Uma abordagem relacional-estratégica: a inserção internacional do Brasil nos governos Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010)

Abstract

The victory of the Workers' Party (PT) in the 2002 presidential elections is a milestone in Brazil's political history. For the first time a representative of the working class was elected. A political project aimed at inclusive economic and social development, committed to overcoming increasingly unsustainable social inequalities, won. In the international field, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva governments determined the implementation of an international insertion project capable of contributing to Lula’s and PT’s developmental agenda, re-signifying, in this way, the directions of the national foreign policy, henceforth central to the achievement of the planned changes. Commanded by Chancellor Celso Amorim, the Lula da Silva government's foreign policy rejected the neoliberal principles that guided Brazil's international insertion under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) administrations, prioritized South-South relations, in particular the formation of coalitions with emerging countries, and regional integration. This thesis aims to analyze the elements of change in the political project proposed by the Lula government and its impact on Brazilian foreign policy. It is argued that there were institutional limits and opportunities for the establishment of a new political project, the result of selective strategies adopted by certain strategic agents that, between 2003-2010, allowed the emergence of a rearrangement of agents who redefined the limits of the international insertion in a dialectical process, permeated by the neo-developmentalist paradigm. The strategic-relational approach (SRA), developed by the English Marxist Bob Jessop within the field of political sociology, is used in the analysis of change, making it possible to understand the process of interaction between selective structures, strategic-agents and ideational elements, revealing the political projects in dispute, as well as the one that prevailed in a certain historical space and time.