Agency and geopolitics: Brazilian formal independence and the problem of Eurocentrism in international historical sociology

Abstract

The main narratives that explain the development of the modern international order fall short of incorporating the historical peculiarities of processes of state-formation in non-European contexts. To overcome that limitation, this paper argues that class agency must be taken as a core element to understand the social and geopolitical struggles that shape each case of transition towards modern sovereignty in its historical particularity. This is informed by the Brazilian historical experience. In that case, statehood can only be understood as an outcome of the disputes of its ruling landowning class against Portuguese colonialism, mediated by the British informal empire throughout the 19th century. In order to bring all these elements together, I follow the tradition of political Marxism to reconceptualize the very notion of “geopolitics” by grounding it in class-based strategies of reproduction and spatialization. The result is an agency-centred and radically historicist theoretical framework that rejects structuralist transhistorical logics of development. It also argues against the latent Eurocentrism present in theories of state-formation that are grounded on the European experience and simply transposed to other contexts by stressing the agency of non-European subjects in the making of their own history.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Pedro Lucas Dutra Salgado, PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex. Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto de Relações Internacionais e Economia, Federal University of Uberlândia. Assistant Researcher at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex. Email: [email protected] or [email protected].

Notes

1 This paper engages with narratives that present formal independences as parts of large scale changing logics of international politics within IHS, understood as a sub-field of IR. Therefore, it does not engage with other uses of the term or similar expressions (‘state-building’) that presume, even if implicitly, a (neo-)realist framework of competition and power balancing as a transhistorical constant (Centeno and Ferraro 2013; Hui 2005; Kurtz 2013; Soifer 2015).

2 Despite the emphasis on ruling classes, this framework is not comparable to an ‘elite analysis’ since such emphasis is not a result of an a priori methodological principle derived from a philosophy of history based on a ‘top-down’ nature of historical change. It is instead a product of this paper’s focus on political disputes about the making of state institutions and legitimate rule in the transition towards formal sovereignty, motivated by the peculiarities of this specific moment of the Brazilian trajectory. In this sense, Wood’s assertion about ‘horizontal class struggle’ indeed posits a key methodological aspect of historical analysis, through which political disputes between different ruling classes can be analysed ‘as distinct from, and even in some respects independent of, the relation between capital and living labour’ (Wood 1999, 171). However, this does not mean that a PM framework necessarily privileges intra-elite disputes, but that it is able to do so in order to accommodate a broader range of historical evidence available in each particular case.

3 More than including marginalized classes, a richer historicization of Brazilian state-formation would also include racial and gendered lenses to the understanding of collective agencies (Bhattacharyya 2018; Federici 2004; Quijano 2000; Shilliam 2009). The extent to which these lenses are compatible with the framework of ‘class as process’ suggested here must be debated in order to advance an intersectional understanding of IR/IHS.

4 The main example of this assumption is certainly Morgenthau (1948). Although there were alternative conceptions of IR in early twentieth century, these have been largely erased from the discipline’s history in favour of the ‘Aberystwyth narrative’. There is a rich and recent revisionist historiography of the discipline that recovers such contributions (de Carvalho et al 2011; Thakur et al 2017; Vitalis 2015).

5 For a deeper critique of the eurocentrism in the English school, see Sanjay Seth (2011).

6 That last remark reminds the reader that such inclusion is not without trouble, since they are still conceived as “less civilized” than the original members of the international society they joined.

7 This conception of class is not consistent throughout those often included as political Marxists. Brenner (2004; 1985) and Chibber (2013), for instance, use ‘class’ in a sense that is much closer to that criticized by Wood, and even she sometimes contradicts the defence of a Thompsonian emphasis on the historical specificity of class as a process and relationship in order to reaffirm the “objective structures” and totalising imperatives’ (Wood 1995, 238) of a mode of production. This anti-structuralist use of class is not entirely consolidated in Wood’s work. However, her contributions to this topic are crucial for the later applications of PM in IR.

8 Most importantly, about how it changes the ontological status of ‘class’ as collective agencies by understanding them as historical processes. (Bernstein 1971; Feenberg 2014; Wood 1995).

9 One important aspect of the argument is the ‘social history of ideas’ that encompasses the evolution of notions like ‘property’ and ‘sovereignty’ (Wood 2012; 1991).

10 This is not a transhistorical assessment of Portuguese imperial strategies, addressing specifically the period after the Pombaline reforms. References to earlier periods of Portuguese history serve to illustrate the class-formation process that shaped the imperial aristocracy as it existed at the time of Brazilian independence. (Disney 2009a, 263–298; 2009b, 221–248, 280–292; Mauro 1987; Silva 1987)

11 This period also includes the Pombaline reforms to improve the empire’s balance of trade, themselves also motivated by the competitive pressures of British development (Alden 1984, 621–623; Disney 2009b, 280–289). These could be described through the premises of uneven and combined development, with the Portuguese empire under the “whip of external necessity” of Britain’s superior productive, fiscal, naval, and military capacities. Since the Portuguese “privileges of backwardness” are not realized, the empirical analysis of Luso-British relations opens questions about the social and geopolitical strategies employed in both cases that are not answered within the UCD framework.

12 While subaltern classes certainly had geopolitical practices that implied different (and competing) forms of spatialization—the most clear example being the slave resistance that in some cases constituted separate communities, quilombos, and in others organized large scale uprisings, as the Malês did in Salvador—these alternatives were systematically crushed by imperial forces (Portuguese and Brazilian alike). That is, while these elites disputed among themselves the control over Brazilian sovereignty, both were committed to enforcing colonial notions of citizenship and property. (de Azevedo 1987; Motta 1998; Moura 1981; Reis 1986; Reis and Gomes 2016; Smith 2008) This does not mean that subaltern classes provide no contribution to Brazilian history as a whole, but that the power imbalance to which they were subjected and the resulting difference in geopolitical scope of their activities prevented them from playing a direct role in the consolidation of Brazilian formal independence.

13 The plural form “Brazils” was common until the nineteenth century.

14 The establishment of British interest in Brazil is not simply an outcome of Canning’s personal plans. Instead, the involvement of the British empire results from the distinct and class-specific geopolitical strategies represented in Parliament. British diplomacy in Brazil appears as the institutionalized outcome of the geopolitical strategies of British industrial and merchant capitalists. Tracking the process of British foreign policy formation is an important part of this historicized narrative. However, it falls beyond the scope of this article (Teschke 2003, 256–262).

15 The “Portuguese faction’, who demanded the return of the court to Lisbon and the recolonization of Brazil, was composed mostly of local bureaucrats and Portuguese merchants. The “Brazilian faction’, on the other hand, included Portuguese-born bureaucrats with ties to Brazil, as well as members of the Brazilian oligarchy. Despite the deep split evidenced between the ruling classes of the empire, it is important to note that this second faction was in no way revolutionary or anti-colonial in a broader sense. They saw a constitution as a possibility of increasing their own power in relation to the king, but were ultimately interested in protecting the current state of affairs: the political equality with Portugal, their proximity to the court in Rio, and the economic freedom given by the royal decree of 1808 and the treaties with Britain of 1810 (Bethell 1989, 26–27).