Brasil, país do futuro : a ascensão internacional brasileira sob a perspectiva realista das relações internacionais

Brazil, Country of the Future is an expression created in 1941 to indicate the Brazilian potential to become a great power. After an extended postponement of this prediction, the period encompassing late 2000s and early 2010s finally saw Brazil released from its “Third World” label and growing consistently in geopolitical status. Brazilian leadership – ratified by its constitution – presents a discourse of peace and cooperation towards the dynamics of the international system. Structural realism, however, predicts the country’s international posture to be guided primarily on power and on practical and material matters, following its ascension to the great powers “club”. This work aims to evaluate in what extent Brazilian growth in stature in the international system is being performed according to the neorealist theory. In order to accomplish this goal, neorealism’s main concepts are depicted and aggregated in a representation of its main variables in a causal chain. This framework is then opposed to Brazil’s international posture in three phases: first, we confirm changing in Brazil’s relative power, which is responsible to activate the process; then, we evaluate the intervening factors in the causal chain, namely, Brazil’s domestic environment, the perceived threats to its security and Brazil’s main goals in the international system; finally, we verify whether the intervening variables actuated to develop a revisionist posture in Brazil’s foreign affairs. Proceeding in the causal chain, we assess whether there is a noticeable effort for strengthening Brazil’s military capacity and external alliances as evidences that the country is in fact starting to “emulate” great power’s behavior to face a competitive world. The study confirms that Brazilian growth and consequent pursuit of more space in the international arena is being subtly performed according to the neorealist approach to international politics, although the country is still struggling to conciliate the ambition to play a larger role in the world arena, with a declared “destiny” to do it in a cooperative way, supported by peaceful attitudes.