status: The question of the audience for Brazil’s global humanitarian reach is of central importance in terms of understanding how emerging powers organize their quest for higher standing, especially with respect to how status claims are recognized. In a Weberian way, we take status to mean recognized rank vis-à-vis others (this also follows what has become coutume in IR, following Dafoe et al. 2014). The central component here is easily overlooked, namely that status means recognized rank. In other words, there is no rank if it is not recognized by others as such. The question it raises is thus who the intended audience of these policies are, and whether they accept these claims as legitimate. The extent to which Brail sought to have its status claims recognized from the Global North—especially the great powers—or its southern peers is a central question. Or did it seek increased recognition from fellow emerging powers through contestation of the established international order?

As the chapters in this book lay out, the answer was—as it most often is—both. On the one hand, Brazil sought to emulate the practices of established great powers through involvement in peace and stability operations such as MINUSTAH in Haiti. On the other, it sought to challenge Western interventionist conceptions of humanitarian rights and duties through formulating policies and principles of global governance aimed at bridging the gap between North and South. This represents largely a departure from existing literature on emerging powers and begs a specification. For it does not follow from our theoretical focus that Brazil is an “assimilator” into the current international order rather than a “challenger.” Following Barma et al. (2009: 528), we reject the common assumption in mainstream international relations that “rising powers are presented with a binary choice: assimilate to the existing order, or challenge it.” Such an assumption, while central in most of the literature on rising powers—whether focusing on hegemonic stability or power transition—makes it difficult to grasp the many ways in which rising powers seek to make their mark on the international agenda by both adopting norms and seeking to change key elements. This question, we posit, must be an empirical for investigation.

To be sure, a number of studies have examined the importance of status as a foreign policy driver over the past decade (see notably Wohlforth 2009; Larson and Shevchenko 2010; Renshon 2017; Paul et al. 2014), just as there is no shortage of works on Brazilian foreign policy (see, for instance, Gardini and Tavares de Almeida 2016; Stuenkel and Taylor 2015; Burges 2017; Fraundorfer 2015), or even works on Brazil’s humanitarian involvement. The innovation of the present volume therefore lies less in the empirics canvassed than in the integration of different theoretical issues raised. These include the modes through which rising or emerging powers seek to gain recognition for their status claims, the importance the international community gives to humanitarian policies broadly speaking and the relationship between power and authority in international relations.

In fact, while recent takes on status and moral authority have explored the viability of status-seeking through the adoption of a “good state” strategy by (wealthier) small states (see notably Wohlforth et al. 2018), there are few studies on whether this strategy can also yield status dividends for emerging or rising powers (a notable exception being Stolte 2015). Brazil represents an excellent case for exploring this, given the extent to which the country has made clear that it will not seek status through (nuclear) armament and defence spending. This book looks at the drivers behind this engagement: What does Brazil achieve, in terms of direct benefits as well as in terms of symbolic influence, from investing in the international diplomacy of humanitarianism and protection?

This book is concerned with a specific and important period of Brazil’s foreign policy and global engagement, namely the foreign policy drivers of the country under the two presidents from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT; the Worker’s Party), Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003–2010) and the first term of Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014).¹ The period from 2015 until today is dealt with in the conclusion. This selection is important, as it also bears in it the implicit answer to the viability of a “good state” strategy for emerging or rising powers: While such a strategy may have great payoffs in terms of high visibility at the global level, it, nevertheless, also rests on an investment over time. For, to many, it seemed as a paradox for this widespread and rapidly increasing international engagement to emerge at a time when Brazil itself was still a developing country by many standards and experiencing an economic slowdown. This puzzle, however, draws our attention to other drivers beyond excess of wealth, namely what motivated Brazil and what it aimed to achieve through these investments, whether in the form of direct benefits or indirectly in the form of increased recognition and influence.

But while the chapters all speak to the issues concerning international status, they also go beyond this in teasing out other developments that followed Brazil’s global humanitarian policies. Through its engagement, Brazil sought to reconceptualize both humanitarianism and peacekeeping, in line with its more principled stance on sovereignty, non-intervention and less conditionality.

As the chapters also show, being perceived as a good state rests less on single great achievements than on foreign policy continuity and collective identification with these policies, and Brazil’s quest for status—while promising at first—cannot be said to have been all that successful, as the chapters by de Carvalho (Chap. 2) and Beaumont and Røren (Chap. 3) show. For as Halvard Leira has pointed out, a good state may be less defined by its latest actions than by the legitimacy such a policy enjoys over time. The policies followed by Norway, for instance, have deep roots in the way Norwegians perceive Norway in the world, coupled with a specific brand of humanitarian exceptionalism (Leira 2015). In the case of Brazil, the domestic backlash against Brazil’s global humanitarian involvement at the expense of domestic involvement may give some hint as to the viability of such a strategy not firmly anchored in the population and across different elites. Be that as it may, as a new player in the field of humanitarian assistance, Brazil has, nevertheless, brought a new form of moral and strategic motivations to the table. However, this humanitarian action also served Brazil’s regional and international ambitions as a rising power.

Rising Powers, Status and Moral Authority

Policymakers in traditional humanitarian donor countries, international organizations and non-governmental aid organizations all are showing increasing interest in how emerging powers are engaging in humanitarianism and peacebuilding efforts. This is a scholarly field in its infancy, as recent studies on the so-called emerging powers have tended to focus on issues of economic development and trade policies (Amar 2012: 5). The Chinese case, and its development policies in Africa, is perhaps the most researched up to date (Alden et al. 2008; Large 2008; Huang and Ren 2012; Mthembu 2018). The case of Turkey is one of the first to explore international diplomatic engagement in the region and beyond (Tank 2011; forthcoming 2019)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Brazil’s Humanitarian Engagement and International Status
• Section I. Brazil and the Search for International Status
• Section II. Brazil’s Foreign Policy
• Section III. Brazil and the Security Agenda
• Section IV. Brazil and Development Cooperation