Dispute over power or dispute over prestige with Brazil in Menem's foreign policy? The vision of diplomacy

Abstract

It is a usual statement among foreign policy experts that Argentine policy to Brazil and the United States has established ties, checks and balances, besides impacts on one another. To dialogue with this literature, this article aims to analyze the backstage of argentine’s foreign policy, as well as to identify the reasoning behind Menem’s government political-diplomatic disagreements towards Brazil. In this context we highlight the diplomatic perception in the realm of the best strategy to deal along with its neighbor and Mercosur’s founding partner. For an empirical approach, we focus on two different disagreement episodes between those two countries between 1997 and 1999: i) the designation of major non-NATO ally given by the US government to Argentine, in 1997, resulting on a negative Brazilian reaction; and ii) the Argentine opposition to the Brazilian plea for a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council, a relevant subject to the Brazilian diplomacy by the time, which was met by fierce negative reactions from Argentinean authorities. To fulfill the above-mentioned objectives our sources are focused on semi-structured interviews with Brazilian and Argentine diplomats, besides authorities’ speeches and press reports.

Keywords

• argentine foreign policy
• menem government
• diplomacy