Legitimising Emerging Power Diplomacy: an Analysis of Government and Media Discourses on Brazilian Foreign Policy under Lula

Abstract

This study analyses whether Brazilian foreign policy under Lula successfully legitimised the country's international identity as a rising power in the eyes of the domestic and international media. Based on a constructivist framework, we have applied French Discourse Analysis to a corpus of 36 official addresses by the President of the Republic and the Minister of Foreign Relations and 137 news articles from four news outlets, two Brazilian and two international, concerning two diplomatic episodes deemed representative of Brazil's quest for greater pre-eminence: the leadership of MINUSTAH (2004) and the Nuclear Deal signed with Iran and Turkey (2010). Results show that official discourse characterises Brazil's identity as a rising power chiefly by South-South diplomacy, while media discourse was more heterogeneous, being the discursive formation of each news outlet determinant in explaining their interpretation of Brazil's international identity. 385*

Diplomats, Quo Vadis? The determinants of Brazilian diplomatic presence

“…Though successive administrations have unvaryingly underscored the primacy of South America, scholarship remains divided. Some authors emphasize that Brazil sees the region merely as a stepping-stone for global ambitions (Spektor 2010;Vigevani and Cepaluni 2011;Lazarou and Theodoro 2015), or that Brasilia stands astride its region and the world (Malamud and Rodriguez 2014), and that its Global South identity at times eclipses its South American one (Mesquita and Medeiros 2016).…”

Brazil’s non-indifference: a case for a feminist diplomatic agenda or geopolitics as usual?

“…The new Brazilian foreign policy included the aim for "continental solidarity" and the construction of "a more equitable and democratic international order" (Da Silva 2005, 2). The Brazilian diplomatic activity of this period reflected the new goals of foreign policy (Mesquita & Medeiros 2016;Visentini 2011). For Lula, Brazil needed to stop thinking of itself as a third-world country that depended on the United States and the European Union to decide on what it was allowed or not to do (Da Silva 2005, 11).…”

“…Speeches, decisions, encounters, meetings, campaigns, promises, agreements, and disagreements can "produce effects that are both theoretical and material, symbolic and pragmatic" (Richey 2001, 179), but they are also recognized within certain limits of intelligibility. Mesquita and Medeiros (2016) describe four stages through which a State may reshape its role in the world: (a) Breakdown of consensus on identity commitments;…”

“…When we consider the four stages listed by Mesquita and Medeiros (2016) through which a State reshapes its role in the world, it is possible to observe that Brazil has not successfully moved from the third to the fourth stage (where the legitimation process takes place) wherein the recognized qualities displayed by Brazil during its participation in the MINUSTAH, which has been seen as an unprecedented commitment to a foreign intervention in the history of Brazil's foreign policy, have not been translated as appropriate assets of a global player. Thus, Brazil's actions have not been met with the expected feedback from the great powers at the UNSC.…”

Public opinion and foreign policy revisited: a Latin American perspective

“…First, foreign aid is an abstract concept, and by providing a concrete example through the Haitian case, it is possible that we too were not properly addressing the desirability bias problem. Additionally, the topic of MINUSTAH has been repeatedly highlighted in the media (Mesquita and Medeiros 2016), and Brazil has received more than 96 thousand Haitian migrants since 2010, which might have increased public awareness of and sensitivity to this issue. Ultimately, when stimulated with this type of framing, people put a face to foreign aid recipients, making it more difficult to claim that the country should cut foreign aid due to moral constraints.…”