As a report earlier this week by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) noted, Brazil has just overtaken the UK as the world's sixth largest economy. Merely one year ago, it displaced Italy from the seventh spot, after ranking a distant 10th in 2002. Brazil's finance minister, Guido Mantega, then announced that he expected to Brazil to overtake France by 2015 before closing in on Germany's GDP by the end of the decade, predicting that the South American giant would grow twice as fast as Europe's economies over the years to come.

The reaction in Brazil was more cautious than triumphant. Several analysts pointed out that the country faced an great amount of complex challenges, ranging from education to infrastructure, fearing that the good news could weaken the zeal to implement important reforms. Fernando Rodrigues of Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper, argued in an editorial that the 6th position mattered little since Brazilians still lacked 'civilized manners', something that had hardly changed since the economy took off in the 1990s. Regarding per capita GDP, average schooling and all other social indicators, the commentators stressed, Brazil still trails any European country by a wide margin, and the government's inability to deal with growth killers such as high taxes, little incentives to innovate, and a kafkaesque bureaucracy that "suffocated entrepreneurialism in the cradle" gives little reason to be hopeful.

This reaction may seem somewhat surprising to outsiders, yet it can be explained by the numerous disappointments Brazilians have experienced over the past decades. I usually ask my international students to read President Sarney's Foreign Affairs article "A President's Story" of 1986 to show them that this is by no means the first time optimism was rife in a country with all the potential to become an economic powerhouse - Sarney's policies - two 'Cruzado Plans' (1986), the 'Bresser Plan' (1987), the 'Rice and Beans Plan' (1988) and the 'Summer Plan' (1989) - all meant to stabilize the economy, filled Brazilians with hopes, only to see them quickly dashed.

While Fernando Henrique Cardoso's 'Real Plan', which finally did the trick and laid the groundwork for economic growth and stability, now lies 18 years in the past, the memory of economic hardship continues to shape Brazil's public opinion. A Brazilian friend of mine, who had participated in a recent conference organized by The Economist in São Paulo, fumed when she told me how 'absurdly exuberant' and 'uncritical' the 'gringo presenters' had characterized Brazil's situation.

There is some truth to that claim. The West is, understandably, anxious to see democratic and nonthreatening Brazil succeed and provide a counterexample to rising China. A similar logic applies to India, which in general is seen as a less frightening power than China. This can lead to a somewhat overly optimistic coverage of Brazil. Yet it would be wrong to describe The Economist's (now increasingly frequent) articles on Brazil as biased - for example, an astute analysis of Brazilian politics in late November correctly argued that Rousseff needed to make "radical changes" to the country's rotten "political-patronage system" to make real progress - hardly a flattering thing to say.

More importantly, Brazilian society will have to get used to the fact that being part of the world's top league will bring unknown challenges with it. For example, given recent growth, all donors have terminated development aid projects in Brazil, and the country will increasingly be expected to help others overcome poverty. A potential regional backlash as a reaction to its rise, which I have written about before, comes to mind as well. In addition, a growing number of immigrants will come to Brazil to seek jobs (see my article "How immigration will change Brazil"). While the arrival of qualified immigrants from other rich countries may not require great adaptation, the arrival of economic refugees, most of them unskilled, is likely to force Brazilians to rethink their place in the world. As Tom Phillips of The Guardian recently wrote:

Nearly two years after their homeland was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, several thousand Haitians are already thought to have made the pilgrimage through Bolivia, Peru or Colombia into Brazil in search of work. New groups are reportedly arriving each weekend. But while some are able to secure legal documents and find employment, many end up stranded in tiny border towns such as Brasiléia, now home to at least 724 Haitians out of a total population of around 20,000.

Addressing Brazil's senate on Monday, Aníbal Diniz, a senator from President Dilma Rousseff's Workers' party (PT), said: "We are facing an extremely serious problem. The number of Haitians leaving Haiti for Brazil rises every day because they have no chances in their country."

The arrival of growing numbers of refugees and economic migrants will force the government to learn to better receive and integrate foreigners, something it never had to do before. Those who hope that the Haitians are an exception will be disappointed - news of economic growth in Brazil has long spread into all corners of the continent, turning it into a magnet for many in the region who seek a better life.

Prior to a recent meeting of Latin American policy makers and academics in Rio de Janeiro, I asked a participant from Ecuador whether he'd prefer to speak Spanish or Portuguese. "Nobody in Ecuador bothers to learn Portuguese", he answered. Ecuador is hardly exceptional. In Argentina, Chile or in any other Spanish-speaking country on the continent, it is probably easier to find people fluent in French or German than in Portuguese. In the same way, very few Brazilians care to learn Spanish, despite the fact that the vast majority of its neighbors speak it. Considering Brazil's dominant economic and political position on the South American continent, this may seem puzzling to outside observers.

In the same meeting, a former foreign minister of one of Brazil's neighbors affirmed that his country was culturally more connected to several European countries, saying he felt "far away from Brazil", which now "has a global focus rather than a regional one". But the increasing presence of Brazilian companies in the region, the opaque nuclear policy (e.g. construction of nuclear-power submarines), "makes us uneasy".

This was very much aligned with the views several Uruguayans shared with me during my visit to Montevideo two weeks ago - Brazil, according to them, sought to be "o mais grande do mundo" (the world's greatest, in Portuñol), but cared little about its neighbors' welfare. "When was the last time Brazil stood up for Latin America?" a Uruguayan minister asked me during an interview.

Much too late has the public debate in Brazil picked up on growing anti-Brazilian feelings in the region. Brazilian policy makers' traditional view, particularly on the left, is still that South America needs to resist North American dominance, something that seems increasingly out of touch from a, say, Bolivian or Paraguayan perspective.

Indeed, while Brazilian policy makers frequently affirm their commitment to their neighborhood (in what seems like a grotesque inflation of pro-regional rhetoric), one cannot deny that many policy makers and analysts are currently too attracted to global issues - the rise of China, India, the conflict in the Middle East, opening embassies in Africa - to engage with its immediate neighbors in a more profound manner. Yet Brazil's frequently mentioned soft power may be more powerful in Luanda and New Delhi than in Asunción or La Paz.

Finally, Brazil's decision to drop the concept of 'Latin America' and focus on South America instead (by, among others, creating UNASUR), is seen as a worrying sign that Brasília would like to exclude Mexico, the only country that could dispute its dominant position, from its sphere of influence. (Brazil’s support for CELAC, a club that includes all of Latin America but excludes the US and Canada, can be understood as a mere gesture, and the Brazilian media rightly treated its recent creation as a non-event.)

At the same time, when proposing innovative policies that could help Brazil deal with anti-Brazilian feelings in the region, one must be careful not to overestimate Brazil's capacity. It is by far the greatest economy in the region, but its per-capita GDP is still lower than that of countries such as Uruguay or Chile. It is thus too easy to point to Germany's role in the EU and ask Brazil to turn into the region's paymaster. Contrasting Germany's economic dependence on the EU, Brazil's economy is increasingly detached from the region, particularly driven by skyrocketing trade with China.

In order to avoid any unwelcome backlash in the region, policy makers in may need to be more innovative to assure that its neighbors welcome Brazil's rise. For example, Brazil should think about how to combine its regional and global strategy. It could think about establishing an open dialogue with its neighbors about its nuclear policy, energy policy and evolving security strategy and its redefinition of the South Atlantic Space. And most importantly, it needs to lay out clearly what its vision of the region is and how it intends to go about implementing it - as always, transparency is a powerful tool to mitigate fear.