The volume under review is the latest in a series of studies by José Honório Rodrigues calling for a reassessment of Brazil’s current domestic and foreign policies in the light of his reinterpretation of the nation’s past. It draws heavily upon his Brasil e Africa, outro horizonte (1961); Aspirações nacionais, interpretação histórico-política (1963); and Conciliação e reforma, um desafio histórico-político (1965) It also shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of these earlier works. Like the latter two it is a compilation of articles and essays published at different times in response to changing circumstances and thus suffers somewhat from repetition and lack of chronological unity. Above all it is a coherent, well-argued polemic designed to stimulate discussion, to influence Brazilian policy makers, and to justify a highly nationalistic approach to Brazil’s international relations.
The author’s thesis is clear. He maintains that Brazil can and should pursue its own independent, wholly sovereign foreign policy, but that it has never done so, except briefly under Quadros and Goulart. The traditional foreign policies were formulated and executed by a few ministers of extraordinary intelligence and an admirable capacity for improvisation. However, as he seeks to demonstrate, they have seldom been fully adequate to advance the permanent national interests of the Brazilian people, which he lists in order of importance. Rodrigues credits Brazil’s foreign policy successes—as in the settlement of boundary questions—to her own efforts, while attributing responsibility for failures or shortcomings in the field of foreign relations to the blindness, selfishness, and traditionalism of the ruling elite minority and to the undue influence of the Great Powers, chiefly Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth.
The student accustomed to detached, objective analysis of the historical process may well be disturbed by the frequently impassioned tone of this volume and may question some of the author’s assertions and omissions. But he cannot fail to be impressed by the mass of evidence Rodrigues presents to buttress his thesis. Some of the material is new, and most of it is examined in a new light. The book is comprised of seven sections, each of which deals with a broad aspect of Brazilian foreign policy or of Brazil’s relations with other countries or geographic areas. The succinct review of relations with the United States to 1930, found in section 4, and the numerous commentaries on the more recent period scattered throughout the text will be of particular interest to historians in this country. The book’s major new contributions to the body of knowledge about Brazilian diplomatic history are the lengthy chapter on relations with China since the colonial period, which occupies one-fifth of the text, and the appendix, a previously unpublished letter of May, 1944 from Ambassador João Neves in Lisbon to Getúlio Vargas, which illuminates an aspect of the Estado Novo’s wartime policies.
