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Mostrando postagens com marcador Niall Ferguson. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Niall Ferguson. Mostrar todas as postagens

segunda-feira, 16 de novembro de 2015

Niall Ferguson e a queda de Roma na Europa atual (The Sunday Times)

Analogias históricas são sempre enganosas, mas não deixam de ser saborosas...
Grato ao meu colega Renato Marques que me enviou este artigo, e autor dos comentários iniciais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
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Para aqueles que (não) leram meu livro, capítulo Tempus Fugit, recordo que nele abordo o impacto da invasão desses "novos bárbaros" (na composição étnica, na identidade cultural e no quadro de valores das sociedades hospedeiras) e a estratégia ambígua e ineficaz até agora adotada pela Europa (ajuda financeira e/ou intervenção militar). Os EUA tampouco estão imunes a essa problemática, mesmo que à margem das grandes correntes migratórias (dado o antagonismo entre a agenda assistencialista favorecida por seus núcleos hispânicos e afroamericanos, cuja taxa de natalidade faz antever sua maioria em 2043). No Brasil, a proliferação na base da pirâmide torna o ambiente político refém de noções que vão na contra mão do desenvolvimento e da competitividade. Por distintas razões, os três estariam assim condenados a um futuro medíocre (Europa e EUA - de onde vêm os Nobel de ciências e medicina - teriam sua trajetória de grandeza interrompida; o Brasil sequer a realizaria).   
Mas o objetivo era enviar o excelente artigo de Niall Ferguson (caso você tenha chegado até aqui). Eu acrescentaria apenas um elemento novo dentre as causas do declínio do Império Romano, algo que o bom mocismo e o politicamente correto tem deixado de mencionar: a crescente introdução e propagação de valores cristãos, de solidariedade (somos todos irmãos), de rejeição à acumulação capitalista de riquezas (é mais fácil um camelo passar pelo buraco de uma agulha do que um rico entrar no reino dos Céus) e de apego ao trabalho (visto como uma punição pelo Pecado Capital). 
Dito isso, recomendo sobretudo a leitura do 13° parágrafo do artigo do Ferguson, por sua atualidade.
Renato L R Marques



Like the Roman empire, Europe has let its defences crumble 

Niall Ferguson
The Sunday Times, 15 November 2015

I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud François Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall. 
Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “. . . In the hour of savage licence, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless. . .”
Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history. The causes he identified ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of Sassanid Persia. Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a kind of imperial dry rot.
For many years, more modern historians of “late antiquity” tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual nature of the process. Indeed, some went further, arguing that “decline” was an anachronistic term, like the word “barbarian”. Far from declining and falling, they insisted, the Roman empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic tribes, producing a multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more flattering label than “Dark Ages”. Recently, however, a new generation of historians has raised the possibility that the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth. 
For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure . . . by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”. 
In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. “The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single generation.
Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire emphasises the disastrous effects not just of mass migration but of organised violence: first the westward shift of the Huns of Central Asia and then the Germanic irruption into Roman territory. In his reading, the Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman empire by its wealth, but were enabled to seize that wealth by the arms they acquired and the skills they learnt from the Romans themselves.
“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper . . . Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of [alien groups] across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.” 
Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith. 
The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from south Asia — but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands. 
To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.
It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true that the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving communities.
I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic posture.
I do know that 21st-century Europe has itself to blame for the mess it is now in. Surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe did. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse and empires the worst things of all.
“Romans before the fall”, wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.” 
Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (Penguin)

terça-feira, 29 de setembro de 2015

Niall Ferguson me escreve para recomendar seu novo livro: Kissinger, The Idealist

Na verdade, não foi bem Niall Ferguson, mas o Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, da Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, para anunciar a publicação do seu novo livro, o primeiro volume de uma obra de dois volumes, dedicada ao Mazarino das relações internacionais contemporâneas. Bem, nesse volume ele ainda não era o Mazarino que veio a ser depois...
Bem, agradeço a recomendação, mas vou esperar o livro ficar disponível a 3 dólares na Abebooks padra comprar. Acho que Kissinger merece mais do que isso, mas não estou disposto a pagar um livro que vou ler nas livrarias nas próximas semanas, e depois esperar que caia sobre a minha mesa...
Esse primeiro volume do livro do conhecido historiador britânico, aliás escocês, do meu ponto de vista, deve até ser mais interessante por quem se dedica à história das ideias, terreno no qual Kissinger foi quase um filósofo da diplomacia contemporânea, bem mais, em todo caso, do que o susequente, segundo volume, quando ele já era um velhaco administrador da potência americana em suas projeções imperiais. Tem quem goste: eu prefiro ficar com a história das ideias.
Para isso recomendo também o livro de um filósofo da CIA, Peter Dickson: Kissinger and the Meaning of History.
Kissinger não tinha princípios? Claro que tinha, mas o seu jeito de Mazarino, justamente, não combina com minhas inclinações kantianas...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Dear Friends:

Kissinger: Volume 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

Few figures provoke as much passionate disagreement as Henry Kissinger. Equally revered and reviled, his work as an academic, national security adviser, diplomat, and strategic thinker indelibly shaped America's role in the 20th century. Kissinger's counsel knew few boundaries: His advice was sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama. Yet the man and his ideas remain the object of profound misunderstanding.


Drawing on 50 archives around the world, including Kissinger's private papers, my new book, "Kissinger: Volume 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968," argues that America's most controversial statesman, and the cold war history he witnessed and shaped, must be seen in a new light. In this first of a two-volume history, you'll learn that:

Kissinger was far from a Machiavellian realist. At least in the first half of his career, he was an idealist, opposed to philosophies that see human actions and events as determined by factors beyond our control, such as laws of history or economic development. Kissinger rejected the idea that such "necessity" was the crucial element in human affairs. He exalted the role of human freedom, choice, and agency in shaping the world.
Kissinger worried that the United States was forfeiting its moral leverage by accepting a Soviet-framed contest over economic productivity. In a remarkable interview with ABC's Mike Wallace in July 1958, he made the startling argument that the U.S. was being insufficiently idealistic in its Cold War strategy. "I think we should go on the spiritual offensive in the world," he said. "We should identify ourselves with the revolution." The aim was not to win a contest between rival models of economic development but above all to "fill…a spiritual void," for "even Communism has made many more converts through the theological quality of Marxism than through the materialistic aspect on which it prides itself."
Kissinger believed deeply in the importance of applied history to good statecraft: "When I entered office, I brought with me a philosophy formed by two decades of the study of history," he wrote in "White House Years." "History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation much discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable."
A proper understanding of American history – indeed, of America's ebbing and flowing faith in itself – requires a proper understanding of Kissinger. As I note in Volume One, "In researching the life and times of Henry Kissinger, I have come to realize that … I had missed the crucial importance in American foreign policy of the history deficit: the fact that key decision-makers know almost nothing not just of other countries' pasts, but also of their own. Worse, they often do not see what is wrong with their ignorance…. What is most needed, for students of economics and international relations alike, is a stiff dose of applied history."

I am pleased to be partnering with Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to help build a project that does just that.

I invite you to read "Kissinger: Volume One," and welcome your thoughts.

Learn More

Sincerely,
Niall Ferguson
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University
Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs