The Brazil-European Union strategic partnership, from Lula to Dilma Rousseff: a shift of focus

Abstract

The article concentrates on the role which the strategic partnership with the European Union played in Brazilian foreign policy from 2007 to 2015, and the shift of focus that took place during the Lula and Dilma Rousseff administrations. It analyses the progress of such strategic partnership and the exchanges per sector carried out within related frameworks. It also discusses and segregates the so-called sector dialogues into two types and argues that, since the beginning of the Rousseff administration, multilateral exchanges encountered growing obstacles to becoming successful, whereas bilateral dialogues found increasingly favorable ground.Keywords: Brazilian Foreign Policy; Strategic Partnership; European Union; Sector Dialogues. AcknowledgementsFunding information: Bolsa de Produtividade em Pesquisa, Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico -CNPq, Brazil).Received: April 19, 2016 Accepted: October 6, 2016 Introduction D iplomatic relations between Brazil and the European Community date back to 1960. Throughout the 1980s, these relations were strengthened politically and in terms of cooperation, and in 1992 a framework cooperation agreement was signed, classified as a third-generation agreement. This agreement encompassed a variety of areas and gave rise to some sector dialogues between Brazil and the European Union. In 2007, a strategic partnership was established between Brazil and the EU. This formally included a reinforcement of multilateralism and a quest for joint actions in several fields, including human rights, poverty, environmental Copyright:• This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are credited.• Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto e distribuído sob os termos da The Brazil-European Union strategic partnership, from Lula to Dilma Rousseff: a shift of focus Rev. Bras. Polít. Int., 60(1): e009, 2017 Saraiva 2 issues, energy, MERCOSUR and stability in Latin America. The drivers behind this initiative on the European side included: Brazil's active role in international affairs; the EU's willingness to partner with emerging nations; the perception of Brazil as a potential partner in multilateral forums and the so-far stagnated political dialogue between the EU and MERCOSUR. For their part, Brazil's policymakers saw a partnership with the EU as an opportunity to strengthen Brazil's international acknowledgement and prestige, and harboured hopes that such collaboration would entail a boost in investments and technology transfers in areas of innovation.Since the strategic partnership was signed, two Joint Action Plans have been introduced and a third one has already been negotiated and drafted. Under the framework of the partnership, 33 sector dialogues have been set up in different areas involving a diversity of players 1 . Some of these di...

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