Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Uma passagem da base mensal para a base anual, obviamente multiplicaria "n" vezes os números consolidados abaixo, o que pode ser visto ao final das estatísticas de 30 dias.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Analytics
Your Impactfrom November 09, 2016 to December 09, 2016
When Hugo Chavez took office in Venezuela in 1999, he promised his compatriots many wonders, from a hemispheric “Bolivarian” alliance against gringo imperialism to 21st-century socialism. Free trade was not part of the deal. So it couldn’t have come as a total shock when on Dec. 2, four South American nations ruled tosuspendVenezuela from the continental trade compact to which it never ought to have been admitted.
And yet, for the keepers of the Bolivarian Republic, the ouster from Mercosur might have been a diplomatic outrage. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who succeeded Chavez in 2013, called the move a “coup”; Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez denounced it as “an illegal action” andvowed to appeal. Assorted sympathizers andfringe militantsas far away as Uruguay andParaguayjoined the chorus.
What’s at stake isn’t the future of regional commerce. Venezuela’s economy is sucha shambles-- merchants have taken toweighing currencyinstead of counting it -- that trade in any conventional sense of the word ceased to matter long ago. But the choler in Caracas and the initiative by Venezuela’s once-accommodating neighbors said a good deal about the state of play in Latin American relations, where over a decade of diffidence and indulgence before the region’s stumbling autocracy has given way to umbrage and confrontation.
Sure, Chavez, had long pushed for a seat in the region’s signature commercial union, but less to join the compact than to subvert it. As early as 2007, he spoke of trying to “decontaminate” the block of its “neoliberal” bent. Instead, he saw Mercosur membership as a credential to raise Venezuela’s standing in the Americas even as his government eroded democratic rights, jailed opponents, and stunted economic liberty at home. Such behavior ran counter to Mercosur’s charter, which by theUshuaia Protocolrestricted membership to countries with “fully functioning democratic institutions,” and called for sanctions in case of a breakdown of democracy.
Clearly, Venezuela was an outlier. And yet, because criticizing an allied nation was long an unstated taboo in Latin America -- and practically a code of honor during the left’s governing heyday over the last decade -- neither Chavez nor Maduro needed to worry about diplomatic blowback, much less the migraine-inducing fine print of trade treaties. Four years after itsbackdoor inductionto the trade bloc -- a legally questionable maneuver that badly roiled hemispheric diplomacy -- Venezuela still hadn’t bothered to adhere to adhere to Mercosur’s basic precepts, including the founding Treaty of Asuncion and the common external tariff. “Venezuela never should have been allowed to join,” said Brazilian diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida, who heads the International Relations Research Institute.
That dereliction was serious enough to exclude Venezuela from Mercosur’s negotiations to strike a trade agreement with the European Union, but drew little more than a shrug from the trade group’s controlling partners. The waiver was not a show of Latin bonhomie. Under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil nursed global ambitions, and promoting national champions abroad was part of the game. Flush with oil money, Venezuela was a plum client for contractors like the Odebrecht Group, which took on an estimated $25 billion in sometimesdubious public workswith soft loans from Brazil’s national development bank.
Now all that has changed. As Venezuela’s economy tanked, unpaid debts (totaling some$2 billion in 2014) to Brazilian contractors piled up. Tolerance also faded as leftists leaders across the hemisphere lost traction, including in Mercosur. Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay are run by free market centrists, who quickly unfriended the Maduro regime. “The mess in Venezuela has hurt Brazil’s own international reputation especially,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a scholar of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. “Brazil has not fulfilled its role as a regional leader.” They were backed by Luis Almagro, the outspoken head of the Organization of American States, who in a break with that body’s anodyne diplomacy threatened to invoke the compact’sdemocracy charteragainst Venezuela’s excesses.
How much the hardening of Latin attitudes will sway the Maduro government is debatable. Street protests, pressure by the opposition-led legislature,censureby the O.A.S, appeals by Pope Francis -- so far nothing has deterred the bus driver-turned-president from his economic collision course or trashing what’s left of Venezuelan democracy. Ousting Venezuela from Mercosur may have been a symbolic gesture, but at least that’s one credential that Latin America’s outlier government no longer gets to wave.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
A palestra anunciada abaixo vai ser transmitida ONLINE pelo canal YouTube da Funag. Anunciaremos o link oportunamente.
Por enquanto, sintam-se convidados para um debate importante sobre se o mundo será ou não chinês, e se ele já é "pós-ocidental".
Veja aqui: http://www.funag.gov.br/index.php/pt-br/component/content/article?id=1331
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
O presidente da
Funag, embaixador Sérgio Eduardo Moreira Lima, e o Diretor do Instituto de Pesquisa
de Relações Internacionais (IPRI), Paulo Roberto de Almeida, convidam para a
palestra-debate com o professor de Relações Internacionais da FGV-SP Oliver
Stuenkel, no auditório Paulo Nogueira Batista, no próximo dia 13/12, às 16:00hs.
Stuenkel, colaborador regular de diversas publicações na área de relações
internacionais e autor de vários livros – entre eles The Brics and the Future of Global Order (2015) e do recentemente
publicado Post-Western World (2016) –
falará sobre “Rumo ao mundo sinocêntrico? - As transformações globais e suas
implicações para o Brasil”.
Nota curricular:
Oliver
Stuenkel é Professor de Relações Internacionais da Fundação Getulio Vargas
(FGV) em São Paulo, onde coordena a Escola de Ciências Sociais e o MBA em
Relações Internacionais. Tem graduação pela Universidade de Valência, na
Espanha, Mestrado em Políticas Públicas pela Kennedy School of Government de
Harvard University, e Doutorado em Ciência Política pela Universidade de
Duisburg-Essen, na Alemanha. É autor de três livros, entre eles Post-Western
World: How Emerging Power Are Remaking Global Order (2016, Polity) e colunista
da revista Americas Quarterly.
A more complete CV:
Oliver Della Costa Stuenkel is an Assistant Professor of International
Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo, where he
coordinates the São Paulo branch of the School of History and Social
Science and the executive program in International Relations. He is also
a non-resident Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in
Berlin and a member of the Carnegie Rising Democracies Network. His
research focuses on rising powers; specifically on Brazil’s, India’s and
China's foreign policy and on their impact on global governance. He is
the author of IBSA: The rise of the Global South? (Routledge Global Institutions, 2014), BRICS and the Future of Global Order (Lexington, 2015) and Post-Western World (Polity, 2016) (Amazon Author Page). Seu artigo mais recente:
5 December 2016
BY OLIVER STUENKEL | DECEMBER 5, 2016
Growing Chinese engagement in the region will test Latin America's ability to adapt. http://americasquarterly.org/content/how-trump-benefits-china-latin-america
The timing was perfect, and the symbolism could not have been
stronger. A mere week after Donald Trump’s upset victory stunned the
world, Xi Jinping traveled to Lima for the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) summit and projected China as a bastion of stability,
predictability and openness. With the U.S. increasingly skeptical of
globalization, Xi promised that China would stand up for free trade.
Faced with an emerging global leadership vacuum, Beijing was quick to
recognize a window of opportunity. Compared with the abrasive U.S.
president-elect, the Chinese president, with his avuncular charm, seemed
to have a soothing effect on …
NONFICTION Neither War Nor Peace: A New Look at the Aftermath of World War I
By MARGARET MacMILLAN
Robert Gerwarth's "The Vanquished" is about the continuing conflict in the years following the end of World War I.
Neither War Nor Peace: A New Look at the Aftermath of World War I
ByMARGARET MacMILLAN
THE VANQUISHED
Why the First World
War Failed to End
By Robert Gerwarth
Illustrated. 446 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
Ethnic
German refugees from West Prussia on their way to Germany following the 1920
plebiscite.CreditScherl/Suddeutsche Zeitung
“This war is not the end but the beginning of violence,” the
German war hero Ernst Junger wrote in 1928. And many of his contemporaries,
including Junger himself, did not shrink from that. A significant minority of
Europeans welcomed violence as ennobling, and as a way to degrade their enemies
while creating new types of societies. Robert Gerwarth, a professor of modern
history at University College Dublin, looks at the turbulent five-or-so years
especially in the center of Europe, between 1918, when World War I ended, and
1923, when peace seemed to come to the Middle East. His account is both
important and timely, and obliges us to reconsider a period and a battle front
that has too often been neglected by historians.
The standard view of the 1920s has been that they were merely
the brief pause before the 1930s and the inevitable slide into a second world
war. The peace settlements made in Paris in 1919, in this telling, were so
vindictive and so flawed that they drove Germans toward the Nazis and left even
victorious nations like Italy and Japan deeply dissatisfied. Historians have
recently been suggesting a more nuanced version, with economic production
reaching prewar levels and a sort of normality returning. That hopeful moment
came to an abrupt end with the Great Depression, which destroyed the faith of
millions in capitalism and democracy and made the alternatives of Communism and
fascism seem attractive. And, as Gerwarth’s well-researched and engrossing book
makes clear, there was already plenty of flammable material lying about.
The pressures of the war led to the disintegration of empires —
the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman — that had endured for centuries,
setting off a scramble for territory and control. Even stable societies
buckled. Gerwarth counts 27 violent conflicts in Europe, from civil wars to
coups, between 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, and 1920 alone. The
breakdown of society and the ensuing conflicts may have been worse in the
center of Europe and the Middle East, but even relatively stable Britain
experienced the bitter Irish war of independence and then civil war.
Three types of conflict overlapped. States like Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Greece and Turkey fought over land and resources; peoples
turned on each other in civil wars as in Finland or Russia; and national groups
or social classes struggled for dominance.
Increasingly the distinction so painfully established in the
18th and 19th centuries between combatants and noncombatants was breaking down.
War was becoming total, seen as an existential struggle of one people or
civilization against another. Attacks on civilians became acceptable.
In Russia, Lenin urged his Bolsheviks to hang rich peasants as
an example to others. To force the villages to give up their food, his
government bombed them and used poison gas. German paramilitaries — the
Freikorps — rampaged through the Baltic States under the pretext of fighting
Bolshevism. The Freikorps were motivated by a passionate German nationalism as
well as the excitement of conflict. They found enemies everywhere and killed
and raped with abandon. “We chased the Latvians like rabbits over the fields,”
a volunteer proudly recalled. “We slaughtered whoever fell into our hands.”
Nationalists demanded nation-states with as much territory as
possible. Yet the mix of ethnicities meant it was impossible to draw borders
that brought all the Poles into one state, for example, or all Europe’s Germans
into another. Even the small states that succeeded the empires were themselves,
as Gerwarth points out, mini-empires, with a majority of one people ruling over
substantial minorities.
Abstract nouns — the “revolution” or the “nation” — too often
became justifications for treating whole categories of human beings as though
they didn’t matter. Put them into the dustbin of history, said the Bolsheviks.
On the right, prewar ideas like social Darwinism and the racialist theories it
spawned remained influential. (The young Adolf Hitler had eagerly absorbed them
in prewar Vienna.) Struggle, so Darwin could be twisted to say, was a natural
part of human existence.
From the Baltic to the Black Sea a dreadful cycle of reprisal
and counterreprisal left millions of dead. How many we will never know for
sure, but some three million people probably died in the Russian Civil War
alone. Anti-Semitic pogroms had long been known in Russia, but now they spread
into the former Austria-Hungary as Jews were blamed, inconsistently, for being
capitalists and Bolsheviks, or, in an ancient charge, for killing Christ. In
Western Russia and Ukraine alone, 100,000 Jews were murdered in the second half
of 1918.
What we now call ethnic cleansing became acceptable. The Turkish
government had already connived at the Armenian genocide during the war. In the
early 1920s, as Greece tried to seize a huge piece of Anatolia, it became the
turn of the Turks to suffer attacks for who they were. The Greek prime minister
Eleftherios Venizelos, in the grip of his dream of reconstituting the Greek
empire of the classical world, sent his troops to land in Asia Minor. The
atrocities started almost at once. The Turks responded in kind. Under Mustafa
Kemal (Ataturk) they rallied their forces and drove the Greeks back to the sea.
In the Treaty of Lausanne the new republic of Turkey and the Allies agreed to a
population exchange. Some 1.2 million nominal Greeks (distinguished by religion
and not by language or culture) left Turkey while 400,000 equally nominal Turks
went the other way, accompanied by scenes of people drowning and starving that
are reminiscent of Europe’s southern edges today.
Historians have tended to blame these and other such horrors on
the brutalizing effects of World War I, but Gerwarth argues convincingly that
it is not as easy as that. Finland, which had been neutral, had one of the
bloodiest civil wars of all. The dispiriting conclusion to draw from “The
Vanquished” is how easily what we think of as the restraints of civilization
can break down.
Even when peace of a sort was re-established, the fires of
extreme nationalism died down but did not go away, and the language of
political leaders in certain countries continued to resonate with talk of
enemies and metaphors of war. Mussolini called Bolshevism a “gangrene” or
“cancer” that had to be excised. Fears of disorder, civil war and Bolshevism
remained and fueled the rise of fascism. Constitutional and democratic
governments, especially in Germany and the newly emerged states in the center
of Europe, never quite managed to shake off the charge that they were weak and,
perhaps worse, boring.
Defeat proved to have what Gerwarth calls a dangerous “mobilizing
power.” Right-wing nationalist leaders promised to undo this shame and recover
“lost” territories and peoples. Hitler vowed to break the “chains” of the
Treaty of Versailles. No matter that Germany was not that badly treated — and
certainly not as badly as German leaders had treated Russia in the 1918 Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk. The myth of the “stab in the back” — that traitors at home,
whether left-wingers, liberals or Jews had prevented German forces from
fighting on to victory — helped undermine the German republic and fostered
dreams of vengeance. On the winning side, both Japan and Italy believed that
they had not gained enough. Japanese increasingly felt humiliated. Mussolini
excoriated the “mutilated victory” that had not given Italy everything it
wanted.
It is too easy to blame the peace settlements, however. What
happened to Europe had deeper causes. Without that war, existing structures
would not have crumbled as they did. Indeed, the empires might have survived.
(In retrospect that might not have been such a bad thing, especially if they
had continued to reform themselves as they were already doing before 1914.)
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we have learned again that
winding down empires is not easy.
There are other tantalizing questions as well. What if the
United States as the new power on the international scene had joined the League
of Nations and used its great economic and political influence to rebuild
Europe, as it did after World War II? “The Vanquished” is an excellent guide to
help us think again about such issues.
