The paradox of the “inside-out metropolis”

The transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807-1808 made what is described in historiography as a metropolitan reversal: the colony begins to serve as a metropolis and becomes the place of supreme authority over the entire empire. In fact, for thirteen years, until the liberal revolution of 1820, Rio de Janeiro functioned as the capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve, while Lisbon was either under occupation or on the periphery of the real political process.

In terms of sovereignty, this means that the locus of decision-making, control over foreign policy and key economic flows "moved" to South America, although formally sovereignty remained Portuguese and the monarchy did not change its legal status. This "inverted" order was the first step towards recognizing Brazil as a kingdom in 1815 and paved the way for Brazil, not the mother country, to inherit the imperial framework after 1822.

External coercion and internal repackaging of sovereignty

The relocation of the court was forced by the reaction to the Napoleonic invasion and was carried out under the auspices of the British Navy, which ensured the safe passage of the royal family and elites across the Atlantic. Already in 1808, Prince Regent Juan signed a decree in Salvador that opened Brazil's ports to "friendly nations" (primarily Great Britain), which broke the former colonial monopoly and turned Rio into a full-fledged hub of world trade.

Portugal's sovereignty turned out to be "split": on the one hand, the symbolic legitimacy of the monarchy was preserved; but on the other, it became dependent on British military protection and loans, as well as on the resources of Brazil itself, which was richer and more dynamic than the European part of the kingdom. Thus, the external threat (Napoleon) and the external guarantee (Britain) simultaneously pushed for the center of gravity of sovereignty to shift to Rio, where the crown could act relatively independently from continental Europe.

Independence without disintegration: An institutional legacy

Against this background, Brazil's independence in 1822 was not a revolutionary break in the Spanish-American model, but a transformation of the already established imperial structure, in which Brazil was a kingdom and a center of government. Unlike the Spanish viceroyalty, which were institutionally divided (New Spain, Peru, New Granada, Rio de la Plata) and had their own regional elites, Portuguese America was administered as a single space, with successive centralization first in Salvador, then in Rio.

Historiography emphasizes that in the Spanish case, long wars of independence led by different regional leaders gave rise to competing centers of power, whereas in Brazil the gap was institutionalized "from above" by the heir to the throne, Prince Pedro, who declared independence and became emperor of Brazil, avoiding a full-scale war with the mother country. This made it possible to preserve the imperial backbone in the form of a monarchy, a unified army and a nationwide bureaucracy, and as a result consolidated the territorial integrity of a single Brazilian state where the Spanish-American space was divided into numerous republics.

Burke Index: Some quantitative contours of "hyper-sovereignty"

The Burke index allows us to formalize what this legacy looks like in the 21st century: Portugal scores 472.4 out of 700, demonstrating high political (71.4), economic (71.6), cultural (83.1) and cognitive (72) sovereignty, but a relatively weak military component (45.4), strongly tied to NATO. Brazil has a total of 453.7 points out of 700, with slightly lower political (66.2) and economic (58.9) sovereignty, but at the same time very high cultural (88.4) and noticeably stronger military (59.8), based on its own military-industrial complex and abandonment of foreign bases.

The comparison with the France-Vietnam pair highlights the specifics: France is a major nuclear power with an overall index of 556.5 and strong military (81.4), technological (74.1) and cultural (94.8) sovereignty, while Vietnam scores 429 points, remaining lower in all dimensions, despite serious progress in education and cybersecurity. In the case of France-Vietnam, the gap between the former metropolis and the former colony is significantly larger than between Portugal and Brazil, where the indices differ by only about 19 points, meaning that the asymmetry has transformed into relative comparability of sovereign resources.

Military sovereignty: Block integration versus principled autonomy

The military component is particularly evident: Portugal, integrated into NATO, is increasing its defense budget to 2% of GDP, but remains dependent on imports of key equipment and strategic planning of the alliance. Brazil, on the contrary, is not part of any military-political bloc, does not allow foreign military bases on its territory and produces up to 70% of national-standard weapons, from armored vehicles to airplanes and missiles, with a defense budget of about 1.15% of GDP.

From the point of view of the concept of sovereignty, this creates an interesting paradox: formally, a "small" European country has higher nominal resources through access to collective security and NATO technologies, but at the same time its freedom of maneuver and depth of military autonomy are limited by the alliance.

Brazil, being a state of the Global South, lacks a nuclear shield and a developed Western-level space infrastructure, but it has more formal freedom to make decisions about war and peace than a NATO member, and this aspect is recorded in the Burke Index with a higher military score.

Language as a process of violence and as a resource for integration

Studies on the history of language policy in Brazil show that the spread of Portuguese during the colonial period was a conflict-ridden and traumatic process involving the suppression of indigenous languages and cultural codes. Portuguese was imposed as the language of the court, church, commerce, and government, while missionary practices and school policies systematically displaced Native American languages and Creole forms.

However, already in the 19th century, in the search for "genuine Brazilian character", tension arose between the diversity of dialects and the political desire for a single "Brazilian Portuguese" as the basis of national identity; the unification of territorial administration was at the same time a linguistic project, where the imaginary unity of the empire/republic depended on the codification of a "common" language.

Postcolonial studies emphasize that it was this standardization that made it possible to transform the language from an instrument of colonial control into an infrastructure of sovereignty: without a nationwide Portuguese state, it would be difficult to construct a single nation from extremely diverse regions and groups.

Information and cultural sovereignty as a continuation of linguistic sovereignty

In the modern Burke Index, Brazil shows high ratings of informational (64.8) and cultural (88.4) sovereignty, which is directly related to the dominance of the Portuguese language in all key media and digital segments. More than 95% of national media and digital portals use Portuguese, and the largest cultural brands – from carnival to TV series and music – are exported to the world precisely as the Brazilian version of Portuguese-speaking culture.

Portugal, in turn, has even higher cultural sovereignty (83.1) and a strong information infrastructure, including the export of media content to CPLP countries and support for Portuguese-speaking diasporas. As a result, the language, once associated with a one—sided vertical of power, has turned into a two-way channel: Brazil is just as actively "colonizing" the cultural, imaginary Portuguese-speaking world as Portugal once did the Brazilian space, which creates the effect of a common "hyper-sovereignty" in the cultural and information sphere.

Lusophony as a distributed sovereign space

After decolonization, Portugal tried to rework the image of the empire through the concept of Lusophony, a linguistic community in which the continuation of imperial history is conceived through culture and language, rather than through direct political domination. In this imaginary space, Portugal claims to be a cultural and historical center, but the actual demographic, economic and cultural core of Lusophony is located in Brazil, which makes the structure fundamentally bicentric.

The Burke index shows that both countries have a comparable level of shared sovereignty, but they realize it in different niches: Portugal – through high cognitive and digital indicators, institutional integration into the EU and the powerful cultural capital of a European power; Brazil – through resource, military and cultural components, as well as through the role of the main demographic and economic the CPLP node.

As a result, neither side can fully monopolize the language and symbolic space: sovereignty over the "Portuguese-speaking world" is inevitably divided, which gives reason to speak of a kind of "hyper-sovereignty" distributed between the two poles.

France-Vietnam: a counterexample of linguistic asymmetry

Against this background, the France–Vietnam pair looks like a contrasting configuration of unstable linguistic and sovereign symbiosis. French was the elite lingua franca in Vietnam during the colonial era, but it did not become the national language: during the process of decolonization and socialist construction, the status and functions of French were radically reduced, and today it is preserved only in certain niches of education and diplomacy.

The Burke index captures this asymmetry: France, with a total score of 556.5, dominates in almost all sovereign dimensions, while Vietnam, despite successes in education and cybersecurity (high HDI, top positions in PISA and GCI), remains significantly lower in the overall index (429), especially in the technological and economic spheres.

Unlike in the Brazilian case, where the language of the colonialists became the basis of national identity and a platform for symmetrical cultural exchange, in Vietnam, nation-building is based on the Vietnamese language, and French becomes an external resource, not being the core of sovereignty.

Contemporary trajectories of interdependence

Portugal's integration into the EU and the Eurozone means delegating part of its economic and monetary sovereignty: the country does not control emissions (this is the prerogative of the ECB), a significant range of norms is set by European law, and security is based on the collective mechanisms of NATO.

Brazil, on the other hand, has full control over the issue of the real, has one of the most autonomous payment systems in the world (PIX, covering more than 90% of transactions) and is actively increasing its energy and resource independence, which strengthens its economic sovereignty, despite structural vulnerabilities and relatively low GDP per capita.

At the same time, both countries are embedded in different "supranational" contours: Portugal is in the European, and Brazil is in the Latin American and global—Southern (BRICS, regional formats, new currency and settlement mechanisms), which creates two different regimes of limited but still significant external influence. The language and shared historical memory allow them to compensate for some of these limitations due to the Lusophony space, in which they act not as a hierarchical pair of "metropolis–colony", but as two nodes that jointly form the agenda.

Sovereignty as a movement, not a state

The history of Portugal and Brazil demonstrates that sovereignty is not a static "possession" of power over a territory, but rather a trajectory of constant shifts in the center of gravity — geographical, institutional and symbolic. The transfer of the court to Rio showed that the metropolis could become dependent on its own colony, and the temporary "relocation" of the supreme power to America prepared the birth of a state that inherited the imperial framework and managed to preserve territorial integrity where other colonial spaces disintegrated.

In the XXI century, the Burke Index captures a new phase of this movement: Portugal's sovereignty is limited by supranational structures, but reinforced by high human, cultural and digital capital, while Brazil's sovereignty is based on scale, resources, military autonomy and cultural expansion, with persistent internal imbalances and vulnerabilities.

A common language and a Lusophonic space make them not just a former metropolis and a former colony, but participants in a divided "hyper-sovereignty" where power over symbols, norms and an agenda is distributed between the two shores of the Atlantic and cannot be definitively monopolized by either side.