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An ability to take a certain distance from direct involvement in major conflicts, asufficient degree of autonomy in relation to major powers, a commitment toorderliness and security in inter-state relations and to facilitating of orderly changein the world system…. 123Indeed, while there is no clear definition of middle power in the literature, there isbroad agreement on its behavioural and functional characteristics, and the ascriptionof this label to certain large developing states, such as India, Brazil and SouthAfrica. 124 Internationalism is a key feature of middle power foreign policy. 125Contrary to the pursuit of ethical foreign policies in developed parts of the world,where they reflect the ‘exhaustion of modern politics’, 126 rapidly industrialisingdeveloping countries, even the most internationally competitive members of thisgroup, are still caught up in the challenges of these modern politics: the politics ofdevelopment and progress, leaving little political room for deliberation on ethicalforeign policies. Yet, what may be termed ‘ethical’ foreign policies, in the sense thatthese policies appear to be based on some normative foundation, but do not appearto accrue immediately perceptible benefits to the country, have increasingly beenpracticed by emerging developing countries, in face of sometimes stern oppositionfrom domestic quarters.According to Lawler,the principal challenge now for any resuscitated internationalist alternative to thedominant narrative of Western foreign policy is an investigation of what kinds ofnational context can generate an internationalist discourse sufficiently sensitive tothe cultural complexities of the contemporary world or contemporary multi-ethnicstates and to the dangers of a presumptive moral universalism. 127This is indeed the claim of the ‘new’ Southern internationalism: that the nationalcontexts that can provide a measure of this sensitivity are those that have123 Robert Cox, “Middlepowermanship, Japan, and future world order”, in Approaches toWorld Order, Cox, Robert W with Timothy J. Sinclair (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996, 1989): 244.124 See Alexandre Nina, “Action against hunger and poverty: Brazilian foreign policy inLula’s first term (2003-2006)”, Working Paper Number CBS-83-07, Centre for BrazilianStudies: Oxford (2006). Accessed online at:http://www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/9331/WP83-Nina83.pdf on 28September, 2011; Adam Chapnick, “The Canadian middle power myth”, InternationalJournal (Spring 2000)125 See Pratt, Middle Power Internationalism and Internationalism Under Strain; as wellas Stokke, Western Middle Powers.126 David Chandler and Volker Heins, Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls,possibilities and paradoxes (London: Routledge, 2007): 12.127 Lawler, “The Good State”, 448.70