Status and the Rise of Brazil

Emerging powers have been emerging for quite some time now, yet seldom risen to great power status. This state of affairs is such that the emerging powers have not only institutionalized their ‘emerging’ status though institutionalized cooperation, but this cooperation has been steadily going on for over a decade: what started as an acronym (BRIC) turned into a grouping of states (Brazil, Russia, India, China) before another so-called emerging power was added to the group, changing again the acronym into BRICS in order to accommodate the ‘South’ in South Africa.

Recent domestic crises have put a dampener on Brazil’s great power aspirations. We suggest that this period of pessimism is an apt moment to take long-lens perspective on Brazil’s historical quest for status. To be sure, the “rise of Brazil narrative” was certainly ubiquitous, but prior research has lacked a means of assessing the extent to which international recognition for Brazil’s rise was forthcoming. Therefore, to complement existing research into Brazil’s status seeking, we provide a systematic evaluation and analysis of Brazil’s status performance between 1970 and 2010. To what extent was Brazil able to translate its economic resources into international status across the period? Compared to its BRICS peers, did Brazils status seeking bring about relative improvement in international recognition? To this end, we put to work a recently developed mixed-methods framework for systematically assessing and comparing countries’ status performance across time. Our results will be chastening to Brazilians but not entirely surprising. In short, our findings suggest that not only does Brazil underperform compared to its status resources, but also that it performs worse than any of its BRICS peers. While Brazilian politicians have tended to blame the P5 for excluding them from the high status “in group”, our findings show that Brazil has also struggled with recognition from smaller powers for a prolonged period stretching from the 1970s and into the twenty-first century.

Middle powers such as Brazil have become relevant players in the world stage. In the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, they displayed particularly impressive credentials—countries with large territories and huge populations, responsible for the major part of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth. As their relevance in international politics increases by leaps and bounds, so does their institutional investment. Not only by building coalitions and organizations of their own, middle powers also show considerable interest in those already available international institutional arrangements which conform the backbone of a post-World War II international system, such as the United Nations (UN) and the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank [WB], not to mention a latecomer, World Trade Organization [WTO], and a novel grouping, the Group of Twenty (G-20), brought to life as a multilateral response to the world’s financial crisis).

The quest for status has long been an integral part of Brazil’s global strategy. Despite being a ‘monster country’ in terms of population and territory, Brazil has seldom resorted to traditional forms of power and coercion—be it economic or military—in its international relationships (Lafer, Daedalus 129(2):207–238, 2000). Therefore, Brazil’s global standing has largely depended on how it was perceived by other members of the international system. This chapter’s aim is to analyze the transition between Rousseff, who was subjected to an impeachment trial in May 2016, and her Vice President, Michel Temer, who remained in office until December 2018, from the perspective of Brazil’s international status. We argue that Brazil went through a ‘status downgrading’ process and sought to return to a condition of middle power, a move that involved specific patterns of signaling and accommodation. Our hypothesis is fourfold: first, signaling Brazil’s intentions to the world meant slowly changing the substance of bilateral relations, from big political ambitions to immediate trade and investment goals. Second, signaling in the region implied that Brazil progressively abandoned its regional leadership bid and subsumed its interests to trade-oriented relations with neighbors. Third, signaling to domestic audiences was also necessary and mostly made through newspaper op-eds, interviews, and press releases, which led government officials to an unprecedented engagement in the public debate. Fourth, and equally important, signaling was not always consistent, especially as divergences between the president and the foreign minister came to the surface.

During the past two decades the Brazilian Foreign Policy Community (BFPC) experienced a great deal of change. Brazil’s international stance has for a very long time been recognized for its attachment to the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention and non-interference, as well as for its quest for autonomy and status recognition. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 2000s, Brazil led the peacekeeping operation in Haiti (under Chap. VII of the UN charter), got involved in the military coup in Honduras and engaged itself in contentious development projects in Africa. What has changed? How has the Brazilian foreign policy community bared new understandings about these long-standing principles. This chapter discusses Brazil’s international stance in the field of international security, focusing on the intersection between security and development and the regional-global nexus. We contend that in order to understand the process of change and continuity it is necessary to look into the relations between the positioning of the country, the understandings about the dynamics of the international system and forms of resistance and adaptation considered by those who are making decisions and building discourses (the foreign policy community).

Peace operations, as well as humanitarian intervention and its attendant debates, constitute a key element of Brazil’s foreign policy project as an emerging power. This chapter situates Brazilian participation in peace operations, atrocity prevention and the surrounding normative debates, and highlights the key issues this activity has raised for Brazil as it navigates its shifting global role. The analysis lays out the patterns of Brazilian participation in intervention operations and debates has followed, as well the distinctiveness of their contribution and its changing weight in the way the country constructs its narrative of global participation. The role of status seeking as a determinant of that participation is a guiding focus throughout the chapter.

At the UN General Assembly in 2011, Brazil put forward the need for a “responsibility while protecting” (RwP). The initiative made reference to the well-known and long-debated principle of “responsibility to protect” (R2P), and was seen as a direct response to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led intervention in Libya in March of that year. The message was: in situations where the international community has a responsibility to protect, it should at a minimum also have a responsibility for its actions while protecting. Yet, despite being seen as bold in the way it appeared as engaging directly with the established idea of R2P, it was actually more in contrast with traditional Brazilian principles of non-intervention and restricted use of force. Specifying the responsibilities while protecting presupposes an acceptance of the application of the responsibility to protect in certain cases. The mere initiative created worldwide expectations that Brazil would champion the new concept and develop it further, which did not match Brazil’s own ambitions. Understanding this mismatch of expectations, and where the proposition came from, requires an analysis of the broader context of Brazil’s stance on intervention and use of force.

As the turn of the twenty-first century brought new light to the so-called emerging powers, the international attention shed on Brazil also put to the fore the country’s willingness to engage in areas of international solidarity, and notably foreign aid and “humanitarian cooperation”. During the Lula da Silva presidency (2003–2010), known for its efforts to reduce domestic poverty and inequalities, Brazil also increased its international footprint and scaled up its international humanitarian engagement. According to official figures, foreign aid more than quadrupled from 2005 to 2010, increasing from USD 219 million to USD 923 million (IPEA & ABC 2010, 2013). In relative terms, Brazil is not a large humanitarian donor internationally—in a position of 34th in terms of volume and 53rd in terms of international humanitarian assistance as a proportion of gross national income (GNI) (Global Humanitarian Assistance report 2015). Yet, its increased engagement during these years was noted in international fora, raising hopes that it could play an important strategic role: first due to its successes in terms of reducing domestic poverty, then due to its role as having been both a donor and a recipient over the past decade, and finally due to its emphasis on South-South cooperation and bringing new principles and insights to the table (ibid.: 41).

This chapter has as a point of departure the enquiry into the drivers for Brazil’s engagement with South-South cooperation (SSC). Nonetheless, instead of taking SSC as a tool always already available for the foreign policy community, it enquires (i) into the process of manufacturing SSC as a foreign policy tool and, (ii) on its role in shaping the moral claims that Brazilian policy networks brought to the international arena while seeking a new status. The analysis is mainly on the “golden period” of Brazilian SSC from 2003 to 2014. During this decade, the Brazilian foreign policy community strove to change the perception the international community kept about Brazil. This process entailed establishing moral authority in some specific areas of international policymaking, particularly on issues like inequality, poverty, and hunger. During that period, Brazil started to be recognized as a kind of social policies powerhouse. Through a systematic bottom-up analysis, the chapter briefly presents the policy networks related to public health, food and nutrition security and agricultural innovation. These three sectors have played a germane role in shaping Brazil’s moral authority and its international standing as a champion for eradicating hunger, providing access to a universal health system and medicines and feeding the world’s growing population.

The contributions to this volume provide a systematic assessment of Brazil’s quest for a status upgrade during the three Workers’ Party presidential terms (2003–2014). The Government of Brazil (GoB) adopted a two-pronged status-seeking strategy: advocate a reformist agenda for key international institutions, particularly in the security and financial fields, and active engagement with activities related to the maintenance of international order, such as humanitarian protection and development cooperation. Even with minimal results, as demonstrated throughout the chapters, these strategies are worth examining more closely, for a number of reasons. First, Brazil’s case can illuminate how rising powers seek higher status within an international order tailored by prevailing major powers. Second, despite its limited success in some issue areas, Brazil’s strategy not only failed but virtually collapsed, leading to a status free fall, which requires further inquiry. Third, it may advance the research agenda on status in international relations by highlighting not only how rising powers may employ status-seeking strategies which the literature hitherto has reserved for other states than the great powers (e.g. moral authority as emphasized in Wohlforth et al. 2018).