Oliver Stuenkel - Post-Western World: How Emerging Powers Are Remaking Global Order

Copyright Oliver Stuenkel 2016

The right of Oliver Stuenkel to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0456-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0457-2(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stuenkel, Oliver, author.

Title: Post-western world : how emerging powers are remaking global order / Oliver Stuenkel.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016005450| ISBN 9781509504565 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

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I would like to thank my undergraduate, graduate, and executive students at Fundao Getulio Vargas (FGV) in So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as the many exchange students from all over the world who greatly contributed to this book through their comments and critiques during our discussions.

Special thanks go to Amitav Acharya for his support. This book would not have come to fruition without him. In the same way, the encouragement of Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos of Polity Press was crucial throughout the writing process.

Over the past year, I have been able to discuss the ideas here exposed in a variety of settings, and I thank Sumit Ganguly at the University of Indiana in Bloomington for inviting me for a great discussion. Raffaele Marchetti was a wonderful host during my time as a visiting professor at Libera Universit Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) in Rome, where I had time to write and present my research. Renato Baumann of the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA) in Braslia kindly asked me to be part of the Brazilian delegation to the BRICS Academic Forum in Moscow, where I had the chance to hear useful comments, particularly from Russian policy makers and my friends at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in New Delhi. Paula Almeida invited me to discuss my research at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro. Robin Niblett invited me to the London Conference at Chatham House, offering a great opportunity to discuss my ideas with policy makers from around the world. Tom Carothers and Richard Youngs, who coordinate the Carnegie Rising Democracies Network, to which I belong, organized three terrific meetings in Bali, So Paulo, and Brussels, allowing me to discuss some of the ideas in this book with former policy makers and academics. Jean-Baptiste Jeangene Vilmer of the French Foreign Ministry invited me to participate in a great discussion at Sciences Po in Paris.

Thorsten Benner at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), where I am a nonresident Fellow, provided great support, useful advice, and a leafy balcony in Berlin to work on this book. Marcos Tourinho, Alan Alexandroff, Alexandre Moreli, Joo Marcelo Maia, and Elena Lazaro gave very useful comments on several occasions. Matias Spektor, my colleague in So Paulo, provided guidance, moral support, and inspiration, on things both RI and non-RI throughout. Margarita Kostkova and Al Montero kindly read and commented on the manuscript. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Polity Press. I alone, however, am responsible for any shortcomings of the work.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Joice Barbaresco, Gusela Pereira, Ana Patrcia Silva, Eun Hye Kim, Leandro Silvestrini, Joo Tefilo, and Allan Greicon for their research support and for keeping our So Paulo office up and running. I would also like to thank Celso Castro for his support and encouragement over the past five years.

Marita and Hlio Pedreira provided a great place to write (and rest) in Maresias, as did Marielza and Marcelo Della Costa in Nova Friburgo.

Several other people have been immensely importantmostly in dragging me away from my desknamely Seth Kugel, Leandro Piquet, Flavia Goulart, Andrew Downie, Hanna Meirelles, Fabio Rubio, Patrick Schlieper, my sisters, and my parents. My wife Beatriz was amazingly supportive, as always, commented on several parts of the book, and her working hours are a comforting reminder that political activism is sometimes even more demanding than academia. This book is dedicated to Anna, Jan, and Carlinha, the three newest members of our family, who will grow up in a post-Western world.

Oliver Della Costa Stuenkel, So Paulo, February 2016

The way we understand the world today occurs within an unusual historical context. The West has held a dominant position both economically and militarily for the past century and a half.

To those thinkers, when it comes to the past, non-Western thought is rarely seen to have had a decisive role in the history of ideas. The so-called global conversation is mostly limited to US-based commentators, academics, and foreign-policy makers. Norms are understood to have generally diffused from the Western center to the periphery. Non-Western actors either adopted or resisted such new ideas, but rarely were they the agents of progress. According to this widely accepted model of Western diffusionism, history is seen as a Western-led process, which creates little awareness of non-Western contributions to ideas on global order. The discipline of international relations has so far failed to embrace the far more nuanced perspectives that scholars of global history, anthropology, and other disciplines have been adopting for decades.

That is highly problematic, as key events in the history of global order, such as the transition from empire to multilateral order made up of nation-states, were not Western-led processes but products of intense bargaining between Western and non-Western actors. Even colonial administrators were often unable to create rules through top-down imposition, as is generally thought. The most important example is the rise of self-determination, the bedrock of today's liberal global order, which is not the product of Western thinkers but of anticolonial movements, which, long before Woodrow Wilson, acted in opposition to Western interestsnotably succeeding in establishing the global norm at the height of Western dominance in the decades after World War II, when traditional historic accounts depict non-Western agency as entirely absent. Throughout history, the spread of ideas was far more dynamic, pluridirectional, messy, and decentralized than we generally believe.