Brazilian Foreign Policy after the Cold War

Conclusion

Conclusion Nuance is important. Traditional conceptions of leadership as relying on forms of coercion and domination played little role in the approach adopted by Itamaraty during the Cardoso era. Instead, a new style of leadership was developed , one that found parallels in the Gramscian student-teacher dialectic’s focus on consensus creation, discussion, and mutual internalization of new ideas and techniques. The intent was not to seek Brazilian leadership of a South American region through imposition, but to instigate a mutually beneficial ordering that would quietly embed Brazilian interests, aspirations, and strategies in the region. While this goal was sometimes hinted at in official statements (Cardoso 2000h; Lampreia 2000b) and academic analyses, it was not explicitly proclaimed or comprehensively examined until the transition to the Lula presidency (Almeida 2004; D. Costa 2003; H. Oliveira 2005; Vizentini 2003). The theme that emerges from the political economy–based account of Brazilian foreign policy offered by this book is that Brazilian policymakers were seeking to use the principle of interdependence to fashion regional structures that would maximize national policymaking autonomy in the face of hemispheric and global pressures. The detailed discussions of economic and physical integration, leadership, ideas, and security issues demonstrate how initiatives in one area served to bolster and advance policy goals in another. Of particular importance in this respect is the often-overlooked issue of infrastructure integration; it weaves through the discussion of both the economic and the security dimensions of Brazil’s regionalist project, and is something that Cardoso himself has highlighted as central to his foreign policy (Cardoso and Lafer 2007). Brazil’s foreign-policy makers sought to deploy ostensibly apolitical or technocratic agreements as a tool for reforming production structures and fostering the confidence and interdependence necessary to support Brazil-centered regional projects. This emerges most clearly in the security implications of IIRSA and the macroeconomic implications that Brazilian Foreign Policy after the Cold War 186 regional energy matrices held for countries such as Bolivia, Paraguay, and, after the 2002 economic collapse, Argentina. The inclusive nature of a Gramsci-inspired approach to leadership predicated on the notion of consensual hegemony, particularly in the fostering of substate-level interaction between countries, emerges clearly in the contrasting analysis of Mercosul, SAFTA, and IIRSA to strongly suggest that political intent is not enough to form a region. Rather, political initiatives must be married with leadership in concrete and seemingly apolitical policies such as infrastructure integration to bring about the mutual interpenetration necessary to incite pressure from civil society and business groups for a continuation and deepening of the regional project. The emphasis on cooperation and inclusion free of aggressive coercion is critical because, as has been argued here, the formation and operation of a successful region depends on decisions made by business independent of state influence. In short, the ultimate decision by business and the wider population to embrace a regional project on a sustained basis will be based on a calculation of interests, not on political rhetoric. As the brief discussion of Lula’s continuation of the consensual hegemony leadership strategy suggests, an important part of the approach adopted by Itamaraty during the Cardoso era was a clear and sustained willingness to actively disavow leadership ambitions when solid, fungible resources were not available consistently to offer payoffs in return for acquiescence to the regional project. If we turn our attention to the successes and failures of Brazil’s foreign policy during the Cardoso era it becomes possible to understand the formative dynamics of a regional project guided by consensual leadership. The evolution of a region is not a “big bang” appearance of a new order when a dominant state expends power resources to forcefully impose a particular structure on the international system. Instead, the process is more akin to the contrast between light and shadows. In areas of light what we might term the substance of a consensual hegemonic project—the regional project led by the predominant state—is accepted and in operation. The shadows offer metaphorical nuance to discussions about the uptake of the regionalist vision, with soft shadows indicating partial acceptance and the deepest shadow areas where the consensually hegemonic nature of the region has been rejected. A longer-term question that the researcher might then address is whether or not the “light” of a particular consensual vision will spread across the political landscape of a region, an event that would represent participating states’ full acceptance of the “hegemon’s” leadership and internalization of the “consensual hegemony...