AMAZON AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER: FROM PROMISE TO PERIL.

• Author: Casaroes, Guilherme

INTRODUCTION

The Amazon region sprawls across nine South American countries and is home to some 38 million inhabitants--28 million in Brazil alone. It encompasses the world's largest rainforest, river basin, and aquifer, as well as massive mineral reserves and hundreds of indigenous groups. Amazonia, as we often refer to the region, is intertwined with some of the most pressing global challenges, from human rights to border security, from biodiversity to climate change. Yet, the place the Amazon occupies in multilateral discussions is still unclear. Given the sovereign logic of the current international order, debates over how to tap into the human, natural, and mineral resources of the Amazon are always intertwined with nationalist and territorial concerns of all kinds. This is particularly true in Brazil, home to almost two-thirds of rainforest's massive area, which in turn constitutes an equivalent two-thirds of the Brazilian territory. There is no way of detaching forest and country: most of the Amazon is in Brazil and most of Brazil is in the Amazon.

The ongoing and increasing degradation of the Amazon is a source of insecurity for both the Amazonian nations and the rest of the world. Tensions between framing rainforests as a public commons and safeguarding national sovereignty over its resources represent the fundamental paradox of today's international system. In Brazil, for example, fears of foreign powers willing to take control of the forest's riches have been for decades a salient theme of political discussions. To many environmental activists and foreign governments, in turn, the fear is that predatory exploitation of the Amazon could lead to climate insecurity with the potential to affect the lives of people from across the globe. But the Amazon has only recently been placed at the forefront of the international order: the understanding of the links between the environment, human security, and economic development are relatively new and have evolved together with the normative and institutional framework of the current international system.

In 1992, as Brazil was preparing to host the world's largest environmental summit of the century, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), one of the country's leading scholars on the Amazon, Samuel Benchimol, summarized the Amazonian (and Brazilian) dilemma as an evolving two-pronged threat of internationalization and planetarization: while internationalization "is a process of transferring and alienating national political sovereignty" in favor of the interests (economic or otherwise) of a foreign power or supranational entity, planetarization is "a false currency defended by scientists according to which the world must maintain the virginity of the Amazon rainforest to safeguard the survival of the planet." (1) The conflation of international greed and conservationist alarmism over the Amazon has caused great distress not only in Brazil and South America, but also in many global circles. This is a puzzle that the international community has yet to solve.

In this article, we investigate the place of the Amazon in the international system throughout history. We argue that, from a global perspective, the Amazon has moved from a source of prosperity to insecurity, while in Brazil the vast rainforest, once seen as a geographical liability, has been occupied, integrated, and developed precisely to allay common fears of losing sovereignty over the region. To this end, we undertake a historical descriptive analysis, seeking to reconstruct the global and national role of the Amazon vis-a-vis the development of the international system.

Our argument is divided into four parts. First, from the construction of the modern international order--based on sovereignty and great-power colonial disputes--until World War II, the rainforest was treated both as a terra incognita (uncharted land) and a terra nullius (no-man's land). The second section looks at the rise of the first grand movement calling for some flexibility in sovereign control over the Amazon, albeit relatively timidlv and more focused on scientific endeavors. The third focuses on the initial moments of rise of the environmental movement of the 1970s in the context of North-South and third world narratives of global power, which intersected with growing calls from developed countries' proposals for internationalization of Brazil's Amazon. Then, we discuss a more contemporary scenario, starting with Rio 92 and Brazil's engagement with the international system over the Amazon and the domestic pushback against any external interference, followed closely by concerns (and conspiracy theories) over breaches in the country's sovereignty. We finish the paper by looking briefly at the current scenario attentive to the "securitization" of climate change and spillovers of this approach upon the Amazon. In doing so, we provide an arch that spans from the discovery of the Amazon to modern day Brazil and an international system that has (re)framed it in a Janus-faced manner: as both a promise and a threat for mankind.

FROM TERRA INCOGNITA TO TERRA NULLIUS: THE AMAZON AMONG COLONIAL POWERS

The modern history of the Amazon begins with the colonial voyages made on behalf of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Even though Portuguese explorers had probably sailed Amazon waters around 1498, official records suggest that Spaniard Vicente Pinzon was the first European to reach the Amazon River in 1500, naming it the Mar Dulce, or the freshwater sea. (2) Four decades later, a compatriot of his, Francisco de Orellana, sailed the river from close to its source in the Andes to the Atlantic. It was not until 1638, however, that the trip was made in the reverse direction by the Portuguese. A vast and inhospitable rainforest cut by massive rivers, Amazonia was seen by European colonizers of the 16th and 17th centuries as either an "Eldorado," where they would find immeasurable riches, or a "Green Hell" that was simply impossible to tame. (3)

The Iberian kingdoms had the advantage of establishing the first settlements in the mouths of the Amazon River. Unable to explore its inlands, French, English, and Dutch explorers ended up colonizing the forest's northern coastal fringe in what corresponds today to the Guyanas. In the meantime, the Portuguese bandeirantes--slavers, explorers, adventurers, and fortune hunters--based around Sao Paulo slowly moved north and westwards, taking over the vast areas of jungle and savannah left fallow by the absence of European settlements in what would have been Spanish domain under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (4). In 1621, while Portugal was under Spanish control, (i) the State of Grao-Para and Maranhao, encompassing the Portuguese Amazonian lands, was established as a separate entity from Brazil, later reincorporated into the colony in 1774. (5)

In 1750, following a series of de facto territorial rearrangements at the heart of South America, Spain and Portugal agreed to the Treaty of Madrid, which granted the Portuguese Empire almost the entirety of Brazil's current borders, including some 60% of the total Amazonian territory. Five years later, then-Prime Minister of Portugal, the Marquis of Pombal, established the General Company of Grao-Para and Maranhao, a trading company aimed at exploiting natural resources and spices, as well as cattle ranching. To defend the newly-acquired territory, military garrisons were stationed in strategic areas. Pombal also moved to change the region's demographics, abolishing indigenous slavery in 1755, transforming religious villages into civil municipalities, and encouraging the miscegenation between whites and indigenous people in the region.

Over the next two centuries, Amazonia witnessed a period of relative calm. Brazil's independence in 1822, with the Southern metropole of Rio de Janeiro as its capital, did not break the isolation of the Amazonian provinces or the long-standing policy of keeping the Amazonian heartland from foreign interference. At the height of the developments in the study of natural history in Europe, scientific expeditions dominated Western interest in the region. While some were genuine, others concealed ambitious economic interests on the part of Great Britain and the United States, to the chagrin of the Brazilian Empire. (6) After decades of British and American pressure, as well as their attempts to enter the Amazon through neighboring countries like Bolivia and Peru (at times through the expedient of chartered companies), Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II reluctantly opened the Amazon River to international navigation in 1866.

One of the leading figures in inducing Brazil to "abandon the policy of seclusion and unlock the door of the Amazon to the world's commerce" (7) was U.S. Navy Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury Serving as Superintendent of the U.S. Observatory and Hydrographical Office, Maury threw the weight of his prestige to convince the U.S. government to force the Amazon open to international trade. (8) Among his arguments were the expansionist, Manifest Destiny-understanding of the Amazon River as a "natural" continuation of the Mississippi River valley and the chauvinistic view that "the execrable policy by which Brazil has kept shut up... from man's--from Christian, civilized, enlightened man's--use of the fairest portion of God's earth, will be considered by the American people as a nuisance, not to say an outrage." (9)

Given the precarity of international law of that time, Brazil's sovereign interests were subdued by the power politics and imperialist leanings of the key industrial nations. The timing was convenient, as the world was going through a rubber boom, and predatory exploitation of the rainforest ensued. Until 1910, the port cities of Manaus and Belem experienced a surge of prosperity, only to be abandoned in favor of the more competitive plantations started by the British in...