Abstract
The quest for status has long been an integral part of Brazil’s global strategy. Despite being a ‘monster country’ in terms of population and territory, Brazil has seldom resorted to traditional forms of power and coercion—be it economic or military—in its international relationships (Lafer, Daedalus 129(2):207–238, 2000). Therefore, Brazil’s global standing has largely depended on how it was perceived by other members of the international system. This chapter’s aim is to analyze the transition between Rousseff, who was subjected to an impeachment trial in May 2016, and her Vice President, Michel Temer, who remained in office until December 2018, from the perspective of Brazil’s international status. We argue that Brazil went through a ‘status downgrading’ process and sought to return to a condition of middle power, a move that involved specific patterns of signaling and accommodation. Our hypothesis is fourfold: first, signaling Brazil’s intentions to the world meant slowly changing the substance of bilateral relations, from big political ambitions to immediate trade and investment goals. Second, signaling in the region implied that Brazil progressively abandoned its regional leadership bid and subsumed its interests to trade-oriented relations with neighbors. Third, signaling to domestic audiences was also necessary and mostly made through newspaper op-eds, interviews, and press releases, which led government officials to an unprecedented engagement in the public debate. Fourth, and equally important, signaling was not always consistent, especially as divergences between the president and the foreign minister came to the surface.
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Notes
- 1.
Although this part was cut from the interview that was published online, the original footage leaked some days later and quickly went viral (Revista Fórum 2016).
- 2.
One of José Serra’s greatest critics was the former Foreign and Defense Minister Celso Amorim, which was ironic because Serra himself said that had he won the 2002 presidential elections against Lula, Amorim would, too, be his Foreign Minister (Folha de S. Paulo 2010). A few days after Serra becoming Foreign Minister, Amorim wrote a harsh op-ed bashing the PSDB senator: ‘Brazil will return to the tight corner it should never have left’ (Amorim 2016).
- 3.
In August 2017, the Brazilian ambassadors to the three regional giants—China, India, and Japan—urged the government to adopt an integrated foreign policy for Asia, in a joint internal document sent to Itamaraty and to Planalto (Spektor 2017).
- 4.
In the Portuguese-speaking archipelago, Serra reaffirmed Africa’s importance to Brazil and highlighted two bilateral initiatives—the Exchange Program for Undergraduate Students (Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação, PEC-G), of which Cape Verde is the main beneficiary, and the Center of Brazil’s Naval Mission in the country, which helps training Cape Verde’s navy officers and personnel (MRE 2016e).
- 5.
As for Paraguay, who was embittered with Mercosur after spending a year suspended from the bloc following President Lugo’s impeachment trial, holding on to the Pacific neighbors seemed a matter of political survival. While leading local newspaper ABC Color charged Brazil with lobbying against Paraguay’s admission in the Pacific alliance (ABC Color 2013), the Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes went as far as to declare that the Pacific group ‘had fulfilled its rights, or rather its obligations, better than Mercosur’ (El Comercio 2015).
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Casarões, G. (2020). Leaving the Club Without Slamming the Door: Brazil’s Return to Middle-Power Status. In: Esteves, P., Gabrielsen Jumbert, M., de Carvalho, B. (eds) Status and the Rise of Brazil. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21660-3_6
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