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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;

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

segunda-feira, 18 de março de 2024

A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government - Nakae Chomin

 


A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government

By Nakae Chomin

Translated by Nobuko Tsukuba

Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1984 (9th printing, 2015)

Um livro curioso, escrito por um cientista político do inicio da era Meiji, Nakae Chomin, que teve um papel preeminente nas reformas daquele período, com base na sua cultura francesa – ele era chamado de "Rousseau do Oriente – e na sua adesão aos princípios do governo constitucional, com amplas liberdades para a livre expressão do pensamento. 

Foi censurado diversas vezes, dado o autoritarismo dos governos da era Meiji, e vários dos seus jornais foram fechados pelas autoridades da vigilância política. Ainda assim foi eleito para o Parlamento, mas renunciou quando constatou que pouco poderia fazer para levar o Japão a uma situação de governo democrático, não militarizado e não autoritário.

Os três "bêbados" consistem no Mestre Nankai, e dois interlocutores, um, de modos e pensamento europeus, por ele chamado de Gentleman, o outro de tendências militaristas, dito Champion. Ele trocam opiniões sobre como seria melhor o Japão se preparar para sustentar os desafios externos.


Eles bebem e trocam ideias sobre o que o Japão deveria fazer para se defender das potências agressoras mais avançadas, e também sobre como ele poderia se organizar internamente para conquistar a democracia e os princípios constitucionais dos países mais avançados do Ocidente.

O autor cita todos os filósofos europeus, os pensadores mais respeitados no mundo, na esperança de que o Japão caminhasse pela via do governo democrático.

Depois de muita conversa, e muita bebida, os dois visitantes se despedem. Dez dias depois, Mestre Nankai completou o seu livro:

"The two guests never returned. According to rumor, the Gentleman of Western Learning went to North America and the Champion went to Shanghai. Master Nankai, as always, keeps drinking." (p. 137)

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 18 de março de 2024




quarta-feira, 8 de novembro de 2023

Timothy Snyder on Ukraine, and the duty for Americans and Europeans: Would you sell them out?

Would you sell them out?

A question for American lawmakers about Ukraine

Timothy Snyder

November 8, 2023

 

Imagine that freedom was in decline around the world.  Imagine that things had gotten so bad that a dictatorship actually invaded a democracy with the express goal of destroying its freedoms and its people.  And yet... imagine that this people fought back.  Imagine that their leaders stayed in the country.  Imagine that this people got themselves together, supported and joined their armed forces, held back an invasion of what seemed like overwhelming force.  Imagine that their resistance is a bright moment in the history of democracy this whole century.  We don't have to imagine: that attack came from Russia and those people are the Ukrainians.  Would you sell them out?

Americans have an alliance in North America and Europe which has existed for more than seventy years, with the goal of preventing an attack from the Soviet Union and then from Russia.  Imagine that, when the Russian attack came, the hammer fell on a country excluded from that alliance.  Ukraine indeed took the entire brunt of the invasion, resisted, and turned the tide: a task assigned to countries whose economies, taken together, are two hundred fifty times larger than Ukraine's.  In so doing, Ukraine destroyed so much Russian equipment that a Russian attack on NATO became highly improbable.  With the blood of tens of thousands of its soldiers, Ukrainians defended every member of that alliance, making it far less likely that Americans would have to go to war in Europe.  Would you sell them out?   

(If there is anyone out there who still thinks that NATO had anything to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, consider this: invading Ukraine made Russia far more vulnerable. If Russia actually feared NATO, invading Ukraine would be the last thing it would do. Russian leaders are perfectly aware that NATO will not invade Russia, which is why they can pull troops away from the borders of NATO members Norway and Finland and send them to kill Ukrainians.) 

For this whole century, American politicians and strategists of all political orientations have agreed that the greatest threat for a global war comes from China.  The scenario for this dreadful conflict, in which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers could fight and die, is a Chinese offensive against Taiwan.  And now imagine that this can defused at no cost and with no risk.  The offensive operation the Chinese leadership is watching right now is that of Russia against Ukraine.  Ukrainian resistance has demonstrated how difficult a Chinese offensive operation in the Pacific would be.  The best China policy is a good Ukraine policy.  Will we toss away the tremendous and unanticipated geopolitical gain that has been handed to us by Ukraine?  There is nothing that we could have done on our own to so effectively deter China as what the Ukrainians are doing, and what the Ukrainians are doing is in no way hostile towards China.  Ukrainians are keeping us safe in this as in other ways.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine, because it's true, that the whole world is watching the war in Ukraine.  From everyone else's point of view, whether they like us, hate us, or don't care about us, Ukraine seems like an obvious ally and an easy win for the United States.  Anyone around the world, regardless of their own ideology, knows that Ukraine is a democracy and America is supposed to support democracies.  Anyone around the world, regardless of the state of their own economy, knows that our economy is enormous, far larger than Russia's, and that economic strength wins wars.  Anyone around the world can easily see that Americans are not at risk in Ukraine, and that Americans draw extraordinary moral and geopolitical gains from Ukrainian resistance.  From the point of view of all observers, in other words, defunding Ukraine would demonstrate enormous American weakness.  Is that the face we want to show the world?  Do we want to tell everyone that we are unreliable and unaware of our own interests?  Ukrainians, with American help, make Americans look sensible and strong.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine that this is a winnable war, because it is. Russia's main strategic objective, the seizure of Kyiv, was not achieved.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kyiv.  Russia was forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts.  Imagine the Russia's campaign to take Kharkiv failed.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kharkiv.  Imagine that Kherson, the one regional capital Russia has taken in this war, was taken back by Ukraine.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kherson.  Snake Island, lost early in the war, has been taken back by Ukraine.  Ukraine has taken back more than half of the territory seized by Russia in this invasion.  Knowing that all is this is true, imagine that Putin knows it too.  Russia's main offensive instrument, the paramilitary Wagner Group, staged a coup against Putin and that Putin had to kill its leader.  Imagine that Putin knows he cannot really take much more Ukrainian land -- not without American help, anyway.  Ukraine has a theory of victory that involves gains on the battlefield. Putin has a theory of victory that involves votes in the US Congress. Putin thinks that he has a better chance in the Capitol than he has in Kyiv.  Should we prove him right?

Imagine a world food system with Ukraine as a major node.  In normal times Ukraine can feed four hundred million people, and usually the UN World Food Program depends upon Ukraine.  Ukrainian exports feed some of the most sensitive parts of the Middle East and Africa.  Much of the instability in those regions is related to shortages of food.  Russia has destroyed a major dam to destroy Ukrainian farmland.  And mined Ukrainian farms on a huge scale.  Russia targets ports and grain storage facilities with its missiles, and claims the piratical right to stop all shipping on the Black Sea with its navy.  And yet...  Imagine that Ukrainians resist here as well.  Ukrainians farmers are hard at work.  Ukraine still supplies food to the World Food Program.  Ukrainians, through their own innovative weapons and clever tactics, managed to intimidate the Black Sea Fleet and open a lane for commercial shipping.  That they are feeding the people who needed to be fed.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine that we were a country that cared about war crimes.  And imagine that there was a law, an international genocide convention, that defined five actions that constitute genocide, and that Russians have committed every one of these crimes in Ukraine.  I cannot keep on writing about "imagining" when I have seen some of the death pits myself.  I cannot say "imagine" when writers I know have been murdered because they represent Ukrainian culture.  I cannot stay with my device when I read that the Russian state boasts of having taken 700,000 Ukrainian children to be russified, when every day Russian propagandists make clear that Russian war aims are exterminationist.  And yet Ukrainians resist and persist.  This is a genocide that can be stopped, that is being stopped.  We are living within the scenario, the one we say that we have been waiting for, when American actions can stop a genocide, simply by helping the people who have been targeted, simply by paying their taxes.  Whenever the Ukrainians take back land, they rescue people.  This is how they think of their liberated territories: as places where no more children will be kidnaped, no more civilians will tortured, no more local leaders will be murdered.  Would you sell out a people to a genocidal occupation?  A people that has done nothing but good for you?

I have heard the excuse that Americans are "fatigued."  I have been in Ukraine three times since the war began.  I have been in the capital and in the provinces.  I have seen almost no Americans, fatigued or otherwise, in the country.  And that is for the simple reason that we are not in Ukraine.  How can we be fatigued by a war we are not fighting?  When we are not even present?  This makes no sense.  It causes no fatigue to give money to the right cause, which is all that we are doing.  It feels good to help other people help themselves in a good cause.  

If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster: across all of these dimensions: food supply, war crimes, international instability, expanding war, collapsing democracies. Everything that the Ukrainians are doing for us can be reversed if we give up. Why would lawmakers even contemplate doing so?

If you happened to know lots of Ukrainians, as I do, you would know people who have been wounded or who have been killed.  You would know people who get through their days with dark circles around their eyes, because everyone has dark circles around their eyes.  You would know people who have lost someone, because everyone has lost someone.  You would know people who are grieving and yet who are nevertheless doing what they can do.  You would not know anyone in Ukraine who believes that fatigue is a reason to give up.  Would you sell such people out?

I have heard the other excuse: that we need to audit the weapons we send to Ukraine.  The expenses are minimal and the gains are great: a nickel on our defense dollar, achieving what we cannot ourselves do with all the rest.  And here's the thing: the weapons we send to Ukraine are the only ones in our stockpiles that are being audited.  They are being audited not by accountants in suits and ties but by men and women in camouflage.  They are being used and used well by people whose lives are at stake and whose country's future is at stake.  Ukrainians have used American air defense more effectively than anyone knew that it could be used.  

Ukrainians are using American missiles that we consider outdated to destroy the most advanced Russian assets.  Ukrainians are taking American weapons built in the last century and using them to defend themselves and the rest of us in this one.  In large measure they are literally using arms that we would otherwise be paying to disassemble because we regard them as obsolete.  

If that battlefield audit done by the Ukrainian army is not good enough: well, then, by all means, American lawmakers, come and visit Ukraine and see for yourself.  You and your staffers would be very welcome.  Ukrainians want you to come. It would be a very good thing if more of us visited Ukraine.

I will tell you what I witnessed in Ukraine: when Ukrainians see American weapons systems, they applaud.  Would you sell them out?


domingo, 23 de abril de 2023

Tunisia, a primeira nação árabe a iniciar a primavera democrática é a última a recair na ditadura, depois de todas as outras - David D. Kirkpatrick (The New Yorker)

 Triste evolução da democrácia islâmica, estrangulada pelas suas contradições internas.

Tunisia Arrests Its Most Prominent Opposition Leader

Rached Ghannouchi has been a voice for democracy in his nation and across the Muslim world.

Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, was the last place where it failed. After a decade of freedom and democracy, in 2021 a new strongman, President Kais Saied, shut down the parliament and, soon after, began imposing an authoritarian constitution and arresting his critics. This week, the police finally came for Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s largest political party and the Arab world’s most influential thinker about the potential synthesis of liberal democracy and Islamic governance.

Born in 1941 to impoverished peasant farmers in remote southern Tunisia, Ghannouchi studied in Cairo, Damascus, and Paris; worked menial jobs in Europe; and returned to Tunis, in 1971. Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist politics was on the rise across the region, as an alternative to the autocracies in power, and, in 1981, Ghannouchi co-founded a Tunisian Islamist movement. He was jailed and tortured for three years, and in 1987 he was arrested again, sentenced to death, and exiled to London. (Other Arab states would not take him.)

Ghannouchi’s examination of Britain’s liberal democracy through an Islamic lens set him apart from a generation of Arab intellectuals. Islamic scholars had long ago concluded that in the true “Abode of Islam” a Muslim must feel secure in his liberty, property, religion, and dignity, Ghannouchi wrote in his landmark treatise, “Public Freedoms in the Islamic State,” which he began writing in prison and published, in Arabic, in 1993. So why had he found that security only in the West? A true Islamic state, he concluded, must be founded on “freedom of conscience” for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Quoting a revered twelfth-century scholar, Ghannouchi urged Islamists to learn from Western democracy—to benefit “from the best of human experiments regardless of their religious origins, since wisdom is Shari’a’s twin.”

He returned to Tunisia, in 2011, when a spontaneous wave of protests against police brutality drove its longtime ruler into exile and set the Arab Spring revolts in motion. Ghannouchi helped make the country’s political transition the most liberal in the region, and he did his best to salvage the prospects for democracy elsewhere. In the late spring of 2013—a decade ago—he flew to Egypt to offer advice to its first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. The hopefulness of those months is now difficult to remember. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had all held credible elections and had started drafting new charters. Western experts cited Yemen as a model for the peaceful handover of power. Even in Syria most rebels still marched under the banner of democracy, rather than of extremist Islam; the uprising had not yet devolved into a sectarian civil war. But a sandstorm was blowing toward Tahrir Square, where two and a half years earlier an eighteen-day sit-in, inspired by Tunisia, had toppled President Hosni Mubarak and opened the way for Morsi. Now Morsi’s opponents were calling for protests to demand his resignation, and the head of the armed forces was sending mixed signals about his allegiance.

Ghannouchi had spent more than two decades thinking and writing about the same promises that Egypt’s Muslim Brothers had campaigned on—combining Islamic governance with democratic elections and individual freedoms. During his trip to Cairo, he told me a few months later, at his party’s headquarters in Tunis, he had tried to convince Morsi that, in order to achieve those goals, he should voluntarily forfeit some power. (Morsi advisers later confirmed the broad outlines of Ghannouchi’s account, which he told me on the condition that I keep it private at the time.) After revolutions like those in Egypt and Tunisia, a majority party should understand the anxious vulnerability of political or religious minorities, such as Egypt’s secular-minded liberals and Coptic Christians. They had been afforded at least some protections under the old authoritarian order, and those were now gone, with little reason yet to trust promises about the rule of law, checks and balances, and individual rights. Precisely because of the Brotherhood’s electoral success—Morsi had already won ratification of the new constitution—in the interest of democracy and to reassure the Party’s weaker rivals, it should bring in a unity government ahead of another election. Why remain the lightning rod for his opponents’ fears or resentments? “The democracy of consensus succeeds—not the democracy of the majority,” Ghannouchi told me.

Morsi rejected that advice, convinced that yielding power under threat of protests would be a capitulation to political extortion and set a dangerous precedent.. Had Morsi followed Ghannouchi’s advice, perhaps he could have defused the protests that filled the streets on June 30th, demanding his ouster, or at least won over more Egyptian liberals. We’ll never know: on July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—now President Sisi, possibly for life—ousted Morsi from power, ending Egypt’s thirty-month experiment with democracy and freedom.

More than a thousand Egyptian Islamists were killed in the streets for opposing the coup. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Those who were underground or in exile demanded retribution against the ostensibly liberal factions who initially supported Sisi’s takeover. But Ghannouchi still urged reconciliation. “The Egyptian ship needs to include all Egyptians and not throw some of them into the water,” he told me. “There should be no collective punishment. The cure for a failed democracy is more democracy.”

In the months after the Egyptian coup, one Arab Spring revolt after another foundered in despair and extremism—a reversal of 2011, when the Tahrir Square sit-in stirred democracy movements in capitals across the region. Tunisia was the exception to the dark turn after the coup, in part because Ghannouchi followed his own advice there the following year. The Islamist party that he co-founded and led, Ennahdha, meaning “the renaissance,” had won the dominant role in a transitional parliament. By late 2013, the assassinations of a pair of left-leaning, secular politicians had brought the political process and constitution-drafting to a halt; opponents suspected Islamist extremists of carrying out the killings, and blamed Ennahdha for failing to prevent them. Ghannouchi, who held no elected office at the time, defied many in his party to reach a power-sharing agreement with the main leader of the secular opposition. Ennahdha voluntarily handed power to a caretaker government to oversee new elections. Ghannouchi’s concession broke the logjam. Tunisia’s revolution celebrated a fourth anniversary—it was the only Arab Spring uprising that appeared to succeed—and the civil-society organizations that helped sponsor the talks between Ghannouchi and the opposition received a Nobel Peace Prize. “We are not angels. We would like to have power,” Ghannouchi said on a visit to Washington. “But we fervently believe that a democratic constitution is more important.”

His leadership made Ennahdha a unique example of what some called liberal Islamism. In fact, Ghannouchi helped persuade Ennahdha leaders to jettison the label “Islamist” and to begin describing themselves as Muslim democrats. (He published an essay in Foreign Affairs explaining the change.) His party, which led the drafting of the constitution, pushed through a charter with explicit protections for the rights of women and of religious minorities. When we spoke in 2014, he also noted that Tunisia’s was one of the few Arab constitutions that made no reference to Islamic law. He assured me that Tunisia guaranteed freedoms for mosques, churches, synagogues—and even “pubs.” He stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriage but described sexuality as a strictly personal matter—a more liberal stance than that taken by almost any Arab government.

Tunisia’s tourism-heavy economy, however, never fully recovered from the images of turmoil in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising, and the pandemic shut down its resorts. Years of relative inaction by Tunisia’s caretaker government and its successors fuelled a backlash against the whole political class, and especially against Ennahdha. During the next elections, in 2019, Ghannouchi also made the questionable decision to seek a seat in parliament and was then chosen as its speaker. He had become a politician. Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam in exile from Egypt, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard, said, “That parliament was a circus—not a place for a leader of his intellectual calibre to preside over, and he was consumed by petty politics.”

In the 2019 elections, voters rejected every Presidential candidate who had held public office. Two populists—a prominent media mogul and an obscure law professor, who together received only a third of the vote—went to a runoff. The professor, Saied, won in a landslide. In many ways, Saied is an inverse of Ghannouchi. He has eschewed any known political philosophy or faction. He routinely rails against the West, directing particular vitriol toward the International Monetary Fund, whose support Tunisia now desperately needs. His constitution promises the state “will work to achieve the objectives of pure Islam” and gives the government control over Islamic interpretation and teaching. He has called gay people “deviants” and supported the criminalization of homosexuality. This year, in his own adaptation of “replacement theory,” he set off a wave of anti-Black violence by scapegoating dark-skinned African migrants for Tunisia’s economic travails.

Saied initially cited the crisis of the pandemic as a pretext to dissolve the parliament and to rule by decree. It was not long before he began detaining a long list of critics and opponents, culminating this week with Ghannouchi. His alleged crime involves a statement that he made last weekend: “Tunisia without Ennahdha, without political Islam, without the left or any of its components is a project for civil war.” Shortly before dusk and the breaking of the fast on Monday, the holiest night of Ramadan, more than a hundred plainclothes police officers raided his home, his party said in a statement. After two days in custody, Ghannouchi, now eighty-one, was interrogated for eight hours. On Thursday, a judge sentenced him to an extended pretrial detention. Initially accused of incitement, he now faces charges of conspiring against the security of the state—a crime that can carry the death penalty.

The blow to Tunisian democracy is clear. But the imprisonment of a leader as singular as Ghannouchi is also a setback to the wider world. For Islamists who espouse violence, his imprisonment is a vindication—new evidence of the futility of the ballot box. And the silencing of his voice is a loss to the West, too.

“Marrying Islam and liberalism and democratic governance,” Robert Kagan, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, told me, “is the solution to our problems in the Arab world, and it is the solution to their problem with us.” That was also the hope that Ghannouchi tried to salvage in Egypt ten years ago.

Ghannouchi, in a prerecorded video released on Thursday, urged patience. He told Tunisians, “Trust in the principles of your revolution, and that democracy is not a passing thing in Tunis.”

terça-feira, 18 de outubro de 2022

Democracy stays: Brazilian presidential elections highlight precarity of civil-military relations - Pablo Uchoa (Janes)

Democracy stays: Brazilian presidential elections highlight precarity of civil-military relations

Janes, 27-Sep-2022
Author: Pablo Uchoa

UK Publication: Jane's Intelligence Review

Key points

  •   Opinion polls consistently rank Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro below his challenger, with former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva widening the difference between them to approximately 15 points and edging closer to winning in the first round on 2 October

  •   A victory for Lula in the first round would be highly likely to lead to a smooth democratic transfer of power in 2023, yet such likelihood would decrease if a second round takes place on 30 October, as Bolsonaro will be poised to ramp up the rhetoric and renew the criticism against the voting system

  •   Despite Bolsonaro's attempts to discredit the electoral process and his refusal to commit to accepting the electoral results if he loses, the likelihood that Brazilian security forces would back his disregard of the election has declined during the preceding 12 months, since Bolsonaro has been unable to find enough support to trigger an institutional rupture if he loses

UPDATED

Brazil marked 200 years of its independence on 7 September, with supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro using the day to hold a political rally. A civil-military parade in the capital, Brasília, and a military display in Rio de Janeiro were the backdrop for political acts in support of the president, who is seeking a second four-year term in elections scheduled for 2 October. At the time of publication, Bolsonaro was trailing his main rival, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by approximately 15 points in opinion polls by pollsters including Datafolha, Ipec, and Ipespe.

In Brasília, a section of the civil-military parade featured tractors, representing the agribusiness sector's political support of the president. The second main event took place in Rio de Janeiro, with a full military display including a navy parade in Guanabara Bay, a demonstration by paratroopers, an air show by the air force acrobatic team, and a 21-gun salute. The scale of these events contrasted sharply with that in the previous years, which were held in a less prominent location in central Rio.

Bolsonaro gave two public speeches during the day. While addressing thousands of supporters in Brasilia, Bolsonaro struck a strongly religious note, targeting evangelical voters. He called Brazil a promised land” and said he was following a mission that god gave me. Bolsonaro also listed what he considered the main achievements of his government and added that his objective for the country was eternal freedom.

Bolsonaro explicitly targeted the previous Lula administration, by describing the upcoming elections as a struggle between good and evil. The president claimed that evil” had governed Brazil for 14 years, referring to Lula's Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores: PT), and vowed to stop the PT from returning to their crime scene.

In contrast with the previous occasions, Bolsonaro did not directly attack justices of the Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal: STF), however, he made strategic stops during his speech while supporters called for both Lula and Alexandre Moraes, the president of Superior Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral: TSE), to be jailed. Several attendees this year were pictured with signs calling on the president to shut down Congress, dismiss the courts, and enable the armed forces to grab power.

Bolsonaro said, The will of the people will be known on 2 October” and added, The voice of the people is the voice of god.” He gave a similar version of this speech in Rio later in the day, ramping up the tone of the attacks against Lula and promising to extirpate” the left from politics.

Failed test

Polls released after the event suggested that it did not have the intended effect on the electorate, with the president failing to attract new voters while the distance between him and Lula grows. Political observers in Brazilian mainstream media, including Globonews, Folha de S.Paulo , UOL, and CNN Brasil, noted that, although dignitaries from Portuguese-speaking countries attended the celebrations in Brasilia as part of the expected protocol, domestic senior political figures, including the president of the Supreme Court, Luiz Fux, the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, and the lower chamber, Arthur Lira, were not present despite being invited. Bolsonaro was flanked by Silas Malafaia, evangelical pastor, and Luciano Hang, a billionaire businessman under federal police investigation for allegedly trying to articulate a military intervention along with other businesspeople on WhatsApp.

Juliano da Silva Cortinhas, a former defence adviser at the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs of the Presidency between 2012 and 2013, chief of staff of Instituto Pandiá Calógeras of the Ministry of Defence between 2013 and 2016, and co-ordinator of the Group of Studies and Research in International Security at the University of Brasília (Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Segurança Internacional: GEPSI/ UnB), told Janes on 8 September that the president demonstrated a strong ability to mobilise supporters, more than any other politician in Brazil today. Conversely, Cortinhas added that the main event in Brasilia was planned well in advance and relied on financial support from businesspeople who funded the deployment of pro-Bolsonaro groups to the federal capital. In addition, Cortinhas stated that Bolsonaro's undeniable use of public money to fund his campaign” could create legal problems for him in the future. Indeed, the TSE ruled on 10 September that Bolsonaro was not allowed to use images of the event in his campaign, considering that the event had a clear electoral message.

Tensions between Bolsonaro and his political ally Ibaneis Rocha, governor of the Federal District and commander-in-chief of the Military Police in the federative unit, emerged in the lead-up to the rally. Two days before the event, Rocha ordered that Brasilia's central axis, the Esplanada dos Ministérios, be closed to traffic on security grounds. Ahead of the parade in 2021, unauthorised supporters of Bolsonaro removed several protective barriers on the Esplanada, creating a security breach especially affecting the Supreme Court, which had been targeted with fireworks by Bolsonaro supporters in June 2020. Bolsonaro had asked the army to enable approximately 50 trucks to access the site of the 2022 parade, but Rocha stood by his previous order and kept the security plan in place, with the trucks remaining outside the security perimeter. According to Cortinhas, the outcome suggested that Bolsonaro does not enjoy the institutional support of the military police in the Federal District, which had been criticised in 2021 for doing little to prevent supporters of the president from disrupting Independence Day celebrations.

Election challenge

A poll conducted by Brazilian consultancy firm Research Intelligence and Strategic Consulting (Inteligência em Pesquisa e Consultoria Estratégica: IPEC) and commissioned by TV Globo on 19 September suggested that Bolsonaro trails Lula in the polls by 15 points (31% to 47%, respectively). Another poll by Datafolha published on 15 September suggested a narrower but still significant 12-point margin (45% to 33%). Both polls put Bolsonaro's disapproval ratings at approximately 50% among all voters, but higher among women and people on low incomes who earn less than two minimum wages (approximately USD230 per month) . A personal attack on a female journalist, Vera Magalhães, after she asked him a challenging question during the first televised presidential debate on 28 August 2022, appears to have played particularly badly with female voters.

Approximately 50% of voters in the Southeast region, which concentrates the largest share of voters, also disapprove of Bolsonaro. The polling therefore indicates that Lula is likely to reach more than 50% of votes in the first round and avoid a run-off on 30 October. If a run-off takes place, Lula is predicted by both polls to win a second round against Bolsonaro by 54%35% according to IPEC.

To make his position more tenuous, the president is under scrutiny over alleged property deals involving his family, as revealed by a seven-month-long investigation by the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper published on 30 August. According to Folha , members of the Bolsonaro family allegedly used large sums of cash to purchase 51 properties, including flats, houses, and plots of land across the country between 1990 and 2022. The 51 properties are part of 107 purchased by the family for the equivalent in 2022 of BRL25.6 million (USD4.8 million), of which BRL11.1 million (USD2.08 million) was paid in cash. Bolsonaro claims he is not involved in his family affairs and on 18 September, on a visit to London, he denied using cash to make the purchases, during an interview with TV network SBT. He said, On all the certificates, it says current currency'. It is not written cash'. It can be cash, it can be cheque, bank transfer, anything.

Despite these challenges for Bolsonaro, if he is able to reach the second round of voting during the presidential election, it significantly increases his chance of countering pre-election polling trends. In August 2022 the government increased a handout paid monthly to families in the lower-income bracket, known as Auxilio Brasil, from BRL400 to BRL600 (USD75 to USD112) to ease the effect of food and fuel price increases. On 7 September, Bolsonaro promised an extra BRL200 (USD38) to people who find a job while receiving the benefit, pledging to keep the payments into 2023, however, the government did not set aside funds to finance this expense in a budget proposal sent to Congress.

The payments do not appear to have significantly affected Bolsonaro's performance in the polls, but Leonardo Sakamoto, a political commentator in São Paulo, told Janes on 27 August that it was too soon to gauge the effect with voters. He said, In the initial moment, people use this money to pay their bills and ease their debts ... [The] feeling of wellbeing kicks in [later], it is not immediate. If Bolsonaro is given an extra month to campaign, he'll heap more benefits [from it],” Sakamoto said.

Rupture scenarios

Bolsonaro has repeatedly suggested that he would reject the election results if he were to lose on 2 October. Throughout his term, Bolsonaro has questioned the integrity of the ballot process. In July 2021 he suggested, without evidence, that electronic voting machines are not trustworthy, despite the fact that no fraud has ever been proven since machine voting was first adopted in Brazil in 1996.

On 7 August 2022 Bolsonaro called for institutions to enable the armed forces to conduct parallel counting” of the vote, which is outside of its jurisdiction as set out in the constitution. Voting machines are audited before, during, and after the elections, and Congress rejected a government bill to introduce printed ballots in August 2021, prompting the former president of TSE, Luís Barroso, to label the controversy water under the bridge” in December 2021.

Bolsonaro has nevertheless continued to discredit the electoral process and, during an interview with Brazil's most-watched television news Jornal Nacional on 22 August, he refused to commit to accepting the results if he loses. Minister of Defence General Paulo Nogueira had asked Moraes to enable the armed forces access to real-time data during vote counting, but the TSE firmly denied this possibility on 12 September, reiterating that vote counting is the constitutional responsibility of electoral authorities. The TSE nevertheless agreed to put in place a pilot project to use voters' biometric data to test a small sample of electronic voting machines on the election day, after being suggested by the Ministry of Defence. Cortinhas told Janes that the last 12 months had been a moment of greater tension in civil-military relations” with the constant being the participation of the armed forces in national politics.

There are signs that the likelihood that the armed forces, or any other security forces, would back Bolsonaro if he decided to disregard the election has declined during the preceding 12 months. An internal report produced for the armed forces detailed the political position of its senior members, military police commanders, and some politicians. The left-leaning media outlet Brasil 247 published parts of the report on 6 September, and details were also discussed with Janes by a journalist with access to the material who requested anonymity. The journalist suggested that army commanders were the least likely to endorse Bolsonaro's attacks against the voting system, with much of the military's high command showing low” and very low” adherence to the president's allegations. The report, quoted by Brasil 247 , classed the commanders of the navy, Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, and the air force, Air Brigadier Lieutenant Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior, as highly” aligned with Bolsonaro's claims, along with mid-ranking officers.

The source told Janes that pro-Bolsonaro officers lacked both leadership” and a clear plan” to trigger an institutional rupture to favour the president. It seems to me a mistake to understand the military as a group, a cohesive body, with an idea in their heads of what they want. They don't think as a unit,” the source said. In April 2018 the then army commander, General Eduardo Villas-Bôas, posted a tweet that was seen as a threat of intervention on the eve of a crucial Supreme Court decision on whether or not to allow Lula to remain free while appealing a conviction for corruption. The general, who later became a special adviser under Bolsonaro, acknowledged in a book interview with FGV military anthropologist Celso Castro, published in 2021, that it was a concerted effort to put the armed forces back on the forefront of Brazilian politics. However, the source told Janes that the army now lacks the political leadership that Gen Villas-Bôas represented, despite this role clashing with his constitutional duties.

Significantly, the analysis of the internal report indicated that all but two corps among the military police could be considered strongly bolsonaristas , with 14 of them under the control of state governments, notably São Paulo, according to the source. These forces would be crucial to any plan to destabilise the elections, given the improbability of the army staging a power grab in Brazil. Instead, it is more likely that Bolsonaro would opt to discredit the elections on the eve or immediately after the vote, and rally his supporters onto the streets, claiming to protect democracy and freedom. This would then lead to a scenario similar to the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 but, instead of acting to prevent chaos, the police forces would stand by and watch. The Supreme Court would have no option but to request an operation known as guarantee of law and order (Garantia da Lei e da Ordem: GLO), enabling the armed forces to act as police and opening the door for a military takeover.

Scenarios like the one described above are nowadays considered less likely to unfold, said Cortinhas. Nevertheless, he noted, We continue with this tension in the electoral process. If Bolsonaro manages to get to the second round, we will have the apex of this tension. If Lula is elected in the first round, I think things will ease.

Several violent incidents involving supporters for both main candidates have illustrated the potential for increased violence ahead of the election. On 9 September a Bolsonaro supporter stabbed to death a backer of Lula in the west-central state of Mato Grosso. In July, a local PT official was shot dead at his birthday party by a prison guard shouting Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro supporters have also claimed to have been attacked by PT supporters. Although Bolsonaro has distanced himself from such incidents, Lula has called the climate of hatred in the electoral process ... completely abnormal” and suggested that it was part of a political strategy.

Support for democracy

As voting day approaches, it appears that Bolsonaro has been unable to find enough support, either in the military or civil society, to trigger an institutional rupture if he loses. In contrast, support for democracy has been widespread. Some of the strongest demonstrations took place across the country on 11 August, during which politicians, artists, intellectuals, public figures, and business leaders led people to read manifestoes in favour of democracy.

One of the most influential pro-democracy manifestoes, signed by more than one hundred entities including the Brazilian Banking Federation (Federação Brasileira de Bancos: Febraban), the National Industry Confederation (Confederação Nacional da Indústria: CNI), the National Confederation of Trade (Confederação Nacional do Comércio de Bens, Serviços e Turismo: CNC), and the National Confederation of Transport (Confederação Nacional do Transporte: CNT), the American Chamber (Amcham), as well as the largest unions, was organised by the confederation of industries of São Paulo (Federação das Indústrias de São Paulo: FIESP) whose members account for one-third of the national GDP, according to the news outlet Exame on 4 August. Another manifesto entitled Letter to Brazilians” gathered more than one million signatures and was read out loud to a cheering crowd at the University of São Paulo law school, the same place where a similar manifesto was read in 1977 to denounce the country's military government at the time.

A strong sign of support for Brazilian democracy also came from abroad after Bolsonaro invited about 70 diplomats, including dozens of ambassadors, according to Brazilian media, to the presidential palace on 18 July. Bolsonaro rehashed false claims about the electoral system and mounted an attack on Brazil's electoral system without presenting any evidence to back his claims. According to the New York Times ' article of 19 July, citing two diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity, many were shaken by the presentation, particularly at Bolsonaro's suggestion to increase the involvement of the military to improve transparency, and some worried that Bolsonaro was trying to lay the groundwork” to dispute election results if he loses.

Following this event, various foreign governments, including the US, have expressed their trust in the Brazilian electoral system. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated this position on 7 September, saying, The United States trusts in the strength of Brazil's democratic institutions. Brazil has a strong track record of free and fair elections, which are conducted with transparency, and high levels of voter participation. The elections that have been conducted by Brazil's capable and time-tested electoral system and democratic institutions serve as a model for nations in the hemisphere and across the world.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a former diplomat, professor, and adviser to the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI), told Janes on 15 August that after this fruitless event, any chance of Bolsonaro finding international support for institutional rupture is doomed. He said, I think this is a closed chapter. [The meeting] exposed Bolsonaro to ridicule.

Almeida pointed out that US support for Brazilian democracy carries heavy weight, because being at odds with the US government would come at a cost for the military. Today, we have military personnel who have been co-operating with the United States for a long time and who consider it very positive that Bolsonaro obtained an extra-NATO ally status for Brazil from Trump. The military has the need to exchange information, to have access to weapons and to be aligned with partners who can co-operate in terms of technology, training, equipment supply, co-operation etc. The Brazilian military knows that if there is any attempt of military intervention, Brazil would be isolated diplomatically, militarily, and economically.

Support for Bolsonaro continues to be solid among members of the armed forces, who resent Lula and PT governments for the 201114 national truth commission that held critical views of the 196485 military regime. Almeida, among other political observers in Brazil, does not believe it is enough for the institution to back an anti-democratic adventure by Bolsonaro. Almeida said, [The military] want to keep the material gains achieved under Bolsonaro, but without a break with democracy or the law, because it would have a very high cost for Brazil and for them. Sure, they would like Bolsonaro to continue, but they will not follow him into an extra-constitutional adventure.

However, within two weeks of the vote, he dialled up the rhetoric once more, telling supporters during a visit to London on 18 September that there is no way we will not win in the first round, citing the simply exceptional” welcome he receives from voters in the campaign trail. He also told SBT on the same day that if I get less than 60% of votes, [it means] something abnormal happened in the TSE.

Given the president's refusal to commit to accepting election results, such comments should not be dismissed as purely campaign rhetoric. They could lead to localised clashes between his supporters and Lula supporters before, during, and after the election. However, it is looking less likely that the president could count on widespread support from the armed forces and state-wide police forces to disregard election results.

A victory for Lula in the first round would be highly likely to lead to a smooth democratic transfer of power in 2023. This likelihood would decrease if a second round takes place on 30 October, as Bolsonaro will be poised to ramp up the rhetoric and renew the criticism against the voting system. He could reap more benefits from handouts paid monthly to families in lower incomes, which have so far made little difference to his performance.

For the armed forces, a Lula government in 2023 would not lead to a full-scale withdrawal from politics, but Cortinhas believes the military would seek an accommodation with the former president, keeping the benefits achieved under Bolsonaro while agreeing to subordinate to a precarious” civilian control. The military will continue to be active in politics as they have in every moment of our history,” Cortinhas said. They will put up some resistance in the beginning, but they will gradually accept the new rules.

Pablo Uchoa is a journalist and PhD candidate on civil-military politics at the UCL Institute of the Americas in London.

Outlook

Polls suggested Bolsonaro's comments on 7 September were badly received by voters, with Lula widening the difference between him and Bolsonaro to approximately 15 points and edging closer to winning in the first round on 2 October.

Bolsonaro initially toned down this rhetoric, telling a poll of podcasters intended at young evangelical listeners on 13 September, If it is god's will, I will continue [being president]. If not, we will pass the sash and I will retire, because at my age, I have nothing more to do here on earth if I end my time in politics on December 31 of this year. page9image55648176

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domingo, 12 de dezembro de 2021

1914, the Urkatastrophe of the 20th century (Chartbook #57) - Adam Tooze

Um dos maiores historiadores do século XX retorna à catástrofe inicial de nossa era, a Grande Guerra.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

1914, the Urkatastrophe of the 20th century 


On liberalism and the age of imperialism.


WWI is clearly the “Urkatastrophe” - the original catastrophe - of the 20th century. Not just of the short twentieth century, from 1914 to 1991, but of the long twentieth century too. 

1914 is in the news again today as a way of understanding the mounting tension between China and the United States. In this historical analogy, the United States, the incumbent, is allotted the role of the British Empire, seeking to resist the challenger, China, which is placed in the position of the Kaiser’s Germany. (Btw: Apart from the weirdness of this analogy, it also assumes a pretty strong and contentious thesis on what actually happened in 1914. More on this another time.)

The line you take on the outbreak of the war in 1914 colors your entire vision of European and world history. One way of describing the situation is simple. In the words of my good friend Alexander Zevin, as quoted by Perry Anderson: ‘The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires and between empires’.

A clash of Empires, for sure. How could it have been anything else? After all, all the great powers at the time were one or other type of empire. To add any value we need to be more precise in defining the historical conjuncture. 1914 was not simply a clash of Empires. The war was a product of a distinct conjuncture, well-labeled as the ‘age of imperialism’ . This conjuncture was defined not simply by empires butting up against each other, as they had for centuries. It was a new epoch defined by a new blend of expansive geopolitical claims, empires dynamized by nation-state mobilization at their core and the imbrication of those states with the interests of the latest generation of capitalist accumulation. All of this took place against the backdrop of a vision of history and global geography that was both grand and claustrophobic. The global frontier closed in the 1890s. The stage was set for the great play of world history to begin in earnest. 

Nor was this lost on contemporaries. The wide currency of imperialism theories dates to the moment of the Spanish-American war and the US invasion of the Philippines (1898-1899), the Boxer intervention (1899-1900) and the Boer War (1899-1902). The notion comes in different shades, ranging between J.A. Hobson’s liberal version to Lenin’s Bolshevik classic. 

Lenin’s analysis, like that of Rosa Luxemburg before him, is more holistic and deterministic than that of Hobson. They have in common that they described the current moment of imperialism as something new. 

The age of imperialism was clearly the final stage in a Western drive to expansion that began in the 15th century. It also continued the history global competition, which in the case of Britain and France went back to the 18th century. But in the late nineteenth century, this took on a radical new expansiveness and violence. Crucially, because it was now conceived of as taking place within a finite sphere. The frontier was closed and because the pressure of historical time and drama speeded up. The German phrase, Torschlusspanik, is apt. 

In this remarkable interview, the South African artist William Kentridgedefines it as:

The panic of closing doors. The fear of opening one door rather than another, and hearing it slam behind you, once you have made your decision; but maybe that decision is the wrong one, so you would rather stand paralysed in front of three doors to avoid making it. Torschlusspanik.

William Kentridge in interview with Peter Asden, “The art of war” for The Financial Times, 7/8 July 2018.

In 1959 the publication of William Appleman Williams’s Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and in 1961 Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht, gave imperialism theory a new lease on life in the historical profession. 

Amidst the general resurgence of imperialism-talk in the context of Vietnam and Third World struggle, Fritz Fischer’s Germano-centric account of 1914 produced an extraordinary éclat. But as far as the July crisis of 1914 was concerned this was also the last great hurrah of imperialism theory. The critical onslaught against Fischer’s interpretation of the outbreak of the war helped to discredit models of imperialism more generally. It did not help that Fischer’s take on German responsibility got caught up with crude Sonderweg models that tried to identify the supposed abnormalities of Germany’s modernization. This involved tying undeniable and important differences in political organization, military command chain and strategic outlook to subtle and much harder-to-define national social-structural differences. It was an intellectual dead end. What got lost in the process was any awareness of the broader development both of global capitalism and imperialist competition. 

By the 1990s, whether or not historians have ascribed responsibility for the July crisis to Germany, the focus has shifted away from a broad-based analysis of imperialism (and the Sonderweg) to one based on politics, diplomacy, the arms race and military culture. Often this is associated with a stress on the July crisis as an event determined by the continental logic of Central Europe rather than the wider forces of global struggle - the scramble for Africa or imperial tension in Asia - that seemed to be implied by references to imperialism. 

Economic forces continue to play a key role in any plausible interpretation of World War I - in the form of Russia’s looming development and the costs of the arms race between the major power. But whereas under the sign of imperialism theory the link from geopolitical ambition to economic interests was made scandalously explicit, in more recent work the underlying economic dynamics are no longer foregrounded . The tight connection between the outbreak of war, imperial expansionism and capitalist competition has unravelled. 

If conventional historiography displaced imperialism and the discussion of capitalism from the center of the discussion, economists and economic historians were only too happy to concur. British economic historians of empire were in the vanguard of the academic attack on the first generation of imperialism theories. They never liked Lenin. 

The body of work on the 19th-century world economy that emerged in the 1990s, notably that jointly authored by Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, treated the period before 1914 under the rubric of globalization, rather than imperialism. Theirs was not a panglossian history of globalization. Loosely following the model offered by Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation (1944) they focused on social tensions unleashed by mass migration and the grain invasion in Europe, which collapsed commodity prices and hurt the rural interest. But war lay outside their purview. 1914 was exogenous. Sarajevo appears as a nasty accident. 

In 2007 the Communications Director of the IMF remarked ruefully: “Alas a sniper's bullet on June 28, 1914, triggered a chain of events that reversed globalization.” Indeed, pushed to the limit, the neo-Polanyian school of economic history could be read as arguing that to understand the crises of globalization that arose in the early 20th century, you did not need the exogenous shock of World War I at all. Counterfactually, the “interwar crises” might well have happened even without the wars. 

It is strong stuff! 

Crucially, monopolies and militarism were not seen as constitutive of globalization, as imperialism theory à la J.A. Hobson would have it, but as antithetical to globalization. As Williamson and O’ Rourke put it with characteristic frankness, in their calculations of market integration they assume that ‘(i)n the absence of transport costs, monopolies, wars, pirates, and other trade barriers, world commodity markets would be perfectly integrated’. Globalisation, by their measure, would thus be complete if only power and politics did not get in the way. The fact that imperial rivalry actually led to major investments in transport infrastructure and enabled globalization is excluded by assumption. Likewise, there is little room for acknowledging the way that large-scale foreign lending - on the basis of an increasingly integrated capital market - supercharged the imperialist aggression of a rising power like Japan. Whilst “domestic” socio-economic stresses are admitted, economics and geopolitics are held at arms length. 

An economics squeamish about the question of power converged with an anti-Leninist historiography to squeeze out the question of imperialism and 1914. 

Whatever one thinks of the political and intellectual lineage of imperialism theory, this is obviously problematic. A useful theory of globalization must account for global conflict as endogenous to the process of global growth, rather than exogenous. 

My book Deluge sought to capture one element of that shift - the dramatic rise of the United States. For that reason it started, provocatively, in 1916. 

But, conscious of the need to face the “1914 question”, I addressed the question of the politics and economics of the war in a trio of essays that appeared at the same time as the book.

An essay with Ted Fertik queried whether WWI was really a break in the trajectory of globalization or could instead be seen as a phase in which globalization was rearticulated in violent ways. 

Another, argued not that WWI was a war of democracy v. autocracy, as Entente propaganda had it, but a war fought under democratic conditionsover what democratization might turn out to be in the 20th century. 

I will come back to both those arguments in later posts. 

Most pertinently, I contributed an essay to a volume edited by Alex Anievas explicitly on the question of “Capitalist Peace or Capitalist War? The July Crisis Revisited”. A full draft can be downloaded here. 

Adam Tooze Political Economy And The Jul...
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You can find at least some of the footnotes necessary to support the following sketch argument in that pdf. 

Even within the sphere of mainstream academic social science, it is striking that compared to history or economics, political science has been far bolder and more interesting in advancing ways of explicitly connecting economics, politics and war. In arguments over the theories of “capitalist peace”, “democratic peace” and bargaining theories of war, economic development, or the lack of it, is tied to 1914. The PDF article discusses some of those debates as they stood around the anniversary in 2014. 

In this newsletter I want to make a more streamlined version of that argument. 

The key points are as follows:

The firewall drawn between “1914” and the story of the first globalization is ideological. But it is also a weak form of ideology - a silence rather than a strong thesis. Mainstream historical accounts of the July crisis in 1914 are, in fact, based, more often than not, on a modernization theory that dare not speak its name. Accounts such as Chris Clark’s Sleepwalkers rank Western European Empires and the scrappy Balkan protagonists in developmental terms. Meanwhile, economic accounts of the late 19th century that give a civilian-socio-economic analysis of the stresses of globalization and treat 1914 as exogenous, result not just in a whitewashing of global economic development, but in strange and counterfactual history of the early twentieth century.

Uncoupling geopolitics from socio-economic development is a problem not just for our understanding of 1914, but for the interwar period that follows. Not only is 1914 exogenized but you end up, for instance in Barry Eichengreen’s work, with an account of the interwar period to which the war itself is causally incidental. As I will argue in a future note, this points to a broader problem of articulating global power politics with international economic history in the early 20th century. 

In light of all this evasiveness, we should bring the concept of an age of imperialism back. 

In a remarkable article published in 2007, Paul Schroeder the doyen of European diplomatic history, asked how are we to characterise the sea-change that had clearly come over the international system in the generation before 1914. The world that the modern political science literature takes for granted, of multi-dimensional, full spectrum international competition was not a state of nature. It had taken on a new comprehensive form in the late nineteenth century. There is still no better concept, Schroeder insists to grasp this competition that embraced every dimension of state power –GDP growth, taxation, foreign loans – that made the constitution of Russia itself endogenous to grand strategic competition, than the concept of an ‘age of imperialism’. Schroeder is not, of course, appealing for a return to Lenin. But what Schroeder wishes to highlight is what it was that Lenin, Kautsky and other theorists of the 2nd international were trying to analyse and rationalise; namely the widely shared awareness that great power competition had become radicalised, expanded in scope, and had taken on a new logic of life and death. 

In this view of the age of imperialism the driver is not the competition of individual capitalists, harnessing nation states for their purposes, with Krupp or Vickers Armstrong, or Cecil Rhodes in the driving seat. The notion of imperialism that Schroeder invokes and I would subscribe to, is more general and ultimately framed by state power and politics. As far as the economy is concerned the key is the global balance of (geoeconomic) power, both as a specific construct - number of guns etc - and as a frame for thinking about the world. This links to my early work on the history of statistics. It is against the backdrop of the age of imperialism that both the concept of national economy and, as Quinn Slobodian has shown, the idea of the “Weltwirtschaft” take shape. We enter, in short, the world of mental mapping that we still inhabit today, the mapping that causes us to ask: when China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy? 

The basic point to be made about global economic growth before 1914 in connection with the outbreak of the war, is that it was uneven. Some national economies grew faster than others. This uneven economic development threatened to shift the military balance of power, by way of manpower, tax revenue and technological capacity as well as strategic assets like railways. And it was that which was a prime driver of the tensions and calculations that lead to war in 1914. 

Furthermore, this competition should not be understood merely in objectivist terms - the numbers of troops and speed of railways etc. If we want to understand decision-making we also need to grasp the way in which those differences were made sense of. How they fitted into visions of the present and the future. How they were framed as part of the great drama of world history. 

The logic of rivalrous uneven development played out in distinct force fields. 

The one most commonly invoked for purposes of historical analogy is Imperial Germany’s rivalry with Britain. This was no doubt serious. It could, at various points have lead to conflict. But, as far as the war that actually broke out in 1914 was concerned, it was an indirect contributor. By 1914, Britain had clearly won the naval arms race. It had sone so, not through superior industrial performance, but through strategic focus, determined technological development and the success of the Liberal government in forcing through a constitutional and a fiscal revolution. Britain had the tax base to compete. 

The military-industrial race that directly impelled the outbreak of war in 1914 was not naval but continental and it was not, in fact, one race, but two. 

The decisive axis was France-Germany-Russia. This revolved around the relative mobilization of national resources by France and Germany and the sporadic and unpredictable development of Russia. Russia was truly the swing variable. 

Russia was defeated by Japan in 1905 and had been shaken by revolution. On the other hand its huge size and enormous potential made it a looming threat as far as Germany and Austria were concerned. The Tsar and his ministers had huge freedom of action. It had a neutered parliamentary system. In Russia’s governing circles politicised nationalist protectionism was rampant. Added to which, with ample funding from France, Russia’s power was growing by the year and its expanding railway network was speeding its pace of mobilization. In the summer of 1912 Jules Cambon of France noted after a conversation with Germany’s Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that regarding Russia’s recent advances, 

the Chancellor expressed a feeling of admiration and astonishment so profound that it affects his policy. The grandeur of the country, its extent, its agricultural wealth, as much as the vigour of the population … he compared the youth of Russia to that of America, and it seems to him that whereas (the youth) of Russia is saturated with futurity, America appears not to be adding any new element to the common patrimony of humanity. 

The French themselves were extremely optimistic about Russia’s prospects. A year later French foreign minister Pichon received from Moscow a report commenting that 

there is something truly fantastic in preparation, …. I have the very clear impression that in the next thirty years, we are going to see in Russia a prodigious economic growth which will equal – if it does not surpass it – the colossal movement that took place in the United States during the last quarter of the 19th century. 

Was Russia a bankrupt? Or was it a steamroller? 

In 1913 the Kaiser’s government finally persuaded the Reichstag to agree to raise the size of peacetime army from 736,000 to 890,000. But the immediate response was to triggers the passage of the French three year conscription law and the promulgation of Russia’s ‘Great Programme’, which raised its peacetime strength by 800,000 by 1917. By 1914 Russia’s army strength was double that of Germany and 300,000 more than that of Germany and Austria combined with a target by 1916 of 2 million. Against this backdrop the Germans were convinced that by 1916–1917 they would have lost whatever military advantage they still enjoyed. This implied to them two things. First, Russia would be unlikely to risk a war until it reached something closer to its full strength. So Germany could risk an aggressive punitive policy in Serbia. If this containment were to fail, then 1914 would be a better moment to fight a major war than 1916 or 1917. 

But, no more than Anglo-German competition, was it a direct confrontation between France, Germany and Russia that triggered war in 1914. The stakes were too high for an open clash to happen there. 

What launched the war was a clash between their allies in a third zone of competition - the shatter-zone of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. The basic question that dominated the rivalry between the Balkan powers and their great power backers was the question of backwardness. This was in part political and military but it was also, crucially, economic. These were the poorest parts of the European economy. Could they catch up? Did any of them, the Bulgarian, Serbians, Austrians or the Tsarist Empire, actually have a place in the 20th century?

In a very general sense this three-sphere model: Anglo-German, Franco-German-Russian, Habsburg-Serb-Russian can clearly be ranked in terms of economic and political development. 

But that neat hierarchy is muddled by the fact that the logic of alliances dictated not separation of hierarchical levels but interconnection. For progressives in France and Britain, those who believed most firmly in the logic of progress, it was profoundly disturbing to find themselves from the 1890s onwards, drifting towards a strategic alliance with Tsarist Russia. 

On grounds of liberal political ethics an alliance between the French republic and the autocratic and anti-semitic regime of Tsarist Russia was clearly to be regarded as odious. But furthermore, if as liberals insisted, the domestic constitution of a society was predictive of its likely international behavior and its future prospects, then an alliance between a republic and an autocracy was questionable not merely on normative liberal, but on realist grounds. For a convinced liberal placing a wager on the survival of the Tsarist regime was a dubious bet at best. Tsarism’s army was huge and it was convenient to be able to count on the Russian steamroller. But could Tsarism really be relied upon as an ally? Might Tsarism not at some point seek a conservative accommodation with Imperial Germany? Furthermore, given liberals understanding of history, was the Tsar’s regime not doomed by its brittle political constitution and lack of internal sources of legitimacy? 

Following the defeat at the hands of the Japanese and the abortive revolution in Russia in 1905, Georges Clemenceau, an iconic figure of French radicalism before his entry into government in 1906 was particularly prominent in demanding that France should not bankroll the collapsing Tsarist autocracy. From Russia itself came pleas from liberals calling on France to boycott the loan to the Tsar. Poincaré typically cast the problem in legal terms. How was Russia to reestablish its bona fides as a debtor after the crisis of 1905? If Russia was to receive any further credits it must provide guarantees of their legal basis. That would require a constitution, precisely what the Tsar was so unwilling to concede. Meanwhile, France’s own democracy suffered damage as Russian-financed propaganda swilled through the dirty channels of the French press. The most toxic product of this multi-sided argument were the notoriously anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion a forgery generated by reactionary Russian political policemen stationed in Paris, who were desperate to persuade the Tsar that the French-financed capitalist modernisation of Russia was, indeed, a Jewish plot to subvert his autocratic regime. 

But the demands from French Republicans and Russian radicals were, in fact, to no avail. The international system had its own compulsive logic that might be modified but could not so easily be overridden by political considerations, however important they might be. The consequences of Bismarck’s revolution of 1866–1871 could not be so easily escaped. By the 1890s the triumphant consolidation of the German nation-state had created enormous pressure for the formation of a balancing power bloc anchored by France and Russia. This type of peace time military bloc might be a novelty in international relations. It might be odious to French radicals. But Tsarism knew it was indispensable. By 1905, Russia was too important both as a debtor and as an ally to be amenable to pressure. With the French demanding that foreign borrowing be put on a secure legal basis and the Duma parliament uncooperative, the Tsar’s regime simply responded by decree powers arrogating to itself the right to enter into foreign loans. 

Desperate to escape this dependence on Russia, French radicals looked to the Entente with liberal Britain. Clemenceau indeed risked his entire political career in the early 1890s through his adventurous advocacy of an Anglo-French alliance, laying himself open to allegations that he was a hireling of British intelligence. And certainly some British liberals, Lloyd George notable amongst them, understood the 1904 Entente with France as a way of ensuring that there would be no war between the two ‘progressive powers’ in Europe. But Britain’s own concern for its imperial security was to pressing for it to be able to ignore the appeal of a détente with Russia. It was the hesitancy of the British commitment to France that combined with the Russian revival to push Paris back in the direction of Moscow. By 1912 the French republic was committing itself wholeheartedly not to regime change in Russia but to maximising its firepower. 

The appeal of the ‘liberal’ British option was not confined to France. In Germany too the idea of a cross-channel détente with Britain was attractive to those on the progressive wing of Wilhelmine politics. Amongst reformist social democrats there were even those who toyed with the idea of a Western democratic alliance against Russia, including both France and Britain. Bernstein reported that when he discussed the possibility of a Franco-German rapprochement with Jaures, the Frenchman had exclaimed that in that case France would lose all interest in the alliance with Russia and the ‘foundations would have been layed for a truly democratic foreign policy’. Beyond the ranks of the SPD, ‘Liberal imperialists’ speculated publicly about the possibility of satisfying Germany’s desire for a presence on the world stage, without antagonising the British. But in practice the Kaiser and his entourage, no doubt backed by a large segment of public opinion, could never reconcile themselves to the reality that they would forever play the role of a junior partner to the British Empire. Antagonism with Britain, however, implied an alliance system that bound Germany to the Habsburg Empire as its main ally. And this commitment was reaffirmed in 1908 by Bülow’s support for Austria’s abrupt annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This in the eyes of many liberal imperialists in Berlin was to prove a tragic mistake. Richard von Kühlmann, a leading advocate of détente with Britain, who would serve as Germany’s foreign secretary during World War I and was driven out of office in the summer of 1918 as a result of clashes with Ludendorff and Hindenburg, would describe Berlin’s dependence on Vienna as the true tragedy of German power. From the vantage point of a liberal view of history, the true logic of World War I was a struggle over the inevitable dismantling of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. For a German liberal such as Kuehlmann for Berlin to have tied itself to the Habsburg Empire, a structure condemned by the nationality principle to historical oblivion, was a disaster. A true realism involved not sentimentality or blank cynicism but an understanding of history’s inner logic. A new Bismarck would, Kühlmann believed, have joined Britain in a partnership to oversee the dismantling of both Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, whose crisis was instead to result in the self-destruction of European power.

Instead, 1914 manifested an utter confusion of hierarchies. And in a historical moment characterized by extreme reflexivity it is hardly surprising that all these theories were anticipated and incorporated such that all sides derived justifications for their actions. Both the rally by German social democracy to national defense and Lenin’s defeatism were justified in terms of hierarchical notions of historical development. For both the pivot of the argument was Tsarist Russia. 

At the time of the 1848 revolution and after both Marx and Engels had preached the need for a revolutionary war against reactionary Russia. Since the 1912 election the SPD had emerged as the largest party in the Reichstag. As a socialist party it was committed to a Marxist interpretation of history and thus to the cause both of progress and internationalism. It was also, of course, a mass party enrolling millions of voters many of whom were proud German patriots, who saw in August 1914 a patriotic struggle and an occasion for national cross class unity. Famously the party like virtually all its other European counterparts voted for war credits. But despite the abuse hurled at them by more radical internationalists, for the SPD as for other European socialists, it was not naked patriotism that triumphed in 1914. What overrode their internationalism was their determination to defend a vision of progress cast within a national developmental frame. World War I was a progressive war for German social democracy in that it was through the war that domestic reform would be won. It was not by coincidence that it was during the war that the Weimar coalition between the SPD, progressive liberals and Christian Democrats was forged. It was that coalition that delivered the progressive constitution of the Weimar Republic. This was a democratic expression of the spirit of August 1914. It was the first incarnation of Volksgemeinschaft in democratic form. It was defensive in inspiration. An Anglophile like Bernstein deeply regretted the war in the West, but there was no question where he stood in August 1914. The cause of progress in Germany would not be helped by surrendering to the rapacious demands of the worst elements of Anglo-French imperialism. If the Tsar’s brutal hordes were to march through Berlin, the setback to progress would be world historic. But it was not merely a revisionist like Bernstein who took this view. Hugo Haase, the later founder of the USPD, justified his support for the war on 4 August in strictly anti-Russian terms: ‘The victory of Russian despotism, sullied with the blood of the best of its own people, would jeopardise much, if not everything, for our people and their future freedom. It is our duty to repel this danger and to safeguard the culture and independence of our country’. 

Lenin himself employed a similar logic in developing his position on the war in 1914. In his September 1914 manifesto Lenin declared the defeat of Tsarism the ‘lesser evil”. Nor did Lenin shrink from making comparisons. In his letter to Shlyapnikov of 17 October, he wrote: “for us Russians, from the point of view of the interests of the working masses and the working class of Russia, there cannot be the smallest doubt, absolutely any doubt, that the lesser evil would be now, at once the defeat of tsarism in this war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than Kaiserism.” Early in 1915 this line was reiterated in a resolution proposed to the conference of the exiled Bolshevik party that echoed Marx and Engels in 1848. All revolutionaries should work for the overthrow of their governments and none should shrink from the prospect of national defeat in war. But for Russian revolutionaries this was essential, because a “victory for Russia will bring in its train a strengthening of reaction, both throughout the world and within the country, and will be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the peoples living in areas already seized. In view of this, we consider the defeat of Russia the lesser evil in all conditions.” 

Lenin, of course, was at pains to distance himself from the logic of national defense that would seem to follow from his comment for German social democracy. Instead, he called on revolutionaries to raise the stakes by launching a civil war. But, given the difficulties that Lenin had in formulating his own position, it is hardly surprising that the SPD chose a more obvious path. A German defeat at the hands of the Russian army would be a disaster. So long as the main aim was defense against the Tsarist menace they could be won for a defensive war. And this was well understood on the part of the Reich’s leadership who by 1914 were convinced that they needed to bring the opposition party onside. To secure the solidity of the German home front it was absolutely crucial from the point of view of Bethmann Hollweg’s grand strategy during the July crisis that Russia must be seen to be the aggressor. Throughout the desperate final days of July Berlin waited for the Tsar’s order to mobilise before unleashing the Schlieffen Plan. As Bethmann Hollweg well understood, whatever Germany’s own entanglements with Vienna, only if the expectations of a modernist vision of history were confirmed by a first move on the Tsar’s part could the Kaiser’s regime count on the support of the Social Democrats, who were in their vast majority devoted adherents of a stage view of history that placed Russia far behind Imperial Germany. It was Russia’s mobilisation on 30 July 1914 that served as a crucial justification for a defensive war, which by 1915 had become a war to liberate the oppressed nationalities from the Tsarist knout, first the Baltics and Poland then Ukraine and the Caucasus. 

The logic of the imperialist age was at work here in multiple layers of determination. In the threat of being locked in life and death competition with Russia. In the significance of Russia’s railway development and the scale of its military mobilization. But also in assumptions about the aggression that such a regime would surely manifest and what the appropriate reaction of a progressive Empire like Germany should be. 

Most fundamentally what were at stake were conceptions of history. This subtle point is explicated by Schroeder himself in the telling image he chooses to illustrate the difference between the classical game of great power politics and the age of imperialism. 

The classical game of great power politics, Schroeder suggests, was like a poker game played by highly armed powers but with a sense of common commitment to upholding the game. It was thus eventful, but repetitive, highly structured and to a degree timeless. There was no closure. Win or lose, the players remained the same. Imperialism, by contrast, was more like the brutal and notoriously ill-defined game of Monopoly. Under the new dispensation the players’ sole aim was accumulation up to and including the out-right elimination of the competition through bankruptcy. As Eric Hobsbawm also pointed out, one of the novelties of the situation before 1914 was that great power status and economic standing had come to be identified and the terrifying aspect of capital accumulation was that it had not natural limit. 

The difference with regard to temporal dynamics is striking. Unlike an endlessly repeated poker round, as the game of Monopoly progresses, the piling up of resources and the elimination of players marks out an irreversible, ‘historical’ trajectory. Unselfconsciously Schroeder thus introduces into the discussion one of the most fundamental ideas suggested by Hannah Arendt in the critique of imperialism and capitalist modernity that she first developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism. What she described was precisely the colonisation of the world of politics by the limitless voracious appetites of capital accumulation. And for her too this brought with it a new and fetishistic relationship to history. 

If global capitalist development was tied up in a very deep way with dynamic that drove the powers to war in 1914, so too was its guiding ideology of liberalism. Liberalism is not imperialism’s other, as by 1918 would be suggested by Woodrow Wilson’s reworked version of liberal ideology. Nor, on the other hand, is it reducible to, or identical with imperialism, as some critics would allege. They undeniably existed within the same space and in the early 20th century constituted each other.

Liberalism could justify violent escalation - “the war to end all wars” etc. But that violent dialectic was only one possibility. The moment also gave rise to a new crop of theories of world order order and “ultra-imperialism” as advanced, for instance by Karl Kautsky and J.A. Hobson. 

The problem of finding a new global order in the early twentieth century, the idea that came to such prominence in the wake of World War I, is not best understood in terms of “idealism” or the soft tissue of a disempowered international civil society. As I argued in Deluge, the project of world order, is best understood, as a power-political project. 

And this is where the question of hegemony enters in. 

With the plausibility of empire as a means of global ordering having reached its limit, hegemony is a convenient term for a global ordering of power amongst the powerful. The concept is indispensable. But it is also a snare. 

In the wake of the interwar crisis, analysts, taking inspiration from cyclical models of the development of capitalism, posited that hegemony was, if not a universal tendency, then certainly a recurring imperative of modern capitalism. To function well, the system needs a hegemon. Always! 

This was the thesis both of Kindleberger and Arrighi. 

The interwar crisis was the latest to result from a phase of hegemonic transition. In this case the baton dropped as it passed from the British Empire to the US.

There can be little doubt that a baton dropped. But what was at stake was not some ancient scepter of hegemonic power passed down from the Genoese to the Dutch, from them to the British and from there to the United States - the phrase is translatio imperii. 

That is of course an attractive idea for empire-builders, but its significance is as a piece of ideology rather than as an explanation. British power in the 19th century constituted the global condition, in Geyer and Bright’s terms, but it had precious little to do with hegemony as the US exercised it after 1945 - as instantiated in organizations like NATO and the European Community. Those were tools of order suited for an age of extremes. The problem of order is defined by the forces in play. The transhistoric notion of a hegemonic imperative fails to do justice to the explosive force of accumulation and state-formation unleashed from the middle of the nineteenth century i.e. the age of imperialism. To corral those forces, hegemony of a far more robust and intrusive kind was required. 

The British Empire did attempt to raise its game to match the challenges of the era. I take this to be the point of John Darwin’s indispensable Empire Project. But that radical new British ambition, to hold the global ring not at a distance, but through direct engagement of all the key players, suffered shipwreck in 1922 at Genoa. That was the moment, especially in comparison with the remarkable deal brokered at the naval conference in Washington, that America’s indispensability - in this conjuncture, at this moment - became undeniable. More on this to follow.