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.

sábado, 18 de fevereiro de 2017

Google Scholar: trabalhos PRA mais citados (18/02/2017)

Por acaso atualizando a lista de trabalhos, depois de revisto mais um (o de n. 3078; mas já estou no n. 3086, e terminando o seguinte), cliquei no link do Google Scholar, este aqui: 
http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=OhRky2MAAAAJ
Depois de eliminar 4 ou 5 indevidamente a mim atribuídos pelo sistema do Google (de homonímia), encontrei estes listados abaixo, mas não fui até o final, pois já estava suficientemente abrangente. Reparei que os mais citados são relativamente antigos, provavelmente por isso mesmo, e que os mais recentes ainda não consolidaram a sua clientela preferencial.
Em todo caso, creio que isto possa servir de informação aos que se interessam por trabalhos de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, assim como alguns temas relativos a integração, comércio ou finanças internacionais.
Existe algo mais que eu possa informar? Não sei, mas sei que preciso continuar reformulando, restruturando, completando, corrigindo meu site pessoal, que tive de modificar inteiramente por problemas com o provedor anterior.
Ainda não consegui fazer, por falta de tempo, acreditem...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
www.pralmeida.org
diplomatizzando.blogspot.com
Citation indicesAllSince 2012
Citations1385589
h-index1610
i10-index4213
200920102011201220132014201520162017

Trabalhos Paulo Roberto de Almeida mais citados, segundo o Google Scholar (em 18/02/2017)

Título do trabalho
Nro.
Ano

PR Almeida
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 47 (1), 162-184
2004

PR de Almeida
Grande Oriente do Brasil
1998

PR Almeida
Porto Alegre: Livraria do Advogado 82
1999

PR Almeida
Revista brasileira de política internacional 49 (1), 95-116
2006

PR de Almeida
Revista de Sociologia e Política
2003

PR Almeida
Cena Internacional 9 (1), 7-36
2007

PR Almeida
Revista brasileira de política internacional 53 (2), 160-177
2010

PR De Almeida
1998

P Roberto de Almeida
Braz. J. Int'l L. 2, 20
2005

PR de Almeida
Carta internacional 2 (1)
2007

PR Almeida, JFS Saraiva
Relações Internacionais: dois séculos de História: entre a ordem bipolar e o ...
2001

PR de Almeida
Cortez Editora
2001

PR Almeida
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 36 (1), 11-36
1993

PR Almeida
Política externa 3 (1)
1994

PR de Almeida
Contexto Internacional 12 (1), 53
1990

PR Almeida
Mercosul, NAFTA e ALCA: a dimensão social. São Paulo: LTr
1999

PR De Almeida
Meridiano 47 10 (104), 10
2009

PR Almeida
Revista de Informação Legislativa, Brasília
1989

PR De Almeida
Meridiano 47 7 (68), 10
2006

PR Almeida
Meridiano 47 3 (22), 14
2002

PR Almeida
Política externa 19 (2), 27-40
2010

PR ALMEIDA
Revista de economia e relações internacionais 1 (2), 05-17
2003

PR Almeida
Revista brasileira de política internacional 44 (1), 112-136
2001

PR de Almeida
Ministério das Relações Exteriores
1992

PR de Almeida
Contexto Internacional 26 (1), 7
2004

PR Almeida
Sessenta anos de política externa brasileira (1930-1990). São Paulo: Cultura ...
1996

PR Almeida
Parcerias estratégicas 9 (18), 157-190
2012

PR Almeida
Meridiano 47 11 (119), 1
2010

PR Almeida
Edição do Autor, Brasília
2009

PR ALMEIDA
Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário. Edição Fac-similar. São Paulo ...
2001

PR Almeida
Sessenta Anos de Política Externa Brasileira (1930-1990) 4, 381-447
2000

PR Almeida
O que ler na Ciência Social Brasileira (1970-1995): Ciência Política 3, 191-255
1999

PR Almeida
São Paulo: Saraiva
2013

PR ALMEIDA
De agosto de
2009

PR ALMEIDA
2005

PR Almeida
Meridiano 47 5 (42-43), 15
2004

PR Almeida
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 45 (2), 229-239
2002

PR ALMEIDA
São Paulo: Paz e Terra
2002

PR de Almeida
Revista Estudos Históricos 1 (27), 31-62
2001

PR Almeida, Y Chaloult
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 42 (2), 145-160
1999

PR Almeida
Boletim de Integração Latino-Americana
1995

PR Almeida
Revista Brasileira Política Internacional, Brasília, DF 29 (115), 83-90
1986

PR ALMEIDA
BAUMANN, Renato. O Brasil e os demais BRICS–Comércio e Política. Brasília ...
9
2010

PR de Almeida
São Paulo: Edicões Aduaneiras
9
2007

PR de Almeida
9
2005

PR ALMEIDA
Política e Estratégia 5, 486-495
9
1987

PR ALMEIDA
Cena internacional 10 (2), 72-97
8
2008

PR Almeida
Interpretações divergentes sobre a política externa do governo Lula (2003–2006)
8
2006

PR ALMEIDA
MAZZUOLI, Valério de Oliveira; SILVA, Roberto Luiz (Coords.). O Brasil e os ...
8
2003

PR de Almeida
8
2000

PR de Almeida
Revista Brasileira de Comércio Exterior, 40
8
1994

PR de Almeida
7
2004

PR de Almeida
Reformas no Brasil: balanço e agenda, 203
7
2004

PR Almeida
São Paulo em Perspectiva 16 (1), 3-16
7
2002

D Brunelle
Mercosul, NAFTA e ALCA, A dimensão social. Sao Paulo: Editora LTr
7
1999

PR de Almeida
Contexto Internacional 19 (2), 307
7
1997

PR de Almeida
7
1994

PR de Almeida
Contexto Internacional 14 (2), 161
7
1992

PR Almeida
Estudos avançados 5 (12), 187-203
7
1991

PR Almeida
Meridiano 47 2 (10\ 12), 12
6
2001

PRDE Almeida
O Mercosul no limiar do século XXI. São Paulo: Cortez, 17-26
6
2000

PR Almeida
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 40 (2), 76-105
6
1997

P Roberto de Almeida
Braz. J. Int'l L. 10, 11
5
2013

PR Almeida
Temas & Matizes 14, 73-95
5
2008

PR de Almeida
Carta Internacional 1 (2), 6-10
5
2006

PR ALMEIDA
Revista Espaço Acadêmico, 01-13
5
2005

G Dupas
Chaloult e Almeida (orgs.), 132-146
5
1999

Y Chaloult
Mercosul, Nafta e Alca: a dimensão social
5
1999

PR Almeida
Carta Internacional 9 (1), 79-93
4
2014

PR Almeida
Contexto Internacional 35 (2), 471-495
4
2013

PR Almeida
Revista Espaço Acadêmico 10 (113), 38-45
4
2010

PR Almeida
Parcerias Estratégicas 10 (21), 301-314
4
2010

PR Almeida
Unpublished paper, updated September 25
4
2006

PR de Almeida
O Crescimento e As Relaçoes Internacionais no Brasil, Instituto Brasileiro ...
4
2005

PR Almeida
Seminário O Brasil e a Alca. Brasília: IPRI
4
2002

PR Almeida, FR Fins
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 44 (1), 151-154
4
2001

PR ALMEIDA
Brasília: Senado Federal
4
1992

PR Almeida
Revista espaço acadêmico 10 (119), 106-114
3
2011

PR Almeida
Revista Espaço Acadêmico 9 (101), 41-50
3
2009

M Diaz, PR Almeida
Stanley Foundation
3
2008


Bill Gates: Bioterrorism could kill more than nuclear war

Bill Gates: Bioterrorism could kill more 

than nuclear war — but no one is ready 

to deal with it


 
A genetically engineered virus is easier to make and could kill more people than nuclear weapons — and yet no country on Earth is ready for the threat, Bill Gates warned world leaders Saturday.
No one on his panel at the Munich Security Conference argued with him.
“The next epidemic has a good chance of originating on a computer screen,” said Gates, who made a fortune at Microsoft, then spent much of it fighting disease through his global foundation.
Whether “by the work of nature or the hands of a terrorist,” Gates said, an outbreak could kill tens of millions in the near future unless governments begin “to prepare for these epidemics the same way we prepare for war.”
His co-panelists shared some of the same fears.
“Disease and violence are killing fewer people than ever before, but it's spreading more quickly,” said Erna Solberg, the prime minister of Norway. “We have forgotten how catastrophic those epidemics have been.”
She recalled the Black Death, which she said killed more than half her country's population and created a 200-year recession in Europe.
“It's not if, but when these events are going to occur again,” said Peter Salama, executive director of the World Health Organization. “We need to ramp up our preparedness.”
Gates, who founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife in 2000, has been worrying about the world's ability to stop a deadly pandemic since Ebola killed thousands two years ago, while governments and militaries struggled to stop it from spreading through West Africa.
“NATO countries participate in joint exercises in which they work out logistics such as how fuel and food will be provided, what language they will speak, and what radio frequencies will be used,” Gates wrote in 2015 in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Few, if any, such measures are in place for response to an epidemic.”
He took the same message to Reddit a year later, when a commenter asked which technologies the world was better off without.
'"I am concerned about biological tools that could be used by a bioterrorist,” Gates wrote. “However the same tools can be used for good things as well.”
Before his panel on Saturday, Gates told the Telegraph: “It would be relatively easy to engineer a new flu strain” by combining a version that spreads quickly with one that kills quickly. Unlike a nuclear war, such a disease would not stop killing once released.
At Munich, Gates ran down all the ways that the world's great powers were unprepared: governments out of touch with the companies that make vaccines, international health departments out of touch with each other, and militaries that may not have considered responding to a biological threat.
“Who's this alternate group that's going to deal with the panic?” Gates said. “Who's got the planes and the budget? Maybe the fire department?”
While some others on the panel — “Small Bugs. Big Bombs” — focused on the threat of natural diseases, Gates called for “germ games” simulations, better monitoring to spot outbreaks early, and systems to develop vaccines within weeks — rather than the 10-year lead time he said was more common.
“We need a new arsenal of weapons, antiviral drugs, antibodies, vaccines and new diagnostics,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website lists seven agents — including anthrax, plague and bleeding fevers such as Ebola — as potential ingredients in a bioterrorist's cookbook.
The center's sections on surveillance and “planning for all bioterrorism” cite research papers that are mostly more than a decade old.
In his New England Journal of Medicine article, Gates said the United States's last epidemic simulation took place in 2001. At the end of President George W. Bush's administration, a bipartisan report accused the U.S. government of doing too little to address the threat of bioterrorism. Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, a congressional panel gave the government an 'F' in preparedness.
On Saturday, the Munich panelists named only a handful of countries working fast enough to identify and address the threat.
“Rwanda is a leader,” Gates said. “If an epidemic started there, we'd see it quickly.”
More reading:

sexta-feira, 17 de fevereiro de 2017

Argentina: parada no tempo, dificil retomada - Orlando J. Ferretes (La Nacion)

Cesar Maia transcreve em seu blog diário (17/02/2017), traduzindo (com diversas imperfeições no texto), artigo de Orlando J. Ferretes (La Nación, 15/02/2017) sobre a difícil situação argentina, que enfrenta uma tentativa de retomada de políticas econômicas de boa qualidade, depois de anos, décadas, de destruição progressiva dos fundamentos do país por elites ineptas e corruptas (tanto quanto no Brasil, mas lá nem os militares conseguiram modernizar o país).
Basta dizer que um século atrás, os argentinos exibiam 73% do PIB per capita americano, à frente de vários países europeus, e hoje mal chegam a 30% disso, quando nós, que partimos de 11% apenas, chegamos no máximo a 28% nos tempos do "milagre econômico brasileiro" (1968-1979), e hoje temos menos de um quinto da renda dos americanos.
Estive recentemente na Argentina e o que pude observar é que, à parte da modernização superficial (internet, celular, essas coisas), a Argentina parou no tempo, vítima, como explicado no artigo, dos confiscos de poupança feitos por vários governos (com destaque para os peronistas) e de uma inflação impressionante, que destruiu qualquer esperança no país, tanto é que existe pouca bancarização e o argentino mantém seus ativos em dólares.
Instrutivo essa leitura, mas já sabemos o que aconteceu na Argentina em termos de destruição de valor.
Aqui tivemos um peronismo de botequim, sem doutrina, sem qualquer racionalidade, mas os nossos "peronistas" também conseguiram destruir o Brasil...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

SITUAÇÃO DA ARGENTINA!

(Orlando J. Ferretes - La Nacion, 15)

1. Estamos em um período de transição de um país decadente para um país que pode ser recuperado. De fato, a Argentina é o país que mais diminuiu em relação a outros países desde 1910, ainda que isso seja mais percebido a partir de 1930. O mais inaceitável para um habitante da Argentina é ter passado do oitavo lugar mundial, naqueles anos com valores semelhantes aos do Canadá, Austrália e Nova Zelândia, para os números atuais, onde estes países têm cerca de 45.000 dólares de renda per capita e a Argentina cerca de 12.000 dólares per capita.

2. O que aconteceu conosco? Não investimos o suficiente. Atualmente existem mais de 30 países que investem mais de 30% do PIB, incluindo a China, Coréia e muitos outros, enquanto nós estamos apenas em um esforço de investimento de 14,8% do PIB, quando entre 1880 e 1910, investíamos 42% do PIB. Sei que é muito difícil de investir esse montante de forma permanente, mas tampouco se pode explicar por que reduzimos a um valor de investimento tão baixo.

3. Confirmado o fato de que o nosso esforço de investimento tem sido muito baixo, temos de encontrar as causas desse comportamento. Por um lado temos incentivado o consumo de forma adequada, mas não temos o equipamento para sustentar essa produção. Por outro lado, temos expropriado a poupança dos argentinos e estrangeiros com uma inflação média anual de cerca de 70% desde 1944 e periodicamente temos tido um padrão de hiperinflação. Isso fez com que ninguém queira ter suas economias em pesos argentinos.

4. No máximo o necessário para se observar como temporariamente se incrementava nosso saldo bancário acima de um valor mínimo. Superado esse valor, já nos preparávamos para salvar essa economia em divisas fortes, seja na Argentina ou no exterior, mas sempre fora do sistema bancário ou financeiro do nosso p aís.

5. Houve duas expropriações de poupança em 1990 e 2002, onde substituíram todos os depósitos por títulos estatais de 10 anos e os argentinos não se esqueceram daqueles terríveis momentos. Agora, com o plano de anistia fiscal proposto pelo governo, que pode atingir 150 bilhões de dólares, está acontecendo uma reversão das expectativas de confisco por 10 anos. Não se acredita que o atual governo se atreva a expropriar novamente a poupança em troca de um bônus estatal de 10 anos, como aconteceu naquelas oportunidades.

6. Ainda não há muito investimento físico, mas esse processo leva pelo menos três anos para se consolidar desde que não existam ruídos macroeconômicos e que tudo funcione bem para investir. Nós que estão infectados com o vírus populista, que queremos resultados imediatos naquilo que estamos tentando alcançar, precisamos saber que esses resultados não vão acontecer. Vai demorar mais do que um ou dois anos para que nos recuperemos do nosso baixo investimento, pois é um processo que está em andamento há mais de oitenta anos desde 1930, quando a grande crise global começou.     

7. Outros países se remodelaram e mudaram significativamente sua orientação, mas decidimos continuar da mesma forma, exceto em raros momentos de raciocínio. Mauricio Macri, que é engenheiro, tem vários objetivos a alcançar e trabalha em função dos mesmos, mas sabe que não se podem alcançar todos esses objetivos simultaneamente. A Argentina precisa de tempo para ver os resultados e, enquanto isso, precisa que trabalhemos.

Relacoes EUA-America Latina em tempos trumpianos - Andrew J. Kirkendall

Policy Series:
U.S.-Latin American Relations in the Age of Donald Trump
by George Fujii
H-Diplo | ISSF POLICY Series
America and the World - 2017 and Beyond

“U.S.-Latin American Relations in the Age of Donald Trump”[1]
Essay by Andrew J. Kirkendall, Texas A&M University
Published on 16 February 2017 | issforum.org

A production of H-Diplo with the journals Security Studies, International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, and the International Studies Association’s Security Studies Section (ISSS).

Editors: Robert Jervis, Francis Gavin, Joshua Rovner, and Diane Labrosse
Web and Production Editor: George Fujii

Shortlink:  tiny.cc/PR-1-5O
Permalink:  http://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/1-5O-Latin-America
PDF URL:  http://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-1-5O.pdf

The election of Donald Trump seems to many to mark the death of liberal internationalism.  Given the President-elect’s failure to give clear guidelines regarding what he intends to do in so many areas, however, we may be surprised by the things he chooses to do because he has yet to devote much time and attention to thinking about them. But one wonders whether U.S. relations with Latin America will change all that much. Latin America may have remained an area which the United States assumes it can dominate, but in general there has been a lack of a clear direction in U.S. policy for the most part.1

For many of the years following the end of the Cold War, U.S. relations with Latin America were focused largely on efforts to encourage economic integration. The North American Free Trade Agreement was the most visible sign of these efforts, as well as the most far-reaching such agreement. Attempts to create a broader Free Trade Area of the Americas foundered on opposition from nationalists in Latin America, in part due to a recognition on their part that U.S. agricultural subsidies were not going away. The left’s resurgence in Latin America in the 1990s was, in part, due to an expectation that they would better protect national economic interests. But U.S. policy has largely lacked an overall goal in the region since the drive for hemispheric integration failed in the early twenty-first century.

In the United States, Republicans tended to forget that it was one of theirs, President George Herbert Walker Bush, who had signed the agreement with Mexico and Canada, even if he left it to his Democratic successor, President Bill Clinton, to get it through the Senate. For many of the years since, partisan politicians have found it hard to address that dual legacy even as ‘free trade’ itself largely found its critics on the left. Donald Trump, obviously less wedded to conventional wisdom, has claimed that he will renegotiate the treaty. And it is important to keep in mind that this comes at a time when NAFTA is increasingly unpopular in Mexico itself. But Trump’s rhetoric on the wall and deportations and aspersions he has cast on the character of Mexicans entering the United States may make it difficult to establish a dialogue with a Mexican president who increasingly lacks internal support.2

It is also a time when the Latin American left generally has lost much of its political legitimacy, as, to cite just two examples, leftist leaders who have instituted significant socioeconomic reform (Venezuela, for example) as well as those who have not (Brazil) have endured massive socioeconomic crisis and the impeachment of a president, respectively. In Brazil one can even find signs of a distressing nostalgia for military rule. So it is certainly possible that Latin America will experience a wave of right-wing populist victories at the polls in keeping with the experience of many countries around the world.3 President Trump may have a few kindred spirits to work with.

Even so it may not be so easy for the new President, given the things he said about Latin Americans (specifically, Mexicans) that, in other years, would have disqualified him as a candidate. And yet it is easy to see Trump’s negative attitudes towards Latin Americans as part of a historical tradition dating back to the period before these countries achieved their independence. No scholar has delved into these unattractive depths more trenchantly than the historically minded political scientist Lars Schoultz in his masterful Beneath the United States.  Schoultz argued that the “pervasive belief that Latin Americans constitute an inferior branch of the human species” underlay U.S. policy toward the region, but whatever opinion high-level leaders have held privately since the 1930s, they have tended to keep them to themselves.4 Certainly Latin Americans, for their part, have reason to believe that Trump’s disdain for Mexicans extends to people hailing from points further south.

The only other issue that really came to the fore during the campaign was, of course, the establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba. President Barack Obama’s bid to end what the newly elected Senator from South Dakota George McGovern called, in his maiden speech in 1963, a “Castro fixation” was still audacious and unexpected in 2014, even if it built on years and even decades of intermittent secret negotiations, as Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande have demonstrated. Certainly Republicans have, by and large, been more likely than Democrats to criticize this move, and one hardly expected the trade embargo, established in 1962, to end soon no matter who was in the White House. But Obama had removed the anti-Americanism that had served as one of the pillars of support for the Cuban government, and a President Hillary Clinton would have been unlikely to take action to reverse course.5 Even Republican attitudes toward normalization have not been uniform. I like to point out to my students that “our” governor (Greg Abbott, not known as a liberal even in these parts) went to Cuba before President Obama did. But the Governor was denounced by Breitbart news, and many people who seem likely to fill the lower ranks of the Trump administration, including those associated with the Heritage Foundation, want to turn back the clock on this issue. It seems unlikely that there is much support for that among the population at large. It also is unlikely that Cuban President Raúl Castro will respond positively to a belligerent approach that indicates a lack of respect for Cuban national sovereignty. But the movement toward the reestablishment of what President William McKinley once called “ties of singular intimacy” certainly may slow, further encouraging hard-liners on both sides.6 

Trump’s thinking on the rest of Latin America is, largely, unknown. The endless and fruitless war on drugs will certainly continue. Not all the news from the region is bleak (a decades-long civil war in Colombia has ended, it would seem). In any case, there is little reason to believe that Latin America will rise to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy concerns.  

U.S. officials once believed that the United States had a special responsibility toward Latin America. That may be regretted (it was certainly often paternalistic, at best). But U.S. policy in recent decades has been more characterized by drift than by a determined effort to maintain hegemony.7 President Obama at the end of his time in office may (somewhat wistfully, perhaps) have wished that he had paid more attention to Latin America (and Africa).8 Certainly, there has been some periodic concern regarding the rise of regional influence of China. It may be that, in a period of crisis, the United States may seek to reassert itself in Latin America in order to regain its international footing, and President Trump may find that there are some low-cost benefits to a more muscular policy toward Latin America. 9

As the world appears to lurch toward conflict, however, it is important to remember that one of the reasons the United States won World War II is that it had the virtual unanimous support of Latin American countries. To achieve that, President Trump will have to make some changes in the approach he has taken so far and seek, instead, to woo Latin America as President Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s. At least one might suggest to him that, with apologies to Robert Frost, a good neighbor would never ask the other guy to pay for the fence.10



Andrew J. Kirkendall is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University.  His most recent book is Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).  He wrote the chapter on teaching Cold War Latin America in Matthew Masur (ed.), Understanding and Teaching the Cold War (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). He is at work on a book about the Kennedy brothers, liberal Democrats, and Cold War Latin America.



© Copyright 2017 The Authors

Notes
[1] This essay was written on 14 January 2017.

1 See David E. Sanger, “Nation-Building’s Siren Song,” The New York Times Book Review, 1 January 2017, 8. Tony Smith, Why Wilson Matters: The Origins of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). For a critical approach see, for example, Samuel Moyn, “Beyond Liberal Internationalism,” Dissent, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/left-foreign-policy-beyond-liberal-internationalism, accessed 11 January 2017. Trump seems, at least, unlikely to engage in efforts to change other countries (other than Cuba, perhaps), although as Walter A. McDougall argues, perhaps the temptation for any U.S. president will be too strong. See his The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

2 Mexicans, of course, believe that NAFTA has largely benefitted the United States.  See Azam Ahmed and Elizabeth Malkin, “Mexicans Lament NAFTA’s Promise Has Fallen Short,” New York Times, 5 January 2017, A1 and A15. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval ratings currently are below 25 percent. See Elisabeth Malkin, “Unrest Erupts in Mexico as Gas Prices Rise Sharply,” The New York Times, 6 January 2017, A6. It should be noted that Mexico “is also no longer the top origin country among the most recent immigrants to the United States,” having been overtaken by China and India in 2013. See Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova, “Mexican Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/mexican-immigrants-united-states, accessed 11 January 2017.

3 See, for example, Simon Romero, “Voice of Rodeo Rides Brazil’s Shift to the Right,” The New York Times, 8 January 2017, 6; Lucas Iberico Lozada, “What’s Left for Brazil?”, Dissent, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/whats-left-brazil-dilma-lula-coup-history, 19 October 2016, accessed 19 October 2016.

4 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), xv. For the record, I studied with Professor Schoultz in the early 1990s when he was working on this book.

5 Thomas J. Knock, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 287-289; William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, updated ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 418-457.

6 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), ix. Mauricio Claver-Carone, executive director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee, a vocal critics of Obama’s policy shift, is a member of Trump’s transition team. See Nora Gámez Torres, “Trump Adds Cuba Embargo Supporter to Transition Team,” Miami Herald, http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article116289068.html, 21 November 2016, accessed 11 January 2017.  (Thanks to historian Michael Bustamante of Florida International University for pointing this out to me.); Joel B. Pollak, “Blue State Blues: Texas Governor Greg Abbott Defects to Cuba,” Breitbart News Network, http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/04/blue-state-blues-texas-governor-greg-abbott-defects-to-cuba/, 4 December 2015, accessed 4 December 2015.

7 A pointed critique of early post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy can be found in a book with an exquisite sub-title: David Scott Palmer, U.S.-Latin American Relations during the Clinton Years: Opportunities Lost or Opportunities Squandered? (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).

8 Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic (April 2016): 81.

9 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Drawing upon the typology of Walker Russell Mead, conservative pundit and former George W. Bush speech-writer Michael Gerson classifies him as a “Jacksonian” who prefers “a strong America that is occasionally roused to kill its enemies but then returns home and avoids international commitments...[and which] should vigorously pursue national interests and seek to be feared rather than loved.”  See Gerson, “Trump’s Nationalism is Corrosive and Dangerous,” www.washingtonpost.com 25 February 2016, accessed 25 February 2016. 

10 Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 33-35; Robert Frost, “Mending Wall,” Collected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Halcyon House, 1939), 47-48. 

Historia ambiental brasileira discutida em coloquio internacional (2016) - sumario

Conference summary:
“Destruction and conservation in debate: Brazil’s environmental history in a global perspective”
by Nathalia Capellini

The International Workshop “Destruction and conservation in debate: Brazil’s environmental history in a global perspective” took place on October 13 and 14, 2016 in Paris, France. This workshop, the first ever to be dedicated to Brazilian environmental history outside of Brazil, offered a space to discuss both the state of the art and the new perspectives of this discipline. Studies presented dealt with a wide variety of environmental topics, including its representations, politics and material changes, and covered a large timeframe, from colonial times to contemporary studies. Despite the diversity of approaches, the research presented was linked by the idea of going beyond the declensionist narrative of Brazil’s environment that has historically characterized the reflections on this subject.

The workshop grew out of a desire to gather European scholars working on Brazilian environmental history and work to evaluate and overcome the lack of research in France on this field. This absence seemed odd in a country that has a large history of Brazilianist studies (including about the environment) and a tradition on environmental consideration in history, with the heritage of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and the École des Annales. In welcoming participants to the workshop, Antonella Romano, director of the hosting institution, the Center Alexandre-Koyré (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), pointed out that although there are many bridges between French and Brazilian research, and that the Center, among other institutions, has a commitment to developing the field of environmental history, thus far, these two subjects have not been combined. In response to the call for papers, many proposals came from Brazil and the United States, and so the workshop broadened and became a space of transatlantic discussion on the environmental history of Brazil.

The workshop’s first panel was centered specifically on the colonial period. Inês Amorim (Universidade do Porto) analyzed images and cartography of Brazilian territorial occupation produced during colonization and made the case for going beyond the Eurocentric view of this process as a homogeneous movement from the coastline to inner lands. Diogo de Carvalho Cabral (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) reminded us of the effect literacy had on the subjugation of indigenous labor, territory and culture by the colonizer. Drawing on a more local analysis, Gustavo Azenha’s (Columbia University) presentation dealt with Portuguese interactions with indigenous people in a region of Southern Bahia over timber extraction and the concomitant rise of nature conservation policies.

In the second panel, Teresa Cribelli (University of Alabama) presented her ongoing research about narratives of progress through the use of natural resources and “wilderness geographies”. She examined nineteenth century International Exhibitions to compare and find bridges between the cases of Brazil and the United States’ frontier states. Ethienne Sauthier (Université Paris III) examined how Brazilian writers like Lima Barreto and Euclides da Cunha depicted tropical nature as an identitarian element for national sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ely Bergo de Carvalho (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais) presented a study about the representations of Brazilian environment in school textbooks since the 1960s. He observed that they follow a declensionist pattern while, at the same, praising (capitalist) development, inhibiting a critical perspective on the matter.

On the evening of the first day a broader debate took place about the environmental policies of Brazil after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Led by the environmentalist André Abreu de Almeida and the journalist Frédéric Pagès, the conversation was an open dialogue between civil society and academia. The discussion was strongly politicized and dealt with the legacy of Presidents Lula and Dilma’s policies for the environment and the prospective actions of the current government. Many participants expressed their fear of increased attacks against the nature preservation law in Brazil and the communities that depend on it. Abreu de Almeida underlined the need to get out of a good versus bad dichotomy to find better solutions to the environmental (and political) crisis in Brazil, and Pagès stressed the fact that these attacks against environmental and social environmental movements in Brazil are not new. Even though the assessment of the current and future situation was rather negative, the debate ended on the positive note that the crisis might be an opportunity to build a new critique of the political system based on political ecology.

The second day opened with a round table organized to go beyond the Brazilian example. The presentations included other world regions (Mexico, Cambodia and Malaysia) and a transnational space (the Amazon forest). Jorge Quetzal Argueta (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) presented a study about the history of agronomic research in Mexico stressing the role of foreign expertise and environmental conflict in this example. Matthieu Guérin (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) compared the colonization processes of Malaysia and Cambodia and their impact on the evolution of forests, fauna and later environmental policies, questioning the relevance of the nation-state scale. The following presentations dealt with the Amazon forest: Kevin Niebauer (Freie Universitat Berlin) discussed the globalization of the Amazon rainforest focusing on the role of circulation of scientific knowledge, while Thomas Mougey (Maastricht University) focused on the UNESCO’s project for an International Scientific Institute in the Amazon. In this panel the importance of transnational and foreign actors in the management of the environment was central: the role of U.S. corporations in Mexico’s case, the ex-colonial powers for Malaysia and Cambodia, the international scientific community and international agencies in the Amazon case. That is not to say that these territories are always under the yoke of outsiders, as Mougey underlined in his study questioning the marginalization of the Amazon forest in global history. Guérin emphasized the common trends and actors in the comparison of environmental histories of the Global South but also highlighted the importance of local (and very local) dynamics for understanding the complexity of these histories.

The next session started with Jennifer Eaglin’s study of caneworkers and the Guariba strikes of 1984 in São Paulo, and their impacts on establishing labor rights under an exploitative agriculture-focused development program. Next, Claire Lagier’s presented on the Landless People’s Movement (MST) in Southern Brazil and their ecological turn. The discussion showed the connections between these two examples through the figure of the agricultural worker and how the Guariba strikes ended up influencing the adoption of agroecology by MST.

The last session started with the presentation by Mariana Sales (Université Paris III) of the eighteenth century manuscripts of traveler Ferdinand Denis on the Brazilian flora gathered in the Saint-Genevieve’s library. Then, Georg Fischer (Aarhus University), using the example of iron ore extraction in Minas Gerais around 1910s, talked about the making and circulation of knowledge around iron prospects and how it shaped the materiality of a commodified landscape. Last, André Felipe Cândido da Silva (Fiocruz) stressed the key role of science and technology in development projects in Brazil while presenting his research program, “Water, Health and Environment in Development Projects in the Brazil of the Twentieth Century”. The role of experts, doctors, intellectuals and travelers in the production of knowledge around nature and the subsequent transformation of nature into resource was central to all of these papers.

José Augusto Pádua, professor of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and leading scholar on Brazilian environmental history, gave the closing lecture titled “Brazil in the History of the Anthropocene”. He presented a longue-durée approach to Brazilian history in relation to the three waves that evoke the Anthropocene concept, industrialization (1800-1945), the great acceleration since the 1950s and the current “self-reflecting” times. In his presentation he emphasized the importance of global connections in this analysis and developed some ideas on the key role of environmental history’s reflections for the present and future of the environment in Brazil.

These two days of discussion offered a very broad perspective on the research being done on Brazilian environmental history in Brazil, the United States and Europe. This international panorama proved very enlightening for European researchers working on the subject. Likewise, European researchers offered original viewpoints and new archival possibilities. The studies presented showed the importance of transnational as well as local dynamics and revealed the importance of conflict in the making of environmental histories. In spite of the variety of issues presented in the different studies, the strong links between environmental history and history of sciences stood out. Overall, the workshop offered a more careful and complex understanding of environmental dynamics in Brazilian history beyond a narrative of plundering and destruction. In sum, the workshop was very fruitful and announces potentially promising pathways for Brazilian environmental history research in Europe and further afield.

The workshop was organized by Antoine Acker, postdoctoral fellow in the Environmental Humanities Research Group at the University of Turin, and Nathalia Capellini, PhD candidate in history at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. This workshop was made possible with the help of several institutions, and especially the European Society for Environmental History that granted us with their Small Workshop Fund, the Institut des Amériques, the Centre d’Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines) and the Association for Brazilian Research in Europe.

A cidadania, a democracia e a manifestação de 26 de marco - Augusto de Franco

DAGOBAH
Augusto de Franco - NL 0041 - 16/02/2017

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Está sendo convocada uma manifestação nacional para o dia 26 de março de 2017. Essa manifestação faz sentido porque há uma insatisfação geral com um velho sistema político que apodreceu. Não é apenas uma insatisfação com a demora na punição do chefe da organização criminosa que comandou o governo que sofreu impeachment em 2016. Nem é somente uma insatisfação com o governo Temer que o sucedeu por força do que reza a Constituição. É uma insatisfação com o sistema como um todo, do modo como está organizado e funciona. A situação atual lembra mais a de 2013 do que a de 2015 e 2016. Em 2013 também havia uma insatisfação com o sistema como um todo – não com o governo do PT em particular – sintetizada pelos cartazes dos manifestantes de junho:

“Vocês não nos representam” 

Por mais que o governo Temer seja refém da mesma base fisiológica que sustentou, durante uma década, o PT no governo, o presidente da República, em particular, não teve tempo de cometer, no exercício do seu mandato, tantos desatinos que justificassem uma ira popular contra sua permanência no cargo. A não ser para o PT, que inventou a falsa narrativa de que o impeachment foi golpe e quer se vingar daquele que ele mesmo escolheu para ser vice de Dilma, aproveitando a oportunidade de baixa popularidade de Temer para instaurar um clima de caos que possibilite sua volta ao poder em 2018, reconduzindo Lula à presidência como uma espécie de redentor, nos braços do povo. E também para a direita que – capitaneando a ingenuidade dos moralistas e analfabetos democráticos – gostaria de varrer o país, limpar a política, separar definitivamente os maus dos bons por meios autoritários e anticonstitucionais.

O fato é que grupos antidemocráticos, de esquerda e de direita, estão querendo pautar a manifestação convocada para 26/03/2017. A esquerda quer enfiar o Fora Temer, Contra as reformas da Previdência e Trabalhista, Contra a privatização da Cedae e outras maluquices. A direita, por sua vez, quer enfiar suas sandices de sempre, como Intervenção militar, Fim do estatuto do desarmamento e sabe-se lá mais o quê.

Para os democratas, as únicas coisas razoáveis neste momento são: Apoio à Lava Jato e Fim do foro privilegiado. Sim, é preciso apoiar a Lava Jato, não porque ela esteja sendo vítima de uma conspiração de cinema, mas de uma coalizão tácita de interesses de sobrevivência dos velhos atores políticos que compõem a base fisiológica do governo Temer e que já compunham a base fisiológica do PT. Renan, Sarney, Collor, Eunício, Jader, Jucá, Moreira Franco e tantos e tantos outros não apareceram agora no cenário político, nem eram da base da oposição ao governo do PT. Eles pertenciam ao governo que foi deposto, não apenas no Legislativo, mas também no Executivo: vários, inclusive, foram ministros de Lula e Dilma. Ora, esses velhos atores têm aguçado instinto de sobrevivência e zero de vocação para o suicídio.

Igualmente é preciso pedir o fim do foro privilegiado porque ele assegura, na prática, a impunidade dos parlamentares e governantes que cometeram crimes.

As tentativas de barrar ou domesticar a Lava Jato e de manter a impunidade dos que estão sendo investigados revoltam a população e contribuem, diretamente, para aumentar a insatisfação das pessoas com o velho sistema político.

Sem as ruas, muito provavelmente, a Lava Jato será desidratada. É inevitável que um sistema político que apodreceu tente se proteger da Lava Jato. Se as pessoas não saírem às ruas novamente, parece obvio que tudo tende a se acomodar nos tribunais superiores, mais uma vez em nome da governabilidade. Choverão recursos sobre recursos e os julgamentos finais vão ficar para muito depois de 2018. Boa parte dos processos prescreverão. Por isso é tão importante sair às ruas em 26 de março de 2017.

É claro que há muito mais do que isso. A crise do velho sistema político é, no fundo, a crise da forma Estado-nação e do seu padrão de relação com a sociedade. Há uma crise do modelo representativo, vulnerável ao discurso inverídico e ao uso da democracia (notadamente das eleições) contra a própria democracia. Por isso as pessoas dizem – e se não dizem, pensam: vocês não nos representam. E o fato das instituições do Estado de direito estarem funcionando não é garantia alguma de que elas funcionarão de acordo com o que as pessoas consideram ser justo. A estrutura e a dinâmica das instituições que temos não estão sintonizadas com o que queremos. Daí decorre muita coisa a ser modificada. Uma pauta para corrigir todos os problemas decorrentes da inadequação dos sistemas atuais de governança às aspirações da sociedade seria quilométrica. Não pode servir de convocação para uma manifestação.

Na verdade, porém, as pautas formuladas por grupos ideológicos que convocam manifestações não são tão importantes quanto se pensa. Se a manifestação adquirir a dinâmica de um enxameamento – independentemente do que querem ou pensem os grupos organizados no seu interior – seu efeito será sentido pela sociedade e pelo Estado. Se acontecer um swarming – como vimos em junho de 2013, em março, abril e agosto de 2015 e em março de 2016 – é sinal de que a manifestação se descolou completamente das intenções particulares dos grupos que tomaram a iniciativa de convocá-la. Se não acontecer tal fenômeno, ela terá pouca influência no comportamento dos atores.

Uma manifestação de alta interatividade – capaz de constelar multidões – é sempre convocada de modo distribuído, por iniciativa de miríades de pessoas, agrupadas ou não em torno de uma pauta (ainda que possam existir vários grupos querendo convocá-la centralizadamente). Por isso ela quase sempre expressa sentimentos, programas e plataformas difusos. É impossível evitar que, entre as pessoas que a convocam, por iniciativa própria, sem pedir autorização a ninguém, existam as que têm as propostas mais descabidas do ponto de vista da democracia. Na concentração da praça Maidan, em Kiev, no final de 2013 e início de 2014, havia de tudo, de neonazistas a anarquistas. O sentido geral do movimento, entretanto, foi o da liberdade (contra a dominação da ditadura de Putin sobre a Ucrânia).

Então o importante mesmo é o que se configura a partir da interação. A verdadeira pauta é um resultado, não uma intenção prévia. Temos 40 dias para observar o bamboleio dos fluxos interativos. E, mesmo assim, tudo dependerá mais do que ocorrer no próprio dia 26 de março do que das tentativas anteriores de direcionar o fluxo.

Uma coisa – e é a mais importante – não se pode negar: há uma insatisfação geral com um sistema político que, além de estar defasado da sociedade atual, apodreceu. Vamos ver até que ponto isso será suficiente para ensejar a manifestação de um fenômeno interativo de grandes proporções. Querer canalizar essa insatisfação para a realização de pautas particulares, pegando uma carona no sofrimento das pessoas, não é apenas errado de um ponto de vista ético-político (posto que revela uma tentativa de instrumentalização): é inútil.

Durante o período que antecede a manifestação, entretanto, há uma disputa política pelo seu sentido. E o sentido deve ser o da transição democrática pós-PT (que ficou perigosamente inconclusa). Os democratas devem interagir nesse processo, para garantir que ele não seja conduzido por ideias autocráticas, sejam de esquerda ou de direita.
Augusto de Franco
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