Revista Intellector (Cenegri), n. 22 - Geopolitica e Relacoes Internacionais

Revista Intellector, n. 22
Editorial

A Intellector em sua edição nº 22 oferece ao público um amplo espectro de temas. Sendo assim, participam desta edição: Maria Cristina Cacciamali, Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa, Ângela Cristina Tepassê, Marina Neves Biancalana e Marcos Fávaro Martins com o trabalho Relações Econômica Brasil–China: o Padrão de Comércio e o Investimento da China no Brasil (Brazil-China Economic Relations: Trade Pattern and China Investment Profile in Brazil). O artigo analisa a dinâmica comercial sino-brasileira com a predominância de exportações de produtos primários brasileiros para a China e a importação de seus produtos manufaturados.

Cláudio Júnior Damin (Universidade Federal do Pampa) no artigo O Debate Teórico Sobre o Poder de Guerra nos Estados Unidos (The theoretical debate about the power of war in the United States) aborda a questão do chamado Poder de Guerra contido no desenho constitucional dos Estados Unidos.

No artigo A Episteme da Geografia das Relações Internacionais (Episteme of the Geography of International Relations), Elói Martins Senhoras (Universidade Federal de Roraima) apresenta o manifesto para uma episteme do subcampo científico intitulado como Geografia das Relações Internacionais.

Já em Geopolítica e desenvolvimento: notas sobre a inserção da África do Sul, Angola e Nigéria no sistema interestatal capitalista (Geopolitics and development: notes on the integration of South Africa, Nigeria and Angola in the interestate system), Hélio Farias (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) analisa os três grandes momentos de inclusão do continente na dinâmica global de acumulação de riqueza e poder.

Rodrigo Milindre Gonzalez (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) em A questão da soberania sobre a plataforma continental: implicações e ações do Brasil para ampliação até 350 milhas marítimas (The issue of sovereignty over the continental shelf: implications and actions of Brazil to expand up to 350 nautical miles), busca identificar as implicações e ações da expansão da soberania brasileira na Plataforma Continental em consonância com a Convenção das Nações Unidas sobre o Direito do Mar (CNUDM), em especial, ao artigo 76°.

Do Uruguai temos pela primeira vez a presença de Ignacio Bartesaghi (Universidad Católica del Uruguay) com o artigo El Ascenso de China en el Escenario Internacional: un análisis desde las corrientes teóricas de las relaciones internacionales (The Rise of China in the International Scene: an analysis from the theories of international relations). Bartesaghi analisa as relações entre a China e os EUA, a partir do maior peso internacional de Pequim desde os anos 1970.

Em seu artigo A Evolução da Ordem Internacional e os Emergentes: Uma Perspectiva Geopolítica e de Economia Política Internacional (The Evolution of International Order and The Emerging Countries: A perspective Geopolitics and International Economy Policy) de Marcela Tarter da Rosa (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), analisa o sistema internacional atual sob a ótica da economia política internacional com destaque para o papel da China e o Brasil.

Eliane Superti e Gutemberg Vilhena Silva (Universidade Federal Amapá) com Integração Internacional e Políticas Públicas de Defesa e Segurança na Fronteira Setentrional Amazônica: Reflexões sobre a Condição Fronteiriça Amapaense (International Integrations and Policies on defense and Security in Northern Border Amazon: Reflections on the Border Conditions of Amapá), analisam o atual cenário político-econômico da Amazônia setentrional brasileira, especificamente a fronteira internacional entre Amapá (Brasil) e Guiana Francesa (França).

Amine Ait-Chaalal (Université Catholique de Louvain-Bélgica) com o artigo Les relations du Brésil avec les Etats-Unis durant la Présidence Lula : l’affirmation d’un protagoniste majeur au niveau régional et international (Brazil’s relations with the United States during the Lula presidency: the affirmation of a major player at the regional and international) aborda o período do ex-presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva e o aumento do reconhecimento do Brasil como um protagonista no cenário internacional a partir da perspectiva europeia.

Finalizando com o artigo A Segurança Alimentar nas Organizações Regionais da América do Sul e a Cooperação internacional (The Food Security in the South American Regional Organizations and International Cooperation) de Claudete de Castro Vitte (Universidade de Campinas), temos a contribuição sobre um tema que vem ganhando destaque na América do Sul.

Uma edição com temas variados e com a colaboração de importantes pesquisadores.

Boa leitura!

Os Editores

http://www.revistaintellector.cenegri.org.br/
* Brazil-China Economic Relations: Trade Pattern and China Investiment Profile in Brazil

Relações Econômicas Brasil-China: o Padrão de Comércio e o Investimente da China no Brasil

Por Maria Cristina Cacciamali, Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa, Ângela Cristina Tepassê, Marina Neves Biancalana, Marcos Fávaro Martins

*O Debate Teórico sobre o Poder de Guerra nos Estados Unidos

The Theorical Debate about the Power of War in the United States

Por Claudio Júnior Damin

*A Episteme da Geografia das Relações Internacionais

Episteme of the Geography os International Relations

Por Elói Martins Senhoras

* Geopolítica e Desenvolvimento: Notas Sobre a Inserção da África do Sul. Angola e Nigéria no Sistema Interestatal Capitalista
The issue of sovereignty over the continental shelf: implications and actions of Brazil to expand up to 350 nautical miles

Por Rodrigo Milindre Gonzalez

*El Ascenso de China en el Escenario Internacional: un análisis desde las corrientes teóricas de las relaciones internacionales

The Rise of China in the International Scene: an analysis from the theories of international relations

Por Ignacio Bartesaghi

*A Evolução da Ordem Internacional e os Emergentes: Uma Perspectiva Geopolítica e de Economia Política Internacional

The Evolution of International Order and The Emerging Countries: A perspective Geopolitics and International Economy Policy

Por Marcela Tarter Rosa

* Integração Internacional e Políticas Públicas de Defesa e Segurança na Fronteira Setentrional Amazônica: Reflexões sobre a Condição Fronteiriça Amapaense

International Integrations and Policies on defense and Security in Northern Border Amazon: Reflections on the Border Conditions of Amapá

Por Eliane Superti e Gutemberg Vilhena da Silva

* Les relations du Brésil avec les Etats-Unis durant la Présidence Lula: l’affirmation d’un protagoniste majeur au niveau régional et international

Brazil’s relations with the United States during the Lula presidency: the affirmation of a major player at the regional and international

Por Amine Ait-Chaalal

*A Segurança Alimentar nas Organizações Regionais da América do Sul e a Cooperação internacional

The Food Security in the South American Regional Organizations and International Cooperation

Por Claudete de Castro Vitte

http://www.revistaintellector.cenegri.org.br/

A fatalidade da lideranca americana e a exportacao da democracia - Robert Kaplan (National Interest)

Retiro uma passagem, do artigo abaixo apresentado, que recomendo leitura, do conhecido jornalista Robert Kaplan, sobre a "fatalidade" da liderança americana. Interessa-me menos esse projeto geopolítico do que as considerações históricas que ele faz ao longo do texto, inclusive no que respeita os imponderáveis da história, ou seja, os famosos "what ifs?", que poderiam ter determinado outro curso a determinados eventos, alguns very big (Hitler e a Segunda Guerra, por exemplo), outros de consequências incomensuráveis para a toda a humanidade (o sucesso do putsch de Lênin, e a criação da União Soviética).
Mas, interessou-me esta passagem sobre a futilidade da "exportação" da democracia, o que nos deixa um pouco pessimistas sobre a evolução da nossa, no momento presente:

" Just consider the case of promoting democracy abroad: it took England nearly half a century to hold the first meeting of a parliament after the signing of the Magna Carta, and more than seven hundred years to achieve women’s suffrage. What we in the West define as a healthy democracy took England the better part of a millennium to achieve. A functioning democracy is not a toolkit that can be easily exported, but an expression of culture and historical development. Great Britain’s democracy did not come from civil-society programs taught by aid workers: it was the offshoot of bloody dynastic politics and uprisings in the medieval and early modern eras. In a similar spirit, whatever indigenous cultural elements India possessed for the establishment of democracy, the experience of almost two hundred years of British imperial rule under the colonial civil service was crucial. Certain other countries in Asia had many years of economic and social development under enlightened authoritarians to prepare them for democracy. In Latin America, the record of democracy remains spotty, with virtual one-man rule in some places, and near chaos and social and economic upheaval in others. African democracies are often that in name only, with few or no governing authorities outside of the capital cities. Holding elections is easy; it is building institutions that counts. Given this evidence, and with the Arab world having suffered the most benighted forms of despotism anywhere in the world, how can one expect to export democracy overnight to the Middle East? "

O texto completo do artigo de Robert Kaplan está aqui, e reproduzo só a parte inicial:

America is Fated to Lead

Robert Kaplan

The National Interest, january-february 2015

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-fated-lead-11901

Culture and geography really do matter. Great statesmen may attempt to rebel against these limits, but their skillful diplomacy constitutes an implicit acceptance that they exist.

Printer-fiendly version: http://nationalinterest.org/print/feature/america-fated-lead-11901?page=7

(December 22, 2014)

THE SLEEP of any president, prime minister or statesman is haunted by what ifs.

What if I had only fired that defense secretary sooner, or replaced that general in Iraq with the other one before it was too late? What if I had not wholly believed the air force when they told me that the war in southern Lebanon could be won from the skies? What if I had more troops on the ground in Iraq from the start? What if I had called off those fruitless negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians a few months—or even a few weeks—earlier than I did? What if I had asked more questions at that meeting, and listened sooner to the pleas of my assistant secretary or whoever it was that said something could be done about Rwanda? The whole world, and my reputation, would be different.

Counterfactuals haunt us all in the policy community. We all want to be right, and assign failure to someone else. We all want to deny fate, even as we recognize that it exists. For example, we know that despite Isaiah Berlin’s admonition against the very idea of vast impersonal forces, such as geography and culture, these forces really do matter, and they affect the tasks ahead: whatever the intervention strategy, Iraqis will never behave like Swedes, and Afghans or Libyans will never behave like Canadians. And sometimes it is that simple. While individuals are more real and concrete than the national groups to which they belong, group characteristics actually do exist and must play a role in the foresight of any analyst. For group characteristics are merely the sum total of a people’s experience on a given landscape throughout hundreds or thousands of years of history.

But that is only the half of it. We also know that grand historical events can turn on a hair’s breadth, on this or that contingency. While the destiny of Afghanistan or Libya might never be that of Canada, better or worse outcomes in such places are possible depending upon the choices of individual policy makers, so that all of us, as Berlin rightly suggests, must take moral responsibility for our actions. And because wrong choices and unfortunate opinions are part and parcel of weighing in on foreign policy, we go on torturing ourselves with counterfactuals.

WHAT IS fate—what the Greeks called moira, “the dealer-out of portions”? Does it exist? If it does, Herodotus best captures its complexities: from his geographical determinism regarding the landmasses of Greece and Asia Minor and the cultures they raise up to his receptivity to the salience of human intrigues, he skillfully conveys how self-interest is often calculated within a disfiguring whirlwind of passion, so that the most epic events emerge from the oddest of incidents and personal dramas. With such a plethora of factors, fate is inscrutable. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short tale “The Lottery in Babylon,” fate means utter randomness: a person can get rich, be executed or tortured, provided with a beautiful woman or be thrown into prison solely because of a roll of the dice. Nothing appears to be predetermined, but neither is there moral responsibility. I find this both unsatisfying and unacceptable, despite the story’s allegorical power.

How can a great episode in history be determined in advance? It seems impossible. The older I get, with the experience of three decades as a foreign correspondent behind me, the more I realize that outside of a class of brilliantly intuitive minds—including the late Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger—political science is still mainly an aspiration, and that Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories offer a much better guide to the bizarre palace maneuverings of the last Romanov czar and czarina of Russia, of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of Romania, of Slobodan Milosevic and Mirjana Markovic of Yugoslavia, or of Zviad and Manana Gamsakhurdia of Georgia. In short, there is no scientific formula to understanding international relations. There is primarily insight, which by definition is Shakespearean.

Yes, geography and culture matter. Tropical abundance produces disease, just as temperate climates with good natural harbors produce wealth. But these are merely the backdrops to the immense and humming beehive of human calculation, the details of which can never be known in advance. And yet, over the course of my life I have known people who are abrasive and confrontational, and generate one crisis after another to the detriment of themselves and their relations, even as I have known others who are unfailingly considerate and modest, who go from one seemingly easy success to another. Character, which itself is partly physiological, can indeed be destiny, and that is fate.

It is this very contradiction concerning fate that produces our finest historians: men and women who discern grand determinative patterns, but only within an impossible-to-predict chaos of human interactions, themselves driven by the force of vivid personalities acting according to their own agency, for better and for worse. A classic work that comes to mind is University of London historian Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. “It was by no means inevitable that the [Russian] revolution should have ended in the Bolshevik dictatorship,” he writes.

“There were a number of decisive moments, both before and during 1917, when Russia might have followed a more democratic course.”

Nevertheless, Figes adds, Russia’s democratic failure was deeply rooted in its political culture and social history

. . . [for example, in] the absence of a state-based counterbalance to the despotism of the Tsar; the isolation and fragility of liberal civil society; the backwardness and violence of the Russian village that drove so many peasants to go and seek a better life in the industrial towns; and the strange fanaticism of the Russian radical intelligentsia.

Figes gives us the determinative forces, but then, like a good novelist, he provides in capacious detail the other factors, without any one of which such seemingly determinative forces might have been stayed. Had only Czar Alexander III not died of kidney disease at the age of forty-nine, long before his son Nicholas II was temperamentally ready to rule. Had only Nicholas truly supported Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and recognized the talent of another bureaucrat, Prince Lvov, early on. Had only the Czarevitch Alexei not had hemophilia, forcing the royal family to rely for treatment on the mystic Grigory Rasputin, whose baleful influence fatally weakened the regime. Had only Alexander Kerensky been better grounded emotionally and less in love with his own rhetoric, and had only his provisional government not bet its fortunes so completely on the spring 1917 offensive against the Germans. Had only Lenin’s past as a member of the nobility not awarded him such a “dogmatic” and “domineering manner,” and had Lenin only been arrested or even temporarily detained by a nighttime patrol while he walked in disguise to the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, to take control of the squabbling Bolsheviks and declare an insurrection in October 1917. And so on. Again, we are in the realm of geography and culture, until we are in the realm of Shakespeare, and finally in the realm of sheer chance. Although Figes says that “historians should not really concern themselves with hypothetical questions,” his textured rendition of history allows the reader to ponder other outcomes.

 (...)

Leia o artigo inteiro aqui: 

 http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-fated-lead-11901

O fim do acordo Sykes-Picot na Siria, e no Oriente Medio em geral - Gregory Gause (Foreign Policy)

Is this the end of Sykes-Picot?

• BY F. GREGORY GAUSE III

• May 20 at 4:18 pm

The Gulf/2000 Project and United Nations ReliefWeb

The intensity of the civil war in Syria, combined with the continued upheavals in Iraq and the endemic instability of Lebanese politics, has naturally led to speculation that the famously “artificial” borders in the eastern Arab world, drawn by Britain and France in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, are on their last legs. Are the state entities created by European colonialism in the 1920s about to collapse? Are we about to see a grand redrawing of the borders in the Middle East? The short answer to this question is no. While none of these three states will be able to claim effective governance within their borders anytime soon, the borders themselves are not going to change. They are devolving into what the political scientist Robert Jackson perceptively referred to as “quasi-states,” internationally recognized de jureas sovereign even though they cannot implement de facto the functional requisites that sovereignty assumes – control of territory and borders. Real governance in the eastern Arab world is certainly up for grabs, but the borders themselves will be the last things to change, because almost none of the actors, either regionally or internationally, really want them to change.

“The end of Sykes-Picot” is the tagline used by those who argue that the borders themselves are on the verge of substantial change. This is something of a misnomer. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 made a preliminary division of the Arab (and some Turkish and Kurdish) territories of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, but the final borders were determined by the two powers at the San Remo conference in 1920. Sykes-Picot, for example, gave what is now northern Iraq to France and foresaw an international regime for the Holy Land. San Remo gave League of Nations approval to the borders that France and Britain subsequently worked out – Lebanon carved from the French mandate of Syria, Transjordan separated from the British mandate of Palestine, and the British mandate of Iraq created from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. It would be more accurate historically to refer to the prospective collapse of the regional order in the Fertile Crescent as “the end of San Remo,” but that is not a semantic fight worth fighting.

Google returns 14,700 results when queried on “the end of Sykes-Picot.” Formerdiplomats, respected journalists and academics have all recently used the phrase to express their doubts that the territorial state status quo can be sustained. But we should be leery about jumping to the conclusion that the geopolitical dispensation created by France and Britain nearly a hundred years ago is not much longer for this world. These “artificial” entities have had remarkable staying power. Their borders are basically unchanged from their post-World War I creation. Transjordan is now Jordan, and the old mandate of Palestine is now completely under Israeli control (with Gaza a partial exception and the West Bank in an uncertain limbo regarding sovereignty). Iraq, Lebanon and Syria (with the exception of the cession of Alexandretta/Hatay by France to Turkey in 1939) remain as they were created.

The prospects that the map will continue to look as it does now remain strong. First, no one questions the longevity of either Israel or Jordan. Palestinian statehood, which would have been a major shift in the map, looked closer to realization in 1999 than it does now. If anything, the British-drawn border between “Palestine” and “Transjordan” seems more stable now than it has been for years. Second, the deconstruction of the Iraqi state began not recently, but back in 1991 with the establishment of the Western-protected (under a United Nations Security Council resolution) Kurdish region in the north and northeast of the country. That soft partition of Iraq became a constitutional element of the post-Saddam Iraqi state, with the establishment of the Kurdish Regional Government. The KRG has had most of the attributes of statehood – effective control of territory, its own military and an ability to conduct foreign relations – for more than 20 years, yet the map of the Iraqi state remains unchanged.

The anomalous status of the KRG, effectively sovereign but lacking international recognition, leads to the third and most serious weakness of the “end of Sykes-Picot” argument. The international powers constructed the post-Ottoman eastern Arab world. They created territorial shells in which colonial authorities, local elites in league with the colonialists and then independent state rulers, tried, with varying degrees of success, to build real states. But the success or failure of those efforts has not determined whether outsiders grant diplomatic recognition to those entities or not. The Lebanese government has not been able to claim effective control over all its territory since the civil war began in 1975. Yet not a single state granted diplomatic recognition to any sub-state Lebanese entity during the civil war, nor did a single state withdraw diplomatic recognition from Lebanon as a state. The KRG effectively governs a good chunk of Iraq, but no foreign government has recognized it as a state or limited its recognition of the Iraqi state to the territory that Baghdad effectively controls. Knowing that it is unlikely to receive international recognition, the KRG will very likely continue to maintain the fiction that it is a part of Iraq, despite the fact that most Kurds would rather have an independent state. Syria might end up, like Lebanon in its civil war, in a state of de facto partition, but it does not look like any foreign power would be willing to recognize the independence of any of those Syrian statelets. Nor is it clear that the Syrian leaders of such statelets would claim formal independence.

This is the ultimate analytical flaw of the “end of Sykes-Picot” argument. Outsiders drew those borders. No outsiders seem to have any interest in redrawing them, or recognizing the redrawing of them, at this time. The United States certainly does not. It has patronized the KRG for nearly 25 years while never encouraging the Kurds to declare independence. No Russian, Chinese or European leader has suggested an international conference to remake the Middle Eastern map. The states themselves might fragment internally. De facto governing authorities might emerge. But the international borders themselves do not look like they are going to change. All the action in the Middle East is bottom-up, as various domestic and regional groups fight for control of these states and regional powers aid their allies in these fights. But these fights look to remain, at least formally and in terms of international law, within the borders that the French and the British drew nearly a hundred years ago. “Sykes-Picot” lives, as fragile as governance within those borders is.

F. Gregory Gause III is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. He is the author of “The International Relations of the Persian Gulf.”