Vladimir Putin has few allies in his war against Ukraine. The democracies of East Asia, Europe and North America are against him, and have imposed unprecedented economic sanctions. Almost the entire rest of the world has condemned the invasion.
A few countries are reluctant, or have outright refused, to take a stand. I asked the Atlantic Sentinel‘s China, India, Israel and South America experts to explain why. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron has threatened to hold up ratification of an EU trade deal with Mercosur unless Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro does more to fight fires in the Amazon Rainforest.
Canada, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands have backed Macron up. Germany is less sure. Donald Trump is expected to side with Bolsonaro at the G7 summit this weekend.
Here are the arguments for and against the threat. (more…)
Brazil’s presidential election is less than four months away, yet it’s still far from clear what will happen. (more…)
Whether change comes swiftly or slowly, a deafness to cries for change can discredit not just politicians or political parties but whole systems of government.
This has already happened in Venezuela. It’s in the process of happening in Brazil. Chile, however slowly, is showing a better way. (more…)
Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, scored a major political victory last week when Congress passed a constitutional amendment that limits public spending for the next twenty years.
This was no small feat, given that 63 percent of Brazilians, according to one recent poll, want Temer out.
At the same time, right-wing parties, which support his austerity program, prevailed in municipal elections in October at the expense of the long-ruling Workers’ Party. (more…)
By the end of this month, not only will the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio have come and gone; it is also likely that the left-wing Dilma Rousseff will have finally been removed from the presidency.
Neither will occur without incident. Nor will they solve Brazil’s increasingly confused, complex and confrontational state of affairs, from a messy entanglement of impeachment proceedings to the possibility of fresh elections to the worst economic recession in Brazilian history. (more…)
In the last two decades, the linkages among nation states have deepened to an unprecedented level. In terms of commerce and finance, the world has recovered and surpassed the degree of interconnectedness that was achieved before the Great Depression. Moreover, new issues have emerged, creating new linkages, deepening the web that connects the international community and giving a much wider sense to the notion of globalization.
This has come at a price. As the 2008-2009 financial crisis demonstrated, the consequences of the actions of one state or one nonstate actor can resonate across the globe. The countries which are more likely to have a wider impact are, obviously, the most powerful ones.
It is in this context that the rise of a number of nations has caused both interest and alarm. Among them, Brazil, Russia, India and China are regarded as the emerging powers. Their growing power has enabled them to present the most credible challenge to the hegemony and legitimacy to run world affairs which the United States and their Western allies enjoyed after the Cold War.
The BRICs know it. Their leaders regularly meet to announce their agreement on certain issues and to let the world know that they can act in unison. By doing so, they increase their own power as well as the legitimacy of the group, helping them to provide an alternative forum to all states, including, if not especially, those that are not well regarded in the West.
One thing to note is that the BRICs are all developing countries when comparing their gross domestic product per capita levels with those of the Western powers. This characteristic and their growing international legitimacy has led them to become representatives of the interests of the developing world in certain negotiations with developed nations.
As a group, the BRICs have advanced the notion of reforming the current international system to give more say to the developing world. Among the most important demands are expansion of the United Nations Security Council and an increased voting shares for developing nations in the World Bank.
In the area of global commerce, the BRICs have demanded a decrease of trade barriers. With respect to climate change and efforts by the West to reduce green emissions, the BRICs argue that the current environmental problems are the largely consequence of the industrialized world’s actions and that they have no right to stop others from developing.
But the BRICs are not a coherent group. China and Russia are authoritarian states and sit on the UN Security Council while Brazil and india are democracies and looking to become permanent members. Would China and Russia still endorse the claim of expanding Security Council permanent membership if there was a strong possibility of doing so? Not likely.
Furthermore, China and India are very suspicious of one another and have territorial disputes. India also fears a Chinese monopoly of the Indian Ocean and has recently increased its investment in maritime capabilities. Energy relations among China, India and Russia are very complex. China and India need Russian oil and gas, allowing Moscow to trade energy concessions for strategic gains elsewhere at the detriment of the other two BRIC powers.
Unlike its peers, Brazil is not a nuclear power, which severely decreases its leverage on hard power issues. Brazil is also more adamant about trade liberalization while India seeks to protect its rice farmers.
In short, each one of these countries has its own particular interests and will not renounce to them in favor of an alliance.
While Brazil plays the role of model global citizen, Russia is far more focused on its security. China has serious domestic problems in terms of political accountability and sustainable growth. India struggles between its growth prospects and the institutional inefficiencies which prevent it from achieving them.
The BRICs’ sole factor of cohesion is a shared interest to promote change in the international community. This implies that its usefulness as a grouping in the future will depend on the following perception in the member states — will acting as a group benefit their own particular agendas?
Another question is whether these four countries are the only ones that can be qualified as the emerging powers and therefore legitimate representatives of the developing world? They answered that question by including South Africa in the group. Although it doesn’t compare in size and power to the BRICs, South Africa’s inclusion amply demonstrated there are other countries with sufficient assets and capabilities to be considered as rising powers.
Other clear examples are Indonesia and Turkey. The BRICs would do well to include them. After all, the only requirement for joining seem to be power and an opposition to the existing international system.
However, more members means more national interests to consider. Soon enough, an expanded BRICs could resemble a “G20 minus G7” which would hinder the very notion of promoting dialogue between the developing and the developed world.
When President Dilma Rousseff addressed the United Nations General Assembly this month, she confirmed what many analysts of Brazilian foreign policy had expected since she assumed office in January of this year — that she would soldier on in the pragmatic fashion of her predecessor to see to it that Brazil is recognized as a world power.
Although recent actions on the part of her government, including UN votes regarding Iran and Libya, may suggest that Rousseff is more assertive abroad than Lula da Silva was, in fact, Brazil’s foreign policy is likely to remain the same.
Like Lula, the extremely popular Workers’ Party president who propelled Rousseff to national prominence, the incumbent Brazilian leader stresses the need for the international community to change the way in which it runs its affairs.
As the world becomes more globalized the need for international organizations will continue to grow. This is the most effective and secure way for governments to manage their relationships, express their concerns and manifest their interests. Lula recognized this and so does Rousseff. The problem is that the institutional structure does not reflect today’s reality. In the same way as governments have demonstrated to be unable to keep in pace with the developments in the free market, changes in states’ power relations have outpaced the evolution of international institutions. (more…)
Brazil, Russia, India, China and the new entrant South Africa are not neighbors. Nor have they shared ancient history or cultural mutuality. Yet the first decade of the twenty-first century has witnesses these “middle powers” teaming up, sometimes to the frustration of the traditional Western order.
Although skeptics have dismissed the concept of the BRIC or the new BRICS as an alliance without cement, it makes sense for these countries to cooperate. While NATO is bombing Libya and the United States remain entrenched in two long wars in the Middle East, emerging powers are seeking security — particularly economic security. They seek a global balance of power that equally serves their interests as it does the West’s.
In 2008, America’s National Intelligence Council recognized the shifting trend, predicting that,
The whole international system — as constructed following WW II — will be revolutionized. Not only will new players — Brazil, Russia, India and China — have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.
During the most recent BRICS summit in China, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said that the challenge facing these nations was to “harness the vast potential that exists among [them].”
We are rich in resources, material and human. We are strengthened by the complementarities of our resource endowments. We share the vision of inclusive growth and prosperity in the world. We stand for a rule based, stable and predictable global order. We respect each other’s political systems and stages of development. We value diversity and plurality. Our priority is the rapid socioeconomic transformation of our people and those of the developing world. Our cooperation is neither directed against nor at the expense of anyone.
The “developing country” tag is one that unites not just the BRICS but countries as far apart as Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, even South Korea. While much of the Western world is struggling to recover from a recession that it home made, China has asserted itself more forcefully on the world stage; Russia has been reminiscing about its good old days as a superpower while Brazil and India are trying to finding a place for themselves as great powers.
India is mostly concerned about stability within its own region and the Middle East. From this perspective, it is not at all clear whether it would benefit from standing with the protesters demanding political reform in the Arab world; with China and Russia or with the current managers of the international system, NATO and the United States.
India’s initial response to the popular uprisings was a balanced one therefore. It has an economic as well as a strategic interest in supporting democratic sentiments across the world to foster and strengthen plural and secular societies like its own. But its foreign policy hasn’t been driven by self-interest alone nor by an unrealistically strict commitment to national sovereignty. While it hesitates to provide moralistic running commentary on world events, India is willing to help build a more liberal global system.
The BRICS is a game changer in international relations but the critics are right to point out one possible source of discord among them. Two of its members — Brazil and India — aspire to permanent United Nations Security Council membership while two others — China and Russia — certainly intend to guard their privileged positions as the only non-Western power brokers in the organization.
When the fifth president of the United States designed the Monroe Doctrine, which was a watershed moment in the country’s foreign policy to check the ambitions of European imperial powers in Latin America, he could not have imagined that one day, a Persian nation would breach it.
President James Monroe devised his famous doctrine in 1823 after the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia and Russia managed to reestablish Bourbon rule over Spain and its colonies by force. Spain’s dominions in South America were struggling for independence at the time. The Monroe Doctrine made it clear to Europe that armed intervention to prevent these nations from attaining self sovereignty would be considered nothing short of an attack upon the United States.
Two centuries later it is not a European power with the audacity to challenge American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere but Iran which realizes that the United States’ influence on the continent has peaked. From Brazil to the Southern Cone of Argentina and Chile, South America is asserting itself as a region that is more independent from the United States than it has been in decades. (more…)
