The Fight for “Realism” in Foreign Policy: The Brazilian Debate over Lula’s Approach to International Affairs

By the second decade of this century, foreign policy has become a central theme in the national agenda. The redemocratization of the 1980s, coupled with the liberalization and stabilization of the Brazilian economy in the next ten years, and the more affirmative model of international insertion one decade later, all of them lead up to this (relative) popularization of foreign affairs in Brazilian society. In fact, this was not such a consistently interesting subject for most Brazilian heads of government until the inauguration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1995. Later in 2003, with the first transition between presidents elected by direct vote since the end of the Military Regime, the presidential profile of Brazilian diplomacy became even more evident, emphasizing the impact of popular vote over the fate of the state’s foreign policy. Along with the greater involvement of more segments of society, there has been a greater polarization of ideas about what the objectives and strategies of Brazil's insertion in world politics should be. This strong politicization reached not only political leaders, the mass media, and public opinion, but the academic community itself. In 2010, with the engagement of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an attempt to avoid further sanctions against Iran's nuclear program, the differences of understanding of the world in which we live in and the most appropriate strategies in it have taken on pejorative outlines when not excluding ones. This politicization process seemed to have reached its peak. Dilma Rousseff’s apparently lack of such a personal taste for engagement and the lesse favorable external contingencies brought foreign policy off the national political agenda once again. However, with the domestic political crisis that culminated in the impeachment of the president, politicization of Brazilian foreign policy gained new momentum. The government that was implanted and its opposing political coalition saw in Brazilian foreign policy a great showcase to present to the population the intentions of a complete turn away from the policies of the predecessor party, especially the end of ideological element that the new Foreign Minister claimed to be a deviating interference from the nation’s real national interests. The goal of this article is to investigate the presence of the dominant semantic structure in the IR academy – that of the opposition between realism and idealism – in Brazilian foreign policy debates in these two moments of great political polarization. It is believed that, especially in the analyses of the academic community, some conceptual aspects of the debate have revealed a banal anachronism that may impoverish its collective output because of limited conceptual frameworks imported from the development of IR in other national and historical contexts. The major motivation behind the reflection developed here is the conviction that the maturation of this national academy of IR goes through overcoming this semantic structure and bring controversies to a more empirical level guided by native problematics and conceptual developments, and even to a more consistent critique of the ever present ideological standings behind this positions.