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

Abstract

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.