No One’s World, by Charles A. Kupchan - Resenha de Oliver Stuenkel

Acabo de receber este livro, que comprei de segunda mão, no Abebooks, bem barato, a despeito de ser relativamente recente.
Concordo, em grande medida, com a resenha abaixo de meu colega acadêmico e de Academia.edu, que fui buscar nessa plataforma, mas sempre insisto em que as pessoas, autores ou resenhistas, sempre fazem certa confusão em torno da política externa do Brasil, ao dizer, por exemplo: o Brasil fez isto, ou o Brasil fez aquilo. Sempre sou tentado a corrigir, dizendo: não foi o Brasil, foi o PT, ou foi Lula. O exemplo citado é o famoso "acordo nuclear" turco-brasileiro-iraniano", rejeitado imediatamente pelo P5+1, pois não preenchia os mínimos requerimentos solicitados pelos membros do CSNU mais a Alemanha, quanto às garantias de desenvolvimento pacífico da energia nuclear.
Foi o Brasil que fez esse acordo? Duvidoso que o Itamaraty se engajasse, por vontade própria, nesse assunto, que foi conduzido quase solitariamente pelo chanceler de Lula a pedido deste, que talvez aspirasse a qualquer outra coisa que não apenas o acordo nuclear em questão.
Bem, ainda vou ler o livro, e depois opinar.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Book review: 

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

Charles A. Kupchan

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 272 p.

International Affairs, vol. 89, n. 4, 2013, p.1025-1027

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, tradition-ally successful, regions behind, thus initiating western global dominance. While the world had historically been compartmentalized, with each region operating according to cultur-ally 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-à-vis 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?

  

The author speaks of the ‘West’ as if it were a cohesive bloc, a somewhat misleading idea to begin with. For example, he writes that Brazil’s then President Lula’s decision in 2010 to meet Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to negotiate Iran’s nuclear programme serves as proof that Brazil will not accept the western global order. Turkey’s quarrels with Israel are supposedly evidence of Turkey’s drift away from the West. Yet such views find little support among policy-makers and analysts in Brazil and Turkey. Equally controversially, Kupchan argues that India’s voting behaviour in the UN shows that ‘its interests and status as an emerging power are more important determinants of its foreign policy than its democratic institutions’ (p. 143), thus implying that the United States’ democratic institutions are somehow more important to US policy-makers than the national interest. 

Yet the history of US foreign policy is littered with instances when strong partnerships with non-democratic regimes were established to promote US national interest—not at least in the Middle East where Saudi Arabia remains an important US ally. This highly US-centric argument paradoxically shows how difficult it will be for policy-makers in Washington to adapt to a truly multipolar world in which the United States will be one among several large actors. 

Kupchan thus interprets emerging countries’ independent foreign policy strategies as evidence that they will undermine today’s global order, all the while overlooking the fact that despite their growing strength, there is little evidence that countries such as China seriously challenge the norms and rules that undergird today’s system. In the final chapter, Kupchan lays out a series of interesting ideas about how the new world order could appear. He argues that ‘the West will have to embrace political diversity rather than insist that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government’. He rightly observes that ‘even as the West does business with autocracies … it also delegitimizes them in word and action’ (p. 187). Kupchan argues that while such a pro-democracy stance  may be morally compelling, it was simply not pragmatic and made unnecessary enemies in the emerging world. He declines, however, to specify at which degree of a dictator’s nastiness the West should switch from cooperation to condemnation. 

No one’s world is sprinkled with interesting insights, yet the ground Kupchan covers is vast, forcing him often to remain superficial and to rely on sound bites when commenting on other countries’ domestic affairs. ‘The world’, he writes, ‘is headed toward a global dissensus’ (p. 145). The prediction that we will live in a world with competing narratives (rather than a convergence towards a western narrative) is an important starting point. Yet Kupchan could offer a more rigorous analysis of what these competing narratives might look like. 

Oliver Stuenkel, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil