Entraves internos, autobloqueios internacionais: um olhar sobre a diplomacia cultural do Brasil no período 2017-2022

Abstract

Brazil’s cultural diplomacy in contemporary times is faced with a central dilemma: to overcome internal obstacles that generate international self-blockades. Based on this reading, this doctoral research was developed from the following questions: how has the cultural diplomacy of the Federative Republic of Brazil been carried out today? What is the State’s discourse on its performance in this field/strand of national foreign policy? These questions unfold in the research problem that is the limited and non-coherent understanding on the part of the Brazilian State with regard to the reality of the 21st century. This assertion is justified because access to the means of production of cultural content – based on textual, audiovisual, imagery and sound discourses – has favored clashes of symbolic order, which implies in constant disputes between social actors for the definition of the political sphere. This motivated the identification of the hypothesis: to prove that it is possible to insert a new look at cultural diplomacy that would come to be seen and worked on as a strategic element of the power politics of States because it is, in its nature, an international policy that goes beyond traditional methods hitherto applied: simple symbolic-persuasive support to the foreign policy of countries in a perspective of instrumentalization of culture. To transform this interpretation into an academic text, we worked based on the following research elements: (a) population and sample – the corpus of analysis; (b) data collection – sources for six analyses present throughout the thesis: bibliographical, documental, discursive, informational, conceptual and imagery; (c) methods of analysis – relating to eight types: mappings, comparisons, schematizations, discourses, social networks, websites and blogs, journalistic texts and information in general; (d) statistical techniques – mainly for the generation of tables, frames and graphs; (e) theoretical framework – mainly through contributions from Michel Foucault, but also from other sources, depending on the argumentative necessity of the debate that developed throughout the writing. The discussion of the results indicates, therefore, that there is difficulty in building public policy for cultural diplomacy because, above all, of the instability and polarization that Brazil has undergone, motivated by national and international elites who have not accepted – and perhaps still do not accept – the fact that political forces of popular base entered democratically into the powers of the State – which strengthened the emergence of the discourse of the extreme right in the political-cultural field. Therefore, this investigative path allows me to defend the following thesis: although the ideological-cultural war of the Bolsonaro government has had hegemonic force in foreign policy, and in all actions at home, the cultural field has not succumbed: the approval of the Aldir Blanc Law, from the collective work between society and most of Parliament, allowed cultural production to be carried out in all geographic regions of the country with direct investment from the Union; at the international level, the bicentenary of Brazil’s independence was celebrated and Itamaraty created the Guimarães Rosa Institute. However, the Lula 3 government has the challenge of facing internal obstacles, such as the elitist vision of what it is and the way in which Brazilian cultural diplomacy is thought and done.