South-South cooperation and foreign policy: Challenges and dilemmas in the perception of Brazilian diplomats

Abstract

Brazil’s government has historically engaged with other developing countries to promote technical cooperation. Since the 1988 federal Constitution, different presidents have paid attention to this foreign policy agenda. However, it was particularly under the Workers’ Party’s administrations (2003–2016) that South-South cooperation (SSC) gained political ground, rooted in official principles of South-South solidarity, horizontality, non-interference in domestic affairs, and the defence of a multipolar world-vision. In this article, based on the argument that international development cooperation (IDC) is a key instrument of a country’s economic diplomacy, we analyse the perceptions of Brazilian diplomats about SSC in order to understand Brazil’s interests and motivations in this field. Methodologically, the article discusses the main results of a survey conducted between 25 August and 23 September 2016 among 349 Brazilian individuals, who correspond to approximately 22 per cent of Brazil’s active diplomats. The survey results showed that Brazilian diplomats generally have a favourable perception on Brazil’s SSC programmes, and that a great majority of them has already acted in SSC activities. Still, the issue of political conditionality brings in cleavages, indicating that there is a large group of Brazilian diplomats who openly support SSC as an instrument of national interests and not because of the official narratives related to a ‘solidarity with the South’ or ‘the promotion of human rights’. As a consequence, with the exception of perceptions on political conditionalities and economic criteria, the majority of diplomats share commonalities that also correspond to the government’s official rhetoric between 2003 and 2016. This article is structured around the following three sections: (1) South-South cooperation as a foreign policy agenda, (2) Diplomats as agents of Brazil’s South-South cooperation and (3) Presenting and discussing the perceptions of Brazilian diplomats.

Public opinion and emerging powers: perceptions of the assertive diplomacies of South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey in national and regional surveys

“…10 Also noteworthy is the survey conducted by Milani and Klein in 2016 with 349 Brazilian diplomats (corresponding to 22% of active diplomats) on South-South Cooperation and development policy, in which they explore other aspects beyond just endorsement, for example: assessment of the main bottlenecks, position regarding the adoption of political or economic conditionalities, among others Klein, 2021). 11 Among Brazilian members of congress, the focus on national needs has always been in the majority: when asked if BNDEs should prioritize projects inside Brazil, 68% agreed in 2013 and 81% in 2017, according to BLS data.…”

A comparative overview of Brazil and South Africa’s BRICS Agendas, 2011-2017

“…Another brief conceptualization that further supports our understanding of Brazil and South Africa as southern regional powers is the debate on the International Development Cooperation (IDC) agenda. According to Milani and Klein (2020), IDC can be defined as a political field that articulates a set of policies of states, international organizations, and non-governmental actors, as well as norms and criteria that orient their actions, and the common belief that development cooperation is the best tool to mitigate contradictions and inequalities generated by capitalism.…”

“…At the outset of the twenty-first century, boosted by the Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and Brazilian economic reactivation, SSC and its narratives of solidarity and horizontal relations among developing countries were revitalized. In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in its resolution 67/39 decided to upgrade the multilateral relevance of SSC and to strengthen the special unit created within the United Nations Development Program (UNDP): the special unit to promote technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC), that became the UN Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) (Milani & Klein, 2020) In the case of SSC, the most powerful countries from the South have also established primacy in this field. China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa, for instance, associate SSC with the promotion of their economic diplomacy, but also with their foreign policy interests, such as the building of multilateral coalitions of support, such as the BRICS and IBSA, leadership in international agencies (WTO, WHO, FAO) and reform of global governance structures and mechanisms (Milani & Klein, 2020) In this sense, on the analysis that is produced in this article, we consider the development of the BRICS agenda by Brazil and South Africa as part of the relational dimension of the study of a Regional Power.…”