[Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun. The Birth of a New America. Hurst and Co. London, 2020. 203 p.]

review / Emili J. Blasco

What if the United States were not in decline, but quite the opposite? The United States could actually be in its beginnings as a great power. This is what Bruno Maçães argues in his new book, the degree scroll -History Has Begun- in a certain sense refutes Fukuyama's end of history, which saw the democratization of the world at the end of the 20th century as the culmination of the West. Precisely, the hypothesis of the internationalist of Portuguese origin is that the United States is developing its own original civilization, separate from what has been understood until now as Western civilization, in a world in which the very concept of the West is losing strength.

Maçães' work follows three lines of attention: the progressive separation of the USA from Europe, the characteristics that identify the specific American civilization and the struggle between the USA and China for the new world order. The author had already developed aspects of these themes in his two immediately preceding works, already reviewed here: The Dawn of Eurasia y Belt and Roadand now focuses on the US. The three titles are basically a sequence: the progressive dissolution of the European peninsula in the Eurasian continent as a whole, the emergence of China as the superpower of this great continental mass and the remaining role of Washington on the planet.

As to whether the U.S. is going up or leave, Maçães writes in the book's introduction, "Conventional wisdom suggests that the United States has already reached its peak. But what if it is simply now beginning to forge its own path forward?" The volume is written before the coronavirus crisis and the deep unease now apparent in American society, but even before that some signs of U.S. domestic unrest, such as political polarization or divergence over the direction of its foreign policy, were already evident. "The present moment in the history of the United States is both a moment of destruction and a moment of creation," says Maçães, who considers that the country is going through "convulsions" typical of this process of destructive creation. In his opinion, in any case, they are "the birth pangs of a new culture instead of the death throes of an old civilization".

It could be thought that the United States is simply evolving towards a mixed culture, the result of globalization, so that the influence that some European countries have had in shaping U.S. society in recent centuries is now being joined by Asian immigration. In fact, it is expected that by mid-century immigrants from the other side of the Pacific will outnumber those arriving from Mexico and Central America, which, although imbued with indigenous cultures, largely follow the Western paradigm. Between the first European and the new Asian heritage, a "hybrid Eurasian" culture could develop in the United States.

Indeed, at one point in the book, Maçães asserts that the US "is no longer a European nation," but "in fundamental respects now seems more similar to countries like India or Russia or even the Republic of Iran." However, he disagrees with this hybrid Eurasian perspective and argues instead for the development of a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilization, rooted in new sentiments and thoughts.

When describing this different way of being, Maçães deals mainly with some manifestations, from which he gradually deduces deeper aspects. "Why do Americans speak so loudly?" he asks, referring to one such symptom. His theory is that American life emphasizes its own artificiality as a way of reminding its participants that, at bottom, they are experiencing a story. "The American way of life is consciously about language, storytelling, plot and form, and is meant to draw attention to its status as fiction." An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to analyzing the importance of television in the US. In the midst of these considerations, the reader may come to think that the reasoning has been drifting towards a cultural essay , leaving the field of international relations, but in the conclusion of the work the ends are conveniently tied up.

Having left this loose end here, the book goes on to analyze the pulse between Washington and Beijing. He recalls that since its rise as a world power around 1900, the permanent strategic goal of the USA has been to prevent a single power from controlling the whole of Eurasia. Previous threats in this regard were Germany and the USSR and today it is China. employee Normally, Washington would resort to the balance of power, using Europe, Russia and India against China (using a game historically played by Great Britain for the goal to prevent a single country from controlling the European continent), but for the moment the US has focused on directly confronting China. Maçães sees the Trump Administration's policy as confusing. "If the US wants to adopt a strategy of maximum pressure against Beijing, it needs to be clearer about the end game": is this constraining Chinese economic power or converting China to the Western model , he asks. He intuits that the ultimate goal is to "decouple" the Western world from China, creating two separate economic spheres.

Maçães believes that China will hardly manage to dominate the supercontinent, since "the unification of the whole of Eurasia under a single power is so far from being inevitable that in fact it has never been achieved". In any case, he considers that, because of its interest as a superpower, the US may end up playing not so much the role of "great balancer" (given the weight of China it is difficult for any of its neighbors to exercise a counterweight) as that of "great creator" of the new order. "China must be trimmed down in size and other pieces must be accumulated, if a balance is to be the final product," he asserts.

It is here that the American character as a builder of stories and narratives finally comes back into the picture, with a somewhat flimsy argument. Maçães can see the US succeeding in this task of "great creator" if it treats its allies with autonomy. As in a novel, his role as narrator "is to bring all the characters together and preserve their own individual spheres"; "the narrator has learned not to impose a single truth on the whole, and at the same time no character will be allowed to replace him." "For the United States," Maçães concludes, "the age of nation-building is over. The age of world building has begun."