Brazil, Ukraine, and Russia
The importance of the recent visits by President Fernando Enrique Cardoso to Russia and Ukraine cannot be underestimated. The only regrettable thing could be that the visits were somewhat late. If they had taken place early last year, President Cardoso would have had a whole year in store to start implementing the agreements he reached. At the same time, President Putin’s visit to Brazil, slated for this year, is supposed to facilitate their speedier implementation.
To realize the significance of the documents signed, one should take into account the obvious global trend toward narrowing the access of rapidly developing economies like Brazil’s to participation in world processes. Globalization and the tremendous pressure from the most developed countries on international organizations lead to the establishment of a world order that narrows the limits of the external and internal autonomy of the developing states. The point is the situation and the processes which, due to their inherent internal gravitation and to the pressure from more developed countries, lead to eternalizing the chasm between the developed and developing nations.
Brazil requires conditions that would allow it to have a considerable positive foreign trade balance in order to offset the huge deficit in its current accounts amounting to $20 billion. Brazil requires access to modern technologies which would ensure its transformation into a developed country. For these and many other reasons, Brazil needs to extend the framework of its internal and external autonomy. It should be added here that the nation has very little time to fulfill these tasks, no more than two decades. If Brazil fails to reach a satisfactory level of development and autonomy by 2020, it will just turn gradually into an appendage of the world market, a country with faНade sovereignty but in fact ruled from outside.
It is in this context that the agreements reached with Russia and Ukraine assume exceptional importance. They open vast prospects for trade, offering Brazil alternative sources of supplies of equipment and technologies and, at the same time, opening new markets for its own products with a high added value, like the Embraer airplanes or advanced technologies of the Petrobras Oil and Gas Company.
We should mention in particular the agreements envisioning the use of the Alcantara spaceport for launching Russian and Ukrainian satellites (rockets, actually – Ed.). By all accounts, the agreements provide for necessary mechanisms of protecting space technologies without including humiliating extraterritorial demands, like those contained in a similar agreement with the United States. Unlike the Brazil-US agreement on the nonproliferation of space technologies, the agreements with Russia and Ukraine do not rule out in principle the possibility of transferring such technologies. The latter agreements make it logical to demand that the agreement signed earlier with the USA be revised substantially or simply renounced.
With all the importance of economic and technological cooperation, the political mutual understanding reached with Russia is still more important: it enables Brazil to build its relations of strategic partnership with that great country. In the complicated conditions of the beginning of the new century characterized by the increasingly narrowing life zone for countries like Brazil, the possibility to preserve and extend the frameworks of internal and external autonomy depends on the strengthening of the strategic triangle: first, MERCOSUR, the community of southern Latin American nations with its system of cooperation and free trade; secondly, the regime of close political and economic-technological cooperation with the European Union, and thirdly, the formation of real relations of strategic partnership with the other three largest continental states – China, India and, above all, Russia.
During their talks, Presidents Cardoso and Putin stated the similarity of their countries’ international interests. They also noted the importance of establishing relations of strategic partnership between Brazil and Russia to attain their goals. It is from this perspective that we should regard the Brazilian government’s decision to render maximum support to Russia in its WTO membership bid and Russia’s decision to support the enlargement of the UN Security Council, particularly by adopting Brazil as a permanent member.
During his talks with Vladimir Putin, Fernando Enrique Cardoso reached mutual understanding on a number of other important issues, particularly those concerning IMF and World Bank policies. The definition of Brazil as a tropical Russia, which actually belongs to your humble servant, was used by President Cardoso quite to the point and was quite in the spirit of his very successful visit to Moscow.
