Brazilian Foreign Policy after the Cold War

2. Leadership in Brazilian Foreign Policy

2 Leadership in Brazilian Foreign Policy As outlined in the previous chapter, Brazil’s diplomatic history is marked by consistent efforts to avoid any suggestion that the country was seeking a leadership role in the region. The idea that Brazil was looking to lead in South America was resisted by many of the diplomats I interviewed. Most, keeping strictly to the Itamaraty diplomatic tradition of shying away from explicit pursuit or acknowledgment of a leadership role for Brazil, recalled Rio Branco– era fears that perceptions of Brazilian imperialism might lead to a coalition of Spanish-speaking republics that would launch a coordinated attack against the country’s sparsely protected borders. This fear prompted a foreign policy emphasizing multilateralism and equality among nations (Burns 1966). In effect , official Itamaraty discourse during the period of interest to us equated leadership with notions of overt and active coercive domination (Lampreia 2002; Chohfi 2002), a position that I will argue was at odds with the reality of Brazilian–South American relations during the Cardoso era and the general style of leading seen in Brazil’s foreign policy. The real issue, which will become increasingly evident throughout the rest of the book, was not so much the exercise of leadership as the perception of this leadership and the careful masking of it behind consensus creation and inclusion. Looking back on his time as foreign minister and an extremely internationally engaged president, Cardoso remarked bluntly about the constant disavowal of Brazilian leadership: “This was our rhetoric. Behind it was the idea that leaders don’t need to say they are taking leadership” (Cardoso and Lafer 2007). This logic was embedded in the thinking of senior career figures at Itamaraty, one noting after his retirement that “I like to say that you don’t claim leadership. You act. You exert your leadership” (Barbosa 2007). The nature and style of Brazilian leadership underpinning these statements will be set out in this chapter to illustrate the techniques put into operation in discussions of the ideational, economic, and security aspects of the consensual hegemonic project. Proof of the existence and effectiveness of Itamaraty’s Brazilian Foreign Policy after the Cold War 44 leadership style will come through a discussion of the extent to which other South American countries not only cooperated with Brazil, but also adopted and assimilated policies and positions that originated within the Brazilian foreign policy–making system. Indeed, the attempt at consensually constructing a regionalist project would not have been possible without some leadership to instigate the necessary discussion and cooperation. This indicates that the regional foreign policy pursued during the Cardoso era required Brazil to assume an active leadership role. Before turning to an examination of the nature of Brazilian leadership in South America during the Cardoso era I will briefly focus on a theoretical discussion of the concept. Here two approaches to leadership will emerge, one distinguishing between the implicitly coercive conceptualization (Kindleberger 1973; Gilpin 1981; Keohane 1984; Strange 1994), and the softer form derived from the consensual hegemony approach employed in this book. I will then set out the broad parameters of Brazilian leadership before detailing specific instances. Attention will first be turned to the strong attempts to generate consensus before the 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas and the launch of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Next, the latently coercive impulse behind Brazil’s consensual leadership style emerges more clearly from analysis of its efforts to secure interregional agreements between Mercosul and the Andean Community as well as the European Union. Finally, discussion of IIRSA, a program to advance the consolidation of a South American region by constructing integrated infrastructural matrices, offers an example of how Brazil sought to disperse and avoid the costs associated with consensual leadership. Leading and Leadership The concept of leadership in international relations and international political economy has received little sustained study (Ikenberry 1996, 386). In part this is because the subject has been subsumed in larger debates examining questions of domination, hegemony, and power. This oversight is particularly strange given that the question of leadership lies at the heart of key texts of all stripes on hegemony in international relations. Within the realist, neorealist, and neoliberal institutionalist canon the emphasis is generally on a coercive style of leadership, one that requires the leading actor to absorb the costs of maintaining the system. Although some neoliberal institutionalists and structuralists do acknowledge that the formation of regimes can play an important [18.118.0.240] Project MUSE...