Brazil is a product of diplomacy. Brazil's destiny was settled even before discovery in April 1500, by an act of international policy that decided that this territory, bathed by the mild waters of the South Atlantic, would belong to the Portuguese branch of Mediterranean culture, Latin and Catholic. Southey has claimed that Brazil was discovered by chance. We could submit the thesis that, on this occasion, the chance that presides over the birth of nations had a diplomatic instrument to foreshadow its decree. It was the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 that set the division of lands to be discovered in the New World between the Iberian monarchs, thus precluding a serious clash that both the Catholic kings and Dom João II of Portugal contemplated with misgivings. Tordesillas marked the direction of conquest. The course of navigation had already been anticipated by the expedition of Columbus and of Bartolomeu Dias. The treaty simply ratified the paths of discovery, that of the Spaniards westward-el levan£e por el poniente - and that of the Portuguese eastward, around the bulk of Africa. The destiny of Brazil was thereby also linked to that of Africa. The country was born out of an unfulfilled dream of Dom Afonso V of Portugal, of imperial Iberian union, and of an imminent conflict between the neighboring sovereigns, a clash happily avoided thanks to the spirit of diplomatic conciliation to which the Pope added the prestige of his good offices. Brazil came into being as a successful afterthought of the Great Navigations, an epic achievement that brought its distant oriental goal within reach of galleons and caravels by exactly opposite routes - thus confirming empirically the roundness of the earth. It is generally contended that Brazil is a fruit of the Renaissance. More exactly, one should consider it the conscious product of Renaissance diplomacy that strove to give order and direction to the planetary expansion through seas never previously sailed, owing to the initiative of two Iberian people.

The line of Tordesillas is a geopolitical imposition, the commencement marking the route under which the colonial history of Brazil was arched, thus determining the configuration of our foreign policy ever since. Tordesillas is the first in historical importance and chronological order of the foundations over which Brazilian international life was to develop. It represents Brazil's relations with Spain and with those Spanish dominions to the west of the line that were to become seven neighboring republics. Tordesillas is, therefore, the problem of frontiers, always a question of priority in any diplomatic policy, thus tacitly tabled at the very beginning of discovery by Admiral Pedro Alvares Cabral.

Immediately afterwards, however, a new element in this policy became apparent: the problem of external security along the coast line, from the mouth of the Amazon to the land bulge in the present state of Santa Catarina. The new problem was announced by the ominously ironic remarks of the king of France, that he had never heard of the clause in the Testament of Adam that divided the world between his cousins of Portugal and Castille. The bon mot of Francis I was intended to legitimize possession of all lands to the east of the meridian of 370 leagues from Cape Verde. It could not achieve a similarly satisfactory result in preventing claims by third parties. These claims came thundering through the guns of French and Dutch adventurers, of Villegaignon and La Ravardière, of Cavendish, of Jacob Villekens and Hendryk Lonck, of Duguay-Trouin and Duclerc, to cite only a few among the most hostile aggressors. They brought on some hard struggles, attacks by land and tremendous naval combats, considerable efforts indeed, at coastal defense, shouldered most of the time by the Portuguese settlers themselves and their creole descendants, with very little help from the mother country.

Those European incursions and attempted foreign settlements had, nevertheless, little to expect from the Portuguese diplomatic art, impotent as it was to resist them. Lisbon was involved in the intrigues of the Thirty Years' War and in the struggle between Bourbons and Habsburgs for the control of Europe. It fell for sixty years, between 1580 and 1640, under the rule of Castille, and in its decline it did not even possess resources valuable enough to justify defensive alliances. Thus, only some weapons from the mother country and a few ships flying the banner of Spain in the period of union of the two crowns, fought against Dutch invaders by land and Sea. The reaction of the local population was the sole strength of the colony during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As early as the seventeenth century, the two fronts over which the policy of security and development of the colony were drawn seemed, therefore, to be clearly delineated. The first front was active, pointing westward beyond the meridian of Tordesillas for expansion into the backlands (sertão – the “big desert”), attracted by the mysterious unknown and facing as antagonists the Spanish conquistadores of the Andean plateau and the La Plata area. The second front was essentially passive and defensive, attentive to the seacoast, leaning eastward, and apprehensive at any sudden appearance of hostile fleets that might be looking for new commercial opportunities in the imperial Mercantilism favored al the time. This apprehension, incidentally, strengthened the traditional Portuguese tendency toward monopolistic centralization of trade in the hands of the Lusitanian crown. The fronts (see Map 1) represent the two dominant preoccupations with development and security required by the fast-expanding colony in its territorial integrity. They constitute, as it were, the two guidelines of colonial foreign policy, two coordinates that invested meaning into the material to be treated by a diplomacy pregnant with possibilities.

Furthermore, because Brazil was discovered as an incident of the great Portuguese navigations, because it long represented merely a stop on the way to India, and because it was colonized with the indispensable work of African slaves, the country had a destiny that is not only continental, but eminently maritime - an Atlantic destiny. Geographically, Brazil leans over the South Atlantic. Very early in its history, transoceanic links were established between its Atlantic shore and West Africa, from the Guinea coast and the Costa de Mina to Angola. Brazil's Atlantic destiny and communion with the Sudanese and Bantu peoples, as well as its more recent African policy, are perfectly predicted in the intense trade that prospered between Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and the Gulf of Benin, a tradce concerned with more than just slaves. They are foreshadowed in the reconquest of Angola from the Dutch in the seventeenth century, by an expedition organized by Brazilians sailing out from Rio de Janeiro. The Atlantic role of Brazil is absolutely original in Latin America. Its negative aspect, however, is represented by the stubborn refusal of the population to abandon the seashores and engage in the agricultural occupation of the interior - the process of full westward development having begun only during the last fifty years. Yet the double destiny of the country enriches its history and complicates the general outlook of Brazilian foreign policy.

In Europe, Portugal was fighting for its independence against Spain, struggling hard under the leadership of the house of Bragança to ensure that its autonomous development would be respected by the court of Madrid. Lisbon was therefore bound to seek some sort of European support in order to supplement its scarce military resources. During the Thirty Years War and the subsequent period of French hegemony, the exertions of Louis XIV deflected to the Pyrenées the main thrust of Castillian power. But Spain itself was already in decline. The English alliance soon appeared better suited to the prevailing conditions and therefore lasted longer. It started to take shape in 1661 in a treaty with the restored British king, Charles II (who was married to a Portuguese infanta), and reached a formal conclusion in 1703, during the War of Spanish Succession. Allied to the Austrians and the British, a Portuguese general entered Madrid in 1706. The alliance between the courts of Lisbon and of St James would shield the Brazilian coastline, the safety of which was never thereafter to be contested by any other colonial power. The last attempts against Rio were undertaken from 1710 to 1711 by French squadrons under Duguay-Trouin and Duclere. Thus the security of Brazil was to be preserved from the border wars and territorial exchanges that, during the whole of the eighteenth century, affected the European colonial empires in North America, the Caribbean, and the Orient. The celebrated treaty signed by John and his son Paul Methwen also established the commercial clauses (cloth against wine) of an agreement destined to become a permanent feature of Portuguese foreign policy to this day - a small price to be paid through dependence on the Anglo-Saxon trade system.

The Treaty of Madrid of 1750 was the second decisive landmark in Brazilian diplomatic history. On this occasion, Alexandre de Gusmão, a Portuguese diplomat and a Brazilian by birth and interest, managed to confirm on behalf of Brazil the new principle of uti possidetis. The treaty stipulated that the jurisdiction of the two kingdoms in South America, Portugal and Spain, was to be fixed, taking as reference rivers and mountains, but obeying the actual occupation of territory by their respective nationals. The preamble of the treaty proclaimed that "each party will remain with what it presently possesses." As we may recall, during the time of the union of the two crowns, the Brazilian pioneers (Bandeirantes) had roamed far and wide beyond the line of Tordesillas, and by so doing, they had practically tripled the colony to its present size of roughly eight and a half million square kilometers. The treaty of 1750 confirmed the conquests of the Bandeirantes, of the Jesuits, and of the cattle raisers, thus stabilizing, by a legal instrument, the first of the two fronts in Brazilian foreign policy. To the element of action-and even aggression, as exemplified by the assault upon the missions of Paraguay and the foundation of the colony of Sacramento on the left bank of the Plata - that act of high diplomatic foresight added a new principle of collective security and cooperation, foreshadowing feelings of solidarity among all the people of this Southern cone.

The Brazilian essayist Alceu do Amoroso Lima has observed that Spanish America came into being by a process of dismemberment and fragmentation of the former Vice-royalties; British North America by the union of the formerly autonomous thirteen colonies; whereas Portuguese-America came into its own by a specific process of segregation. The mother country kept the territory in strict political, economic, and cultural isolation, not only in relation to alien European influences, but toward its southern neighbors. The situation prevailed until the decisive turning point in 1808. At that time, the ports of Brazil were opened to international trade by the efforts of the British, who had just saved the Portuguese court from capture by Napoleonic armies. Portugal's insistence on preserving its identity in the Iberian Peninsula against the hegemonic ambitions of Castille, brought reaction in South America, eventually evolving to Brazil's greater benefit. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, splendid isolation allowed Brazil to watch undisturbed the disintegration of the Spanish colonial empire. The regionalistic and autonomist tendencies of the people of Spain, contained for so long under the inflexible centralizing policies of Castille, finally burst open freely through the immense areas of regional variety of the New World. Brazil remained happily aloof, united, but faced as it was with the problem of its frontiers. Segregated and clinging together through the ferocious feeling of independence inherited from the Portuguese, the Brazilians maintained without much trouble the unity of their territory. Only two serious revolutionary movements endangered that outlook, one in Rio Grande do Sul and the other in Pernambuco. With all the tremendous potentialities that such circumstances grant the country, union in the immensity of its territory is the sole miraculous datum in the history of Brazil.

A Scheme for Brazilian Geopolitics
Three principles have been proposed as leading Brazilian foreign policy for the attainment of its permanent national objectives:

1. The preservation of the frontier line against the territorial ambitions of neighboring Spanish-speaking republics: this is called the "Frontier Policy."

2. The defense of Brazilian territorial supremacy in South America against any attempt at the reconstitution of the old Spanish vice-royalties, particularly in the La Plata region: this is called the "Policy of Equilibrium." It justified the hostility of Brazil toward Rosas of Argentina; Solano López of Paraguay; and more recently Per6n, in his wild imperial dreams.

3. Closely connected to the preceding principles is the protection of the internal political stability of the country against the spirit of caudillismo. From this resulted the "Policy of Intervention" as happened in Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay in the nineteenth century.

The first two principles, as can be seen, have today a mere historical significance. They represent steps that have already been transcended in the search for permanent national objectives. The third principle, however, entails the preservation of internal order through operations aiming at avoiding contamination by anarchy, despotism, and totalitarianism. As a result of the impact upon Latin America of extra-continental ideologies, inimical to the democratic way of life, this policy is by no means obsolete. A modern version justified Brazilian participation in World War II, when an expeditionary force was sent to Italy (1944 to 1945). The principle of intervention also accounted for Brazil's presence in the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965, when that country was endangered by a communist-oriented military coup; and the breaking off of relations with Cuba from 1964 to 1986. Nowadays, this policy does not find the same acceptance, for reasons which will be seen shortly. It has been corroded by anti-U.S. sentiments like those found in the Third World. It can be observed for example, in the case of Nicaragua, where Brazilian diplomacy tended to favor the Sandinista cause; and in the case of Fidel Castro´s Cuba.

Other scholars who have studied Brazilian history tend to emphasize the problem of dealing with Argentina in the establishment of Brazil's land frontier in the south, as the most strenuous Brazilian diplomats have had to face. In fact, this problem has played a formative role in Brazilian diplomacy, as far as long experience, solid institutionalization, and training of specialized professionals are concerned.

Another point is worth raising at this stage: expansion of the human frontier due to demographic growth, the building of roads and railways, and the extension of airlines, facing a contrary movement eastward from the side of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, where the population is beginning to drive down from the Andean Altiplano to occupy the Amazonian jungle. This double movement will soon clash, creating living frontiers in confined areas that were, until recently, purely abstract geographical lines. The transition occurs also from the side of Venezuela, a country that is undergoing turmoil and rapid growth as a result of the development of its mineral wealth. The building of Brasília has contributed to this result. In Paraguay for instance, half a million Brazilian farmers and the Itaipu hydroelectric power project had certainly a decisive impact upon the destiny of that country, cut off from the seas as it is.

In the evolution of Brazilian foreign policy, therefore, we can distinguish three successive historical phases: in the first one, the human frontier of the colonial nationality expands toward the interior, beyond the Tordesillas meridian, facing the Spanish settlers in the distant reaches of the Guaíra and Sacramento colony, in the extreme south; in the second phase, Brazilian diplomacy tries to consolidate and institutionalize the borders thus conquered - this is the phase that culminates in the work of peaceful negotiations and arbitration under the administration of one who became a famous foreign minister, José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Baron of Rio Branco; and in the third phase, up to the present, the dynamism of diplomatic activity is converted into an effort at peaceful cooperation with Brazil's newly rediscovered Hispanic neighbors, including economic integration. Simultaneously, Brazil becomes conscious that it has an extra-continental destiny to pursue, especially in Africa. In other words, Brazil is beginning to come of age.

American independence, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars started a process at the end of which the whole of Latin America, Brazil included, obtained self-determination. Important diplomatic intrigues took place and decisive foreign policies were followed after those episodes. There were timid attempts from the Brazilian side to obtain the interest of, and court favor from, the new leaders of the former British colonies in North America on behalf of Brazil's own whims of independence. These were considered, however, too imaginative and deprived of realism. Yet certain scholars have considered those inchoate attempts in Washington as the foundation of the bonds of friendship between Brazil and the United States. They were unilateral steps to be sure, and the American reaction was one of indifference. But, whatever it was, the pursuit of the U.S. alliance could be naturally deduced from the role played by Great Britain to the benefit of the integrity of the Portuguese-speaking territories in the New World. Emperor Pedro II pursued that enlightened policy. In 1876, he travelled to the United States for the centennial celebrations, the first South American head of state to do so. The traditional axis of Anglo-Portuguese alliance was simply transferred to the Americas, and for the same reasons. The idea took some time to mature - a hundred and fifty years, as a matter of fact - but the seeds of the grand scheme were sown very early, as an intuition of a geopolitical necessity.

Our attention is also drawn, as far as this question is concerned, to the Monroe Doctrine, which made very little sense or had a limited value for Brazil at the time it was promulgated. Whatever the historical value of the doctrine in the elaboration of the Pan-American idea, it was not meant for Brazil: Portugal in the 1820s and 1830s had no power or material means to cherish any hope of reconquering Brazil. Besides, the monarchical system Brazil had adopted under a crown of legitimate European lineage kept the country well protected from the wrath of the Holy Alliance. A few years after independence, Brazil already belonged to the family of civilized nations, surrounded, perhaps, by the mysteries of tropical exoticism, but enjoying a sort of respect that, at that time and outside of Europe, only the United States itself had managed to acquire. A Venezuelan president mused sadly when Dom Pedro II was exiled in 1889, that Brazil and Chile were the only two organized democratic countries in the hemisphere, the “republic" of Brazil and the "empire" of Chile.

Brazil preserved its self-determination without being exposed to any particular risk, because of the prestige of the Empire and the internal order and stability it enjoyed, in contrast to the anarchy then prevailing in most of Latin America. Brazil even engaged in several wars in the La Plata region without provoking undesirable foreign interventions. If British commercial interests contributed to pay for a discreet naval protection, it certainly was not an exorbitant price. Brazil enjoyed a vast unexplored territory, certainly aplenty with unknown riches, and an immense, unprotected Atlantic coastline, open to all temptations. The risks that were avoided were certainly considerable if we take into account what happened in the late nineteenth century to most of Africa and Asia. On only one occasion foreign intervention loomed possible: in 1893, soon after the republic was proclaimed, a short civil war pitted army radicals against navy conservatives in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro. Foreign warships were caught in the cross fire and warned the government that they might disembark marines. They refrained from doing so when President Floriano Peixoto replied that foreign troops would be received with bullets.

The removal from London to Washington of the third axis of Brazilian foreign policy took definite shape only at the beginning of the XXth century, under the enlightened administration of Baron Rio Branco (+1912) who both consolidated and administered this policy. 'We find ourselves at the beginning of a new era", wrote Joaquim Nabuco, a prominent Republican and Abolitionist statesman who was appointed our first full ambassador to the U.S. capital. "In our calculations, the observation post in Washington is the most important... Under these conditions our diplomacy should be made principally in Washington."

In other words, in the Brazilian conception that developed at the beginning of the XXth century, the American continent is divided into three, not two, parts: Anglo-Saxon North America, Spanish America, and Brazil. Brazil is supposed to play precisely the role of a "third force," burdened with the task of unofficial go-between, interpreting and settling disagreements in the great dialogue of the Pan-American community. This "third position" is still Brazil's. Nevertheless, we should emphasize that it has never been well understood by the Spanish-Americans, who consider Brazil under a sort of vassalage with regard to the United States; nor by the "Anglos" who never clearly distinguished Brazil - one among twenty-odd Hispanic republics - from the other "Latinos." Most commonly, U.S. citizens don't even know that Brazilians speak Portuguese, not Spanish. In the interplay of these ponderable historical-cultural, psycho-social, and geopolitical factors, the inter-American system was created.

We can ascertain, in conclusion, that by the time Rio Branco took over the Ministry of External Relations in the early XXth century, the North American alliance loomed large as one of the foundations of Brazilian foreign policy. Positive and negative aspects, offensive and defensive, dynamic or passive, could also be ascertained in relation to Brazil's Spanish-speaking neighbors, particularly those of the La Plata region. Brazil used to feel surrounded, isolated in a continent of Hispanic nations. There was even a certain amount of snobbery in its attitude toward them. But Brazilian reaction reached beyond the effects of the inferiority/superiority complex, the same way it overstepped the narrow limits of Tordesillas. The actual frontier, lost somewhere in the Amazonian jungle, or Mato Grosso (the "thick bush country"), the frontier of struggle, of advance and retreat, of intervention or pioneering incursions, the living frontier of trade, commerce, cooperation, and mutual involvement along the Uruguay and Paraguay rivers all have become frontiers of creative tension where Brazil can already devise the ideal image of a future and necessary economic and political integration.

A Foreign Policy Persona

Early tendencies of its policy toward the world found expression in what I call the Brazilian Persona. The new nation endeavored to strengthen its national security by adapting its governmental system to what seemed more in vogue in Europe. By becoming an empire ruled by a European royal family, it guaranteed its independence against a possible colonial return of the reactionary forces of the European Holy Alliance. By turning into a federal republic according to the U.S. model at the turn of the XXth century, it again guarded itself against the rising tide of European colonial imperialism. Between two World Wars, the country toyed with fascist political schemes then in the upswing. Vargas inaugurated the game of playing one dominant power system against the other. During a short period (1937-1940), he applauded Hitler's New Order, as witnessed by a famous speech in June 1940. He turned to left-wing support for his staying in power in 1945, and for his return to power from 1950 to 1954. Brazilian foreign policy took a “leftwing”, non-aligned turn in the seventies and eighties, just in time to cope with the dangers of the Cold War and Soviet expansion in Eurasia, Africa, Central America and the Caribbean area.

Brazilians always displayed a widespread preoccupation with the manner in which Brazil is perceived by North Americans and Europeans. A preoccupation, let us say, with our Collective Persona. There is an impatient ambivalence in the way in which we wish to be considered and judged. I maintain that this attitude reveals a certain inferiority complex. It results from Brazil's having made North America into its "model society." In political terms, the ambivalence reflects itself in the argument whether Brazil is or is not a Third World country, or a friendly and independent competitor of the United States; or even whether it is or not a viable country.. On the other hand, such concerns provoke a certain inconsistency among intellectuals, seduced by modern ideologies. They sometimes describe themselves as ill-treated supplicants who deserve the right to receive more from their wealthy and egocentric persecutors from the North, some sort of assistance, advice or help. At other times, they pretend to be independent and equal coactors, feeling consequently offended by classification as "Third Worldly", under-developed or dependent on multilateral acts of charity.

We could focus on two particular points which have to do with the Brazilian persona. First, many Americans, not necessarily for reasons of flattery, have insisted on the similarities between Brazil and the United States. Like the United States, Brazil is a vast, multiracial country, possessing many natural resources, a country that liberated itself from a European colonial power. Brazil is populated mainly by European immigrants but, at the moment of discovery, the Europeans encountered indigenous peoples who were "culturally inferior." This immediately distinguishes Brazil from Mexico and from the Andean nations, and puts the country on a different category. São Paulo is indeed much more like a North American metropolis than any Hispanic city, including Mexico City. Brazil has known African slavery, which however, was abolished in a milder way than in the North American South. Brazil prides itself of "a conquest of the Far West" of epic proportions, the growth of which is still taking place. It has built a new capital city and is a culturally well-decentralized federation. Other features common to both the United States and Brazil, albeit with 50 to 100 years' difference in time, are the gold rush, industrial expansion, and the opening up of new pioneering territories. However, Brazil´s Catholic/Latin religious and cultural background, and its situation in the general zone of the humid tropics, gave rise to radical social, economic and-political differences between this country and the United States.

The second point is that, in common with its friends from the North before World War II, Brazil has nurtured a secret penchant for isolationism, with a nearly autistic consciousness of its own reality. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that there is an equivalent reaction to the warped U.S. perception; this has provoked the ignorance, indifference, and even the sense of superiority Brazil has in relation to its continental neighbors - with the exception of Argentina where a mutual compromise has been brought about by the dictates of history and common sense. Who, in Brazil, would be able to distinguish clearly Ecuador from Colombia, or Costa Rica from Honduras? Brazilians have no right to complain about the U.S. attitude, because their own also contains a large dose of snobismo regarding their neighbors and Hispanic cousins.

The deepest contrast between North and South America is political. It rests on U.S. knowledge about self-government and mastery of political economy, in a liberal market system, or capitalism, both of which Brazil lacks. That is why the "gringos" are rich and powerful, while Brazil is still a developing country. They succeeded in establishing firm and durable bases for a system that reconciles order, justice and freedom, defined in terms of democracy. Brazilians have never overcome the antinomy and remain under a regime that could better be termed "patrimonialist" (in Max Weber's sense of the word). The result is that Brazil oscillates between periods of anarchy and periods of overbearing authoritarianism. The State remains under the power of a patrimonialist elite of politicians, and the economy still mostly government led or owned. Since Brazil has shown no talent in the art of self-government, it has failed to gain the respect of North America. It is of course, not up to the United States to take this part of the world seriously. This will happen only when countries like Brazil decide to take themselves seriously and behave accordingly. It shall cease to be an “invisible continent", or terra incognita, as it was recently defined by a prestigious French journalist, on the day that the Brazilian homo ludens transforms himself into homo sapiens and homo faber...