Humilhação e políticas de reconhecimento: Brasil e China em busca de status no sistema internacional

Abstract

This research is part of a scholarly agenda of debates on humiliation in international relations, identified as a structuring and organizing factor in the international system. Based on the work of Bertrand Badie and Axel Honneth, we start from the hypothesis that humiliation is a systemic variable in the analysis of international relations and that emerging powers conceive and implement policies of recognition according to perceived humiliation. The practices of humiliation in international relations have manifested in the lowering of the status of a State, in its condition of being tutored by the superpowers and by the central States, in its positioning apart from the decision-making spaces and in the stigmatization of its leaders, of its political development and international integration models. Therefore, we seek to analyze the importance of policies (and politics) of recognition in the contemporary international system, a discussion that has not yet been fully developed in the field of Political Science and International Relations. This type of policies/politics has particularities in each State, but in general it revolves around the search for recognition of countries as full members and of equal status in the system, and in the redistribution of power, wealth, and privilege in the global economy, in international institutions, multilateral forums, and within financial institutions. Methodologically, we intend to analyze, from a comparative perspective, the policies of recognition designed and implemented by Brazil and China to understand the existing interfaces between them and their respective foreign policy agendas. In our research, we take the profile of foreign policy of status recognition as a dependent variable, and here we study the cases of Brazil and China. Our independent variable refers to how humiliation practices in international relations lead to policies of status recognition. This variable is articulated into two dimensions: domestic and systemic. We conclude that Brazil and China have suffered humiliation in different ways, and both manage this experience according to each one’s perceptions and reconstruction of events throughout history. We believe that the emergence of developing countries should not be understood only through the lenses of economic growth or military might, but also through more comprehensive approaches, which also take into account the political dimension of status, humiliation, and recognition in international relations.