Raphael Machado
There are many models or proposals for multipolarity, but the most balanced ones foresee at least one pole for each continent or civilization.
One of the fundamental aspects of the idea of multipolarity is precisely that some countries would bear a certain historical responsibility to reach the status of "poles" in this new order. In other words, some nations must become regional or continental hubs and, consequently, leaders in an international landscape where-despite respect for national sovereignties-a new realism imposes the primacy of certain states that could be understood through the lens of the "Civilization-State" concept, developed by the Chinese philosopher Zhang Weiwei.
There are many models or proposals for multipolarity, but the most balanced ones foresee at least one pole for each continent or civilization. While the roles of Russia, China, India, and the U.S. are obvious in this context, other regions of the world face a more uncertain destiny.
Oswald Spengler's concept of pseudomorphosis helps explain why Brazil, despite its potential, struggles to establish itself as an autonomous power. Since its formation, the country has labored under the weight of imported cultural and institutional forms, which distort its organic development and perpetuate a structural dependence. Will Europe find its own path, or will it remain tethered to the U.S.? Which way will the scales tip in the Middle East-toward Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Israel? And how will Sub-Saharan Africa reorganize to meet the challenge of multipolarity?
Another case is that of Iberian America, from Mexico to Argentina. This region has seen interesting geopolitical projects, such as that led by Argentina's Juan Domingo Perón in the mid-20th century and, more recently, the Bolivarian movement spearheaded by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. But we can look further back to Simón Bolívar's efforts to unite the newly liberated republics of Spanish America, Brazil's imperial project of unification with Argentina, the unrealized regionalist ambitions of the Mexican Empire, and so on.
Amid all these hypotheses and possibilities, one expectation has always stood out: that Brazil would assume a leadership role, at least in South America, and perhaps across all of Iberian America. The mere fact that Brazil remained unified after its independence from Portugal, while Spanish America fragmented, placed the country in a position of relative advantage.
Yet, can we say that Brazil is fully prepared to assume the position of one of the poles in a multipolar world?
An affirmative answer here would seem doubtful. The country lacks nuclear weapons and possesses outdated armed forces dependent on U.S. doctrine and technology; it is not economically self-sufficient nor industrialized. Even worse: culturally, academically, and even psychologically, Brazil is entirely dictated by what is produced between New York, London, and Paris.
It is in this last point, perhaps, that we find a key to understanding Brazil's difficulties.
A new multipolar order would potentially be structured around so-called Civilization-States, as described by Zhang Weiwei and echoed by Alexander Dugin, transcending the post-Westphalian model of the nation-state. And although it is not our intention here to define what exactly constitutes a "civilization," we can point to the necessity of an autonomous cultural horizon with its own developmental rhythm.
How does Brazil fare in this regard?
From the outset, we must reject the notion that Brazil is intrinsically Western. The reality is that the Portuguese, through colonization, founded a "new people" (in the words of Brazilian theorist Darcy Ribeiro)-one that is neither a mere transplant of the Portuguese people, nor a simple sum of Portuguese, Indigenous, and African elements, nor a mere continuation of the pre-Columbian Tupi-Guarani civilization.
By all accounts, then, this colonization should have initiated a process of autonomous cultural evolution, especially after the country's independence in 1822.
The problem is that nothing of the sort happened. Throughout the 19th century, Brazil's intellectual class took France as its reference and proceeded to import all its trends. But 19th-century France, particularly post-Napoleon, was already a country in decline-one rapidly advancing along the path of self-negation paved by the Enlightenment.
This is not a critique of the reception of foreign influences, as all peoples and cultures develop by absorbing and adapting external elements.
What happened in Brazil, however, was that onto a budding protoculture was grafted the culture of an already inverted and decadent West: positivism, materialism, Freudianism, relativism-Brazil had barely been born and was already receiving the late-stage constructs of a tired European civilization turned "upside down" by the French Revolution.
This phenomenon is what German philosopher Oswald Spengler called pseudomorphosis. According to Spengler, pseudomorphosis afflicted certain young cultures that, due to specific circumstances, were overwhelmed by more mature cultures to the point of losing the ability to grow on their own and realize their potential. Pseudomorphosis is like a cultural bridle that forces young and fertile cultures to follow in the footsteps of aged and calcified civilizations.
This is why, without ever truly reaching its peak or realizing its potential, Brazil already suffers from all the manifestations and symptoms of Western decline. A joke says that Brazil is a country with "the infrastructure of Haiti and the progressivism of Sweden." Partly an exaggeration. Partly.
Interestingly, Spengler argued that Russia, too, had been a victim of pseudomorphosis. As a potentially original culture, it had been "Westernized" from the top down, practically by force, starting with Peter the Great. Much of Russia's intellectual and artistic tension throughout the 19th and 20th centuries stemmed from the clash between Westernizing trends (often specifically French influences) and Eurasian tendencies. In a sense, what we see in Putin's government in recent years is precisely a revival of Russia-Eurasia as an autonomous civilizational project, overcoming the pseudomorphosis that once afflicted Russia.
Brazil also saw this pseudomorphosis spreading from the late 18th to the early 19th century, with the diffusion of the Enlightenment in the country. From then on, Paris became Brazil's civilizational reference, and the Empire was unable to offer an alternative project. The intellectuals of the time were likewise incapable of mobilizing culturally in a manner analogous to Russia's Eurasianist and Slavophile thinkers.
Only in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s-with the Semana de Arte Moderna, the Revolução de 30, the Estado Novo, Integralismo, the journal Cultura Política, etc.-did Brazil encounter tendencies that sought to rethink the country in a more autonomous way, as a civilization in its own right or as the heart of an Ibero-American civilization-neither European, nor African, nor Indigenous.
However, the alliance with the U.S. once again pushed this possibility aside, reinforcing the pseudomorphosis. Our reference ceased to be Paris and became New York.
But how can a country free itself from this dilemma? The task is necessary because a nation's actions are dictated by the character of its culture. Yet that does not make it simple. It is a task that falls to the intellectual class, eternally responsible for clearing the jungles of the spirit.
Until Brazil confronts this challenge, it will continue to struggle to claim a leading role in a multipolar world order.