Facing its fifth term in Brazil’s government, the Worker’s Party remains being inquired about a delicate and recurring question: why does Brazil, a consolidated democratic country, keep diplomatic relations with dictatorships worldwide?
This question spawns a wide range of answers, briefly based on Brazil’s representative legitimacy to connect the richest nations to the peripheral ones, on its constitutional choice on cooperation and pacific solution of conflicts, and on its respect for foreign sovereignty.
In spite of these answers, one key fact goes unnoticed: from 1964 up to 1985 Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship, which, besides having oppressed its own people, also maintained pernicious collaborative networks with several dictatorships in Latin America.
Maybe some indiscreet questions can take place: while the military dictatorship ruled Brazil, did democratic nations break off diplomatic relations? Did the free world feel embarrassed about maintaining its diplomatic relations with Brazil? Was the nation excluded from the United Nations or even treated like a pariah state during the dictatorial years?
Some might say that the repression years in Brazil coincided with the Cold War time, when democracies tolerated dictatorships of the western bloc on behalf of struggling against communism and maintaining freedom, and that nowadays the international community’s acceptable pattern is based on democratic values and human rights.
However, the eternal necessity of interaction between nations transcends international regimes and historical junctures. Even assuming that a global community is an attainable goal, there’s no doubt that the international society will remain anarchic and that even the strongest nations can’t fully handle their power to the disadvantage of the rest. So, the minimal understanding between nations precedes the international system itself, precisely because it comes from an interdependent community.
There’s no doubt that some nations excel over others due to their distinct power and legitimacy, but each one of them plays its role inside the international system’s enormous and complex maze, and nations can only obtain the world context panorama if they interact in an unrestrained way.
In this particular aspect, Brazilian diplomacy has been largely successful. Moving freely between strong and peripheral nations and plainly active in most of the international organizations, Brazil consolidated its legitimacy as a natural diplomatic interlocutor. Under dictatorial or democratic regimes, Brazil has always represented a covetable capital in the world, due to the wide-ranging foreign affairs of its diplomatic corps.
Therefore, the Brazilian government has definitely not connived with dictatorships. On the contrary, it is fully committed to the state policy exerted by the diplomatic service, based on democratic legal—but not utopian—precepts. Excluding dictatorial states from Brazil’s range of relationships would mean the antithesis of the key constitutional principle of its foreign affairs: the cooperation between nations, whatever they are.
So, besides being a matter of politics itself, the broad and unrestricted foreign policy of Brazil constitutes a rule of law provided by its constitution, whose cogency cannot be detached by the single act of the current government. Law and politics dialogue concerns the foreign policy-making process, above all a state policy indifferent to successive governments, hence the plain democracy in Brazil.
