The debate about how to explain Brazilian foreign policy is often dominated by analyses of the President, the Foreign Minister and the ruling party, whose ideological convictions are thought to have a strong impact on Brazil’s international strategy. Most studies of Brazilian foreign policy embrace the notion that the president is the major — or even sole — force in devising policy, able to implement whatever ideas he or she wants. This became particularly clear under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, whose personalities and interests are frequently mentioned when making sense of Brazil’s foreign policy at the time.
Many analyses of foreign policy under Cardoso point to his friendship with Bill Clinton to explain why Brazil supposedly moved closer to the United States. Other’s point to Cardoso’s ideological convictions to explain Brazil’s stance vis-à-vis the United States at the time. Lula, others argue, had a personal interest in Africa, which explains why Brazil emphasized the continent during his time in office. Rousseff, in turn, supposedly had little interest in international affairs, which, many argue, explains the country’s retreat from global affairs. For instance, some say that Brazilian presidents who hail from Minas Gerais, a landlocked state, tend to be less interested than leaders from other parts of the country.
All of these analyses partly suffer from a phenomenon known in Brazil as “fulanização” — the tendency to explain policy decisions pointing to personality traits of leaders. That may sound intuitive, but is intellectually lazy. While Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Bill Clinton were indeed good friends (they still occasionally call each other), bilateral ties at the time were far from smooth. Indeed, one may go so far to say that the two discussed their personal hobbies during official visits because there was so little to agree on. A key example is the disagreement about the United States military presence in Colombia, which Cardoso was opposed to.
Did Lula’s personal interest in Africa matter? To some extent, yes. But comparing Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s commitment to Africa with Lula’s is of only limited usefulness. After all, Africa after 2003 was seen as up and coming, while it was seen as a basket case of little significance in the 1990s. Lula was therefore not necessarily a visionary, but merely followed global trends. By the time he became President, China had begun an unprecedented initiative that transformed the African continent. There is reason to believe that had Serra become President, he would also have prioritized Africa— after all, he had already done so as Health Minister under Cardoso, when he worked with the South African government to break patents of HIV retroviral drugs. Serra, it is said, would have picked Celso Amorim as foreign minister had he been elected president in 2002.
Our desire to identity some type of ‘grand strategy’, purpose or basic coherence may make us see supposed doctrines, while national leaders are far less principled, and more pragmatic and reactive, shaped by factors they cannot control, than we like to think. Another reason may be policy makers’ rhetoric, which indeed suggests the existence of coherent strategy.
As a consequence, there is a wide body of literature that mystifies the personality of the executive. This is particularly frequent in the case of the US president. As Adam Gopnik recently pointed out in The New Yorker,
(…) we talk solemnly about “his Presidency”, just as people in the Middle Ages talked about “his papacy “, not as a powerful office but as an epoch of spiritual leadership. (…) it means that we expect our Presidents to shape the meaning of our times.
The truth may be far less inspiring. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that while leaders try to articulate broad principles, they are above all driven by demands and unforeseen challenges that constantly force them to change course. One example is George Bush’s radical change in foreign policy strategy after September 11 — until then, he had embraced a far more limited international presence.
There are some good reasons to believe in the almost unlimited power of the executive in foreign policy making: the president and the executive branch often possess privileged access to intelligence and are indeed somewhat more immune to public and/or interest group pressure than the legislative branch. This is particularly true for US-Presidents in their second term. Among scholars of US foreign policy, this has led to the rise of the literature of the “two presidencies”, which argues that because of the requirements of secrecy, timeliness and information, presidents are more able to set the agenda in foreign than domestic policy and to move forward on it without congressional interference.
In Brazil, that may be true to some extent as well. In the 1980s, President Figueiredo enjoyed very little room for manoeuvre domestically, yet he was able to innovate on the foreign policy front, being the first President in Brazil’s history to visit Colombia and Peru, thus initializing a long process of strengthening the country’s ties to its northern neighbors.
There is also some support in International Relations theory for seeing the executive as all powerful. Realism argues that countries behave according to their relative power positions and the threats that other states pose to them. But realism also admits that for a better understanding of foreign policy, one has to look not only at these two components but also at the ability of leaders to extract and direct resources from their societies to foreign policy ends. It is this second aspect that is most often overlooked by International Relations scholars, who usually lack a solid sense of domestic politics of the political economy of the countries they study. Rather than looking abroad to explain foreign policy decisions, what we would need is to assess under what conditions the president can get the resources he or she needs to fashion foreign policy in the direction he desires.
In Brazil’s case, those who study non-state actors at times consider the role of FIESP and civil society. However, few assess the significance of subnational actors more systematically, for example the influence of Congress, state governors, mayors in border regions, other Ministries or the Federal Police, which all have specific but little studied international interests.
To great extent, Milner and Tingley write in Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (reviewed here), the president’s ability to obtain his desired foreign policy depends on negotiations with Congress as well as public opinion and interest group support. In the case of the United States, this matters far more than mainstream IR literature recognizes: close to a third of the time when the president endorses a crucial foreign policy vote, he is unsuccessful in obtaining congressional approval.
While the US president can, of course, try to circumvent Congress, this shows that we cannot make sense of US foreign policy without a keen understanding of domestic politics — a perspective the authors call “intermestic.” For example, the President may prefer one policy measure (say, sanctions or aid) but opt for another (e.g., drone strikes) because of this inability to obtain congressional approval for his first choice of action. Even though congressional approval is less of a concern for Brazilian foreign policy due to its more limited role in the world, there is no specific reason to believe that the fundamental dynamic described by the authors above should not apply to the Brazilian president as well – or, for that matter, for most heads of government.
The debate about Venezuela’s accession to Mercosur is an interesting example in this context. While ideological factors dominate in the public debate about this contentious topic, subnational actors are often overlooked. One of the most ardent supporters of accession, for example, was Eduardo Campos, the governor of Pernambuco, the state that was to benefit greatly from closer ties to Venezuela.
Free trade is another: the arrival of José Serra, who had criticized Mercosur for being too protectionist, created expectations that Brazil would reduce tariffs and promote a free-trade agenda. This has not occurred, however, suggesting that structural factors should be included when understanding foreign policy. Serra, for example, hails from the state of São Paulo, where FIESP, a powerful industry association, and CUT, a union, are strongly protectionist. Governors from agricultural states such as Matto Grosso, by contrast, are in favor of free trade, as they would stand to gain from a less protectionist policy. Similar dynamics play out in the United States, where states in the Southwest will oppose President Trump’s plans to renegotiate NAFTA. Few International Relations scholars are aware of these domestic dynamics.
When it comes to US foreign policy, Milner and Tingley show that since presidents tend to have more capability to shape the use of military and national intelligence instruments than other instruments, they may opt for military instruments of statecraft not because they believe it is best, but because it is the best option available given domestic constraints and because ideological divisions are relatively low — that, in turn, may explain the militarization of US foreign policy, and the fact that the Department of Defense is today see as more powerful than the State Department. More notable still, despite President Obama’s pledge that military force would not be his central foreign policy instrument, he was the first president in decades to have been at war every single day of his eight years in office. As Milner and Tingley point out.
Our starting assumption would be that Brazilian presidents tend to have more difficulties to articulate foreign policy strategies with a significant redistributive impact — such as trade agreements. The more concentrated the losses are on one single group, the greater the political hurdles are. In the case of the United States, that explains why ending the embargo against Cuba was so difficult (those who rejected it were concentrated in Florida), while maintaining the Iraq War was easier (the soldiers’ families were spread around the country).
Since Brazil does not fight foreign wars, this dynamics is most visible in the realm of trade. Protectionism may not be the result of the president’s preferences, but rather due to a very obvious domestic power dynamic: while those opposed to free trade are well-organized (trade unions such as CUT and industry associations such as FIESP), those in favor of free trade are numerous but not organized – they include millions of poor Brazilians working in the informal economy, who pay more for basic goods due to high tariffs but due not enjoy any of the benefits protectionism produces, and which are limited to the salaried and unionized workers.
Yet it will be useful for other areas as well. That will require an enhanced capacity to measure the distributive impacts of foreign policy — as pointed out by Matias Spektor in the introduction of a recently published collection of essays on Brazilian foreign policy. Who would win if Mercosur became a functioning free trade area and customs union? Who would lose? Which governors support better trans-border cooperation, and which prefer to maintain the status quo? Or, which groups within Brazil would benefit if the country joined the OECD, or signed up to the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime? Answering these questions would not only be of relevance to the field of IR, but could also help policy makers get a better sense of how foreign policy can be used as a tool for domestic purposes.
Read also:
Was Dilma Rousseff an international affairs wonk at heart?
Why Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Doesn’t Look Finished Quite Yet
