Continentalization versus Maritimization - the debate within Brazilian School of Geopolitics and its political consequences
Abstrakt
Brazilian School of Geopolitics comprises a debate about whether the country's applied geopolitics should move towards continentalization or maritimization. While revisiting that debate, its authors and arguments, the paper aimed to assess the consequences between those two views and Brazil's recent foreign relations with its neighbor countries (e.g.
Argentina), great powers (e.g. the U.S.A.) and particularly Portugal in the position of geohistorical partner. The paper is a qualitative study grounded in the positivist approach.
It used the deductive method, proceeding from geopolitical concepts and general abstractions to facts of political reality in respect to Brazil's foreign policy. One of the article's most innovative aspects was to identify some theoretical and methodological flaws in Brazilian School of Geopolitics, from the neoclassical geopolitics point of view.
In fact, the line of division between politics in its dynamics of executive power, and geopolitical studies as academic discipline, was deeply mixed in Brazilian School of Geopolitics and that fact was properly identified. Nevertheless, the paper's main result was to try to demonstrate how Brazilian élites' perceptions of space towards 'land' or 'sea', affected by the continentalization vs maritimization debate, has been influencing foreign policy conduct in terms of a preference within the international organizations sphere, a preference for bilateral allies and, by extension, the objectives and the means of action of military power.