Auto-Estima in Brazil
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Author | Sean W. Burges |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000415 |
| Subject Matter | Coming Attractions |
Sean W. Burges
Auto-estima in Brazil
The logic of Lula’s south-south foreign policy
| International Journal | Autumn 2005 | 1133 |
COMING ATTRACTIONS
Less than two weeks after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silvawas sworn in as president
of Brazil, his newly appointed foreign minister, Celso Amorim, was asked
what would change in his country’s foreign policy. For seasoned national
observers the reply that Brazil would take an active role in world affairs was
a bit of a disappointment, representing little more than a reaffirmation of the
country’s longstanding position of pushing multilateralism as a device for
defending national autonomy. Subsequent suggestions by Lula that Brazil
might fill a middle ground between the north and the south as well as
Amorim’s detailed call for the use of multilateral institutions to democratize
international affairs contributed to the impression that, despite forceful
assertions to the contrary, little of substance had changed. Indeed, the reap-
pointment of Amorim as foreign minister—he served in the post from
August 1993 to December 1994—reinforces the long-term trajectory of
Brazilian foreign policy initiatives such as regional and continental integra-
tion, elaboration of an inclusive multilateral trading system, and the expan-
sion of linkages with other major emerging markets. These similarities
between the Cardoso and Lula policies aside, suggestions that everything
was changed so that all could remain the same are quite mistaken. Although
Sean Burges is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Norman Paterson School of
International Affairs at Carleton University and a senior research fellow with the
Washington, DC-based Council on HemisphericAffairs.
| Sean W. Burges |
| 1134 | International Journal | Autumn 2005 |
Lula has maintained the tradition of continuity in Brazilian foreign policy,he
has precipitated a dramatic change in the psychological tenor of his coun-
try’s diplomatic efforts.
This article argues that the Lula government in Brazil is pursuing a psy-
chologically transformative foreign policy agenda in the global south. The
goal is not to overturn or delink from the existing international political and
economic system, but to prompt a change in how developing countries are
inserted into and view the system. In itself, this is not a particularly original
ambition and is firmly grounded in Cardoso’s persistent calls for reform of
international economic governance institutions to make them more inclu-
sive of the south. The originality lies in the strategy being taken to achieve
this end. Although Cardoso-style institutional reform and a commitment to
multilateralism remains a central facet of Brazilian foreign policy, it has
assumed a subordinate role to a conceptual agenda that explicitly questions
the neat division between developed and developing. Lula is consciously
attempting to reframe the development dichotomy, deliberately seeking to
reshape notions of southern and Brazilian identity in the international polit-
ical economy. Rather than presenting the country as a developing state in
need of aid, the emphasis is on Brazil as a complex and highly sophisticated
economy and polity that is working to overcome an inequitable internal
development pattern. The argument that emerges in Brazilian diplomatic
discourse is that neat categorizations of developed and developing bifurcate
countries into two camps. Implicit in this division is a packet of assumptions
about the capabilities of developing countries predicated upon a hierarchical
ordering that privileges the capabilities, markets, products, investments,
development practices, and socio-cultural norms of “northern” countries
over those found in the “south.”1
The result is not only a perpetuation of the socioeconomic dependence
outlined by Cardoso in 1971,2but also a psychological dependence on the
1 This argument is offered in more detail in Marie Suetsugu, “Japan’s development aid: A deriva-
tive discourse,” paper presented at the 45th International Studies Association Convention,
Montreal, March 2004.
2 FernandoHenrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto,
Dependency and Development in Latin America
,
trans. M. M. Urquidi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). The evolution of Cardoso’s
thought in the 1990s can be traced in the works on globalization and development included in
Fernando Henrique Cardoso with Mauricio Font,
Charting a New Course: The Politics of
Globalization and Social Transformation
(New York:Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
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