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whether the internationalism long-espoused by their ruling parties, ANC and PT,respectively, plays any role in this. While they have been at peace with theirneighbours for the period under consideration, they have participated ininternational conflicts, either as mediators, or as troop-contributors to multilateralpeacekeeping missions. Faced with roughly the same international position –regional hegemon, continental powerhouse, upper middle income developingcountry – South Africa and Brazil have responded - by and large - similarly to theirinternational threats and opportunities. This temporal period is, furthermore, theperiod that has seen the heightening of South African and Brazilian activism oninternational questions, and coincides with the premiership of the noteworthyleaders of two large and influential leftist movements in each country. Where theydiffer, on the intervening variable, is that while Brazil plays host to a Presidentialelectoral system where alliances need to be painstakingly constructed for electoralprimacy, South Africa is a parliamentary democracy, in which a single party, theANC, is dominant.For the most part, other domestic factors are, for the purposes of this study, heldconstant. South Africa and Brazil are both marginal recipients of OfficialDevelopment Assistance (ODA), in spite of each country playing host to a fifth ofits population living in poverty. 54 This affords some measure of independence inforeign policymaking. Military spending as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product(GDP) is comparable at 1.7 percent for South Africa and 1.8 percent for Brazil.This is lower than other states considered intermediate states, such as Malaysia(2%), Turkey (2.8%), India (3%), China (2%) and Russia (4.3%). 55 Brazilian andSouth African societies both faced chronic inequality during the period underconsideration, with two of the highest Gini coefficients in the world. Domesticpolitics in both polities have thus been driven by the issues of development andeconomic growth, employment and redistribution, and foreign penetration of thedomestic economy. A key point of similarity is the effect of race-basedconsiderations on society, which has played a significant – yet different - role innational identity for both states. The percentage of Brazil’s population considered tobe ethnically white is 53.7 percent, while mixed and black constitute some 4554 As noted in Table 1, this figure only fell dramatically for Brazil near the end of theperiod under investigation.55 World Bank, World Development Indicators.43