Brazil as a New Rome

Completing the construction of the tropical Latin civilization

Lucas Leiroz describes the metapolitical horizon of Brazilian patriotic ideology.

When we think about Brazil and its political and geopolitical potential, it is common to conclude that it is a country with great chances of becoming one of the main global players in the multipolar order. Having a large territory and population, and a vast amount of resources, Brazil can reach relevant positions on the world stage and become one of the main global powers.

However, there are Brazilian thinkers who aspire to something greater than mere geopolitical power. In the Brazilian patriotic tradition, it is common to make reference to the figure of a “New Rome,” or “Tropical Rome,” in order to talk about the “Brazil to come.”

The founder of this mentality is Darcy Ribeiro, an important Brazilian anthropologist and a specialist in indigenous cultures, who worked both as an academic and as a politician throughout the second half of the 20th century.

Darcy differentiated himself from other Brazilian political thinkers by interpreting Brazil’s potential through a metapolitical perspective. For him, Brazil had the potential to become a kind of “new civilization” — a model of national and continental organization based on the tropics, which could create a new civilizational pattern and inspire other regions of the planet.

In Darcy’s opinion, Brazil should be seen as the greatest heir of Latinity and as the direct result of the development of Latin peoples. Ribeiro saw the Iberian Peninsula as the most prosperous region among the imperial dominions of the First Rome, since it was from Portugal and Spain that, centuries after the Roman collapse, the naval expeditions that discovered the New World left. And, in this sense, Ribeiro pointed to Brazil as the greatest “son” of this Latin expansion, having as its historical destiny a union with the other Ibero-American peoples for the formation of the “New Rome” — the tropical civilization that should become an important actor in the contemporary geopolitical scenario.

Darcy said the following in his book The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil:

Our destiny is to unify with all Latin Americans through our common opposition to the same antagonist, which is Anglo-Saxon America, to found, as occurs in the European community, the Latin American Nation dreamed by Bolívar. Today, we are 500 million; tomorrow, we will be one billion. That is to say, a human contingent of sufficient magnitude to embody Latinity in the face of Chinese, Slavic, Arab and neo-British blocs in future humanity. We are young people still struggling to make ourselves a new human race that has never existed before. A much more difficult and painful task, but also much more beautiful and challenging. Indeed, what we are is the New Rome. A late and tropical Rome. Brazil is already the largest of the Neo-Latin nations, due to its population size, and is also beginning to be so due to its artistic and cultural creativity. It now needs to be in the field of technology for the future civilization to become an economic power with self-sustained progress.

Being a profound critic of the Brazilian social structure and a radical political activist, Darcy saw his country’s economic elites as the main obstacle for Brazil to reach its potential and protect its interests. In his opinion — which is followed by all Brazilian patriots and dissidents to this day — the elites who control the country are anti-national agents who protect foreign interests and try to prevent Brazil from becoming a New Rome.

However, for Darcy, the Brazilian people must be viewed as a strong nation that “builds itself” despite the elites’ wishes. He saw Brazilian mestizaje (racial mixing) as a process of nation-building through which Brazilians are able to express their greatness and show the world a model of interaction between peoples.

Brazil’s imperial vocation is expressed in its mixed-race pluriversity. Formed by the physical and spiritual interaction of Europeans, Africans and indigenous Americans, Brazil is home to a large number of ethnicities, religions and traditions, which, instead of weakening Brazilian unity, strengthen it in an interaction based on mutual respect and mixing. For Darcy and his followers, this not only proves Brazilian Romanity, but shows the world a model of civilizational organization — the tropical and mestizo model.

Over the years, these thoughts have consolidated themselves as a true metapolitical horizon pursued by Brazilian patriots. In fact, for any Brazilian who truly loves his country, thinking of Brazil’s future as a simple “world power” sounds offensively shallow and beneath Brazil’s real potential. The ideal of a New Rome is something to be constantly sought, even if achieving this goal seems difficult, distant or almost impossible. The eternal struggle of the Brazilian people must be to complete the construction of the tropical Latin civilization.

It is also necessary to emphasize how this struggle is combined with other relevant political ideals in South America. As explained by Darcy himself, the construction of the New Rome must be done in partnership with Simon Bolivar’s Patria Grande project,¹ which is currently the main guideline of the Venezuelan revolutionary government for relations with South American countries. In practice, this makes the material political struggle for the construction of the Tropical Rome actually viable.

More than that, it is notable how Ribeiro also predicted the creation of a multipolar world, even decades before current global events. For him, the formation of the Tropical Rome would be a way of creating representation for neo-Latin peoples in an international order in which Anglo-Saxons, Slavs, Chinese, Arabs and other peoples would also have their respective spaces. In other words, Darcy saw the future of the world order as a coexistence of empires and sought a role for Brazil in this world to come.

In a traditionalist reinterpretation, some Brazilian thinkers have recently analyzed Darcy Ribeiro’s “prophecies” through key concepts from non-Brazilian scholars, such as the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. It should also be noted that for Dugin himself, Brazil has always been a topic of particular interest. Being an admirer of Brazilian culture and a speaker of the Portuguese language, Dugin dedicated part of his multi-volume philosophical project Noomakhia to the study of the Brazilian Logos.

According to the Russian author, Brazil is formed by the interaction of three logoi: the European Imperial Logos, the African Dionysian Logos and the indigenous American Chthonic Logos. Throughout history, none of these three forces proved to be strong enough to represent the Brazilian Logos better than the others, which is why it is possible to say that Brazil has an “open logos,” still to be fully built.

This is perfectly in line with Darcy’s notion of the Brazilian people as “a builder of itself,” as an unfinished work — or as a “Rome to come.” Being a relatively young country and still moving towards achieving its real objectives, Brazil is not yet fully aware of its own imperial potential and its mission as heir of Rome. And it is precisely the awakening of this consciousness that is the biggest challenge for contemporary Brazilian Traditionalists.

1. Editor’s note: Simón Bolívar’s Patria Grande (“Great Homeland”) was a vision of a united political federation encompassing the newly independent Spanish American republics, stretching from Mexico to the southern tip of South America. Bolívar saw this supranational union as essential for safeguarding independence from foreign powers and fostering continental strength.