Admirable, complex new world

The asymmetries of international society have made it difficult to understand the complexities of today’s world and make projections about future scenarios, says FAPESP President Celso Lafer at the USP "Challenges of Globality" series.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Understanding the complexity of today’s world and forming projections on future scenarios is an especially difficult task given the many worlds formed by regional subsystems with specific dynamics, arising from the interaction between the countries they comprise, and the distinct symmetries and asymmetries of a heterogeneous international society that is globally interconnected. However, seeking to understand this complexity is fundamental for shedding light on space where the foreign policies of nations and the horizon of collective coexistence in a globalized world are established.

This evaluation was made by Celso Lafer, president of FAPESP in a lecture he presented on September 26 in the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) Law School’s Grand Hall. The event opened a series of four talks promoted by the USP Dean of Research on the “Challenges of Globality,” aimed at discussing a topic that is highly relevant and common to the areas of political science, law, international relations and economics.
In the first lecture, on “The asymmetries of international society,” Lafer gave a general outlook on the main topic of the series, which will also be discussed in three additional meetings.

Lafer’s talk touched on the determining elements of the economic, political and social asymmetries that characterize international society and evaluated how this scenario effects and is affected by the inherent dynamics of the globalization process.

According to him, understanding the way the “world machine” works, which is effectively the field of international relations, is one of the indispensable ingredients of knowledge for conducting of a nation’s foreign policy.

However, understanding this is impossible through reading classical authors or others that arrive at dichotomies like idealism versus realism and metaphors like the scale of balanced power.

“Today, there are no more places that live in isolation. The ‘world machine’ is moving into the life of nations in distinct manners and impacts, depending on the characteristics of the societies, the states and regions they hit, and deeply altering the way in which space and time penetrate the day to day lives of people,” he said.

In order to evaluate the current complexity of the globalization process, Lafer made an analysis of the five large blocks of topics on today’s international agenda proposed by Oxford University’s international relations professor Andrew Hurrell in his recent book On Global Order.

The first block deals with the impact of identity and recognition policies that appeared during the Cold War and put into debate the stability of the global order and the territorial integrity of sovereign states, leading to processes of separation among them.

Some examples are the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the Kurd problem in the Middle East, and attempts at sovereignty by the Basque in Spain, Quebec in Canada, or Tibet in relation to China.

The second block deals with the challenges that appeared in 1948 with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document proposed the construction of an international society comprised not only of sovereign states, but of free and equal individuals. 

“Rights that are violated in one part of the world are now felt the world over, a positive sign for the progress of collective human coexistence and one of the positive facets of internalization of the world in countries’ day to day lives, brought on by the globalization process and international law which has been elaborated because of it,” evaluated Lafer. 

The third block involves the problems of war and violence, intensified by the permanent fear of weapons of mass destruction. The fourth block talks about the challenge of managing a globalized economy in a world characterized by social inequality.

Lastly, the fifth block talks about the challenge of sustainable development in a globalized world, where environmental questions such as climate change are now global. “None of the big environmental topics such as biodiversity and climate change will be solved without Brazil’s presence,” highlighted Lafer.

Tribute

The event welcomed the presence of USP Dean of Research, Marco Antônio Zago, Professor Antônio Magalhães Gomes Filho, director of USP’s Law School, Professor Nicolau Reinhard, vice-director of USP’s School of Economics, Administration and Accounting (FEA) and coordinator of the lecture series, aside from university students and professors.

According to the event’s organizers, inviting Lafer to open the lecture series was also a way of paying him tribute. Full professor at USP’s Law School since 1988 where he has studied and taught International Law and Philosophy of Law since 1971, Lafer is retiring from USP.
 
“It was no accident that we chose Professor Celso Lafer to open this lecture series. We thought the best way to pay our respects to an educator would be to ask him to keep lecturing precisely when he is retiring. There is nothing more important, or that shows more clearly how dear a teacher is than an invitation for him to continue being a teacher,” said Pedro Dallari, an USP professor.

The second lecture in the series, “The Political Economy of Redistribution,” was held on October 7th at 5:00 p.m. Professor Adam Przeworski of New York University led the discussion.

The third lecture in the series will be held on October 19th at 5:00 p.m. Jacques Marcovitch, professor at USP’s FEA and university dean 1997 to 2001 will speak on “Asymmetries and International Cooperation.”  Marcovitch is a specialist in entrepreneurism, climate change and international relations.

Otaviano Canuto dos Santos Filho, vice president and chief of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, will address the topic of “Developing Economies as Locomotives of the Global Economy” in the last lecture of the “Challenges of Globality” series on October 26 at 5:00 p.m.

The lectures will be held in the FEA-5 auditorium on USP’s campus in São Paulo. Over the next two years, the series will continue with lectures dedicated to looking closely at international regimes and the many aspects of international governance.

A cooperative effort of the Dean of Research, the Department of Political Science at the School of Philosophy, Letters and Humanities (DCP-FFLCH), the Law School, the International Relations Institute (IRI) and FEA, the lecture series seeks to bolster interdisciplinary cooperation at USP, to increase the possibilities of interpreting globality and to study its diverse implications.