A Grande Guerra que mudou o mundo: e se o arquiduque nao tivesse morrido? - Simon Winder (NYT)

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived

By SIMON WINDER - New York Times,JUNE 27, 2014

FOR over 25 years, Archduke Franz Ferdinand paced up and down in his palaces and castles waiting impatiently for the death of the ever more ancient emperor, his hated uncle Franz Joseph I. As we all know, his wait was in vain.

Of this summer’s great anniversary commemorations of World War I, the most important will be those marking the assassination on June 28, 1914 of Franz Ferdinand, the “original sin” from which all the terrible subsequent events followed. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne has come to symbolize everything backward and myopic about pre-1914 Europe. With his ostrich-feather hat, medaled bulk and waxed mustache, he was a sitting duck for a young radical with a cheap semiautomatic. In his apparent archaism, no leader could contrast more with the horrific modernity of his eventual postwar inheritor: the young Adolf Hitler, a gaunt Everyman with a toothbrush mustache and a raincoat.

In the public perception of history, Franz Ferdinand is thought to have had a mere walk-on role. But that is a measure of how low the Hapsburg empire had fallen. In an early-20th-century world of exuberant American and Russian expansion, of Britain and France as global colonial powers and of the newly united nations of Germany and Italy, the Hapsburg empire seemed ever more marginal. And yet the challenges and opportunities of the empire — encompassing a huge region, widely varied terrain, all of Europe’s religions and a dizzying variety of languages — are still relevant today. Franz Ferdinand was heir to an entity which now forms all or part of 12 modern states. Somehow, despite linguistic and religious disputes that could result in riots and legislative gridlock, it worked.

Following a deal in 1867, the empire had been split into two giant pieces, one ruled by German speakers in Vienna, the other by Magyar speakers in Budapest. Both groups formed large minorities in their own halves and had to ride wave after wave of nationalist agitation. The German speakers were distracted by the mesmerizing existence of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany on their doorstep; and it was in Vienna that both modern anti-Semitism and the logical Jewish response, Theodor Herzl’s Zionism, were created. The Magyar speakers were isolated by their language, and rule over their half was spent in a frantic but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “Magyarize” the other nationalities — a battle that was played out bitterly across schools, churches and armies.

How to rationalize this Tower of Babel was Franz Ferdinand’s great preoccupation. The Hapsburgs had many cards to play and there was no sense in 1914 that their empire was reaching its end. Indeed, it was not until 1918 that the Allies decided the empire would be broken up. It was only the war’s years of grinding attrition that so radicalized all the combatants that any weapon — even the unleashing of chaotic minor nationalisms — seemed worth using.

There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.

We will never know if such schemes might have worked. But these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.

Its destruction in 1918 proved a universal disaster. The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.

Most became vicious dictatorships; and even the least offensive, Czechoslovakia, contained a partly alienated German minority that would play a central role in the outbreak of the next world war. The fates of the countries of the former empire, as they fell into the hands first of Hitler and then of Stalin, represented nightmarish “solutions” to the challenge of multinational rule, solutions based on genocide, class war and mass expulsions of kinds unimaginable in 1914.

There were many reasons Franz Ferdinand was the perfect target for the Serbian-sponsored terrorists of 1914. They knew that his plans for reform within the empire were a profound threat to them. And in symbolic terms, he was ideal.

But what they could not have known was that Franz Ferdinand was probably the most senior antiwar figure in Central Europe, a man acutely aware of Hapsburg weakness, scathing about the delusions of his generals and a close friend of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. The recklessness and stupidity of the Hapsburg response to the assassination — the ultimatum of humiliating demands served on Serbia, a response so crucial to the outbreak of the World War I — would not have occurred in the face of some other provocative outrage that had left Franz Ferdinand alive.

For those who had been living in the shelter of the Hapsburg empire, the shooting initiated a catastrophe that ended only with the conclusion of the Cold War. The shadow of this vanished empire continues to hang over Europe, and the assassination’s centenary must, for many millions of Europeans, be viewed as a truly solemn event.

Simon Winder is the author, most recently, of “Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 28, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived. 

A Grande Guerra mudou o mundo - Steven Erlanger (NYT)

The Great War: World War I Brought Fundamental Changes to the World

31 NYT > Home Page / by By STEVEN ERLANGER, NYT, 27/06/2014

It destroyed kings, kaisers, czars and sultans; it demolished empires; it introduced chemical weapons; it brought millions of women into the work force.

ZONNEBEKE, Belgium — To walk the orderly rows of headstones in the elegant graveyards that hold the dead of World War I is to feel both awe and distance. With the death of the last veterans, World War I, which began 100 years ago, has moved from memory to history. But its resonance has not faded — on land and geography, people and nations, and on the causes and consequences of modern war.

The memorial here at Tyne Cot, near Ypres and the muddy killing ground of Passchendaele, is the largest British Commonwealth cemetery in the world. Nearly 12,000 soldiers are buried here — some 8,400 of them identified only as “A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God.” Despite the immensity of this space, the soldiers represent only a tiny portion of the 8.5 million or more from both sides who died, and that number a fraction of the 20 million who were severely wounded.

In Europe’s first total war, called the Great War until the second one came along, seven million civilians also died.

Yet the establishment of these grave sites and monuments, here and in villages all over the Western Front, is more than a reminder of the scale of the killing. World War I also began a tradition of memorializing ordinary soldiers by name and burying them alongside their officers, a posthumous recognition of the individual after the trauma of mass slaughter.

The First World War: 100 Years Later

CreditLt. John Warwick Brooke, British Army photographer, via Imperial War Museums

World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia. The four and half years that followed, as the war spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, reshaped the modern world in fundamental ways.

The war destroyed kings, kaisers, czars and sultans; it demolished empires; it introduced chemical weapons, tanks and airborne bombing; it brought millions of women into the work force, hastening their legal right to vote. It gave independence to nations like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries and created new nations in the Middle East with often arbitrary borders; it brought about major cultural changes, including a new understanding of the psychology of war, of “shell shock” and post-traumatic stress.

It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new world order and a credible League of Nations, setting off much chaos with his insistence on an armistice and his support for undefined “self-determination.” And the rapid retreat of the United States from Europe helped sow the ground for World War II.

Historians still squabble over responsibility for the war. Some continue to blame Germany and others depict a system of rivalries, alliances and anxieties, driven by concerns about the growing weakness of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia that was likely to produce a war in any case, even if there was some other casus belli.

But the emotional legacies are different for different countries. For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion. Preventing the German Army from reaching Paris in the first battle of the Marne spelled the difference between freedom and slavery. The second battle of the Marne, with the help at last of American soldiers, was the beginning of the end for the Germans. This was France’s “good war,” while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration.

For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals. The Germans, too, are still coming to terms with their past, unsure how much to press their current economic and political strength in Europe.

For Britain, there remains a debate about whether the British even had to fight. But fight they did, with millions of volunteers until the dead were mounded so high that conscription was finally imposed in 1916. The memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed — has marked British consciousness and become a byword for mindless slaughter.

“The sense that the war was futile and unnecessary still hangs over a lot of the discussion in Britain,” said Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College, London.

In Britain there is also a deep presumption that the generals were incompetent and cold to human sacrifice, that “lions” — the brave ordinary Tommies — were “led by donkeys” like Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

“That was almost certainly true at the start, but not true at the end,” Mr. Freedman said. “But the notion that lives were lost on an industrial scale because generals kept trying to launch offensives for a few feet of ground is widespread.”

In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army. The rate of killing in the muck and mud of the trenches was much lower than during the mobile part of the war.

If the inheritance is mixed, the war still casts a long shadow, refracted through what can now seem the inevitability of World War II and our tumultuous modern history. This is also, after all, the 75th anniversary of the start of that war and the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they are so eager to defend it now.

Analysts wonder if the period of American and European supremacy itself is fading, given the rise of China and the return of traditional nationalism, not just in Russia but in the many euroskeptic voters in France, Britain and Denmark.

Inevitably, analogies are drawn. Some analysts compare Germany after the war to Russia now, arguing that just as Germany rejected the “Carthaginian peace” at the end of World War I, so Russia is now rejecting the “settlement” of the Cold War, seeing it as unjust, chafing over its defeat and prompting a new Russian aggressiveness and irredentism.

Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939, when restraint was costly, and miss the lessons of 1914, when restraint could have avoided the war?

Some see a continuing struggle between Germany and Russia for mastery of Europe, a struggle that marked both world wars and continues today, and not just in Ukraine, where a century ago its people fought on both sides. Others see World War I, at least as it began in Sarajevo, as the third Balkan War, while the post-Cold War collapse of Yugoslavia and its multinational, multicultural, multireligious model continues to present unresolved difficulties for Europe, in Bosnia, Kosovo and beyond. Similar tensions persist in Northern Ireland, the rump of Ireland’s incomplete revolution that began with the Easter Rising of 1916.

Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East, where the Syrian civil war and the advance of Islamic militants toward Baghdad are ripping up the colonial borders drawn up in the Sykes-Picot agreement by the French and British, with Russian agreement, in 1916, the middle of the war, when the Ottoman Empire was cracking. The carnage at Gallipoli helped shape the national identity of the inheritor state, modern Turkey, let alone Australia.

Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917.

With the new interest in the centenary, mourners and tourists, schoolchildren and relatives, walk the living battlefields of Ypres, which still turn up human remains and live ammunition. And they walk the finely kept grass between the gray headstones here at Tyne Cot, laying bright red poppies upon the earth.

The poppy is one of the most obvious inheritances of the Great War — made famous in the 1915 poem by a Canadian military doctor, Lt. Col. John McCrae: “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row, that mark our place…” The short poem was written as a eulogy and a call to solidarity from the dead to the living, that they not “break faith with us who die.”

Not far away is the tiny Flanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial, an exquisitely kept six acres containing only 368 graves, including 21 unknown, while the names of 43 more, missing in action, are carved on the walls of a small chapel.

If Tyne Cot is the largest military cemetery for the Commonwealth, this is the smallest American military cemetery. The headstones tell the stories of first- and second-generation Americans, their names redolent of the Europe their parents left to make a better life, who returned here to die. Like Giuseppe Spano, a private from Pennsylvania, and Angelo Mazzarella, a private from West Virginia, and Emil P. Wiser, a private from Montana, and Ole Olson, a private from Wisconsin, and John Dziurzynski, a private first class from Ohio.

“The dead were and are not,” the historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote in his autobiography. “Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them.”

O Brasil e a Primeira Guerra Mundial no Observatorio da Imprensa - texto de Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Alberto Dines, coordenador do Observatório da Imprensa, pediu-me para colaborar com um programa que está montando para ser transmitido pela TV Educativa em agosto, quando se comemoram (ugh!) os cem anos da Primeira Guerra Mundial. Eu deveria, em princípio, falar de seus impactos sobre o Brasil, nos aspectos econômicos, políticos, culturais, etc.
Para guiar minha participação, como sempre faço quando vou falar em público, na rádio ou na TV, mesmo que não leia absolutamente nada, eu costumo preparar um texto, que me permite organizar as ideias, separar os temas relevantes e sistematizar os argumentos.
Agora me dizem que eu tenho direito a 1 minuto e meio, já que o programa tem menos de uma hora, e são várias entrevistas, documentários, documentos, narrador, enfim, o normal costumeiro num programa desse tipo.
1,5 minuto não dá para falar grande coisa, por isso vou ter de selecionar.
Para não perder o texto já escrito, vou postar aqui, apenas para receber comentários dos interessados no assunto, e depois preparar algum artigo mais estruturado para publicação.
Portanto, é o que segue, escrito às pressas, sem intenção de ser artigo ou ensaio, apenas um texto-guia para servir no momento da gravação.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A guerra de 1914-18 e o Brasil

Impactos imediatos, efeitos permanentes

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Texto-suporte para gravação-vídeo de programa especial do

Observatório da Imprensa, sobre o impacto da Grande Guerra sobre o Brasil.

Sumário:

1. O que era o Brasil em 1914, e o que representou a guerra europeia?

2. Impactos imediatos do conflito iniciado em 1914

3. Impactos de mais longo prazo, efeitos permanentes

1. O que era o Brasil em 1914, e o que representou a guerra europeia?

Para abordar o impacto da guerra de 1914-1918 sobre o Brasil seria preciso ter bem presente o que era o Brasil em 1914, o que era a Europa, o que ela representava para o Brasil nessa época, e o que a guerra alterou no padrão de relacionamento, direta e indiretamente. Vamos resumir um complexo quadro político, econômico e diplomático.

O Brasil de cem anos atrás era o café, e o café era o Brasil. Toda a política econômica, aliás toda a base fiscal da República e dos seus estados mais importantes, assim como a própria diplomacia, giravam em volta das receitas de exportação, que compreendiam tanto ao próprio produto, e que faziam a riqueza dos barões do café, quanto os impostos de exportação, que afluíam ao orçamento de São Paulo e dos demais estados produtores. Dez anos antes, angustiados por um problema que eles próprios haviam criado, a superprodução de café, esses estados realizaram um esquema de valorização do produto, via retenção de estoques, no famoso Convênio de Taubaté, para cujo financiamento tivemos, pela primeira vez, a participação de bancos americanos. Os próprios banqueiros oficiais do Brasil, os Rothchilds de Londres, haviam se recusado a fazer parte do esquema, pois se tratava de uma típica manobra de oligopolistas contra os interesses dos consumidores. O Brasil dominava então quase quatro quintos da oferta mundial de café, e essa posição lhe assegurava a capacidade de fazer grandes manobras.

Mais tarde, em 1914, justamente, outros concorrentes tinham entrado nesse lucrativo mercado, a Colômbia, por exemplo, que sem poder competir em quantidade, começou a dedicar-se a melhorar a qualidade dos seus cafés. Na mesma época, o Brasil estava sendo processado em tribunais de Nova York, por praticas anti-concorrenciais na oferta de café, justamente. Foi também quando os mercados financeiros se fecharam repentinamente para o Brasil, com o estalar da guerra em agosto desse ano. O Brasil sempre dependeu do aporte de capitais estrangeiros, seja para financiar projetos de investimento em infraestrutura – que eram feitos sob regime de concessão, num esquema muito similar ao que viria a ser conhecido depois como PPP, ou seja, parcerias público-privadas, com garantia de juros de 6% ao ano –, seja para o financiamento do próprio Estado, que vivia permanentemente em déficit orçamentário.

O Brasil já tinha efetuado uma operação de funding-loan en 1898, isto é, um empréstimo de consolidação trocando os títulos das dívidas anteriores por novos títulos, e tinha conseguido fazer um novo pouco antes da guerra, e já não mais teve acesso ao mercado de capitais durante toda a duração do conflito europeu. Este representou um tremendo choque para a economia brasileira, pois os mercados europeus ainda eram importantes consumidores dos produtos primários de exportação, e os principais ofertantes de bens manufaturados, equipamentos e, sobretudo, capitais, ainda que os Estados Unidos já fossem o principal comprador do café brasileiro desde o final do século 19, e que suas empresas já tivessem começado a fazer investimentos diretos no Brasil.

2. Impactos imediatos do conflito iniciado em 1914

O espocar dos canhões de agosto representou, em primeiro lugar, uma interrupção nas linhas de comunicação marítimas, já que a Alemanha tinha construído para si uma marinha de guerra quase tão importante quanto a da Grã-Bretanha. Mais adiante a British Navy consegue desmantelar boa parte da frota germânica, mas de imediato, os transportes marítimos com os portos da Europa do norte foram bastante afetados pelas batalhas navais e pela ação dos surpreendentes submarinos alemães. Mas mesmo os estoques de café nos portos de Trieste, no Mediterrâneo, ficaram retidos, sob controle dos impérios centrais, neste caso da monarquia multinacional representada pela Áustria-Hungria, que seria desfeita com a derrota em 1918.

O produto mais importante de exportação do Brasil foi, assim bastante afetado pela perda de importantes mercados consumidores, o que aumentou tremendamente a dependência da demanda americana. Mas, os principais financiadores externos da jovem República ainda eram banqueiros europeus, agora comprometidos com a compra de títulos da dívida nacional de seus próprios países. A Alemanha também se tinha convertido num importante parceiro comercial do Brasil, além de ter iniciado um itinerário promissor com alguns investimentos diretos de suas empresas e casas comerciais. Outros mercados do velho continente também se viram engolfados no conflito, causando novos e continuados prejuízos ao Brasil.

O debate interno, sobre quem o Brasil deveria apoiar na guerra europeia, também foi importante, colocando importantes intelectuais em oposição, assim como tribunos e magistrados dos dois lados da cerca. O grande historiador João Capistrano de Abreu foi considerado um germanófilo, ao passo que Rui Barbosa insistiu na culpa moral da Alemanha, que tinha invadido e esquartejado a Bélgica, um país neutro. Uma das vítimas desse debate passional foi o próprio sucessor de Rio Branco, o chanceler Lauro Muller, considerado talvez menos isento por causa de sua ascendência alemã: ele renunciou ao cargo quando o Brasil fez a sua escolha. A maior parte da classe culta no Brasil, os membros da elite que adoravam gastar seus mil-réis nos cabarés de Paris, era evidentemente francófila, mas os alemães ajudaram a empurrar o Brasil para o lado da aliança franco-britânica ao atacarem navios comerciais brasileiros no Atlântico, quando o Brasil ainda era oficialmente neutro no conflito. Acabamos entrando modestamente na guerra, quase ao seu final, enviando um batalhão médico para a França.

No conjunto, a guerra representou imensas perdas comerciais e financeiras para o Brasil, que tentou se ressarcir, na conferência de paz de Paris, sem obter de verdade satisfação plena por suas reivindicações de obter compensação pela apropriação de navios alemães: os próprios países europeus se encarregaram de extorquir a Alemanha o máximo que puderam, e o caso do Brasil não era julgado realmente importante em face do conjunto de demandas dos países mais afetados pela guerra.

3. Impactos de mais longo prazo, efeitos permanentes

Os efeitos mais importantes da primeira guerra mundial, porém, não se limitaram aos terrenos militar e comercial, mas foram verdadeiramente impactantes no domínio econômico no seu sentido mais lato, provocando mudanças extremamente importante nas políticas econômica de todos os países, com consequências negativas para todo o mundo, e moderadamente positivas para o Brasil. Uma das primeiras consequências econômicas da guerra foi a cessação de pagamentos entre os inimigos, o que era lógico, com a cessação de toda relação comercial, confisco de bens e sequestro de ativos financeiros. Os países suspenderam o famoso padrão-ouro, ou seja, a garantia em metal das emissões de moeda papel; ainda que teoricamente em vigor, para alguns países, e a despeito de tentativas de seu restabelecimento ao final do conflito, ficou evidente que o lastro metálico tinha deixado de fato de ser um fator relevante nas políticas monetárias dos países. Todos os governos, depois de esgotadas as possibilidades de financiamento voluntário interno do esforço de guerra – via emissão de bônus da dívida pública, e até mediante empréstimos compulsórios – passaram a imprimir dinheiro sem maiores restrições, provocando a primeira grande onda inflacionária nas economias contemporâneas.

Mais impactante ainda foi a intervenção direta na atividade produtiva, não apenas desviando para a produção de guerra quase todas as plantas industriais que tivessem alguma relação com o aprovisionamento bélico, inclusive alimentar, de transportes e comunicações, mas também via controles de preços, restrições quantitativas, mobilizações laborais e vários outros expedientes intrusivos na vida do setor privado. Nacionalizações e estatizações foram conduzidas por simples medidas administrativas e a planificação nacional tornou-se praticamente compulsória. O mundo nunca mais seria o mesmo, e nesse tipo de economia de guerra estaria uma das bases dos regimes coletivistas que depois surgiriam na Europa, o fascismo e o comunismo.

O Brasil não foi tão afetado, naquele momento, pela estatização, mas ele também sofreu esses impactos de duas maneiras. De um lado, as dificuldades de aprovisionamento e de acesso a mercados levaram ao estímulo a novas atividades industriais no país, ainda que com todas as restrições existentes para a compra de bens de produção nos principais parceiros envolvidos no conflito. O mercado interno se torna mais relevante para a economia nacional. De outro lado, o nacionalismo econômico conhece um novo reforço nesse período. O Brasil já tinha uma lei do similar nacional desde o início da República, mas a guerra ajuda a consolidar a tendência introvertida, a vocação de autonomia nacional que já estavam presentes no pensamento de tribunos e de empresários. O Brasil encontrou naquela situação uma espécie de legitimidade acrescida para continuar praticando aquilo que sempre fez em sua história: a preferência nacional e o protecionismo comercial como políticas de Estado.

Este talvez seja o efeito mais importante, ainda que indireto, da guerra europeia sobre o pensamento econômico brasileiro, especialmente em sua vertente industrial. As gerações seguintes, sobretudo aquelas que ainda viveram a crise de 1929, e uma nova guerra mundial, dez anos depois, consolidaram uma orientação doutrinal em economia que também tendia para o nacionalismo econômico, uma política comercial defensiva, uma vocação industrial basicamente voltada para o mercado interno e uma tendência a ver no Estado um grande organizador das atividades produtivas, quase próxima do espírito coletivista que vigorou na Europa durante o entre-guerras e mais além.

Essencialmente, a geração de militares que passou a intervir de forma recorrente na vida política do país, ao final da Segunda Guerra, e que depois assumiria o poder no regime autoritário de 1964, era em grande medida formada por jovens cadetes que tinham feito estudos e depois academias militares no entre-guerras e na sua sequência imediata, e que tinham se acostumado exatamente com esse pensamento: um intenso nacionalismo econômico, a não dependência de fontes estrangeiras de aprovisionamento (sobretudo em combustíveis e em materiais sensíveis), a introversão produtiva, a ênfase no mercado interno, enfim, tudo aquilo que nos marcou tremendamente durante décadas e que ainda forma parte substancial do pensamento econômico brasileiro.

Tudo isso, finalmente, foi o resultado político e econômico da Primeira Guerra Mundial, que durante muito tempo ficou conhecida como a Grande Guerra. Os custos e as destruições da Segunda foram mais importantes, mas as alterações mais significativas nas políticas econômicas nacionais, no papel dos Estados na vida econômica, já tinham sido dados no decorrer da Primeira. O mundo mudou, a Europa começou sua longa trajetória para o declínio hegemônico, e o Brasil deu início ao seu igualmente longo itinerário de nacionalismo econômico e de intervencionismo estatal. Parece que ainda não nos libertamos desses dois traços relevantes do caráter nacional.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Hartford, 26 de junho de 2014.

2622. “A guerra de 1914-1918 e o Brasil: impactos imediatos, efeitos permanentes”, Hartford, 26 junho 2014, 5 p. Roteiro para gravação de um depoimento em vídeo para emissão especial do Observatório da Imprensa, sobre o impacto da Primeira Guerra Mundial sobre o Brasil e a região; depoimento por meio de webcam: padrão quicktime (.mov), full HD, 1920x1080 pixels, 16:9, NTSC, 29,97 fps; em torno de 2 minutos; envio por via web-transfer ou FTP.

A very big, BIG, What IF? - David Stockman on American intervention on World War I (The Globalist)

David Stockman, um economista liberal conhecido por ter renunciado ao cargo de diretor do orçamento do presidente Ronald Reagan, quando este, em lugar de prosseguir suas sólidas políticas de ajuste, começou a fazer keynesianismo militar, com seus enormes gastos de defesa (em especial a Strategic Defense Initiative, ou Star Wars), escreve aqui o que é, provavelmente, o maior BIG IF de toda a história contemporânea. Ele parte da hipótese de não envolvimento dos EUA na guerra europeia de 1914-1918 para chegar até os tempos atuais de Al Qaeda. passando pelas crises do entre-guerras e a própria Segunda Guerra.
Que a história seja imponderável isso sabemos todos. Que pequenas ações num setor provocam consequências em vários outros também sabemos.
Agora, afirmar que sem isso ou aquilo não teria acontecido aquilo outro e mais outra coisa já é um pouco de feitiçaria. Por exemplo: afirmar que sem essa intervenção, Alemanha e Itália teriam sido poupadas de experiências fascistas, e a Rússia do comunismo, é extremamente arriscado, uma vez que determinadas forças sociais existiam efetivamente, podem ter sido impulsionadas pela guerra, INDEPENDENTEMENTE da intervenção americana, e esses países poderiam ter passado por vários desses problemas, qualquer que fosse o resultado da guerra.
Ou seja, Stockman faz uma história mais virtual do que histórica.
Ficamos com Ranke e sua pretensão em examinar a história, wie es Eigentlich gewesen, como ela efetivamente se passou...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

http://www.theglobalist.com/wwi-and-the-united-states-woodrow-wilsons-wisdom-or-folly/

WWI and the United States: Woodrow Wilson’s Wisdom or Folly?

Would Europe have become a better place faster if the United States had not intervened in World War I?

By David A. Stockman, The Globalist, June 24, 2014

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

Takeaways

• Had Woodrow Wilson not misled America on a messianic crusade, Europe’s Great War would have ended in 1917.
  
• Absent President Wilson’s war, there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace and no war reparations.
  
• Europe -- and the world -- could have been a better place if the US had not intervened in the First World War.
  
• WWI caused a boom the US Economy could not handle, eventually hurting the whole world.
  
• WWI brought to a halt over 40 years of economic growth occurring all across Europe.
  

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The first big wave of embracing a liberal international economic order — relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration — resulted in something remarkable.

Between 1870 and 1914, there was a 45-year span of rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment and prolific technological progress. In terms of overall progress, these four plus decades have never been equaled — either before or since.

Then came the Great War. It involved a scale of total industrial mobilization and financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone before. In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold.

In addition, England’s price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most offshore investments were liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive overhang of human and financial liabilities.

Despite all that, England still stood out as the least devastated of the major European countries. In France, the price level inflated by 300%, its extensive Russian investments were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and its debts in New York and London catapulted to more than 100% of GDP.

Economic disaster after WWI

Among the defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly worthless. The German mark was only worth five cents on the pre-war dollar, while the country’s wartime debts — especially after the Carthaginian peace of Versailles which John Maynard Keynes skewered so brilliantly — soared to crushing, unrepayable heights.

In short, the wave of debt, currency inflation and financial disorder from the Great War was immense and unprecedented.

With all that in mind, one important question only rises in importance: Was the United States’ intervention in April 1917 warranted or not? And did it only end up prolonging the European slaughter?

Never mind that it resulted in a cockamamie peace, which gave rise to totalitarianism among the defeated powers. Even conventional historians like Niall Ferguson admit as much.

Had Woodrow Wilson not misled the United States on a messianic crusade, Europe’s Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917. Both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt — but would not have presented any danger to the rest of mankind.

What could have been

Indeed, absent President Wilson’s crusade, there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace — and no war reparations. Nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd — or later on, the emergence of Stalin’s barbaric regime.

Likewise, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazi dystopia, noMunich, no Sudetenland and Danzig corridor crises, no need for a British war to save Poland, no final solution and Holocaust, no global war against Germany and Japan — and, finally, no incineration of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nor would all of these events have been followed by a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and the Congo, to name just a few.

Surely, there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.

There would have been no Dulles brothers, no domino theoryand no Vietnam slaughter, either. Nor would the United States have launched a War in Afghanistan’s mountain valleys to arouse the mujahideen from their slumber — and hence train the future al Qaeda.

Likewise, in Iran there would have been no Shah and his Savak terror, no Khomeini-led Islamic counter-revolution, no U.S. aid to enable Saddam’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.

Nor would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our erstwhile ally Hussein from looting the equally contemptible Emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten oil plunder — or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blow-back a decade later.

Most surely, the axis-of-evil — that is, the Washington-based Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon axis — would not have arisen, nor would it have foisted a near-$1 trillion warfare state budget on the 21st-century United States.

An artificial boom heard across the world

The real point of that Great War, in terms of the annals of U.S. economic history, is that it enabled the already-rising U.S. economy to boom for the better part of 15 years after the onset of the war.

In the first stage, the United States became the granary and arsenal to the European allies. This triggered an eruption of domestic investment and production that transformed the nation into a massive global creditor and powerhouse exporter, virtually overnight.

U.S. farm exports quadrupled and farm income surged from $3 billion to $9 billion. Land prices soared, country banks proliferated and the same was true of industry. For example, steel production rose from 30 million tons annually to nearly 50 million tons.

Altogether, in six short years from 1914 to 1920, $40 billion of U.S. GDP turned into $92 billion — a sizzling 15% annual rate of gain.

The depression that could have been avoided

Needless to say, these figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen economy. After all, the United States had loaned the Allies massive amounts of money — all to purchase grain, pork, wool, steel, munitions and ships from the United States.

This transfer amounted to nearly 15% of GDP, or an equivalent of $2 trillion in today’s economy. It also represented a form of vendor finance that was destined to vanish at war’s end.

As it happened, the United States did experience a brief but deep recession in 1920. But it was not a thoroughgoing end-of-war one that would “de-tox” the economy.

The day of reckoning was merely postponed. It finally arrived in 1933 when the depression hit with full force. The U.S. economy was cratering — and Germany embarked on its disastrous “recovery” experience under Adolf Hitler.

These two events — along with so many of the above-listed offenses later on — could have been avoided if only the United States had shown the wisdom of staying out of World War I.

Tags: Asia, Cold War, Europe, Middle East, Treaty of Versailles, United States, World War I

About David A. Stockman

David A. Stockman is an author, former U.S. politician and businessman. He served as Ronald Reagan's budget director from 1981-1985.