Legal rhetoric and power: an analysis of Itamaraty's campaign for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

The starting point for the present article is Itamaraty’s ongoing campaign for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. The aim is to identify the rationale contained in pronouncements of policymakers and officials of Brazilian government. After identifying legal arguments as the cornerstone of the campaign, the authors discuss therelevance of Law in the only precedent so far regarding the change in the permanent composition of the Security Council: the Chinese representation affair, which took place between 1949 and 1979. The analysis of such events indicates that the motivations for changes were not of legal nature; they were rather due not only in virtue of power framework of the international scenario at the time, but also to the weight reached by (continental) China in the late sixties and early seventies. Thus, the authors identify power politics as pivotal in the changes in the core of the UNSC in that particular case and point out that the vulnerability of crafting such campaign on legal grounds.