Cairo – The new configuration of the international scenery and the emergence of new hubs, like the BRICs, place Brazil in a prominent situation and grant the country the opportunity to play a leadership role in the dialogue between cultures. This statement was made by the secretary general at the Academy of Latinity and member of the High Level Group for the Alliance between Civilizations, professor Candido Mendes.
Mendes granted an exclusive interview to ANBA during the 20th meeting of the Academy of Latinity, which took place this week in Cairo, and brought together over 20 intellectuals of renown in the Islamic world and in the West. Also participating in the meeting were the United Nations (UN) High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, Jorge Sampaio, and former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali.
The Academy of Latinity was established ten years ago by Brazilian intellectual Candido Mendes with the objective of producing conceptual instruments regarding Latinity and regarding how it can contribute to dialogue between the Islamic and Western world. Read below the main stretches of the interview with Mendes:
ANBA: What is the true objective of the Academy of Latinity and what are its main objectives?
Candido Mendes: The Academy of Latinity is an academic institution, connected to universities, established in 1998 due to convergence of concerns between Frederico Mayor, who was leaving the Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), Mário Soares, former president of Portugal, Gianni Vattimo, then a member of the European Parliament. We spoke, at that moment, about the need for development of a form of dialogue with the Muslim world, especially with Iran. After Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution, Iran has been barred from dialogue with the West. We started the works of the Academy of Latinity specifically going to that country.
The idea was to establish this academy with intellectuals to promote unarmed dialogue between the East and other cultures. It was not necessarily connected to Iran, or to the Muslim world, but it was a question of knowing to what level global dialogue could overcome the Western view of civilization. And this necessarily resulted in a fight against all fundamentalisms. The meetings were organized, and two started taking place each year since then, and we are currently reaching our tenth year. We, as a rule, always have one meeting in the Islamic world and one in Latin America.
To what extent do the works of the Academy of Latinity affect reality, helping improve the dialogue between the West and the Islamic world?
The fundamental idea, in fact, is to open dialogue within some concepts. The first is that Latinity is the soft side of the West. Secondly, the plan is to promote talks that may be not just between the West, the Islamic world and distant Latin-America, but also within the extremes. That means, in the Muslim world itself and also in the Latin American world.
We are greatly concerned with expanding the number of members and boosting the quality of dialogue. For this we have now managed to get, at conferences, participants from Latin America. It is true that we had no Guatemalans, nor, to be precise, Salvadorans. But we were concerned in working a world view to overcome conflicts which are barring global dialogue more and more.
You are Brazilian and were a High Level member of the UN Alliance of Civilizations. Brazil currently presents to the world reality as an example of coexistence between varied cultures and religions. What can Brazil offer, in your opinion, for the generation of closer ties between Western and Arab-Muslim cultures?
Brazil is doing that, being a transnational interpreter of this dialogue. Brazil is a country that is more and more prominent in Latin America and one of the members of the so-called BRICs, where its development, its international scale may be compared to that of China, India, South Africa and Russia.
And what makes it possible for Brazil to have this coexistence, mutual respect or lack of difficulty in communication between different cultures and religions?
This question comes from the fact that Brazil was helped by its historic inertia. Brazil is a country with notorious subculture, where, effectively, the elites lived in a mimetic way, plagued by this subculture. We are a country that corresponds to Henri Michaux’s concept: ‘the colonial countries, always a reflex, never reflecting’. This situation is currently changing, not due to the elites, but due to the extraordinary conscience of those who are destitute, and who, through the possibility of making a political project, gained conscience that is not mediated by the elites. It is popular conscience of what I would call the people of Lula.
This is a very new phenomenon in Latin-American development. And this is a movement that is, possibly, being the object, maybe, of difference within all this. We do not know what may happen, but the truth is that Brazil is a country that may be one of the main players as it has a legitimate public conscience, or, should we say, of representatives of the sectors that were marginal in the collective concept.
Secondly, due to the size and inexistence of border conflicts, Brazil is the country of the ‘great historical hollow’. The country was saved from all forms of wars, conflicts and fights. Our only war was the defence against Madame Lynch. That is, a lady who motivated Paraguayan president Solano Lopez to think he should repeat in Brazil the Napoleonic adventure. And Paraguay declared war on three countries that barred his access to the Atlantic Ocean: Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. But apart from that war, Brazil never had the experience of conflicts resulting in belligerence with neighbouring countries.
Thirdly, Brazil is a country that, due to its continental dimensions, to the self-sufficiency of its basic resources, now expanded due to the discovery of the pre-salt reserves, has economic autonomy to develop due to its domestic market. In all of this, Brazil stands apart from the rest of Latin America and will be, more and more, a non-Latin American nation.
Do the closer ties between Brazil and the Arab countries contribute or bring something positive to the work of the Academy of Latinity?
These closer ties bring Brazil to a position of non-alignment with Latin America, in the future of global policies. Secondly, it brings a new appreciation of all our African roots. The ‘Elite Brazil’ always sneered at or disqualified the African contribution to the establishment of our culture. It was not possible to say you accepted the thesis proposed by writer Olavo Bilac, who said Brazil was the loving fruit of a mix of three sad races. Brazil did not assume its African roots up to late last century. And Brazil also created mysticism surrounding an Indian importance that was not present. Therefore, the balance between depreciating the African descendants and appreciating the Indians resulted in this ambiguous national representation. This representation is becoming clear. Brazil is a country that is going to grow and it will be the country of mulattoes. It is not getting whiter, as was previously thought in the world of the elite society.
In the logic of formation of a new global scenery, what does it mean to bring South American and the Arab nations closer together? Would it be possible to create a Southern axis that may have special weight in global relations?
At this moment, I no longer believe in geometric symmetries that consider axes that allow for coalitions in the South. It will not happen. We will certainly have a world where the lower influence of empires, especially after the Obama era, will have as its counterpart the birth of other centres of power like that of the BRICs. And the future should depend on the organisation of the BRICs, among themselves, which will necessarily be precarious as all are continental countries turned to themselves and in which globalisation should play a precarious part.
And could this transformation, resulting from the Obama era, from the lower influence of hegemonies and empires, and from the emergence of the BRICs lead to a more tolerant world, where dialogue and understanding between cultures and religions could take place with greater ease?
The fact of being a plural world evidently expects tolerance, but peace is necessary. We can have a world of closed coexistence, especially in part of the enormous countries with domestic markets. And, different from expansionist countries, China and India are good examples of this. These are peaceful countries by nature. Different from the Western world, the Slavic countries and the Arab world.
But regarding tolerance, could it be said that there is currently a light at the end of the tunnel regarding the improvement of conditions for dialogue and respect among peoples?
This seems to be an expectation, let’s call it, of international goodwill. The same perspective that resulted in the belief that the rich would feed the poor and that development would result in self-sufficiency, or that thought that international organisations would demolish polarization between the international ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. But it is evident that hope is not harmful to anyone. And necessarily, within this scope, the volunteer and naïve coefficient of this perspective cannot be reduced. Normally, what we will have is coexistence of these countries, each more guided to themselves.
And how about the Alliance of Civilizations of the United Nations? How can this initiative contribute to improve the reality in terms of dialogue and how can Brazil participate in it?
The Alliance of Civilizations is a non-hegemonic perspective for understanding international development. It was born in Mediterranean countries like Spain and Turkey and today has a third partner: Brazil. Brazil is bringing this perspective from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and believes that the Alliance of Civilizations will have much to do with the fact that it does not begin from the centre and the central axis, although this may change with the Obama era, but from the possibility of nations that used to be on the outskirts understanding what they have in common and what they have in terms of difference.
*Translated by Mark Ament
