O Ocidente, o resto e o mundo de ninguem - book review, Charles A. Kupchan

International Affairs, July 2013

Book review

Charles A. Kupchan:

No one’s world: the West, the rising rest and the coming global turn

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 272pp. 

Index. £16.99. isbn 978 0 19973 939 4. Available as e-book.

What will replace the western world order once the United States is no longer capable of exercising global leadership? Will China’s rise be ‘unpeaceful’ and prove to be disruptive, as John Mearsheimer argues, or will rising powers support today’s system that is ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’, as G. John Ikenberry predicts? Who will rule the world once the United States’ reign ends, and what will such a world look like? Is it a ‘post-American world’, a ‘Chinese world’, or simply a western world order under non-western leadership?

Rejecting such predictions, Charles Kupchan predicts that tomorrow’s world will ‘belong to no one’. Before elaborating on this claim, the author briskly moves through centuries of history to explain why the West was quickly able to develop economically and leave other, traditionally successful, regions behind, thus initiating western global dominance. While the world had historically been compartmentalized, with each region operating according to culturally particular and exclusive principles, the author argues that Europe’s rise helped create one single global system: as European powers conquered the world, ‘they also exported European conceptions of sovereignty, administration, law, diplomacy, and commerce’ (p. 65)—thus creating what we now call the ‘western world order’.

Kupchan writes that ‘remaking the world in its own image was perhaps the ultimate exercise of Western power’ (p. 66). The West’s capacity to define modernity caused generations of non-western thinkers to argue about whether there was a difference between modernization and westernization. Kupchan shows that in a few decades, at least three BRIC countries will be among the world’s five leading economies, and he predicts that there will be multiple versions of modernity. Not only do the characteristics of Brazil’s, India’s and China’s rise differ markedly from Europe’s, but their cultural DNA is different, too, he argues. This is hardly news; the author fails to explain how internal peculiarities affect countries’ strategy vis-àvis the global system. His assertion that ‘much of Latin America has been captivated by left-wing populism’ and that this represents ‘an alternative to the West’s brand of liberal democracy’ is controversial (p. 90). What exactly are the characteristics of the ‘West’s brand of liberal democracy’? Is Brazil’s democratic system fundamentally different from, say, Portugal’s?