"Privatizing Diplomacy: The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Rise of Commercial Policy in Brazil during Globalization"

My research reveals the centrality of the US Department of Commerce in shaping foreign policy in Brazil to address the dual challenges of globalization and international development from the 1960s through the 1980s. While my dissertation analyzes the pivotal role of business actors in Commerce in dismantling trade barriers, liberalizing international financial institutions, and promoting tax incentives for foreign investment, my BHC paper focuses on the privatization of diplomatic labor in the Foreign Service. Here, privatization reflects a trend from the Kennedy through the Reagan administrations to turn to private enterprise for solutions to the nation’s declining industrial competitiveness, rising costs of foreign aid, and heightened human rights scrutiny of US relations with Brazil’s dictatorship. My paper analyzes how Commerce collaborated with the State Department and management consultants to strengthen ties between the Foreign Service and the nation’s industry in order to align diplomacy with US trade interests. I examine how prioritizing commercial policy altered the Foreign Service’s objectives and shaped the ideologies and expertise of high-ranking officials and field officers, ultimately centering relations with Brazil on the profitability of US private enterprise. To trace the evolving goals and worldviews of high-ranking officials, I study transcripts of meetings and congressional hearings. I also research correspondence with field officers from US embassies in Brazil to show how high-level decisions informed daily operations. Throughout, I emphasize the role of management consultants in facilitating relations between state and business. My research bridges Histories of American Capitalism and US Foreign Relations. Building on scholarship that examines neoliberalism through boundary blurring public-private partnerships in the midcentury welfare state, I move from the literature's focus on domestic policy to foreign relations. Moreover, I draw on research highlighting how globalization transformed US supremacy, focusing on changes in the labor of diplomacy rather than shifts in high-level strategy.