Bras. Political Sci. Rev.2012;6(2):119-24.
Power Matters: The Structural Sources of Brazilian Foreign Policy
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3905201200020006
Ibeg your pardon: Octavio wrote a book on what?! For those familiar with previous publications and the career path of Amorim Neto – and there are many in Brazil as well as abroad – nothing could be more surprising than him writing a book on foreign policy. “Domestic” institutions such as presidents, cabinets and parliaments had always been at the core of his research, and articles in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the American Journal of Political Science, and Party Politics have earned him a reputation as a quantitative-oriented, comparative politics scholar. How – and why – could he possibly have transited from a solid terrain that he fully mastered to uncharted territories of another social science he had never previously published? I think two reasons should be called forth to explain this gamble. First, it is not so infrequent for people to come back to their first love, and diplomatic history was among Amorim Neto’s earliest and dearest interests – and remained a strong reason for his fondness for politics. Second, and partly as a consequence of the above, he never bought into the idea that comparative politics and international relations were separate disciplines. Rather, as he once wrote that comparative politics was “the politics of the others” (2010), he would most likely subscribe to Javier Solana’s dictum that “foreign policy is all about the domestic policy of others”, and thus that international relations is the arena of interaction between both comparable and entangled units. In his understanding, all these fields of knowledge fall fully within the sphere of power relations, which is to say that they belong to what political science – and political scientists – study. For such an open mindset, state borders are not stiff enough as to keep knowledge in watertight compartments or, to paraphrase , separate tables. So Amorim Neto decided to invest his methodological skills and comparatist training into a new, though related, venture: to find out the determinants of the contemporary foreign policy of his home country.
This book introduces three main innovations to preexisting analyses. They regard methods, time frame and theory. As to methods, this volume is the first systematic attempt to test with empirical data whether it is domestic politics or the international system that have influenced more decisively Brazilian foreign policy. Thus far, discussions had mostly been held between arguments on continuity (accentuating the professionalism of Itamaraty and above-politics strategies) versus change (focusing on leadership and epitomized in the famous Lula’s sentence, “never before in the history of this country”). However, both strands of arguments were defended in an impressionistic rather than fact-based fashion and also, more often than not, ideologically biased and normatively oriented. To overcome these pitfalls, Amorim Neto made the careful though risky decision to use a quantitative indicator to measure the orientation of Brazilian foreign policy, and so he resorted to a database that included every non unanimous vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations () to build the dependent variable, i.e., policy alignment with the United States. It measured the degree of convergence in voting behavior between the two countries over time and across issues, and showed that it decreased abruptly from over 80% in the 1940s to around 10% in the 2000s.
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