Mudanças de governo e reorientação de política externa: um estudo comparado da diplomacia brasileira na UNASUL, no Acordo de Salvaguardas Tecnológicas e no BRICS (2003-2021)

Abstract

After experiencing a period of economic growth and international projection in the first decade of the 21st century, Brazil began to face a deep economic recession and political instability, whose apex was the traumatic deposition of former president Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. As predicted in the Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature, contexts marked by political and economic crises are highly conducive to ruptures and reorientation of countries' international insertion strategies. And, in fact, with Brazil it was no different. The rise to government of a new political coalition led by former vice-president Michel Temer and, in particular, the controversial administration of current president Jair Bolsonaro not only led Brazil to see its international status downgraded from emerging power to middle power and then, during the Covid 19 pandemic, become an international pariah, but also brought about important changes in some of the main guidelines of Brazilian foreign policy. These include the Brazilian government's decision in 2018 to suspend its participation in the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and, a year later, to denounce the constituent treaty of the organization whose creation it had led. Equally notable was the ratification, in 2020, of the Technological Safeguards Agreement (TSA) with the United States, thus ending a controversy that had extended for almost twenty years in the National Congress, which was refractory to the agreement. However, these changes presented different speeds and not all Brazilian foreign policy guidelines were modified after 2016. In fact, during this period, in spite of emphasis changes, Brazil continued the cooperation projects inside the BRICS group and advocated reforms in the main international institutions, such as the reform of the United Nations Security Council. The objective of this thesis is to analyze the conditioning factors of foreign policy changes and continuities in the face of alternating governments. Through the mobilization of analytical models of FPA and Public Policy Analysis (PPA), we defend the argument that changes in government tend to produce a reorientation of foreign policy initiatives when three conditions are present: i) in the face of political failures, capable of delegitimizing the status quo and making it vulnerable to new ideas and alternative policies; ii) when there are materially and politically viable alternative policies; and iii) in the absence of veto players for political change or when the new rulers articulate coalitions capable of overcoming them.