South-South cooperation and foreign policy: Challenges and dilemmas in the perception of Brazilian diplomats

Abstract

Brazil’s government has historically engaged with other developing countries to promote technical cooperation. Since the 1988 federal Constitution, different presidents have paid attention to this foreign policy agenda. However, it was particularly under the Workers’ Party’s administrations (2003–2016) that South-South cooperation (SSC) gained political ground, rooted in official principles of South-South solidarity, horizontality, non-interference in domestic affairs, and the defence of a multipolar world-vision. In this article, based on the argument that international development cooperation (IDC) is a key instrument of a country’s economic diplomacy, we analyse the perceptions of Brazilian diplomats about SSC in order to understand Brazil’s interests and motivations in this field. Methodologically, the article discusses the main results of a survey conducted between 25 August and 23 September 2016 among 349 Brazilian individuals, who correspond to approximately 22 per cent of Brazil’s active diplomats. The survey results showed that Brazilian diplomats generally have a favourable perception on Brazil’s SSC programmes, and that a great majority of them has already acted in SSC activities. Still, the issue of political conditionality brings in cleavages, indicating that there is a large group of Brazilian diplomats who openly support SSC as an instrument of national interests and not because of the official narratives related to a ‘solidarity with the South’ or ‘the promotion of human rights’. As a consequence, with the exception of perceptions on political conditionalities and economic criteria, the majority of diplomats share commonalities that also correspond to the government’s official rhetoric between 2003 and 2016. This article is structured around the following three sections: (1) South-South cooperation as a foreign policy agenda, (2) Diplomats as agents of Brazil’s South-South cooperation and (3) Presenting and discussing the perceptions of Brazilian diplomats.