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Mostrando postagens com marcador Sean W Burges. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Sean W Burges. Mostrar todas as postagens

quinta-feira, 8 de março de 2018

Book Review, Fabio Zanini: Euforia e Fracasso do Brasil Grande - Sean W Burges

Zanini, Fábio. Euforia e Fracasso do Brasil Grande: política externa e multinacionais brasileiras da Era Lula [Euphoria and Failure of Grand Brazil: Foreign Policies and Brazilian Multinationals] (São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2017): pp. 224 ISBN 978-85-7244-988-5


At the heart of traditional Brazilian foreign policy thinking is the idea of ‘Brasil grandeza’ or a ‘great Brazil’. For decades this was seen as the country’s natural destiny, something that would arrive in the future. Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) government brought a real sense that the future had arrived, that Brazil was now a major global player. To a significant extent this new status was underwritten by the outward expansion of Brazilian business into African and South American markets. While the subject of a growing scholarly and policy literature, there is little work that provides a more granular, contextualized account of the story. This is the task Zanini sets for himself.

Researched and written in a sabbatical period as Zanini moved from being foreign editor to national politics editor at the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, this book combines the easy style of travel writing with the perceptive eye of an investigative journalist. For example, the story of Brazil’s training of the Namibian navy and attempts by Petrobras to explore for oil are well known. How these companies integrated into the fabric of Namibian society, working through social networks at an elite level is less well understood. The account Zanini provides is one of clear strategic calculation by the Brazilian government and a sense of wildcat pioneer capitalism by Brazilian entrepreneurs. Zanini describes an influx of ‘mini Eikes’, taking the reader on a tour through their now abandoned offices in an attempt to search out what is going on in terms of Brazilian trade and investment in the country and other frontier markets.

Another theme Zanini takes up is that of the Brazilian corporate model, which major firms such as Odebrecht and Vale sell as being more inclusive and humane. Again, the author’s use of the travel diary style is particularly compelling in unpacking this rhetoric. In Angola, an economy dominated by Odebrecht, attention is turned to the centrality of Lula’s support and the importance of funding from Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES). The difficulties Brazilian firms face operating in Africa are starkly highlighted, disentangling the public relations spin and pointing to an underlying business case that seeks to maximize the use of local labour to minimize project delivery cost while maintaining quality. Public good is being done because it makes financial sense. For Brazilian firms, as Zanini alludes, this sort of approach is not new and grows from the experience of many projects in the remoter parts of Brazil. It is also consistently hailed by Brazilian firms, corporate observers, and African government officials as a strength, but one that is not particularly well exploited by Brazil’s government.

The importance of the Brazilian experience for these firms remains as a subtle theme throughout the book with clearly referenced echoes of the Lava Jato corruption scandal that was taking place as Zanini researched and wrote the book. While the close relations between Odebrecht and the ruling Santos family in Angola are not deeply unpacked, neither are they minimized nor their implications discarded. Perhaps more interesting is the discussion of Vale’s coal project in the Tete province of Mozambique. The importance of government-to-government relations, particularly intermediated by Lula, in winning the concession are made clear. What is perhaps more telling is Zanini’s discussion of the mistakes Vale made when resettling people displaced by development of the mine as well as worries about land expropriations that residents in the Nacala corridor fear will take place due to the Japanese-Brazil ProSAVANA agricultural development assistance project. A history of highly integrated business-government-operations in Brazil as part of a sophisticated national industrialization and development strategy resulted in perhaps too much confidence being given by Vale to the Mozambican government to adequately address its side of the social commitments in these projects. The result was a mess, which Vale has addressed but that nevertheless threatens to damage the perception of Brazil in Mozambique and other countries. For Zanini this was a potentially costly lesson highlighting the extent to which Brazilian firms and diplomats are scrambling to learn how to play the outward engagement game.

This is perhaps the key problem Zanini highlights. Lula’s government aggressively helped major national firms expand, but failed to think through the attendant strategic risks and opportunities. Mozambique and Angola are held up as cases of risk. More ambivalent is the bi-oceanic highway through Peru. By Zanini’s assessment the highway is massively over-engineered for traffic levels that remain a distant mirage. The result for some is a boondoggle designed solely to enrich Brazilian construction companies on the back of Peruvian tax-payers. Yet, the drive Zanini takes the reader on along this road underlines the massive transformation it has had on the micro-level political economy of the region. The story is problematic and complicated, but also positive. The unanswered question is how Brasília is managing and leveraging the narrative.

To be clear, this is not a scholarly book and has no pretensions of being one. Rather, it is a sensitive journalistic record of what is taking place on the ground and a critique of the Lula administration’s lack of strategic planning as it raced to build and deepen links throughout Africa and South America. The question of corruption and the de facto privatization of Brazilian foreign policy to serve the needs of firms that now appear to have been the PT government’s paymaster is acknowledged, but as Zanini points out, much of this problematic story broke as the book was moving through the printing press. This book is thus an important contextual study for those examining Brazil’s South-South relations, the rise of Brazilian multinationals, and a good starting point for those turning to questions of corruption and presidential foreign policy strategy in the PT years.


Sean W Burges

The Australian National University