O Big Brother em acao: George Orwell is alive and kicking...

O Estado mais orwelliano do mundo, o que recomendaria uma segunda edição, revista e atualizada de 1984, mostra que é possível, pelo menos temporariamente, controlar o fluxo das informações nesta era de internet amplamente acessível.
Mesmo sendo disseminado o uso da internet na China, seus mandarins -- e hackers contratados especialmente para estes objetivos, espécies de thugs sob o comando do Grande Irmão -- demonstram que é possível, sim, isolar mais de um bilhão de pessoas do fluxo político da contemporaneidade. Talvez seja por pouco tempo, mas um George Orwell revisitado certamente teria muito a dizer sobre isso.
Um desafio para os cientistas políticos, para os simples observadores de relações internacionais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

El Gobierno chino teme el contagio y censura la palabra Egipto en los ”microblogs’
El País, 30/01/2011

Pequim – Las autoridades chinas no quieren correr riesgos ante la posibilidad de un efecto decontagio de las protestas en favor de la democracia ocurridas en Egipto, Túnez y otros países musulmanes. Pekín ha bloqueado la palabra “Egipto” en los microblogs de portales como Sina.com y Sohu.com, que, cuando se efectúa una búsqueda, devuelven el mensaje “De acuerdo con las leyes, regulaciones y políticas relevantes, los resultados no pueden ser mostrados” o dicen que no han sido encontrados.

Los microblogs chinos son similares a Twitter -que, al igual que Facebook y Youtube, está bloqueado en el país asiático-, y se han convertido en una potente herramienta de difusión de información, aunque también de rumores, debido a la falta de confianza de los jóvenes en los medios oficiales. El servicio de Sina.com cuenta con más de 50 millones de usuarios, un campo de cultivo demasiado sensible para que los censores lo descuiden.

Pekín posee uno de los sistemas de censura de Internet más sofisticados del mundo, gracias, en parte, a tecnología suministrada por empresas extranjeras, con el que logra con bastante éxito controlar lo que pueden ver, leer y publicar sus 450 millones de internautas.

Las revueltas en Egipto y las imágenes de los tanques en las calles de El Cairo han traído a la memoria de muchos chinos los recuerdos de las protestas de Tiananmen, en la primavera de 1989, y la consiguiente represión a manos del Ejército, en la que murieron entre cientos y miles de personas, según las fuentes. Las manifestaciones, a favor de reformas políticas y democracia, fueron catalizadas por la corrupción y la inflación.

China es hoy muy distinta de la de aquellos años. La economía ha progresado a un ritmo vertiginoso y la conciencia política de la inmensa mayoría de los jóvenes -más interesados en ganar dinero que en pedir libertades- está anestesiada, en gran parte por la ausencia de información en los medios de comunicación y los libros de historia sobre lo ocurrido en 1989, y por la falta de cualquier debate político en una prensa totalmente controlada por el Gobierno.

Sin embargo, la corrupción sigue siendo rampante, las desigualdades sociales están entre las mayores del mundo, la inflación ha alcanzado niveles peligrosos (4,6% en diciembre pasado) y entre los intelectuales hay demandas crecientes de libertad y reformas.

La prensa oficial ha informado en los últimos días de las revueltas en Egipto, e incluso de los cortes de Internet y el servicio de telefonía móvil en El Cairo. Pero lo ha hecho de forma limitada, y ha aprovechado lo sucedido para lanzar un mensaje que más parece destinado al consumo de su propia población. El diario Tiempos Globales, publicado por el Partido Comunista, asegura hoy en un editorial que la democracia no es compatible con las condiciones existentes en Egipto y Túnez, y que “las revoluciones de color” -en referencia al término aplicado por primera vez para describir las protestas en favor de reformas políticas en las antiguas repúblicas soviéticas- no pueden lograr democracia real.

“La democracia está todavía muy lejos en Túnez y Egipto. Para que la democracia tenga éxito son necesarios cimientos sólidos en economía, educación y temas sociales. Cuando se trata de sistemas políticos, el modelo occidental es solo una de las opciones”, señala la publicación. Los dirigentes chinos han declarado en repetidas ocasiones que China nunca copiará el sistema de democracia occidental.

Drogados em acucar: sim, existe, nos EUA

Um editorial do Washington Post, deste domingo, preconizando o fim dos subsídios absurdos pagos aos produtores americanos de açúcar, e o fim do protecionismo também, duas coisas que eu tenho absoluta certeza de que NÃO ocorrerão...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Break the sugar addiction
Editorial - The Washington Post
Sunday, January 30, 2011

CONGRESS AND the Obama administration are in the market for fresh ideas to create jobs. Or so we are told. So far, however, we haven't seen too many specifics - but that may be about to change. Two senators, one from each party, have introduced legislation that would phase out the costly, job-destroying federal sugar program. Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Mark Kirk of Illinois call their bill the Stop Unfair Giveaways and Restrictions (SUGAR) Act. Despite the cutesy title, it's a seriously necessary proposal.

Current law is a pastiche of protectionist measures that drives up prices for consumers in two ways. First, 4,700 U.S. sugar cane and sugar beet farmers share a government-guaranteed 85 percent of the U.S. market; the remaining 15 percent gets divided among some 40 lucky sugar-exporting countries, plus Mexico, which recently started exporting here under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Second, the government guarantees minimum prices for both raw cane sugar and refined beet sugar. The combined effect of these measures has been to keep the U.S. price well above the world price. According to Ms. Shaheen, consumers pay an extra $4 billion for their food because of these policies.

When food costs more, consumers buy less of it, and processors must cut production. Therefore, U.S. sugar policy costs jobs among bakers, candy makers and other food processors. Estimates vary; Promar International, an agriculture consulting firm, produced a figure of 112,000 jobs lost between 1997 and 2009. In 2006, the Commerce Department estimated that the sugar program cost three manufacturing jobs for each job it saved in sugar growing and harvesting. And, by the way, job preservation in U.S. sugar growing and harvesting came at the expense of agricultural employment in poorer sugar-producing countries.

Ms. Shaheen and Mr. Kirk have offered President Obama and the Republican leadership in the House a common-sense way to keep their promises to get rid of unnecessary government regulation and liberate the job-creating energy of the market. As such, it's also a good early test of the sincerity of those promises.

A imbecilidade da semana (talvez do ano)

Sempre existe um imbecil completo, propenso a atribuir ao sistema capitalista aquilo que é da responsabilidade de políticos vagabundos e um pouco da natureza...

Claro, também existem idiotas capazes de concordar com um imbecil do gênero:

"Darwin ensinou que, na natureza, sobrevivem os mais aptos. E o sistema capitalista criou estruturas para promover a seleção social, de modo que os miseráveis encontrem a morte o quanto antes. É esse darwinismo social, que tanto favorece a acumulação de riqueza, que faz dos pobres vítimas do descaso do governo."

Frei Betto, sobre os desastres na região serrana do Rio de Janeiro

(Se existisse algo como a "central patronal do capitalismo", algo que os adeptos de uma teoria conspiratória do mundo são propensos a acreditar, o imbecil em questão, que só é frei no título autoatribuído, poderia ser processado por difamação.)

Nunca antes visto na diplomacia brasileira - Paulo R. de Almeida

O mais recente trabalho publicado e disponível online:

Never Before Seen in Brazil: Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s grand diplomacy
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 Originais n. 2207; Publicados n. 1013.

Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional
version ISSN 0034-7329
Rev. bras. polít. int. vol.53 no.2 Brasília 2010

ARTIGO

Never Before Seen in Brazil: Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's grand diplomacy
Nunca antes visto no Brasil: a grande diplomacia de Lula
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Phd in Social Sciences and Brazilian career diplomat

ABSTRACT
Critical assessment of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy, which departed from the previous patterns of the Brazilian Foreign Service, to align itself with the political conceptions of the Workers' Party. This diplomacy has neither consolidated the position of Brazil as a regional leader, nor attained its declared goal of inserting Brazil into the United Nations Security Council, although it has reinforced Brazil's image in the international scenarios; but this was achieved much more through the personal activism of the President himself, than through normal diplomatic work.

Key-words: Brazil, diplomacy, Lula government, regional leadership, global presence.

RESUMO
Avaliação crítica da diplomacia do governo Lula, que abandonou os padrões tradicionais do Itamaraty para alinhar-se com as concepções políticas do Partido dos Trabalhadores. Essa diplomacia não conseguiu consolidar a posição do Brasil como líder regional, nem logrou o objetivo declarado de colocar o país no Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas, muito embora tenha reforçado a imagem do Brasil no cenário internacional; mas isso foi alcançado mais por meio do ativismo do próprio presidente, do que pelo trabalho diplomático normal.
Palavras-chave: Brasil, diplomacia, governo Lula, liderança regional, presença global.


South America was not enough: Luis Inácio Lula da Silva goes out into the world

Has Brazil already attained the status of a global power, as sought by Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy? Or, despite all his efforts, does it remain a mere regional power? Those two questions were, almost obsessively, at the center of Lula's entrepreneurial diplomacy, for the whole duration of his administration (2003-2010). The questions are still open.

Global power status, as is well known, is not a matter of national choice, or an issue subjected only to the political will of the actors involved in what is a complex and interrelated equation. It depends on a complete set of objective factors - connected with economic strength, technological endowments and military capabilities - as well as on a clear recognition of that status by other actors, first of all by the general consensus of the international community, but especially by the great powers.1 This recognition is usually linked to primary sources of power - Russia and China clearly fit the pattern - but it can also be associated with other attributions and types of participation in world affairs - cooperation, defense of human rights and democracy, etc.

According to those criteria, Brazil cannot be recognized, yet, as a global power, as it lacks some of the capabilities linked to those pre-conditions, with an emphasis on financial and military capabilities. Neither is it acknowledged as such by the world community. Much of the talk about Brazil's new role is due to its active diplomacy under Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, together with the deployment of external cooperation towards poor countries in Africa and Latin America (efforts labeled, by the President himself, as the 'diplomacy of generosity'). But, Brazil's association with some less commendable actors - such as Iran or Cuba - as well as its poor record on human rights questions, an issue which clearly diminished in importance in Lula's time, has weakened its credentials in terms of the expectations of public opinion.

But even on a more limited regional basis, it is also probably an exaggeration to count Brazil as a South American 'natural leader', for reasons other than a desire for 'grandeur'. Notwithstanding the fact that it fills almost completely the objective criteria to be recognized as such - territorial, economic and demographic dimensions; size of internal markets; presence in external markets; concentration and diversification of investments; level of industrial development; the most advanced technological basis on the continent; its already large direct investment flows in neighboring countries; and, of course, military capabilities - Brazil does not yet enjoy some of the 'subjective' criteria linked to that status, the most important of those being the willing acceptance by the neighboring countries of such a role. Not only Argentina and Colombia, the two other middle-level powers in South America, but also the smaller countries, are not yet ready to accept Brazil as their regional representative or want it to act as a kind of an unelected speaker on their behalf. Unfortunately, big countries are seldom appreciated in their regions.

This lack of natural leadership derives not only from historical reasons - the fact that Brazil is the sole Portuguese-speaking country within a Spanish environment, and that it emerged as a monarchy in the 19th century, in a republican continent - but also from negative contemporary factors, such as the traditional links it has maintained with developed countries in Europe and North America at the expense of its interactions with South American neighbors. Huge Brazilian direct investments and many diplomatic initiatives have been undertaken in recent years in practically all South American countries, but this has not been enough to change the lack of enthusiasm for Brazil's role as a leader.

Notwithstanding its importance in the regional context and its growing role and presence in some questions on the international agenda - especially in multilateral trade policies and WTO negotiations, and environmental affairs, among others - it would be a little premature to count Brazil among the major powers in the world. An objective evaluation of Brazil's current limited capabilities also has to recognize brilliant prospects for the medium term: Brazil is already an 'emerged' country, but still an 'emerging' economy and a power broker. The fact of the general discussion about its greater role on the world diplomatic agenda should be acknowledged as a real accomplishment for President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.

Any assessment of his diplomacy has to start from the fact - and this is its distinctive character - that it does not follow the traditional patterns of professional diplomatic practices, but rather its own Workers' Party, the PT's, ideological choices and political inputs. Those party preferences have left their marks heavily in the foreign policy of Brazil in a manner never seen before 2003. Accordingly, we shall first review the said 'innovation' in Brazilian foreign policy, both in terms of doctrine and of political orientation, and then move to the main issues of the diplomatic agenda. Lula's diplomacy was not only conceived and applied more in line with party politics than with State considerations, but it has also served much more his own motivations for personal aggrandizement in world scenarios than Brazil's national interests.



Shoes and sovereignty: the rhetoric of a sectarian Party diplomacy

For the first time in decades, or ever, Brazilian foreign policy was conceived and conducted under the overriding influence of non-professional diplomats. The PT's 'foreign policy' was the dominant element in Brazilian foreign policy since the beginning of the da Silva government, but not in a structured manner, as the PT never 'produced' a structured or a complete set of conceptions and solutions for Brazil's international relations. The party always had a poor theoretical structure, simply relying on 'Gramscian' figures from academia for the preparation of more sophisticated papers and proposals relating to economics and political life. But the core of its 'thinking' - if one can indulge it with such a description - is a confused mixture of typical (and stereotypical) Latin-American leftism with old-style nationalism and anti-imperialism, with brushes of Castroism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Liberation Theology beliefs.

From the standpoint of its organizational structures, the PT is a quasi-Bolshevik party, albeit without the old apparatchik apparatus of a Soviet-style Communist party. In the beginning, its core staff was formed mainly by: (a) 'alternative' trade-unionists, who started by rejecting the traditional trade-unions linked to the Ministry of Labor, but who have quickly adapted to the flow of easy money provided by the compulsory labor tax (the act of creating new trade unions is a prosperous 'industry', and the practice has enormously prospered under Lula); (b) old guerrilla-fighters, or semi-professional revolutionaries, 'recycled' into party politics (albeit keeping some old habits from their previous clandestine life, and liaisons with Cuba in particular); and, (c) religious movements, such as the leftist Liberation Theology and 'ecclesial communities'.

The PT's 'ideology' is a mixture of old style socialist credo, prior to the fall of Berlin wall, and of social-democratic economic beliefs (mostly of a purely redistributive character). In fact, many of the sects that make up PT are still true believers in socialism, and are die-hard statists who still trust in the merits of a planned economy. For all purposes, they are anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, and naturally, anti-Americans, as almost all of the leftist Latin-American parties are. Some of the PT apparatchiks were trained and instructed by Cuban intelligence officers, which can explain their loyalty to Cuba's goals in Latin America, such as the organization of the São Paulo Forum (the FSP), a Cuban-sponsored coordinating mechanism for all leftist parties in the region which until 2005 included members of the Colombian FARC.2

The PT's main guidelines in foreign policy were established by those involved in its 'international relations', starting with the who had apparatchiks that lived in exile during the military regime (1964-1985). Some of them happened to enjoy the confidence of their Cuban mentors, a fact that exerted some influence in the definition and implementation of 'their' foreign policy, when the time arrived. The future President himself - who, as a trade unionist and leader of metalworkers, developed links with counterparts in Cuba, in the USA, and in Europe - came to understand better the intricacies of international politics; his qualitative leap, the one that was decisive for his own personal life and for the political itinerary of Brazil, was to create in 1980, with the help of former guerrilla fighters, a political party that was to represent a departure from traditional politics and trade-unionism in Brazil.

Nevertheless, the PT always was, and continues to be, a consortium of leftists, engaged actively in the party's cause, which is not exactly a national cause according to the normal lines of a parliamentary or even a presidential democracy. The PT has always relied on mass politics or popular organizations, like students' associations, labor unions or peasant movements, which it controlled. Its concept of democracy is merely instrumental: everything that serves the major objective of holding power for the party fits its "philosophy" and practices. Adhering to a 'Cuban' agenda, it is not surprising if human rights or democracy do not occupy higher levels in this kind of diplomacy. This feature has to be considered as the major political component of Brazilian foreign policy during Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's government.



Bizarre friendships and 'new trade geography': Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's international policy

Two main objectives have marked, in a somewhat contradictory manner, Brazilian foreign policy under Luis Inácio Lula da Silva: the preservation of national sovereignty and the strengthening of regional integration in South America, the latter being a continuation of policies already implemented by previous governments. The former, that is, the sovereign presence of Brazil in the world, would have to be decreased if the latter is to be reinforced, as exclusively national policies - in sectors such as industry, agriculture, or even trade policy - have to accommodate the choices being made in favor of regional integration. Its priorities were established in three main areas: the reform of the United Nations Charter and Brazil's accession to a permanent seat on its Security Council; the finalization of multilateral trade negotiations, with a preferential option for the relationship with the European Union, instead of the conclusion of the American project of a hemispheric free trade area (FTAA), strongly opposed by the PT and other leftist movements; the reinforcement of Mercosur and its extension to other countries in South America, starting with Chile and other Southern Cone countries, such as Bolivia. Other priorities comprised the establishment of a strong relationship with selected 'strategic allies', designated as being 'non-hegemonic countries', namely China, Russia, India, and South Africa, the last two forming part of the IBSA forum, the first three organized along the lines proposed in the Goldman Sachs study on the BRIC countries.

All these moves followed the so-called 'South-South' diplomacy and the desire to create a 'new geography of world trade' and strengthen the 'democratization of international relations', without 'imperial arrogance' and 'hegemonic unilateralism'. In terms of 'tools' to accomplish those objectives, it is not difficult to recognize the high quality of Brazilian professional diplomacy. Brazil's 'diplomatic GDP' is greater than its economic GDP, and the latter is certainly greater than its 'military GDP', in other words, its capacity for projecting power abroad. Indeed, Brazil's influence in diplomatic negotiations is more important than its actual presence in the world, as compared, for instance, to its participation in trade and financial flows (as a recipient of foreign capital and know-how, and a modest investor abroad). Brazil's professional diplomatic skills make it a relevant actor and sometimes a broker in important multilateral trade negotiations (despite its minor role in financial or trade areas).

Nevertheless, Brazil's influence in the new global interdependence is being handicapped by its mixed feelings toward globalization, and this is reinforced by the PT's leading role in its diplomacy, as the party combines an old-style nationalism with defensive policies in the industrial and investment sectors, including trade protectionism and the promotion of substitutive industrialization. For many of its political leaders - and obviously for all the leftists in the da Silva government - globalization is just another name for Americanization, which they reject and even despise because of their superficial nationalism and instinctive protectionism. It is true that Brazil, in promoting Mercosur, has abandoned the worst aspects of its hard-core protectionism from the 1950s up to the 1980s, but entrepreneurs and the political elite maintain the same old feelings of the 'dependency school', a mixture of developmental Keynesianism and a vague Third World ideology demanding a 'new international economic order'.

Policy reforms, in line with the Washington Consensus of the 1990s, and the Cardoso administration's more receptive attitude toward globalization, brought Brazil more in line with mainstream economics, promoting economic opening and trade liberalization. But, starting with Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's government, those policies were somewhat reversed, if not taken back to the old days of Latin American 'Structuralism', identified with Raul Prebisch and Celso Furtado, former guardians of this 'heterodox' school. This reversal in diplomatic guidelines was presented as a renewal with the 'Independent Foreign Policy' of the early 1960s, when it was in fact only the result of nostalgia for old times.

Many of the new manifestations of this 'sovereign diplomacy' have been focused in consolidating alliances with a few selected partners in the Third World, mainly large emerging countries, notably India, South Africa and China, with the addition of Russia to the process, as it is considered to be an 'anti-hegemonic' counter-power. Great efforts have been made to achieve the goal of inserting Brazil into the inner sanctum of the UN Security Council, an initiative that served to arouse the opposition of Argentina and other competitors. Another goal, that of strengthening and expanding Mercosur, with the inclusion of new partners in South America has, in fact, resulted in the dilution of its trade rules and in an overextension of 'social pacts', which have little meaning for real integration.

In parallel with the so-called 'diplomacy of generosity' in Latin America - to consolidate a self-ascribed 'Brazilian leadership' in the region, a role always rejected by professional diplomacy, mindful of its negative tones - the PT government took initiatives to isolate United States in the region and enlarge the sphere of self-coordination among Latin American or South American countries. It started by refusing - in fact sabotaging - the FTAA initiative, proposed by President Clinton in 1994, an act undertaken by a joint action by Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. This policy was also pursued through a series of proposals for the establishment of new bodies uniting exclusively South or Latin American countries. One of them was aimed at submitting the Colombian-US agreement for cooperation against the narco-guerrillas to a detailed scrutiny by a new consultation mechanism proposed by Brazil: the South American Defense Council, itself part of a larger structure, the Union of South American Nations (Unasur).

In February 2010, for instance, with total support from Brazil, a Latin American 'unity' Summit decided the double establishment of the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which replaced the former Rio Group (1986), and of a Latin American Summit on Integration and Development, also created by a Brazilian initiative in December 2008. "For the first time in 200 years", it was said, Latin American countries were meeting "without any kind of guardianship", that is, exempt from any influence from the 'empire' and fully integrating Cuba into the coordinating and consultation mechanisms. The exclusion of the 'empire' was presented as a "success", a 'first' in Latin American history, as Brazilian diplomacy acquired the capacity to "say no".

The anti-American orientation of those actions was very clear, not only for ideological reasons, a feature which might be normally expected from a typical leftist Latin American party, such as PT, still proud of its Cuban links and its solidarity with 'liberation movements'. It was also welcomed as a misguided feeling that integration under the aegis of "imperialism of free-trade" (as the American initiatives were labeled) would rather correspond to a project of 'annexation', instead of a symmetrical integration. It was on behalf of that creed that many other initiatives were taken, including the deliberate sinking of the regional negotiations for a hemispheric free trade area and the frustrated proposal for a South American free trade area (which did not prevent some countries from signing bilateral trade agreements with the US).

Paradoxically, Brazil was accused of being 'imperialist', and has been asked, in consequence, to pay the costs of the 'asymmetrical situation' created by its very huge presence. Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, other countries - even Argentina - forced Brazil to accept new and very generous terms for the reinforcement of their relationship: Bolivia nationalized oil and gas resources exploited by the Brazilian state company Petrobras; Paraguay required additional payments for its share of electricity generated by the bi-national hydro-electric plant at Itaipu; Argentina unilaterally imposed safeguards and other defensive trade restrictions on a number of Brazilian manufactured goods that would be normally exported through the free-trade area of Mercosur; Uruguay and other countries, including Venezuela wanted investments or financing from Brazil.

During previous administrations, professional diplomacy conducted bilateral relations with the United States under normal assumptions of cooperation and consultation without any ideological misconceptions about what is usually called 'American hegemonic pretensions'. The PT's diplomacy reverted to the 'normal' anti-imperialism (together with some anti-Americanism) of the old Latin American left. Dealing cautiously with American interests in the world and in the region during its first mandate, the da Silva government exhibited a more assertive 'anti-hegemonic' stance in its second mandate, developing (at least rhetorically) some confrontational positions in relation to American interests in the global scenario; political conflicts over specific issues were always avoided and direct opposition never allowed to arise, but a more assertive behavior, connecting Brazil with other 'non-hegemonic' emerging powers, was allowed to develop (in fact, was explicitly promoted).



Too much transpiration, less inspiration: Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy in action

Intentions and proclamations aside, diplomacy under Luis Inácio Lula da Silva has to be evaluated according to its concrete results - or lack thereof - in the many subjects that mobilized the attention of the professional staff of the Foreign Service, under the triple guidance of the Presidential Assistant, the Minister and his Secretary-General, with the clear approval and the appreciation of the President himself. Among those issues, the following protracted the most attention from all these actors during the period under consideration: the UN Security Council; alliances with strategic partners; Mercosur and related issues of regional integration; the relationship with Argentina; Brazil's leadership in South America and regional blocs; the WTO and multilateral trade negotiations; relations with other emerging powers and the international role of Brazil. For some of these issues, the PT already had its own 'policies'; for others, it followed the official diplomatic line, distorting it for its own purposes.

The United Nations Security Council: a long-standing obsession

Despite a vague mention related to the "reform of international organizations", the issue was never a priority in the PT's guidelines on Foreign Policy but it was a pet subject for the Foreign Minister, who had a long career in multilateral forums and a personal attraction for international security matters; he transmitted this interest to the President, who promptly excepted the idea that Brazil was ready to enter the inner sanctum of the United Nations. This issue is notoriously difficult, and Brazil engaged vast resources - human, diplomatic, financial - in lobbying other countries for the purpose of reforming the UN Charter and enlarging its Security Council. The remarkable degree of acceptance of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva by the international media and other world leaders - all of whom, with the exception of George Bush, invited him to the annual G8 meetings - convinced the President that the idea was not only feasible but attainable, despite some opposition from regional partners (most vociferously, Argentina and Mexico).

Brazilian initiatives took various forms. With other developing countries, bilateral debt write-offs were offered to the poorest countries, but sometimes even to oil exporters like Gabon. With the other candidates (Japan, Germany, and India), a G4 was created to support one of the proposals put forward by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Brazil never reached an agreement with two key actors in this process, USA and China, who continuously opposed any substantial reform of the international body. For the sake of its great objective, Brazil assumed a commanding role in the pacification process of Haiti, engaging considerable resources in the task of nation-building that went clearly beyond the country's traditional participation in peacekeeping missions. Also, to enhance Brazil's international presence, the President ordered the opening of permanent embassies in almost all African countries and in all the Latin American states, even in the smallest islands of the Caribbean, all with very limited results in practice. Despite rhetorical support for his pretention, expressed in many bilateral communiqués along his mandate, the President was continuously frustrated.

Alliances with strategic partners (Argentina, China, India, South Africa)

Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy believed that countries such as Brazil, Argentina, China, South Africa and India not only share common values and the same objectives in the world system, but also have relatively similar social and economic characteristics, making them ready to sustain joint projects and efforts at cooperation. IBSA, or the G-3, for instance, was presented as one example of creativity and shared vision between three great multiracial democracies, Brazil, India and South Africa. Having decided to form the group, the three countries struggled hard to find common problems and to establish a list of 'shared solutions', installing as many working groups as possible without regard for the actual differences among. Official rhetoric refers to IBSA as a 'success story', although concrete results, objectively assessed, remain below expectations, providing more promises than real accomplishments.

Argentina is another kind of 'strategic partnership': it was the co-founder of the Southern Cone integration process, with Mercosur at its core, the consolidation of which would require that the co-ordination of macroeconomic policies between the two big associates, as well as a set of joint measures to strengthen the regional bloc, be placed at the center of that endeavor. Instead, Argentina's behavior in Mercosur became a hindrance for Brazilian industrialists, as their exports were subjected to many protectionist restrictions adopted by the Buenos Aires Government, which was still committed to old national practices in trade and industrial policies. The da Silva Government not only tolerated such abuses - contrary to the spirit and to the letter of Mercosur agreements, as well as to WTO-GATT dispositions on safeguards - but also managed to contain the dissatisfaction of Brazilian exporters.

China, for its part, was previously (and uncritically) selected by the President and the PT as a strategic ally, and began to benefit from this position by the declaration, by Brazil, that it filled the requirements of a "market economy", as defined by WTO rules (and thus able to enjoy the bonuses of this recognition in its bilateral trade with Brazil). Brazilian diplomacy misread completely the real will of China in terms of accepting the reform of the UN Charter and the elevation of Brazil to its long sought ambition to become a permanent member of the Security Council. Neither were the Chinese ready to make the huge investments in Brazilian infra-structure that were expected by Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, as they actually regarded Brazil as one more commodity provider among many others.

The dismantling of Mercosur as an unintended consequence

The 'restructuring', institutional consolidation and enlargement of Mercosur were on Lula's diplomatic menu, as had been explicitly announced since the beginning. According to this priority, total dedication was devoted to the attraction of new partners - Bolivia, Chile, Venezuela, and Ecuador - and facilitating their integration into the bloc (including a waiver on the application of the Common External Tariff, a clear circumvention of the normal discipline inside a customs union, which is what Mercosur pretends to be). Besides the creation of a Mercosur Parliament - without real functions, to be precise - there was no real progresses in the fields of trade liberalization and economic opening among member countries. From the designated group of 'candidates', only Hugo Chávez's Venezuela decided to join the bloc, to the consternation of the real democrats and the concerns of the business world. Despite a strong lobby exerted by the da Silva Government in favor of Chávez, the documentation has not yet been concluded, as Paraguay has still to endorse it.

Irrespective of the real setbacks in the commercial areas of Mercosur, it is a fact that Brazil has invested heavily in the project of a stronger Mercosur and its expansion throughout the region. For instance, Brazil proposed, created and financed, at 70% of its cost, a fund to "correct the imbalances" in the region, a financial scheme equivalent to only a small part, 1%, approximately, of the combined Mercosur member countries' GDPs and that, in fact, duplicates the work of the multilateral banks already operating in the region - the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank and other bodies. Instead of reducing imbalances in the region by market-friendly mechanisms, in line with each country's comparative advantages, governments allocate money to a vast array of projects poorly managed by bureaucrats and incapable of correcting any imbalance between them.

As well as an emphasis on its social and political agenda, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's big push towards Mercosur's enlargement was to offer it to whichever countries in South America would be willing to join, even at the price of overlooking some of its requirements, simply to accommodate specific countries with strong political motivations. Bolivia, for instance, was offered the chance to enter Mercosur without being liable to the Common External Tariff (which was considered an exaggerated concession by Argentina). Ecuador, along with Bolivia, a member of the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), was also approached, but preferred not to be entangled in any new commercial compromise. Chile, bound to a single tariff, as consolidated in the GATT system, declined from the start to become a full member of Mercosur, taking into account that it benefits from free-trade agreements concluded with each of its hemispheric partners. Colombia and Peru, too, setting aside their CAN membership, opted for free-trade agreements with the United States, a move that pushed Venezuela's Hugo Chávez to denounce the country's membership of CAN and to make a pledge to join Mercosur.

There are two problems with Chávez's political decision to become a full member of Mercosur: on the one hand, since 2006, when that option was chosen, he signed, at the same time, a trilateral pact, with Cuba and Bolivia, creating ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, a bizarre integration scheme built around state trading, managed cooperation and no free trade at all. On the other hand, Venezuela has never complied with the requirements of Mercosur's customs union - that is, the Common External Tariff and all other regulations to that effect - declaring instead that it's intention was to transform Mercosur from its 'neoliberal' rules to a new political bloc, animated by its own proposals concerning '21st-century socialism'. Even accounting for the political empathy demonstrated by the two biggest associates towards Venezuela - in the case of Argentina compounded by the fact that Hugo Chávez was its sole financier after the 2002 moratorium - that was a little too far from the modest capitalist, albeit dirigiste, integration scheme devised by Brazil and Argentina.

Sleeping with a restive neighbor: relations with Argentina

The most sensible, and relevant, of all bilateral Brazilian relationships, the diplomatic interaction with Argentina, remains in a delicate situation, despite the benign propensity of the da Silva Government to accept almost all restrictions and limitations unilaterally imposed by Buenos Aires on the trade exchanges and reciprocal economic flows. At the beginning the da Silva and Kirchner mandates, in 2003, the excuse for many defensive measures was the profound crisis created by the end of the convertibility exchange regime and the external debt moratorium, followed by a complete standstill in foreign financing for Argentina. In a second stage, bruised by the excessive number of initiatives the Brazilian President was taking to assert Brazil's leadership in the region, Nestor Kirchner hardened Argentinean positions in many negotiating situations, either in Mercosur or in regional matters, and even in multilateral situations, such as Brazilian candidacies in some international organizations (IADB, WTO, and others).

Ego disputes aside, the most important problem was a special safeguards regime that Argentina sought to impose on bilateral trade with Brazil, invoking "structural imbalances" arising from the Brazilian exchange flotation or hidden subsidies on Brazilian exports; "involuntary" export restrictions and other market arrangements were put in place, even against Mercosur rules and WTO dispositions, which the Brazilian President accepted as part of his "diplomacy of generosity" (to the great displeasure of Brazilian industrialists). In other contexts, Brazil was unable (or was not accepted) to mediate the conflict between Argentina and Uruguay over the cellulose plants next to the border. Favorable diplomatic rhetoric apart, Argentina was never very enthusiastic about Brazilian initiatives in the region: the South American Community of Nations, the two inter-regional summits - with Arab and African Countries - the South American Defense Council within Unasur, the Latin American and Caribbean meetings, and some other initiatives. Above all, though, the most contentious issue was Brazil's candidacy to the UNSC seat, followed by its implicit posture as regional leader - two endeavors that affected Argentina self-esteem and moved her to an openly active opposition.

Tropical Man's Burden: Brazil's regional leadership

One of the most important of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomatic initiatives, along with the Brazilian candidacy to a permanent seat in the UNSC, is the union of South America as a political entity, free from any interference from the "American empire", and this has always corresponded to a permanent project for his party, obviously supported by its Cuban and other Latin American leftist allies. The core of Brazilian regional diplomacy, under the direct inspiration of Itamaraty's Secretary-General, was strongly directed towards this ambitious objective, with partial successes in various aspects.

The economic aspect of the project - the political implosion of the American proposal of a FTAA, followed by the creation of a South American Free Trade Area - was only half-achieved: the abandonment of a hemispheric trade liberalization scheme. Brazilian initiatives towards creating its own economic space in the region were downsized to a mosaic of bilateral agreements within the framework of a Latin American Integration Association that failed to promote expanded exchanges or to effectively integrate the economies of the countries. The modest opening of the Brazilian economy in favor of its neighbors curtailed the Brazilian's grand vision for the continent.

The political components of the project remained too vague to really unite ten South American States that harbor different conceptions, sometimes opposed to each other, about political and economic integration. Unhappily for the Brazilian project, the fact is that South America became less, not more, integrated during Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's tenure, and the reason has little to do with external crises or military dictatorship. Indeed, democracy has progressed in the region, but political instability remains a crucial factor that explains the differing concepts of integration, and some of the regional crises. By most accounts, Bolivarianism and indigenism, arising in Andean countries, have rendered those polities more instable, socially and politically, and prone to old conceptions of integration, marked by State-led economic policies, nationalization and a less relevant role for trade and finance, compared to social and political issues, all of which was completely at odds with a market-led integration, such as that practiced in Mercosur.

In addition, the exercise in 'regional leadership', as tentatively tried by Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy, was not well received; in fact, it had never been welcomed in the past, one more reason for professional diplomacy making a taboo of this difficult concept. Tempted by his warm reception in the world press and among many political leaders, Lula believed that the time was ripe for Brazil to assume a more assertive posture based on political dialogue, Brazilian financing of development projects and a tentative measure to coordinate positions in regional or multilateral negotiations.

Being the largest economy in the region, Brazil exerts a natural attraction on neighboring countries, but that has not been enough to overcome old suspicions about its quasi-imperialistic behavior in South America, or its supposed desire to impose its own domination over other countries, replicating, albeit in a less arrogant manner, American imperial tutelage. In fact, Brazil has never exerted any guardianship over the region, but the multiplication of initiatives could be seen as devoid of vested interests. That could be one of the reasons for Andean countries not accepting the offer by Brazilian diplomacy to set up a secretariat for the newly-created South American Community of Nations, an entity that was replaced, one year later by the Hugo Chávez-sponsored Union of the Nations of South America (Unasur), with its headquarters in Quito.

The da Silva Government also failed to provide an adequate substitute to a scheme devised by Cardoso's administration for the infrastructure projects in South America. The Initiative for the Integration of South America (IIRSA), created in 2000, never advanced from its stage of portfolio projects - prepared by the INTAL-IADB - to transform them into concrete undertakings capable of mobilizing private and official financial resources to deal with the multiple needs in the region in terms of energy, communications, and major engineering projects (notably in transport). As regards investments and other market opportunities, the successful implosion of the FTAA by Brazilian diplomacy (with a little help from Argentina and Venezuela) may have thrown some countries into the arms of the USA, as Brazil is not really a powerful replacement solution for economies looking for big flows of direct investment and access to larger markets, at least not those of the size of the United States; in the same move, Brazil ended up with less market access and reduced preferences in its neighbors' markets.

A bridge too far: multilateral and regional trade negotiations

Access to new markets through multilateral trade negotiations, with small concessions in new areas - like investments, intellectual property and services - but also in industrial tariffs, have always been a chasse gardée for Itamaraty, preserved from intrusions by other government agencies. This domestic hegemony was somewhat contested during Lula's government - especially by Brazilian agricultural producers competing in world markets, but also other sectors - because of the extreme politicization of those economic issues practiced since the beginning. Under the slogan of creating a 'new geography for world trade', Itamaraty aligned Brazil with other developing countries - always with the aim of presenting a united front against rich countries - disregarding the fact that some of those countries (including China and India, two of its strongest 'allies') possessed in reality interests directly opposed to Brazil's aim in dismantling agriculture protectionism and high subsidies in the area.

The Commercial G20, created at the Cancun ministerial meeting of the WTO (2003), was presented as a strong expression of Brazilian leadership in trade negotiations, and as an 'alternative' to old negotiating schemes, but its internal contradictions quickly became apparent in subsequent phases and the group was not capable of overcoming different interests among its members to present a united front in some crucial issues related to it. For all practical purposes, the offensive stance of Brazil in those matters was rendered as defensive as the Chinese or Indian positions, including in non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and in services, in a time when Brazilian farmers, and even many industrialists, were disposed to advance further.

In the same areas, and in other negotiating instances - such as in the framework of trade talks between Mercosur and the EU - less ambitious positions or a limited disposition to make concessions in industrial tariffs from partners like Argentina (but the same applies to India and some other developing countries) curtailed the possibility for Brazil to reach an acceptable agreement with other developing countries, thus opening new markets for Brazilian products. The preferential alliances devised by Itamaraty with other developing countries - which included 'social concerns' and 'interests of less competitive agriculture', or 'family farms' - added to the hindrances that had been self-inflicted for political reasons, in addition to the fact that the great expansion for Brazilian exports in the farming sector is essentially concentrated in the emerging markets, not in rich countries. In this sense, the 'South-South' policy and the 'new geography of trade', with all their political bias, were in contradiction to Brazilian national interests and the country's natural competitive advantages. Asian countries, for instance, have for a long time been practicing the 'new geography' in expanding their exports to rich countries in the West.

Dragons, elephants and other fauna: Brazil's presence in the world

China was designated an 'ally', or 'strategic partner' even before Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's coming to power, as he made a political visit to that country in 2001, and was received with the honors due to an important political leader. At that time, many of the PT leaders still held the erroneous belief that China was a socialist economy and a country interested in constituting a 'common front' against the arrogant rich countries and Western 'imperialism'. When he came to power, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva started to put in practice his unilaterally conceived 'Chinese policy', which consisted of great expectations concerning major investments in Brazil and, especially, a strong political relationship by which both countries were to influence a big change in world power, reducing the spaces for 'hegemony' in international politics - a concept used by the Chinese, by the way.

The Brazilian's diplomacy imagined that, by conceding to China the status of a 'market economy', as requested by the Chinese leadership, it would be possible to capture large-scale investments and technological cooperation, as well as the most prized reward sought by the president: China's support for the Brazilian aspiration to a seat in the UNSC. In other occasions - during reciprocal state visits - the President even considered the idea of a free-trade agreement between China and Mercosur, and offered the possibility of replace the payment system in bilateral trade, starting to use local currencies instead of dollars. Both measures were clearly in favor of Chinese interests and, thanks to the opposition from entrepreneurs - alarmed by the destructive potential of low-cost Chinese competition - and from some more vigilant bureaucrats in the Central Bank, they were not implemented at all, despite being proposed by the President himself (probably out of naïveté or simple ignorance of economic matters).

China never committed itself to supporting Brazil in its quest for the UNSC seat and has always acted in its own self-interest, even on strictly bilateral matters; it did not hesitate, for instance, to impose a trade embargo on the arrival of a Brazilian cargo of soy beans invoking sanitary measures, when it was simply pushing down the prices, and this on the eve of one of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's official visits to China. In other contexts China makes very clear that it wants to keep for itself the decision on the desirable pattern for bilateral relations, including matters pertaining to private investment and a common multilateral agenda (either in BRIC meetings, or elsewhere).

The creation of the informal group called BRIC, comprising Brazil, China, India and Russia, has the latter country as the main partner with Brazil in the endeavor that looks more at political aims than economic objectives, despite the fact that the proposal by an investment economist takes its legitimacy from their economic importance for the future world economy. The new acronym has attracted a lot of publicity but it remains to be seen if the group has, effectively, coherent, sound and feasible proposals for global governance, justifying its claim to be an alternative to the traditional G7-G8 group. In the same way, the decision to strengthen links with new and old partners, in other continents, fits Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's intention to diversify the options available for Brazilian exports, other sources for sophisticated technology - with France, for instance - and to achieve a balance of commercial objectives and attain a leading political role for the country in the world (as in the summits organized with Arab and African countries together with South American neighbors of Brazil).

A resident diplomatic representation was established in Ramallah and Luis Inácio Lula da Silva tried to insert himself in the complicated chessboard of Middle East conflicts, offering to mediate a 'peace' between Israelis and Palestinians on the basis of 'sincere dialogue', which, of course, arrived at nothing. New attempts at bona fide diplomacy were made in connection with the troubled negotiations between the great powers and Iran, over that country's covert activities regarding its nuclear program, only to characterize Brazil's President as a friend of the controversial figure of Ahmadinejad. Brazil's too lenient posture regarding human rights violations around the world, together with Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's indulgence towards dictators like Fidel Castro, have tarnished the good record previously held by Brazil.

There is no doubt that Brazil has become an important broker in many instances on the international agenda, even if some ambiguities remain over specific points of the political aspect of the PT's external policy (human rights and democracy being the most visible, but also non-proliferation and environment). Luis Inácio Lula da Silva had the opportunity to engage in dialogue at the same time with capitalists in Davos and the dreamers of the World Social Forum, but many in his immediate surroundings exhibited a clear anti-American stance, as was revealed, for instance, in the cases of Honduras and Venezuela. The President's negative appraisals of 'neoliberalism' and 'Wall Street speculators' have more to do with old-fashioned leftist postures than with the diplomatic seriousness required from an aspiring emerging power. At the beginning of his mandate, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva attempted to 'sell' to other Latin American countries a replacement of the 'Washington Consensus', by means of a so-called 'Buenos Aires Consensus', a fragile set of fragile rules about welfare policies. At the end of his mandate, had become a strong critic of the current international system, probably frustrated by the unwillingness of great powers to reform the UNO Charter and accept Brazil as one of the 'more equals'.



Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's heritage: Brazilian diplomacy's new clothes

The October 2010 presidential elections in Brazil provide the opportunity to change many things in foreign policy, if there is a social-democratic victory - probably more in the region, and specifically in connection with Mercosur, than in Brazil's world role - or, otherwise, a new government can maintain, roughly speaking, the same lines in diplomacy as followed during the last eight years of the da Silva administration. Indeed, the PT's foreign policy, though not consensual, is widely accepted by many sectors of public opinion, mainly in academia and left-wing parties and movements. It would be more of the same, except for the lack of a colorful president, who has represented Brazil abroad in a lively manner in times of great changes in world scenarios.

Some positions will probably not change, of course: the self-characterization of Brazil as a developing country, its pretension to be a speaker on behalf of other poor countries seeking a new economic order, with more justice and fairness being shown towards those countries, the reduction of the inequalities and imbalances that still divide the world, the democratization of international politics - with Brazil standing yet again as a candidate for a permanent seat on the UNSC - and many other requests of this nature. Strong action against hunger, poverty and injustices will continue to be high in the agenda, as well as the defense of sovereignty and states' policies directed to social development.

South America - and with the PT, Latin America - will be maintained as the most relevant priority of Brazilian foreign policy, but in the case of a social-democratic win, exclusive 'South-South' policies will probably be scaled down within the ranks of Itamaraty, in favor of a more balanced view of cooperation and a more pragmatic position regarding commercial policies and human rights issues. Multilateralism in economic and political careers will keep the same importance as always and Itamaraty will regain some of the spaces it lost to a very activist presidential palace in the last eight years. There will probably be less presidential diplomacy, and more 'normal', professional diplomacy, with less travel and visits both abroad and to Brazil.

Changes in or of style and different emphases apart, Brazil will undoubtedly retain the growing economic and political importance it attained during Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's administration. The new view of Brazil held by foreign countries has objective grounds: the preservation of economic stability and the steady, albeit modest, growth rates exhibited by Brazilian economy that its diplomacy has been able to capitalize upon. China, the current engine of the world economy became the main Brazil's trading partner in the last year of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's mandate, but it was China that that has contributed most to Brazilian growth, a growth much more based on the value given to its commodities than on the diversification and expansion of exported manufactures. In fact, economic growth in Brazil is perhaps becoming too dependent on China, as was the case in the past with the Brazilian-American relationship. However, in the context of the BRIC countries, Brazil has shown the worst growth rate of the four nations, and has not lost its relative share of the world GDP or the intensity of its participation in international trade.

Thus, despite Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's satisfaction with the greater presence of Brazil in the world, which allows him to enhance his own leading role in building that position, it would not be wrong to say that this new role derives much more from a hyperactive diplomacy, based on the strong promotion of the President himself, than from a real transformation in the objective position of Brazil in the economic and political scenarios. Growth in nominal GDP as compared to other countries is, at least in some measure, the result of the currency's appreciation against the dollar; in the same way, growth in exports reflects the growing demand from dynamic countries for Brazilian commodities; there is also the expansion of domestic credit for consumption, even at the risk of a bubble arising from excessive debt contracted by individuals and families. On a similar topic, the economic stability granted since Cardoso's administration, and rightfully preserved by da Silva, together with the size of the domestic market and Brazilian connections within the framework of Mercosur, are responsible for the huge amounts of foreign direct investments that have been attracted since then. This relatively benign scenario will probably be maintained for the next few years, depending on the main markets for Brazilian products (today tending towards China) and on external credits from financial markets.

An overall evaluation of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy should be able to recognize its ability to project a dynamic image of Brazil worldwide, helping to make the country a fully-fledged actor in the forefront of international diplomacy. Brazil is certainly present in many of the most important discussion bodies dealing with economic and political issues in the world agenda. Not surprisingly, the personal figure of da Silva is even more present than the country, which confirms the real success of his diplomacy in projecting his own image as the personification of Brazil.

In terms of its own development though, Brazil is still an emerging country, with many social deficiencies, economic imbalances, uneven regional progress, and an extremely problematic public education system; its state institutions and corruption levels are much more akin to the standard patterns already familiar in developing countries than with the advanced economies that Brazil is struggling to imitate. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Brazil could be a full member of the OECD, as it has received 10 open invitation in recent years to consider becoming associated with that organization; it was only for ideological and political reasons that Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's diplomacy choose to stand aside. Even taking into account some economic challenges arising from such a decision, OECD patterns in economic policy and governance would help Brazil to modernize its structures and improve the overall performance of its public policies.

Indeed, the main challenges for Brazil in the years ahead are entirely internal, with few, or none, deriving from external factors. Domestic problems are mainly to blame for the modest role still characterizing Brazil's world presence; an ambitious set of governance reforms - the taxation system, labor legislation, political and administrative reforms, and an educational revolution - most of them in line with OECD patterns, should contribute to the international aggrandizement of Brazil. Those tasks will presumably depend on a less ideological type of governance and on a new kind of diplomacy, open-minded and market-friendly. This task is for a post-da Silva government.

Received August 14, 2010
Accepted November 18, 2010

Notes:
1 Some of the questions debated in this essay have been already dealt with in other articles by the author, namely: "Brazil in the world context, at the first decade of the 21st century: regional leadership and strategies for its integration into the world economy", In: Joam Evans (org.), Brazilian Defense Policies: Current Trends and Regional Implications (London: Dunkling Books, 2009), p. 11-26; "Lula's Foreign Policy: Regional and Global Strategies", In: Werner Baer and Joseph Love (eds.), Brazil under Lula (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), p. 167-183; "Política exterior: potencia regional o actor global", In: "Brasil Emerge", Vanguardia Dossier (Barcelona: La Vanguardia, n. 36, Jul-Sept., 2010), p. 68-72.
2 Minutes of the regular meetings of the FSP, since its foundation, in 1990, up to 2007, with evidence of the participation of the Colombian narco-terrorist group FARC, can be found at this website: http://www.midiasemmascara.org/arquivo/atas-do-foro-de-sao-paulo/7.html, accessed on 20th October 2010.

All the contents of this journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License

Instituto Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais
Caixa Postal 4400
70910-900 - Brasília - DF - Brasil
Tel.: (55 61) 2192 9460
Fax: (55 61) 3107 0755

secretaria@ibri-rbpi.org

Piada contextualizada...

Vida de americano:
iPhone, iPod, iPad, iMac

Vida de Brasileiro:
iPtu, iPva, iCms e iiiNaoDeu...

O atraso dos paises islamicos pela lei coranica - Timur Kuran

Um livro importante, com uma tese talvez controversa, mas que merece atenção e debate.

The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East
By Timur Kuran
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 405p.
The Independent, Friday, 28 January 2011

Reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar

Around 300 years ago, the bazaars of the Middle East were overflowing with luxury goods. The commercial centres of the region attracted all variety of fortune seekers, speaking numerous languages. There was nothing to indicate that the region would not continue to be economically prosperous. But then the trajectory changed. The Middle East nosedived into a downward spiral of underdevelopment. So what went wrong?

The major causes of the economic stagnation of the Middle East, which includes Turkey, are not colonisation, or the conservative and anti-scientific attitudes of the people, argues Timur Kuran, a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University. While colonisation certainly played a role, many former colonies, such as Brazil and India, have managed to overcome the historic hurdles of occupation. Conservatism and anti-scientific attitudes are as prevalent in Europe as the Middle East, and they have not been a barrier in the development of the West. The real cause of underdevelopment in the Middle East, Kuran suggests in this meticulously argued book, is the Sharia, or Islamic law.

When it was first formulated, the Sharia developed institutions, such as contract law, that were advanced and sophisticated for its time. But the law has not evolved and adjusted to the new world of business and finance. There have been, throughout history, many attempts to reinterpret it, eliminate ambiguities and resolve contradictions. In some areas, such as tax collection, innovations never ceased. However, the substance of the law was not transformed significantly to cope with radical changes in the range and magnitude of economic activity. The reinterpretations were seldom more than odd ripples in a pond.

Kuran identifies contract law, rules of inheritance, the ban on usury, and the death penalty for apostasy as key elements of Islamic law that thwarted economic development of the Middle East. His goal is not to rubbish Islamic law. Indeed, he takes pains to explore its positive features. But to demonstrates convincingly that lack of innovation generated negative consequences, even from the progressive aspects of Islamic law.

During the Middle Ages, business transactions were based on personal relationships. Islamic contract law, on the other hand, promoted cooperation outside family and kin. Complete strangers could come together to form a business partnership on the basis of mutual interest that was recognised in law and upheld in courts. The problem was that an Islamic partnership could be terminated at will by any partner. The death of a partner also dissolved the partnership, with subsequent profit and loss going solely to the survivor. The children and family of the deceased partner could neither inherit nor automatically take his place.

This meant that durable business partnerships that could last generations did not emerge in the Middle East. The private enterprises in the region became atomistic. When businessmen came together to pool their resources in profit-making endeavours, their cooperation was only temporary and seldom lasted more than a few months.

The problem was compounded by the egalitarian nature of Islamic laws of inheritance. These were designed to dissipate wealth in society and prevent its accumulation in fewer and fewer hands. But it also meant that business empires of successful merchants never survived after them, as their estates were divided and dispersed into several small segments. Recombination and re-emergence of the empire was almost impossible. Everything had to begin again from ground zero with new partnerships.

The ban on usury made it difficult for merchants to obtain credit and suppliers to lend money. Often, it increased the cost as both suppliers and users of credit discovered innovative strategies to bypass the prohibition. The bar on interest also meant that banks could not emerge. There was no incentive to trade shares; or any need for standardised accounting.

The punishment for apostasy made it impossible for Muslims to do business with non-Muslims. They risked life and limb if they conducted business under a non-Muslim legal system, or took disputes to non-Muslim judges.

To make matters worse, social services in Middle Eastern societies were provided by pious foundations, or waqfs. These charitable trusts, set up under Islamic law and supervised by religious officials, provided the region with such essential services as water supplies and looked after orphanages, schools and colleges. They could outlive their founders and continue for perpetuity. But as they were not self-governing, their caretakers could not maximise profits. They thus became an impediment to the growth of corporations.

All this meant that the Middle East was very late in adopting key institutions of modern economy. The laws, institutions and organisational forms, that could mobilise productive resources on large scales within enduring private enterprises, so essential for economic development, just did not emerge in the region.

This is a fresh and thought-provoking argument. But it is based on the assumption that Western financial institutions, and self-serving corporations, are the best possible model for development. Given the havoc that these institutions have caused in recent times, and the fact that injustice and obscene wealth is integral to their make-up, I think it is an assumption too far.

One also needs to consider why Islam insists on the egalitarian distribution of wealth and historically suppressed the emergence of monopoly capital. Perhaps it has something to do with a socially conscience vision of society that emphasises genuine equity and justice? Kuran's thesis is contentious; but it does provide us with an incentive to reformulate Islamic law. It is an excellent starting-point for a debate long overdue.

Ziauddin Sardar's 'Reading the Qur'an' will be published by Hurst in May.

============

Review at The Economist:

The crescent and the company
Schumpeter
The Economist, January 27th 2011

A scholar asks some profound questions about why the Middle East fell behind the West

The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East
By Timur Kuran
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 405p.

IN 2002 a group of Arab scholars produced a brave report, under the auspices of the United Nations, on the Arab world’s twin deficits, in freedom and knowledge. A salutary debate ensued. Now Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American economist based at Duke University, has written an equally brave book on “how Islamic law held back the Middle East”. One can only hope that the result will be an equally salutary debate.

For most of its history the Middle East was just as dynamic as Europe. The great bazaars of Baghdad and Istanbul were full of fortune-seekers from hither and yon. Muslim merchants carried their faith to the far corners of the world. In the 1770s Edward Gibbon had little difficulty imagining Islamic theology being taught in Oxford and across Britain—if only the battle of Tours-Poitiers in 732 had turned out differently.

But even before Gibbon the balance of power had shifted. Angus Maddison has calculated that in the year 1000 the Middle East’s share of the world’s gross domestic product was larger than Europe’s—10% compared with 9%. By 1700 the Middle East’s share had fallen to just 2% and Europe’s had risen to 22%.

The standard explanations for this decline are all unsatisfactory. One is that the spirit of Islam is hostile to commerce. But if anything Islamic scripture is more pro-business than Christian texts. Muhammad was a merchant, and the Koran is full of praise for commerce. A second explanation is that Islam bans usury. But so do the Torah and the Bible. A third—popular in the Islamic world—is that Muslims were victims of Western imperialism. But why did a once-mighty civilisation succumb to the West?

In “The Long Divergence” Mr Kuran advances a more plausible reason. The Middle East fell behind the West because it failed to produce commercial institutions—most notably joint-stock companies—that were capable of mobilising large quantities of productive resources and enduring over time.

Europeans inherited the idea of the corporation from Roman law. Using it as a base, they also experimented with ever more complicated partnerships. By 1470 the house of the Medicis had a permanent staff of 57 spread across eight European cities. The Islamic world failed to produce similar innovations. Under the prevailing “law of partnerships”, businesses could be dissolved at the whim of a single partner. The combination of generous inheritance laws and the practice of polygamy meant that wealth was dispersed among numerous claimants.

None of this mattered when business was simple. But the West’s advantage grew as it became more complicated. Whereas business institutions in the Islamic world remained atomised, the West developed ever more resilient corporations—limited liability became widely available in the mid-19th century—as well as a penumbra of technologies such as double-entry book-keeping and stockmarkets.

How much does this matter for modern business? From the late 19th century onwards Middle Eastern politicians borrowed Western institutions in order to boost economic growth. In the 1920s Ataturk introduced a thoroughly secular legal system in Turkey. Today the Islamic world boasts muscular companies and hectic stockmarkets (the market capitalisation of the region’s three biggest countries, Turkey, Egypt and Iran, doubled between 2003 and 2008). Dubai is laying out a red carpet for the world’s companies. Turkey is growing much faster than Greece.

Yet the “long divergence” continues to shape the region’s business climate. Most obviously, the Middle East has a lot of catching up to do. Income per head is still only 28% of the European and American average. More than half the region’s firms say limited access to electricity, telecoms and transport is a problem for business. The figure in Europe is less than a quarter.

There are more subtle echoes. Business across the region remains intertwined with the state while the wider commercial society is weak. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor suggests that rates of entrepreneurship are particularly low in the Middle East and north Africa. Transparency International’s corruption-perceptions index suggests that corruption is rife: in 2010, on a scale from one (the worst) to ten, Western Europe’s five most populous countries received an average score of 6.5, whereas the three most populous countries in the Middle East averaged 3.2 (Turkey scored 4.4, Egypt 3.1 and Iran 2.2).

Culture’s long shadow
The “long divergence” also helps to explain some of the Islamist rage against capitalism. Traditional societies of all kinds have been uncomfortable with corporations which, according to Edward Thurlow, an 18th-century British jurist, have “neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned”. But that unhappiness has been particularly marked in the Middle East. Corporations and other capitalist institutions were imported by progressive governments that believed the region faced a choice between Mecca and modernisation. Local businesses—particularly capital-intensive ones such as transport and manufacturing—were dominated by Jews and Christians who were allowed to opt out of Islamic law.

Mr Kuran’s arguments have broad implications for the debate about how to foster economic development. He demonstrates that the West’s long ascendancy was rooted in its ability to develop institutions that combined labour and capital in imaginative new ways. The Protestant work ethic and the scientific revolution no doubt mattered. But they may have mattered less than previously thought. People who want to ensure that economic development puts down deep roots in emerging societies would be well advised to create the institutional environment in which Thurlow’s soulless institutions can flourish.

Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter

Piada de economistas... e de historiadores (para connoisseurs...)

Recolhida numa lista de história econômica, com a gentil permissão dos autores:

Roy Weintraub writes:

"We decided that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we would be pleased to act as members of a broad left-wing conspiracy to turn America into a French-loving high taxation socialist state, while on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we would take part in the vast right-wing conspiracy to arm America and send all the leftist liberals back to Russia. We also decided that on Sundays we would drink beer and watch football."

And on the 7th Day, God invented humor, to keep us from each other's throats.
About time for some, and thank you, Roy.

As to French-loving, it is worth remembering that our Founding Fathers were mostly Francophiles, before and after the Revolution. Even Washington, the conservative, allied with Rochambeau, Lafayette, and deGrasse to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown. Jefferson, Franklin, and other authors of the U.S. Constitution consorted with Quesnay, and many Physiocrats, plus Turgot the tutor of Adam Smith. Turgot's Reflexions is a terse masterpiece of early political economy. He might even be considered the father of the Commerce Clause of our constitution, which accomplished for us what he had sought in France. Even Alexander Hamilton had a French mother. So those who idolize the Founders and revile the French have some reconciling to do.
--
E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of Economics
Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy
Duke University
www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html

Merval Pereira : "No centro das decisoes" - O Globo, 28/01/2011: carta PRA

Abaixo o teor de uma carta que despachei ao jornalista, colunista do jornal O Globo e comentarista da rádio CBN:

Caro Merval,
Leitor regular, ainda que não constante, de suas colunas no jornal e de seus comentários na CBN sobre a atualidade política nacional e mundial, não posso deixar de chamar sua atenção para um equívoco importante cometido em sua coluna da sexta-feira, 28/01, e para uma outra passagem que reflete um equívoco do presidente Sarkozy, que deveria ter sido registrado e corrigido por você.

Ao início de seu texto, você escreveu isto:
"O G20, que reúne as maiores economias do mundo, toma cada vez mais jeito de ser o organismo apropriado para as decisões do novo mundo multipolar que vem se desenhando, substituindo o G-8 antes que os fatos o tornassem obsoleto. Em poucos anos, países emergentes como China, Índia e Brasil estarão entre as principais economia do mundo, superando muitas das que hoje fazem parte do G-8."
Mas, no meio do seu texto, você escreve isto:
"O G-20 nasceu em 2003, por ocasião da reunião da Organização Mundial do Comércio em Cancún, no México -- que paralisou as negociações da Rodada de Doha para liberalização do comércio internacional devido a um impasse que colocou o grupo de países emergentes, ~a época liderado pelo brasil, em contraposição a Estados Unidos, Japão, e União Europeia."

Seu equívoco, que me parece grave, pois pode induzir os leitores a confusão, é o de ter confundido o G20 comercial, grupo de países em desenvolvimento criado por iniciativa do Brasil na ministerial de 2003 da OMC em Cancun, para tratar EXCLUSIVAMENTE de quesões de política agrícola naquele foro multilateral, com um grupo totalmente diferente, o G20 financeiro, que existe desde 1999, paralelamente ao Forum de Estabilidade Financeira, criando no âmbito do FMI para tratar da questão dos desequilíbrios monetários, mas que tinha permanecido numa relativa obscuridade, até ser redespertado de seu torpor institucional pela crise americana, a partir de 2008.
Se trata de dois grupos completamente diferentes, pelo escopo, objetivos e composição, ainda que alguns (mesmos) países participem de ambos, como é obviamente o caso do Brasil e da China, por exemplo. Mas um grupo não tem absolutamente nada a ver com o outro, pois o G20 financeiro incorpora todos os países do G8 e outros da OCDE (menos a Espanha, para desgosto dela, mas ela se esforça por participar) e algo como 11 países ditos "emergentes", mas importantes em termos economicos (finanças, investimentos, comércio, propriedade intelectual, tecnologia, meio ambiente, etc.).

Creio, sinceramente, mas isto é apenas uma sugestão, que você deveria registrar esse pequeno equívoco e talvez aproveitar a ocasião para tratar de ambos os grupos, ou da questão da agenda internacional como um todo, fazendo as necessárias distinções entre um debate "comercial-agrícola" de um lado (com o seu G20 comercial de países em desenvolvimento), e os debates de governança global, de outro, com os importantes problemas financeiros e monetários, nos quais o G20 financeiro talvez tenha um papel a desempenhar.
Pessoalmente, creio que, depois de vermos a velha Guerra Fria enterrada em grande medida, estamos em meio a uma "Guerra Fria econômica", com todas as potenciais tensões, eventualmente cambiais, a ela associados.

No que se refere ao equívoco de Sarkozy, que pessoalmente creio você deveria ter corrigido, por corresponder a um absurdo lógico e econômico, ele se reflete na seguinte passagem:

"É dentro de um contexto de um mundo que muda rapidamente, (...) que Sarkozy vê a necessidade de uma ação para conter as especulações." [O presidente francês preconiza, em suas palavras, "regulamentar não apenas os mercados financeiros internacionais, mas também o mercado internacional de commodities, em especial o de produtos agrícolas".]
"Não parecia [Sarkozy] estar fazendo cena quando previu que em 20 a 30 anos, se não houver uma mudança de postura diante dos problemas como escassez de alimentos devido à alta especulativa de preços, pode haver uma crise de proporções inestimáveis."

Ou a posição de Sarkozy é absolutamente inconsistente com os dados da realidade -- e eu tendo a concordar em que ele está atuando politicamente de maneira totalmente irracional e ilógica, no plano econômico -- ou seu texto é muito ambíguo e não chega a perceber a tremenda contradição que existe nessas frases.
Vejamos: a escassez de alimentos não se deve, de nenhuma forma, à alta especulativa de preços, em absoluto. Os preços de produtos agrícolas, e os de várias outras commodities, subiram porque houve aumento da demanda -- o que é claramente percebido pelo aumento de renda em vários mercados emergentes em crescimento sustentado -- ou então quebra temporária, acidental ou natural, da produção, cabendo então responsabilizar a alta de preços pela velha lei da oferta e da procura, e não a qualquer movimento especulativo, o que num mercado absolutamente aberto e globalizado como esse seria difícil de se registrar.
Mas a posição do Sarkozy é ainda mais inconsistente, no plano da lógica e da economia, porque, se existe aumento de preços, haverá novos estímulos à produção agrícola, que tenderá a aumentar, portanto, jamais tendência à escassez catastrófica que ele anuncia. A história, aliás, nos confirma o grau de estupidez que existe em todas essas previsões malthusianas: a população mundial aumentou seis vezes, ao longo do século 20, mas o PIB mundial cresceu mais de 20 vezes, aumentando a riqueza, a renda, a disponibilidade de alimentos e de bens e serviços de todos os tipos para todos os povos do mundo. Apenas aqueles que não participam das trocas mundiais é que podem ter enfrentado fomes epidêmicas ou surtos temporários de escassez de oferta, o que não tem nada a ver com a indisponibilidade de alimentos em outras partes do mundo ou com movimentos temporariamente especulativos em determinados mercados sujeitos a desequilibrios momentâneos.
Surpreende-me, portanto, essa total falta de lógica em aliar "alta especulativa de preços" com "escassez de alimentos". Isso não faz nenhum sentido, nunca fez e não fará daqui para a frente. O presidente Sarkozy está apenas querendo disfarçar um desconforto orçamentário e inflacionário com uma alta temporária dos alimentos, propondo um tipo de regulamentação absolutamente contrária à lógica econômica e à experiência da história.
Se a França e a União Europeia decidissem terminar com o subvencionismo e o protecionismo agrícolas, de fato a absurda "Loucura Agrícola Comum" que eles defendem, o mundo seria um lugar bem mais abundante em produtos agrícolas, sem a penúria e a pobreza que essas políticas provocam em países africanos e outros em desenvolvimento.

Com minhas saudações cordiais, e certo de que você receberá minhas observações com um testemunho do apreço que mantenho por sua coluna e comentários de rádio, despeço-me, cordialmente,
---------------------
Paulo Roberto Almeida

A piada da semana, alias diplomatico-economica...

O Brasil fica com Cesare Battisti, mas Dilma devolve Guido Mantega à Itália.
Acusação: assassinou o superávit primário sem dar chance de defesa à vítima.

Piada inocente...
Continuação da piada (segundo Reinaldo Azevedo):

O ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega, está terminando de escrever um livro técnico cujo título é “Manual da Contabilidade Criativa”. Ele ensina como fraudar os números do superávit primário e influenciar pessoas. Na editora, há quem defenda que a brochura traga uma tarja preta com uma advertência: “Não tente fazer isso em casa; você pode arruinar as suas finanças pessoais”. É claro que esta é uma notícia falsamente verdadeira…

O Brasil em Davos: debate sobre o Brasil, economia e diplomacia

Brazil Outlook
Friday 28 January, 11.00 - 12.00
World Economic Forum: http://www.weforum.org/s?s=Brazil

With a new government in place, what are the country’s domestic and international priorities in 2011?
The following dimensions will be addressed:
- Policy continuity versus new realities
- Macroeconomic challenges
- Foreign policy agenda

Key Points
• New President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first woman head of state, promises continuity.
• Brazil has figured out how to grow and decrease inequality at the same time.
• Inequality and infrastructure remain priorities.
• Brazil successfully weathered the economic crisis in part because it had the strength to take countercyclical measures for the first time in recent history.
• Monetary policy will stay on the same track that it has been on for the last 11 years.

Synopsis
Brazil’s first woman president, Dilma Rousseff, begins her term promising continuity and trying to maintain what most observers consider to be a virtuous circle of success. Notably, in recent years, the country managed to break with the old convention of expanding the pie before dividing it: Brazil has figured out how to grow and decrease inequality at the same time. The new administration plans to continue to battle inequality and to improve and add infrastructure – not in the least because the country will host the World Cup in 2014 and Rio de Janeiro the Olympics two years later.
Brazil has successfully weathered the economic crisis in part because its fiscal and monetary positions allowed it to take countercyclical measures for the first time in recent history. The National Development Bank (BNDES) reacted by increasing outlays, especially for investments in infrastructure. As the crisis winds down, the BNDES plans to retreat, to reduce its role and leave more space for private lenders.
Monetary policy will stay on the same track that it has been on for the last 11 years. The inflation target regime includes a floating exchange rate, accumulation of foreign reserves, and reasonably well adjusted public finances. The Central Bank’s mandate is to deliver monetary stability, which in the current climate means dealing with the copious flows of incoming capital. In that spirit, it has tightened financial and monetary conditions, and is keeping a steady eye on the inflation rate.
Part of the problem with capital flows to emerging market countries like Brazil is that they lack the capacity to absorb the massive influx. Foreign cash ends up in short-term instruments because there are not enough long-term opportunities available. Brazil has recently begun to provide incentives to encourage more investment in corporate bonds and other longer-term instruments.
In terms of foreign policy, Brazil will continue to strengthen ties to its South American neighbours and extend its global reach, without ignoring old ties with the United States, Europe and Japan. Rousseff has chosen Argentina for her first foreign visit as president, and she is scheduled to meet with US President Barack Obama in March. In recent years, Brazil has opened more than 40 embassies around the world, mainly in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, and it will work to strengthen ties in those places. It will also work closely with other emerging market countries, notably China, India and South Africa, in a number of venues. The country continues to support reform of the United Nations and of the UN Security Council.

Participants:
Antonio De Aguiar Patriota, Minister of External Relations of Brazil
Luciano Coutinho, President, Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), Brazil
Frederico Fleury Curado, President and Chief Executive Officer, EMBRAER, Brazil; Global Agenda Council on Emerging Multinationals
Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer, Citi, USA
Alexandre Tombini, President of the Central Bank of Brazil
Renato Augusto Villela, Secretary of State for Finance, Government of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Moderated by
Moisés Naím, Senior Associate, International Economics, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA; Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade

Disclosures
This summary was prepared by William Hinchberger. The views expressed are those of certain participants in the discussion and do not necessarily reflect the views of all participants or of the World Economic Forum.

Copyright 2011 World Economic Forum
No part of this material may be copied, photocopied or duplicated in any form by any means or redistributed without the prior written consent of the World Economic Forum.

[Same link directs to the live discussion]

Wikileaks: the history behind

Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets
By BILL KELLER
The New York Times Magazine, January 26, 2011

Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times,” an ebook available for purchase at nytimes.com/opensecrets.

E-Book: “Open Secrets”
Purchase an e-book of complete and expanded WikiLeaks coverage from:
nytimes.com/opensecrets

This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. Not really, I confessed. The Times doesn’t have encrypted phone lines, or a Cone of Silence. Well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks’s leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested?

I was interested.

The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian); an international cast of journalists; company lawyers committed to keeping us within the bounds of the law; and an array of government officials who sometimes seemed as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.

Soon after Rusbridger’s call, we sent Eric Schmitt, from our Washington bureau, to London. Schmitt has covered military affairs expertly for years, has read his share of classified military dispatches and has excellent judgment and an unflappable demeanor. His main assignment was to get a sense of the material. Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? He would also report back on the proposed mechanics of our collaboration with The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which Assange invited as a third guest to his secret smorgasbord. Schmitt would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known to a few Guardian journalists but not to us.

Schmitt’s first call back to The Times was encouraging. There was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating — a diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there were intimations of more to come, especially classified cables from the entire constellation of American diplomatic outposts. WikiLeaks was holding those back for now, presumably to see how this venture with the establishment media worked out. Over the next few days, Schmitt huddled in a discreet office at The Guardian, sampling the trove of war dispatches and discussing the complexities of this project: how to organize and study such a voluminous cache of information; how to securely transport, store and share it; how journalists from three very different publications would work together without compromising their independence; and how we would all assure an appropriate distance from Julian Assange. We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.

By the time of the meetings in London, WikiLeaks had already acquired a measure of international fame or, depending on your point of view, notoriety. Shortly before I got the call from The Guardian, The New Yorker published a rich and colorful profile of Assange, by Raffi Khatchadourian, who had embedded with the group. WikiLeaks’s biggest coup to that point was the release, last April, of video footage taken from one of two U.S. helicopters involved in firing down on a crowd and a building in Baghdad in 2007, killing at least 18 people. While some of the people in the video were armed, others gave no indication of menace; two were in fact journalists for the news agency Reuters. The video, with its soundtrack of callous banter, was horrifying to watch and was an embarrassment to the U.S. military. But in its zeal to make the video a work of antiwar propaganda, WikiLeaks also released a version that didn’t call attention to an Iraqi who was toting a rocket-propelled grenade and packaged the manipulated version under the tendentious rubric “Collateral Murder.” (See the edited and non-edited videos here.)

Throughout our dealings, Assange was coy about where he obtained his secret cache. But the suspected source of the video, as well as the military dispatches and the diplomatic cables to come, was a disillusioned U.S. Army private first class named Bradley Manning, who had been arrested and was being kept in solitary confinement.

On the fourth day of the London meeting, Assange slouched into The Guardian office, a day late. Schmitt took his first measure of the man who would be a large presence in our lives. “He’s tall — probably 6-foot-2 or 6-3 — and lanky, with pale skin, gray eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes your attention,” Schmitt wrote to me later. “He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

Assange shrugged a huge backpack off his shoulders and pulled out a stockpile of laptops, cords, cellphones, thumb drives and memory sticks that held the WikiLeaks secrets.

The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. At lunch one day in The Guardian’s cafeteria, Assange recounted with an air of great conviction a story about the archive in Germany that contains the files of the former Communist secret police, the Stasi. This office, Assange asserted, was thoroughly infiltrated by former Stasi agents who were quietly destroying the documents they were entrusted with protecting. The Der Spiegel reporter in the group, John Goetz, who has reported extensively on the Stasi, listened in amazement. That’s utter nonsense, he said. Some former Stasi personnel were hired as security guards in the office, but the records were well protected.

Assange was openly contemptuous of the American government and certain that he was a hunted man. He told the reporters that he had prepared a kind of doomsday option. He had, he said, distributed highly encrypted copies of his entire secret archive to a multitude of supporters, and if WikiLeaks was shut down, or if he was arrested, he would disseminate the key to make the information public.

Schmitt told me that for all Assange’s bombast and dark conspiracy theories, he had a bit of Peter Pan in him. One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group. Schmitt and Goetz stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted.

For the rest of the week Schmitt worked with David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor; Nick Davies, an investigative reporter for the paper; and Goetz, of Der Spiegel, to organize and sort the material. With help from two of The Times’s best computer minds — Andrew Lehren and Aron Pilhofer — they figured out how to assemble the material into a conveniently searchable and secure database.

Journalists are characteristically competitive, but the group worked well together. They brainstormed topics to explore and exchanged search results. Der Spiegel offered to check the logs against incident reports submitted by the German Army to its Parliament — partly as story research, partly as an additional check on authenticity.

Assange provided us the data on the condition that we not write about it before specific dates that WikiLeaks planned on posting the documents on a publicly accessible Web site. The Afghanistan documents would go first, after we had a few weeks to search the material and write our articles. The larger cache of Iraq-related documents would go later. Such embargoes — agreements not to publish information before a set date — are commonplace in journalism. Everything from studies in medical journals to the annual United States budget is released with embargoes. They are a constraint with benefits, the principal one being the chance to actually read and reflect on the material before publishing it into public view. As Assange surely knew, embargoes also tend to build suspense and amplify a story, especially when multiple news outlets broadcast it at once. The embargo was the only condition WikiLeaks would try to impose on us; what we wrote about the material was entirely up to us. Much later, some American news outlets reported that they were offered last-minute access to WikiLeaks documents if they signed contracts with financial penalties for early disclosure. The Times was never asked to sign anything or to pay anything. For WikiLeaks, at least in this first big venture, exposure was its own reward.

Back in New York we assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office. Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents. We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. This became the routine we would follow with subsequent archives.

An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always “the source.” The latest data drop was “the package.” When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.

From consultations with our lawyers, we were confident that reporting on the secret documents could be done within the law, but we speculated about what the government — or some other government — might do to impede our work or exact recriminations. And, the law aside, we felt an enormous moral and ethical obligation to use the material responsibly. While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the need to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning, we agreed that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive, we would excise material that could put lives at risk.

Guided by reporters with extensive experience in the field, we redacted the names of ordinary citizens, local officials, activists, academics and others who had spoken to American soldiers or diplomats. We edited out any details that might reveal ongoing intelligence-gathering operations, military tactics or locations of material that could be used to fashion terrorist weapons. Three reporters with considerable experience of handling military secrets — Eric Schmitt, Michael Gordon and C. J. Chivers — went over the documents we considered posting. Chivers, an ex-Marine who has reported for us from several battlefields, brought a practiced eye and cautious judgment to the business of redaction. If a dispatch noted that Aircraft A left Location B at a certain time and arrived at Location C at a certain time, Chivers edited it out on the off chance that this could teach enemy forces something useful about the capabilities of that aircraft.

The first articles in the project, which we called the War Logs, were scheduled to go up on the Web sites of The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel on Sunday, July 25. We approached the White House days before that to get its reaction to the huge breach of secrecy as well as to specific articles we planned to write — including a major one about Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally. On July 24, the day before the War Logs went live, I attended a farewell party for Roger Cohen, a columnist for The Times and The International Herald Tribune, that was given by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop. The Pakistan article, in particular, would complicate his life. But one of Holbrooke’s many gifts was his ability to make pretty good lemonade out of the bitterest lemons; he was already spinning the reports of Pakistani duplicity as leverage he could use to pull the Pakistanis back into closer alignment with American interests. Five months later, when Holbrooke — just 69, and seemingly indestructible — died of a torn aorta, I remembered that evening. And what I remembered best was that he was as excited to be on the cusp of a big story as I was.

We posted the articles on NYTimes.com the next day at 5 p.m. — a time picked to reconcile the different publishing schedules of the three publications. I was proud of what a crew of great journalists had done to fashion coherent and instructive reporting from a jumble of raw field reports, mostly composed in a clunky patois of military jargon and acronyms. The reporters supplied context, nuance and skepticism. There was much in that first round of articles worth reading, but my favorite single piece was one of the simplest. Chivers gathered all of the dispatches related to a single, remote, beleaguered American military outpost and stitched them together into a heartbreaking narrative. The dispatches from this outpost represent in miniature the audacious ambitions, gradual disillusionment and ultimate disappointment that Afghanistan has dealt to occupiers over the centuries.

If anyone doubted that the three publications operated independently, the articles we posted that day made it clear that we followed our separate muses. The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, claiming the documents disclosed that coalition forces killed “hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents,” underscoring the cost of what the paper called a “failing war.” Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in The Times, many of them on the front page. (In fact, two of our journalists, Stephen Farrell and Sultan Munadi, were kidnapped by the Taliban while investigating one major episode near Kunduz. Munadi was killed during an ensuing rescue by British paratroopers.) The civilian deaths that had not been previously reported came in ones and twos and did not add up to anywhere near “hundreds.” Moreover, since several were either duplicated or missing from the reports, we concluded that an overall tally would be little better than a guess.

Another example: The Times gave prominence to the dispatches reflecting American suspicions that Pakistani intelligence was playing a double game in Afghanistan — nodding to American interests while abetting the Taliban. We buttressed the interesting anecdotal material of Pakistani double-dealing with additional reporting. The Guardian was unimpressed by those dispatches and treated them more dismissively.

Three months later, with the French daily Le Monde added to the group, we published Round 2, the Iraq War Logs, including articles on how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces working with the U.S., how Iraq spawned an extraordinary American military reliance on private contractors and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.

By this time, The Times’s relationship with our source had gone from wary to hostile. I talked to Assange by phone a few times and heard out his complaints. He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared — rightly, as it turned out — that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. “Where’s the respect?” he demanded. “Where’s the respect?” Another time he called to tell me how much he disliked our profile of Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being the source of WikiLeaks’s most startling revelations. The article traced Manning’s childhood as an outsider and his distress as a gay man in the military. Assange complained that we “psychologicalized” Manning and gave short shrift to his “political awakening.”

The final straw was a front-page profile of Assange by John Burns and Ravi Somaiya, published Oct. 24, that revealed fractures within WikiLeaks, attributed by Assange’s critics to his imperious management style. Assange denounced the article to me, and in various public forums, as “a smear.”

Assange was transformed by his outlaw celebrity. The derelict with the backpack and the sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled, and he favored fashionably skinny suits and ties. He became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and was evidently a magnet for women. Two Swedish women filed police complaints claiming that Assange insisted on having sex without a condom; Sweden’s strict laws on nonconsensual sex categorize such behavior as rape, and a prosecutor issued a warrant to question Assange, who initially described it as a plot concocted to silence or discredit WikiLeaks.

I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.

In October, WikiLeaks gave The Guardian its third archive, a quarter of a million communications between the U.S. State Department and its outposts around the globe. This time, Assange imposed a new condition: The Guardian was not to share the material with The New York Times. Indeed, he told Guardian journalists that he opened discussions with two other American news organizations — The Washington Post and the McClatchy chain — and intended to invite them in as replacements for The Times. He also enlarged his recipient list to include El País, the leading Spanish-language newspaper.

The Guardian was uncomfortable with Assange’s condition. By now the journalists from The Times and The Guardian had a good working relationship. The Times provided a large American audience for the revelations, as well as access to the U.S. government for comment and context. And given the potential legal issues and public reaction, it was good to have company in the trenches. Besides, we had come to believe that Assange was losing control of his stockpile of secrets. An independent journalist, Heather Brooke, had obtained material from a WikiLeaks dissident and joined in a loose alliance with The Guardian. Over the coming weeks, batches of cables would pop up in newspapers in Lebanon, Australia and Norway. David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor, concluded that these rogue leaks released The Guardian from any pledge, and he gave us the cables.

On Nov. 1, Assange and two of his lawyers burst into Alan Rusbridger’s office, furious that The Guardian was asserting greater independence and suspicious that The Times might be in possession of the embassy cables. Over the course of an eight-hour meeting, Assange intermittently raged against The Times — especially over our front-page profile — while The Guardian journalists tried to calm him. In midstorm, Rusbridger called me to report on Assange’s grievances and relay his demand for a front-page apology in The Times. Rusbridger knew that this was a nonstarter, but he was buying time for the tantrum to subside. In the end, both he and Georg Mascolo, editor in chief of Der Spiegel, made clear that they intended to continue their collaboration with The Times; Assange could take it or leave it. Given that we already had all of the documents, Assange had little choice. Over the next two days, the news organizations agreed on a timetable for publication.

The following week, we sent Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor who was a principal coordinator on our processing of the embassy cables, to London to work out final details. The meeting went smoothly, even after Assange arrived. “Freakishly good behavior,” Fisher e-mailed me afterward. “No yelling or crazy mood swings.” But after dinner, as Fisher was leaving, Assange smirked and offered a parting threat: “Tell me, are you in contact with your legal counsel?” Fisher replied that he was. “You had better be,” Assange said.

Fisher left London with an understanding that we would continue to have access to the material. But just in case, we took out a competitive insurance policy. We had Scott Shane, a Washington correspondent, pull together a long, just-in-case article summing up highlights of the cables, which we could quickly post on our Web site. If WikiLeaks sprang another leak, we would be ready.

Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”

Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.

The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.

“We were all aware of dire stakes for some of the people named in the cables if we failed to obscure their identities,” Shane wrote to me later, recalling the nature of the meetings. Like many of us, Shane has worked in countries where dissent can mean prison or worse. “That sometimes meant not just removing the name but also references to institutions that might give a clue to an identity and sometimes even the dates of conversations, which might be compared with surveillance tapes of an American Embassy to reveal who was visiting the diplomats that day.”

The second category included sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence. We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed. In other cases, we went away convinced that publication would cause some embarrassment but no real harm.

The third category consisted of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials, including heads of state. The State Department feared publication would strain relations with those countries. We were mostly unconvinced.

The embassy cables were a different kind of treasure from the War Logs. For one thing, they covered the entire globe — virtually every embassy, consulate and interest section that the United States maintains. They contained the makings of many dozens of stories: candid American appraisals of foreign leaders, narratives of complicated negotiations, allegations of corruption and duplicity, countless behind-the-scenes insights. Some of the material was of narrow local interest; some of it had global implications. Some provided authoritative versions of events not previously fully understood. Some consisted of rumor and flimsy speculation.

Unlike most of the military dispatches, the embassy cables were written in clear English, sometimes with wit, color and an ear for dialogue. (“Who knew,” one of our English colleagues marveled, “that American diplomats could write?”)

Even more than the military logs, the diplomatic cables called for context and analysis. It was important to know, for example, that cables sent from an embassy are routinely dispatched over the signature of the ambassador and those from the State Department are signed by the secretary of state, regardless of whether the ambassador or secretary had actually seen the material. It was important to know that much of the communication between Washington and its outposts is given even more restrictive classification — top secret or higher — and was thus missing from this trove. We searched in vain, for example, for military or diplomatic reports on the fate of Pat Tillman, the former football star and Army Ranger who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. We found no reports on how Osama bin Laden eluded American forces in the mountains of Tora Bora. (In fact, we found nothing but second- and thirdhand rumors about bin Laden.) If such cables exist, they were presumably classified top secret or higher.

And it was important to remember that diplomatic cables are versions of events. They can be speculative. They can be ambiguous. They can be wrong.

One of our first articles drawn from the diplomatic cables, for example, reported on a secret intelligence assessment that Iran had obtained a supply of advanced missiles from North Korea, missiles that could reach European capitals. Outside experts long suspected that Iran obtained missile parts but not the entire weapons, so this glimpse of the official view was revealing. The Washington Post fired back with a different take, casting doubt on whether the missile in question had been transferred to Iran or whether it was even a workable weapon. We went back to the cables — and the experts — and concluded in a subsequent article that the evidence presented “a murkier picture.”

The tension between a newspaper’s obligation to inform and the government’s responsibility to protect is hardly new. At least until this year, nothing The Times did on my watch caused nearly so much agitation as two articles we published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone conversations and e-mail without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast Treasury Department program to screen international banking records.

I have vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade me and the paper’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story, saying that if we published it, we should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. We were unconvinced by his argument and published the story, and the reaction from the government — and conservative commentators in particular — was vociferous.

This time around, the Obama administration’s reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture. On the contrary, in our discussions before publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defense and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press bashing. There has been no serious official talk — unless you count an ambiguous hint by Senator Joseph Lieberman — of pursuing news organizations in the courts. Though the release of these documents was certainly embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or to the national interest.

The broader public reaction was mixed — more critical in the first days; more sympathetic as readers absorbed the articles and the sky did not fall; and more hostile to WikiLeaks in the U.S. than in Europe, where there is often a certain pleasure in seeing the last superpower taken down a peg.

In the days after we began our respective series based on the embassy cables, Alan Rusbridger and I went online to answer questions from readers. The Guardian, whose readership is more sympathetic to the guerrilla sensibilities of WikiLeaks, was attacked for being too fastidious about redacting the documents: How dare you censor this material? What are you hiding? Post everything now! The mail sent to The Times, at least in the first day or two, came from the opposite field. Many readers were indignant and alarmed: Who needs this? How dare you? What gives you the right?

Much of the concern reflected a genuine conviction that in perilous times the president needs extraordinary powers, unfettered by Congressional oversight, court meddling or the strictures of international law and certainly safe from nosy reporters. That is compounded by a popular sense that the elite media have become too big for their britches and by the fact that our national conversation has become more polarized and strident.

Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.

I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the prewar reporting about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives. We may err on the side of keeping secrets (President Kennedy reportedly wished, after the fact, that The Times had published what it knew about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion, which possibly would have helped avert a bloody debacle) or on the side of exposing them. We make the best judgments we can. When we get things wrong, we try to correct the record. A free press in a democracy can be messy. But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know. Anyone who has worked in countries where the news diet is controlled by the government can sympathize with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.

The intentions of our founders have rarely been as well articulated as they were by Justice Hugo Black 40 years ago, concurring with the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”

There is no neat formula for maintaining this balance. In practice, the tension between our obligation to inform and the government’s obligation to protect plays out in a set of rituals. As one of my predecessors, Max Frankel, then the Washington bureau chief, wrote in a wise affidavit filed during the Pentagon Papers case: “For the vast majority of ‘secrets,’ there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and a right to know. Each side in this ‘game’ regularly ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality.”

In fact, leaks of classified material — sometimes authorized — are part of the way business is conducted in Washington, as one wing of the bureaucracy tries to one-up another or officials try to shift blame or claim credit or advance or confound a particular policy. For further evidence that our government is highly selective in its approach to secrets, look no further than Bob Woodward’s all-but-authorized accounts of the innermost deliberations of our government.

The government surely cheapens secrecy by deploying it so promiscuously. According to the Pentagon, about 500,000 people have clearance to use the database from which the secret cables were pilfered. Weighing in on the WikiLeaks controversy in The Guardian, Max Frankel remarked that secrets shared with such a legion of “cleared” officials, including low-level army clerks, “are not secret.” Governments, he wrote, “must decide that the random rubber-stamping of millions of papers and computer files each year does not a security system make.”

Beyond the basic question of whether the press should publish secrets, criticism of the WikiLeaks documents generally fell into three themes: 1. That the documents were of dubious value, because they told us nothing we didn’t already know. 2. That the disclosures put lives at risk — either directly, by identifying confidential informants, or indirectly, by complicating our ability to build alliances against terror. 3. That by doing business with an organization like WikiLeaks, The Times and other news organizations compromised their impartiality and independence.

I’m a little puzzled by the complaint that most of the embassy traffic we disclosed did not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders. For those who do not follow these subjects as closely, the stories are an opportunity to learn more. If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service. And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. WikiLeaks cables in which American diplomats recount the extravagant corruption of Tunisia’s rulers helped fuel a popular uprising that has overthrown the government.

As for the risks posed by these releases, they are real. WikiLeaks’s first data dump, the publication of the Afghanistan War Logs, included the names of scores of Afghans that The Times and other news organizations had carefully purged from our own coverage. Several news organizations, including ours, reported this dangerous lapse, and months later a Taliban spokesman claimed that Afghan insurgents had been perusing the WikiLeaks site and making a list. I anticipate, with dread, the day we learn that someone identified in those documents has been killed.

WikiLeaks was roundly criticized for its seeming indifference to the safety of those informants, and in its subsequent postings it has largely followed the example of the news organizations and redacted material that could get people jailed or killed. Assange described it as a “harm minimization” policy. In the case of the Iraq war documents, WikiLeaks applied a kind of robo-redaction software that stripped away names (and rendered the documents almost illegible). With the embassy cables, WikiLeaks posted mostly documents that had already been redacted by The Times and its fellow news organizations. And there were instances in which WikiLeaks volunteers suggested measures to enhance the protection of innocents. For example, someone at WikiLeaks noticed that if the redaction of a phrase revealed the exact length of the words, an alert foreign security service might match the number of letters to a name and affiliation and thus identify the source. WikiLeaks advised everyone to substitute a dozen uppercase X’s for each redacted passage, no matter how long or short.

Whether WikiLeaks’s “harm minimization” is adequate, and whether it will continue, is beyond my power to predict or influence. WikiLeaks does not take guidance from The New York Times. In the end, I can answer only for what my own paper has done, and I believe we have behaved responsibly.

The idea that the mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates called this concern “overwrought.” Foreign governments cooperate with us, he pointed out, not because they necessarily love us, not because they trust us to keep their secrets, but because they need us. It may be that for a time diplomats will choose their words more carefully or circulate their views more narrowly, but WikiLeaks has not repealed the laws of self-interest. A few weeks after we began publishing articles about the embassy cables, David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me: “At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I’ve heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings, along the lines of ‘When will I be reading about this conversation?’ But the conversations are happening. . . . American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt.”

As for our relationship with WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has been heard to boast that he served as a kind of puppet master, recruiting several news organizations, forcing them to work in concert and choreographing their work. This is characteristic braggadocio — or, as my Guardian colleagues would say, bollocks. Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it. That is what we did.

But while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated. Taking legal recourse against a government official who violates his trust by divulging secrets he is sworn to protect is one thing. But criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?

Whether the arrival of WikiLeaks has fundamentally changed the way journalism is made, I will leave to others and to history. Frankly, I think the impact of WikiLeaks on the culture has probably been overblown. Long before WikiLeaks was born, the Internet transformed the landscape of journalism, creating a wide-open and global market with easier access to audiences and sources, a quicker metabolism, a new infrastructure for sharing and vetting information and a diminished respect for notions of privacy and secrecy. Assange has claimed credit on several occasions for creating something he calls “scientific journalism,” meaning that readers are given the raw material to judge for themselves whether the journalistic write-ups are trustworthy. But newspapers have been publishing texts of documents almost as long as newspapers have existed — and ever since the Internet eliminated space restrictions, we have done so copiously.

Nor is it clear to me that WikiLeaks represents some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency. If the official allegations are to be believed, most of WikiLeaks’s great revelations came from a single anguished Army private — anguished enough to risk many years in prison. It’s possible that the creation of online information brokers like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks, a breakaway site announced in December by a former Assange colleague named Daniel Domscheit-Berg, will be a lure for whistle-blowers and malcontents who fear being caught consorting directly with a news organization like mine. But I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy. At least not yet.

As 2010 wound down, The Times and its news partners held a conference call to discuss where we go from here. The initial surge of articles drawn from the secret cables was over. More would trickle out but without a fixed schedule. We agreed to continue the redaction process, and we agreed we would all urge WikiLeaks to do the same. But this period of intense collaboration, and of regular contact with our source, was coming to a close.

Just before Christmas, Ian Katz, The Guardian’s deputy editor, went to see Assange, who had been arrested in London on the Swedish warrant, briefly jailed and bailed out by wealthy admirers and was living under house arrest in a country manor in East Anglia while he fought Sweden’s attempt to extradite him. The flow of donations to WikiLeaks, which he claimed hit 100,000 euros a day at its peak, was curtailed when Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to be conduits for contributors — prompting a concerted assault on the Web sites of those companies by Assange’s hacker sympathizers. He would soon sign a lucrative book deal to finance his legal struggles.

The Guardian seemed to have joined The Times on Assange’s enemies list, first for sharing the diplomatic cables with us, then for obtaining and reporting on the unredacted record of the Swedish police complaints against Assange. (Live by the leak. . . .) In his fury at this perceived betrayal, Assange granted an interview to The Times of London, in which he vented his displeasure with our little media consortium. If he thought this would ingratiate him with The Guardian rival, he was naïve. The paper happily splashed its exclusive interview, then followed it with an editorial calling Assange a fool and a hypocrite.

At the mansion in East Anglia, Assange seated Katz before a roaring fire in the drawing room and ruminated for four hours about the Swedish case, his financial troubles and his plan for a next phase of releases. He talked vaguely about secrets still in his quiver, including what he regards as a damning cache of e-mail from inside an American bank.

He spun out an elaborate version of a U.S. Justice Department effort to exact punishment for his assault on American secrecy. If he was somehow extradited to the United States, he said, “I would still have a high chance of being killed in the U.S. prison system, Jack Ruby style, given the continual calls for my murder by senior and influential U.S. politicians.”

While Assange mused darkly in his exile, one of his lawyers sent out a mock Christmas card that suggested at least someone on the WikiLeaks team was not lacking a sense of the absurd.

The message:

“Dear kids,
Santa is Mum & Dad.
Love,
WikiLeaks.”


A version of this article appeared in print on January 30, 2011, on page MM32 of the Sunday Magazine
Purchase "Open Secrets" a new e-book from The New York Times today.
http://www.nytimes.com/opensecrets/