Dissertação
Desvendando o conflito de interesses subjacente ao direito internacional: a agenda ambiental na proposta de Acordo de Livre Comércio entre o Mercosul e a União Europeia
Fecha
2022-10-11Autor
Bastos, Matheus Silva
Institución
Resumen
The environmental agenda, the result of the diverse demands present in international society,
has continually pressured States and International Organizations to adapt their practices and
policies to sustainable principles, a movement also reflected in international law, through the
inclusion of this agenda in different normative instruments. In the early 1990s, the newly
created Mercosur and the European Union began negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement that
continued under negotiation until 2019, the year in which the text of the proposal was finalized.
The Agreement proposal includes topics such as regional integration, tariffs, services,
investment, trade and sustainable development. With the resumption of negotiations of the
Agreement proposal in 2016, after years of stagnation, some factors such as the increasing
deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, combined with the Brazilian government's inaction and
disregard for the environmental cause, raised the concern of European Union countries,
reflecting in the negotiations. In this perspective, the present research aims to investigate
whether the environmental agenda incorporated in the negotiations of the Agreement proposal,
which resulted in the Chapter on Trade and Sustainable Development, evidences a conflict
and/or complementation between the interests of the Parties. These interests are related to
specific actors, such as groups, companies, unions and organizations, which have the capacity
to influence governments and political leaders to defend their objectives in international
negotiations. The main hypothesis observes the existence of a conflict of interests both in the
inclusion of the environmental agenda, during the negotiations, and in the subsequent period of
interpretation of the Agreement proposal, while the text of the Chapter itself results from a
complementation/harmonization between the interests of the Parties. This hypothesis stems
from the categories present in Koskenniemi's discussion on the Policy of International Law,
which help to highlight the conflicting nature of the interests underlying the Agreement
proposal. This is an exploratory research, with a hypothetical-deductive approach and a research
technique based on bibliographic review and document analysis. It is observed that just the
reading of the Agreement’s text could suggest a complementation of interests, translating the
managerial perspective of international law, as proposed by Koskenniemi. However, the
research concludes that the inclusion of the environmental agenda went from a process of
complementation of the trade, in the initial negotiations of the Agreement proposal, to a state
of conflict, in which the various Parties involved struggled to implement a structural bias, and
that such conflicts prevail even after the negotiations are finalized, during the text review
period. The research also argues that conflict is also visible in the stage of implementation and
interpretation of the provisions of the Agreement, since the provision of mechanisms for
resolving disputes also makes room for the indeterminacy of legal terms. Thus, the MercosurEuropean Union Agreement proposal is a useful tool to analyze the conflict and/or
complementation of interests, and, from the point of view of domestic policy, the inclusion of
an environmental agenda in the negotiations of the proposal provides means to pressure the
Brazilian government in relation to its environmental policy.