International relations and the paradiplomacy of Brazilian cities: crafting the concept of local international management.
| Autor | Milani, Carlos R.S. |
| Cargo | Report |
Introduction
Globalization is not merely a competition for market shares and well-timed economic growth initiatives; neither is it just a matter of trade opportunities and liberalization. Globalization has also evolved into a social and political struggle for defining cultural values and political identities (Benhabib, 2006; Milani & Laniado, 2007), having major consequences for the internationalization of politics through the increasing development of transnational actors, networks and institutions (Ianni, 2002; Santos, Souza, Scarlato, & Arroyo, 1994). Subnational entities, such as provinces, federatestates and municipalities also benefit from various political opportunity structures that have emerged from globalization processes.
This means that in a broader context of globalization as politics (Baylis & Smith, 2001; Beck, 2003; Dollfus, 1997; Fiori, 2005; Smouts, 2004), the nation-state no longer has the same exclusive and traditional role it used to have in international relations; non-state economic actors, social movements and subnational governments, inter alia, have gradually come to have an important say in global affairs. The political context within globalization opens unprecedented breaches in power equations among states, markets and civil societies (Therborn, 2000; Touraine, 2005; Velasco & Cruz, 2004).
Globalization defines new modalities in the management of internationalization processes being deployed by states, business, social players and also subnational political entities. Along with the globalization phenomenon, there come not only a series of violations of national borders by flows of technology, economy, culture and information, but also several trespassing actions by infra-national political players and their regional and global networks or organizations. At the same time, transnational problems of major relevance to the system-wide functioning of the world (such as financial crises, cross-border environmental degradation, forced migration, drug trafficking, the spread of genetically-modified organisms, civic alliances for human rights, etc.) transcend the responsibility of the single nation-state and represent a major challenge that can hardly be dealt with solely within the framework of intergovernmental relations.
As a result, there is a profound redefinition of the political field of international management, both in the configuration of its context and in the way it evolves as experience, method and practice (the action). It is no longer possible to understand the political field of international management simply as a discrete set of governing institutions, strategies and policies, including players such as states, multinational corporations, international agreements and intergovernmental organizations. In an intellectual exercise of theoretical cross-fertilization, the traditions of International Management and International Relations must take into account the experience of subnational political entities in order to foster a renewal of concepts and analytical frames.
As an attempt to contribute to such an endeavor, this paper adopts the following assumption: cities through their transnational cooperation networks and economic projects are the expression of a new political actor that has shifted its scale of operations, and have thus partly emancipated themselves from the monopoly of the nation-state in the deployment of transborder public action (Salomon, 2007; Sassen, 2006). As the world's population have become increasingly urban and complex globalization-fragmentation processes have advanced, cities have challenged the Westphalian imaginary and the exclusive role of the nation-state as the bounded political community with the capacity to frame and control a fixed and vertical national territory. In pursuance of developing this assumption, this paper approaches the discussion on municipal paradiplomacy in three parts: firstly, it presents the historical and theoretical background of paradiplomacy in Brazil; secondly, it looks into the empirical reality of several Brazilian municipalities and their international actions; thirdly, it presents a series of key questions for analyzing cities and their transnational networks as new political actors in the global arena. Empirically the authors of this paper intend to analyze the multiple ways through which municipalities across Brazil develop paradiplomatic activities, but also to better understand their "soft-border approach", the economic strategies that they deploy, and whether or not they build a political identity, thus questioning unconditioned national sovereignty as a fundamental tenet of the international system. Theoretically this paper crafts the concept of local international management, herein defined as a series of organizational structures and management procedures that guarantee an increasing capacity for cities to set up, participate in, and foster regional and global economic, cultural, social and information networks or flows.
Major Trends in Paradiplomacy in Brazil: Historical and Theoretical Background
Since diplomacy is a term that naturally corresponds to the organized political exercise of the nation-state's series of international actions, paradiplomacy has been used in recent Brazilian International Relations literature to express the ensemble of international actions of non-state actors: private paradiplomacy, non-governmental paradiplomacy, but also federate-states and municipal paradiplomacy (Associacao Brasileira de Organizacoes Nao-Governamentais [Abong], 2007; Troyjo, 2005; Vigevani, 2006). In spite of the fact that the conceptual validity of this notion has frequently been called into question, paradiplomacy can be simply defined as subnational governments' involvement in international relations through the establishment of formal and informal ties, be they permanent or ad hoc, with foreign public or private entities, with the objective of promoting social, economic, cultural or political dimensions of development (Cornago, 2010).
The phenomenon has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively since the early nineties in Brazil, thanks to structural changes in the world order and domestic political and economic transformations. The end of the Cold War and all its associated features (increased development of non-state actors; new metrics of territory, diversified political identities, globalization of diversified sorts of flows and sweeping transformation of a state-centric political order) coincided with the implementation of new external and internal patterns of economic integration, the re-democratization of the Brazilian political and civil society, as well as the promulgation of the new 1988 Constitution.
In such a context, as Ribeiro (2008) reports, paradiplomacy of subnational entities in Brazil has significantly developed since the late 1980s thanks to the decentralization architecture of the Brazilian federation approved in the new constitutional system. It is true that subnational entities have also had their paradiplomatic activities activated and facilitated in other federative systems, such as in the USA, Germany, Belgium, Argentina or Mexico. It has also been the case of particular historical processes of state building where subnational entities must be politically and culturally acknowledged, as in the case of Spain (Cornago, 2010) or Canada (Lachapelle & Paquin, 2005). National constitutional contexts and political paths matter in the building of explanatory hypotheses to understand the role of subnational governments in the deployment of their paradiplomatic activities.
In the case of the Brazilian constitutional system, there is no legal mention about the legitimacy of international actions undertaken by subnational entities (Rodrigues, 2004). Municipalities and federate-states are given a series of complementary and exclusive responsibilities, and no constitutional statement forbids them from developing international activities. Article 21 states that it falls to the Union (i.e., the federal State) to maintain relations with other States and participate in international organizations. In this light, a proposal for a constitutional amendment is currently under discussion within the Brazilian National Congress (project 475/2005, known as PEC daparadiplomacia). According to this proposal, federate-states, the Federal District (Brasilia) and municipalities would count on constitutional support in the development of their international strategies and agreements of technical cooperation with their international partners.
Irrespective of this constitutional gap, many federate-states and municipalities have been extremely active internationally. Even some national associations such as the National Confederation of Municipalities (Confederacoo Nacional de Municipios [CNM]) and the National Front of Mayors (Frente Nacional de Prefeitos) recognize and steer the international action of Brazilian cities; they organize seminars, training courses, and publish guides for the development of international projects. This also applies to the regional network of cities Mercociudades, created in 1995(1), and the Brazilian Forum of International Relations municipal secretaries, launched in 2005.
At the federal level, the Ministry of External Relations (known in Brazil as Itamaraty) established a special administrative service for dealing with...
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