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279 CHAPTER 15 Brazil and BRICS: A Challenging Space for Global Relevance and Reform of an Obsolete World Order Paulo Sotero1 A useful mechanism for Brazilian international projection in the past five years, the BRICS is likely to lose importance over time, as its members confront the difficulties of articulating their conflicting interests in some sort of common vision. The role and relevance of the group will depend, obviously, on the United States’ and Europe’s capacity to overcome their current crises and on the paths China and Russia will follow to deal with growing internal tensions that could lead to years of instability and disharmony. In Brazil’s assessment, the BRICS has been a topic of controversy. At first, the BRICS concept was dismissed by Brazilian policy makers as a clever acronym created by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to attract investors to a higher risk class of assets. At that time the nation was dealing with a serious crisis of electricity shortages after being bruised by repeated financial crises as it struggled to stabilise its economy in the previous decade. In the eyes of most Brazilians, the idea of a rising Brazil that could articulate a remaking of the post-Cold War geopolitical map of the world existed mostly in the minds of a few diplomats and intellectuals as a possibility, as it had existed for more than a century. Moreover it was viewed as an abstraction unrelated to the country’s harsh reality of the moment. Not only was Brazil not emerging, it was struggling to avoid the consequences of a self-generated and potentially catastrophic energy supply collapse. Subsequent events pulled Brazil closer to an examination of the concept of an alliance of interests among big emerging nations of the South, imperfectly captured in the BRIC/BRICS concept. The efforts produced a variety of initiatives and meetings over the past twelve years. Brazilian scholars and practitioners tend to agree that the effort has not generated a coherent country strategy to deal with and benefit from the BRICS. In late 2003 the Cancun ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation was turned into a historic event when Brazil and India decided 280 CHAPTER 15 to block a consensus led by the old quad formed by the United States, the European Union, Japan and Australia-Canada to keep agriculture out of any global trade liberalisation agreement. With a measure of courage and audacity that took established powers by surprise, Brazil and India, with China helping from the sidelines, managed to force a change in the format of the WTO’s main negotiating table and joined the US and the EU in a new quad. It was the first meaningful demonstration of the political capacity of big emerging nations to act together to assert their interests and alter the rules of global governance. The following year, Brasilia made a strong statement about its desire to act autonomously from mechanisms led by the US and the EU that exclude other emerging nations by declining a formal invitation to join the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a full member. Foreign Minister Celso Amorim explained that Brazil’s preference was to maintain its observer status and join the organisation only gradually and simultaneously with China and India.2 If WTO and OECD-related events served as an indication that Brazil was warming up to elevating its relations with China and India, Beijing’s decision in 2005 to block the reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) produced the opposite effect. Motivated by China’s opposition to Japan’s ascension to UNSC permanent membership, the move took Brasilia by surprise. Amorim, who was actively working at the time with his counterparts from Japan, India and Germany on the UNSC reform, publicly declared his disappointment with Beijing.3 It took a seismic global event – the 2008 Wall Street meltdown – for the ‘BRIC/BRICS’ concept to be embraced by the Brazilian government and, subsequently, by the nation’s academia. From Brasilia’s perspective, the most significant consequence of the 2008 crisis was the opening up of the political sphere to new players, leading to reforms in global governance. It accelerated the shift in the global distribution of power that began two decades earlier with the end of the Cold War and the rise of China. With the collapse of financial markets, leaders of major emerging countries who, up until then, had only been invited to sip coffee at the margins...

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