Hey Brazil, stop worrying about a Security Council seat
At the tail end of an interesting rumination on Brazil’s emergence as a major power, Walter Russell Mead encourages the country to deemphasize the trappings of power, including a U.N. Security Council seat, and instead focus on its reality. He wants Brazil to be less like France and more like Germany: A French Brazil would ...
At the tail end of an interesting rumination on Brazil's emergence as a major power, Walter Russell Mead encourages the country to deemphasize the trappings of power, including a U.N. Security Council seat, and instead focus on its reality. He wants Brazil to be less like France and more like Germany:
At the tail end of an interesting rumination on Brazil’s emergence as a major power, Walter Russell Mead encourages the country to deemphasize the trappings of power, including a U.N. Security Council seat, and instead focus on its reality. He wants Brazil to be less like France and more like Germany:
A French Brazil would make its quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council a prominent part of its daily foreign policy. It would look for ways to insert Brazil into various global issues where its core interests were not engaged as a way of enhancing Brazil’s prestige….Alternatively, Brazil could follow German postwar policy and focus on the realities of power rather than the trimmings. Regionally, it would seek to mask its power rather than magnify it. More broadly, it would focus on its economic interests, promoting Brazilian trade and the interests of Brazilian companies in multilateral and bilateral relations. Over time, growing Brazilian economic power would bring greater prestige and give Brazil a greater say in more global issues — as it has for Germany. The aspiration for a Security Council seat would remain (as it does in Germany), but Brazil would not invest large resources in trying to resolve this issue quickly.
But Germany has and continues to invest real diplomatic resources in trying to secure a Council seat. And I seem to recall Germany engaging in very loud, very visible opposition to the Iraq War and to the U.S. position on the International Criminal Court and Kyoto. In many ways, Germany was much more passionate about those issues than was France. I’m not buying Mead’s portrayal of Germany as a sensible, pragmatic pursuer of core national interests essentially uninterested in the trappings of power and disinclined to engage in showy internationalism.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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