Brazil sees new role for G20 in Foreign Policy

Listen to a recording of his remarks:

Brazil’s longest-serving foreign minister, Celso Amorim, says a change in attitude allowed Brazil to join the ranks of the world’s emerging powers.

In the early 1990s, he recalled, an article described Brazil as a country that punched below its weight. “Now I read in the Brazilian media that Brazil punches above its weight,” Amorim told a seminar at Harvard Kennedy School on April 28.

Amorim, who served as foreign secretary from 2003 until January 2011 under President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, is visiting the Kennedy School as a Fisher Family Fellow in the Future of Democracy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Nicholas Burns, the Sultan of Oman professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics, and director of the Future of Diplomacy Project, introduced Amorim. Burns said that “Brazil is becoming a global power, one of the most important countries in the world – a country that builds bridges to just about everybody, friend and foe alike.”

Amorim said the key enablers of the growing confidence of Brazil include the consolidation of democracy and the stabilization of the economy. But he said the most important factor is the reduction in inequality in a society that long was considered one of the most unequal in the world.

“For the first time, inequality is being reduced in a significant way,” Amorim said, helping the country confront its legacy of slavery, build a middle class and start to reduce the disparity between rich and poor.

The diversification of the Brazilian economy helped set the trend in motion, Amorim said, including greater reliance on regional trade with other South American countries, to the point that trade with the Mercosur bloc now exceeds Brazil’s trade with the United States. And China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner.

It was easier to extend Brazil’s influence abroad with this growing confidence, said Amorim, who also served an earlier stint as foreign minister from 1993-95.  “Before, it was always: ‘we should not, we dare not.’ With Lula, and greater self-esteem, it became, ‘we should, we can’ – like President Obama’s ‘yes, we can’.”

Amorim said he declared publicly in 2008 that “the G-8 was dead,” referring to the Group of Eight industrialized countries that had formed the ruling club of economic powers, and that in its place was the G-20, which includes Brazil and other emerging economic powers. Six months later, Amorim recalled, President Obama said at a summit that the G-20 had become the most important economic forum for discussing global economic policy.

Amorim said the next step should be for the G-20 not only to have meetings of finance ministers but also of foreign ministers, and thus find creative ways to embrace the voices of the world’s developing economic powers in global foreign policy.
Already, the “IBSA group” – Brazil, India and South Africa – has held four summits, Amorim said. The members invoke their ethnic diversity and economic and geographic synergies to encourage further development.

He said President Obama missed an opportunity to seal a strategic partnership with Brazil when he said that he wanted India to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council but stopped short of endorsing Brazil for such status.

“I think the United States still struggles with the fact that for the first time there there’s another global power in its hemisphere,” said Amorim. He added with a smile, “it’s a sweet global power that won’t cause many problems.”

“We have undoubtedly attained a new status,” he said. “The problem is that with power normally comes arrogance. The big challenge for us is to have this new status and not to become arrogant toward our Latin American and Caribbean extended neighborhood.”