Brazil’s foreign policy and the ‘graduation dilemma’

International Affairs 93: 3 (2017) 585–605; doi: 10.1093/ia/iix078 © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com The word ‘graduation’ has been used in a variety of ways. In this article, while acknowledging the existence of other meanings of the term in International Relations and the social sciences, we take the position that states dealing with the ‘graduation dilemma’ confront different and even contradictory expectations from international and domestic audiences. State elites and leaderships may therefore send various signals to internal and external publics, and the process of sending and interpreting these signals is a complex two-level game, prone to apparently paradoxical behaviour. The framework we set out in this article focuses on second-tier states that are non-nuclear powers, such as Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey. In this article, we address the Brazilian case only. In their respective foreign policy trajectories, these states face a graduation dilemma whenever their key decision-makers have the opportunity to choose and the intention of choosing between different international strategies: between a more autonomous type of development or a more dependent one; in security terms, between bandwagoning and balancing; when building a multilateral policy, between traditional alliances and innovative, flexible coalitions; in geopolitical terms and in the field of development cooperation, between an emphasis on North–South or an emphasis on South–South relations. Naturally, these ideal binaries offer several other options which decision-makers may perceive and select, given the political grey areas between the extremes of such dichotomies. No less significant is the non-material element of a graduation dilemma, whether symbolic or interpretative, and how it feeds into decision-making. How decision-makers choose and construct different international scenarios in their own perceptions (e.g. one under western hegemony, or a more multipolar one), and how they highlight a country’s national assets in order to open negotiations with other powers, will depend upon their own cognitive skills and ideological background. To investigate the graduation dilemma in foreign policy, we need to incorporate variables related to perceptions, interpretations, and the political choices made by the members of a country’s elite. These variables are at play in any policy-making process, whether or not a country faces a graduation dilemma; however, in the case of our framework, they play a particularly relevant role related to self-perception and identity-building issues in a state policy area (foreign