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Mostrando postagens com marcador Roger Cohen. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Roger Cohen. Mostrar todas as postagens

quinta-feira, 22 de setembro de 2022

A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever - Roger Cohen (NYT)

 The New York Times – 22.9.2022

A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever

In a major speech, he recast the war in Ukraine and made clear it could spread.

Roger Cohen

 

Vladimir V. Putin’s menacing televised address on Wednesday was much more than a bid to change the course of his faltering war against Ukraine. It attempted to invert a war of aggression against a neighbor into one of defense of a threatened “motherland,” a theme that resonates with Russians steeped in patriotic history.

Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, aimed at nothing less than altering the meaning of the war for his country, raising the stakes for the entire world. He warned the West in unmistakable terms — “this is not a bluff” — that the attempt to weaken or defeat Russia could provoke nuclear cataclysm.

Rattling his nuclear saber, accusing the West of seeking to “destroy” his country and ordering the call-up of 300,000 military reservists, Mr. Putin implicitly conceded that the war he started on Feb. 24 has not gone as he wished. He painted the Ukrainians as mere pawns of the “military machine of the collective West.”

By veering far from his original objective of demilitarizing and “de-Nazifying” all of Ukraine, he made a nonsense of the Kremlin’s far-fetched claims that the war was proceeding according to plan, and tacitly acknowledged something he had always denied: the reality and growing resistance of a unified Ukrainian nation.

But Mr. Putin cornered is Mr. Putin at his most dangerous. That was one of the core lessons of his hardscrabble youth that he took from the furious reaction of a rat he cornered on a stairwell in what was then Leningrad.

“Russia won its defensive wars against Napoleon and Hitler, and the most important thing Putin did here from a psychological perspective was to claim this, too, is a defensive war,” said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin.” “It was an aggressive war. Now it’s the defense of the Russian world against the Western attempt at dismemberment.”

In Mr. Putin’s telling, that imagined world imbued with some inalienable Russian essence has grown in size. He said Russia would support imminent referendums in four regions of Ukraine on whether to join Russia — votes denounced by Ukraine and the West as a sham, and a likely prelude to annexation.

The Kremlin has signaled that if it absorbs that territory, the Ukrainian counter-offensives underway in the east and south to recapture territory seized by Russia would be considered attacks on Russian soil, justifying any level of retaliation, up to and including a nuclear response.

The State of the War

“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will of course use all means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people,” Mr. Putin said.

His speech, which may of course be a bluff despite his denial, nevertheless placed before the West a dilemma that has been inherent in its policy from the start of the war: How far can intense military and logistical support of Ukraine — effectively everything short of NATO troops on the ground — go without setting off nuclear confrontation?

“I believe the nuclear threat is a bluff but it gives Putin a means to terrify the West, and accentuate divisions about providing arms because some may now view that as too dangerous,” said Sylvie Bermann, a former French ambassador to Russia.

Hours after the speech in Moscow, President Biden denounced Mr. Putin’s “overt nuclear threats” against Europe, describing them as “reckless.” Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, he said the West would be “clear, firm and unwavering” in its resolve as it confronts Mr. Putin’s “brutal, needless war” in Ukraine.

“This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple,” Mr. Biden said. He continued: “Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should make your blood run cold.”

A game of brinkmanship has begun with the American and Russian leaders seeking to outmaneuver each other as the war festers. If Ukraine and its Western backers have the advantage for now, that edge is by no means secure.

Seven months into the war, its resolution appears more distant than ever and its reverberations more dangerous. Perhaps not since the Cuban missile crisis six decades ago have American and Russian leaders confronted each other so explicitly and sharply on the danger of nuclear war.

As Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has said, the United States and its Western allies have been trying to use “all means possible” to help Ukraine “without creating an uncontrollable escalation.” But the risk of that escalation, possibly the start of World War III, just grew, because what constitutes a strike “inside Russia” may now be defined differently by Mr. Putin.

Full of anger and venom, portraying Ukraine as the headquarters of neo-Nazis and the West as a giant engine of “Russophobia,” Mr. Putin appeared as deluded about the neighbor he attacked as he was in his Feb. 24 speech that announced the war.

He has downsized Russia’s military ambitions in Ukraine — upended by the Russian defeat in Kyiv and recent battlefield setbacks in the northeast — without downsizing his obsessions over Russian humiliation at the breakup of the Soviet Union three decades ago.

On Wednesday, as in February, he accused the Ukrainian authorities, falsely, of genocide against ethnic Russians. He boasted of nuclear weapons that are “more advanced” than the West’s. He made wild allegations about the threat to Russia. He alluded, for example, to “statements by some high-ranking representatives of leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction — nuclear weapons — against Russia.”

There is no evidence of this.

Mr. Putin “claimed he had to act because Russia was threatened. But no one threatened Russia and no one other than Russia sought conflict,” Mr. Biden said.

The speeches came on the eve of a winter that will be hard in Europe, with inflation and energy costs rising, and days before an Italian election Sunday in which a far-right candidate, Giorgia Meloni, is the favorite. The European extreme right has generally been sympathetic to Moscow, although Ms. Meloni’s own position appears to be evolving.

Up to now, Mr. Biden has been very effective in cementing Western unity. But while the Biden administration has little apparent faith in diplomacy with Moscow at this stage, France and Germany still seek the dialogue with Russia that President Emmanuel Macron of France mentioned in his speech on Tuesday to the United Nations, a dialogue judged necessary, he said, because “we seek peace.”

Not at any price, however. Mr. Macron’s position has hardened. He presented a stark picture of a world hovering on the brink of war and brutal division as a result of Russia’s “imperial” aggression.

He said the world was close to “an enlarged era of conflict, a permanent one, where sovereignty and security will be determined by force, by the size of armies.” It was imperative, he insisted, that those remaining neutral — an apparent reference to India and China, among others — speak out.

“Those who are silent today are, despite themselves, or secretly, serving the cause of the new imperialism,” Mr. Macron said.

The Russian attempt to rebuild the imperium lost at the dissolution of the Soviet Union finds itself at a treacherous crossroads. After multiple military setbacks, Mr. Putin spoke from a weaker position than the one he held seven months ago.

“The situation is very dangerous because Putin is in a trap,” Ms. Bermann said.

 

*

sábado, 8 de agosto de 2015

Teoria da Historia Imediata, ou Presente, num livro de Timothy Garton Ash (2000)

Quando o Mercosul completou dez anos, já tendo escrito dois ou três livros sobre o bloco -- não exatamente de história do tempo presente, que os franceses chamam de histoire immédiate, mas de análise política e econômica, quando não diplomática -- eu pretendi escrever uma História do Mercosul, uma vez que eu tinha, de certo modo, assistindo ao nascimento da criança, acompanhado suas primeiras mamadeiras (sem chegar a trocar nenhuma fralda), e até participado de um ou outro encontro importante, sem mencionar ter sido envolvido, como negociador, na redação do Protocolo de Brasília (reuniões em Montevidéu, onde eu estava) sobre Solução de Controvérsias.
Descobri que seria impossível escrever essa história devidamente apoiado em "documentos históricos", à la Ranke, pelo simples motivos que estes supostos documentos não existiam. Etapas cruciais da construção do Mercosul simplesmente não estava documentadas. Não havia, por exemplo, uma descrição do processo decisório que tinha levado à conformação da TEC, a Tarifa Externa Comum, e sequer se descobriu depois (do Protocolo de Ouro Preto, de 1994) como e em que condições ela estava sendo implementada (e de fato nunca o foi, devidamente, bastando dizer que se o Mercosul possui, apenas no papel, um Código Aduaneiro, ele nunca foi respeitado).
Isso foi, portanto, em 2001, antes dos ataques terroristas em NY e Washington e antes que este livro do Timothy Garton Ash fosse publicado, que nunca li (a despeito de ter lido vários de seus capítulos nas páginas da The New York Review of Books, um jornal de resenhas-artigos do qual sempre fui assinante).
Descubro agora, quinze anos depois, este primeiro capítulo desse livro, e a respectiva resenha, publicados nas páginas da New York Times Book Reviews graças a uma postagem de Carmen Lícia Palazzo (https://www.facebook.com/carmenlicia.palazzo/posts/10203368945183826), interessada, como eu, eu teoria da história.
De certa forma, mesmo não sendo jornalista, ou sequer historiador, eu e ele nos interessamos pelos mesmos assunto, e praticamos, grosso modo, as mesmas habilidades "literárias", escrever sobre o tempo presente, a história se desenvolvendo aos nossos olhos, mesmo sem sermos atores dela, apenas "espectadores engajados", como disse uma vez Raymond Aron de si mesmo.
Obviamente eu não ouso comparar-me ao historiador inglês de Oxford. Com ele apenas partilho essa mania inseparável de sempre levar comigo um caderninho de notas, pronto para ser rabiscado, e registrar alguma frase, alguma observação sobre o que se vê, ou se lê, ou alguma ideia que vai fugir marotamente se longo não tomamos nota dela. Na verdade, eu costumo carregar dois Moleskines: um de tamanho médio, que vai no bolso do paleto ou na pasta de computador, e um mini-Moleskine, que vai no bolso da camisa, para anotações mais curtas e episódicas.
Ainda gostaria de escrever uma história do tempo presente no Brasil, ou seja os tempos do Nunca Antes, em torno dos quais tenho recolhido não mais do que matérias de jornais e revistas e alguns artigos de minha própria lavra. Mas, na parte que mais me interessa, que seria a História Diplomática Imediata, vou provavelmente descobrir que as lacunas, imprecisões, omissões (deliberadas, estou certo disso), são ainda maiores do que para os erros de política econômica que os companheiros cometeram fartamente nesses anos faustos da mentira, da fraude e da corrupção. Aliás, sem poder me me basear em evidências documentais para embasar alguns dos mais momentosos episódios de nossa história diplomática, só me resta imitar o economista queridinho dos keynesianos de botequim e escrever uma Teoria Geral da Fraude, da Mentira e da Corrupção, para ilustar estes anos.
Por enquanto fiquem com estas dez páginas do livro de Garton Ash, e sua resenha por Roger Cohen, que só descobri graças a Carmen Lícia e seu faro infalível.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
Hartford, 7 de agosto de 2015



From the Store of The New York Times Book Reviews, October 29, 2000
(First Chapter)

INTRODUCTION
History of the Present
Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches From Europe in the 1990s

By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
New York: Random House, 2000
Description: https://www.nytimes.com/books/images_br/firstdot.gifRead the Review (at the end)

Even at one minute past midnight on 1 January 1990, we already knew that this would be a formative decade in Europe. A forty-year-old European order had just collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone was hailing a "new Europe." But no one knew what it would look like.
Now we know: in Western Europe, in Germany, in Central Europe, and in the Balkans. Of course, in all these parts, the future will be full of surprises. It always is. But at the end of the decade we can see the broad outline of the new European order that we have already ceased to call new. Only in the vast, ethnically checkered territory of the former Soviet Union is even the basic direction of states such as Russia and Ukraine still hidden in the fog. And perhaps also, at Europe's other end, that of the decreasingly United Kingdom.
This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of the 1990s in Europe. It is a collection of what are rightly called pieces-in other words, fragments-that reflect my own interests, expertise, and travels. However, a chronology running through the book not only supplies missing links between the pieces but also records significant European developments not covered in any of them. Into this time line I have inserted some short, diary-like sketches, drawn mainly from my own notebooks and recollections. There are also several longer sketches in the main text. The largest part of the book consists of analytical reportages, mostly published in The New York Review of Books, after the skilled attentions of the editor to whom this book is dedicated. Finally, there are a few essays in which I attempt an interim synthesis on a larger subject, such as the development of the European Union, Britain's troubled relationship with Europe, or the way countries deal with the legacy of a dictatorship.
As befits "history of the present," everything in the main text was written at or shortly after the time it describes. The pieces have been edited lightly, mainly to eliminate repetition, but nothing of substance has been added or changed. I compiled the chronology and short sketches more recently. Occasionally, I have also added a comment at the end of a piece.
Here I want to reflect on writing "history of the present." The phrase is not mine. It was, so far as I know, coined by the veteran American diplomat and historian George Kennan in a review of my book about Central Europe in the 1980s, The Uses of Adversity. It is, for me, the best possible description of what I have been trying to write for twenty years, combining the crafts of historian and journalist.
Yet it immediately invites dissent. History of the present? Surely that's a contradiction in terms. Surely history is by definition about the past. History is books on Caesar, the Thirty Years War, or the Russian Revolution. It is discoveries and new interpretations based on years of studying documents in the archives.
Let's put aside straightaway the objection that "the present" is but a line, scarcely a millisecond wide, between past and future. We know what we mean here by "the present," even if the chronological boundaries are always disputed. Call it "the very recent past" or "current affairs" if you would rather. The important point is this: Not just professional historians but most arbiters of our intellectual life feel that a certain minimum period of time needs to have passed and that certain canonical kinds of archival source should be available before anything written about this immediate past qualifies as history.
It was not ever thus. As the formidably learned German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck has observed, from the time of Thucydides until well into the eighteenth century, to have been an eyewitness to the events described or, even better, to have been a participant in them was considered a major advantage for a winter of history. Contemporary history was thought to be the best history. It is only since the emergence of the idea of progress, the growth of critical philology, and the work of Leopold von Ranke that historians have come to believe that you understand events better if you are farther away from them. If you stop to think about it, this is actually a very odd idea: that the person who wasn't there knows better than the person who was.
Even the most ascetic neo-Rankean depends upon the witnesses who make the first record of the past. If they do not make a record, there is no history. If they do it badly or in pursuit of a quite different agenda (religious, say, or astrological or scatological), the historian will not find answers to the questions he wants to ask. It's therefore best to have a witness who is himself interested in finding answers to the historian's questions about sources and causes, structure and process, the individual and the mass. Hence, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville's personal account of the 1848 revolution in France is worth twenty other memoirs of that time.
This need for the historically minded witness has become more acute in recent times for a simple reason. In Ranke's day, politics was put on paper. Diplomacy was conducted or noted immediately in correspondence. Politicians, generals, and diplomats wrote extensive diaries, letters, and memorandums. Even then, of course, much that was vital was not written down-murmured private understandings in the corridors of the Congress of Vienna, the pillow talk of queens. Then, as now, most of human experience was never recorded at all. But most of politics was.
Today, however, high politics is more and more pursued in personal meetings (thanks to the jet airplane) or by telephone (increasingly by mobile phone) or by other forms of electronic communication. Certainly, minutes of meetings are made afterward and, at the highest levels, so are transcripts of phone conversations. But the proportion of important business actually put on paper has diminished. And who writes narrative letters or detailed diaries any more? A dwindling minority.
To be sure, researchers can watch television footage. Sometimes, they can listen to the telephone tapes-or taps-of those conversations. Perhaps in future they will also read the e-mails. The point is not that there are fewer sources than there were. Quite the reverse. Where the ancient historian has to reconstruct a whole epoch from a single papyrus, the contemporary historian has a roomful of sources for a single day. It is the ratio of quantity to quality that has changed for the worse.
On the other hand, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, and businesspeople have never been so eager to give their own version of what has just happened. Iraqi crises famously unfold in "real time" on CNN. European ministers tumble out of EU meetings to brief journalists from their own countries. Naturally, each gives his own twist and spin. But if you put the different versions together, you have a pretty good instant picture of what occurred.
In short, what you can know soon after the event has increased, and what you can know long after the event has diminished. This is particularly the case with extraordinary events. During some of the dramatic debates between the leaders of Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution," in the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in November 1989, I was the only person present taking notes. I remember thinking, "If I don't write this down, nobody will. It will be gone for ever, like bathwater down the drain." So much recent history has disappeared like that, never to be recovered, for want of a recorder.
Two objections remain strong. First, since those things governments and individuals try to keep secret are often the most important things, the eventual release of new sources will change pictures substantially. This is not a conclusive argument for waiting-in the meantime, other equally important things, well understood at the moment, may be forgotten-but it is a major hazard of the genre. In the preface to my first "history of the present," an account of the Solidarity revolution in Poland, I observed that I would not have attempted to write the book had it seemed likely that the official papers of the Soviet and Polish communist regimes would become available in the foreseeable future. That, I continued blithely, seemed "as probable as the restoration of the monarchy in Warsaw or Moscow." Eight years later, the Soviet bloc had collapsed and many of those papers were available. Fortunately, I also quoted Walter Raleigh's warning, in the preface to his History of the World, that "who-so-euer in writing a modern Historie shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth."
The second strong objection is that we don't know the consequences of current developments, so our understanding of their historical significance is much more speculative and liable to revision. Again, this is patently true. Every high-school senior studying ancient history knows that the Roman empire declined and fell. Writing about the Soviet empire in the 1980s, none of us knew the end of the story. In 1988, I published an essay entitled "The Empire in Decay", but I still thought the empire's fall was a long way off. In January 1989, I wrote an article pooh-poohing suggestions that the Berlin Wall might soon be breached.
Yet there is also an advantage here. You record what people did not know at the time-for instance, that the Wall was about to come down. You dwell on developments that seemed terribly important then but would otherwise be quite forgotten now because they led nowhere. You thus avoid perhaps the most powerful of all the optical illusions of historical writing.
One of the real pleasures of immersing yourself in the archives of a closed period is that you gradually, over months and years, see a pattern slowly emerging through the vast piles of paper, like a message written in invisible ink. But then you start wondering, Is this pattern really in the past itself? Or is it just in your own head? Or perhaps it is a pattern from the fabric of your own times. Each generation has its own Cromwell, its own French Revolution, its own Napoleon. Where contemporaries saw only a darkling plain, you discern a tidy park, a well-lit square, or most often a road leading to the next historical milestone. The French philosopher Henri Bergson talks of the "illusions of retrospective determinism."
American journalists writing books of recent history sometimes modestly refer to them as "the first draft of history." This implies that the scholar's second or third draft will always be an improvement. Well, in some ways it may be, having more sources and a longer perspective. But in others it may not be, because the scholar will not know, and therefore will find it more difficult to re-create, what it was really like at the time; how places looked and smelled, how people felt, what they didn't know. Writers work in different ways, but I can sum up my own experience in a doggerel line: There is nothing to compare with being there.
Kennan observed that history of the present lies "in that small and rarely visited field of literary effort where journalism, history and literature ... come together." Again, this seems to me exactly right. The corner of Europe where Germany, France, and Switzerland meet is known in German as the Dreiländereck, or Three Country Corner. "History of the present" lies in a Three Country Corner between journalism, history, and literature. Such frontier areas are always interesting but often tense. Sometimes working in this one feels like walking in a no-man's-land.
The shortest and best-marked frontier is that between history and journalism on the one side and literature on the other. Both good journalism and good history have some of the qualities of good fiction: imaginative sympathy with the characters involved, literary powers of selection, description, and evocation. Reportage or historical narrative is always an individual writer's story, shaped by his or her unique perception and arrangement of words on the page. It requires an effort not just of research but of imagination to get inside the experience of the people you are writing about. To this extent, the historian or journalist does work like a novelist. We acknowledge this implicitly when we talk of "Michelet's Napoleon" as opposed to "Taine's Napoleon" or "Carlyle's Napoleon."
Yet there is a sharp and fundamental difference, which concerns the kind of truth being sought. The novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who played fast and loose with all facts, including those about his own life, defended himself aggressively. "I'm interested in truth not facts," he said, "and I'm old enough to know the difference." In a sense, every novelist can say that. No journalist or historian should. In this, we also differ from the father of contemporary history. Thucydides felt free to put words into Pericles' mouth, as a novelist world. We do not. Our "characters" are real people, and the larger truths we seek have to be made from the bricks and mortar of facts. What did the prime minister say exactly? Was it before or after the explosion in the Sarajevo marketplace, and whose mortar actually fired the fatal shell?
Some postmodernists disagree. They suggest that the work of historians should be judged like that of fiction writers, for its rhetorical power and capacity of imaginative conviction, not for some illusory factual truth. Eric Hobsbawm's given a finely measured response: "It is essential" he writes, "for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, being literary compositions, the raw material of those fictions is verifiable fact."
That applies equally to journalism. We all know about fabrications at the bottom end of journalism, in the gutter press. Unfortunately, the frontier with fiction is also violated at the top end of journalism, especially in reportage that aspires to be literature. Any reportage worth reading involves rearranging material, highlighting, and, to some extent, turning real people into characters in a drama. But the line is crossed when quotations are invented or the order of events is changed. There is one genre of modern journalism, the "drama-documentary" or "faction," which does this avowedly. Faction is, so to speak, honestly dishonest. But more often this is done behind a mask of spare authenticity.
The precedents are distinguished. John Reed's account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, is probably one of the most influential pieces of reportage ever written. Yet he spoke virtually no Russian, regularly made up dialogue, offered secondhand accounts as firsthand, mixed up dates, and added imaginative detail. As Neal Ascherson observes, in a fine essay on his work, Reed "gives a thrilling account of Lenin's appearance at a closed Bolshevik meeting in Smolny on 3 November, allegedly communicated to him outside the door by Volodarsky as the meeting went on. No such meeting took place. "
To save us from Reed's disease and to spoil our best stories, great American journals such as The New Yorker employ fact-checkers. As they drag their fine combs through your text, it is horrible to find how many small errors of fact have slipped into your notebook or intruded on the path from notebook to text. But sooner or later you come to the passages, often the most important ones, that they annotate in the margin, "On author." This means you are the only source for the fact (if fact it be) that, for example, a church door in the Krajina was stained with blood, or a Kosovo rebel leader said what your notebook records that he said. Then you are alone with your notebook and your conscience. Did he really say that?
Ideally, I suppose, one should be permanently wired for sound, like a superspy. Or, even better, have a miniature video camera implanted in one's skull. And certainly some of the very best contemporary history has been done on television. I think of documentary series such as The Death of Yugoslavia. Although the television camera can also be made to lie by tendentious selection and manipulative editing, at best it brings you closer than any other medium to how things really were.
For the writer, however, the conventional, handheld, visible tape recorder and television camera have major disadvantages. They are cumbersome, even in their latest, slimmed-down, high-tech versions. Try using one at the same time as taking notes during a fast-moving demonstration. It is, in practice, very difficult to see simultaneously with both the camera's and the writer's eye. You're always liable to miss the telling detail that is vital to good reportage because you're fiddling with a tape or lens. And then you keep worrying about whether and what they are recording. Tape recorders and cameras put people off. Politicians and so-called ordinary people speak less naturally and freely as soon as the machines come out. Worse still, cameras and microphones also turn people on. Demonstrators or soldiers strike heroic poses and make portentous statements they would not otherwise make. So these apparently neutral, mindless recorders of reality actually change it by their mere presence. Yet even the visible notebook does that.
I occasionally use a tape recorder for an important conversation, but my inseparable companion is a pocket notebook. The notebook is often open when the person is speaking, but sometimes, when I think they will talk more freely or simply when walking or eating or whatever, it is not. Then I write the conversation down as soon as possible afterward. I am obsessed with accuracy and, after twenty years, rather well practiced in this kind of remembering. But as I look back through my notebooks there is always this nagging concern: Did he really say that?
Take the opening passage of my reportage from Serbia in March 1997: the student named Momcîlo exclaiming "I just want to live in a normal country," and so on. Now Momcîlo said this, in his imperfect English, as we hurried through the streets of Belgrade toward a students' meeting. I wrote it down as soon as we got there. If I had a tape recording of what he actually told me, it would probably be slightly different-a bit more awkward and less sharp. But I don't have a tape recording. The verifiable historical truth of that fragment of the past is gone for good. You just have to trust me. A little later, I relate excited exchanges at the student meeting. These I scribbled down as they happened. But I don't speak Serbian, so what you read is my interpreter's version and we both have to trust her.
Altogether, the business of language is crucial. Most of what is quoted in this book was said or written in languages I understand. But some, especially from Albanian and the southern Slav languages now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Macedonian, was translated for me by an interpreter, with the inevitable loss of accuracy and nuance. The first thing to ask of anyone writing about anywhere is, Does he or she know the language?
Finally, it seems to me, the key to trust is not the technical apparatus of audiovisual recording and sourcing and fact-checking, invaluable though that is. It is a quality that may best be described as veracity. No one will ever be completely accurate. There is a margin of unavoidable error and, so to speak, necessary license if cacophonous, Babel-like reality is to be turned into readable prose. But the reader must be convinced that an author has a habit of accuracy, that he is genuinely trying to get at all the relevant facts, and that he will nor play fast and loose with them for literary effect. The reader should feel that while the author may not actually have a video recording of what he is describing, he would always like to.
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a model of this kind of veracity. The book is a piece of literature. It is inaccurate in many details, not least because Orwell's notebooks were stolen by the communist goons who came to arrest him as a Trotskyist. Yet you don't doubt for a single moment that he is striving for the greatest possible accuracy, for the fact-based truth that must always set apart the plains of history and journalism from the magic mountains of fiction.
The frontier between journalism and history is the longest in our Three Country Corner. It is also the least well marked and therefore the most tense and disputed. I can testify to this, having lived on both sides and in between. In journalism, to describe a piece as "rather academic"-meaning jargon heavy, boring, unreadable-is the surest path to the spike. In academe, it's a put-down to say that somebody's work is "journalistic," meaning superficial, racy, and generally not serious. "Contemporary history?" sniffed an elderly don when I returned to my Oxford college from a job in journalism at the end of the 1980s. "You mean journalism with footnotes?"
I think it's important to understand that the reasons why so much is made of the differences between journalism and academic or professional history have at least as much to do with the practical exigencies, self-images, and neuroses of the two professions as they have with the real intellectual substance of the two crafts. Granted, the qualities of bad journalism and bad history are very different: sensationalist, intrusive, populist tosh with millions of readers on the one side; overspecialized, badly argued, ill-written doctorates with no readers on the other. But the virtues of good journalism and good history are very similar: exhaustive, scrupulous research; a sophisticated, critical approach to the sources; a strong sense of time and place; imaginative sympathy with all sides; logical argument; clear and vivid prose. Was Macaulay, in his essays for the Edinburgh Review, a historian or a journalist? Both, of course.
Yet, in modern Western societies, profession is a defining feature of personal identity, and the professions that are closest together take most pains to distinguish themselves. I say modern Western societies, incidentally, because this was not so true in the communist world, where the most important social identification was with a broad class: intelligentsia, workers, or peasants. One of the interesting experiences of the last decade in formerly communist parts of Europe has been to see friends rapidly becoming differentiated by profession, Western style. Where once they were all fellow members of the intelligentsia, now they are academics, lawyers, publishers, journalists, doctors, and bankers, with diverging ways of life, styles of dress, homes, incomes, and attitudes.
Now, because of the ways in which the professions of journalism and history have developed and because of the edginess between them, the writing of "history of the present" has tended to fall between the two. That no-man's-land is perhaps wider and more tense than it was when Lewis Namier put aside eighteenth-century English politics to chart the European diplomatic history of his own times and Hugh Trevor-Roper turned from Archbishop Laud to write The Last Days of Hitler
Every profession has its characteristic fault. If I had to summarize in a word, I would say that the characteristic fault of journalistic writing is superficiality and that of academic writing is unreality. Journalists have to write so much, and they are so pressed for time. Sometimes they are "parachuted" into countries or situations about which they know nothing and expected to report on them within hours. Hence the famous, horrible line 'Anyone here been raped and speak English?" Then their copy is cut and rewritten by editors and subeditors who are working to even tighter deadlines. And, anyway, tomorrow is another day, another piece.
Academics, by contrast, can take years to finish a single article. They can (and sometimes do) take infinite pains to check facts, names, quotations, texts, and contexts, to consider and reconsider the validity of an interpretation. But they can also spend a life describing war without ever seeing a shot fired in anger. Witnessing real life is not what they are supposed---or funded-to do. Methodology, footnotes, and positioning in some ongoing academic debate can seem as important as working out what really happened and why. Participants in the worlds they describe sometimes throw up their hands in laughter and despair at the unreality of what comes out.
Of course, I could equally dwell on the characteristic virtue of each side, which is the opposite of the other's characteristic fault: depth in scholarship, realism in journalism. The interesting question is, Has it gotten worse or better? Well, some things have improved. If you read what passed for contemporary history in Britain in the 1920s, you find a bluff amateurism unthinkable today. In journalism, the growth of world television-news services such as CNN, Reuters, and BBC World Television and that of documentation on the Internet offers wonderfully rich new sources for present history. But, on the whole, I think it has gotten worse.
There is still a handful of great international newspapers of record. Top of my personal short list would be The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, The Financial Times, Le Monde in France, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the German-speaking world. You can generally believe what you read in these papers. Yet even with this select group, it is astonishing how many discrepancies you find if you buy them all and compare their accounts of the same event. By and large, they do still separate fact and opinion, although there are exceptions. For example, the coverage of the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was for years distorted by the pro-Croat views of one of that paper's publishers.
In my view, the foreign reporting in the leading American newspapers is the best in the world. Senior, highly educated American journalists are proud to describe themselves as a "reporter," whereas in Britain every twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college wants to be a "columnist" or "commentator. " Standards of editorial accuracy and fact-checking are second to none, and corrections are published when errors are made. Moreover, extensive space is given to foreign coverage. You have a definite sense that what happens almost anywhere in the world matters, because the country in which the paper appears is a world power. What was true of The Times of London a hundred years ago is true of The New York Times today. For an Englishman, the contrast in quality of foreign coverage between the New York and the London Times is now painful to observe.
Outside this small group, the value as historical record of most other newspapers in most other countries is slight, and diminishing. This is particularly true in Britain, where the fierce commercial competition for readers-above all between the groups headed by the Australian-American owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch, and the Canadian proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black-has resulted in a further erosion of the journalism of record. I'm talking not just about the quite astonishing levels of routine inaccuracy and distortion, for reasons of both sensationalism and ideology-although in Britain this is especially apparent in anything to do with the European Union. As important are two other traits: featurism and futurism.
A large part of newspapers is now taken up not, as their name would suggest, with news, but with features: lifestyle, beauty, fashion, medicine, food, holidays, etc. This is what readers are said to want. Meanwhile, in what remains of the news pages, there is the more subtle disease of futurism. More and more space is devoted to speculating about what may happen tomorrow rather than describing what happened yesterday-the original mission of journalism. When read any time after today, this stuff is useless, except as an illustration of what people did not know at the time. Reading my own pieces for this book, I am again reminded that nothing ages more quickly than prophecy-even when it was prescient.
For all these reasons, the history of the present gets written less in its first natural home, the newspapers. But there are also problems on the academic side of the frontier. Some professional historians do tackle subjects in recent history. Even the Oxford history faculty; long accounted conservative (with a small c), now has a history syllabus that is open-ended toward the present. Nonetheless, in my experience, most academic historians are still reluctant to venture much closer to the present than the canonical thirty years after which official papers are released in most democracies. They still incline to leave this territory to colleagues who have made it their own in subjects such as International Relations, Political Science, Security Studies, European Studies, or Refugee Studies.
Yet these relatively new specialisms often feel the need to establish their academic credentials, their claim to the high name of Science (in the German sense of Wissenschaft), by a heavy dose of theory, jargon, abstraction, or quantification. Otherwise-horror of horrors-their products might be confused with journalism. Even when those involved have been trained to write history, the results often suffer from overspecialization, unreadable prose, and that characteristic fault: unreality. At the same time, the pressures of American-style "publish or perish" mean that a huge amount of academic work in progress is hastily thrown into book form. Here, too, the ratio of quantity to quality has surely changed for the worse.
So I maintain that, for all its pitfalls, the literary enterprise of writing "history of the present" has always been worth attempting. It is even more so now because of the way history is made and recorded in our time. Sadly, it has suffered from developments in the professions of journalism and academic history.
Yet you can soon have enough of such methodological self-examination. Altogether, the habit of compulsive labeling, pigeonholing, and compartmentalizing seems to me a disease of modern intellectual life. Let the work speak for itself, In the end, only one thing matters: Is the result true, important, interesting, or moving? If it is, never mind the label. If it isn't, then it's not worth reading anyway.
T.G.A., Oxford-Stanford, March 2000
(C) 2000 Timothy Garton Ash All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-50353-6
==========

Review by Roger Cohen:


A journalist looks at the last decade through the perspective of a historian.


Related Link


By ROGER COHEN



HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches From Europe in the 1990s.
By Timothy Garton Ash.
389 pp. New York:
Random House. $29.95.


With the cold war won and Wall Street on a winning streak, America's interest in Europe has waned. Yet it has been a convulsive decade. Violence took more European lives in the 1990's than in the entire 44-year period of the cold war. Several post-Communist societies muddled their way toward democracy and the market economy. Another, Yugoslavia, fissured in a blood bath. The wars of its destruction may finally have ended with the ouster this month of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's ruthless leader. Saying goodbye and good riddance to the full exercise of their sovereignty, several West European states created a common currency, the euro. The thinly-veiled political objective behind the money could scarcely have been bolder: the forging, one day, of a United States of Europe.
These are the weighty themes of Timothy Garton Ash's ''History of the Present,'' a collection of essays and dispatches from one the most penetrating observers of Europe's recent transformation. A rather self-conscious introduction announces that the author has sought to combine ''the crafts of historian and journalist,'' an objective that in lesser hands might merely have yielded mediocre illustrations of both. But Garton Ash has the wherewithal for his ambitious genre. His strongest pieces combine a quick eye, a gift for concision and an ability to discern the deep currents of history in the restless waters of the present. Pith, prescience and intellectual passion often coalesce to provide a powerful European portrait.
The essays in Garton Ash's book, most of them previously published, form what he calls a kaleidoscope. At times, the patterns are vivid, the images brilliantly illuminating. At others, the fragments are disjointed or simply repetitive. We hear not once but twice from the anonymous French businessman who comments acidly that expansion of the European Union to include post-Communist central Europe should always be talked about but never considered. The term ''demokratura,'' used to describe an authoritarian regime dressed up in the garb of democracy, returns with irritating frequency to characterize governments as different as Milosevic's murderous Serbia and Vladimir Meciar's messy Slovakia. And the eviction of ''innocent'' Germans from Eastern Europe after the end of Hitler's terror appears to be something of an obsession.
But when Garton Ash, a fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, explores his favorite themes, the results are often formidable. Two of the most important essays are ''Catching the Wrong Bus?'' and ''The Case for Liberal Order.'' In them, he argues that European leaders made a cardinal error a decade ago by setting monetary union in the western part of the continent as their chief political priority. That priority should have been the swift integration of post-Communist countries into the democratic order of the European Union: ''They put Maastricht before Sarajevo,'' he writes, referring to the Dutch city where the treaty on the euro was agreed to in 1991.
His case is compelling, and impressive for the cogent consistency with which he has argued it since the Berlin Wall fell. No post-Communist state has joined the European Union; dates for entry keep getting postponed. Meanwhile, monetary union -- decided in haste and on high in order to tie a reunited Germany to an integrated Europe -- is suffering from its largely undemocratic conception and from the absence of a coherent, broadly acceptable political project to accompany it. Hence, in part, the weakness of the euro, which has lost 25 percent of its value in 21 months. A European money probably needs a European government to administer it; but not enough Europeans want such a government, at least not now.
As a result, Garton Ash is deeply suspicious of what he sees as a drive to push Europeans toward more union than they want. His is a conservative Atlanticism, that of a British intellectual deeply engaged in Europe, enraged by the myopia of so many Little Englanders, but still suspicious of too much centralizing idealism on a Continent so ravaged, still convinced that avoidance of the worst is a worthy goal.
Disaster, he suggests, is not impossible. Germans, who have abandoned the much-loved symbol of their postwar nationhood, the mark, may come to view the euro as another Versailles. A ''serious danger'' exists that the French-German ''magnetic core'' of an integrating Europe could come to exert ''magnetic repulsion.'' In a Continent now marked by the rise of populist, rightist politicians like Jorg Haider in Austria, and increasingly wary of the notion of a European ''superstate,'' such warnings are hard to ignore. But the political investment in the euro is probably too great, and the ultimate American interest in a stable Europe too keen, for an implosion to come to pass.
In its southeastern Balkan corner, Europe has already had its share of cataclysms in the past decade. Garton Ash backs into the story in the strangest of ways, with an account of the expulsion of the Serbs by a resurgent Croatian Army in 1995. This is a bit like beginning an account of World War II with the story of those Sudeten Germans ethnically cleansed after 1945. He refers to this expulsion more than once as ''the biggest single exodus'' of the Bosnian war. In fact, that dubious accolade belongs to the more than 750,000 Muslims driven out by the Serbs as they swept through Bosnia in the first months of the war in 1992. This exodus was also the result of one devastating, coordinated sweep. Yet the Serbian concentration camps through which many of the Muslims were processed merit not a mention.
This lacuna is doubly strange because Garton Ash gets so much right. ''Hitler,'' he writes, ''should have been stopped when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936; Milosevic at the siege of Vukovar in 1991.'' Indeed. And his critique of the no-body-bags approach of Bill Clinton and the Pentagon in Bosnia and later Kosovo is superb: ''It is a perverted moral code that will allow a million innocent civilians of another race to be made destitute because you are not prepared to risk the life of a single professional soldier of your own.'' As Garton Ash explains, thousands of ethnic Albanian lives were sacrificed in 1999 because there was no readiness to accompany the NATO bombardment of Kosovo with the deployment of a ground force that could stop the marauding Serbian killers. Years before that, the dismemberment of Bosnia went as far as it did because of similar hesitations. For President Clinton to claim Bosnia as a success story, as he has often done since 1995, is simply extraordinary. Garton Ash now sees little alternative to allowing ethnic separation to be completed in the Balkans, a process that he hopes will eventually open the way for their reintegration. This, he suggests, is the European way; to fight it is to try ''to freeze history.''
Of course, the United States and its allies are trying to prove him wrong by preserving some semblance of mixed societies in Bosnia and even Kosovo. In Bosnia, they may succeed because they have something to build on; Garton Ash underestimates the reality of a Bosnian identity even among many Serbs there. In Kosovo, however, any meaningful multiethnic project is almost surely doomed at this stage. Meanwhile, with Garton Ash, we are left to rue the painful fact that ''the democratization of Yugoslavia, and of Bosnia in particular, would, had it worked, have been a unique example of a part of Europe moving peacefully from a truly multiethnic society under an undemocratic (imperial, then Communist) political roof to such a society within a democratic framework.''
It is this sort of perception, and writing, that makes ''History of the Present'' essential reading. Garton Ash sometimes seems unsure of his role, assuming a highhanded pomposity that makes certain passages read like a ''History of My Presence.'' He is often scathing toward journalists, dismissing their ''color,'' their ''clichés'' and their ''Sarajevo safaris,'' and suggesting that CNN and Christiane Amanpour play fast and loose with the truth. Yet this is the craft he claims to be practicing, at least in part, and the role of journalists in the Balkans -- not least the discovery of the camps in Bosnia in 1992 -- has surely done more honor to the profession than damage.
At the start of his book, throwing in the towel on his convoluted attempts to define history-cum-journalism, Garton Ash writes that the final test must be this: ''Is the result true, important, interesting or moving? If it is, never mind the label. If it isn't, then it's not worth reading anyway.'' So let us apply the test. True? Most of the time. Important? Sometimes. Interesting? Always. Moving? Surprisingly so.




Roger Cohen, the Berlin bureau chief of The Times, is the author of ''Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo.''

quarta-feira, 30 de julho de 2014

Roger Cohen: um judeu não sionista fala sobre a guerra em Gaza (NYT)

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Zionism and Its Discontents


Zionism and Israel’s War with Hamas in Gaza

Roger Coehen
The New York Times, July 29, 2014

My great-grandfather’s brother, Michael Adler, was a distinguished rabbi who in 1916 compiled the “Prayer Book for Jewish Sailors and Soldiers” at the front during World War I. As “chaplain,” he toured battlefields administering last rites. At the end of the war he asked if British Jews had done their duty.
“Did those British citizens of the House of Israel to whom equality of rights and equality of opportunity were granted by the State some sixty years ago, did these men and women do their duty in the ordeal of battle?” he wrote. “Our answer is a clear and unmistakable YES! English Jews have every reason to be satisfied with the degree of their participation both at home and on the battlefronts in the struggle for victory. Let the memory of our sacred dead — who number over 2,300 — testify to this.”
The question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they French or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the Christian societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them. Theodor Herzl, witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case, wrote “The Jewish State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full acceptance for the Jews would never come.
Herzl was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land. Jews would never again go meekly to the slaughter.
The ravages of European nonacceptance endure. I see within my own family how the disappearance of a Jewish woman grabbed by Nazis on the streets of Krakow in 1941 can devour her descendants. I understand the rage of an Israeli, Naomi Ragen, whose words were forwarded by a cousin: “And I think of the rest of Europe, who rounded up our grandparents and great-grandparents, and relatives — men, women and children — and sent them off to be gassed, no questions asked. And I think: They are now the moral arbiters of the free world? They are telling the descendants of the people they murdered how to behave when other anti-Semites want to kill them?”
Those anti-Semites would be Hamas, raining terror on Israel, whose annihilation they seek. No state, goes the Israeli case, would not respond with force to such provocation. If there are more than 1,000 Palestinian deaths (including 200 children), and more than 50 Israeli deaths, Israel argues, it is the fault of Hamas, for whom Palestinian victims are the most powerful anti-Israeli argument in the court of world opinion.
I am a Zionist because the story of my forebears convinces me that Jews needed the homeland voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, one Arab — in Mandate Palestine. I am a Zionist who believes in the words of Israel’s founding charter of 1948 declaring that the nascent state would be based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”
What I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.
This, as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.
The Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If Benjamin Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause with Palestinian moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He has not. Hamas is vile. I would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is also the product of a situation that Israel has reinforced rather than sought to resolve.
This corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the Zionism in which I still believe.


sexta-feira, 23 de maio de 2014

Europeus equivocados vao votar pelo novo totalitarismo, ou pelo velho fascismo - Roger Cohen (NYT)

Poor Angry Magnetic Europe
MAY 22, 2014

BERLIN — Europe at the centenary of the war that devoured it is voting in elections for the European Parliament that will no doubt reflect the anger, disillusionment and boredom of people inclined to cast their ballots for an array of protest parties, many from the xenophobic right, some from the pander-to-Putin left.
Political sentiment across the Continent has converged at a grumpy and small-minded nadir. There is anger about high unemployment. There is pessimism over the future. There is irritation at immigration. There is alienation from the European Union. What, the chorus goes, has Brussels ever done for me? The answer, of course, is that it has brought peace, removed borders and spread once unimaginable prosperity. But this achievement is no longer enough or no longer deemed relevant.
In some ways Europe’s mood resembles America’s. Focus has narrowed and solidarity atrophied. Europe, like America, does not want to die for anyone else. It has turned inward, wanting its own problems solved, and damn the Libyans and Syrians and Ukrainians and whoever else may be making demands through their plight.
Anyone who believes the spread of freedom, democracy and the rule of law matters is a “warmonger.” The sharing economy is in vogue because it affords a better deal on a car ride or a room. Sharing politics is not because it may involve sacrifice for faraway people with strange names.
So the National Front in France, and the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, and Jobbik in Hungary and Die Linke (the Left) in Germany — parties from right and left that have expressed varying degrees of admiration for President Vladimir Putin and his homophobic irredentism (Russian-speaking gays need not apply for admission to the imperium) — are all likely to benefit from a diffuse anger, in which anti-Americanism mingles with general spleen.
Never have the idea and the ideal of the 28-member European Union been so weakened, at least within its borders, to the point that several fringe parties take Putin’s Eurasian Union with its promise of good times in Belarus seriously. Just outside the Union it is a different story. Europe is magnetic still. The dissonance between the Union as perceived by many of its more than 500 million citizens, and the Union as it is idealized and ached for by millions on its fringes or in faraway lands, is complete.
The European Parliament election coincides with a critical election Sunday in Ukraine, where Putin has created havoc by annexing Crimea, dispatching thugs to stir unrest in the eastern part of the country, and inventing a “fascist” threat in Kiev to conceal his own growing affinities with such politics (his beloved, much lamented Soviet Union of course allied with Nazi Germany in 1939 before Hitler tore up the pact in 1941; attraction to fascism is nothing new in Moscow).
On Kiev’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, where Ukrainians died in numbers to escape the rule of an incompetent kleptomaniac backed by Putin, the European Union flag flies in several places. It is equally visible on surrounding streets. It is draped down the facade of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. It stands for something important in Kiev, something that seems almost unimaginable to Europeans in the confusion of their bile: the glowing possibility of freedom and dignity and pluralism, the possibility of a normal life.
 “Europe is a promise of liberty,” said Nataliya Popovych, an activist in the Maidan movement. “As for Putin’s Eurasian Union, we have been in that cage before. Why would we go back? Through Maidan Ukrainians killed Homo Sovieticus in themselves. In Russia and some parts of the east of Ukraine, Homo Sovieticus is still alive.”
It is not dead in Western Europe, either. As my colleague Andrew Higgins noted, Aymeric Chauprade, the National Front’s top European Parliament candidate for the Paris region, trooped off to Moscow last year to declare that, “Russia has become the hope of the world against new totalitarianism.” We live in a time when sentences need to be turned on their heads. The “new totalitarianism” is of course emanating from Moscow.
But Europe is suddenly full of what Germans now call the Putinversteher — literally someone who understands Putin, more loosely a Putin apologist. Europeans of different stripes see him standing up to America, incarnating “family values,” countering a loathed European Union, and just being tough. Germans in surprising numbers are discovering their inner sympathy for Russia, a complex emotion in which anti-Americanism, romanticism, guilt and gratitude for Moscow’s acceptance of unification all play a part. The old temptation in Germany to look eastward is not entirely overcome after all.
Europeans would do well to lift their gaze from the small world of their current anger toward those blue and gold flags fluttering on the Maidan, the better to recall what freedom means and with what sacrifice it has been attained.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 23, 2014, in The International New York Times.