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3 The Ideas Dimension In the Introduction I adopted Susan Strange’s pyramidal model of structural power as a guide for understanding the different aspects of power involved in leading the construction of a hegemony. The elegance of Strange’s model is that it captures the interconnected nature of the various constituent dimensions of structural power, graphically portraying the manner in which each facet simultaneously relies on and bolsters the other aspects. As will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, Brazilian power in the economic and security aspects is far from absolute (Lafer 2000, 221), leaving the question of how Itamaraty could have hoped to construct and lead a viable South American project. The key lies in the subtext concerning the importance of ideas in the construction of Brazil’s foreign policy. In his Portuguese memoirs Cardoso (2006, 612) is explicit that, in a time of scarce economic resources, as was the case during his presidency, foreign policy comes to rest increasingly on diplomatic actions focused on the careful selection of objectives and partners. This is not to suggest, however, that Brazilian foreign policy is dependent on the persuasive power of its ideational underpinnings; I will make it clear that dissemination of the ideas at the heart of the continental project elaborated by Itamaraty are conditioned by Brazil’s willingness to absorb some of the costs of leadership. Rather, the pyramidal model in the Brazilian case might be described as a geometrically imperfect shape with its pinnacle shifted to one side so that the ideas dimension plays a slightly more important role in ensuring structural stability than in the ideal-type model outlined earlier. As this chapter will demonstrate, three main ideas—democracy, liberal economics, and a clear vision of globalization—emerge as the material taken up in the Gramscian student-teacher dialectic, providing a common frame of reference for and the substance around which the leadership effort is organized. The purpose of this chapter is to set out the central ideas underpinning the South American project pursued by Brazilian foreign-policy makers during the Cardoso era. At the heart of Brazil’s foreign policy lie two intertwined goals The Ideas Dimension 65 broadly shared by the other South American countries, namely, national development and democratic consolidation (Abdenur 1994b, 51; Lafer 2001–2002, 161). Conditioning the policy responses designed to attain these goals are the core values and beliefs forming the basis for the ideational aspect of the Brazilian continental project. As the brief theoretical review in this chapter will explain, notions of self-identity are in part fashioned through interaction with the larger international context, working to construct a particular vision of how the global system operates and what role a particular state plays within it. In the Brazilian case, during the Cardoso era notions of self-identity revolved around the physical size of the country—its continental dimensions—and the notion of South America as distinct regional space (Lafer 2007). Indeed, subsequent chapters in this book will reveal the construction of South America and the South Americanness of Brazil as a central element of the ideas aspect of consensual hegemony underpinning the leadership project. The idea of South America as a distinct region is in turn embedded within a largerworldviewthatowesmuchtotheversionofdependencytheorythatCardoso helped articulate as a leading sociologist in the 1960s and 1970s (Goertzl 1999, chapters 2 and 3). A clear suggestion in this chapter is that the precepts of dependency theory shaped Brazilian foreign policy during the Cardoso era, providing added impetus to notions of an asymmetric world order that permeated Itamaraty before Cardoso’s tenure as foreign minister in 1992–1993. Indeed, at this point it is important to be clear that Cardoso did not reject his earlier writings during the 1994 presidential campaign (Cardoso 2006, chapter 10; dos Santos and Randall 1998, 53). Although slightly ambiguous language was subsequently employed to assuage international capital markets—at one point Cardoso likened the creation of dependency to the academic preparation of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein (Cardoso 1995, 8)—the precepts of dependency theory clearly informed his approach to the changing international political economy of the post–Cold War era. Indeed, he has acknowledged this a number of times (Cardoso and Toledo 1998, 172–173; Cardoso and Lafer 2007). In a move paralleled inside Itamaraty, the intellectual shift instead involved a revision of the theory to incorporate the new reality of the international economic system. Here a methodological point becomes pertinent. Like most political figures Cardoso did not...

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