These processes took place in tandem with the erection of an overarching global apparatus, in particular the United Nations system and the Bretton-Wood institutions . Early rapprochements between the dozens of newly independent nation-states unfolded largely under the auspices of – and were in a sense enabled by – this multilateral governance system. In particular, the United Nation’s “one nation, one vote” rule quickly became an appealing invitation for the multitude of new nations, large and small, to band together around issues of common concern, or to make strategic alliances in the pursuit of their interests. In the mid-sixties, the Group of 77 emerged as the most prominent face of the Southern bloc, in the ambit of the UN Conference on Trade and Development . This time, Asian, Middle-Eastern and African countries were joined by most of their Latin American counterparts , and commercial interests came to the fore as a common thread in negotiations with the developed world. Indeed, the G-77 – which is still in place and, despite the maintenance of its original name,flower bucket assembles today over 130 developing countries – is one of the fora where shared principles of South-South cooperation are being currently put forward .
The multilateral system is however far from a neutral space; it carries the imprint of the post-war geopolitical weight of Western and Eastern powers, most notably in the asymmetry between the United Nation’s General Assembly and its highest decision-making body, the Security Council. The U.S. and Europe further entrenched their hegemony through the Bretton Woods institutions, where voting power is weighted according to each country’s financial contributions . Two decades ago, the fall of the Eastern bloc provoked a seismic geopolitical shift in this post-war configuration, whereby the West collapsed into the North, and the Second and the Third Worlds were aggregated under the umbrella category of the “global South”. The international governance structure crystallized in the aftermath of the World Wars remained nonetheless fundamentally unaltered, thus becoming a fundamental battleground for contemporary North-South disputes, according to which South-South alliances are being currently revitalized and rearranged. According to both the literature and my field interlocutors, this is the single strongest drive behind Brazil’s recent South-South cooperation spur, which was triggered and is largely driven by foreign policy.Brazil’s standpoint as an emerging donor also brings to the fore other, more recent global battlegrounds.
After a period of general retraction in South-South relations during the eighties and nineties ,as the twentieth century came to a close they gained new impetus and complexity with the emergence of global regulatory apparatuses in sectors such as trade, environment, finance, and intellectual property. In particular, negotiation rounds on trade and the environment have been marked by successive standoffs credited to seemingly intractable divergences across the North-South divide, for instance over opening up developed countries’ markets to agricultural exports from the developing world. Although far from new, these struggles came to occupy center stage in recent World Trade Organization negotiations, causing a stalemate in the Doha Round that began in 2001 and remains in place. Some have even singled out the 2003 WTO meetings in Cancun as a landmark for the revamping of South-South engagements in the last decade . Indeed, this has been a major battleground for Brazil, which recently succeeded in having its ambassador to the WTO, Roberto Azevedo, elected as the organization’s director general. Several of my interlocutors attributed to Brazil’s South-South cooperation efforts the support many African countries and others granted to Azevedo’s bid, as well as to José Graziano in the Food and Agriculture Organization before him. Like its predecessors in Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, however, concerted action across the global South in these arenas has worked only up to a point. This ensemble of countries is far from homogeneous, and they have collaborated as much as competed with each other – the case of Brazil and Africa will be dealt with in the next two chapters.
The global South, therefore, can only be a provisional assemblage established in relation to an equally constructed global North. Yet, Southern countries have sought to sustain some appearance of unity at least at the level of discursive principles. Many passages in this document are remarkably reminiscent of the Bandung language of solidarity, collective self-reliance, and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty – which was, on its turn, inspired by earlier bilateral relations.Its emissary is a monolithic and homogeneous South addressing an equally monolithic North, and although there is talk of complementarities between South-South cooperation and North-South development, the relationship is largely constructed in terms of difference. The main difference is in character: South-South cooperation is supposed to be based on “expressions of solidarity and cooperation borne out of shared experiences and sympathies” that, one is led to infer, are not shared by the North. But this supposed difference in character has an important procedural side: South-South cooperation should have its own agenda and be evaluated according to its own standards; in particular, it “should not be seen as official development assistance ”. This is as much a matter of principles as of strategy: by not being considered ODA, cooperation provided by emerging donors remains out of the reach of their Northern counterparts’ regulatory agency, the OECDDAC. Part of the literature indeed points to growing concern by Western powers about losing their regulatory and even geopolitical grip over the international development apparatus . Emerging donors’ claims to difference and autonomy are at the root of much of the anxiety that, through their heterodox practices, emerging donors will “support ‘rogue states’, increase levels of indebtedness, ignore environmental protections, focus on extracting resources, and undermine the improvements that have been made over the past several decades” . The non-interference principle in particular has been considered as a threat to achievements in democratic governance and responsible budget management among aid recipients arguably brought about by the conditionalities enforced by Northern donors. These and other accusations are however as strategic as the move they are attacking: even when directed to non-DAC donors at large,plastic flower bucket its preferential targets are not Brazil or India but countries like Venezuela, Iran, and China. The latter in particular has been consistently accused of using this principle as an excuse for closing its eyes to corruption in its dealings with some African countries – the usual retort being that double standards are far from a privilege of Southern donors . The OECD-DAC is not the only agency in the international development community that has been striving to attract emerging donors to its bureaucratic and regulatory orbit: the World Bank has created its own apparatus to this end,and multilateral and bilateral donors have been increasingly engaging in South-North-South triangulation schemes.Emerging donors have shown mixed responses to these efforts, not only between themselves but within each of them; thus far, most have preferred to remain at arms’ length from the OECD-DAC, and to engage selectively with Northern actors and apparatuses . This ambivalence seems to be especially sharp in the case of Brazil, which has trodden a historical path that is somewhat unique amidst the major emerging donors. Differently from China and Russia and like India, it is a constitutional democracy and a former full-fledged European colony; but in contrast with the latter, Brazil has remained consistently within the geopolitical orbit of the West during its much longer history as an independent nation-state, including during the Cold War.
This belonging is manifested in quotidian language: while most Brazilians feel comfortable to talk about “Occidental” in the first person, in Africa and Asia “Westerner” is usually a reference to a third person. Like most other Latin American countries, Brazil participated only as an observer in the Bandung Conference, and was not a full member of the Non-Aligned Movement either – indeed, as the next chapter will illustrate, its stances on both neutralism and decolonization were at points ambiguous. In spite of some Brazilian politicians and diplomats’ whims about assuming leadership of the emerging Third World,36 no Brazilian ruler has ever attained the international status of notable leaders of the non-aligned movement such as India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah, Yugoslavia’s Tito, Indonesia’s Sukarno, or Tanzania’s Nyerere. Indeed, during my fieldwork in West Africa the only Latin American figure I saw referenced and stamped in vans, motorcycles and walls was Ernesto “Che” Guevara. And one would assume that Che gained such lasting popularity due not to his Argentinean nationality, but to his participation in revolutionary Cuba’s efforts to support liberation and anti-apartheid struggles in Sub-Saharan Africa. Not surprisingly, then, other than Bandung a common landmark in historical accounts of South-South cooperation from the point of view of Brazil has been the Buenos Aires Action Plan. It instituted a regulatory framework for Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries , in a meeting sponsored by the United Nations in Argentina in 1978.One can fathom the reasons why this event would find special purchase in Brazil: it was held in Latin America, was a more recent event than Bandung, and was fully codified by the UN’s framework. Different from China and Arab states, for instance, Brazil has relied significantly on the UN apparatus: the Brazilian Cooperation Agency was itself created with the aid of the United Nations Development Program , and continues to entertain key operational relations with it as the country turns from receiver to provider of cooperation. Another global development frequently mentioned by Brazilians has been the rise of a group of countries which are regarded as emerging out of a condition of underdevelopment, codified in the acronym BRIC – coined by a Goldman Sachs executive in 2001 and eventually appropriated by these countries themselves.As the appropriation of the BRIC acronym shows, Brazil’s rise as an emerging donor has been as much an internal as an external formulation. On the one hand, there was a strong foreign policy drive: much of the recent spike in demand for Brazilian cooperation coming from Africa and elsewhere has been attributed to the enhanced visibility of Brazil’s newfound status as a donor promoted by what has been referred to, in the media and reports, as the “presidential diplomacy” of the Lula years . This notion refers to the special attention former President Lula dedicated while in office to the global South and to SubSaharan Africa in particular, manifested in a personal commitment with spreading the word about Brazil’s new status as an emerging donor.Others have disputed the centrality of his figure, claiming that demand for cooperation would have augmented anyway along with Brazil’s rise to global prominence, which is not only political but, perhaps most fundamentally, economic: “it wasn’t Lula who put Brazil in the BRIC group”, one of my interlocutors in Brasília insisted. Indeed, Brazil has long been given a prominent place in the shifting typologies found in global bureaucracies. From the point of view of Northern donors, Brazil lies at the “good” end of a broad spectrum of countries the impressions on which range from a welcome and “valuable complement to North-South cooperation” to a fear that they might end up “underwriting a world that is more corrupt, chaotic, and authoritarian” . In the case of Brazil’s rise as an emerging donor, we therefore find a dovetailing of a horizontal, Third-Worldist and a vertical, Occidentalist axis that, at different points in history , has been manifested as inconsistency, ambivalence or contradiction, but also flexibility and strategic leverage. Thus, even while remaining friendly to the West and its institutions, like many of its peers in the emerging South Brazil strongly rejects the donor label, and the characterization of its activities as aid. This stance secures the country’s autonomy for crafting, implementing and evaluating its cooperation policies according to its own standards – a claim raised by government and cooperation officials, including some of my interlocutors, in response to international pressures for transparency and accountability. This stance also allows for greater flexibility and pragmatism in the translation of cooperation principles into practice. Finally, to align with Northern models and accountability standards would imply adding a bureaucratic and expertise burden to Brazilian cooperation’s already strained institutional apparatus that the country does not seem ready to afford. This indicates how ambivalent, multi-dimensional and politicized may be the relations between emerging donors and the broader apparatus of international development.