What is Brazil's Size in the World?

In the celebrated speech he delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney criticized the underlying hypocrisy of the concept of a “rules-based international order.” The centre-left Canadian leader made explicit the perception that this euphemistic concept has left Western powers at ease to selectively choose which norms of International Law to respect according to their own convenience, while adopting draconian standards with regard to the international behaviour of perceived adversaries. The “rules-based international order” may bear some resemblance to, but should not be confused with, good old-fashioned International Law.

That same speech became notable for another reason: the public call for “middle powers” to unite in confronting the arbitrariness of so-called “great powers” in an international order undergoing rapid erosion. Perfectly evident to readers attentive to international news, the backdrop of Carney’s statements need not be laid out here.

Scholars of International Relations Theory tend to define middle powers by exclusion, situating them halfway between the great powers and the “Lilliputians”–Robert Keohane’s term for “smaller states.” According to Keohane: “[middle powers] are not large enough to determine the system by themselves, but must act in concert with other states to influence systemic outcomes.” Under this typology, middle powers would be those whose international influence does not reach systemic scale, and which, in Barry Buzan’s classification, overlap with “regional powers.”

Middle powers tend to seek international stability and the preservation of the status quo, owing to the absence of what has come to be known as “power surpluses,” at times seeking alignment with one of the great powers, at other times “hedging” between them. Borrowed from financial markets, hedging, applied to geopolitical manoeuvring, means keeping options open by rejecting formal or informal alignment with either great power–which guarantees a certain autonomy to navigate between them.

Carney’s call for the union of middle powers finds theoretical backing: the strength of middle powers lies in their capacity for association or in their adhesion to multilateral structures that afford them some degree of equitable participation. In the opening of the classic work Middle Powers in International Politics, Carsten Holbraad defines: “Middle powers are states whose leaders consider that they cannot act effectively alone, but may be able to have a systemic impact in small groups or through international institutions.”

Brazil has frequently been included in this group of middle powers to which the Canadian Prime Minister alluded. A recent piece in the New York Times (Cave 2026), for instance, lists Brazil as a member of this category alongside South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Vietnam. In Foreign Policy, Sarang Shidore (2026) attributes to “regional powers” such as Brazil, South Korea, France, and India “material capabilities and considerable global influence.” In an essay published in Foreign Affairs, Michael Beckley (2026) enlists Brazil, alongside Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Turkey, among the “middle powers” that would succeed in “hedging” between the United States and China.

These references were not conceived as necessarily detrimental or disparaging to the so-called “middle powers” or “regional powers”: they are intended as a diagnosis of the role that falls to an expressive set of actors in the context of the (undesirable) re-hierarchisation of international relations. What these opinion-shapers have in common is a detection of middle powers’ efforts to escape a world strictly governed by the logic of “strategic competition” between Beijing and Washington.

If the contemporary application of the concept of “middle power” corresponds to the intermediate category between the considered “great powers” (a select oligopoly comprising China, the United States, and Russia) and smaller, less developed countries, it is fair to assume that the remaining members of the G-7 (Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom) and of BRICS+ (South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, India, Iran, and Indonesia), with a few additions (such as Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey), would be comfortably seated between first and economy class.

The questions arise: is Brazil a middle power? Does the classification apply to the Brazilian case? Does the country figure as an exponent of this “Economy Plus” of the contemporary international order? Until recently, the preferred term for describing countries like the BRICS members was “emerging power”–an expression associated with the rise of the Global South that may already have been overtaken by the involution of the contemporary international order and, above all, by China’s dazzling rise. If the criteria adopted to typify Brazil are the capacity to produce “systemic effects”–to the point of bringing about a reordering of the balance of forces through demonstrations of economic weight and military muscle–few doubts would remain as to which lane Brazil occupies: neither superpower nor Lilliputian.

This is not, however, what Brazilian diplomatic discourse recognises. This is not a matter of Itamaraty’s jingoistic claims, nor merely the presumption that criteria of territorial size, demographic weight, and economic scale would claim a higher place for the country in the informal ranking of powers. As an analytical diagnosis of the contemporary international order, Brazil perceives an environment that is more plural, complex, and multifaceted than the rigid stratification that distributes actors into three size-groups defined by fixed and exclusive criteria.

In the view of Brazilian diplomacy, a dynamic multipolar international order is composed of multiple poles of power whose contribution to global governance transcends the size of their treasuries and the number of aircraft carriers at their disposal. In this firmament, Brazil would establish itself as one of the autonomous poles of dynamic multipolarity, grounded in a constructive stance towards international dossiers and its multilateral diplomatic engagement.

There are diplomatic (i.e. policy) implications that derive from this national diagnosis. Even as it resists automatic alignment and subservience, hedging implies the practical acknowledgement–in addition to the intellectual one–of the “freezing” of global power–to borrow the expression dear to Brazilian diplomatic discourse–around a small oligopoly.

This is not the behaviour that characterises the universalist vocation and pursuit of decision-making autonomy of our foreign policy since at least the middle of the last century. In the Brazilian tradition, a universalist foreign policy means maintaining broad and far-reaching relations with the entire world, free from prejudices and automatic alignments, identifying interests and opportunities for Brazil in every quadrant. Decision-making autonomy implies making decisions based on autonomous strategic calculations–without remote-controlled behaviour or mimicry–stemming from an independent reading of international relations.

Adopting a hedging strategy would reduce the latitude and “policy space” of Brazilian external action, narrowing not only the stock of relations with other members of the international community, but the very universe of possibilities within the scope of bilateral relations with Washington and Beijing respectively. Diplomatic relations conducted in terms of respect and equality tend to yield more opportunities, benefits, and fruits than avowedly asymmetrical ties.

Unlike the canonical definition associated with middle powers, Brazil has historically displayed a certain degree of discomfort with the status quo regarding the asymmetry between countries and the hierarchisation of the international order, adopting a reformist stance towards the decision-making processes of global governance. This is precisely what Andrew Hurrell says: “Brazil has sought to be a ‘reformist,’ not a ‘revisionist’ power–contesting the distribution of influence within international institutions without rejecting the institutions themselves.” The campaign to expand the composition of the United Nations Security Council is the most visible expression of this non-conformist attitude–one that nevertheless seeks to build a more just order from within the existing institutional and normative framework.

A universalist power with a conciliatory disposition–and one of the principal guarantors of South America’s character as a peaceful and stable continent–Brazil may not possess the classical “power surpluses” described by the realist tradition, nor carry sufficient weight to define motu proprio the direction of the international order; but it is too large to resign itself to projecting interests solely on a regional scale or merely to extract selfish gains from among the leading poles of the system. Its principal instrument for asserting its interests, projecting its values, and actively participating in global governance is diplomatic negotiation and original contributions to the normative shaping of International Law. It is, moreover, precisely this characteristic–the active promotion of peaceful solutions–that contributes to making Brazil–the largest South American power–a historical factor of stabilisation, rather than perturbation, in the regional environment. It is a style of moving through the concert of nations that is distinctly its own–perhaps even unique–for a country of such dimensions.

Less preoccupied with taxonomic classifications in service of the predominant discourses in the centres of power, Brazil does not see itself as a “middle power” or as confined to regional influence. It does, however, have clarity about its displeasure both with the calcification of global power into a small oligopolistic club of great powers, and with the selective, convenient, and self-interested application of international rules. That, after all, is Brazil’s size in the world.

Bibliographical References

Beckley, Michael. 2026. “The Middle Power Delusion.” Foreign Affairs, May 25, 2026. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/middle-power-delusion .

Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver & Jaap De Wilde. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

Buzan, Barry & Ole Wæver. 2003. Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cave, Damien. 2026. “What Middle Powers Fear About the Trump-Xi Summit.” The New York Times, May 11, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/world/asia/trump-xi-china-summit-iran.html.

Holbraad, Carsten. 1984. Middle Powers in International Politics. London: Macmillan.

Hurrell, Andrew. 2007. On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keohane, Robert O. 1969. “Lilliputians’ Dilemmas: Small States in International Politics.” International Organization 23 (2): 291–310. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706027 .

Shidore, Sarang. 2026. “Can Middle Powers Gel?” Foreign Policy, March 23, 2026. https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/23/middle-powers-mark-carney-global-south/ . 

Received: May 15, 2026

Accepted for publication: June 1, 2026

Translation published: June 22, 2026

* Translated by Theo Pereira with the support of digital machine translation tools: Google Translate (initial draft), Grammarly (grammatical and syntactic revision), and ChatGPT (selective phrasing refinements). Reviewed by the author.  

Copyright © 2026 CEBRI-Revista. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited.