Cold War: deja vu, all over again? Opinion Steven Erlanger - NYT

NATO’s Hopes for Russia Have Turned to Dismay

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By STEVEN ERLANGER

The New York Times, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

LONDON — The NATO summit meeting last week in Wales was dominated byRussia’s military intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.
The rift with President Vladimir V. Putinof Russia was an extraordinary contrast to the last NATO summit in Britain, in 1990. A year after the Berlin Wall fell, NATO issued the London Declaration, asserting that “Europe has entered a new, promising era.” Eastern Europe is liberating itself, the declaration said. “The Soviet Union has embarked on the long journey toward a free society. The walls that once confined people and ideas are collapsing,” and those people “are choosing a Europe whole and free.”
The hopes expressed in that declaration 24 years ago seem so much dust today, and among many Russia watchers, there is considerable sadness.

“I could weep for the hopes that we had in the early 1990s,” said Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia, now at the Center for European Reform. “The walls that divided us were collapsing, and Putin is building them up again.”

Graphic | How Much Europe Depends on Russian EnergyMap of European energy imports that come from Russia.

Rather than moving toward democracy and individual liberties, Mr. Bond said, the Russian government obsesses about public uprisings like those in Ukraine in 2004 and this year. “Putin wants to show that you can’t have a real democracy in a former Soviet state,” Mr. Bond said. “He’s scared witless by the idea of people power.”
For Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, there is sorrow, too. “We Balts are the first who would like to have good, predictable relations with Russia,” he said. “But to have a strategic partnership with Russia,” as NATO has tried to establish for 20 years, “is not possible now.”
Diplomatic dialogue with Moscow remains vital, he said. “But it’s important to have dialogue based on rules, and now people are opening their eyes, realizing something serious is happening.”
There is plenty of blame to go around, said Kadri Liik, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Boris N. Yeltsin, independent Russia’s first leader, failed “in defining Russia’s new place in the world and its engagement with the West,” she said. “He was adept at destroying the system but not at building a new one.”

Interactive Feature |Ukraine Crisis in MapsThe latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.

Russian democrats were too busy with domestic change to worry much about foreign policy. Asked about NATO, Boris Y. Nemtsov, once deputy prime minister, said simply, “I was responsible for Gazprom,” the huge company created from a Soviet ministry.
Mr. Yeltsin presided over the chaotic privatization of Soviet industry, which led to oligarchic theft of public assets. “Yeltsin became delegitimized over privatization, and liberal views toward the West became delegitimized as well,” Ms. Liik said.
Some wonder whether Russia’s break with the West was almost accidental, set off by unforeseen events in Ukraine.
But James Sherr, author of “Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia’s Influence Abroad,” believes that Mr. Putin was heading toward rupture regardless. “Putin has had clear strategic objectives, even fixations, from the start, but he has pursued them by tactical improvisation,” Mr. Sherr said.
Mr. Putin is not just aiming to restore Russian primacy in the former Soviet Union, he said. “One of his fixations is Ukraine,” whose independence Mr. Putin regards as a crime.
At the same time, Mr. Sherr said, “we in the West had a very specific, hopeful, illusory idea about the end of the Soviet Union and the kind of Russia we’d be dealing with.” But even by 1994, Russian democrats were being called “romantics,” if not yet traitors. “I think Putin or something like Putin was almost preordained from this whole period of romanticism and illusions,” Mr. Sherr said. “That was fueled by the equally naïve projection of a Western liberal model of economic and political change on Russia.”
Mr. Putin has miscalculated in Ukraine because he failed to understand how much Ukrainians had changed, Ms. Liik said. But the West has its own blindness, Mr. Sherr said. Ukraine “is a crisis for us because of the things we knew and pretended not to know.”

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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.”

A Franca, a caminho da decadencia (e o Brasil vai atras) - NYTimes

The New York Times, August 24, 2013

A Proud Nation Ponders How to Halt Its Slow Decline

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — For decades, Europeans have agonized over the power and role of Germany — the so-called German question — given its importance to European stability and prosperity.

Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?

At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.

Those close to Mr. Hollande say that he is largely aware of what must be done to cut government spending and reduce regulations weighing down the economy, and is carefully gauging the political winds. But what appears to be missing is the will; France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.

Changing any country is difficult. But the challenge in France seems especially hard, in part because of the nation’s amour-propre and self-image as a European leader and global power, and in part because French life is so comfortable for many and the day of reckoning still seems far enough away, especially to the country’s small but powerful unions.

The turning of the business cycle could actually be a further impediment in that sense, because as the European economy slowly mends, the French temptation will be to hope that modest economic growth will again mask, like a tranquilizer, the underlying problems.

The French are justifiably proud of their social model. Health care and pensions are good, many French retire at 60 or younger, five or six weeks of vacation every summer is the norm, and workers with full-time jobs have a 35-hour week and significant protections against layoffs and firings.

But in a more competitive world economy, the question is not whether the French social model is a good one, but whether the French can continue to afford it. Based on current trends, the answer is clearly no, not without significant structural changes — in pensions, in taxes, in social benefits, in work rules and in expectations.

But Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party and the harder French left have not seemed to grasp the famous insight of the prince’s nephew in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s renowned novel of social upheaval, “The Leopard,” that “everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same.” Sometimes, talking to French politicians and workers, one has the feeling that they all consider themselves communards and revolutionaries, fighters on the left — but at the same time, like the far right, they wish to lock into place the comfort of the known.

In May 1968, students at the University of Paris in Nanterre began what they thought was a revolution. French students in neckties and bobby socks threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that the sclerotic postwar system must change.

Today, at Nanterre, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are demanding that nothing change at all. For Raphaël Glucksmann, who led his own first strike in high school in 1995, members of his generation have nostalgia for their rebellious fathers but no stomach for a fight in hard economic times.

“The young people march now to reject all reforms,” he said. “We see no alternatives. We’re a generation without bearings.”

The Socialists have become a conservative party, desperately trying to preserve the victories of the last century. Many in the party, like the anti-globalization campaigner Arnaud Montebourg, now the minister in charge of industrial renewal — let alone those further to the left — seem to believe that France would be fine if only the rest of the world would just disappear, or at least work a little less hard.

There is nonetheless an underlying understanding that there will be little lasting gain without structural changes to the state-heavy French economy. The warning signs are everywhere: French unemployment and youth unemployment are at record levels; growth is slow compared with Germany, Britain, the United States or Asia; government spending represents nearly 57 percent of gross domestic product, the highest in the euro zone, and is 11 percentage points higher than Germany. The government employs 90 civil servants per 1,000 residents, compared with 50 in Germany.

Hourly wage costs are high and social spending represents 32 percent of G.D.P., highest among the industrialized countries; real wage increases outpace productivity growth; national debt is more than 90 percent of G.D.P.

About 82 percent of the new jobs created last year were temporary contracts, up from 70 percent only five years ago, not the kind of full-time work that opens the door to the French middle class. That keeps nearly an entire generation living precariously, no matter how hard people study or work.

Last year, France was ranked 28th out of the 60 most competitive economies in the world, according to the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. The United States was first. Even China, at 21, and Japan, at 24, outranked France. In the World Bank’s ranking of “ease of doing business,” France ranks 34th, compared with 7th for Britain and 20th for Germany.

In Amiens, in the north of France, Goodyear owns two tire factories. The work force at one has grudgingly accepted a change in work schedules, preserving its factory. The workers at the other have refused, and Goodyear is trying (not so easy in France) to shut it down, throwing more people out of work. Claude Dimoff, a former union leader at the more flexible plant, said: “I’m part of a generation that experienced the common program of the left. We had visions for the future, and different values, but all this is forgotten. The left has completely deviated from its promises.”

The country retains plenty of strengths. France is the world’s fifth-largest economy, with strong traditions in management, science and innovation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower in France than in most Western countries, although it is growing.

When the French work, they work hard; labor productivity, perhaps the single most important indicator of an economy’s potential, is still relatively high, if dropping. But with long holidays and the 35-hour week, the French work fewer hours than most competitors, putting an extra strain on corporations and the economy.

Large French companies compete globally; there are more French companies in the Fortune 500 than any other European country. But the bulk of their employees are abroad, and there are few of the midsize companies that are the backbone of Germany. Ninety percent of French companies have 10 or fewer employees and fear expansion because of extra tax burdens and strict labor regulations.

Even in France’s justly famous agricultural sector, the shrinking number of farmers has not been matched by a similar reduction in bureaucrats. Jacques Galaup, a farmer near Gaillac in the southwest, spoke with disdain of the number of hours he had to spend on paperwork — and estimated that there was probably one functionary now for every farmer.

Mr. Galaup showed off his records on the fewer than 30 cows that he raises. The files are thick and all done by hand; computers have barely made it to most levels of government.

In poll after poll, the French insist that they want renovation and modernization, so long as it does not touch them. That is always the political challenge, and Mr. Hollande’s conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, is considered to have failed in his promise to make serious structural changes.

While complaining constantly, for example, about the horrors of the 35-hour workweek, Mr. Sarkozy never dumped it, but simply played with the tax consequences of overtime, a change that Mr. Hollande immediately revoked. One of Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers, Alain Minc, who tried to get him interested in Germany’s social market revisions, once admitted that Mr. Sarkozy was simply afraid to confront the unions and the social uproar that real change would provoke.

There is a broad consensus that real social and structural renovation can be carried out only by the left. But that can happen only if Mr. Hollande, who has a legislative majority, is willing to confront his own party in the name of the future, as the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder did a decade ago with a series of legal modifications that now get much of the credit for Germany’s revival.

Mr. Hollande says he believes in “dialogue with social partners,” which has so far produced relative peace but little substantive change. With centrist union agreement, he has slightly loosened the labor market, making flex time easier and taxing short-term contracts more steeply. And in 2014 he is moving about $27 billion of social costs from corporations to the regressive value-added tax.

But what can seem bold in local terms tends to yield minor results, and these modest efforts have taken place at the height of Mr. Hollande’s power, which is inevitably declining.

In his book “The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis,” Matthew Cobb quotes a man named Boris Vildé, executed by the Nazis. His last words were: “I love France. I love this beautiful country. Yes, I know it can be small-minded, selfish, politically rotten and a victim of its old glory, but with all these faults it remains enormously human and will not sacrifice its stature.”

But by refusing to grapple with its underlying faults, many here say, that is exactly what it is doing.