Until recently Cesario Melantonio Neto was the Director for Federal Relations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil. One innovative project he oversaw was to establish offices of the Foreign Ministry in the various regions of the country. Federations discussed this novel idea with him at the Forum of Federations’ Conference on the Foreign Relations of Constituent Units, held in Winnipeg, Canada, from 10-13 May 2001.
Federations: In Brazil, you have a very peculiar institution that may be unique in the world: you have “ambassadors” from the foreign service placed in the main regions of the country. Explain how that works.
Melantonio: Well, I do not know if it’s the only country that has such a system, but we are proud of our system and consider it genuine federal diplomacy. We’ve been doing it now for four years and I think it will become a permanent practice. It is a channel of communication, an important one, between the ministry and civil society as well as the constituent units of the federation. So it has to do with democracy. Inside the country, it has to do with democracy and transparency in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it has most to do with a new form of culture inside our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That is, trying to make our representatives abroad better representatives through more contacts with the regions of our country.
Take us back four years to when this idea started. What impelled the government of Brazil to think of trying this?
I think it came from globalization, because with globalization the constituent units of the federation have a tendency—and it’s perfectly natural—to develop more contacts abroad. And it’s very important for a Minister of Foreign Affairs to know at least a little bit about the priorities of the country’s regions. In such a big country it’s impossible to know everything. We have almost 6,000 cities and 27 states, but at least we should know of the most important actions abroad of the constituent units of our federation.
Otherwise, since we are in the middle of the country in Brasilia—a kind of no-man’s land lost in the middle of a big country—we could easily lose contact with the main regions of the country. We have ten big cities with more than one million inhabitants and a number of big states. The Foreign Ministry has to be sensitive to their concerns.
Did the states originally petition the government of Brazil to consider such an idea?
Yes. There was a double movement. There was a movement on our side:
Federations volume 1, number 5, summer 2001
human resources, is a kind of system for recycling senior officers inside the country rather than in the capital.
Can you tell us a story about one particular state having a foreign relations problem which one of these “ambassadors” helped solve?
Yes, I can speak of a very recent demand that concerns Canada, for instance.
We had here, a few days ago, a meeting to discuss the Summit of the Americas in Quebec—the Free Trade Zone of the Americas. We had a governor who informed our Minister of Foreign Affairs that he could not come to the Summit, but he would like very much to have his vice-governor participate as a member of the Brazilian delegation—this is an important agricultural state—to follow up on the discussions in Quebec City. Of course we accepted this governor’s demand.
It was very useful because now we have the vice-governor of this state very interested in the discussion on the Free Trade Zone of the Americas—and particularly the discussion on subsidies and barriers concerning agriculture, since most of the economy of this state is based on agriculture. And this state’s governor is a member of the opposition, so I must also stress that we in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—a technical ministry, let’s say —we do not get caught up in internal politics. We work with governors and mayors from the coalition of the present government or from the opposition all the same.
Might we say that this program is intended in part to control the states’ activities, to delimit and define these activities and prevent them from destabilizing the foreign policy of Brazil by having too many independent positions? In what way is this sort of coherence part of the goal?
I would say that our posture, our approach toward the union of the federation since the beginning, is that we are not working on a basis of control and supervision. It wouldn’t work this way. We work on the basis of cooperation. They know very well that it’s not possible for a constituent unit of a federation to develop an independent foreign policy. And they know very well on the other side that our network abroad of around 150 posts is a very large one and very useful for them.
So we say that it’s more a matter of participation and cooperation, of information among the orders of the federation, than control. Control wouldn’t work in a federation because governors, being elected, are very strong political personalities in any federation and they wouldn’t accept such control.
Do you think there are some lessons— not that it’s up to you or me to teach others lessons—but some lessons that other federations, even federations of countries of the North, might learn from the Brazilian example?
Well, we’ve discussed our experiences with other federations before the creation of the Forum of Federations. That means we’ve been contacted by other federal countries, through their embassies in Brazil, to discuss our experiences.
I would say that this kind of experience is particularly important for continental countries, for big countries, because of course if you are in a smaller country that is a federation it’s easier to move from the capital to other main cities of your country. But in big countries like Canada, Brazil, United States, Australia, China, India, Russia—a diplomat in Ottawa or in Brasilia, in Peking, Moscow, or Canberra is far away from most of the big cities of his own country. I think that this system of internal ambassadors is very important to keep the Minister of Foreign Affairs informed on internal affairs, but internal affairs of course that have a link with external affairs.
And I think this is a matter of changing the culture of the diplomat. The diplomat must no longer be concerned—during this period of globalization and information technology—solely with foreign policy. He must deal a little bit more with internal politics. When I say internal politics I mean to have a better familiarity with what the constituent units of our federation are doing on the political, economic and cultural side abroad.
As we have heard at this conference, in many countries—again, in particular in the North—constituent units have started to play a very formal and active role in foreign affairs to the point where some constituent units actually have a larger foreign service of their own than many sovereign countries. Do you think that in those countries there must be some kind of coordination between the foreign service operations of the constituent units and of the federal government? How do you think that could work?
I think each case is a case unto itself, because, as I’ve learned through the Forum of Federations, problems inside federations are terribly different. We have a lot of problems in our federation, but they are mostly fiscal problems, dealing with fiscal federalism and dealing with regional inequalities. But we don’t have fractures in our federation concerning religion, ethnic problems and linguistic problems because we have only one language. Most of the people have the same religion. So, fortunately for Brazil, we see that the political and economic forces inside the federation do not deal so much with religious and ethnic fractures, which are perhaps the most difficult problems to solve inside a federation. So I think that to transfer experiences from our federation to another is very difficult. You can try sharing similar experiences, but no one has exactly the same experience.
Federations volume 1, number 5, summer 2001