A selection of works on Brazilian Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in English, 2003-2019 - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

PAULO ROBERTO DE ALMEIDA

A selection of works on Brazilian Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in English

Ordem cronológica inversa: 2019 a 2003

Atualizado em 10 de janeiro de 2020

3474. “Brazil and the 1919 peace negotiations: a newcomer among the greats”, Brasília, 7-16 june 2019, 21 p. Paper prepared for the Peace Making after the First World War, 1919-1923 Conference, held on 27 and 28 June at The National Archives and Lancaster House. Sent to the Organizing Committee, on behalf of Dr Juliette Desplat (Head, Modern Overseas, Intelligence and Security Records; Collections Expertise & Engagement Department; The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU. Disponível na plataforma Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/s/d498fd2bfa/brazil-and-the-1919-peace-negotiations-a-newcomer-among-the-greats-2019).

3284. “De la (Non) Démocratie en Amérique (Latine): a Tocqueville report on the state of governance in Latin America”, Brasília, 9 junho 2018, 41 p. Paper presented in the Estoril Political Forum; round-table “Brazil and Latin America: the challenges ahead”; postado em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/s/a4cbf778cf/de-la-non-democratie-en-amerique-latine-a-tocqueville-report-on-the-state-of-governance-in-latin-america), em Research Gate (link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325809199_De_la_Non_Democratie_en_Amerique_Latine_A_Tocqueville_report_on_the_state_of_governance_in_Latin_America) e divulgado no blog Diplomatizzando (17/06/2018; link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2018/06/de-la-non-democratie-en-amerique-latine.html) e no Facebook (link: https://www.facebook.com/paulobooks/posts/1950274015036039). Publicado na Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas Avançadas do Terceiro Setor, REPATS (vol. 5, n. 1, janeiro-junho 2008, p. 792-842; ISSN: 2359-5299; link: https://portalrevistas.ucb.br/index.php/REPATS/article/view/10020/5909; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31501/repats.v5i1%20Jan/Jun.10020). Relação de Publicados n. 1289.

3133. “A Brazilian Adam Smith: Cairu as the Founding Father of Political Economy in Brazil at the beginning of the 19^thcentury”, Brasília, 30 junho 2017, 2 p. Proposal submission to the IASS international conference on Adam Smith (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez; Viña del Mar, Chile, January 12-13, 2018; Publicado na revista Mises: Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Law and Economics (São Paulo, SP, Brazil; vol. 6, n. 1, edição 10 (janeiro-abril 2018); ISSN: 2318-0811, pp. 117-129; DOI: https://doi.org/10.30800/mises.2018.v6.64; e-ISSN: 2594-9187; link: https://www.misesjournal.org.br/misesjournal/article/view/64; artigo em pdf, link: https://www.misesjournal.org.br/misesjournal/article/view/64/179). Relação de Publicados n. 1278.

3125. “Brazil as a Failing State (or, is it already a Failed State?)”, Brasília, 12 June 2017, 15 p. Note of opinion drafted for the Estoril Political Forum, Panel Brazil, June 27, 2017. Divulgado no blog Diplomatizzando (26/06/2017; link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.pt/2017/06/brasil-existe-uma-crise-da-democracia.html).

3062. “Itamaraty and the new Brazilian Foreign Policy”, São Paulo, 1 dezembro 2016, 7 p. Palestra na conferência “Geopolitics of the Global South: changing patterns of development”, realizada na FEA-USP, em cooperação com a Universidade de Pec, da Hungria. Postado no Diplomatizzando(http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com.br/2016/12/geopolitics-of-global-south-changing.html); Disponível na plataforma Academia.edu (http://www.academia.edu/30208664/3062_Itamaraty_and_the_new_Brazilian_Foreign_Policy_2016_). 

3041. “China’s pivot, Brazil’s stance: a personal view”, Brasília, 24 setembro 2016, 6 p. Notas para intervenção no encontro GIBSA (Germany, India, Brazil, South Africa), realizado em Brasília, 26 e 27 de setembro, a convite do Emb. Roberto Abdenur. Publicado em Mundorama (24/09/2016, link: http://www.mundorama.net/2016/09/24/chinas-pivot-brazils-stance-a-personal-view-by-paulo-roberto-de-almeida/; URL: http://wp.me/p71o3r-59r). Disponibilizado em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/s/42e5a419f5/3041-chinas-pivot-brazils-stance-a-personal-view-2016) e colocado no blog Diplomatizzando (link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com.br/2016/09/chinas-pivot-brazils-stance-personal.html). Relação de Publicados n. 1242.

2924. “ Oswaldo Aranha: The continuity of Rio Branco’s Statesmanship”, Brasília, 23 janeiro 2016, 34 p. Tradução por Paul Sekscenski do trabalho n. 2502, destinado a ser publicado na versão em inglês do livro Pensamento Diplomático Brasileiro. Publicado in: José Vicente Pimentel (org.), José Vicente Pimentel (ed.), Brazilian Diplomatic Thought: policymakers and agents of Foreign Policy (1750-1964) (Brasília: Funag, 2016, 3 vols.; ISBN: 978-85-7631-547-6) Traduzido para o Espanhol por Paola Citraro; publicado in: José Vicente de Sá Pimentel (org.), Pensamiento diplomático brasileño: formuladores y agentes de la política externa (1750-1964); ISBN: 978-85-7631-588-9; vol. III, 496 p. sequenciais; p. 663-707.; Brasília: FUNAG, 2016; 3 v. – (História diplomática); Título original: Disponível no link: http://www.funag.gov.br/boletim-editorial/PDB-ES/livros/pdb_vol_3_es.pdf. Relação de Publicados n. 1110 e 1236.

2906. “Brazilian Diplomatic Thought: methodological introduction to the ideas and actions of some of its representatives”, Brasília, 14 dezembro 2015, 16 p. Tradução para o inglês, por Paul Sekscenski do trabalho n. 2503, “Pensamento diplomático brasileiro: introdução metodológica às ideias e ações de alguns dos seus representantes” (Hartford, 27 Julho 2013, 19 p.), in: José Vicente Pimentel (ed.), Brazilian Diplomatic Thought: policymakers and agents of Foreign Policy (1750-1964), vol. 1 (Brasília: Funag, 2016, 346 p.; ISBN: 978-85-7631-547-6; p. 19-41; translation by Paul Sekscenski; available: http://funag.gov.br/loja/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=841; livro em pdf: http://funag.gov.br/loja/download/1166-BRAZILIAN_DIPLOMATIC_THOUGHT-PDB-Ingles-VOL-1.pdf); disponível em Academia.edu (link: http://www.academia.edu/29111021/Brazilian_Diplomatic_Thought_Policymakers_and_Agents_of_Foreign_Policy_1750-1964_2016_). Relação de Publicados n. 1245.

2888. “The Great Destruction in Brazil: How to Downgrade an Entire Country in Less Than Four Years”. Publicado em Mundorama (n. 102, 1/02/2016, ISSN: 2175-2052; link: http://www.mundorama.net/?p=18052). Relação de Publicados n. 1210.

2875. Brazil, Latin America, and the World: Essays in Foreign Policy and in International Economic Relations, Hartford, 21 setembro 2015, 383 p. Livro (2881) para ser editado e publicado, com outro título, constando dos trabalhos n. 1999, 2128, 2494, 1902, 1213, 2207, 2871, 2516, 2510, 1983, 2025, 1871, 1845, 1920, 2202, 2680, 2488, 761+959; 2479 e 2321. Revisão completa, resultou no trabalho n. 2881, sob o nome de Going Global: Brazil and Latin America in International Context. To be published.

2871. “The (non-)continuity of Lula’s Diplomacy under Dilma Rousseff”, Hartford, September 17, 2015, 5 p. A small piece of evaluation for adding to a book on Brazilian diplomacy, as an appendix to the section on Foreign Relations. Unpublished. Available at blog Diplomatizzando (10/01/2020; link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-non-continuity-of-lulas-diplomacy.html); Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41579812/The_non-_continuity_of_Lulas_diplomacy_under_Dilma_Rousseff_2015_).

2830. “Latin American development trends and Brazil’s role in the region”, Anápolis, 1-4 junho 2015, 15 p. Contribution to the journal “International Relations”, from People’s Friendship University of Russia (PFUR), Prof. Alla Borzova. Publicado em PFUR, Bulletin of International Relations (Moscow: People’s Friendship University of Russia, vol. 15, n. 4, December 2015, p. 7-19). Postado no blog Diplomatizzando (20/08/2016; link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com.br/2016/08/latin-american-trends-paulo-roberto-de.html); Publicado na revista Paiaguás: revista de estudos sobre a Amazônia e Pacífico (UFMS; vol. I, n. 1, fevereiro-julho 2015, p. 37-53; link para a revista: http://seer.ufms.br/index.php/revpaiaguas . Link para o artigo: http://seer.ufms.br/index.php/revpaiaguas/article/view/997; em pdf: http://seer.ufms.br/index.php/revpaiaguas/article/view/997/606). Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41579723/Latin_American_development_trends_and_Brazil_s_role_in_the_region_2015_). Relação de Publicados n. 1181 e 1209.

2680. “The Politics of Economic Regime Change in Brazilian History”, Hartford, 26 Setembro 2014, 41 p. Revisão final do trabalho 2673, para incorporação ao livro Ted Goertzel and Paulo Roberto de Almeida (eds.), The Drama of Brazilian Politics: From 1815 to 2015  (Amazon Digital Services; Kindle Book, 2014, 301 p.; ISBN: 978-1-4951-2981-0; ASIN: B00NZBPX8A; available at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NZBPX8A), com a participação de outros colaboradores. (Available Academia.edu; link: https://www.academia.edu/41579661/The_Politics_of_Economic_Regime_Change_in_Brazilian_History_2014_). Relação de Publicados n. 1142 e 1143.

2534. “Historical and Contemporary Trends of Brazilian Foreign Policy: a critical assessment”, Hartford, 14 November 2013, 24 slides. Presentation prepared at the invitation of Dr. Thomas O’Keefe, Chair, Western Hemisphere Area Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, Department of State, for a talk in the Brazil Advanced Area Studies Course, at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center (4000 Arlington Blvd., Arlington, VA, 22204; Room K-1504; Tel. 703/302-6857), December 3, 2013, 11-12am. Shared through Dropbox (links to file in pptx: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8j63y5f62v6q96g/PRAlmeidaBrzForPol.pptx; in pdf: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5sb9e0gu087m296/PRAlmeidaBrzForPol.pdf).

2510. “Democracy Deficit in Emerging Countries: Undemocratic trends in Latin America and the role of Brazil”, Hartford, 3 September 2013, 34 p. Paper for the Conference “Promoting Democracy: What Role for the Emerging Powers?”, organized by the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), the International Development Research Centre (IRDC), and the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, 15-16 October 2013). Feito resumo para apresentação por Joseph Marques, sob n. 2517, devido ao não comparecimento (available at Academia.edu; link: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/32627094/download_file).

2493. “Brazil-USA relations during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso governments”, Hartford, 23 Junho 2013, 28 p. Versão em inglês do trabalho 1413, preparado para o livro Relações Brasil-Estados Unidos: séculos XX e XXI. Munhoz, Sidnei J.; Silva, Francisco Carlos Teixeira da. (Orgs.). Maringá: Editora da UEM, 2011, p. 273-307; em tradução feita por Phillip Wigan, revista por mim. Publicado In: Munhoz, Sidnei J.; Silva, Francisco Carlos Teixeira da (editors). Brazil-United States Relations: XX and XXI centuries. Maringá: Eduem, 2013, 460 p.; ISBN: 978-85-7628-532-8; capítulo 7, p. 217-246; disponível no link: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/32626974/download_file. Relação de Publicados n. 1108.

2488. “Brazilian trade policy in historical perspective: constant features, erratic behavior”, Hartford, 14 Maio 2013, 23 p.; Artigo de caráter ensaístico para a RBDI e para a Auslandsgesellschaft Nordrhein-Westfalen; (http://law.bepress.com/expresso/), site da RBDI: http://www.publicacoesacademicas.uniceub.br/index.php/rdi/index; Feito upload no Academia.edu (disponível no link: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/31443360/download_file). Publicado na Revista Brasileira de Direito Internacional – Brazilian Journal of International Law (vol. 10, n. 1, 2013, número especial: Direito Internacional Econômico; p. 11-26; doi:10.5102/rdi.v10i1.2393; ISSN: 2236-997X (impresso) - ISSN 2237-1036 (on-line); link: http://www.publicacoesacademicas.uniceub.br/index.php/rdi/article/view/2393/pdf). Inscrita na plataforma SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network: Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3483346 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3483346; https://ssrn.com/abstract=3483346). Relação de Publicados n. 1098.

2479. “Brazilian Economic Historiography: an essay on bibliographical synthesis”, Hartford, 11 Abril 2013, 17 p. Versão em inglês do trabalho 2263, publicado como: “Historiografia econômica brasileira”, Revista de Economia e Relações Internacionais (vol. 11, n. 21, July 2012, p. 5-21; ISSN: 1677-4973). Para a 38^a. Conferência da Economic & Business History Society, em Baltimore (23-25 de maio de 2013); publicado em inglês na História e Economia: Revista Interdisciplinar (vol. 12, n. 1, 1^o. semestre de 2014, p, 149-165; ISSN: 1808-5318). Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/7858303/2479_Brazilian_Economic_Historiography_an_essay_on_bibliographical_synthesis_2013-14_). Relação de Publicados n. 1137.

2321. “Brazil and United States: parallel lives?”, Brasília, 29 setembro 2011, 3 p. Review of: Joseph Smith: Brazil and United States: Convergences and Divergences (Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 2010; pp. xii, 244; $ 24.95, paper; ISBN: 978-0-8203-2770-9), for the International History Review (Dr. Gaynor Johnson:). Divulgado no blog Diplomatizzando (9/06/2013; link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2013/06/relacoes-brasil-estados-unidos-um-livro.html).

2207. “Never Seen Before in Brazil: Lula’s grand diplomacy”, Shanghai, 18 outubro 2010, 20 p. Revisão redutora do trabalho n. 2172, para RBPI; revisto em 8.12.2010. Publicado, sob o título: “Never Before Seen in Brazil: Lula’s grand diplomacy” na Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (vol. 53, n. 2, 2010, p. 160-177; ISSN: 0034-7329; link: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-73292010000200009&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en; arquivo em pdf: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbpi/v53n2/09.pdf). Relação de Publicados n 1013.

2148. “The Foreign Policy of Brazil under Lula”, Shanghai-Hangzhou, May 27-30, 2010, 9 p. Respostas a questões colocadas por Candice Moore – PhD. Candidate at LSE. Divulgado no blog Diplomatizzando (9/01/2020; link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/01/brazilian-foreign-policy-under-lula.html).

2128. “Attraction and Repulsion: Brazil and the American world”, Shanghai, 8 abril 2010, 9 p. Ensaio para livro organizado por Sean Clark e Sabrina Hocque, What Lies Ahead?: Debating the Prospects for a ‘Post-American World’ (Routledge: London, 2011), como resposta às teses de Fareed Zakaria em The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009). Versão final em 5/03/2011, reduzida em relação ao original. Publicado in: Clark, Sean and Sabrina Hoque (eds.). Debating a Post-American World: What Lies Ahead? (London: Routledge, 2011, 288 p.; ISBN: 978-0415690553, p. 135-141; available: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415690553/). Disponível (Academia.edu: link: https://www.academia.edu/41576924/Attraction_and_Repulsion_Brazil_and_the_American_world_2011_). Relação de Publicados n. 1061.

2025. “Relações do Brasil com a América Latina e os EUA”, Brasília, 9 julho 2009, 3 p. Artigo para a revista Conjuntura Econômica, edição especial sobre política externa brasileira (setembro 2009); Publicada versão em inglês, sob o título de “Brazilian Foreign Relations with South America and USA”, The Brazilian Economy: Economy, Politics and Policy Issues (FGV, Brazilian Institute of Economics: vol. 1, n. 8, September 2009) p. 30-33. Artigo postado em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41574082/Brazilian_Foreign_Relations_with_South_America_and_USA_2009_). Relação de Publicados n. 925.

2023. “Non-Intervention: a political concept, in a legal wrap: a historical and juridical appraisal of the Brazilian doctrine and practice”, Brasília, 8 Julho 2009, 17 p. Ensaio sobre o conceito em causa, para informar escritório britânico de advocacia. Posted Blog Textos PRA (03.03.2010; link: http://textospra.blogspot.com/2010/03/569-brazil-and-non-intervention-paulo-r.html). Disponível na plataforma Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41574014/Non-Intervention_a_political_concept_in_a_legal_wrap_A_historical_and_juridical_appraisal_of_the_Brazilian_doctrine_and_practice_2009_).

1996. “Brazil’s role in South America and in the global arena”, Urbana, 13 abril 2009, 7 p. Answers to questions presented by Amanda Wade, M.A. Candidate 2010 of the Latin American & Hemispheric Studies Elliott School of International Affairs - George Washington University. Blog Diplomatizzando (13.04.2009; link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2009/04/1063-turismo-academico-13-brazils-role.html).

1902. “Brazil in the world context, at the first decade of the 21th century: regional leadership and strategies for its integration into the world economy”, Rio de Janeiro, 26 junho 2008, 22 p. Essay for the volume edited by Joám Evans Pim (president IGESIP, Corunha; www.igesip.org; Editor Strategic Evaluation), on Brazilian Defense Policy: Current Trends and Regional Implications (to be published in United Kingdom). In: Joam Evans (org.), Brazilian Defence Policies: Current Trends and Regional Implications (London: Dunkling Books, 2009, 251 p.; ISBN: 978-0-9563478-0-0; p. 11-26). Divulgado em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41574135/Brazil_in_the_world_context_at_the_first_decade_of_the_21th_century_Regional_leadership_and_strategies_for_its_integration_into_the_world_economy_2008_). Relação de Publicados n. 935.

1900. “Brazil: Mileposts to Responsible Stakeholdership”, Brasília-Tóquio, 24 junho 2008, 53 p. Joint text, written with Miguel Diaz, for the project “Mileposts to Responsible Stakeholdership” of the Stanley Foundation (http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/); presented by Miguel Diaz in a Washington meeting (July 8, 2008) and published at the website of the Project “Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World” (November 3rd, 2008; link: http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/articles.cfm?ID=504), under the title: “Brazil's Candidacy for Major Power Status”, by Miguel Diaz and Paulo Roberto Almeida, with a reaction by Georges D. Landau (Muscatine, IA: The Stanley Foundation, Working Paper, November 2008, 24 p.; link: http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/powersandprinciples/BrazilCandidacyMPStatus.PDF). Published in book form as: “Brazil's Candidacy for Major Power Status”, with Miguel Diaz. In: Michael Schiffer and David Shorr (eds.). Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009, 328p.; Co-published with: The Stanley Foundation; ISBN Cloth: 978-0-7391-3543-3; $85.00; ISBN Paper: 978-0-7391-3544-0; $32.95; p. 225-250; link: https://www.academia.edu/41574411/Brazils_Candidacy_for_Major_Power_Status_2008_). Relação de Publicados n. 897.

1868. “Brazil’s Integration into Global Governance: The rise of the Outreach-5 countries to a G-8 (plus) status”, Brasília, 9 março 2008, 29 p. Versão em inglês, ampliada, em colaboração com Denise Gregory, Diretora Executiva do Cebri, do trabalho 1866. Draft paper prepared for the Project Dialogue on Global Governance with the “Outreach” countries - Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, para apresentação em seminário no Cebri, Rio de Janeiro, em 4 de abril. Revisões: 4 de junho; 15 julho; 8 setembro (26 p.). Última revisão: 30 de dezembro. Publicado, como “Brazil”, no volume: Growth and Responsibility: The positioning of emerging powers in the global governance system (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2009, 126 p.; ISBN: 978-3-940955-45-6; p. 11-30; link: http://www.kas.de/wf/en/33.15573/-/-/-/index.html?src=nl09-01). Trabalhos publicados n. 887.

1856. “Brazil and Global Governance”, Brasília, 30 janeiro 2008, 17 p. Colaboração a trabalho a ser apresentado pelo CEBRI para centro de estudos do Canadá (Centre for International Governance Innovation - CIGI). Unpublished. Available at Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41576829/Brazil_and_Global_Governance_2008_).

1811. “The Foreign Policy of Brazil under Lula: Regional and global diplomatic strategies”, Brasília, 30 setembro 2007, 25 p. Published as “Lula’s Foreign Policy: Regional and Global Strategies”, chap. 9, In: Werner Baer and Joseph Love (eds.), Brazil under Lula (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009, 326 p.; ISBN: 970-0-230-60816-0; p. 167-183; link: https://www.academia.edu/41574913/Lula_s_Foreign_Policy_Regional_and_Global_Strategies_2009_). Publicados n. 811.

1748. “Brazil as a regional player and as an emerging global power: Foreign policy strategies and the impact on the new international order”, Brasília, 3 maio 2007, 23 p. Contribuição ao seminário Re-Ordering the World? Emerging Powers and Prospects for Global Governance, organizado pela Friedrich Ebert Stiftung - Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Berlim, 15-16 de maio de 2007). Versão reduzida em inglês para publicação pela FES-SWP, dia 7.07.07; publicado sob a forma de Briefing Paper, series Dialogue on Globalization (Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, July 2007; link: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/global/04709.pdf).

1585. “Brazil story: once a vigorous country, now a lag behind economy!”, Brasília, 22 abril 2006, 5 p. Apresentação em PowerPoint para um encontro de estagiários da Comissão Fulbright, em São Paulo, no dia 2 de maio de 2006 (35 slides de texto, gráficos e tabelas), a convite de Luiz Loureiro. Available at Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41576449/BRAZIL_story_once_a_vigorous_country_now_a_lag_behind_economy_2006_).

1213. “Comparing two foreign policies: FHC and Lula in perspective”, Brasília, 21 fev. 2004, 5 p. Revisto e ampliado em 28/02/2004. Tabela sinóptica, escrita originalmente em inglês, comparando princípios e práticas de política externa dos governos FHC e Lula, em grandes temas da agenda diplomática, para apresentação no seminário da Florida International University, em 4/03/2004: “Brazil Between Regionalism and Globalism: Old Ambitions, New Results?”, coorganizado pelo Summit of the Americas Center e o Instituto Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais; available at Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41576385/Comparing_two_foreign_policies_FHC_and_Lula_in_perspective_2004_).

962. “Selective Bibliography: Brazilian Studies in the United States”, Washington, 10 out. 2002, 23 p. Seção final do livro Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to the Study of Brazil in the United States, 1945-2000 (Marshall C. Eakin, as co-editor). Available at the plataform Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41576344/Bibliography_to_the_Guide_of_Brazilian_Studies_in_the_US_2005_).

961. “A Chronology of US-Brazil Relations and Academic Production, 1945-2002”, Washington, 10 out. 2002, 19 p. Capítulo 15 do livro Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to the Study of Brazil in the United States, 1945-2000 (Marshall C. Eakin, as co-editor). Tradução para o inglês Marcia Corteletti Loureiro; em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41576306/A_Chronology_of_US-Brazil_Relations_and_Academic_Production_1945-2003).

960. “Brazilian Studies in the United States: Trends, Perspectives and Prospects, 1945-2000”, Washington, 9 outubro 2002, 22 p. Capítulo elaborado para o livro sobre o brasilianismo acadêmico (publicado em O Brasil dos brasilianistas: um guia dos estudos sobre o Brasil nos Estados Unidos, 1945-2000; São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2002), preparado originalmente para o seminário de estudos brasileiros nos EUA (realizado em Washington em 10/2000), para publicação (com cronologia e bibliografia separadas) no livro Envisioning Brazil: a Guide to the Study of Brazil in the United States, 1945-2000 (Marshall C. Eakin, as co-editor). Livro publicado pela University of Wisconsin Press (Maddison) em 2005. Disponível em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41576278/Brazilian_Studies_in_the_United_States_Trends_Perspectives_and_Prospects_2002-2005_).

647. “O Brasil e o futuro do Mercosul: dilemas e opções”, Brasília, 23 novembro 1998, 20 p. Reelaboração ampliada do trabalho n. 612, com base em pareceres anônimos solicitados pelo INTAL. Publicado como “Brasil y el futuro del Mercosur: dilemas y opciones”, Integración & Comércio (Buenos Aires: BID-INTAL, vol. 2, nº 6, set.-dic. 1998, p. 65-81; link: http://www.iadb.org/intal/aplicaciones/uploads/publicaciones/e_INTAL_IYC_06_1998_deAlmeida.pdf). Versão em inglês: “Brazil and the future of Mercosur: dilemmas and options”, Integration and Trade (Buenos Aires: BID-INTAL, vol. 2, n. 6, sept.-dec. 1998, p. 59-74) Divulgado em inglês em Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/41575485/Brazil_and_the_Future_of_Mercosur_dilemmas_and_options_1998_). Relação de Publicados nº 232. 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 10 de Janeiro de 2020

Brasil na “gaiola de ouro” do Estamento Burocrático Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Brasil na “gaiola de ouro” do Estamento Burocrático

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

(www.pralmeida.org; http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com)

O “estamento burocrático” que Raymundo Faoro seguiu, desde a constituição singular do Estado português no século XIV, está representado nos tempos que correm, e no Brasil, por duas categorias especialmente privilegiadas: a alta magistratura (com ênfase nas cortes superiores, o mais próximo que temos dos aristocratas do Ancien Régime) e os militares de altas patentes das FFAA (o mais próximo que temos daqueles marechais engalados do velho czarismo e da Prússia militarista).

Abaixo ou ao lado dessas duas grandes categorias do estamento burocrático se estendem, se protegem, e se locupletam do Estado, diversas outras corporações de ofício, todas elas afanosamente ocupadas em extrair recursos dos trabalhadores — empresários e assalariados — do setor privado, que servem de vaca leiteira nessa gigantesca máquina de concentração de renda que é o Estado brasileiro.

O “grande capital” (como diriam os marxistas, e os petistas, mas estes menos instruídos que os primeiros), que é constituído pela fina flor da burguesia nacional — grandes banqueiros, grandes industriais, grandes ruralistas, todos eles agrupados nesses sindicatos de ladrões que constituem FIESP, CNA, CNI, Febraban e todas as demais associações setoriais —, alimenta, sustenta, financia essa máquina de extração de recursos do conjunto da população, ao apoiar os seus políticos de estimação e de cabresto a cada escrutínio eleitoral, em todos os níveis, da mais modesta câmara de vereadores até os mais poderosos senadores, mas sobretudo os chefes respectivos dos executivos, dos prefeitos aos governadores e ao presidente, passando pelos grandes candidatos a postos de comando nas grandes corporações do Estamento Burocrático.

Quem será o novo sociólogo weberiano que vai dar continuidade à obra seminal de Raymundo Faoro, atualizando a noção de Estamento Burocrático para os tempos atuais do Brasil?

Registre-se que essa conformação específica de Estado racional-legal acolhe e acomoda o velho patrimonialismo das formas tradicionais de dominação política e até consegue absorver e sobreviver a exercícios temporários de dominação carismática (ainda que farsante), como podem ser o lulismo, o bolsonarismo, o varguismo e outros oportunistas, demagogos e populistas, que por acaso apareçam.

Lamento terminar numa nota pessimista, mas acredito que essa nossa “gaiola de ouro” — que significa luxo para os privilegiados e miséria para grande parte da população — tem fôlego para continuar indefinidamente. O Brasil é um caso único na tipologia weberiana que consegue fazer um amálgama original dos tipos-ideais de dominação política, combinando sincreticamente suas formas mais modernas e as mais atrasadas também.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 10 de julho de 2020

VERGONHA da política externa subordinada - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

‪Puxa vida!
Pensei que os militares fossem mais patriotas.
É até inconstitucional — está no Artigo 4 da CF-1988 — subordinar de forma tão  completa e de maneira tão absurdamente dependente os altos interesses nacionais e a política externa do Brasil não só a uma potência estrangeira, assim como a um dirigente específico (“I love you Trump”), como fazem o presidente e seus medíocres aspones diplomáticos.
Os militares não vão reagir?
Vão deixar que a subordinação se perpetue indefinidamente?
Continuaremos a ser assim tão servis?‬
Os militares não veem que estamos sendo ridicularizados no plano internacional?
Não perceberam ainda que estamos completamente isolados até mesmo no continente e nas relações com nossos vizinhos e parceiros do Mercosul?
Não perceberam que o chanceler foi abjetamente capacho ao ter desistido de apoiar um brasileiro na presidência do BID e que, para se opor a um candidato argentino, foi até ao extremo de expedir uma nota oficial apoiando o candidato de Trump sem sequer saber de quem se tratava? Nem se deu ao trabalho de consultar o Itamaraty, os demais setores do governo, de se coordenar na região.
Dobrou-se ao capricho de seus mestres em Washington. Nada menos que isso!
Automaticamente! Sabujamente!
Trata-se de uma RUPTURA tão extrema em relação ao que está estabelecido DESDE 1960, que CINCO ex-presidentes latino-americanos tiveram de fazer uma declaração contrária a essa decisão de Trump.
Os militares vão deixar que continue essa enorme VERGONHA que é ver o Brasil ser RIDICULARIZADO na própria região?
Não se deram ainda conta de que esse governo subordina interesses concretos da nacionalidade a posturas ideológicas absolutamente ridículas pelo seu anacronismo político?
Não, não estou pedindo que as FFAA deem um golpe. Estou sugerindo que elas, e eles, os MILITARES, deixem de apoiar um presidente tão inepto e tão antinacional quanto o atual e um chanceler abjetamente subordinado a outros ineptos conselheiros.
No ponto em que estamos, tenho MUITA VERGONHA de nossa diplomacia e de suas posturas ridículas no plano externo.
Os militares deveriam pensar um pouco...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 24/06/2020

Preparação para uma carreira na diplomacia - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Preparação para uma carreira na diplomacia

Trabalhos Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 9 de junho de 2020

3683. “Preparação para a carreira diplomática: uma conversa com candidatos”, Brasília, 29 maio 2020, 2020, 6 p. Conversa online com candidatos à carreira diplomática, coordenada por Amanda do “Keep it blue podcast”, sobre as seguintes questões: 1) O que fez o senhor decidir ser diplomata?; 2) Como foi sua jornada para passar o CACD?; 3) Quais são os diferenciais para passar o concurso?; 4) Como o candidato deve abordar as atualidades em seus estudos?; 5) Como deveria ser o mindset para o estudo dos idiomas?; 6) Como foi o Instituto Rio Branco?; 7) O que se aprende por lá?; 8) Como é a vida no exterior?; 9) Como muda em relação a Brasília? Elaborada lista de 37 trabalhos que se encaixam nos critérios solicitados. Divulgado no blog Diplomatizando (29/05/2020; link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/05/preparacao-para-carreira-diplomatica.html); disponível na plataforma Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/43192887/Preparacao_para_a_carreira_diplomatica_uma_conversa_com_candidatos_2020_).

3684. “Um diplomata desvio padrão: podcast para candidatos à carreira”, Brasília, 29 maio 2020, Audio Mpeg da Apple 1:31:13, 37, 2MB. Podcast gravado sobre os pontos enunciados no trabalho n. 3683. Disponível no Dropbox (link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0kd91ucpgmlkhgn/3684DiplomataDesvioPadraoPodcast.m4a?dl=0); anunciado no blog Diplomatizzando (30/05/2020; link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/05/uma-conversa-com-candidatos-carreira.html).

3691. “Uma carreira na diplomacia para jovens estudantes”, Brasília, 8 junho 2020, 4 p. Respostas a questões colocada por coordenadores do programa Explica ENEM (https://www.instagram.com/explicaenem/). Disponível no blog Diplomatizzando (link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/06/uma-carreira-na-diplomacia-para-jovens.html) e na plataforma Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/43292605/Uma_carreira_na_diplomacia_para_jovens_estudantes_2020_).

Consequências involuntárias da tragédia bolsonarista no Brasil - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Consequências involuntárias da tragédia bolsonarista no Brasil

Diz a sabedoria popular que não há bem que sempre dure, nem há mal que nunca acabe. 

Toda e qualquer experiência humana, ou social, mesmo uma das mais horríveis e degradantes, como pode ser a delinquência política e a deterioração intelectual em nosso país, atualmente em curso, sempre pode, aliás deve, nos trazer modestos ensinamentos, e algumas infelizes lições, sobre o que deveríamos ter feito de acertado, e não fizemos, assim como sobre o que poderemos, ou que pelo menos deveríamos fazer de melhor da próxima vez.

Aprendemos uma variação do velho adágio segundo o qual o preço da liberdade é a eterna vigilância. Corrigindo: o preço da democracia é o constante esforço em não nos deixarmos arrastar em divisões sectárias em torno dessas querelas menores sustentadas em meras conquistas táticas, ao preço de uma perda de objetivos estratégicos, que significam, simplesmente, a derrocada do edifício democrático tão duramente construído contra ventos e marés ao longo das últimas três décadas.

Aprendemos a valorizar a unidade — pelo menos espero — das forças democráticas em torno de um patrimônio civilizatório que vem sendo atacado pelos novos bárbaros, que já conquistaram a praça forte, a despeito da indigência de suas propostas e das mentiras tão amplamente disseminadas (ou, mais provavelmente, por isso mesmo, a julgar pela mentalidade obtusa daqueles que os seguem de forma tão entusiasta).

Os bárbaros nos fizeram um favor — pelo menos espero — que é o de valorizar algumas pequenas coisas, que acabam sendo grandes em retrospecto: a importância da convergência de metas mais elementares que vantagens políticas secundárias, que vêm a ser a preservação do diálogo democrático entre nossas tribos até aqui desunidas e a união do conjunto de nossas forças dispersas em nome da simples sobrevivência de valores e princípios que estão na base de uma sociedade civilizada, oposta à peste negra do fascismo e do autoritarismo.

A vitória circunstancial e temporária — pelo menos espero — das forças bárbaras nos demonstra quão vã era a nossa ingênua crença na racionalidade das massas depois que o virus da divisão da nação já nos tinha sido inoculado pelos aderentes a crenças aparentemente opostas, mas inacreditavelmente similares em propósitos — a tal “revolução cultural” da reforma completa daqueles princípios e valores — e mecanismos: a promessa de um futuro melhor nas mãos de algum líder salvador que dá início a um novo ciclo de bajulação e servilismo. 

Uma das consequências involuntárias da presente tragédia  — pelo menos espero — pode ser um esforço de reflexão em torno dos nossos erros acumulados e da dolorosa busca de uma plataforma mínima de sobrevivência, até que uma nova acumulação de forças convergentes nos permita expulsar os novos bárbaros da cidadela, o que não poderá ser feito sem o convencimento de uma maioria de cidadãos complacentes com o regime danoso dos novos bárbaros.

Temos a nosso favor a bestialidade, a ignorância, a estupidez desses bárbaros, assim como a sua completa falta de visão sobre o futuro da nação. Temos de poder oferecer à cidadania — pelo menos espero — alguma razão para acreditar que um projeto iluminista e humanista passa antes, é melhor, do que o empreendimento de destruição prometido e implementado pelos novos bárbaros, ainda que estes possam contar, momentaneamente, com a ajuda da força e do dinheiro. 

Nem sempre a autoridade do argumento prevalece sobre o argumento da autoridade, mas, em princípio, ideias são mais poderosas que as armas, e em muitos casos a pluma pode vencer o poder da espada.

Pelo menos espero...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasília, 10 de junho de 2020

Colaboradores ou colaboracionistas? - Ensaio de Anne Applebaum

History Will Judge the Complicit - Anne Applebaum

The Atlantic, July/August 2020 print edition with the headline “The Collaborators.”

(Artigo disponível neste link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/06/history-will-judge-complicit-anne.html)

O artigo da reputada historiadora americana Anne Applebaum – autora de muitos livros sobre o mundo comunista, entre eles sobre o Gulag, a Europa central sob dominação soviética, o Holodomor stalinista na Ucrânia e vários outros – trata de uma questão que me interessa particularmente, não tanto da perspectiva prática, mas do ponto de vista da história das ideias, e da postura que pessoas com envolvimento político podem ou devem adotar no caso de mudanças relevantes de orientação política, ou até de regime. Ela começa pela história do comunismo na Europa dominada pela União Soviética, mas também trata da situação dos EUA atualmente, sob um presidente "heterodoxo", digamos assim. Seu julgamento está resumido no título: a História julgará os cúmplices (mas que poderíamos talvez minimizar para “complacentes”).

Meu interesse se centra justamente nessa questão: por que alguns escolhem colaborar com um governo, ou um regime qualquer, e como essas pessoas são levadas a isso, e por que outros decidem se afastar, ou até a se opor à nova situação? Não se pode afastar a realidade objetiva que aproxima a situação do Brasil daquela do comunismo soviético, ou da administração Trump, atualmente.

Estas são as motivações que me levaram a selecionar alguns trechos do longo artigo de Anne Applebaum, que pode ser lido em sua integridade no link acima indicado. 

Convido todos a lê-lo, mas creio que minha seleção de trechos ajuda a apresentar os argumentos mais relevantes.

Ela começa por apresentar a história de dois jovens comunistas alemães, educados na União Soviética durante a “grande guerra patriótica”, e que depois seguiram caminhos diferentes na instalação da RDA: um continuou servindo ao regime, e se tornou o famoso chefe da espionagem da Stasi, o outro fugiu para o Ocidente em 1949. 

A pergunta central de Anne Applebaum é esta: 

One man proved willing to betray ideas and ideals that he had once stood for. The other refused. Why?

Esta é também a pergunta que faço, em relação ao governo atual. Deixo as respostas em aberto, para a consciência de cada um.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasília, 7 de junho de 2020

Trechos selecionados: 

(…)

In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.

Hoffmann further sorted the more enthusiastic “voluntary” collaborators into two additional categories. In the first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of “national interest,” rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy, or French culture—though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives, too. In the second were the truly active ideological collaborators: people who believed that prewar republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would strengthen it, people who admired fascism, and people who admired Hitler.

Hoffmann observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, “the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,” people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the “social misfits and political deviants” who would, in the normal course of events, never have made successful careers of any kind. 

What brought these groups together was a common conclusion that, whatever they had thought about Germany before June 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.

Like Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. 

For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires. 

(…) 

To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. 

Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places, Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.

The lie was petty, even ridiculous; that was partly why it was so dangerous. In the 1950s, when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in Eastern European potato fields, Soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots, as a deliberate form of biological sabotage. Posters featuring vicious red-white-and-blue beetles went up all across Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. No one really believed the charge, including the people making it, as archives have subsequently shown. But that didn’t matter. The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.

These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

This process happens in politics, too. In 1947, the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers. The decree did not nationalize the printing presses; it merely demanded that their owners apply for licenses, and that they confine their work to books and pamphlets ordered by central planners. Imagine how a law like this—which did not speak of arrests, let alone torture or the Gulag—affected the owner of a printing press in Dresden, a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife. Following its passage, he had to make a series of seemingly insignificant choices. Would he apply for a license? Of course—he needed it to earn money for his family. Would he agree to confine his business to material ordered by the central planners? Yes, to that too—what else was there to print?

After that, other compromises follow. Though he dislikes the Communists—he just wants to stay out of politics—he agrees to print the collected works of Stalin, because if he doesn’t do it, others will. When he is asked by some disaffected friends to print a pamphlet critical of the regime, however, he refuses. Though he wouldn’t go to jail for printing it, his children might not be admitted to university, and his wife might not get her medication; he has to think about their welfare. Meanwhile, all across East Germany, other owners of other printing presses are making similar decisions. And after a while—without anyone being shot or arrested, without anyone feeling any particular pangs of conscience—the only books left to read are the ones approved by the regime.

The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots, or as competent administrators, or as loyal party members, also created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump-administration officials to the precise nature of the president’s alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration because it was silly. They ignored Trump’s appointment of the wealthiest Cabinet in history, and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists, because that’s business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email account, and for Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest, because that’s just family stuff.

One step at a time, Trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump—people like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and the advocates of “national conservatism,” an ideology invented, post hoc, to rationalize the president’s behavior—advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism: an anti-Wall Street, anti-foreign-wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small-government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party. Their “Drain the swamp” slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics, that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair. Had this actually been Trump’s ruling philosophy, it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016, given that most of them had quite different values. But it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution, and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life.

In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.

More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. 

He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. (…) Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.

His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind. Although some of Trump’s Cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to portray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist – and although foreign-policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have, amazingly, accepted this fiction without questioning it – Trump’s true instinct, always, has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with Xi as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame –to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has had fatal consequences. In January, Trump took Xi’s word when he said that COVID‑19 was “under control,” just as he had believed North Korea’s Kim Jong Un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons. Trump’s fawning attitude toward dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

Maybe it isn’t surprising that the implications of “Trump First” were not immediately understood. After all, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe – or, if you want a more recent example, the Chavistas in Venezuela – all advertised themselves as advocates of equality and prosperity even though, in practice, they created inequality and poverty. But just as the truth about Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution slowly dawned on people, it also became clear, eventually, that Trump did not have the interests of the American public at heart. And as they came to realize that the president was not a patriot, Republican politicians and senior civil servants began to equivocate, just like people living under an alien regime.

In retrospect, this dawning realization explains why the funeral of John McCain, in September 2018, looked, and by all accounts felt, so strange. Two previous presidents, one Republican and one Democrat—representatives of the old, patriotic political class—made speeches; the sitting president’s name was never mentioned. The songs and symbols of the old order were visible too: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; American flags; two of McCain’s sons in their officer’s uniforms, so very different from the sons of Trump. Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Glasser described the funeral as “a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows.” In truth, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the 1956 funeral of László Rajk, a Hungarian Communist and secret-police boss who had been purged and murdered by his comrades in 1949. Rajk’s wife had become an outspoken critic of the regime, and the funeral turned into a de facto political rally, helping to set off Hungary’s anti-Communist revolution a couple of weeks later.

(…) 

Nothing quite so dramatic happened after McCain’s funeral. But it did clarify the situation. A year and a half into the Trump administration, it marked a turning point, the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics, and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past – doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low. Poles like Miłosz wound up in exile in the 1950s; dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study. In harsher regimes like that of Stalin’s Russia, public protest could lead to many years in a concentration camp; disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation.

(…)

Nevertheless, 20 months into the Trump administration, senators and other serious-minded Republicans in public life who should have known better began to tell themselves stories that sound very much like those in Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. Some of these stories overlap with one another; some of them are just thin cloaks to cover self-interest. But all of them are familiar justifications of collaboration, recognizable from the past. (...) 

(…) 

A few months ago, in Venezuela, I spoke with Víctor Álvarez, a minister in one of Hugo Chávez’s governments and a high-ranking official before that. Álvarez explained to me the arguments he had made in favor of protecting some private industry, and his opposition to mass nationalization. Álvarez was in government from the late 1990s through 2006, a time when Chávez was stepping up the use of police against peaceful demonstrators and undermining democratic institutions. Still, Álvarez remained, hoping to curb Chávez’s worst economic instincts. Ultimately, he did quit, after concluding that Chávez had created a loyalty cult around himself—Álvarez called it a “subclimate” of obedience—and was no longer listening to anyone who disagreed.

In authoritarian regimes, many insiders eventually conclude that their presence simply does not matter. Cohn, after publicly agonizing when the president said there had been “fine people on both sides” at the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, finally quit when the president made the ruinous decision to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, a decision that harmed American businesses. Mattis reached his breaking point when the president abandoned the Kurds, America’s longtime allies in the war against the Islamic State.

But although both resigned, neither Cohn nor Mattis has spoken out in any notable way. Their presence inside the White House helped build Trump’s credibility among traditional Republican voters; their silence now continues to serve the president’s purposes. As for Anonymous, we don’t know whether he or she remains inside the administration. For the record, I note that Álvarez lives in Venezuela, an actual police state, and yet is willing to speak out against the system he helped create. Cohn, Mattis, and Anonymous, all living freely in the United States of America, have not been nearly so brave.

I, personally, will benefit. These, of course, are words that few people ever say out loud. Perhaps some do quietly acknowledge to themselves that they have not resigned or protested because it would cost them money or status. But no one wants a reputation as a careerist or a turncoat. (…) 

Many people in and around the Trump administration are seeking personal benefits. Many of them are doing so with a degree of openness that is startling and unusual in contemporary American politics, at least at this level. As an ideology, “Trump First” suits these people, because it gives them license to put themselves first. (…) 

(…) 

I must remain close to power. Another sort of benefit, harder to measure, has kept many people who object to Trump’s policies or behavior from speaking out: the intoxicating experience of power, and the belief that proximity to a powerful person bestows higher status. (…)

In any organization, private or public, the boss will of course sometimes make decisions that his underlings dislike. But when basic principles are constantly violated, and people constantly defer resignation — “I can always fall on my sword next time” — then misguided policies go fatally unchallenged.

In other countries, the effectiveness trap has other names. In his recent book on Putinism, Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa describes the Russian version of this syndrome. The Russian language, he notes, has a word — prisposoblenets — that means “a person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his beliefs and conduct accordingly.” In Putin’s Russia, anyone who wants to stay in the game—to remain close to power, to retain influence, to inspire respect—knows the necessity of making constant small changes to one’s language and behavior, of being careful about what one says and to whom one says it, of understanding what criticism is acceptable and what constitutes a violation of the unwritten rules. Those who violate these rules will not, for the most part, suffer prison—Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s Russia—but they will experience a painful ejection from the inner circle.

For those who have never experienced it, the mystical pull of that connection to power, that feeling of being an insider, is difficult to explain. Nevertheless, it is real, and strong enough to affect even the highest-ranking, best-known, most influential people in America. 

LOL [Laughing Out Loud] nothing matters. Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement—these are all reasons to collaborate, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong—“so you might as well collaborate.”

This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy”—order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went—Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

(…) 

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

I am afraid to speak out. Fear, of course, is the most important reason any inhabitant of an authoritarian or totalitarian society does not protest or resign, even when the leader commits crimes, violates his official ideology, or forces people to do things that they know to be wrong. In extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, people fear for their lives. In softer dictatorships, like East Germany after 1950 and Putin’s Russia today, people fear losing their jobs or their apartments. Fear works as a motivation even when violence is a memory rather than a reality. When I was a student in Leningrad in the 1980s, some people still stepped back in horror when I asked for directions on the street, in my accented Russian: No one was going to be arrested for speaking to a foreigner in 1984, but 30 years earlier they might have been, and the cultural memory remained. 

In the United States of America, it is hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime’s political enemies, and there never have been. Political opposition is legal; free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet even in one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump’s Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that “they are all scared.”

They are scared not of prison, the official said, but of being attacked by Trump on Twitter. They are scared he will make up a nickname for them. They are scared that they will be mocked, or embarrassed, like Mitt Romney has been. They are scared of losing their social circles, of being disinvited to parties. They are scared that their friends and supporters, and especially their donors, will desert them. John Bolton has his own super PAC and a lot of plans for how he wants to use it; no wonder he resisted testifying against Trump. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is among the dozens of House Republicans who have left Congress since the beginning of this administration, in one of the most striking personnel turnovers in congressional history. They left because they hated what Trump was doing to their party—and the country. Yet even after they left, they did not speak out.

They are scared, and yet they don’t seem to know that this fear has precedents, or that it could have consequences. They don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships. They don’t seem to realize that the American Senate really could become the Russian Duma, or the Hungarian Parliament, a group of exalted men and women who sit in an elegant building, with no influence and no power. Indeed, we are already much closer to that reality than many could ever have imagined.

In February, many members of the Republican Party leadership, Republican senators, and people inside the administration used various versions of these rationales to justify their opposition to impeachment. All of them had seen the evidence that Trump had stepped over the line in his dealings with the president of Ukraine. All of them knew that he had tried to use American foreign-policy tools, including military funding, to force a foreign leader into investigating a domestic political opponent. Yet Republican senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never took the charges seriously. They mocked the Democratic House leaders who had presented the charges. They decided against hearing evidence. With the single exception of Romney, they voted in favor of ending the investigation. They did not use the opportunity to rid the country of a president whose operative value system — built around corruption, nascent authoritarianism, self-regard, and his family’s business interests — runs counter to everything that most of them claim to believe in.

(…)

The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse. Unless, of course, they decide not to.

(…) 

What would it take for Republican senators to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love? What would it take for their aides and subordinates to come to the same conclusion, to resign, and to campaign against the president? (…) 

If, as Stanley Hoffmann wrote, the honest historian would have to speak of “collaborationisms,” because the phenomenon comes in so many variations, the same is true of dissidence, which should probably be described as “dissidences.” People can suddenly change their minds because of spontaneous intellectual revelations (…). They can also be persuaded by outside events: rapid political changes, for example. Awareness that the regime had lost its legitimacy is part of what made Harald Jaeger, an obscure and until that moment completely loyal East German border guard, decide on the night of November 9, 1989, to lift the gates and let his fellow citizens walk through the Berlin Wall – a decision that led, over the next days and months, to the end of East Germany itself. Jaeger’s decision was not planned; it was a spontaneous response to the fearlessness of the crowd. “Their will was so great,” he said years later, of those demanding to cross into West Berlin, “there was no other alternative than to open the border.”

But these things are all intertwined, and not easy to disentangle. The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain, and the outcomes can be unpredictable. (…) 

(…) At some point, after all, the calculus of conformism will begin to shift. It will become awkward and uncomfortable to continue supporting “Trump First,” especially as Americans suffer from the worst recession in living memory and die from the coronavirus in numbers higher than in much of the rest of the world.

Or perhaps the only antidote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s, or of the 1940s. The Miłoszes and the Hoffmanns of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see, more clearly than we can, the path that led the U.S. into a historic loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven’t experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. (…) 

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life – he lived to be 93 – he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym — “Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent — that’s what will be remembered.

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Convido novamente à leitura do artigo neste link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/06/history-will-judge-complicit-anne.html