Cooperação para o Desenvolvimento como Agenda de Política Externa: Assimetria, Humilhação e Condicionalidade

Abstract

The field of international cooperation for development (ICD) as had been made in the post-World War Two is related to the material and symbolic domination of developed coutries under developing countries, type of domination that is critical to the maintenance of inequalities countries in the international system. Here we propose a critical look at the constitution of the field, bringing the discussions and the conflicts that permeate their conceptual and historical development. We seek to make a genealogy of development without presumed to every account, but selecting the major events that we have identified as central in its history. We discuss how ―development‖ was formed as a widely shared Western belief as a global phenomenon, and acts as a guiding principle in the cooperation agenda, having allied with him several other goals, which can be clear or not along this path. We will seek to show how the concept of development is central to understand the symbolic force that sustains the discourse of international development cooperation. The promotion of development in the South was directly linked to the foreign policy interests of the North, the ICD is, in this sense, both a foreign policy agenda and innovation of its time. In the early twenty-first century, the ICD field saw the emergence of new actors, reflecting the ongoing changes in geopolitics and geo-economics led by the so-called emerging powers. These states identify their cooperation as South-South cooperation (SSC), contributing to the field of ICD new discourses and approaches that clash of North-South cooperation (NSC). The effort in this work focuses on shedding light on the role that plays ICD plays within what here is denominated ―humiliation system‖, identifying two different patterns of cooperation.The collective belief in development is common to SSC and the NSC, but they operate a distinct symbolic system, which shifts the SSC out of humiliating relationship between states, mainly from the non-application of political conditionality, which here ttake for the main elements distinguishing between the two main forms of cooperation nowadays.