Guilherme Casarões
Introduction
As Jair Bolsonaro enters his fourth year in office, his foreign policy strategy (or lack thereof) is still a matter of intense debate. How could one describe the foreign policy of a government that virtually made no policies whatsoever? The key to understanding Bolsonaro’s relations with the world follows the same logic of other policy areas: a combination of institutional dismantling and intense interest-group scramble for control over agendas and priorities, all wrapped up in a populist, highly ideological narrative. More specifically, the Bolsonaro administration has openly sidelined Brazil’s traditional diplomatic values, traditions, and bureaucracy to advance a foreign policy orientation based on the radical right ideological pillars of anti-globalism (an expanded and updated version of anti-communism) and religious nationalism. In this post, which is largely drawn on Casarões and Farias (2021), I will discuss the elements of Bolsonaro’s international relations and how they have impacted Brazil’s external image.
Jair Bolsonaro’s populist foreign policy
First, a bit of context. Former Army captain and long-time congressman Jair Bolsonaro was elected in the extremely polarized presidential race of 2018 on a far-right, anti-Workers’ Party, and anti-establishment platform. He vowed to fight communism and corruption and to hand back the country to the ‘good citizens of Brazil’ – basically white, middle-class, Christian Brazilians. Much along the lines of US president Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s electoral strategy was based on conservative-religious values, disinformation spread across social media, and a bold rejection of political correctness (Chagas-Bastos 2019). This combination has rendered Bolsonaro the nickname ‘Trump of the Tropics’, which he has proudly carried during the campaign and beyond.
In political terms, Bolsonaro is an unequivocal example of a radical right populist (Hunter and Power 2019), whose ideology is structured around three pillars: nativism, authoritarianism, and populism (Carter 2018). Nativism entails a combination of nationalism and xenophobia, pinning members of the native group – the only ones who deserve to live in the state – against and non-natives, who are supposedly threatening the very essence of the nation. Authoritarianism refers to the belief in a strictly ordered society, manifested in the use of state and non-state institutions to discipline and punish individuals who threaten not just the legal structures but also the moral values of a given community. Populism, in turn, involves pitting ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ as part of a governing ideology (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2014) or political style (Moffitt 2016). Governments led by populists will often spend considerable time stirring such divisions to secure popular support, strengthen their hold to power, and weaken state institutions.
Although populist politicians do not necessarily transpose their strategies and style at home onto foreign policy orientations, radical right populists advance a revisionist platform regarding the current international order, as it outspokenly rejects multilateralism and multiculturalism. They envision independent ethnic (or ethno-religious) communities that interact with one another seeking to advance their economic interests and to protect their own cultures and civilizations (Jenne 2021). That is the case of Jair Bolsonaro, who has systematically used foreign policy as part of this broader ideological project – or culture war.
The pillars of Bolsonaro’s foreign policy: anti-globalism and religious nationalism
From an ideological standpoint, the Bolsonaro administration’s foreign policy rests on two pillars, one that establishes Brazil’s common enemies (anti-globalism) and another one that informs who Brazil’s friends and allies are (religious nationalism). They have been an integral element of Bolsonaro’s populist approach to government and reflect a combination of deep-rooted beliefs and concessions made to some interest groups, namely military hardliners and far-right ideologues, who see anti-globalism as an expression of Brazil’s affirmation of sovereignty, and Evangelical Christians and Catholic fundamentalists, who want to turn the country into a religious nation.
Anti-globalism is arguably the main feature of Bolsonaro’s foreign policy, and the most visible way in which his worldview clashes with the tenets of the liberal international order. But what exactly is globalism? While the Bolsonaro administration has treated it with some degree of academic reverence, there is no specific scholarly concept that relates to the political usage of the term. In the literature, it is generally taken as a synonym for economic globalization (Keohane and Nye 2000). Anti-globalists, on the other hand, see globalism as a master conspiracy theory through which financial capitalists collude with left-wing parties, media, universities, and international bureaucrats to control the world. Their goal is to acculturate societies, undermining traditional values of family, nation, and God through the widespread imposition of progressive and cosmopolitan worldviews.
In the own words of (former) Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, “globalism is the economic globalization that became driven by Cultural Marxism. It is essentially an anti-human and anti-Christian system. Today, to have faith in Christ means fighting against globalism, whose main goal is to break the bond between God and man, making man a slave and God irrelevant” (Araújo 2018). Thus, globalism is communism, only by another name, and to fight for God is to fight communism in all its manifestations.
Until Araújo’s resignation in March 2021, he formed the administration’s foreign policy troika with Filipe Martins, Bolsonaro’s international advisor, and congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s third son. Besides steering the country’s foreign policy, they share the same mentor: writer and self-proclaimed philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, who passed away earlier this year. For two decades, Carvalho denounced the so-called ‘globalist plot’ in his online classes and national newspapers (Carvalho 2013), drawing on antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theories popular among the American far-right (Zimmer 2018).
Through anti-globalism, Brazilian foreign policy has taken an about-face in virtually every aspect of its long-standing global strategy. Brazil’s erstwhile universalist approach to foreign affairs has been replaced by a narrow idea of international partnerships, which basically encompasses other nations led by radical right governments – such as Israel, Hungary, Poland, India, and the US – and some occasional friendship with Sunni absolute monarchies. Itamaraty’s adamant love for international law gave way to an unprecedented contempt for UN treaties, agreements, and resolutions. Following on president Trump’s steps, the Bolsonaro administration withdrew Brazil from the Global Compact for Migration, turned its back on the Palestinian people’s rights, promised to transfer the Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem, and even applauded the unlawful US targeted killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani (Casarões 2020).
As if it were not disruptive enough for a country that had actively contributed to the shaping of international order over the past hundred years, the Bolsonaro administration has launched a systematic attack on multilateralism, in both rhetoric and practice. To justify the government’s desire to break with Brazil’s diplomatic traditions, Filipe Martins repeatedly accused Itamaraty of serving as the United Nations’ office in Brasília. Araújo, a career diplomat, made a similar point in his inaugural speech: “Itamaraty exists [to serve] Brazil, it does not exist [to serve] the global order” (Araújo, 2019). In his first participation at the UN General Assembly, Bolsonaro himself ended his remarks with a critical message against globalism and the UN: “We are not here to erase nationalities and sovereignties in the name of an abstract ‘global interest’. This is not the Global Interest Organization! It is the United Nations Organization and so it must remain!”.
As a result, multilateral issues such as human rights, gender and sexual orientation, global health, and climate change have come under heavy Brazilian fire. Claiming to defend so-called ‘family values’, Brazil aligned with authoritarian monarchies and religious fundamentalists at the Human Rights Council to prevent the use of expressions ‘rights to sexual and reproductive health’ and ‘rights to sexual education’ in resolutions (Graieb 2020). When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, the president himself dismissed the role of the World Health Organization as part of a Chinese conspiracy to rule the world by deliberately spreading the virus. Finally, in response to worldwide criticism of the administration’s approach to growing deforestation in the Amazon, Bolsonaro and several of his climate-denier aides began attacking European partners and donors to conservation projects in the rainforest (Chade 2020a; 2020b).
Thanks either to the Bolsonaro’s deliberate decision to walk away from some key debates at the UN, or to the administration’s open hostility toward ‘globalist’ leaders Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Joe Biden and well as the ‘socialist’ governments of China and Argentina, Brazil has isolated itself from partners and issues in an unprecedented way. Foreign policy choices were consequential to the country’s diminishing global relevance.
If anti-globalism – and anti-communism – tells Brazilians who they should fight against, it is religious nationalism that informs who are Brazil’s friends and, most importantly, how the ‘new Brazil’ envisions state-society relations and the international order at large. It may be defined as an ideology that defines the nation in terms of religion, and in which religious and national loyalties overlap (Juergensmeyer 1993). In many ways, it offers a project for the future that draws upon pre-modern elements, such as the permanent intersection between religious and political authority, as well as a particular view of civilization.
Even though religious nationalism is not a feature of all populists, it helps us understand the patterns of cooperation between radical right governments – such as Bolsonaro’s – across two basic dimensions. The first relates to a fundamentally negative idea of common enemies, who are often described as communist/socialist, globalist/cosmopolitan, or a combination of both categories. They are often treated as synonyms, as the old socialist left and the new globalist left represent the same plot to rule the world through acculturation (ideological domination) and subjugation (physical control) – based upon not just secular but atheist values. ‘Metapolitics’, or culture war, is presented as the only way to fight the globalist-socialist collusion, while attempting to ‘bring back’ religion to the front stage of social and national life.
The second dimension that reveals the importance of religion in emerging radical right cooperation refers to a common vision of the future international order. The religious nationalist radical right envisions a world composed of ethno-political communities better enabled to preserve their national and cultural identities (Stewart 2020). Religion allows the Bolsonaro administration to spread the otherwise controversial idea of ethnopluralism to a much broader audience by reframing it into a less contentious platform: simply preserving a nation’s cultural, national, and religious values as part of a struggle to self-determination (Caiani 2018). That was the spirit of Bolsonaro’s closing remarks at the 2020 United Nations General Assembly: “Brazil is a Christian and conservative country and has the family at its core” (Bolsonaro 2020).
Final remarks
Anti-globalism and religious nationalism underscore the two most devastating policies to Brazil’s external image in the last two years: the administration’s negligent (and even complicit) approach to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and its disastrous pandemic response, which has led to over 660,000 deaths in two years and spurred accusations of crimes against humanity (Ventura, Aith, Reis 2021). On top of that, the US presidential election results have placed Brazil into an even more vulnerable spot. Having openly campaigned for Donald Trump, Bolsonaro ran into a collision course with Joe Biden as of early 2021. After clashing with Argentina over the election of Alberto Fernández (“a left-wing bandit” in Bolsonaro’s own words), with China over Covid-19 and now with the new democrat administration, Brazil saw itself isolated from its most strategic partners.
While many expected that the new Foreign Minister, Carlos França, a low-profile career diplomat, would correct Brazil’s course and drive the country’s international relations away from anti-globalism and religious nationalism, any major changes are yet to be seen. If it is true that foreign policy became less contentious over the last twelve months, it might have more to do with the administration’s shifting priorities than with any sudden ideological moderation on the president’s part.
Bolsonaro’s increasing global isolation explains why he does not want to place foreign policy on the spotlight as presidential elections approach. The only time he did so – visiting Russian president Vladimir Putin in February 2022, on the eve of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine – the move was promoted by Bolsonaro’s supporters as the gathering of two God-loving, anti-globalist leaders who are trying to reshape world politics. Little did they know that courting Russia and relying on Bolsonaro’s alleged miraculous capacity to prevent a war in Eastern Europe would backfire – and further increase Brazil’s international isolation. At this point, it seems that the only way to revert the country’s terrible image abroad, and perhaps start rebuilding our democracy at home, is to vote Bolsonaro out of office.
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