Brazil’s international rise: an overview of limitations and constraints

At a recent presentation to the LSE Ideas Centre, Roberto Jaguaribe, the Brazilian ambassador to the UK, painted a relatively positive picture of Brazil’s regional and global role. He noted Brazil’s efforts to achieve greater regional integration, from the creation of the Mercosur common market (including Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and, as an associate member, Venezuela) in 1991 to the establishment of the South America-wide Unasur in 2008. He reported on Brazil’s increasingly diversified trade relations with the world and its current efforts to open up global governance through its participation in various groups of other state actors, along with the G20. Brazil’s emergence, along with these other state actors, opens the prospect of change in the nature of international relations more generally.