Brazil, the Entrepreneurial and Democratic BRIC

By most objective metrics, Brazil is the least imposing of the “BRICs countries”—less populous than China and India, slower-growing in recent years than China, India, or Russia, and the only member of the group lacking nuclear weapons. We argue that Brazil's material capabilities are more significant than commonly supposed. Moreover, Brazil's democratic transition in the mid-1980s, along with that of its neighbors, has for the first time enabled Brazil to realize its promise of becoming a regional leader in South America. On the basis of its democratic and regional prominence, Brazil has become an effective political entrepreneur at the global level, initiating and participating in multilateral fora as diverse as the trade G20, the financial G20, and now the BRICs club. On issues of style, inclusion, and distributive justice, Brazil reliably sides with the “South.” Yet its core public policy instincts embrace familiar “Northern” preferences: liberal, and mixed-capitalist, democracy.