Brazil’s International Rise: an overview of limitations and constraints
LSE BLOG
At a recent presentation to the LSE Ideas Centre, Roberto Jaguaribe, the Brazilian ambassador to the UK, painted a relatively positive picture of Brazil’s regional and global role. He noted Brazil’s efforts to achieve greater regional integration, from the creation of the Mercosur common market (including Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and, as an associate member, Venezuela) in 1991 to the establishment of the South Americawide Unasur in 2008. He reported on Brazil’s increasingly diversified trade relations with the world and its current efforts to open up global governance through its participation in various groups of other state actors, along with the G20. Brazil’s emergence, along with these other state actors, opens the prospect of change in the nature of international relations more generally.
Yet is it really the case that Brazil’s rise at the regional and global levels has been successful? Has it not been more contested and problematic than that? To suggest this goes against much of present public opinion. In large part this may be due to the fact that Brazil is seen as one of the more appealing actors among emerging states, especially when compared to Russia and China in the BRICs group. Given these circumstances, it was perhaps appropriate that a oneday conference on Brazil and the Americas was held at the LSE earlier this month, jointly hosted by the LSE Ideas Centre and the Rio based Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) institute. While the participants broadly shared the Brazilian ambassador’s view that Brazil was on the rise, they believed that such developments had not been without some degree of difficulty. The Latin American editor of the Economist, Michael Reid, the historian Kenneth Maxwell and the FGV’s Matias Spektor all noted a number of tensions and constraints regarding Brazil’s growing regional and global role, thereby contributing to its neighbours’ unease.
