Brazil's insertion in the "new world order" is inexorably conditioned to the adequacy of national institutions to the demands of the global market.
The above statement can and should be extended as widely as possible, relativized in all senses and extensively problematized: first, insert Brazil into the "new order" (and so far I will only keep the quotation marks) will in no way mean submitting one nationality (ours!) to others, or abdicating any one, or, in my opinion, less also, prioritize this or that nationality over any supranational or international collective benefit, in the general sense of VELLOSO, FRITSCH et alii, among others authors; then, I understand a new order as the dynamic situation of transformations that the world started to present in its structure geopolitical and megaeconomic in the periods immediately preceding and subsequent to the collapse of socialist regimes in the eastern european; in this sense, the new order is much more "new" than "order", the adjective being the most relevant semantic portion of the expression, from what can be inferred from the discussion around the theme; the conditioning of the insertion to an order that is "newer" than "order" itself means that this insertion may or may not occur, that it can occur to a greater or lesser degree, that it can occur in different ways and according to relations of forces many different; the next step in my statement, which mentions adequacy, refers to any transformation that takes place necessary, within a project where there is a certain type of insertion as a collective goal identified; the institutions I am referring to are all: the government, parties, unions, professional associations, NGOs of all kinds, etc.; the market referred to here, in turn, is also understood in the broadest sense, that is, all the combined and interacting economic, political and social offers and demands; and global because it is considered in the statement that, in whatever models are adopted, the component macrodimensional of international relations in all fields of the aforementioned market, are a factor that can be taken as passive point. I will return to these questions in a little more depth later.
In an article exhaustively published as an Introduction to several volumes of his organization in the publications of the National Forum, the former Minister Reis Velloso establishes a necessary connection between governability and the achievement of a desirable degree of economic, political and social modernity.
I want to believe that the institutional adjustments to the market, which I referred to above, are the same ones that lead to these modernities, the same ones capable of generating long-term governability. This from the point of view that the adaptations in reference constitute an ideal or ongoing national project and the mentioned insertion an identified collective desideratum, aspects that, from this point on, I will have as premise.
Long-term governance, in a long-term historical time, in a completely interdependent world, paradoxically submitted (albeit provisionally) to US hegemony, would mean reaching a universal peace that, if desirable from a utopian point of view, certainly cannot be glimpsed, at least in the short term, under another optics.
This long-term governability comes very close to what has been called the "end of history" by Fukuyama and those who followed in his footsteps. This long-term governability, or the lack of perspective for it to be achieved, is what Hobsbawn seems to have been disillusioned to see in our days, for numerous local problems, some linked to ultranationalist groups, and other global problems such as the resurgence of xenophobia and the very fallibility of Keynesian liberalism, even in its so-called neoliberal strand, into which the redemocratized countries of the east have immersed themselves, rather hastily (still according to Hobsbawn).
In other words, from the set of these opinions: adapting institutions to the demands of the global market, thus achieving governability would be take a step towards the end of history, which is as far away as ever, for the downfall of socialism, as opposed to simply eliminating the problems of the cold war brought back old problems that were "frozen" by socialism and the bipolarization.
This last paragraph purposely mixes the authors' ideas building a paradox that, if it presents an apparent logic, although fragile, is nothing more than my artifice for argumentation.
My thesis, on the contrary, and I confess to being optimistic, is that we are approaching a time when general conditions will be considerably better than in any other period. historical for any geographic cut, and in which global actors will act in a much clearer cooperative way and with a positive continuity in the development of this cooperativity.
I believe that a stage is being reached in the modern world in which cooperation is perceived as the best condition for competition, and vice versa. I will come back to this point.
For now, I intend to point out some aspects of the international order as factors to be seen as determining the nature of institutional transformations that are currently underway and whose dynamics and trends must be well understood for the preparation of any project in the long run.
INTERNATIONAL OVERVIEW
The first aspect I intend to point out is the issue of liberalism and neoliberalism. Taken by each other, understood in its current form as the unanimity practiced by the global market, there is still a series of different realities in which it is intended to practice the same doctrine (or exercise the same practice) economical; the discrepancies between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, instead of decreasing, are increasing; within Brazil, the distance between the poorest and the richest has been greater in recent years, and the proportion between them is even more unequal, in most of these the reality is not much better that here. Even in the first world, despite the gigantic financial and managerial efforts of the richest countries, there is still a huge gap between the West (mainly countries with stable democracy since World War II) and the East (newly born from socialism).
In this regard, see the article by Helmut Koln (in VELLOSO, 1993a); on the other hand, there is a plurality of liberalisms (as a movement of ideas, as distinct origins, as conceptions of state) that, if if we go beyond the common stratum established by the market economy and the minimum state, we will already be in as many aspects as there are authors who dedicate to the theme. But neither is it the aspect of the genesis or the typification of liberalism that matters centrally here. The crux of the matter is whether liberalism is viable, whether it is compatible with procedural democracy (from Bobbio, still) or any other, and whether it will be the alternative to integrate increasingly broad parcels into the economic market and political.
The problem for liberalism at this historic moment is not the same one it has already faced previously, as the reality of megamarkets and the dynamics of capital flows across the planet constitute a news. And we are no longer questioning whether liberalism will be viable here or there, or whether for as long or as long, but the question that arises is whether liberalism is the alternative that will take care of regulate the entire global market and all global markets, political, economic, and social, increasingly satisfying the complex demands that continually grow in each of these sectors.
This question about the hegemony of liberalism and its viability stems from another that is no less important for the understanding of the current order, as well as certainly pointing to paths which one does not intend (or at least I do not know who else intends to) walk: the end of "real socialism", that is, its capitulation to the market economy in the late 1980s it restores certain questions about the conception of the world to the stage they were in in the 19th century, at the same time that it launches the world in the 21st century avant la letre, still in the 90s. In Hobsbawn's thought (op.cit.) the 20th century would have been the era around the October Revolution. And this time is up. In fact, it's all over, or at least Hobsbawn – in spite of his disagreement with Fukuyama – gave his farewell to all that, even though doing so in a completely opposite direction to the latter.
With the collapse of socialism, ideology (and praxis) ends, which in its foundation and genesis advocated the need to extend its scope to the entire planet, through planned actions of the state, the "export of the revolution", etc., but always through actions specifically rationalized with this end; and the ideology remains that, even if in any of its aspects it may have aspired to hegemony, in none of its schools it preaches this necessity as absolute, and in no way interfered rationally in this regard, except, and here's the point, by passively (and not always peacefully) opposing interventionism socialist. My view is that socialism opposed all the precepts of liberalism and attacked every one of them, while liberalism was only opposed to one precept of socialism, but one that is everything to it: its interventionism.
Socialism was not viable because of its bureaucracy, low individual stimulus in the targeted market, its inflexibility, and so many well-known causes that led the USSR's GDP to involute in relative and absolute numbers from the mid-1970s onwards, but whose explanations have yet to be delineated by knowledge historic. The role of the arms race in this list of causes cannot be overlooked, but this process, like a sword of two edges, if it is unquestionably a variable to be weighed, it hurt both opponents to approximately the same degree; only the abilities to resist the blow were different.
What is left of the end of socialism? The end of the story? In other words, does the absence of antagonism, or, in other words, the lack of antithesis, stop the (dialectical?) process of history? The world has been excessively accustomed to transposing to all spheres (from politics to the psychological, passing through the historical) the reality of the cold war, the ideological dichotomy of the world of 20th century. In the understanding of the factors at the end of history, the man (the so-called "last man") will be discouraged from competition, due to the dominant character of the cooperation that will occur at all levels, from between States to the microspheres of social relation, and it will approach an isothymia (which is the same as athymia, in my opinion) that will decharacterize it as a being. political.
But as thought-provoking as Fukuyama's line of thought is, however erudite and well-founded, and however much he defends his point of view by claiming historical understanding processualist in opposition to the other so-called evenementiel, it is necessary to take into account a couple of issues, among which the great instability that the end of socialism launched in Eastern Europe and the question of the relative decadence of the USA, which unquestionably make the international situation of today much less than a calm ocean, a series of rough seas with currents still unknown.
The fact of not knowing the direction of the processes, the fact that the current situation does not allow any valid type of speculative exercise (which the historian is not given by vocation, by the way) does not mean at all the end of history, quite the contrary, the absence of an order international (what at the moment we call a new order) necessarily makes the actors act, that is, that the phenomena that are characteristic of the story; of living history, of history in process, of social, political and economic transformations that are characteristic of humanity, whether there is competition or cooperation dominantly.
And, although it is not possible to predict what will happen, as this is a matter alien to science, it can certainly be assumed without great risk of error that the speed of transformations will be even faster than the previous ones, that the processes will be even more accelerated, as the continuous acceleration of historical processes to the logo of macro-history is perhaps the only law on which there is unanimity, that is, as opposed to an "end of history", what we will have will be more history yet. And man, instead of dehumanizing himself, will become even more human, starting to seek magalothymia in competition and cooperation interacting dialectically, or in any of them, in search of their optimization.
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/brasil/brasil-na-nova-ordem-politica-social.htm
