Paulo Roberto de Almeida
This is the meeting:
GIBSA Workshop: Germany, India, Brazil and South Africa:A Strategic Quadrilogue 2016
Geoeconomics and Geopolitics at Play:
The outlook from Europe, South Asia, South America and Africa
Brasilia, September 25 – 27
The GIBSA Quadrilogue was launched in 2007 as a collaboration between four Think Tanks: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin, the Centro Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (CEBRI) in Rio de Janeiro, the Institute of Peace & Conflict Studies (IPCS) in New Delhi, and the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria. The forum is supposed to facilitate exchanges of ideas between these countries with regard to their respective perceptions and analyses of international relations.
And this is my paper:
China’s pivot, Brazil’s
stance: a personal view
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
[GIBSA meeting,
Brasília, September 26, 2016]
Since August, I’m Director of the Brazilian International
Relations Research Institute, supposedly a think tank for Itamaraty, today much
more a tank than a think. Let’s assume, then, that we are capable of doing some
free think work, as we do not have financial resources of our own, or a proper
research staff to fill the tank side of this dependent body of the Alexandre de
Gusmão Foundation.
Alexandre de Gusmão is said to be the grand-father of the
Brazilian diplomacy, as the role of father is reserved to our Grand Priest,
Baron of Rio Branco, for once minister in Berlin, before being the most famous
Brazilian diplomat, the sole to be reproduced in at least six of our last eight
currencies throughout the 20th century. Gusmão, a Brazilian diplomat
on behalf of the Portuguese crown, negotiated the 1750 partition of South
America between Spain and Portugal, redrawing the geopolitical map of the
region and in fact abolishing the famous Tordesillas treaty (1494), a kind of
Yalta partition of the world at the dawn of modern era.
Being currently outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I
cannot pretend to speak on behalf of this respectable, traditional and very old
institution, older than the corresponding bodies of Germany, India and South
Africa. As I cannot speak for the Ministry, and as I cannot either redraw any
geopolitical map for today’s international relations of Brazil, I’ll speak for
myself, trying to express personal views about, not exactly China’s role in the
world, but Brazil’s stance towards the new giant of the 21st
geopolitical scenario. I will try to correct some misperceptions, among our
friends from abroad, about Brazil’s stance in relation to the new kids in the
block, that is, IBSA and BRICS, the innovations of the 2000s, and about
Brazil’s recent partisan diplomacy.
What is important to perceive, at the start, and I stress this
for our guests, is that we have to make a very clear distinction between
Brazilian traditional, and professional, diplomacy, and that other “diplomacy”,
the one that was publicized and practiced by the Worker’s Party governments,
both under Lula and Dilma, a diplomacy that was based much more on ideological
choices than well reflected decisions, a foreign policy that pursued old
beliefs based on a North-South divide, and on an delusional and futile attempt
to unite “non-hegemonic” countries in the restructuring of global relations.
(...)
Available at Academia.edu:
https://www.academia.edu/s/42e5a419f5/3041-chinas-pivot-brazils-stance-a-personal-view-2016
In Twetter:
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