Brazil’s Generous Diplomacy: Friendly Dragon or Paper Tiger?

Abstract

Featuring a stable democracy and dizzying economic growth, Brazil is fast on the way to acquiring global power status. The country is investing in enhanced multilateral and bilateral relationships as a means of leveraging trade and reducing vulnerability abroad and on the domestic front. This chapter demonstrates how Brazil has increasingly aligned its foreign policy with a South—South Cooperation (SSC) agenda as a means of achieving these parallel objectives. But while Brazil’s trade activities have received attention, there has been comparatively less focus on the country’s aid policy and practice. Moreover, there is surprisingly little discussion of how the country’s foreign policy pillars — trade and aid — are explicitly linked.

The chapter demonstrates how Brazil’s emerging aid agenda is fundamentally informed by trade considerations. Over the past decade Brazil has positioned its foreign policy agenda in such a way as to re-shape the global terms of trade in its favour and decrease its dependency both domestically and internationally. Brazil’s relatively modest development aid allocations are amplified by a wider effort to advance trade, foreign direct investment and technology transfer. As Brazil seeks to expand to new markets for its products, services and investment, it anticipates that its South—South Development Cooperation (SSDC) stance will facilitate the extension of its influence in bilateral and multilateral arrangements, including the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations (UN) Security Council.