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.
Um leitor de trabalhos meus, em alguma das plataformas que uso (e são várias), escreveu-me para dizer que estava lendo (ou ouvindo, agora não sei), uma entrevista minha na Zero Hora de Porto Alegre, o que eu mesmo já nem me lembrava de quando exatamente foi isso. Só pode ter sido depois de minha defenestração do cargo de diretor do IPRI-MRE, quando fiquei brevemente e temporariamente "famoso", e fui assediado por diversos jornalistas de vários veículos de comunicação. Sem saber exatamente o que foi registrado, busquei no instrumento de pesquisa do jornal Zero Hora por meio do meu nome, e veio o que vai abaixo. Ainda não li, ou ouvi, depois eu faço isso. Paulo Roberto de Almeida Brasília, 20 de maio de 2019 Addendum: agora pude ler minha entrevista ao Zero Hora, que transcrevo abaixo.
RELAÇÕES EXTERIORES
"Fui proibido de
trabalhar", desabafa diplomata demitido por Bolsonaro e Ernesto Araújo
Em
entrevista, Paulo Roberto de Almeida, que foi afastado na segunda-feira,
denuncia quebra de hierarquia e diz que exoneração ocorreu por críticas a Olavo
de Carvalho
Antes, o
embaixador agora demitido havia feito críticas ao escritor Olavo de Carvalho,
responsável por apresentar Araújo ao presidente Jair Bolsonaro.
Almeida acredita que este foi o real motivo de seu afastamento.
Na entrevista a
seguir, Almeida faz duras críticas ao atual assessor especial da
Presidência, Filipe Martins,
chamando-o de "Robespirralho", em referência a Robespierre, líder dos
jacobinos durante a Revolução Francesa, quando foi implantado um regime de
terror no país. Ele também considera Araújo "um embaixador júnior",
que promoveu uma nova geração a postos de comando por ter dificuldade em
dialogar com embaixadores mais antigos "e provavelmente mais sapientes do
que ele".
Pelos colegas, o
afastamento é visto como um ato de repressão político-ideológica do governo
Bolsonaro.
Diplomata desde
1977, Almeida serviu nas embaixadas de Paris e de Washington, entre outros
postos de destaque. Em 1984, concluiu doutorado em Ciência Política pela
Universidade Livre de Bruxelas, na Bélgica. Ele havia assumido a direção do
instituto em 2016 durante o governo Michel Temer.
Mesmo exonerado do comando do Ipri, Almeida seguirá no Itamaraty porque é
diplomata de carreira.
A seguir, os
principais trechos da entrevista.
Como o senhor está
depois da exoneração do cargo?
Estou me sentindo
livre porque, desde novembro do ano passado, quando foi anunciado o novo
chanceler, sabia que meu tempo no Ipri (Instituto de Pesquisa de
Relações Internacionais)estava contado. Trata-se de um embaixador
júnior (Ernesto Araújo), que anunciou várias coisas bizarras do
ponto de vista da diplomacia. O que se viu pelo blog dele (antes de ser
nomeado chanceler) e por declarações que deu, Araújo seria algo
estranho para a diplomacia brasileira e para a administração, inclusive pelo
fato de ser um embaixador júnior. Toda mudança de governo suscita substituição
de pessoal. É normal que os novos dirigentes escolham seus assessores. É normal
que eu fosse substituído. Só não sabia que seria dessa forma. Eu sabia que
haveria substituição, tanto que foi anunciado um chefe mais jovem do que eu.
Não um embaixador, mas um ministro de segunda classe, aliás um rapaz que foi
meu secretário em Washington. Em dezembro, todos os embaixadores que eram
subsecretários, com dois ou três postos no Exterior, foram comunicados de que
estavam em disponibilidade. Todos foram substituídos por secretários jovens.
Essa é a postura do Itamaraty, uma ruptura de hierarquia, como os militares
dizem, coronel mandando em general. Mas (uma atitude)que combina
com a postura do chanceler devido a sua insegurança em dialogar com
embaixadores mais experientes, mais antigos, provavelmente mais sapientes do
que ele em diferentes temas.
O senhor se
considera vítima de censura?
Desde janeiro, fui
proibido de trabalhar. Saí de Brasília logo depois do Natal, fui para o Rio
Grande do Sul (sua esposa, Carmen Licia Palazzo, é gaúcha), fiquei
aí até o começo do ano. Voltei a Brasília no dia 14. Quando retornei, fui
instruído a não fazer nada até que tivesse um novo presidente da Funag (Fundação
Alexandre de Gusmão, instituição ligada ao Ministério das Relações Exteriores),
até que tivesse aprovado meu programa pelo chanceler. É inédito ser instruído a
não fazer nada, a não trabalhar. Não esperava uma defenestração como ocorreu
ontem (segunda-feira) pela manhã. Eles usaram o argumento da publicação no meu
blog pessoal de três artigos (de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, de Rubens Ricupero e
de Araújo).
Chamei Olavo (de Carvalho) de sofista da Virgínia. E
gozei dele em várias postagens, porque ele é um ignorante em política
internacional.
PAULO ROBERTO DE ALMEIDA
Diplomata
O senhor sentiu
que aquela publicação seria a gota d'água?
Estava propondo um
debate, como sempre fiz. Sempre publiquei coisas sobre política externa em meus
blogs e nas minhas redes sociais. Sempre debati com as pessoas, sempre escrevi.
Aquilo não foi o gatilho da demissão. O gatilho está em comentários anteriores
que fiz sobre Olavo de Carvalho,
que é o santo protetor de Ernesto Araújo. Chamei Olavo de sofista da Virgínia.
E gozei dele em várias postagens, porque ele é um ignorante em política
internacional, em economia. Na última postagem, gozei de uma declaração que
fez, dizendo que os anos de maior comércio com a China também corresponderam
aos de maior decadência moral, política e social no Brasil. Algo tão
estapafúrdio que não pude me conter ao dizer que aquilo era uma idiotice total.
E, claro, (critiquei) Eduardo Bolsonaro, quando ele falou
contra a ida de Lula no velório do neto. Fiz uma postagem pequena dizendo que
fundamentalistas não só se parecem como são semelhantes. Achei horrível.
Chama atenção que
o senhor ficou quase 14 anos na geladeira do Itamaraty, durante o governo do
PT. E agora é exonerado pela direita. O senhor se sente perseguido?
Os extremismos e
fundamentalismos se parecem. Eles não suportam contestação, controvérsia. James
Bond, que todo mundo conhece porque tinha permissão especial da rainha para
matar. Eu me auto atribuí permissão especial para dissentir, para divergir.
Sempre escrevi e por isso sempre fui punido. Inclusive antes do lulopetismo eu
já havia sido punido pelo regime tucanês por escrever sem autorização. O
próprio Seixas Corrêa (Luiz Felipe de Seixas Correa, embaixador) me
puniu três vezes, por eu escrever e publicar sem autorização. Me puniu
indevidamente porque você, como diplomata, não pode escrever sobre temas de
política externa da agenda corrente sem autorização superior. O que eu
concordo. Mas eu escrevia sobre política internacional de forma geral. Ele
tinha feito uma lei da mordaça que serviu para defenestrar o Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães
da minha mesma posição. Ele era diretor do Ipri em 2001 e foi defenestrado pelo
Seixas Corrêa. Passei 13 anos e meio fora de qualquer cargo, só fui
chamado depois do impeachment de Dilma, em agosto de 2016.
O filho do
presidente e deputado federal Eduardo Bolsonaro é uma espécie de chanceler
paralelo?
Sem dúvida. Já
tinha o Marco Aurélio Garcia (assessor especial da Presidência) no
regime lulopetista. Mas é muito diferente. Não dá para compará-lo com o Filipe
Martins (que ocupa o cargo no governo Bolsonaro), chamado de
"Robespirralho" (referência a Robespierre, líder dos
jacobinos durante a Revolução Francesa, quando foi implantado um regime de
terror) porque não tem estatura. Marco Aurélio Garcia era um agente
cubano, homem de confiança dos cubanos para o Fórum de São Paulo e outras
coisas da política externa para a América do Sul, tanto que era chamado de
chanceler para a América do Sul. Ele tinha certa autoridade sobre o Itamaraty.
Felipe Martins é só um colega de conversas de Ernesto Araújo. Ernesto Araújo
não tem nada desse olavismo desenfreado. Nunca foi. Ele usou isso para
ascender, isso é construído, é deliberado. Ele farejou essa coisa e investiu
nessa vertente.
O senhor quer
dizer que ele usou Olavo de Carvalho como trampolim para chegar ao cargo?
Exatamente. Ele
estava em Washington quando estava lá Nestor Forster Júnior (diplomata
na capital americana), um grande amigo meu, bom funcionário, mas um
olavista fanático. Ele foi o cara que o levou Araújo a Olavo de Carvalho, em
maio do ano passado, na Virgínia (estado americano onde Olavo mora).
Bolsonaro e
Ernesto Araújo prometem desideologizar o Itamaraty, mas aparentemente há muita
ideologia na atual política externa brasileira. É até irônico falarem essas coisas. Não tem nada de
mais ideológico do que falar contra globalismo, climatismo, marxismo cultural,
politicamente correto, ideologia de gênero. Eles não se dão conta de que são
ridículos. É absolutamente ridículo de falar política externa e comércio sem
ideologia, quando o que mais fazem é reclamar da China.
Não tem nada de mais ideológico do que falar contra
globalismo, climatismo, marxismo cultural, politicamente correto, ideologia de
gênero.
PAULO ROBERTO DE ALMEIDA
Diplomata
E Araújo, o senhor
tem o criticado duramente, chamando-o de "júnior". As relações entre
vocês inexistem?
Elas são
totalmente inexistentes. Eu o conheci nos anos 1990, quando ele trabalhava
sobre Mercosul e até assinou um livro sobre o tema com o embaixador Sérgio
Florêncio (embaixador), que eu resenhei, achei muito bom livro (a obra
chama-se Mercosul hoje). Depois, nunca mais havia encontrado com ele. Em
novembro de 2016, quando comecei a convidar pessoas para palestras no Ipri,
chamei um amigo meu, professor da Academia Diplomática Americana, para falar
sobre as implicações do governo Donald Trump para o Brasil e a América Latina.
Tinha chamado Ernesto Araújo, que então era ministro-chefe do Departamento da
América do Norte para ele comentar e introduzir o debate. Ele sacou do bolso um
monte de folhas e começou a ler aquela coisa que depois se converteu no artigo
dele: Trump e o Ocidente. Fiquei agastado porque não o chamei para proclamar
que Trump iria salvar o Ocidente, mas não podia interrompê-lo na frente de todo
mundo. Ele falou 20 minutos. Nem prestei atenção no que tinha falado. Fiquei
entregue a minhas coisas. Teve uma pergunta de um professor da audiência,
Eduardo Viola, que fez uma pergunta: "Ernesto, o senhor acredita realmente
que o Facebook e o Google fazem parte dessa conspiração globalista contra a
soberania dos países?". Ele simplesmente disse: "Sim, acredito."
Fiquei surpreendido. Só em março ou abril de 2017 é que ele (Araújo)apresentou
esse artigo para a revista Cadernos de Política Exterior. Em novembro de 2018,
soube que, depois que a revista fora impressa, ele foi levá-la para Olavo de
Carvalho na Virgínia. Ele começou a construir a coisa desde 2016.
O senhor foi
exonerado por meio de uma ligação do chefe de gabinete do ministro de Estado,
Pedro Gustavo Ventura Wollny. Foi dito que o senhor estava saindo do cargo
devido às publicações dos artigos em seu blog?
Ele achou que eu
tinha sido descortês com o ministro não só em relação a esses artigos, mas a
outras postagens que fiz. Sempre coloco o que acho interessante. Todos os
artigos que coloco estão no clipping do Itamaraty. A alegação é de que fui
descortês com a chefia da Casa. A versão verdadeira é de que provavelmente
ofendi Eduardo Bolsonaro e Olavo de Carvalho, os dois sustentáculos de Ernesto.
Tecnicamente, o
senhor pode ser exonerado. O que vai fazer agora?
Fui colocado lá
por decisão do governo Temer, do ministro José Serra (ex-chanceler),
do Rubens Ricupero, do Rubens Barbosa (embaixadores). Estava nos
corredores por anos. Me resgataram, fui promovido. Eu poderia ser exonerado a
qualquer momento. Muda o governo, todos os embaixadores podem ser substituídos.
Agora, vou fazer o que sempre fiz. Vou para a biblioteca (do Itamaraty),
sento, leio, penso e escrevo. Eles não vão me oferecer nada no Itamaraty e nada
lá fora. Ou eu arrumo um trabalho fora do Itamaraty ou fico sem função, o que
até é uma irregularidade administrativa. Você não pode ficar recebendo sem
trabalhar. Mas fiquei. Durante todo o lulopetismo, fui todas as vezes ao chefe
da administração dizer: "Olha, estou aqui para trabalhar, por favor, me
deem uma função". Eles respondiam: "Ah, sim, vamos tratar".
Nunca fizeram nada.
Ficaram enrolando?
Até um chefe da
área falou: Você é uma pessoa muito valiosa, mas, se o chanceler não gosta de
você, fica difícil eu lhe colocar na minha área".
Como o senhor
resume o que está acontecendo no Itamaraty em termos de política externa
brasileira?
Não temos política
externa. Alguns questionam a minha opinião sobre política externa, eu pergunto:
"Qual?" Não há nenhuma exposição sobre política externa. Há um
conjunto de pronunciamentos que vão sendo revertidos por "volta
atrás!" do próprio presidente ou por tutela dos militares. Tudo o que
Ernesto Araújo falou de mais controverso foi claramente cerceado, revertido
pelos militares: base americana, Jerusalém, China, Acordo de Paris. Não está
acontecendo nada de política externa porque não há. Existem eflúvios
bolsonaristas e olavistas que orientam algumas ações do chanceler Ernesto
Araújo sob estreita e estrita vigilância do comitê de tutela militar.
Matt Stuart/Magnum PhotosA protest against the G20 summit, Hamburg, Germany, July 2017
For the American right, Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth. Elements of American conservatism had long fostered a reactionary counterculture, which defined the push for civil rights as oppression, resisted the equality of women and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms, pilloried the hegemony of the liberal media, and was suspicious of globalism and its corporate liberal institutions, including the UN and theWTO. Already in the 1950s this reactionary politics had secured a niche on the right wing of theGOP. It was reenergized by the Goldwater campaign and the conservative backlash against the social revolutions of the 1960s. Reintegrated into the mainstreamGOPby Ronald Reagan, it then flared into the open in the ferocious hostility to the Clintons in the 1990s. With Trump it finally claimed center stage. For the right, the explosion of “truth-speaking” by Trump and his cohorts, the unabashed sexism and xenophobia of his administration, and its robust nationalism on issues of trade and security need no justification. His election represents a long-awaited overturning of the consensus of liberalism.
Centrist Democrats also view the administration as historic, but for them it represents the betrayal of all that is best about America. The election of a man like Trump in the second decade of the twenty-first century violated the cherished liberal narrative of progress from the Civil War to the New Deal to the civil rights movement to the election of Barack Obama. This was a self-conception of the United States carefully cultivated by cold war liberalism and seemingly fulfilled in the Clinton era of American power. The election of a man as openly sexist and xenophobic as Donald Trump was a shock so fundamental that it evoked comparisons with the great crises of democracy in the 1930s. Parallels are readily drawn between Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg. There is talk of a Reichstag fire moment, in which an act of terrorism might be exploited to declare emergency rule. Such references to the interwar period are both rousing and reassuring. They remind us of good battles decisively won. Not for nothing does the anti-Trump movement refer to itself as “the resistance,” recalling memories of midcentury antifascist heroics.
But though this rhetoric is based in history, what is surprising is how recently it developed. Only a few years ago the mood in the Democratic Party establishment was not one of defiant resistance. What prevailed was bland futuristic complacency. The evolving diversity of America and the manifest political preferences of the Californian digital oligarchs would guarantee the Democrats’ grip on power. Trump’s supporters were not just deplorable, they were doomed to extinction. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was the job of centrist intellectuals to swat down critical talk from the left about the rule of undemocratic technocrats and the hollowing out of democracy.
America’s revived left wing, mobilized by Bernie Sanders and drawn to organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), does not doubt the disastrous consequences of the Trump presidency. Yet for the left he represents not a historic rupture but a continuity. As Jed Purdy put it inDissentlast summer, Trump is “not an anomalous departure but rather a return to the baseline—to the historical norm.”1Trump exposes starkly what the civility of Obama and his administration obscured—the subordination of American democracy to capitalism, patriarchy, and the iniquitous racial order descended from slavery.
For its steadfast radical critique, the American left once earned the dismissive scorn of centrists. Now that the center is panicking, the left senses an opening. An insurgency in the Democratic Party backed by theDSAappears to have a genuinely broad base. Among a swath of young Americans, talk of socialism has lost its stigma. This is not a moment of democratic crisis but an opportunity the likes of which the American left has not seen in many decades.
As different as their positions are, one thing these three sides have in common is that their goals are resolutely national. Trump promises to make America great again. Centrist Democrats are scandalized that Trump ever called America’s greatness into question and promise to repair the damage he has done. The preoccupation with Russian meddling is a call to rally around the flag. Meanwhile, the left draws its inspiration from a narrative that is no less patriotic and nationalistic than that of its centrist and right-wing opponents. Purdy inDissentcalls on activists to take up the national tradition that goes back to Radical Reconstruction, the left wing of the New Deal, and civil rights. InTablet, Paul Berman has revived Richard Rorty’sAchieving Our Countryand its insistence on the continuing tradition of radical republicanism from Walt Whitman to John Dewey and beyond.2
The scope for a truly internationalist or cosmopolitan politics in the United States is limited. It would be unrealistic for any politically minded person not to reckon with this constraint. Nor should one waste time imagining how America might shed its creaking eighteenth-century constitution, the oldest that is still in use. But if patriotic appeals are simply the sine qua non of politics in this country, the historicist tone of America’s crisis talk is nevertheless puzzling. How can references to World War II, the Gilded Age, the Civil War, or the Revolution not seem anachronistic at a moment when accelerating climate change, the last great burst of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and the rise of Asia, driven by China’s authoritarian capitalism, are transforming the world?
While a nonnationalist politics may be unrealistic, one must wonder whether the full-throated embrace of the national narrative as proposed by Berman and others is not doing “the resistance” a disservice. Tim Shenk, coeditor ofDissent, has sensibly suggested that American progressives should turn to addressing the country’s fundamental social, economic, and political problems not as the burden of an exceptional nation but simply as a matter of justice and practicality, as any other democracy would.3Given the current mood, especially among younger activists, it may turn out that the historical significance of the Trump crisis is to immunize an entire generation against any form of celebratory American exceptionalism. Yet as Trump himself is keen to point out, his victory can be seen as a harbinger of a broader wave of nationalist populism around the world.
InThe People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, Yascha Mounk, the former executive director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, addresses the comprehensive revulsion that supporters of a roughnecked illiberal democracy à la Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump express toward elite technocratic liberalism, exemplified by the politicians and corporate leaders who gather annually at Davos. With good reason thegilets jaunesand many of those who voted for Brexit imagine that the governing class regards them with disdain. Their reaction is a truculent reassertion of popular sovereignty. Though the youth vote continues to swing to the left, it does not do so uniformly. Mounk traces an alarming rise in authoritarian attitudes, even among younger Europeans and Americans. Support for strongmen and military leadership is increasingly prevalent among those in their twenties. The United States, far from being a democratic exception, fits squarely in this mold, with high levels of support for authoritarian rule.
While these findings are striking and original, Mounk’s analysis is less so. To explain the shift toward authoritarian thinking, he points to three forces: the collapse of elite control over political media with the rise of the Internet, the failure of economic growth to distribute wealth, and white anxiety about increasing diversity. It’s a familiar list of worries, and he calls for a familiar list of fixes: greater responsibility of media outlets in disseminating hate speech, greater attention to economic inequality, and a sustained effort to ensure that “people and nations should again feel they have control of their lives or their destiny.” This is all very well. But if undemocratic liberal technocracy is the ultimate driver of the popular revolt, how can a technocratic list of solutions offered by a technocratic think tank be a credible answer? How can efforts to ensure that people again “feel” in charge, rather than a program of politics that actually empowers them, not sound like an obfuscation?
The most thought-provoking book comparing democratic crises in different nations has been written by the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.How Democracies Dieplaces America in a broader investigation into how elected autocrats subvert and undermine democracy. Democracies are fragile because they depend on competing parties accepting common norms. Norms are essential because without them, “constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be.” Once placed in a position of power and freed by the erosion of democratic norms, elected authoritarians will seek to influence the referees in the system, forcing judges to retire, stifling the press, and tilting the playing field permanently against their opponents. There can be no doubt that America’s political system at this moment is under threat on all three fronts. And for those engaged in America’s solipsistic national debate, Levitsky and Ziblatt have a sobering message: “American democracy is not as exceptional as we sometimes believe. There’s nothing in our Constitution or our culture to immunize us against democratic breakdown.”
What, then, can stop the slide into illiberalism? The restoration of democratic norms requires building a new consensus. Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the example of Chile, where the violent confrontation between left and right in the early 1970s that resulted in Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup was overcome by a new culture of bipartisan cooperation in the so-called Democratic Concertation. In the US today, the problem lies first and foremost with theGOP. It has repeatedly behaved like an anti-systemic party that does not consider itself bound by common democratic norms. “Reducing polarization,” Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, “requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded.” There is no other way to break the party’s addiction to what former Republican senator Jeff Flake called the “sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery.”
But how can this be done? Levitsky and Ziblatt point to the reformation of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union after 1945. The consolidation of Konrad Adenauer’sCDUaround democratic norms undoubtedly made a crucial contribution to the success of democracy in postwar Germany. But what relevance does it have to American politics? Can one seriously imagine anyone in theGOPtaking lessons from Angela Merkel and her counterparts?
For all their facility as analysts of political procedure and form, Levitsky and Ziblatt are strikingly naive when it comes to power. The overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973 was not merely a deterioration into extreme partisanship. It was a violent clash over fundamental social and economic reforms during the cold war. Among the forces that enabled the destruction of Chilean democracy were the security and foreign policy apparatuses of the United States. Likewise in Germany, as Levitsky and Ziblatt admit, it took the absolute defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945 to set the conditions for the reconstruction of German conservatism. And there, too, the cold war influenced the course of events, as it made Adenauer’sWestbindung(attachment to the West) seem infinitely preferable to the Soviet alternative.
For theGOPto transform itself, will America need to experience a catastrophe similar to that of Germany in World War II? Levitsky and Ziblatt pose the question but never fully explore its implications. Their limited, case-by-case comparative approach and their focus on national political institutions and cultures leave such questions of international politics to one side and offer no basis on which to consider the connection between cold war and post–cold war geopolitics and the trajectory of modern democracy.
One author who does address the crisis of Western democracy as an interconnected international development is Timothy Snyder. Snyder made his reputation as a scholar of Eastern European history. The Ukraine crisis of 2014 turned his engagement with the region’s history into a vehicle for thinking about the contemporary transatlantic political scene. Historical narratives do not merely reflect and describe realities, they can help shape them. The central organizing idea of Snyder’s latest book,The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, is that democracy is threatened by two types of deterministic worldview, which he calls “inevitability” and “eternity.” The first is the determinism of the “end of history” and modernization theory, which declares that “there is no alternative” to liberal democracy. This, broadly speaking, is the worldview of the liberal elite in the West—Mounk’s technocratic liberals. The disappointments and resistance that their top-down programs of modernization engender give rise, in Snyder’s view, not to a genuine popular reaction, but to a second type of elite mythmaking, in the form of “eternity politics,” or mythic nationalism. Whereas modernizers promise a better future for everyone as long as we all follow the one best path, mythic nationalism “places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood.” Against the dark backdrop of a world of threats, the governing elite promises not progress but protection.
Our current situation, as Snyder sees it, has been shaped by the wild oscillation between the determinism of modernization theory and the determinism of nationalism. Both foreclose any real debate and all practical alternatives. They are both inimical to genuine democracy. One licenses domineering technocracy; the other, cruder forms of authoritarianism. True history, which in Snyder’s definition is a matter of contingency and individual choice, is the best intellectual antidote to these dangerous worldviews.
At a very general level there is much to agree with in Snyder’s approach. History is indeed an urgent preoccupation of politics and of democratic politics in particular. Determinism, whether of a social-scientific or mythical variety, should be viewed skeptically. One can also agree with Snyder that we must seek to understand Russia, Ukraine, the EU, and the US as part of “one history.” But the question is how to assemble that “one history,” and the challenge in doing so is to apply to ourselves the same standards that we apply in our criticism of others. If the health of democracy is the issue, how well does Snyder’s kind of history promote democratic health? And does it succumb to mythmaking of its own?
TheRoad to Unfreedomis undeniably engaging. Written in Snyder’s epigrammatic style, it takes us on a dizzying ride through Europe’s past and present. It is a history in which there are perpetrators and victims. Snyder’s starting point is Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954), an itinerant nationalist and sometime-fascist thinker who has acquired a new vogue in post-Soviet Russia. Vladislav Surkov, a close political adviser to Vladimir Putin, cited Ilyin approvingly to justify his designs for a “sovereign democracy” that prioritizes “centralization, personification and idealization” over individual freedom. For Snyder these are the true inspirations for Putin’s aggressive politics, and Ilyich and Surkov are the masterminds behind the global backlash against complacent liberal visions of modernization.
Yet the construction of such a network of influence is a rich field for mythmaking in its own right. Among experts in Russian politics there is no agreement that the ideologues around which Snyder builds his account in fact have the significance he attributes to them.4Where did the clash between Putin and the West originate? Was it driven by an obscure nationalist turn on the part of the Kremlin, or by broader and more obvious geopolitical conflicts?
As part of his account of the rise of Russian aggression, Snyder refers several times to Putin’s attendance at aNATOconference in Bucharest in the spring of 2008. But he never mentions the subject of that acrimonious meeting. In dispute was the proposal, sponsored by the Bush administration, for accelerated membership applications toNATOby Ukraine and Georgia. This provoked a hostile reaction not only from Russia but from Germany and France as well. They had no interest in seeing Ukraine welcomed into their exclusive European club and no desire to raise tensions with Moscow. What was at issue was not neofascist mythmaking in Moscow, but post–cold war geopolitics. The obvious text to consult to decipher the Russian position is Putin’s speech to the Munich security conference in 2007, which was not so much an ethnonationalist declaration as a clearly articulated denunciation of American unilateralism. Snyder does not discuss it.
Even more telling is Snyder’s treatment of the Ukraine crisis and its effects on the US. Can one really understand the clash of 2013 in Ukraine with reference to the machinations of Putin’s regime alone, without considering the clumsy diplomacy of the EU and the wider economic and geopolitical background? As Snyder has insisted in an earlier work,Bloodlands(2010), Ukraine’s history has been shaped by the clash of tsarist, German, and Soviet imperial projects. What is surprising is that inThe Road to Unfreedomhe does not approach recent history in the same way, as the result of a many-sided power struggle.
Donald Trump; drawing by John Springs
It would be fatuous to suggest thatNATOand the EU are involved in an expansionist project akin to that of Nazi Germany. But it would be no less fatuous to insist that geopolitical rivalry did not have a part in the crisis that exploded in Kiev in November 2013, when negotiations concerning Ukraine’s prospective membership in the EU broke down, opening the door to Putin’s intervention. Poland, the Baltics, and Scandinavian countries had supported Ukraine’s EU membership—in pushing the Eastern Association agreements with six post-Soviet states from 2008 onward, they were using the EU to pursue a strategy of containment in which “Westernization” was not simply an end in itself but also a means of hardening their eastern fortifications against Russia. Moscow did not misunderstand what was at stake.
For Snyder, the malign influence of Russia’s antidemocratic turn does not end in Eastern Europe. In his final chapters he reproduces media reports of Putin’s meddling in the US and French elections of 2016 and 2017. But if one wants to understand this, one must address the geopolitical factors that Snyder slights. Hostility to Hillary Clinton was not, as Snyder suggests, the result of misogyny among the Kremlin’s ideologists. Clinton’s views of America’s relations with Russia date back to the unipolar triumphalism of the 1990s and found clear expression during her time as secretary of state. Clinton may not have fomented the protests in Russia in December 2011, as Putin believes, but she made no secret of her support for the opposition. With the Ukraine crisis still in flux, Moscow could have no interest in a Clinton election victory, especially with Trump as the alternative.
Rather than discussing this geopolitical backdrop to the election of 2016, Snyder recounts the now familiar litany of allegations about Trump’s business connections to Russia. The findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation are frustratingly inconclusive. And it is precisely this radical uncertainty that we have to come to terms with in our historical moment. We are still trying to decipher whether the American crisis is best understood as the result of self-dealing by a kleptocratic elite, the political sociology of the Rust Belt, the complacency of Clinton’s campaign managers, or the persistence of American racial divides. It is unlikely that outside interference decisively affected the election, but even that cannot be excluded. It is this deep indecipherability that defines our situation. Snyder’s tone of prophetic certainty and his bombastic call for resistance against the dark and all-pervasive forces of Russian neofascism is illuminating more as a symptom of the times than as a work of history.
By contrast, the great virtue of David Runciman’sHow Democracy Endsis that he takes our bewilderment as his starting point. Instead of offering a definitive narrative or specific policy prescriptions, Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge, discusses a variety of ways to make sense of our present. The result is a collection of diagnoses that are insightful and useful, whether or not one agrees with his ultimate conclusions.
Runciman argues for the need to break with the compulsive return to the interwar period. Could Trump’s presidency really have the makings of a descent into fascism? It cannot be ruled out. Moments like the Charlottesville rally reveal the depth and breadth of rightist undercurrents. But these are not the battle-hardened fascist squads of the 1920s and 1930s. If the emergence of a mass fascist movement seems implausible, what about the coups that haunted Latin America and southern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s? Runciman throws cold water on the idea. As the memory of conscription, mass mobilization, and total war fades, so too do the truly violent political passions of the twentieth century. Both the threat of fascism and the mobilizing slogans of antifascism are hollow, Runciman suggests. Mass nationalist rallies even of the type orchestrated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and the Law and Justice Party in Poland seem more like pastiche than the genuine article.
This is reassuring at one level. Democracy is unlikely to die with a bang. But all the more likely is the possibility that it will expire with a whimper. There doesn’t seem to be the level of national solidarity that would be required to address the challenge of mounting inequality by raising income and wealth taxes or undertaking comprehensive welfare reform—the reforms that were the achievements of the mid-twentieth century and that were in large part spurred by the huge mobilization efforts of the two world wars.
Runciman argues that once we leave behind the dark memories of the 1930s, we can expand our historical imagination to include a wider array of threats. Democracy has no clear answer for the mindless operation of bureaucratic and technological power. We may indeed be witnessing its extension in the form of artificial intelligence and robotics. Likewise, after decades of dire warning, the environmental problem remains fundamentally unaddressed. For Runciman these developments come as no surprise, and he cites Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of modern evil and Rachel Carson’sSilent Springto show that we have been aware of these issues for many decades.
Bureaucratic overreach and environmental catastrophe are precisely the kinds of slow-moving existential challenges that democracies deal with very badly. And given the West’s failure to address them, we should expect to see ever-louder calls for energetic authoritarian answers. It is symptomatic of our moment that meritocratic authoritarianism is finding defenders not among the kind of sulfurous ideologues that populate Snyder’s book, but among anodyne professors of political science. For example, Jason Brennan in his bookAgainst Democracy(2016) has revived the nineteenth-century argument for rule by the qualified, what he calls epistocracy. In this respect we live under the shadow not of Moscow but of Beijing. But as Runciman points out, though authoritarian meritocracy may promise more decisive policymaking, it also increases the likelihood of catastrophic missteps.
Finally, there is the threat du jour: corporations and the technologies they promote. As Runciman reminds us, corporations are at least as old as the modern state, and they may outlive it. The networks of Facebook and similar companies are more extensive than any hierarchical state organization. Runciman regards Mark Zuckerberg as a far more serious threat to US democracy than Trump. But what kind of threat is it that the likes of Zuckerberg pose? Twenty-first-century oligarchs may be profit-driven and intolerant of the checks and balances of the rule of law, but in the US at least, they try to seem the mild-mannered sort, eager to spout the platitudes of corporate social responsibility and susceptible to political pressure.
On every subject he discusses, Runciman’s conclusions are deflationary, and this is refreshing. It is tempting to say that his book makes the perfect antidote both to the superheated American national debate and the certainty of Snyder’s dark narrative. Yet this should not obscure the quiet prophecy in Runciman’s own account. It can be traced to his innocent-sounding quip that repeated references to the 1930s are psychological tics of a political midlife crisis. The premise for his vision of our current situation is that democracy is a political form with a life span, a beginning and an end. We have not reached the end point, which is why talk of an immediate terminal crisis is exaggerated. But we must acknowledge that we are in late middle age.
This argument marks a remarkable slide from history into organicist metaphysics. And it is an ironic one. Runciman’s suggestion that political constitutions have a natural life cycle is reminiscent of Oswald Spengler, the author ofThe Decline of the Westand the exemplary political and cultural writer of the Weimar Republic. Like Runciman, Spengler employed a natural philosophy to organize world history into a series of quasi-biological trajectories. He viewed the situation of the West as being close to the end of a natural cycle of civilizational ossification. For Runciman this process is most advanced in polities like Greece and Japan. They are not dead but caught, he argues, in a post-historic state, paralyzed by fiscal constraints and demographic decline.
At this point Runciman’s grand vision converges with that of Alexandre Kojève, another prophet of the end of history and the inspiration for Francis Fukuyama’s now notorious 1989 essay. Beyond biological metaphors, what these writers have in common is their intellectual and political posture. Rather than raging against the dying of the light, Runciman, like Spengler and Kojève, invites us to adopt a stance of disillusioned realism. If we can see the decline of democratic polities all around us and can diagnose the multiple causes of their eventual demise, that does not excuse us from the responsibility to make them work until the bitter end. This is Runciman’s way of saying that “there is no alternative” to liberal democracy.
Democracy has long been the benchmark of Westernization. Talk of a crisis in democracy has relevance precisely because the rise of the Chinese economy under Communist Party leadership puts that benchmark in question. Runciman is stoical. He ends his book with an imaginative projection of the future: Monday, January 20, 2053, the inauguration of President Li, who succeeds the controversial President Chan-Zuckerberg. Due to climate change, Washington, D.C., is now balmy in January. The Democrats and the Republicans are still around, but the party system is in disarray, as it has been for decades. Congress is deadlocked. The dollar is worthless. Li’s ties to China are an open secret, but Americans are far beyond caring. In any case, he no longer controls the nuclear codes. But the flag still flies and the inaugural speech is predictable: “He reminded his audience that the United States of America was, first and foremost, still a democracy. It always would be.” As Li leaves the stage, one of his predecessors is heard to remark, “He protests too much.”
How is this fantasy meant? Presumably less as a deterministic prediction than as a provocative thought experiment. And it succeeds in posing the most pressing question of the present. Assuming current trends continue, will America accept its relative decline with equanimity? The concern must surely be that Runciman’s vision of a passive America is in fact overly optimistic. In a perspicacious Op-Ed, Larry Summers recently asked, “Can the US imagine a global system in 2050 in which its economy is half the size of the world’s largest? Even if we can imagine it, could a political leader acknowledge that reality in a way that permits negotiation over what such a world would look like?”5
Trump has responded to that question in his characteristic belligerent and petulant manner, launching an ill-conceived trade war. But on this policy, at least, he is not alone. Across the American political spectrum, if there is agreement on anything, it is on the need for a firmer line against China. Rather than the stoical acceptance of a new reality suggested by Runciman’s scenario, is not the more likely outcome a reconfiguration of American democracy like the one that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, when the executive branch was given unprecedented power to confront external foes? The risks in a confrontation with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were enormous. By comparison, our troubles with Putin’s Russia are trivial. The perils of a new cold war with China will not be.
1
“Normcore,”Dissent, Summer 2018. ↩
2
“The Philosophers and the American Left,”Tablet, November 25, 2018. ↩
3
“Hannah Arendt’s Answer to Paul Berman on the Contemporary American Left,”Tablet, December 6, 2018. ↩
4
See Sophie Pinkham, “Zombie History; Timothy Snyder’s Bleak Vision of the Past and Present,”The Nation, May 3, 2018. ↩
5
“Washington May Bluster but Cannot Stifle the Chinese Economy,”Financial Times, December 3, 2018. ↩
In a 2012 essay on US president Lyndon Johnson’s Latin American foreign policy, historian Alan McPherson noted the lack of a full-length monograph on the topic. This is true no more, thanks to Thomas Tunstall Allcock. Thomas C. Mann focuses on both Johnson and Mann, who served first as Johnson’s chief Latin American adviser in the State Department, and then as undersecretary of state for economic affairs. Tunstall Allcock succeeds at synthesizing existing literature on the Johnson/Mann years with new findings gleaned from extensive primary source research. In contrast to McPherson’s contention that Johnson was a transitional president on Latin American policy between President John Kennedy’s sunny optimism and emphasis on development and Richard Nixon’s more realistic, cynical approach, Tunstall Allcock argues that Johnson and Mann continued Kennedy’s policies, infusing them with a mix of ideas from the New Deal and Good Neighbor Policy, under which they came of age during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.[1]
Often directly addressing critics of Mann, Tunstall Allcock paints him as a staunch anticommunist concerned with maintaining US interests who “also favored sustainable aid programs and regional integration initiatives” (p. 3). This view dovetailed with Johnson’s, for whom Latin America held a lifelong interest. Though he contends Johnson’s record in the region is “mixed” (p. 4), Tunstall Allcock eschews the idea that the Johnson/Mann years were regressive and ineffective. Kennedy partisans who saw Johnson as an imposter president claimed Johnson and Mann abandoned Kennedy’s policies, particularly his Latin American-oriented Alliance for Progress. Tunstall Allcock shows, however, that the Johnson administration “wedded New Deal ideals, aspects of modernization thinking, and traditional summit diplomacy to propose a new direction for hemispheric affairs” (p. 7) while still maintaining the Alliance.
Tunstall Allcock provides a brief biography of Mann that expertly displays his ideological approach and how it not only lined up with Johnson’s, but differed little from Kennedy’s. The author shows how Mann’s pre-Johnson career combined constructive achievements with an overriding commitment to US hemispheric security that carried over into his work with Johnson. Mann grew up learning Spanish and practicing law, credentials that qualified him for many years of Latin American duty during his Foreign Service career. Starting as an adviser to the Uruguayan government during World War II, Mann tried to hew to the Good Neighbor policy of nonintervention as often as possible, while aiding Latin American economic development. In the late 1950s his conviction grew that more should be done to diversify regional economies to avoid either communist revolution or US intervention. It might seem natural that he would mold Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, but Mann was seen as a Dwight Eisenhower-era holdover and was thus instead dispatched to Mexico, where he was ambassador until Kennedy’s assassination.
Johnson inherited an Alliance that Tunstall Allcock argues was already teetering due to bureaucratic squabbles and myopia. While nominally set up as a multilateral development fund for Latin America, from an early date it was clear that the Alliance was not a multilateral institution, as its funding was controlled by an impatient Congress, which regularly slashed Kennedy’s foreign aid budget. Influential adviser Walt Rostow’s one-size-fits-all modernization theory also hampered the Alliance, influencing policymakers preconditioned to view Latin America as a homogeneous region. Already by Kennedy’s death a new push for private investment in Latin America was underway, along with a shift away from a preference toward democratic governments to more support for anticommunist dictatorships. That did not protect Johnson and Mann from the wrath of critics who felt the new president did not live up to the Alliance’s promise. Press coverage of their Latin American policy hit an early nadir with the March 18, 1964, “Mann Doctrine” speech, reported with the headline “U.S. May Abandon Efforts to Deter Latin Dictators” (p. 82). Although the Kennedy administration had recognized Guatemala’s military dictatorship and was providing $1 billion annually to Latin American militaries in counterinsurgency funds used for internal repression (p. 87), the Mann Doctrine made it seem as though Johnson’s team had regressed in the region.
At the same time, the administration badly handled rioting in the Panama Canal Zone and a military coup in Brazil. In Panama, although Tunstall Allcock contends that “the skill and flexibility with which Johnson and Mann would steer the crisis to a satisfactory conclusion would be impressive” (p. 91), the United States was committed to security above all else. Reports that Johnson was ready to invade Panama if its government collapsed amid the rioting, combined with press leaks of contradictory early reports on the progress of talks between the US and Panamanian governments, suggested that Johnson and Mann did not have a clear strategy. In Brazil, Johnson welcomed General Humberto Castelo Branco when he was installed as president, believing military rule would be temporary. Short-term economic prosperity—fueled in part by Alliance aid—followed under a US-friendly regime. But Branco installed a repressive military dictatorship, confirming critics’ fears that dictatorships were acceptable to the Johnson administration. Tunstall Allcock counters that the coup was largely driven by domestic Brazilian factors. To the extent that the United States played a role, Kennedy’s CIA funded Brazilian state governors who opposed former president Joào Goulart. But he also notes that because Johnson hastily expressed public support for Branco, he limited US ability to restrain the military in the future, while providing “those looking for evidence that US support for democracy in the hemisphere was dead and buried … with a perfect example” (p. 115).
The 1965 US intervention in the Dominican Republic is oft-examined by historians of Johnson’s Latin American policy, but Tunstall Allcock adds a useful analysis. Johnson intervened in the civil war between military leaders and rebel supporters of the ousted president Juan Bosch because “domestic pressures and global credibility outweighed the importance of continuing to rebuild his administration’s reputation in Latin America” (p. 148). Mann contended the intervention was “self-defense” (p. 150), arguing that subversion by nonstate actors, even if it appeared to be in the name of a domestic revolution, justified US intervention. What was really nothing more than a civil war “was quickly subsumed into dominant Cold War paradigms” built on shaky justifications (p. 152). Tunstall Allcock adds a discussion of Mann’s visit to Santo Domingo to urge the warring sides to negotiate, arguing that he rejected a compromise plan hatched there by national security adviser McGeorge Bundy not because he favored military rule—as critics would later claim—but because he thought it was a bad plan that would lead to another coup or indefinite US occupation. He did himself no favors, however, in testimony to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright, by taking a hard-line anticommunist tack. Fulbright accused the Johnson administration of lying and overreacting, and thus it was amid the Dominican crisis that the credibility gap opened which consumed the Johnson presidency. Even the triumph of Joaquín Balaguer over Bosch in fresh elections in 1966 involved deceit, as Johnson and Mann funneled CIA support to Balaguer. The author urges the reader to see Johnson as more than just an imperialist, that the president and Mann tried to hew a middle way between communism and a return to military rule. In the end, though, the Cold War security doctrine came first, and Tunstall Allcock rightly concludes that the Dominican crisis was disastrous for all parties.
If Tunstall Allcock’s focus on Mann is one of this book’s unique contributions to the historiography of Johnson in Latin America, the other is his analysis of Johnson’s post-Dominican inter-American policy: from 1965 to 1968, he contends Johnson was more engaged in Latin America than is commonly believed. At a conference in Rio de Janeiro in November 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk advocated for making some Alliance programs permanent. In 1967, Johnson—with behind-the-scenes support from the now-retired Mann—tried to make another big splash with a conference at Punta del Este, Uruguay. There Johnson pushed for multinational development projects and a hemispheric common market, and held bilateral meetings with Latin American leaders. In 1968, the United States achieved a coffee-price stabilization agreement Mann had long hoped for, and in July the president visited Central American leaders in El Salvador. These heads of state worried, though, that the US commitment to the Alliance was tenuous, and they were correct, as Congress slashed Johnson’s final Alliance aid request in half. Even so, Tunstall Allcock emphasizes that Johnson’s efforts “reflect a genuine, if flawed, attempt by a beleaguered administration to breathe some life back into” the Alliance (p. 203).
A continued emphasis on security over development stunted the Alliance in the Johnson administration’s waning years. Tunstall Allcock believes the United States invited the 1966 military coup against Argentine president Arturo Illia through its policy of orienting Latin American militaries away from external defense and toward rooting out internal subversion. When the Peruvian military deposed President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Johnson suspended diplomatic relations only temporarily. When Omar Torrijos seized power in Panama, Mann advised Johnson to extend recognition after a brief delay, not wanting to jeopardize the Panama Canal renegotiations he had painstakingly started in 1964. In the end, for Johnson, “Latin America had proved another frustrating foreign policy challenge” (p. 212), representing “the last significant effort of an era characterized by the belief that the United States could further its own interests by encouraging Latin American modernization and economic development through various forms of aid and assistance” (p. 214). As his successor, Richard Nixon, stated bluntly: “Latin America doesn’t matter” (p. 214).
Thomas C. Mann is an enjoyable and informative read. In just 220 pages—many adorned with excellent illustrations—Tunstall Allcock provides broad and deep coverage, putting his own spin on well-worn historiographical turf, while highlighting Johnson and Mann’s hemisphere-wide strategy. Although Tunstall Allcock is sympathetic to his subjects, he is hardly a gadfly revisionist. The argument is carefully crafted and often repeated, emphasizing that while Johnson and Mann were more committed to the Alliance than their critics believed, they should still be taken to task for their shortcomings. Tunstall Allcock also does well to acknowledge other Latin American historians as his Beltway-centered work often draws on their multi-archival scholarship. The book also points toward exciting new directions in the literature of Johnson and Latin America. For instance, Tunstall Allcock analyzes Mann’s professional background and Latin American policy, but does not offer a comprehensive biography. In an era in which most prominent State Department employees are political appointees, a work highlighting a career Foreign Service officer would be welcome. More also needs to be written on the Johnson administration’s Latin American interventions beyond Panama, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. The Johnson team’s failure to prevent a military coup in Argentina, in particular, bears closer inspection, as it triggered economic instability, civil war, and brutal military rule that vexed Americans and Argentines for nearly two decades. Dustin Walcher’s forthcoming manuscript will hopefully close this gap, but as Tunstall Allcock’s all-too-brief discussions of Bolivia and Peru demonstrate, others remain.[2]
In all, Tunstall Allcock has crafted an excellent monograph that should be required reading for Johnson and foreign relations scholars. It is also timely, as President Donald Trump becomes further embroiled in Latin America. His support for Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó, on the one hand, harkens to earlier visions Washington once held for hemispheric uplift. On the other hand, Trump’s divisive anti-immigration rhetoric, mainly projected toward Mexico and Central America, reminds us of the legacy of Cold War-era presidential administrations that US security should matter above all else. Even with all the inter-American changes since the end of the Cold War, that doctrine—whether named for Mann, Johnson, or even Trump—has remained.
Notes
[1]. Alan MacPherson, “Latin America,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, ed. Mitchell B. Lerner (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 400.
[2]. See David M.K. Sheinin, Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Dustin Walcher, Containing Social Revolution: Argentina and the International Liberal Order, 1955-1969 (book manuscript in preparation).
Chris Foss is an adjunct history professor at the University of Portland and Tokyo International University of America. Foss received his PhD in US foreign relations history from the University of Colorado in 2016. His book manuscript, Facing the World: National Security and International Trade in the Pacific Northwest since World War II, will be published by Oregon State University Press in spring 2020. Foss has written for Oregon Historical Quarterly, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Passport, The History Teacher, and Oregon Encyclopedia. Foss is researching a manuscript on Edith Green, who represented Oregon’s Third Congressional District from 1955 to 1974.
Citation:Chris Foss. Review of Allcock, Thomas Tunstall,Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2019.URL:http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53794
Bolivar Lamounier retraça a trajetória prática do patrimonialismo brasileiro, cuja primeira reconstrução teórica-histórica foi feita por Raymundo Faoro, por ironia da História um dos fundadores do PT, justamente o partido que transformou o patrimonialismo parcialmente modernizado na era Vargas em um patrimonialismo gangsterista. Estou seguro que se vivo fosse ele teria se alinhado com Hélio Bicudo, outro fundador do PT, na apresentação do pedido de impeachment contra a organização criminosa em se transformou o PT.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
A política brasileira entre dois passados
Somos um país sem elites autônomas, sem classe média e sem partidos políticos
BOLÍVAR LAMOUNIER*, O Estado de S.Paulo
18 de maio de 2019 | 05h00
Em 1958, quando publicou Os Donos do Poder (Editora Globo), mestre Raymundo Faoro introduziu o conceito de patrimonialismo, estabelecendo por meio dele a mais clássica das clássicas interpretações da História brasileira.
Mas, parafraseando Ortega y Gasset, podemos dizer que toda grande obra é ela mesma e sua circunstância. Nós, leitores preguiçosos, lemos o título e deixamos de lado o subtítulo do livro. Neste – Formação do Patronato Político Brasileiro – Faoro esclareceu melhor o sentido de seu trabalho. O Estado patrimonialista deitava raízes na era medieval portuguesa, mas Faoro quis manter a dignidade do substantivo formação. Nós, imbuídos da ideologia desenvolvimentista que à época emergia com todo o vigor, não quisemos perceber o paradoxo que o grande historiador gaúcho ali deixara, de caso pensado. Otimistas, só queríamos pensar no futuro e acreditávamos piamente que a industrialização liquidaria todos os resquícios do passado colonial. Portanto, o próprio patrimonialismo haveria de fenecer naturalmente. Morreria de morte morrida logo que as chaminés das fábricas de São Paulo enchessem o céu com sua espessa fumaça. Não nos passou pela cabeça que o Estado patrimonialista era uma estrutura poderosa, capaz de resistir a pressões contrárias à sua índole.
De nossa incapacidade de perceber a resiliência do patrimonialismo decorreram vários equívocos, o mais óbvio dos quais é que ele simplesmente se recusou a morrer. Está aí, perceptível a olho nu, agigantado e cada vez mais forte. Seu hábitat natural é, obviamente, Brasília, onde, sem dificuldade alguma, seus tentáculos sufocam e interligam os três Poderes. Estado patrimonialista, uma estrutura que vive em função de si mesma, que persegue os objetivos que ela mesmo escolhe, e o faz distribuindo o grosso da riqueza e as melhores oportunidades de ganho entre os “amigos do rei”. É certo que admite novatos, mas por cooptação, não como protagonistas autônomos, como bem explicou Simon Schwartzman no também clássico Bases do Autoritarismo Brasileiro(Editora da Unicamp).
Do equívoco que acima enunciei no atacado, penso que três outros merecem ser abordados no varejo: somos um país sem elites autônomas, sem classe média e sem partidos políticos.
Teríamos elites autônomas se as tivéssemos fora do Estado, capazes de balizar as ações do núcleo estatal, impelindo-o a levar mais em conta o que, para abreviar, chamarei de bem comum. Os poderosos “de dentro do Estado” obviamente não são elites no sentido que acabo de definir; são o próprio Estado, os amigos do rei, vale dizer, de si mesmos. Os que não se deixam balizar por nenhum poder externo, pois detêm em caráter privativo a função de balizar a sociedade, de fixar e aplicar as normas, com a parcialidade que lhes parece adequada em relação a qualquer assunto e a cada conjuntura.
Do ponto de vista histórico, como aconteceu isso? Ora, sabemos todos que a grande atividade econômica do Brasil colonial era a lavoura canavieira. O consórcio colonial luso-brasileiro deteve o monopólio mundial do produto até meados do século 17. Começou a perdê-lo com a invasão holandesa, iniciada em 1624. Expulsos, entre 1654 e 1661, os holandeses pegaram seus volumosos capitais, a técnica dos engenhos e o respaldo da Holanda, então a rainha dos mares, e foram para a América Central, de onde, num abrir e fechar de olhos, destruíram a hegemonia luso-brasileira. Rápida no gatilho, a camada dominante da lavoura açucareira percebeu que dali em diante sua sobrevivência dependeria mais da política que da economia. E pulou para dentro do Estado, onde até hoje se encontra.
Algo semelhante, mas em menor escala, ocorreu com a extração do ouro e dos diamantes em Minas Gerais, mas o caso verdadeiramente instrutivo é o da cafeicultura paulista. Tendo viabilizado a passagem do trabalho escravo ao assalariado, ela também deteve por algum tempo um quase monopólio do mercado mundial do produto. Não menos importante, como esclareceu Celso Furtado, ela permitiu o surgimento de uma elite muito mais qualificada, capaz de pensar grande e de operar com tirocínio no mercado internacional. Mas a História se repetiu, embora por outros caminhos. A superprodução e a competição internacional não tardaram a aparecer e a brilhante elite cafeicultora o que fez? Reuniu-se em Taubaté, em 1906, e pleiteou também seu lugarzinho no colo do Estado. Nos primórdios da industrialização, a elite nem precisou pleitear nada, pois já nasceu aconchegada na estrutura corporativista montada por Getúlio Vargas, encaixando-se no sindicalismo de empregadores.
Demonstrar que tampouco dispomos de uma classe média capaz de sobreviver com os rendimentos da pequena empresa ou de empregos de boa qualidade é uma tarefa bem mais simples. Poucos anos atrás trombeteamos muito o surgimento de uma “nova classe média”, não nos dando conta de que toda série numérica pode ser subdividida em quantas subséries quisermos, e uma delas será “média”. Uma pena que os limites mínimo e máximo de tal subsérie eram constrangedoramente baixos. Nada que ver com uma classe média numerosa, robusta e autônoma, e é por isso, evidentemente, que temos uma das piores distribuições de renda do mundo: nossa “classe média” é um conjunto vazio entre a pífia minoria que maneja o Estado patrimonialista e a massa de miseráveis à qual tal Estado nem uma escolarização decente proporciona.
E os partidos políticos? Ora, um partido político digno de tal designação tem como requisito fundamental a capacidade de se superpor a interesses demasiado estreitos, balizando-os no sentido do bem comum. Os nossos são incapazes de fazer isso porque no fundo eles não passam disto: são meros grupos de interesse, protagonistas do corporativismo desatinado a que nosso país chegou.
* BOLÍVAR LAMOUNIER É CIENTISTA POLÍTICO, SÓCIO-DIRETOR DA AUGURIUM CONSULTORIA, MEMBRO DA ACADEMIA PAULISTA DE LETRAS; É AUTOR DO LIVRO "DE ONDE, PARA ONDE – MEMÓRIAS" (EDITORA GLOBAL)
PS.: Onde Bolivar Lamounier se refere à América Central, no caso dos judeus empenhados na cultura do açucar, deve se ler, preferencialmente, Caribe.
