Lusophony as a Transregional Bridge: Brazil, Europe, and the PALOP in a Multipolar International System

Brazilian foreign policy is rarely analyzed through its African dimension. Yet relations between Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP, for its acronym in Portuguese) constitute one of the most revealing laboratories for understanding how a semi-peripheral country, aspiring to assert itself as a middle power, can exercise autonomy within a multipolar international system. During Lula da Silva’s first administration (2003–2010), Brazil underwent one of the most significant transformations in the history of Latin American foreign policy. Far from merely managing its traditional alignment with Washington, Brasília adopted a strategy that Vigevani and Cepaluni (2007) termed “autonomy through diversification”: the deliberate search for new partners in the Global South in order to expand Brazil’s international room for maneuver and reduce its structural dependence on the Global North. This orientation was not unique to Brazil. During the same period, Argentina under the Kirchners and Venezuela under Chávez pursued similar trajectories, building South-South cooperation networks that represented a novelty in Latin American foreign policies.

What distinguished Brazil from its neighbors was the depth of its soft power resources: the Portuguese language, Afro-descendant ties, a tradition of technical and academic cooperation, and a multilateral diplomacy with decades of experience in global forums. These assets made Brazil an actor capable of projecting influence in Africa. This dynamic can be conceptualized through the framework of multipolar autonomy, understood as the ability of a semi-peripheral state to take advantage of the dispersion of power within the international system in order to raise its status and reduce its dependencies, combining material and immaterial resources in an international insertion strategy that prioritizes the Global South without abandoning dialogue with the North. Within this framework, soft power is not a decorative complement to Brazilian foreign policy, but rather a key comparative advantage in the African Lusophone sphere.

Lusophone architecture as a transregional space

The main institutional vehicle for Brazil’s projection toward Africa is the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), created in 1996 and bringing together Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Timor-Leste. The CPLP is not merely a cultural forum: it is a diplomatic network that grants Brazil a legitimized presence in the African continent that no other Latin American actor possesses. Its most tangible instrument is the PEC-G student mobility program, which has brought thousands of students from the PALOP to Brazilian universities, consolidating long-term academic, professional, and personal ties.

What makes this architecture geopolitically unique is that Portugal simultaneously participates in both the CPLP and the Macau Forum — a multilateral organization created by China in 2003 that brings together Portuguese-speaking countries under the umbrella of the Macau Special Administrative Region — while also being a full member of the European Union. This means that Lusophony constitutes, de facto, a transregional space in which the foreign policies of Brazil, the EU, and other global actors intersect, compete, and potentially complement one another. The overlapping memberships of these actors in different Lusophone forums are not merely a diplomatic curiosity: they are a geopolitical variable that defines the possibilities and limits of cooperation in Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Brazilian soft power and its complementarity with Europe

Europe’s presence within the CPLP has historically been mediated by Portugal, whose African policy oscillates between its colonial legacy and its commitments as an EU member state. This dual belonging is simultaneously a limitation and an opportunity. It is a limitation because Portuguese colonial memory generates diplomatic tensions within the CPLP that condition the scope of Lisbon’s influence in Africa. It is an opportunity because Portugal acts as a bridge between Lusophone architecture and European institutions, opening a channel for EU engagement in Portuguese-speaking Africa that is not directly mediated by colonial weight.

Brazil occupies a singular position within this framework. Unlike Portugal, Brazil’s relationship with Lusophone Africa is not burdened by colonial asymmetry, but rather by a postcolonial solidarity built upon shared Afro-descendant ties, a common language, and decades of technical and academic cooperation. This cultural legitimacy is the resource that makes Brazilian soft power a complementary — rather than competitive — asset in relation to European development cooperation instruments. Where the EU can provide financing, market access, and technology transfer, Brazil can contribute symbolic legitimacy, academic networks, and a diplomacy culturally anchored in African experience. The combination of these resources within a coordinated agenda would represent significant added value for the PALOP, whose bargaining capacity vis-à-vis external actors increases as they diversify their partners and sources of cooperation.

An underutilized transregional agenda

The EU is currently undergoing a moment of strategic redefinition. The search for reliable partners in the Global South, the need to give substantive content to the Mercosur-EU agreement, and the growing volatility of transatlantic relations under Trump’s second administration have created renewed incentives for Brussels to deepen its ties with Latin America. However, this transregional agenda has tended to focus on trade exchanges and interregional political dialogue mechanisms, neglecting less visible but equally strategic dimensions such as trilateral cooperation in third geographical spaces. Lusophone Africa represents precisely one of these underutilized dimensions.

A coordinated agenda between Brazil and the EU in the PALOP, articulated through the CPLP and with Portugal as a privileged interlocutor, could be developed around three complementary axes. The first is educational and academic cooperation, strengthening and expanding the student mobility programs already implemented by Brazil, with European funding increasing their scale and impact and consolidating South-South knowledge networks institutionally anchored in Europe. The second is strengthening the CPLP as a development organization, providing it with greater operational capacity to implement concrete projects in the PALOP, with Brazil and Portugal as complementary pillars and with European resources extending its scope beyond the cultural dimension. The third is the articulation of a common Brazil-EU position in Lusophone multilateral forums, allowing both actors to project a shared vision on governance, sustainable development, and human rights in Lusophone Africa while taking advantage of existing institutional overlaps.

Lusophony is not merely a historical legacy. In a multipolar international system, where the reconfiguration of global alliances is redefining the room for maneuver of actors in both the Global South and the Global North, Lusophone institutional architecture may become a first-order geopolitical resource. For this to happen, Brazil, Portugal, and the EU must be capable of articulating a shared vision that transcends immediate national interests and commits to a collective presence in Lusophone Africa with real capacity for influence. Brazilian soft power and European institutional capacity are, in this regard, complementary resources that still await strategic combination.

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Alberto Maresca is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Ghent University, where he is developing his research project South America within the Global South: Multipolar Autonomy in the Foreign Policies of Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, funded by a BOF scholarship and as a fellow at UNU-CRIS. He holds an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University and an MA in Diplomacy and International Relations from the Diplomatic School of Spain.

The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the EULAS Network.