Geopolitics of the Global South: changing patterns of development (USP, 1/12/2016) - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Participei, na manhã desta quinta-feira, 1/12/2016, dia no qual, em princípio, a Venezuela perdeu seu status de "membro pleno" do Mercosul (uma ficção, obviamente, criada pelos dois grandes do Mercosul, e pelas próprias lideranças chavistas), de uma conferência internacional animada por acadêmicos hungaros da Universidade de Pec (o c de Pec com acento circunflexo invertido em cima do c, o que faria algo como "petch") e da Universidade de São Paulo, em torno do tema acima indicado: 

Geopolitics of the Global South

Não me perguntem se concordo com o conceito de Global South. Não, não concordo, como parece implícito a essa pergunta sem sentido. Não existe esse tal de Global South, assim como não existe um Global North, nem um Global West, nem tampouco um GLobal East. O que existem são países, nações soberanas, que de vez em quando, por mútua conveniência e interesse partilhado, formam blocos, grupos políticos (União Europeia, Brics, Unasul), econômicos e comerciais (UE outra vez, Nafta, Mercosul, com restrições neste caso), ou militares (Otan, o finado Pacto de Varsóvia), etc. Enfim, acho que tem tudo para todos os gostos, a serviço dos clientes.
Em todo caso, a minha mesa estava interessante, mais pelo primeiro painel, pelo fato de o economista ter feito uma digressão prática a partir da Taylor Rule e sua aplicação aos casos do Brasil e do Chile.

Como eu tinha de fazer a conferência de abertura, passei os últimos dias preparando um texto, que aliás me serviu para debater com alunos e professores da FAAP, curso de Economia e Relações Internacionais, e do Instituto de Relações Internacionais da USP. Já postei as minhas 18 páginas de argumentos sobre o Itamaraty e a nova política externa na minha página da plataforma Academia.edu.
Só na véspera da conferência acima recebi o programa parcialmente transcrito acima e aí fiquei sabendo que a conferência teria de ser feita em inglês. OK, passei metade da noite escrevendo seis ou sete páginas em inglês, e é o que figura abaixo, ainda sem revisão, e provavelmente com vários erros, por estar dormindo em cima do teclado. Depois eu reviso. 
Boa noite, zzzz
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Itamaraty and the new Brazilian Foreign Policy

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

(www.pralmeida.org; http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com)

 [Conference: Geopolitics of the Global South; USP, December 1, 2016]

First of all, I would like to thank the organizers for this pleasant invitation to be with you, today, in this conference, joining together some of our representatives from this most important Brazilian university, and our foreign friends from Hungary. I’m not sure if my name was advanced to open this conference, by some of the Brazilian co-organizers, as the current Director of the Institute for International Relations Research, a think tank that works within the Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, or only in my personal capacity, as a professor and also as one of the researchers in that field in Brazil. Anyway, I will be speaking only in my personal capacity, as I find this more in line with I have to say, today, to our foreign guests. My Brazilian colleagues from academia already know very well what I have to say about our Foreign Policy, in its regional context and our very recent changes in concepts, ideology and priorities, from the previous government to the current transitional one. Probably I’ll have to tackle a little more in detail some characteristics of Brazilian political scenario, both domestically and in its external relations, in order to give to our foreign guests an idea about what is going on in Brazil currently.

Before that, though, there are some questions to be dealt with: what is IPRI, what is Funag, and what Itamaraty does in terms of dialogue between academy and diplomacy? The Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation is the intellectual branch of our Foreign Ministry, an autonomous public body, created 45 years ago, in 1971, with the task to increase the awareness by the civilian society about international relations of Brazil. Besides organizing seminars and other activities linked to the current agenda of Itamaraty, Funag became, probably, the most important publishing house for works dealing with diplomatic history, international relations in general and external policy of Brazil in especial; better, all these books are freely available, more six hundred of them, totally open to a single click of the mouse. Funag has two agencies, or subsidiaries: one is my IPRI, in theory a think tank, in practice much more a tank than a think, at least up to now; I intend to shackle a little this small research institution; and there is in Rio de Janeiro, the Center for History and Diplomatic Documentation. IPRI deals with the present, CHDD with our diplomatic archeology, that is the past, from Portuguese times, passing the Empire, in the 19^th century, and the Republic in Rio, up to the transfer of the capital to Brasilia, in 1960. IPRI will be commemorating, next year, its 30^th anniversary, as we were created in 1987, to become a more active bridge between academy and our ministry. Besides that, we also had, in the past, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, ABC, but it became independent from Funag more than 10 years ago.

And now, what is Itamaraty? Itamaraty, the Brazilian Foreign Service, is a respectable institution of ancient traditions, taking its initial steps from the good Portuguese diplomacy, which has negotiated some of the oldest bilateral treaties in the world, with England, even before Westphalian times. Itamaraty descends directly from the old State Secretary for War and External Affairs, created by King John the Fifth, in the middle of Eighteenth Century. At the Brazilian independence, in 1822, the two services, War and External Affairs were still together, but were subsequently separated with the building up of the new State by our Founding Father. Itamaraty takes its name from the old palace in Rio de Janeiro, residence of Baron of Itamaraty, an indigenous word, a beautiful house that served as temporary residence of the vice-president at the beginning of the Republic, donated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shortly before the ministerial inauguration of our patron, Baron of Rio Branco, the diplomat national hero.

Notwithstanding these old, historical traditions, it is important to stress now that Itamaraty is not directly responsible for the definition of the main features and positions taken by the Brazilian Foreign Policy, which falls under the presidential competence. Itamaraty is a highly skilled bureaucracy, and could establish by itself the main lines of that Foreign Policy, if allowed to do so. But Itamaraty is somewhat like the Vatican: guided by the principles of discipline and hierarchy, it is totally obedient to the Head of State, who in Brazil is also the head of government. In this sense, Itamaraty is highly dependent of the personalities and parties that have the temporary hegemony of the political game in town. And, for the last thirteen years, from January 2003 to May this year, the hegemonic party was the Worker’s Party, PT, and the great hegemon, the most important figure in the Brazilian politics was Lula, before being indicted by a small province judge in a number of crimes that Brazil and the whole world are discovering just now, and believe me, those crimes are horrible, cleptocracy in its worst form.

Well, talking about a NEW Brazilian Foreign Policy implies that an OLD one, the former foreign policy, existed and prevailed for some times, before being replaced by the current one, to which I’m associated, after exactly 13 years of being outside of Itamaraty during the whole period of PT rule in Brazil. It also means that those two diplomacies are distinguishable one from the other. That is not a normal situation: throughout its history, Brazil has known a high degree of consensus, that is, a real continuity between its successive foreign policies, which happened to be essentially molded, fashioned and implemented by Itamaraty. That time was over in 2003: from that very moment, up to last May, we started to have a very different situation, never before seen in our history, a period that was object of my most recent book, the fourteenth that I wrote in international relations of Brazil, called, precisely, Never Before Seen in Itamaraty: Brazilian external policy in non conventional times. And believe me again: those were not conventional times, but a period of clear subversion and break down of traditional patterns under which our diplomacy was being directed, formulated, implemented, since our Independence.

One single word could define PT’s foreign policy, or what I call lulopetista diplomacy: a party diplomacy, in fact, a sectarian one, functioning under motivations and interests that were in a clear disruption with long held traditions and patterns of Brazilian diplomacy for almost two centuries of its existence.

1. Itamaraty: just the operator or a true decision maker in Brazilian diplomacy?

Being one of the most admired foreign services in the Hemisphere and perhaps even elsewhere, Itamaraty can be recognized by its quality and excellence both in terms of formulation and conduction of the official foreign policy. The brilliance of its career personnel, and some other outstanding features in the inner functioning of Itamaraty, are probably at the basis of an over exposure of Brazil in the international scenarios, much more than could be allowed by some of its modest accomplishments in terms of trade, finance, inventiveness, innovation, and other scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. Anyway, our diplomatic GDP is higher than our economic, or material, GDP, but probably not so high as our soccer (football), musical or fashion models GDPs. Brazil became a great exporter of football players, composers and musicians, and models.

There is, nevertheless, a clear distinction between our crude assets, based on the huge amount of resources that Brazil has, as a result of its territory, population and other natural assets, including individual ones, such as those I have just mentioned. But we do have less desirable results in terms of the most striking features of globalization, financial and commercial flows, technology improvements and scientific education and other human development criteria. Indeed, our respectable presence in the world could be considered a direct result of the good qualities of Brazilian diplomacy, including the recent success of Mister Lula and his intense presidential diplomacy for the eight years of his two mandates. Lula became the most popular, or successful president in the world not only due to his personal qualities but also because of a strenuous work of Brazilian diplomacy, which, for the whole duration of his presidency was totally mobilized to serve his megalomaniac personality, a kind of great czar, a mixture of Louis the 15^th and the general De Gaulle. Like Louis the 15^th, Lula always thought that L’État c’est moi, and like De Gaulle he talked of him in the third person: Lula thinks that, Lula has done that, Lula is the cleanest politician in Brazil, the greatest, the perfect one.

So, Lula and his PT’s apparatchiks dominated Brazilian diplomacy in a manner never before seen in Brazil, and in Itamaraty. There were some external links and relations maintained by Lula, or by those apparatchiks, that remained unknown by Itamaraty and isolated from its documental records. Some initiatives, some relationships – especially with the so-called Bolivarian countries, Venezuela, Bolivia, and others, including Cuba – were taken outside of Itamaraty, without the interference or even without the knowledge of Itamaraty, which was maintained totally at the margin of those operations. One big example is of course the tripartite agreement, in fact a simple declaration, that of Teheran, in 2010, between Brazil, Turkey and Iran, concerning the nuclear clandestine program of this last country, its secret enrichment of uranium and other activities in the nuclear field. Few people know that Itamaraty had almost nothing to do with this affair, which was conducted personally by the minister and a few of his assistants, without adequate preparation or technical expertise by Brazilian diplomats or specialized personnel in this domain.  

There are other examples like this one, in many cases involving Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, some African countries, operations that are being examined nowadays by our accounting staff or judiciary prosecutors, to verify if all rules were strictly observed and the best practices in financial management were properly followed. We could have some big surprises in the near future, with some of Latin American and African deals and contracts of the big Brazilian construction companies, the same that are involved in current investigations under Car Wash operation by federal prosecutors. You know very well that big construction companies are genetically corrupt, in many countries, and Brazil is no exception: what is new in Brazil is the extension and the profound, very deep dimension of this gigantic scheme of corruption managed, conceived, conducted by PT and other associated parties and movements inside the Brazilian State, its big public companies, and many big Brazilian private corporations, the crème de la crème of the crony capitalism in Brazil.

Itamaraty was maintained relatively immune from this festival of corruption, and continued to be a very professional and dedicated group of high officials of the State, a kind of mandarins of the Republic, but of course the same cannot be said of the external policy, which was used for the personal objectives and interests of Lula and some high Party apparatchiks, the more equals among the equals during our Orwellian experiment for the last 13 years. All that is history now, but it is a story that is not very well known by the common people, not in the knowledge of the Brazilian society, and perhaps even unknown by the diplomats themselves. Unhappily for future historians, some delicate aspects of our diplomacy during those Lula’s years will remain in the dark, as there is not enough documentation about those bizarre episodes and special operations.

2. The new Foreign Policy and Itamaraty’s diplomacy

First thing to be said about the new foreign policy, that classified by minister José Serra as one affirmative diplomacy, is precisely the fact that it no more represents a party diplomacy, but one resuming the old pillars, beliefs, principles and values of the traditional Itamaraty’s diplomacy: that was always consensual among public opinion and the field specialists alike, especially those in the academia, even if most of our academia was, I recognize, very fond of lulopetista diplomacy. We could discuss for a very long time about this, but I will retain only some of the guiding principles of this new Foreign Policy.

I have already mentioned the party character of PT’s diplomacy, disregarding its old national character, and the fact that there was a complete inversion of the decision making process of formulation and implementation of the main postures by Brazil in the regional, bilateral and multilateral endeavors and agendas. Perhaps we could remember the meaning of a “shadow cabinet”, or a “parallel diplomacy”, being operated by side channels of the normal State institutions. Well, that is now over: Itamaraty regained the control of the policy implementation of Brazilian diplomacy, even if its formulation and the ultimate decision making rest with the supreme commandant, that is, the president himself, as always. If this is true, perhaps we could establish a new division in Brazil’s political historiography: in the same manner that we distinguish, in our Christian or Western Civilization tradition, between a BC, and AC, Before and After Christ, we can make a similar division, in our history, between BC and AC, Before and After the Companions, as the comrades of the PT were known in Brazil. Before 2003, and after May 2016, we have had normal Brazilian politics and diplomacy, perhaps the same corrupt practices as always, as Brazil endures its patrimonial political traditions. You know that Brazilians love the State, by itself; we want more State, everyone in the country want to become a public official. In the middle of those years, between 2003 and 2016, we lived in special times, unconventional ones, a kind of Gramscian State without even reading Gramsci, or Marx, or Lenin. Pure practice, without any kind of theory. But who wants to be a philosopher?

Now, in the quandary of a very deep economic recession, the biggest, the worst in our history, even worse than the Great Depression of the Thirties, which I call the Great Destruction, we are trying to rebuild the economy and also rebuild the diplomacy. As minister Serra said in his inaugural speech, May the 18^th, as its first directive:

[Q] Brazilian diplomacy will reflect again, in a transparent manner and in a resolute way, the legitimate values of the national society, the interests of its economy, at the service of Brazil as a whole, no more serving the ideological preferences of one political party or of its foreign allies. Our external policy will be determined by the values of the State and the nation, not of a government and never of a single party. This new foreign policy will not break with the good traditions of Itamaraty and of the Brazilian diplomacy, but, conversely, will put them to a better use [UQ].

His second guiding principle is also worthwhile to stress, although, as in the case of the nine other following principles, it corresponds to what should be expected from any normal diplomacy, in the case of Brazil expressed in the principles and values inserted in our Constitution. Our constitutional chart has embedded many of the patterns and instruments of the International Public Law, the same that were disregarded by president Lula himself, with his political support for many leftist candidates in the region and elsewhere, which is contrary to the very known precept of no interference in the domestic affairs of other countries. Minister Serra said:

[Q] We will be very alert in terms of defense of democracy, of freedoms and human rights in any country, in every political regime, in accordance with our assumed obligations under international treaties and also with respect to the principle of no interference [UQ].

The return to a new professional diplomacy means, among other things, that Itamaraty, and no more party apparatchiks, acting under non transparent criteria, will take over again – which in fact has already occurred – the central role in Brazilian diplomacy, with due notation and documentation of every action and initiatives as was always the case in our institution. This does not means that the foreign minister, and the president himself have a small role in the big undertakings by Brazil in its external relations. Minister Serra, for instance, acting under the guidance of president Temer, has invite all his colleagues from Southern Cone countries, and their security and defense ministers to a recent meeting, convened in our Brasilia headquarters, to deal with the most serious problems of all countries: drug and arms trafficking, money cleaning, traffics of all kinds, illegal immigration, trans-border criminality and other criminal activities. He also decided, with his colleague from Defense ministry, to establish a joint consultation and coordination mechanism, to settle a common agenda between the two ministries, in order to examine joint actions and initiatives of a political-strategic nature (especially in South America) and of a technological and industrial interest. South America, of course, and developing countries in general, will continue to be at the forefront of Brazil’s priorities, including our African partners, especially Portuguese speaking countries in that continent.

To sum up, and I finish here, the short cycle of the bizarre diplomacy of Lula and PT came to its end, and Brazilian foreign policy is resuming its national, not party, character, benefitting from its normal, traditional, consensual nature. Itamaraty renews with its professional dedication to excellence in diplomacy that was always its high mark throughout the times. We do this offering to our minister, and to the president, of course, the best available technical expertise, in order to allow the defense of national interests of our country, without any ideological bias, or party preferences. It is the best we can do, as public servants.

Many thanks for your attention. All the best in this conference.

A selection of some works by the author is available at:

Paulo Roberto de Almeida: “Uma seleção de trabalhos sobre a política externa brasileira na era Lula, 2002-2016”; disponível na plataforma Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/26393585/Trabalhos_PRA_sobre_a_politica_externa_brasileira_na_era_Lula_2002-2016_; blog Diplomatizzando (http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com.br/2016/08/trabalhos-pra-sobre-diplomacia.html).

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

São Paulo, December 1st, 2016