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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador culpabilidade. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador culpabilidade. Mostrar todas as postagens

sábado, 15 de fevereiro de 2014

Quem leva a culpa pela Primeira Guerra Mundial?: ainda o debate entre historiadores (BBC)

World War One: 10 interpretations of who started WW1

Germany's Wilhelm II and Britain's King George V horse riding in BerlinRoyal cousins Wilhelm II and King George V went to war
As nations gear up to mark 100 years since the start of World War One, academic argument still rages over which country was to blame for the conflict.
Education Secretary for England Michael Gove's recent criticism of how the causes and consequences of the war are taught in schools has only stoked the debate further.
Here 10 leading historians give their opinion.
Sir Max Hastings - military historian
Germany
No one nation deserves all responsibility for the outbreak of war, but Germany seems to me to deserve most.

Lions led by donkeys?

General Officers of World War I by John Singer Sargent
It alone had power to halt the descent to disaster at any time in July 1914 by withdrawing its "blank cheque" which offered support to Austria for its invasion of Serbia.
I'm afraid I am unconvinced by the argument that Serbia was a rogue state which deserved its nemesis at Austria's hands. And I do not believe Russia wanted a European war in 1914 - its leaders knew that it would have been in a far stronger position to fight two years later, having completed its rearmament programme.
The question of whether Britain was obliged to join the European conflict which became inevitable by 1 August is almost a separate issue. In my own view neutrality was not a credible option because a Germany victorious on the continent would never afterwards have accommodated a Britain which still dominated the oceans and global financial system.
Sir Richard J Evans - Regius professor of history, University of Cambridge
Serbia
Serbia bore the greatest responsibility for the outbreak of WW1. Serbian nationalism and expansionism were profoundly disruptive forces and Serbian backing for the Black Hand terrorists was extraordinarily irresponsible. Austria-Hungary bore only slightly less responsibility for its panic over-reaction to the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne.
France encouraged Russia's aggressiveness towards Austria-Hungary and Germany encouraged Austrian intransigence. Britain failed to mediate as it had done in the previous Balkan crisis out of fear of Germany's European and global ambitions - a fear that was not entirely rational since Britain had clearly won the naval arms race by 1910.
Gavrilo Princip Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
The generally positive attitude of European statesmen towards war, based on notions of honour, expectations of a swift victory, and ideas of social Darwinism, was perhaps the most important conditioning factor. It is very important to look at the outbreak of the war in the round and to avoid reading back later developments - the German September Programme for example (an early statement of their war aims) - into the events of July-August 1914.
Dr Heather Jones - associate professor in international history, LSE
Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia
A handful of bellicose political and military decision-makers in Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia caused WW1.

World War One Centenary

WW1 recruitment poster
Relatively common before 1914, assassinations of royal figures did not normally result in war. But Austria-Hungary's military hawks - principal culprits for the conflict - saw the Sarajevo assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Bosnian Serb as an excuse to conquer and destroy Serbia, an unstable neighbour which sought to expand beyond its borders into Austro-Hungarian territories. Serbia, exhausted by the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 in which it had played a major role, did not want war in 1914.
Broader European war ensued because German political and military figures egged on Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally, to attack Serbia. This alarmed Russia, Serbia's supporter, which put its armies on a war footing before all options for peace had been fully exhausted.
This frightened Germany into pre-emptively declaring war on Russia and on Russia's ally France and launching a brutal invasion, partly via Belgium, thereby bringing in Britain, a defender of Belgian neutrality and supporter of France.
John Rohl - emeritus professor of history, University of Sussex
Austria-Hungary and Germany
WW1 did not break out by accident or because diplomacy failed. It broke out as the result of a conspiracy between the governments of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary to bring about war, albeit in the hope that Britain would stay out.
Kaiser Wilhelm IIKaiser Wilhelm II was eventually forced to abdicate
After 25 years of domination by Kaiser Wilhelm II with his angry, autocratic and militaristic personality, his belief in the clairvoyance of all crowned heads, his disdain for diplomats and his conviction that his Germanic God had predestined him to lead his country to greatness, the 20 or so men he had appointed to decide the policy of the Reich opted for war in 1914 in what they deemed to be favourable circumstances.
Germany's military and naval leaders, the predominant influence at court, shared a devil-may-care militarism that held war to be inevitable, time to be running out, and - like their Austrian counterparts - believed it would be better to go down fighting than to go on tolerating what they regarded as the humiliating status quo. In the spring of 1914, this small group of men in Berlin decided to make "the leap into the dark" which they knew their support for an Austrian attack on Serbia would almost certainly entail.
The fine-tuning of the crisis was left to the civilian chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, whose primary aim was to subvert diplomatic intervention in order to begin the war under the most favourable conditions possible. In particular, he wanted to convince his own people that Germany was under attack and to keep Britain out of the conflict.
Gerhard Hirschfeld - professor of modern and contemporary history, University of Stuttgart
Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Britain and Serbia
Long before the outbreak of hostilities Prussian-German conservative elites were convinced that a European war would help to fulfil Germany's ambitions for colonies and for military as well as political prestige in the world.
A rally in Trafalgar SquareBritain could have done more to avert war argue some
The actual decision to go to war over a relatively minor international crisis like the Sarajevo murder, however, resulted from a fatal mixture of political misjudgement, fear of loss of prestige and stubborn commitments on all sides of a very complicated system of military and political alliances of European states.
In contrast to the historian Fritz Fischer who saw German war aims - in particular the infamous September Programme of 1914 with its far-reaching economic and territorial demands - at the core of the German government's decision to go to war, most historians nowadays dismiss this interpretation as being far too narrow. They tend to place German war aims, or incidentally all other belligerent nations' war aims, in the context of military events and political developments during the war.
Dr Annika Mombauer - The Open University
Austria-Hungary and Germany
Whole libraries have been filled with the riddle of 1914. Was the war an accident or design, inevitable or planned, caused by sleepwalkers or arsonists? To my mind the war was no accident and it could have been avoided in July 1914. In Vienna the government and military leaders wanted a war against Serbia. The immediate reaction to the murder of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 was to seek redress from Serbia, which was thought to have been behind the assassination plot and which had been threatening Austria-Hungary's standing in the Balkans for some time. Crucially, a diplomatic victory was considered worthless and "odious". At the beginning of July, Austria's decision-makers chose war.
German general Paul von Hindenburg, centreGermany recalled Hindenburg, centre, from retirement when war broke out
But in order to implement their war against Serbia they needed support from their main ally Germany. Without Germany, their decision to fight against Serbia could not have been implemented. The Berlin government issued a "blank cheque" to its ally, promising unconditional support and putting pressure on Vienna to seize this golden opportunity. Both governments knew it was almost certain that Russia would come to Serbia's aid and this would turn a local war into a European one, but they were willing to take this risk.
Germany's guarantee made it possible for Vienna to proceed with its plans - a "no" from Berlin would have stopped the crisis in its tracks. With some delay Vienna presented an ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July which was deliberately unacceptable. This was because Austria-Hungary was bent on a war and Germany encouraged it because the opportunity seemed perfect. Victory still seemed possible whereas in a few years' time Russia and France would have become invincible. Out of a mixture of desperation and over-confidence the decision-makers of Austria-Hungary and Germany unleashed a war to preserve and expand their empires. The war that ensued would be their downfall.
Sean McMeekin - assistant professor of history at Koc University, Istanbul
Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Britain and Serbia
It is human nature to seek simple, satisfying answers, which is why the German war guilt thesis endures today.

Find out more

Michael Portillo
  • In BBC Radio 4's The Great War of Words Michael Portillo explores why responsibility for WW1 has been a fierce battle for meaning ever since 1914
Without Berlin's encouragement of a strong Austro-Hungarian line against Serbia after Sarajevo - the "blank cheque" - WW1 would clearly not have broken out. So Germany does bear responsibility.
But it is equally true that absent a terrorist plot launched in Belgrade the Germans and Austrians would not have faced this terrible choice. Civilian leaders in both Berlin and Vienna tried to "localise" conflict in the Balkans. It was Russia's decision - after Petersburg received its own "blank cheque" from Paris - to Europeanise the Austro-Serbian showdown which produced first a European and then - following Britain's entry - world conflagration. Russia, not Germany, mobilised first.
The resulting war, with France and Britain backing Serbia and Russia against two Central Powers, was Russia's desired outcome, not Germany's. Still, none of the powers can escape blame. All five Great Power belligerents, along with Serbia, unleashed Armageddon.
Prof Gary Sheffield - professor of war studies, University of Wolverhampton
Austria-Hungary and Germany
The war was started by the leaders of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Vienna seized the opportunity presented by the assassination of the archduke to attempt to destroy its Balkan rival Serbia. This was done in the full knowledge that Serbia's protector Russia was unlikely to stand by and this might lead to a general European war.
A postcard featuring Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II (right) and Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I (left)Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II were allies
Germany gave Austria unconditional support in its actions, again fully aware of the likely consequences. Germany sought to break up the French-Russian alliance and was fully prepared to take the risk that this would bring about a major war. Some in the German elite welcomed the prospect of beginning an expansionist war of conquest. The response of Russia, France and later Britain were reactive and defensive.
The best that can be said of German and Austrian leaders in the July crisis is that they took criminal risks with world peace.
Dr Catriona Pennell - senior lecturer in history, University of Exeter
Austria-Hungary and Germany
In my opinion, it is the political and diplomatic decision-makers in Germany and Austria-Hungary who must carry the burden of responsibility for expanding a localised Balkan conflict into a European and, eventually, global war. Germany, suffering from something of a "younger child" complex in the family of European empires, saw an opportunity to reconfigure the balance of power in their favour via an aggressive war of conquest.
War is declared, London 1914Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914
On 5 July 1914 it issued the "blank cheque" of unconditional support to the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire (trying to reassert its dominance over the rebellious Serbia), despite the likelihood of this sparking war with Russia, an ally of France and Great Britain. However, Austria-Hungary's actions should not be ignored.
The ultimatum it issued to Serbia on 23 July was composed in such a way that its possibility of being accepted was near impossible. Serbia's rejection paved the way for Austria-Hungary to declare war on 28 July, thus beginning WW1.
David Stevenson - professor of international history, LSE
Germany
The largest share of responsibility lies with the German government. Germany's rulers made possible a Balkan war by urging Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia, well understanding that such a conflict might escalate. Without German backing it is unlikely that Austria-Hungary would have acted so drastically.
They also started wider European hostilities by sending ultimata to Russia and France, and by declaring war when those ultimata were rejected - indeed fabricating a pretext that French aircraft had bombed Nuremberg.
Finally, they violated international treaties by invading Luxemburg and Belgium knowing that the latter violation was virtually certain to bring in Britain. This is neither to deny that there were mitigating circumstances nor to contend that German responsibility was sole.
Serbia subjected Austria-Hungary to extraordinary provocation and two sides were needed for armed conflict. Although the Central Powers took the initiative, the Russian government, with French encouragement, was willing to respond.
In contrast, while Britain might have helped avert hostilities by clarifying its position earlier, this responsibility - even disregarding the domestic political obstacles to an alternative course - was passive rather than active.
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More on This Story

Primeira Guerra Mundial e o debate de historiadores: quao culpado foi o Imperio Alemao? - Der Spiegel

A Alemanha, país, ou nação, de imensas realizações nos campos da cultura, da ciência, da filosofia, da história, continua a ser uma sociedade torturada por ações e processos vergonhosos em seu passado, nomeadamente a Primeira Guerra Mundial (ainda em debate) e os doze anos de nazismo, que causaram incomensuráveis desastres em toda a Europa e em boa parte do mundo, inclusive no terreno das ideias e motivações, pois pequenos nazistas ainda pululam um pouco em todas as partes proclamando a superioridade de uns sobre outros, e instilando ódio, desprezo, racismo, intolerância, quando não crimes e genocídios.
O genocídio, a despeito de já existir implicitamente antes e sob variadas circunstâncias, tomou uma forma definitiva no século 20, com os massacres nazistas sobre populações indefesas e com o terrível holocausto, que pretendeu eliminar todo um povo, conseguindo matar 5 ou 6 milhões de judeus em várias partes da Europa.
O fato é que os alemães continuam a ser angustiados e torturados por sua terrível história, não de todo o povo alemão, mas de alguns líderes nefastos, nacionalistas e racistas ao extremo, a ponto de provocar catástrofes inacreditáveis, no que foram seguidos sempre pela massa inerme de cidadãos pouco educados, que são sempre em maior número que o pequeno número de ilustrados que tentam se opor aos desastres.
Essa responsabilidade o povo alemão carrega consigo, e seus historiadores deveriam trabalhar sobre ela. Mas parece que alguns pretendem, na verdade, descarregar tamanha responsabilidade, e se eximir de tantas culpas.
O debate continua, como se pode ver pela longa matéria abaixo, que continua nos links finais, não transcritos neste post, mas que valeria conferir.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

World War I Guilt: 

Culpability Question Divides Historians Today

By Dirk Kurbjuweit
Der Spiegel, February 14, 2014
(The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 7/2014 (February 10, 2014) of DER SPIEGEL.)
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I and the 75th of the start of World War II. Questions over the degree of German guilt remain contentious among historians, who have been fighting over the issue for years.
In his book "The Blood Intoxication of the Bolsheviks," published in the early 1920s, a certain R. Nilostonsky described a particularly horrific form of torture used in the Russian civil war. A rat was placed into an iron pipe, which was then pressed against the body of a prisoner. When the torturers placed the other end of the pipe against a fire, the panic-stricken rat had only one choice: to eat its way through the prisoner
When Hitler met with his officers on Feb. 1, 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, he told them that he suspected some German prisoners were likely to commit treason. "You have to imagine a prisoner being brought to Moscow, and then imagine the 'rat cage.' That prisoner will sign anything."
Historian Ernst Nolte published an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on June 6, 1986. In it, he suggested that Hitler's use of the term "rat cage" meant that the Nazi leader had heard of the Soviet form of torture involving a rat and a pipe. For Nolte, this served as evidence of the fear that Hitler and his men had of the Russians, a fear that could have "prompted" them to commit genocide.
In 1988, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler published a book in which he devoted an entire chapter to the "rat cage," in an effort to prove that Nolte's theory was wrong.
As much as their debate seemed to revolve around rats, the real issue was culpability. How much guilt has Germany acquired throughout its history? And does the anecdote about Hitler and the Russian rat torture somehow diminish German guilt?
This year will be a historic one, marking three important anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of the eruption of World War I, the 75th anniversary of the start of World War II and the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first two dates have been the source of heated debates among German intellectuals. The Fischer controversy in the early 1960s had to do with assigning blame for the eruption of World War I, while the dispute between historians in the mid-1980s revolved around culpability for the Holocaust. Both debates were informed by the positions in what was then a divided nation, including views on German unification.
History is not just history, but also a part of the present. This is especially true of Germany. The overwhelming history of the 20th century engulfed the country and shaped the consciousness of politically active citizens.
Both debates ended in victory for those who advocated Germany accepting the greatest possible culpability and therefore sought to exclude the possibility of German reunification, fearing that a unified Germany could lead to fatal consequences, perhaps even a third world war. As a result, German consciousness was strongly influenced by this acceptance of guilt for decades to come.
A New Identity for Germans?
In the meantime, new information has come to light on the issues in both debates, which tends to support the losing side. Could this lead to a new national identity for Germans?
The importance of this question underscores the need to revisit the Fischer controversy and the dispute among historians in this historic year. It also focuses our attention, once again, on a controversial concept of the day: revisionism. It was once anathema to one side of the debate, and subsequently to the other. But it's a necessary debate.
A device that has already been relegated to history stands on the desk of Hans-Ulrich Wehler: a typewriter. In a sense, Wehler lives between the Netherlands and Italy, in a white house on the outskirts of the northwestern German city of Bielefeld, near the underground Dutch-Italian natural gas pipeline. For Wehler, living so close to the pipeline means that nothing can be built to spoil his view. When he sits in his office, he looks out at trees and meadows. Behind him are enough books to take an ordinary person an entire life to read, but for Wehler they represent only a small portion of his reading material.
He was a professor at the University of Bielefeld for 25 years. His most important work is a book called "Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte" (German Social History). Wehler, 82, is a slim, cheerful man with a hint of the singsong accent typical of the Rhineland region.
When he was an assistant professor at the University of Cologne in the early 1960s, Wehler attended a colloquium led by Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer. But he was disappointed. He had expected something wild and exciting, but Fischer was a conservative man who "engaged in the conventional history of diplomacy."
Destroying a Comfortable Relationship with the Past
In 1961, Fischer published a book called "Germany's Aims in the First World War." A sentence in Fischer's book led to many changes. For Fischer, the German Reich bore "a substantial share of the historical responsibility for the outbreak of the general war."
The young Wehler was speechless. He had been waiting for a sentence like that.
At the time, West Germany was a country that felt relatively at ease with its past. The "national master narrative," the account of Germany's good past, still existed. The 12 Nazi years were certainly viewed as horrific, but they were also largely repressed at the time. German history prior to the Nazi era was viewed as anything from tolerable to heroic, including the history of World War I. German historians of the early postwar period clung to a word that had been used by former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George: "slid." In George's view, the major powers had slid into the war, which meant that everyone was equally culpable or innocent.
Fischer's theories destroyed this comfortable relationship with the past. He saw a continuity between the war objectives and 1914 and 1939: great conquests with the goal achieving global power. The German Empire became a precursor to the Nazi regime and World War I an overture to World War II. "A mine has been placed against the good conscience of the Germans," SPIEGEL, which agreed with Fischer's ideas, wrote in its review of his book.
For Gerhard Ritter, an important historian at the time, Fischer's book was intolerable. He had served the German Kaiser as a soldier in World War I, and he believed that Fischer's theories were a "national disaster." He was uninterested in revisionist history. The Fischer controversy had begun, a debate that was carried out in newspapers and magazine, and at the 1964 "Historikertag" (Conference of German Historians) in Berlin.
Wehler says he defended Fischer "as much as possible." But he was still too young at the time to be taken seriously as a historian.
The dispute soon became political. In 1964, the German Foreign Ministry tried to prevent Fischer from traveling to the United States to give a series of lectures. In 1965, Franz Josef Strauss, the deputy chairman of the conservative faction in the German parliament, the Bundestag, called upon the government to do everything in its power "to combat and eradicate the habitual, negligent and deliberate distortions of German history and Germany's image today, distortions that are sometimes made with the intention of dissolving the Western community."
Strauss was troubled by the idea of "sole moral responsibility," which was not something Fischer had mentioned but had become a central concept in the dispute. This is often the case in debates, when they become condensed into individual words and sentences, making do with less than complete accuracy in the interest of strengthening an argument.
Carving History into Stone
Fischer's view prevailed. Whether the term being used was "sole responsibility" or a "significant share of the historic responsibility," the national master narrative had been destroyed -- an agreeable outcome for those who dominated the public dialogue starting in the late 1960s, the student revolutionaries who came to be known as the 1968 generation.
In 1972 historian Immanuel Geiss, one of Fischer's students, said: "The overwhelming role played by the German Reich in the outbreak of World War I and the offensive character of Germany's war objectives is no longer a point of controversy, nor is it disputable." It was as if he were carving history into stone.
Geiss knew how to make this final state of the history of World War I politically useful. In his view, the Fischer controversy had produced a new kind of person, "the German who had become insightful." From the 1972 perspective, Geiss had developed instructions for this person. The first and second world wars, he said, had resulted in "the need to make do with the status of lesser powers in Europe," as well as the "final liquidation of all patriotic dreams of a German Reich." He was referring to the possibility of German reunification. "Any attempt to circumvent these political consequences, to squeeze past them, would inevitably lead to a third phase of German power politics, hence leading to a third world war initiated, once again, by Germany."
Four decades later, over lunch at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Herfried Münkler, 62, shoots that notion down. A third world war? Nowhere in sight. Power politics? Difficult question. Germany is a power in Europe once again, but primarily an economic one. Münkler is critical of Germany, which, as "the strongest player at the center is keeping itself out of the political fray."

Münkler, who teaches political science at Berlin's Humboldt University, has just written a book about World War I, "Der Grosse Krieg" (The Great War). He refers to Fritz Fischer's research as "outrageous, in principle," noting that the historian limited his research to German archives, ignoring Russian, English and French material. This, says Münkler, meant that Fischer couldn't have discovered that the other major powers also had reasons to go to war.Confusing Scenarios and Political Plans
Besides, says Münkler, Fischer "confused scenarios and political plans." The German military leaders had in fact developed war plans, just as everyone else had, he explains. They were determined to be prepared. But the political leadership did not embrace these plans, says Münkler. Australian historian Christopher Clark reaches similar conclusions in his book "The Sleepwalkers." There are similarities between sleepwalking and sliding into war. Both involve uncontrolled movements.
Nevertheless, Münkler finds the Fischer controversy "helpful in terms of political history" and sees "a positive effect of mistakes." It was necessary, says Münkler, for the Germans to turn to their history once again, for something to break open and for the national master narrative to give way to a critical consciousness.