ABSTRACT
The question of how new centres of power such as China, India and Brazil will affect the global order, and the international regimes and norms that sustain it, is fast becoming one of the most pressing of the 21st century. Most analyses, however, focus on individual emerging powers or groups such as the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa partnership (BRICS). Rarely is this undertaken through an investigation of the actual differences and similarities in terms of particular emerging powers’ perceptions and sources of influence vis-à-vis the established powers. Brazil and the United Kingdom are prime examples of new and old powers which are trying to adapt their foreign policies to the fast-changing context of global politics and governance. For issues as diverse as climate change, development assistance, humanitarian intervention and international security, both states are clearly and inescapably involved in reshaping and renegotiating the current rules of global governance. This special issue compiles a series of articles that explore the analytical possibi-
lities of contrasting Brazil and the United Kingdom as examples of emerging and established powers, respectively. It is organised around several themes focusing on the roles of Brazil and the United Kingdom in the management of global economic governance, international development, international security, the politics of regional integration, global climate change governance, and the political leveraging of sports mega-events. Each article explores Brazil’s and/or the UK’s particular foreign policies and their resulting impact on the key areas of global governance and politics touched on above. The conceptual focus is on these states’motivations as either status-seekers (Brazil) or status-maintainers (UK) in the context of a fastmoving international landscape. The articles in this issue directly or indirectly indicate that these states wish to draw attention to their aspiring or established position as key global players through either visible foreign policy action and/or symbolic rhetoric. The first two articles, by Mahrukh Doctor and Chris Rogers, examine the contri-
butions and central motivations of Brazil and the UK, respectively, in reforming global economic governance. In the opening article, Doctor argues that Brazil’s foreign policy goals and positions have changed in the past decade from an almost exclusive focus on economic development to the current and increasingly
important additional element of prestige and status recognition. Doctor empirically examines Brazil’s positions at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the G20 to claim that “Brazil has shifted its foreign policy behaviour to the point where it sometimes seems to support positions that contradict its immediate material interests”. In his article, Rogers argues that the institutions of global economic governance,
from the Gold Standard to the G20, have favoured and reinforced the ideological and material agendas of policy elites in the UK. Interestingly, Rogers claims that “by incorporating emerging economies in the framework of the G20, it has also served to legitimise liberalisation in nations on which countries reliant on financialisation, like Britain, depend for liquidity and the supply of commodities”. Rogers’ point is that the G20 served well the British goal of consolidating a common narrative and policy framework among developed and developing states around the idea of “globalisation as a fact that must be managed in a particular way”. We can take away from Rogers’ analysis that the UK has successfully managed to preserve, in the context of a much more diverse and unstable international environment, its influential position as a key ideological and political pillar of the postWWII international economic order. The next two articles, by Adriana Abdenur and Emma Mawdsley, deal with the
Brazilian and UK approaches to international development cooperation. Abdenur’s central argument is that in the past decade Brazil has more clearly and systematically used its particular model of South-South technical cooperation as a tool to promote broader foreign policy objectives. More specifically, she focuses on Brazil’s involvement in Africa to demonstrate that “technical cooperation is increasingly used to bolster the government’s global power aspirations and to resist Northern-led efforts to set international development norms”. Mawdsley’s article turns to the British model of international development
cooperation. She claims that in recent years the UK’s Department of International Development (DIFD) has shifted its mandate to accommodate the government’s private sector-led economic growth agenda. According to her critical assessment, “this strategy may well achieve growth outcomes in partner countries, but without sufficient conceptual rigour… or attention to the connective fabric between growth and development, the latter is more uncertain”. The doubling of DIFD’s budget for economic development (from 2012/13 to 2015/16) means this growth-led model of “international development” is likely to continue-a model which seeks to convince a domestic audience while maintaining international support. The fifth and sixth articles in the issue, byMonica Hirst and PageWilson, respect-
ively, look at the role of Brazil and the UK in the global management of international and regional security. Hirst argues that Brazil has in recent years expanded the reach of its international security agenda to areas conventionally controlled by the Western powers. This has been achieved through a foreign policy based on a “double-track course of action, both of which may be considered fertile sources for the accumulation of soft-power assets”. In her account, Brazil’s soft power strategy relies on: 1) coalitions of emerging powers, namely the BRICS and the India, Brazil, South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA); and 2) “an enhanced involvement and responsibility in UN-led operations, accompanied by a robust portfolio of bilateral and multilateral accords with developing countries”.
