Amado Luiz Cervo Antônio Carlos Lessa Joªo FÆbio Bertonha Filipe Nasser Cristina Soreanu Pecequilo AndrØ Luiz Reis da Silva Juliana Sandi Pinheiro Frederico Arana Meira Delchi Bruce Forrechi Gloria Paulo JosØ Chiarelli Roberta Maschietto History of international relations in Brazil: new directions Os pareceres dos consultores jurídicos do Itamaraty: do direito para a história Checkerboards & Shatterbelts  The Geopolitics of South America Em nome da democracia O Dragªo ChinŒs e os Tigres AsiÆticos Governança sem governo Uma visªo brasileira da OCDE A nova política internacional: uma visªo didÆtica Uma biografia do SØculo XX A história como instrumento da diplomacia O Brasil e o ComØrcio Internacional BOLETIM DE AN`LISE DO ESTADO DA ARTE EM RELA˙ÕES INTERNACIONAIS ISSN 1518-1227 N” 3 JAN-MAR  2001 S U M A R I O * Professor titular de História das Relaçıes Internacionais da Universidade de Brasília (UnB). History of international relations in Brazil: new directions Amado Luiz Cervo * The traditional cycle of Brazils diplomatic history came to an end in the 1970s with the publication of `lvaro Teixeira Soares·s work. I refer to a kind of history upheld by historians from all over the world that limited itself to describing and defending the international conduct of the state by using the argumentsand reasoning of the Foreign Ministries. The history of international relations that replaced the old diplomatic history expanded the object of study and modified the methodology. The core of the history of international relations is the political interaction resulting from exchanges of economic, demographic, cultural and military natures that exist between states or organized societies. This way of writing history, which implies exploring other sources besides the diplomatic documents, became standard in Brazil as well. In a article published by myself in 1992 in The Inter-American Review of Bibliography entitled The Brazilian historiography on international relations, I made an analysis of the progress achieved in this field of study in Brazil. In 1999, Paulo Roberto de Almeida published a three-hundred pages book entitled The International Relations Studies in Brazil. I intend to limit my contribution to the identification and discussion of the new directions in the Brazilian historiography on international relations, which, I believe, restricts my paper to the 1990s. I think that the best way to introduce this subject is by comparing the studies of international relations in Latin America and by discussing some developments of Brazilian and Argentinean academic productions in the 1990s. These two countries are closely linked since the Asuncion Treaty that established the Mercosul in 1991. Brazilians and Argentineans are, since then, observing very closely what is being done on either side of the River Plate. Recent bibliography concerning Inter-American relations and the projection of Latin America in international society does not show a unified interpretation pattern. There are contradictory interpretations about the results of the so called development cycle, that goes from 1930 to 1986-89. In some countries, the eruption of (neo-)liberalism by the end of this century affected the intellectual discussion and called for a revision in interpretations. In other countries, the national intelligence kept the critical approach to both the development cycle studies and the liberal cycle that followed. The pluralism of interpretations did not disappear in any of the countries. But the 1990s also witnessed the emergence, both in political science and historiography, and both in Brazil and Argentine, of interpretations which express a certain perplexity on the part of the scholars, having now to confront and integrate into their works the perspective of the recent world-wide transformations.