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quinta-feira, 9 de janeiro de 2020

Acordo de Helsinque e o fim da Guerra Fria: Book review Roundtable

H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-21 on The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War

Amazon.com presentation: 

 The first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War
The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation across the Iron Curtain. The Final Act is the first in-depth account of the diplomatic saga that produced this historic agreement. Drawing on research in eight countries and multiple languages, this gripping book explains the Final Act’s emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major players, and the conflicting designs for international order that animated the negotiations.
Helsinki had originally been a Soviet idea. But after nearly three years of grinding negotiations, the Final Act reflected liberal democratic ideals more than communist ones. It rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine, provided for German reunification, endorsed human rights as a core principle of international security, committed countries to greater transparency in economic and military affairs, and promoted the freer movement of people and information across borders. Instead of restoring the legitimacy of the Soviet bloc, Helsinki established principles that undermined it.
The definitive history of the origins and legacy of this important agreement, The Final Act shows how it served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War, and how, when that conflict finally came to a close, the great powers established a new international order based on Helsinki’s enduring principles.


Book review Roundtable: 
by George Fujii
H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-21
Michael Cotey Morgan.  The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.  ISBN:  9780691176062 (hardcover, $35.00/£30.00).
6 January 2020 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-21
Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Contents

Introduction by Vladislav Zubok, London School of Economics and Political Science
Michael Cotey Morgan has written a well-researched and important book that makes us revisit an unfinished discussion about the causes of enormous changes in Europe, from the Cold War divisions to the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet implosion. Morgan locates the starting point of all this in the Helsinki Final Act. In his view, the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is an event in European history that is comparable in significance to the Treaty of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna, and the Yalta conference. It marked the beginning of the erosion and crumbling of the Soviet Communist order and set Western liberal order on the track of unexpectedly quick victory.
The author’s ideas stem from historiography produced after Daniel Thomas published his book, The Helsinki Effect. The book is also a response to Sarah Snyder’s influential book on the “transnational network” of human rights activism that she claimed significantly contributed to the collapse of Communism.[1] “Helsinkiphilia” became almost a fad among theorists in International Relations, who tend to ascribe the end of the Cold War bipolarity to ideational and normative causes. Some of us, who grew up during the Cold War and under the hollow ideocracy of the Soviet regime, remain sceptical of this trend, particularly on the impact of non-government human rights activism. The recent return of power-politics and the crisis of the liberal international order substantiates this scepticism. In his book, Morgan is less ebullient than his predecessors. “The Helsinki Final Act,” he concludes, “did not cause the end of the Cold War…nor was the collapse of communism in Europe inevitable” (253). Still, the book in many ways remains loyal to the trend. One of Morgan’s major assumptions is that Communism fell and the Soviet Union dissolved to a great extent because of transportation and transplantation of Western ideas, norms, and concepts to Eastern Europe and into the minds of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his enlightened advisers (236-237). We will return to this assumption later.
The book addresses three questions: why was the CSCE created, why did the Final Act take the shape that it did, and how did it influence the Cold War? (4) In answering these questions, Morgan carried out impressive research: he worked in many archives in many European languages, encased his findings in an impressive historical framework, and articulates his concepts with nuance and clarity. The book elevates the almost-forgotten CSCE process to the major development that shaped European history and global international affairs. This process, Morgan claims, grew out of a massive crisis of legitimacy that shook the West and the East. It was, however, the Soviet side that was more active than Western side, and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev who set the process in motion. In a sense, the book argues, Brezhnev offered a deal to Western countries, one that involved reaching an ‘eternal peace’ with the Soviet Union, which would no longer be a revisionist power but instead would be a major stake-holder in an international order. This vision, if realized, could have led to a ‘one order, two systems’ combination.
Morgan considers this proposal to have been an illusion that was never really feasible. Yet it was this illusion, as his book demonstrates, that accounted for Soviet concessions, without which the Helsinki Final Act would have never taken its revisionist shape. Namely, it became a set of norms based on the non-use of force and on a strictly Western liberal interpretation of human rights inside sovereign states. After 1974 the U.S. government, which had initially been dismissive of the CSCE, supported the process. The West, acting as a team, then turned the Soviet proposal “into a tool for waging cold war by other means” (10) and ultimately into a weapon to undermine communist regimes. The Soviet leaders were deceived: instead of reaping the benefits of modernisation from rapprochement with the Western developed economies, they fell into a trap. In their search for an elusive and illusory partnership with the West, they accepted a set of Western-promoted norms of international legitimacy that directly threatened the Soviet geopolitical assets that had been conquered in 1945.
The H-Diplo roundtable discussion of the book, as should be expected, produces a gamut of opinions. Gottfried Niedhart read Morgan’s book through critical lenses. For him, Morgan clearly overrates the Helsinki effect as a single factor. The review challenges the book on its main conclusions to all three questions. First, Niedhart doubts that the CSCE was a response to a “crisis of legitimacy” in the West. Second, “there was no finality in the Final Act,” as it was not a milestone, but only an episode in the messy and complex process of European detente. Finally, there is no sufficient proof that the Final Act was a crucial factor in undermining Communist regimes or that it influenced Gorbachev when he consented to the reunification of Germany inside NATO in May-July 1990.
In contrast, James Cameron, Jonathan Hunt, and Rósa Magnúsdóttir admire the book without reservations. For Cameron it is a “perfectly balanced treatment of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act;” even “the 100-plus pages of footnotes is a joy in itself.” Hunt declares that Morgan “filled the residual ditch” in the historiography of the international human rights and claims that “the sheer breadth of archival research on display brings every individual spark into sharper relief.” Cameron and Hunt believe that Morgan’s research offers a final confirmation of the narrative that had been mapped out by Thomas and Snyder. Both reviewers credit Morgan with a discovery of how the Western countries translated the Soviet project of the European conference into “an almost complete victory for the West.” They do not mention the fact that this thesis was first advanced and explained by Richard Davy in a seminal article in 2009. [2]
Morgan’s praise for Western diplomatic victory in the CSCE process reads almost like a textbook explanation of the advantages that democratic free countries have over closed societies: free discussion and diversity brings out the best of creativity. In this account, Western allies outperformed the Soviets even in a quarter where authoritarians usually have a natural advantage: patience and perseverance (254). I wonder, however, how much of this praise is deserved? Or perhaps in this particular case the Western democracies had an unusually mellow opponent? Morgan and two of the reviewers dwell on the remarkable phenomenon of Soviet negotiating behaviour at the CSCE. It was not a usual Andrei Gromyko-style steadfast and dogged Soviet diplomacy. Brezhnev’s bizarre fixation on the success of the conference was linked to his search for domestic legitimacy, which was framed in terms of international agreements and treaties. As a result, Morgan writes, the Soviet leader “was reluctant to drag negotiations out” (255). This is an understatement: relentless pressure drove Brezhnev and his allies to produce a speedy conclusion of the conference. Cameron wonders why the authoritarian leader of the Communist regime “was willing to run far greater risks in his attempts to prove the Soviet regime’s domestic and international legitimacy than any leader of democratic West.” Hunt agrees that Brezhnev’s concessions left “fatal chinks in the Warsaw Pact’s armour,” using the words “poetic,” “ironic,” “perverse,” and “striking” in his description of the strange need of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union for Western legitimation. Perhaps, Hunt wonders, it was “the halting humanization of Soviet society after Stalin’s death” that explains this anomaly. He even concludes, in an echo of the thoughts of George Kennan, that “the seeds” of the fall of the Soviet Union were “planted over a decade before in ways that were quasi-intentional.”
Morgan does admit that he could not fully resolve this mystery and refers to the paradoxes of Soviet power in the 1970s. Apparently, he concludes, Brezhnev and his colleagues concluded that the Soviet Union had enough sovereignty and authoritarian controls to stave off external pressures. Morgan believes it was a failure of imagination and a failure of Brezhnev’s strategy. He quotes from Soviet recollections that even the KGB head Yuri Andropov supported the ratification of the Final Act. Andropov’s attitude should be fleshed out more, however. Andropov, as well as some Soviet diplomats, like the liberal-leaning negotiator in Geneva Anatoly Kovalev, wanted a new foreign policy to pave the way for domestic reforms. The principles of the Final Act were deliberately included into the new ‘Brezhnev’ Constitution of the Soviet Union (1977). The biggest problem, however, was how to synchronize the two currents of change: the idea of a new Europe and domestic Soviet reforms. Andropov was one of very few who saw the severity of the problem: Soviet state and society would not be prepared to handle greater openness and freedoms, as stipulated in the Final Act, for at least another decade (189).
Was the Final Act a force that planted the seeds for rapid Communist self-destruction? On this I would share some of Niedhart’s scepticism. The road from 1975 to 1985, and even from there to 1989, was fuzzier and messier than Morgan’s narrative suggests. If Brezhnev’s energy in peace-making had been coupled with reformist courage, the history of the Soviet Union and Europe might have proceeded differently. The Soviet failure to reap any economic benefits from ‘common European space’ should also be qualified: European détente made possible the construction of a massive and profitable system of oil and gas pipelines—a major achievement. Last but not least, the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev was the strangest accident in Soviet history. The last ten pages of the book includes a fast-moving summary of how Gorbachev used the Helsinki principles as a justification for dismantling of Stalinist structures and practices inside the Soviet state and society. In 1986-1987, apparently with Gorbachev’s consent, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze proposed to sceptical Western states the holding of a human rights conference in Moscow (244). Gorbachev argued with more conservative colleagues that in order to have a real détente with the West, one had to release dissidents, support glasnost, and open up Soviet society and economy.
Morgan, justifiably, sees this as validation of centrality of his subject. Yet he also acknowledges “a utopian element” in Gorbachev’s behaviour (240). It was the failure of Gorbachev’s strategy and his wrong-footed reforms—not the failure of Brezhnev’s strategy—that account for the rapid collapse of the Soviet outer and inner empire. Instead of preparing the Soviet people for a ‘shock of the global.’[3] Gorbachev’s policies magnified this shock, fatally destabilized the Soviet regime, and unleashed the forces that not only overthrew the already eroded Communism, but shattered to pieces the Soviet state. In a bittersweet irony of history, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) human rights conference did take place in Moscow in September 1991, yet it was the time when the Soviet Union was breaking up into fifteen independent states, and in most of them, not only political, but elementary economic rights and safety, could not be ensured or protected.
Morgan mentions China only a few times in the book. China, however, posits a challenge to the normative explanations for the fall of Communism. The Chinese Communist leadership always resisted—and resists even more today—the principles of international legitimacy based on the Final Act. The Chinese resistance to Western norms puts the turn of Brezhnev and Gorbachev in even sharper perspective. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the fact that Brezhnev and Soviet elites viewed themselves as Europeans and, in contrast to China, regarded a possible ‘return’ of the Soviet Union to a European concert of nations as historically natural. After all, Brezhnev’s pet project was a European conference, one which was in part aimed against China.
On the final pages of his book Morgan considers the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in November 1990 as the true end of the Cold War (253). Yet normative lenses were not the only one used at the time. The Bush Administration, acting in the spirit of superpower politics, deftly transformed the idea of a collective European security and liberal order into a U.S.-led global liberal order. In January 1992, George H.W. Bush declared in his State of the Union address: “The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the cold war…..A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America.” Bush praised generations of Americans who contributed to this victory. He did not mention the impact of Helsinki Final Act. [4]
To conclude, I agree with the reviewers that the book makes for an excellent and thought-provoking reading; it also gave an impetus to fascinating discussions. Morgan’s book enriches historical debates about the end of the Cold War. It cautions against a linear approach to the complex interrelationship between sovereignty, peace, security, and legitimacy in Europe and the world. Human rights liberalism, like all other “isms,” has peaked in its capacity to influence global affairs. The future that we face now may be less charitable than the history of 1975-91 in providing near-miraculous gifts to humanity.
Participants:
Michael Cotey Morgan is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received a BA from the University of Toronto, M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and Ph.D. from Yale University. He is the author of The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2018), and is currently writing a book on the geopolitics of information from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg.
Vladislav M.  Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His books include A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia(Belknap Press, 2009), and The Idea of Russia. The Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev (I.B. Tauris, 2017). He is currently finishing a book entitled “Russia Destroys the USSR.
James Cameron is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. An international historian, his work uses newly declassified documents to explore the lessons of the Cold War for today’s nuclear arms control regime. He is the author of The Double Game: The Demise of America’s First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Jonathan Hunt is a lecturer in modern global history at the University of Southampton, having received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. He is finishing a book on the international history of nuclear nonproliferation from the Manhattan Project to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. His edited volume, The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s, with Dr Simon Miles of Duke University, is under contract with Cornell University Press.
Gottfried Niedhart is professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Mannheim. He has published on English and German history and on the history of international relations mainly in the 20th century. His publications on East-West relations during the era of détente include (co-edited with Oliver Bange), Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe, (Berghahn Books 2008) and Entspannung in Europa. Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Warschauer Pakt 1966 bis 1975 (Oldenbourg Verlag 2014). Together with Oliver Bange he organised a research project on the CSCE, the German question, and the Warsaw Pact, which was published in a special issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies 18:3 (2016).
Rósa Magnúsdóttir is Associate Professor of History at Aarhus University in Denmark and most recently the author of Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford University Press, 2019) and coeditor (with Óscar J. Martín Garcia) of Machineries of Persuasion: European Soft Power and Public Diplomacy during the Cold War (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019). Her research covers the cultural Cold War quite broadly, though with a focus on transnational exchanges. She is currently writing a couples-biography about Icelandic Communists and has started a new project on Soviet-American intermarriage during the Cold War.


Review by James Cameron, King’s College, London
Once seen as a decade of stasis and decline, the 1970s is now viewed as a period of transition, during which the old certainties of the early Cold War were challenged and new centers of power began to emerge.[5] While neither witnessing nor preordaining the transformative upheavals that would mark the later 1980s and early 1990s, the economic, political, and ideological reconfigurations of the 1970s in many ways laid the groundwork for them. Michael Cotey Morgan’s richly sourced, judiciously argued, and perfectly balanced treatment of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act is an outstanding contribution to this literature that deserves a wide readership among historians of the Cold War, members of the public, as well as contemporary policymakers struggling to wrest control of today’s myriad crises.
The Helsinki Accords were the work of many hands. One of the most impressive aspects of The Final Act is the way in which Morgan threads together the motivations and strategies of a broad range of states from both sides of the Iron Curtain. This is an extremely difficult task given the logistical and linguistic hurdles involved, and Morgan should be praised for crafting a truly balanced account, with Soviet and East European voices sharing equal space with their Western counterparts. Morgan brings the Warsaw Pact participants to life with telling quotations from Communist archives. Mining the 100-plus pages of footnotes is a joy in itself.
Whereas previous scholars have focused on various aspects of the Helsinki Accords, Morgan’s work tackles the conference and the resulting agreement “in the round” (5).[6] The Final Act examines the negotiation of all three of the Accords’ main issue areas, or ‘baskets’ as they were known in conference jargon: security, economic and scientific cooperation, and humanitarian issues. Morgan agrees with the established view that the most significant areas of the agreement were Baskets One and Three. Unlike some of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (CSCE) critics then and since, Morgan argues that Basket One’s provisions on borders did not in fact legitimize the permanent division of Germany and Europe, but instead established rules by which international boundaries could be changed. Morgan agrees with scholars such as Sarah B. Snyder and Daniel C. Thomas that the Helsinki Accords’ clauses on human rights provided inspiration and opened space for a transnational network of activists, and eventually General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, to push for the transformation of Soviet and East European domestic politics.[7]
As Morgan notes, in its final form the Final Act represented an almost complete victory for the West. Even before Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy in Moscow, Western governments, as well as activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, used the human rights and other provisions to keep Communist regimes on the back foot. Yet the conference was Moscow’s idea, championed by none other than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, crusher of the Prague Spring and promulgator of the doctrine that asserted the right of the USSR to unilaterally intervene in Eastern Europe to enforce Soviet-style socialism. Even as the more dangerous aspects of the Helsinki Accords became clearer during the negotiations, the Warsaw Pact stuck with the CSCE – the Kremlin even pressing for the rapid conclusion of the conference. With hindsight this chain of events seems inexplicable. Morgan’s most important contribution is the judicious way in which he unravels this mystery.
For Morgan, the key issue motivating the negotiation of the Helsinki Accords was legitimacy. The 1960s saw a widespread crisis of legitimacy that transcended the Cold War divide. Internationally, both the United States and the Soviet Union had to contend with newly restive allies that demanded greater autonomy from their respective superpower sponsors. Gaullism and the Prague Spring were the most high-profile manifestations, but Morgan shows how widespread this desire was. In response to Polish requests to democratize the organization’s military structure,  Marshal Ivan Konev asked, “What do you imagine? That we would make some kind of NATO here?” (28). Yet Morgan shows that the Soviet political leadership took these challenges seriously. On the home front, the United States reeled from the fallout of Vietnam, while economic growth slowed in both East and West. People questioned Cold-War orthodoxy on both sides, and the post-war economic boom that had underpinned governments’ claims to domestic legitimacy seemed to be running out of steam.
Leaders of many various political stripes grasped for East-West détente as one means to resolve their difficulties, but Morgan underlines how different their conceptions of that process were. While President Richard Nixon and Brezhnev shared a focus on stability built on a balance of power, the West European leaders, French President Georges Pompidou and German Chancellor Willy Brandt, placed greater emphasis on trade and human contacts as a way to “overcome” the Cold War (51). Brezhnev revived an old Soviet proposal for a European security conference as the cornerstone of his Peace Program, designed to legitimize the post-war map of Europe, but Morgan shows how the final shape of the Conference was the result of a great deal of pushing and pulling, both between the Soviets and Western governments as well as within NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Morgan argues that it was the West’s ability to encompass a greater diversity of viewpoints that ultimately gave it a decisive edge. The Nixon and Ford administrations may have denigrated the West Europeans’ insistence on human rights issues in private, but by and large Washington let them press their claims—in part because the U.S. saw the Conference as of only marginal significance compared to issues such as triangular diplomacy and arms control. The Soviet Union exerted more sway over the Warsaw Pact, relying on negotiating tactics that had served it well in bilateral superpower forums with the West such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—principally an unyielding adherence to a position in the hope of wearing the other side down. However, it was the Soviet negotiators, under pressure from an impatient Kremlin, who eventually yielded in the face of a generally united Western front on fundamental matters of principle such as the qualified nature of sovereignty, the changeability of borders through peaceful means, the importance of human rights, and a series of related issues, including the freer flow of information, foreign travel, and emigration. Moscow did attempt to “defang” the West European position on human contacts in concert with the United States and Finland, but the effort rendered meagre results (182).
Why did the Soviets press ahead, even as the conference turned against them? Morgan points to several factors. Brezhnev had invested a vast amount of his political capital in a successful outcome, sending some of the Soviet Union’s most senior diplomats to the talks whereas Western states often dispatched relatively junior officials. The CSCE was intended to be the capstone of Brezhnev’s Peace Program, cementing the territorial results of the Great Patriotic War, which itself was in the process of being turned into a touchstone of the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Failure to secure agreement would have been a huge blow to Brezhnev’s standing within the Soviet elite, as well as his legacy as a peacemaker. Some of Brezhnev’s advisors encouraged their boss to press ahead, believing that the liberal principles embodied in the Final Act would push the USSR to revive the regime through controlled political reform.
Brezhnev also calculated that the Soviet government would be able to contain the consequences of Helsinki, using its monopoly on official media to push a narrative that emphasized the Final Act’s affirmation of sovereignty and inviolability of borders at the expense of human rights. Soviet reaction to Western criticism was to hug the Act closer, incorporating the principles guiding relations between signatories into the country’s 1977 constitution. “Notwithstanding the barrage of foreign and domestic criticism,” Morgan argues, “the Kremlin still relied on the Final Act as an indispensable tool for bolstering its legitimacy” (226). The reader is left with the impression that Brezhnev was willing to run far greater risks in his attempts to prove the Soviet regime’s domestic and international legitimacy than any Western leader. Inextricably linked to this legitimacy campaign, the Helsinki Final Act played a more important role in Soviet politics than it did in any capitalist country.
Under pressure from both governments and new non-governmental organizations, the Brezhnev regime nevertheless stuck to its interpretation of the Act. The key shift came with Gorbachev, whom Morgan portrays as embracing the Western conception of the Act through the political liberalization of glasnost and New Thinking’s emphasis on common security. Yet The Final Act shows that disagreements over the interpretation of Helsinki persisted until the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev argued against the rapid reunification of Germany on a Western basis, proposing a pan-European approach that he argued was more in keeping with the spirit of the CSCE. Moscow eventually acquiesced, however, to the East Germans’ right to self-determination and the peaceful change of borders.
Morgan sees the 1990 Paris Charter, which affirmed the Western interpretation of Helsinki, along with the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, and the reunification of Germany, as providing the basis for “a single international [post-Cold War] order” (253). Morgan mentions Russia’s turn away from this consensus in the years following 1991, but the book’s conclusion left this reviewer wondering about the broader post-Cold War failure to build a robust pan-European security architecture. Gorbachev hoped that the CSCE could serve as the basis of a new organization that could supersede NATO and the Warsaw Pact, or at least subordinate them to a new structure, but Morgan shows how resistant the United States and others were to any limits on NATO’s autonomy. Russian President Boris Yeltsin continued to press his own version of Gorbachev’s vision in the 1990s, with the same meagre results. The CSCE became the OSCE, but its influence remains limited. A truly pan-European security organization with significant powers might well have been unworkable, but nevertheless we feel its lack today. Russian actions in Ukraine delivered a major blow to the Final Act, including its provision on the inviolability of frontiers. Instead of a common security space we face a newly divided Europe, in which the limits of each side’s sphere of influence are tested in ways reminiscent of the Cold War. At the same time, many states are facing new crises of legitimacy, often fueled by a backlash against some of the liberal principles embodied in the Final Act. Morgan’s excellent book offers today’s policymakers an instructive tale of how leaders in the midst of upheaval grasped an opportunity to stabilize the international system and lay the groundwork for a better world.


Review by Jonathan Hunt, University of Southampton
In her 2006 American Historical Association Presidential Address, Linda Kerber declared us “all historians of human rights.”[8] In the thirteen years since, what had been a budding field has flowered fully, with a wellspring of monographs, articles, speeches, interventions, and provocations replotting the gardens of privileges and immunities commonly avowed to belong to every human being by birthright. Along the way, the field has transformed from a self-congratulatory epic of self-evident rights expanding in concert with the mediated empathy found in modern novels and the legal tenets in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), to a more modest tale about the rise of human rights activism in the 1970s, when lost Cold War utopias gave way to a ‘last utopia’ best exemplified by Amnesty International’s crusade against torture, cruel and usual punishments, and arbitrary arrest and detention.
Michael Cotey Morgan’s The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War fills in a residual ditch in the field: how thirty-five European and North American delegations negotiated over the course of six years, thousands of meetings, and a small forest of paperwork to produce the pièce de résistance of European détente—the Helsinki Final Act—which carved Western notions of civil and political rights into the constitution of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). To establish the scale of Morgan’s achievement is to describe the complexity of the diplomatic proceedings that he recounts. The text of the Final Act alone ran to 22,000 words, while heads of state and of government who trekked to the Finnish capital on 29 July 1975, numbered such that the host city and government were nearly overwhelmed by the pageantry.
Morgan reaches back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and the 1815 Congress of Vienna for summits of like pomp, circumstance, and moment. Yet the company is as striking for its contrasts as for its commonalities. The Helsinki Final Act’s most original features, after all, were the normative commitments these two precursors (hobby horses of classical realist) left largely unspecified. If each of these pan-European parleys were, at bottom, struggles “over the constitutive principles of international order and legitimacy” (6), the Helsinki process is most noteworthy for how it elevated universal principles predicated on individual dignity and fulfillment into measuring sticks for all organized European societies.
Morgan is a consummate chronicler of relations between the capitalist and Communist worlds, as well as within them. While the friction within each geo-ideological bloc will surprise few scholars of Cold War détente, the sheer breadth of archival research on display brings every individual spark into sharper relief. The Final Act is international history at its boldest – multi-archival, -lingual, and -national—even if it is primarily preoccupied with European affairs, apart from a sizeable digression into the People’s Republic of China’s economic approach to East-West interdependence. It is to this work’s credit that statesmen as (self)-important as U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with their archly conservative notion of superpower-led détente, serve as potential spoilers rather than as self-anointed saviours of the negotiations.
On the contrary, it was the transformative agendas adopted by West German chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, British Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and French presidents George Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing that triumphed in Helsinki. Morgan evaluates trans-Atlantic relations within the context of European integration (in all its vicissitudes) and Brandt’s Ostpolitik, with the divided German nation at the broken continent’s heart.
Morgan’s presentation of the dynamics at work in the Eastern bloc, in which Soviet leaders could shape but never dictate policy, is just as commanding. In his telling, the Helsinki process unfolded against crises of legitimacy across the industrial “North” and an international economic reckoning, brought on by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system as well as the oil weapon in Persian Gulf hands. The talks in Helsinki and Geneva were therefore complexly ‘two-level games,’ with negotiators and their bosses, including the undemocratic attendees, profoundly mindful of how the fruits of their labours would be consumed by their home audiences.
The CSCE would never have met without Leonid Brezhnev’s enthusiastic sponsorship. Morgan injects color into the grey hues in which the Soviet general secretary is typically painted. In place of Brezhnev’s vanity and insecurity, Morgan highlights the origins of his commitment to peace in the continental slaughterhouse of the Great Patriotic War. His investment in peace talks that he hoped would cement Europe’s post-1945 borders led to concession after concession to Western demands, leaving fatal chinks in the Warsaw Pact’s armour. NATO may have forsworn military rollback in the talks, but the potential for internal dissent to redraw Europe’s maps and alliances was another matter altogether. In a bid to “reap the rewards of globalization” (11), which East European governments hoped would modernize their economies, Brezhnev and his comrades effectively dug their own graves, as Western investment would leave them in hock to investment banks once the ‘Volcker Shock’ turned United States Treasury bonds into magnets for global investment in the 1980s.
The Final Act should be judged not only against the vast literature on the North American and European experience of the Cold War, to which it makes a signal contribution. The Helsinki Final Act was insufficient for bringing the Cold War to an end. For decades hence, graduate seminars will debate its necessity, and Morgan’s authoritative work will serve as a new touchstone for debates about how soft power and normative influences catalysed the revolutionary convulsions from which a new world order would arise after 1989.
But scholars must also think about where this congress of Helsinki fits into our narratives of a half-century of human rights work and neoliberal globalization. The status of human rights in the final document was as often implicit as explicit. The sub-section affirming “[r]espect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief” mirrored kindred articles in the UDHR. Brezhnev consented to them even though the Soviet Union and its partners—Belorussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia—had long abstained from adhering to the non-binding UDHR.
Even more interesting, the UDHR’s follow-ons, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) which were adopted in 1966 and ratified by the Soviet Union in 1973 (at the behest of chief Soviet negotiator Anatoly Kovalev) entered into force one year after the Helsinki Final Act, in 1976. Given that these covenants reflected divergent liberal and socialist rights packages, which had forced the United Nations to split the post-UDHR proceedings in two in the first place, it is surprising that Kovalev and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would not have worked harder to incorporate elements of the CESCR into the Helsinki Final Act, at least as poison pills with which to parry Western demands for the inclusion of major elements of the rival civil and political rights covenant. I and others eagerly await Francine Hirsch’s forthcoming book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A Cold War Story, to flesh out the history of how the Eastern bloc engaged with new formulae in international law: crimes against humanity, genocide, and human rights. Further work is needed on how the Soviet Union and its allies conceived of and pursued their conceptions of basic rights, duties, and imperatives in international fora.
It appears poetic that the idealism of Marxist-Leninism and the halting humanization of Soviet society after Stalin’s death led Brezhnev and his diplomats to value a peace of legally inviolable borders more highly than Moscow’s longstanding reluctance to adhere to norm-based covenants. It is ironic that for however much anti-Communists like Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs Richard Perle or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger disparaged the idea of trusting Moscow enough to verify arms pacts in the 1980s, the Kremlin vested considerable significance in international law. It is perverse that when Soviet diplomats accepted that borders would be ‘inviolable’ rather than ‘immutable,’ they in essence repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had sanctioned armed intervention whenever a Warsaw Pact member strayed from Marxist-Leninism’s primrose path.
It is striking that political, civil, and religious freedoms proved so deeply corrosive for one-party, central-planned empires and nation-states in the 1970s and 1980s. Where Samuel Moyn’s recent Not Enough maintains that the florescence of human rights in the 1970s obligingly dovetailed with a state-change in the relationship between states and markets as neoliberal practices went global after 1971, Morgan’s work suggests not one, but two parallel processes, at least in the Eastern bloc. The first was the increasing humaneness of Soviet-style Communism. The most surprising character in this narrative is Kovalev, who saw the Helsinki process as a means “to reform the Soviet Union and humanize the socialist system” (255). He found willing ears in Mikhail Gorbachev and his circle of cosmopolitan reformer socialists. This indicates that Gorbachev’s ‘new political thinking’ had already been set in motion by the time the future general secretary arrived in Moscow from Stavropol in 1974. For all that was unforeseen in the fall of the Soviet Union, the seeds of glasnost, perestroika, democratization, human rights, and demilitarization had been planted over a decade before in ways that were quasi-intentional.
The second is how we think about human rights in conjunction to human capacities. In the modern world of information overload and choice tyrannies, it’s easy to forget the virtues of open societies, Henri Bergson’s famous distinction, elaborated by Karl Popper, between societies closed to iconoclasm and those in which individual shoulders bear primary responsibility for ethical choices.[9] (We hear echoes of this in The Final Act’s Chapter Six, “The Closed Society and Its Enemies”). One can read human rights narrowly, as Moyn and other critics are wont to do. Or one can read human rights as a subset of liberal doctrines, in which case such a distinction falls away. The Helsinki Final Act’s humanitarian clauses aimed to enhance cultural exchange, information sharing, trade relations, and travel and emigration opportunities, with a view toward building human capacity throughout the Eastern bloc and Europe more broadly. The Final Act offers a view of human rights as a cornerstone of the liberal tradition and implies that liberal norms helped transform Eastern Europe and Russia for the better. Those messages can no longer be taken for granted, if it ever could. No matter one’s views on historical objectivity or liberalism’s fate in the Age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, today, the liberal tradition can use all the bold, judicious champions it can find.


Review by Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Aarhus University
The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War is a truly international history of the process that led to the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 and its aftermath.[10] The Helsinki Accords were the outcome of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); in the book, Morgan analyzes the process which was initiated by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, negotiated for almost three years by hundreds of diplomats, and finally signed by thirty-five European, Soviet, and North American heads of state. The Final Act debunks the many myths and simplifications about the Helsinki agreement that have surrounded it since 1975 and is an extremely valuable contribution in the current reevaluation of the late Cold War.
The book is organized chronologically around three main questions: “Why was the CSCE created in the first place? Why did the Final Act take the shape that it did? And how did it influence the Cold War?” (4). Morgan argues that while the CSCE’s significance was underestimated at the time, the Final Act proved very consequential for Europe and its place in the international system, and that the 1975 Helsinki Summit should therefore claim its prominence as the successor to the 1815 Congress of Vienna or the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This emphasis on the importance of the CSCE and the resulting European order also elevates the West and the role some key Western actors, such as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, French President Georges Pompidou, and U.S. President Richard Nixon, played in the process but Leonid Brezhnev is also in the midst of the narrative, which takes into account the context of the Cold War.
One of the most astonishing thing about the Helsinki process is how many diverse actors were involved. The dominant actors were the United States and the Soviet Union, but the dividing Iron Curtain did not govern the process. Morgan does a great job of showing how the hundreds of diplomats involved in negotiating the process could advance and retreat at different points in time; indeed it comes out very clearly how diplomatic the process actually was. The preparatory talks took longer than anyone had suspected, with delegations arriving in Geneva in September 1973 and completing their work in July 1975. Chapter 4, “The Meaning of Security,” discusses the workload, bureaucracy, tactics, personalities and brings out “the mixture of tedium and exhilaration that characterized life at the CSCE” (114). The Western media was not very interested in the preparatory talks but the Soviet and Eastern bloc media, as instructed from above, discussed the overall process in a positive light, criticizing the “Western governments for demanding too much” (112). The Soviet delegation in Geneva was by far the largest one, with Anatoly Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they “would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise” (113). 
By focusing on all the different actors involved, Morgan debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much “every significant point,” (5) no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Morgan also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious, especially to the Western leaders, that they should leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise, which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a secretive process governed by the superpowers.
Morgan has succeeded in creating an effortless narrative of a complicated international diplomatic process while highlighting its far-reaching importance. The Final Act is based on archival research in eight countries, a long list of published diplomatic documents, interviews, periodicals, and excellent command of the existing historiography. It is hard to imagine a more balanced account; this book is sure to become the standard work of reference for research focusing on topics as varied as human rights, trade relations, activist groups, and international diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s.


Review by Gottfried Niedhart, University of Mannheim
Broadly speaking there are two schools of thought in the historiography dealing with the East-West conflict in the 1970s and 1980s. Both talk of a period of détente starting in the late 1960s and leading to a lessening of tensions between the superpowers as well as in Europe and culminating in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). As for the late 1970s, a divergence can be noticed. One school maintains that the Cold War returned.[11] The other believes in a lasting impact of the Helsinki Accords and in a continuous process of détente.[12] The book under review here belongs to the second category.
Using a wide range of sources from archives not only in the West but also in Moscow, Michael Morgan’s ambitious aim is to write an international history of the CSCE. He wishes to examine the “conference in the round. Only by looking at the CSCE through the eyes of all its leading participants, and setting it in a wider international context, can one grasp how the Final Act came into existence” (5). He thus describes the development leading to the CSCE and the negotiations in Helsinki and Geneva by looking at them from different perspectives and by depicting the different and often antagonistic expectations of the participating states. Of course there are limits capacity which every researcher has to respect. Hence Morgan concentrates on the main actors and on the central concepts and ideas which framed the policies of ‘the’ West and ‘the’ Soviets. He collected an impressive amount of material, not only diplomatic evidence but also contemporary assessments by various writers. But I think it would have been worthwhile to make use of his knowledge of German and consult the archival records in Bern, thereby facilitating a closer look at the neutral and non-aligned states. This is not to belittle the author’s achievement or to say that the neutral states are overlooked. But one could imagine that, in an international history, more light could have been shed on their contribution to the proceedings of the conference. Likewise, the role of the European Economic Community (EEC) as a new actor in East-West relations could have received more attention.
The book is convincingly structured and makes excellent reading. The main chapters are concerned with the three ‘baskets,’ or issue areas. Morgan traces the course of debates and conflicts not only between East and West but also within the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The Final Act was a compromise after the long haul of inter- and intra-bloc debates. One of the introductory chapters, titled “the class of 1969,” provides an overview of the main concepts and circumstances which were relevant for the whole process of détente. 1969 is understood as a kind of break. The world witnessed a “new class of Cold War leaders” who assumed power, in Washington Richard Nixon, in Paris Georges Pompidou and in Bonn Willy Brandt. In Moscow Leonid Brezhnev was already in power but, according to Morgan, succeeded already in this momentous year in establishing his pre-eminence within the Soviet leadership. The four of them had to “challenge old Cold War habits and develop new policies” (50). The over-arching aim was to find a solution for a widely felt “crisis of legitimacy” (18 ff.).
This is a sensible starting point although, with respect to the CSCE, it also raises certain problems. The Soviet Union had been a promoter of a European Security Conference since 1954 and it remained Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s favourite project. With President Richard Nixon it was completely different. Together with National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger he was full of contempt for such a conference. Chancellor Willy Brandt was not that radical but he was hesitant and insisted on two preconditions, namely a treaty regulating the relationship between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and an agreement of the Four Powers on Berlin. In the last instance he regarded the negotiations on Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) as more urgent. Among Western leaders, President Georges Pompidou was relatively early in favouring the CSCE, mainly because he feared the dynamism of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which might have been channelled by a multilateral conference. In other words, what formed the basis for the “four leaders” (73) who figure prominently in Morgan’s account, was their determination to pursue a policy of détente, notwithstanding any “differences in their strategies and worldviews” (51).
Though Morgan does not say so explicitly, his treatment of the CSCE is, for good reasons, embedded in the general development of East-West relations. The CSCE appears as an integral part of détente on the superpower as well as on the European level. The Final Act was neither the peak in the process of détente, nor was there a “Helsinki effect” (Daniel C. Thomas) that can be regarded as an isolated phenomenon in overcoming the East-West conflict.[13]There was no finality in the Final Act. At the same time Morgan does not resist the temptation of asking who the winner was; nor does he dodge a straight answer. A “close reading” of the Final Act in 1975 “demonstrated the extent of the Western victory” (212). There is an inappropriate sense of triumphalism in these words. Morgan builds in caveats here and there but his over-all conclusion is crystal clear. The “Western allies scored a decisive victory” (254).
Morgan comes to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that the Final Act had a tremendous impact on the future development of East-West relations. It “did not cause the end of the Cold War,” but it helped to “resolve” it (253). A discussion of other factors that caused 1989/90 would have been welcome. In Morgan’s interpretation, the Final Act “profoundly shaped the imaginations of leaders in the Soviet bloc” (245). Does this pertain to Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania or Erich Honecker in the GDR and their “imaginations”? And even Mikhail Gorbachev – did he really think of Helsinki when he, together with President Ronald Reagan, signed the INF treaty? Regarding his relations with the West in general and the FRG in particular, was he really converted to Western ideas or even get caught in the Helsinki trap? Or were his actions driven by the poor state of Soviet economy, the imbalance of a costly empire and an inefficient economy? German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, being only a belated believer in the usefulness of the Final Act himself, had not only the financial means at his disposal but also calculated the Soviet weakness. The negotiations with the Soviet Union consequently ended up as a matter of cash. 
By praising the effects of the Helsinki accords Morgan tends to overrate the Final Act as a single factor. The Western strategy of transformation, which can be detected in the text of the Final Act, was developed already some time prior to the CSCE. The Final Act was thus a catalyst rather than an initiation



Author’s Response by Michael Cotey Morgan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
It is a privilege to participate in this roundtable with such distinguished colleagues. I thank James Cameron, Jonathan Hunt, Rósa Magnúsdóttir, and Gottfried Niedhart for their insightful reviews, Vladislav Zubok for his introduction, and Tom Maddux for convening our discussion. Because the reviewers’ kind comments make my job easier than it might otherwise have been, I would like to offer a few thoughts about the rationale for the book, its interpretation of the Final Act’s origins and consequences, and what the history of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) can tell us about the problems that afflict the international system today.
Since 1975, the CSCE has been much discussed but only partially understood. A typical account goes something like this: In 1954, the Soviets proposed to hold a conference on European security. For years, the Western allies refused to participate, but in the late 1960s they suddenly changed their minds—and the CSCE was born. At the negotiations in Helsinki and Geneva, the Western allies recognized Europe’s postwar frontiers. In exchange, the Soviets and Eastern Europeans promised to respect human rights. Little did they realize that, by signing the “Helsinki accords on human rights” (as some scholars refer to the agreement), they planted a time bomb under their own regimes. When it detonated in the late 1980s, it brought down communism in Europe. The CSCE’s significance therefore lay in its affirmation of human rights.[14] This version of events has several drawbacks. It summarizes what happened, but cannot explain why it happened. It misses what was actually at stake in Helsinki and Geneva. It distorts the agreement that the negotiations produced. And it oversimplifies the connection between the Final Act and the end of communism in Europe.
Recent scholarship has clarified some parts of the story. Indispensable books like Daniel C. Thomas’s The Helsinki Effect and Sarah B. Snyder’s Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War broke new ground by examining the transnational movements that the CSCE spawned.[15] But Thomas and Snyder focus on one particular theme—human rights—in the period after 1975. The Final Act takes a different approach and reaches different conclusions. Instead of considering one aspect of the agreement, it looks at the CSCE as a whole, and addresses the questions that conventional accounts of the negotiations leave unanswered, including why the Soviets proposed the conference in the first place, why the Western allies agreed to participate, and why the Final Act took the shape that it did. This broader perspective reveals that the CSCE was something far more consequential than an argument about human rights or borders. It was an attempt to articulate a new concept of international legitimacy.
This new concept of legitimacy was necessary because, by the late 1960s, both Eastern and Western governments had tumbled into crisis. In response, leaders on both sides devised strategies to rebuild their regimes’ legitimacy on the basis of new principles. The four members of the class of 1969—Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev, American president Richard Nixon, West German chancellor Willy Brandt, and French president Georges Pompidou—took the lead in this process. As Gottfried Niedhart points out, these leaders all favored East-West détente in some form or other. But they did not all conceive of it—or of fundamental ideas like peace, security, and sovereignty—in the same way. As I argue in the book, Brezhnev and Nixon pursued a conservative strategy of détente, which aimed to stabilize the Cold War. By contrast, Brandt and Pompidou’s transformational strategy aimed to overcome the Cold War by breaking down the political, economic, and human barriers that divided the continent. This confluence of crisis and strategy gave birth to the CSCE. The four leaders’ support for détente made the conference possible, but their divergent goals ensured that it would be contentious.
The USSR played an indispensable role throughout. If Brezhnev had not put peace at the center of his plan for rebuilding the legitimacy of the Soviet system, and if he had not made the CSCE an essential component of that plan, the negotiations could not have succeeded. The general secretary’s commitments informed every major Soviet decision from the genesis of the CSCE to the signature of the Final Act. “If Helsinki is held, then I can die,” he said (201). His attention to the conference was neither a mystery nor—to use Vladislav Zubok’s phrase—a “bizarre fixation,” but the product of a reasoned and coherent strategy.
To say that the USSR’s strategy was coherent, however, does not mean that it was effective. Comparing what the Soviets wanted from the CSCE with what they actually got, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they and their allies fell short. On both offense and defense, they struggled. After failing to win consensus on the ideas that mattered most to them, especially the permanence of Europe’s frontiers, they accepted many of the Western allies’ proposals. The Final Act therefore proclaimed that Europe’s frontiers could be changed; repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine; empowered states to choose their own alliances; affirmed state sovereignty and respect for human rights as equally important principles of international security; and endorsed the virtues of openness and transparency between states, most notably in the freer movement of people and information across borders. During the negotiations, as Jonathan Hunt emphasizes, the Soviets missed opportunities to insert “poison pills” that could have neutralized Western schemes. In response to Western arguments about freedom of emigration in Basket III, for instance, the Soviets could have demanded freedom of immigration. If such a clause had made it into the final text, the NATO allies could hardly have enacted it. If they had tried to criticize the Soviets for breaking their promises, they would have exposed themselves to Soviet accusations in turn.
This balance sheet raises important questions about why the Final Act took the shape that it did. Neither the Soviets nor their allies had any illusions about Western goals. Before the diplomats convened in Helsinki and Geneva, Communist officials worried about “ideological subversion,” especially in Basket III (175). They hoped to deflect this threat in a variety of ways. The Warsaw Pact allies consulted at length in order to forge a united front to resist Western demands. In a bid to seize the moral high ground and gain negotiating leverage, the Soviets ratified the United Nations Human Rights Covenants before the Western states had done the same. Once the negotiations got underway, they attempted to grind their interlocutors down by practicing what Zubok calls “steadfast and dogged” diplomacy. Brezhnev and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko regularly complained to Western leaders that the negotiations were moving too slowly because the NATO allies refused to drop their unacceptable demands. The conference could only succeed, they warned, if Western delegates took a more reasonable approach. Meanwhile, the Warsaw Pact representatives in Helsinki and Geneva used the CSCE’s rule of strict consensus to block any proposal that they found unpalatable.
In the end, however, the weaknesses of the USSR’s approach outweighed the strengths. The consultations within the Warsaw Pact failed to produce an “offensive concept of cultural cooperation” to counter the Western insistence on freer movement, as one Polish official observed (204).[16] Once the NATO allies grasped that the Soviets planned to fight a diplomatic war of attrition, they responded in kind. Their tactics depended on the assumption that the USSR’s desire for an agreement would eventually yield concessions. Although the negotiations dragged on longer than anyone had expected, and Western diplomats often worried that they would lose their nerve, this approach paid off.
When the Soviets eventually gave ground, however, they did not fall into a trap. Instead, they took a calculated risk. Brezhnev and his supporters on the Politburo reasoned that, no matter what compromises they made, the principle of state sovereignty would shield them from any unpleasant consequences. In Geneva, the Soviets gave way on point after point, wagering that they would only have to implement those parts of the agreement that suited them. Some of the USSR’s allies disagreed with this gambit, but because of the importance that Brezhnev attached to the conference, they concluded that they had no choice but to go along.
To be sure, the Soviets got something out of the CSCE. Brezhnev boasted that it had brought his Peace Program to fruition. Pravda declared that the Enlightenment’s search for perpetual peace had reached its culmination in the Final Act. Some officials—including KGB chief Yuri Andropov and the head of the Soviet delegation, Anatoly Kovalev—even hoped that the agreement’s provisions on freer movement would reinvigorate the USSR by providing an impetus for domestic reform. And when the Soviet government promulgated a new constitution in 1977, its text included the Final Act’s ten principles of international relations, reproduced verbatim. Even if the Final Act bore only a passing resemblance to the agreement that Brezhnev had originally sought, it became a mainstay of Soviet domestic politics, as James Cameron observes, and a key component of the government’s bid to renew its legitimacy at home and abroad.
The agreement crystallized a new concept of legitimacy for the whole of Europe. Rósa Magnúsdóttir rightly emphasizes that the CSCE’s success owed something to the diversity of voices around the table. As the negotiations wore on, cacophony became polyphony. The diplomats brought forth new ideas that neither superpower would have advanced on its own. But perfect harmony remained elusive. The Final Act combined rousing declarations with maddening ambiguities and unresolved tensions. By affirming the equal importance of human rights and state sovereignty, for instance, it blurred the relationship between them and sowed the seeds of later arguments, which continue to rage today. Because the NATO allies hoped that the CSCE would crack open the closed societies of the East, they championed principles such as the freer movement of people and information, and ignored the economic and social claims that the USSR traditionally emphasized. The document focused international attention on human rights in the late 1970s and 1980s, but it articulated a truncated version of that concept. In this way, it reinforced the failure of rights talk to address resurgent economic inequality.[17]
After the 1975 Helsinki summit, the Final Act powerfully shaped the course of events in Europe, but its effects were by no means straightforward. The book explicitly rejects the claim that the agreement caused the end of the Cold War (253). Instead, it makes two distinct but related arguments about its influence. First, the CSCE helped persuade some Communist leaders to relax some of the controls they had long placed on their citizens, and it empowered those who wanted even bolder reforms. Second, when the Cold War did come to an end in Europe, the Final Act provided the foundation for the continent’s post-Cold War peace settlement. Many of the central ideas of the order that coalesced after the fall of the Berlin Wall had been promulgated in the Finnish capital more than a decade earlier.
At the CSCE’s follow-up conference in Belgrade in 1977-1978, where Western governments demanded respect for the promises made in Helsinki, the USSR and its allies stonewalled. Meanwhile, they cracked down on the small but vocal number of their own citizens who invoked the Final Act in calling for domestic reforms. Even by this early date, however, the agreement had become so intertwined with the Communist governments’ claims to legitimacy that they could not easily repudiate it. As East-West tensions returned to levels unseen in decades, and the Soviets weathered intense criticism at the next follow-up meeting in Madrid, they and their allies refused to withdraw from the CSCE. In a few significant cases, including the East German decision in 1984 to approve tens of thousands of applications to emigrate, they felt compelled to honor the agreement they had signed, at least in part.
After Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko, the USSR became more receptive to the Western interpretation of the Final Act. Many factors shaped the new general secretary’s worldview and influenced his reform program, but several of his signature ideas—especially the Common European Home—echoed the CSCE’s central assumptions. As he grew bolder, he articulated a vision of international security that increasingly resembled that of the Final Act. Peace required a shared set of values spanning the continent, Gorbachev argued, and security involved humanitarian considerations in addition to military ones. He repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine, proclaimed that universal human values superseded international class conflict, and freed hundreds of political prisoners. He told the Politburo that Basket III obliged the USSR to stop jamming Western radio broadcasts. When a CSCE follow-up meeting on human contacts failed to produce an agreement, he decided to relax travel restrictions unilaterally. Over the objections of the chief of the general staff, Gorbachev ordered the Red Army to comply with the CSCE’s Confidence-Building Measures (242-243). In June 1991, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, he hailed the new partnership between the superpowers, the reunification of Germany, and the new era of European security. “The ideas of the Helsinki Final Act have begun to acquire new significance, [and] they are being transformed into real policies,” he said.[18]
Any number of contingencies could have produced a different outcome. The Final Act was, after all, just a piece of paper. Gorbachev could have ignored it. In that case, neither Western governments nor domestic critics could have easily enforced its provisions. Over time, however, the general secretary did adopt most of the Final Act’s key components. He did so because those components fit with his own ideas, because he judged it more expedient to comply with than to reject the internal and external demands for compliance, and—perhaps—because he was persuaded by the vision of European peace, security, and legitimacy that the agreement held forth.
What if the CSCE had never taken place? Gorbachev might well have implemented the same policies, and his tenure as general secretary might not have looked that different. In the event, however, the Final Act certainly reinforced his core convictions and gave him a valuable tool for pressing his case in the face of hardline opposition. One cannot say that the Final Act was the primary factor that caused the Soviet order in Europe to unravel. But it did shape both the speed and the manner of that unraveling—and not just through its provisions on human rights.
The Final Act also exerted an unmistakable influence on the peace that ensued. The closest thing that the Cold War had to a final peace treaty, the 1990 Paris Charter, drew directly on the provisions laid down in 1975. The idea for the CSCE’s Paris summit, its first such meeting since the one in Helsinki, came from Gorbachev, who hoped to negotiate a major agreement on the future of Europe and reassert control over the process of German reunification. He achieved the first goal, but not the second.
In the summer of 1990, diplomats from the CSCE’s participating states gathered to draft the Charter, which would set out the governing principles for the new era then dawning on the continent. The work went much more quickly than it had in the early 1970s. Whereas the original CSCE negotiations had witnessed fierce disputes on fundamental questions, the delegates now expressed “broad agreement about the basic underlying concepts,” the head of the American contingent, John Maresca, later recalled (251). The USSR and its allies had embraced the Western concepts of security, peace, and legitimacy, which the Final Act had articulated and the Paris Charter now recapitulated. The 1975 agreement furnished the blueprint for Europe’s post-Cold War order.
In assessing the Final Act’s long-term impact, Hunt asks how the CSCE compared with earlier episodes of order-building, and what it can tell us about “soft power and normative influences” in international politics. From our vantage point, the Peace of Utrecht and Congress of Vienna may seem like reactionary exercises in preserving an archaic system. What could the diplomats of 1713 or 1815 tell us about human rights, or the virtues of openness and transparency? In their own eras, however, these settlements broke as much ground as Helsinki. Utrecht established a new order on the concept of the balance of power. Vienna affirmed that the great powers had a collective responsibility to preserve postwar stability. Conceptual innovations of this kind have animated every great moment of order-building in Europe, from the sixteenth century to the end of the Cold War. But because the balance of power is never static, and because established ideas come under attack as new ones come to the fore, every peace settlement eventually becomes obsolete. Fresh crises demand fresh efforts—and fresh conceptual innovations—to preserve peace.
This cycle continues. As Cameron notes, Europe is witnessing a “backlash against some of the liberal principles embodied in the Final Act.” One could go further and say that the continent has tumbled into a new crisis of legitimacy, with interlocking geopolitical, economic, and social dangers. Similar dynamics are at play in other regions of the world, calling the future of the liberal international order into question.
Pundits routinely suggest that we face a stark choice. Either we preserve the liberal order, or we allow its enemies to destroy it. The history of the CSCE, however, points to a third option: renovation. During the crises of the late 1960s, governments in East and West sought new claims to legitimacy. The Final Act was among the most important fruits of their efforts. Instead of trying to shore up the status quo and reiterating the principles of the 1940s, it transcended them. The CSCE formulated new concepts of peace, security, and legitimacy that—together with the era’s other initiatives, including the acceleration of European integration and the turn towards free market economic principles—established the contours of the continent’s post-Cold War order.
With that order now in crisis, the solution is neither to cling ever more tightly to the status quo, nor to defend the principles of the 1970s at any cost. Instead, following the example of the CSCE, the time has come to craft new principles that will, once again, put international order on a solid footing before the crisis becomes a cataclysm.

Notes
[1] Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect. International Norms, Human Rights, and Demise of Communism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational Story of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 
[2] Richard Davy, “Helsinki Myths: Setting the Record Straight on the Final Act of the CSCE, 1975,” Cold War History 9:1 (2009): 1-22.
[3] Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel S. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
[4] “STATE OF THE UNION; Transcript of President Bush’s Address on the State of the Union,” The New York Times, 29 January 1992, Section A, p. 16, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/29/us/state-union-transcript-president-bush-s-address-state-union.html.
[5] Christopher R.W. Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014);  Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[6] Oliver Bange and Gottfried Niedhart, eds., Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2008); Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Andreas Wenger, Vojtech Mastny, and Christian Nuenlist, eds., Origins of the European Security System: The Helsinki Process Revisited (New York: Routledge, 2008).
[7] Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War; Thomas, The Helsinki Effect.
[8] Linda K. Kerber, “We are all historians of human rights,” 1 October 2006, Perspectives on History: The newsmagazine of the American Historical Associationhttps://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2006/we-are-all-historians-of-human-rights.
[9] Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (South Bend: Notre Dame University, 2002); Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 2011).
[10] This review was first published in slightly different form in The Slavonic and East European Review 97:3 (July 2019): 588-589. Dr. Magnúsdóttir and SEER kindly granted H-Diplo permission to re-publish it.
[11] See, for instance, Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Konrad H. Jarausch, Out of Ashes. A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
[12] See, for example, Oliver Bange and Poul Villaume, eds., The Long Détente. Changing Concepts of Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1950s-1980s(Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2017); Stephan Kieninger, The Diplomacy of Détente. Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
[13] Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect. International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[14] For representative accounts along these lines, see Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1994) 757–760; Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 172–176; Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History (New York: Henry Holt, 1995) 237; David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000) 337; Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 136; and William R. Keylor, The Twentieth-Century World and Beyond, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 313–315.
[15] Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
[16] “Projekt tez Departamentu Studiów i Programowania do rozmów z ministrem spraw zagranicznych NRD w sprawie EKBiW (z załącznikami),” 16 March 1972, Polskie Dokumenty Dyplomatyczne, 1972 (Warsaw: Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarodowych, 2005) doc. 52.
[17] See Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), chapter 5.

A Theory of International Organization - book by Liesbet Hooghe; Tobias Lenz; Gary Marks

A Theory of International Organization

  • Liesbet Hooghe; Tobias Lenz; Gary Marks:
  • A Theory of International Organization
  • OUP Oxford, 2019, ISBN: 9780191079610


Why do international organizations (IOs) look so different, yet so similar? The possibilities are diverse. Some international organizations have just a few member states, while others span the globe. Some are targeted at a specific problem, while others have policy portfolios as broad as national states. Some are run almost entirely by their member states, while others have independent courts, secretariats, and parliaments.
Variation among international organizationsappears as wide as that among states. This book explains the design and development of international organization in the postwar period. It theorizes that the basic set up of an IO responds to two forces: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders and a desire forself-rule that can dampen cooperation where transnational community is thin.
The book reveals both the causal power of functionalist pressures and the extent to which nationalism constrains the willingness of member states to engage in incomplete contracting. The implications of postfunctionalist theory for an IO's membership, policy portfolio, contractual specificity, and authoritative competences are tested using annual data for 76 IOs for 1950-2010.
Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advancesour understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour withreadable prose and an attractive production style.The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

  • OUP Oxford; August 2019
  • ISBN: 9780191079610
  • Read online, or download in secure PDF or secure ePub format
  • Title: A Theory of International Organization
  • Series: Transformations in Governance
  • Author: Liesbet Hooghe; Tobias Lenz; Gary Marks
  • Imprint: OUP Oxford

In The Press

Deep thinking and theorizing as well as profound and methodologically advanced empirical analysis - if you ask for the impossible and want to have both in one book, this one has it. A Theory of International Organization is at its core about the tension between scale and community. It develops a sophisticated and encompassing set of insights into the working of International Organizations in an interdependent world constituted of (mostly) nationalcommunities. This book is one of the most important contributions to a new wave of theorizing about world politics that overcomes old schisms. It is a must-read for all serious students of International Relations.

About The Author

Liesbet Hooghe is the W.R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill and Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. In 2017 she received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award of the APSA. Born and educated in Belgium with a PhD. from the KU Leuven, she was a Fulbright fellow at Cornell University and a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She joined the University of Toronto in 1994and moved to UNC-Chapel Hill in 2000. Between 2004 and 2016, she also held the Chair in Multilevel Governance at the VU Amsterdam. Hooghe is the former chair of the European Politics Society section of the APSA and of the European Union Studies Association. Her chief focus is multilevel governance,European integration, political behavior, and international organization.
Tobias Lenz is Assistant Professor of Global Governance and Comparative Regionalism at the University of Goettingen, and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg. During the academic year 2015/16, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in a research project on the authority of international organizations, directed by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Lenz holds a PhD in International Relations from Oxford University and has held visiting fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research deals chiefly with global and regional organizations, institutional design andchange, legitimacy and diffusion.
Gary Marks is Burton Craige Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. He was educated in England and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was a recipient of the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Research Prize) in 2010 and of a €2.5 million Advanced European Research Council grant (2010-2015). In 2017 he received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award of the APSA. Heco-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and EU Center of Excellence in 1994 and 1998, respectively. Marks has had fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, Sciences Po, Konstanz University, McMaster University, the University of Twente, and was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research and teaching are chiefly in comparative politics, multilevel governance, and measurement.

quarta-feira, 8 de janeiro de 2020

Compras Governamentais: Brasil adere a acordo multilateral

Um grande avanço, não só para aumentar a concorrência, como para diminuir a corrupção sistêmica nessa área.

Brasil adere a acordo que abre compras governamentais a empresas estrangeiras

Decisão que será anunciada este semestre dá mesmo tratamento a empresas nacionais e do exterior em licitações

O Globo, 8/01/2020

BRASÍLIA - O governo brasileiro vai anunciar, ainda neste semestre, a adesão do Brasil ao acordo de compras governamentais, firmado no âmbito da Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC) por 48 países, entre os quais os da União Europeia (UE), os Estados Unidos e o Japão. A ideia é permitir que as empresas brasileiras tenham acesso a um mercado de US$ 1,7 trilhão por ano nas licitações públicas em outros países. 
O mercado brasileiro também é promissor: dados do Ministério da Economia mostram que, em 2017, o setor público — União, estados e municípios — contratou cerca de R$ 78 bilhões em bens e serviços, o que inclui desde equipamentos para obras a material de escritório e merenda escolar.
Pelo acordo, os governos dos países signatários são obrigados a dar tratamento isonômico a empresas nacionais e estrangeiras nas licitações públicas. Isso significa, por exemplo, o reconhecimento mútuo de documentação dos fornecedores, o que pode representar uma redução concreta de barreiras à participação de firmas de outros países nas operações. A empresa também não precisará ter um representante no Brasil para participar da concorrência.
A avaliação dos técnicos da área econômica é que, quanto maior o número de concorrentes, mais reduzidas são as chances de corrupção. Segundo explicou uma fonte, “isso dificulta a combinação de jogo entre empresas”.
O Brasil sempre foi pressionado a entrar nesse acordo, mas resistiu tanto nos governos do ex-presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso como nos mandatos de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Nas negociações para a criação da Área de Livre Comércio das Américas (Alca) — abortadas logo no início do governo Lula —, os EUA tentaram inserir, sem sucesso, compras governamentais como parte do tratado continental.
Na época, a diplomacia brasileira considerava que o melhor seria discutir o tema de forma multilateral, na OMC. Porém, desde o governo do ex-presidente Michel Temer, a situação começou a mudar. Compras governamentais passaram a fazer parte de acordos negociados pelo Brasil com outros parceiros sul-americanos, como Peru e Chile.
Também há um protocolo de intenções com esse objetivo firmado com os demais sócios do Mercosul (Argentina, Paraguai e Uruguai).
No ano passado, já sob o governo do presidente Jair Bolsonaro, o Brasil e os demais sócios do Mercosul incluíram compras governamentais nos acordos com a União Europeia e a Efta (Associação Europeia de Livre Comércio, formada por Islândia, Liechtenstein, Noruega e Suíça). Os técnicos estimam que as licitações realizadas anualmente pela UE superem a cifra de US$ 1 bilhão.
Desde 2017, o Brasil passou a participar das reuniões de um comitê que trata de compras governamentais na qualidade de observador. Mas a adesão do Brasil não será imediata, pois requer uma negociação prévia na OMC. Também estão prestes a aderir ao acordo China e Rússia.

A maldição das empresas públicas: corrupção e má gestão - o caso da Petrobras

Criada por Getúlio Vargas, Petrobras é alvo de CPIs desde os anos JK e Jango
Fonte: Acervo O Globo 
Estatal se envolveu em escândalos nos governos Sarney e Collor. Operação Lava-Jato da PF prendeu 4 ex-diretores da empresa, entre eles Nestor Cerveró em 2015.
Um dos principais alvos da Operação Lava-Jato da Polícia Federal (PF), a Petrobras — a maior estatal do país — já enfrentou outras investigações de Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito (CPI) na Câmara dos Deputados. Dirigentes da companhia foram convocados, desde a década de 50, para prestar esclarecimentos a parlamentares. No dia 24 de maio de 1958, O GLOBO informava que o coronel Janari Nunes, presidente da empresa, prestava depoimento para desmentir acusações feitas pelo “Diário de Notícias”. Entre elas, estava a de ter ocultado do presidente da República — na época, Juscelino Kubitschek — que o mandato de um dos diretores, Nazaré Teixeira Dias, estava encerrado desde 1956. Janari Nunes, na ocasião, defendeu-se culpando a imprensa. Alegou que se tratava de uma campanha do jornal contra ele e a diretoria.

Na década seguinte, uma nova polêmica envolveu outro presidente da empresa. “Só cego não vê que o que acontece na Petrobrás está acontecendo no Brasil”, afirmava o general Albino Silva, presidente da “Petrobrás” (à época com acento) na CPI sobre Assuntos do Petróleo, no Palácio Tiradentes, segundo reportagem publicada em 28 de janeiro de 1964. Aos parlamentares o executivo disse ainda que alguns diretores mantinham compromissos “que não eram específicos aos cargos que ocupavam”. Eram tempos do governo de João Goulart, dois meses antes do golpe que o depôs da Presidência da República. Além disso, o general ressaltou que havia um “anel de ferro” transformando a empresa “num organismo impenetrável” e que estabelecia um clima de terror em diversos setores. Outro lado da história foi publicado pelo jornal no dia seguinte. Nessa edição, Jairo José de Farias, ex-diretor da estatal, acusava Albino Silva de ser agente de cartéis internacionais. Ainda assim, segundo o jornal, o diretor não possuía provas para culpar o general.

Símbolo nacional, a estatal tem na sua biografia outros episódios que afetaram a sua credibilidade. “Petrobrás passa pelo maior escândalo de sua história”, noticiava O GLOBO no dia 13 de dezembro de 1988. A edição destacava que o escândalo, na subsidiária Petrobrás Distribuidora (BR), era o maior dos 35 anos da companhia, criada em 1953 no governo do presidente Getúlio Vargas após a campanha nacionalista “O petróleo é nosso”, que mobilizara setores da sociedade brasileira desde os anos 40. De acordo com as informações, sete banqueiros haviam procurado, em novembro de 1987, o presidente da Petrobras, Armando Guedes Coelho. Eles estavam sendo pressionados por funcionários da BR para obter vantagens e benefícios para manter e até aumentar depósitos da estatal nas instituições financeiras. A cobrança das comissões, segundo denúncia da época, atingia a cifra de US$ 2 milhões mensais. Quem governava o país era o presidente José Sarney, e a crise na empresa culminou com o pedido de demissão de Armando Guedes, noticiado no dia 17 de dezembro de 1988. Quatro anos depois, um novo escândalo envolveu a empresa no governo Collor.

Em 20 de março de 2014, a Operação Lava-Jato, desencadeada pela PF três dias antes com a prisão de 17 pessoas, entre elas o doleiro Alberto Youssef, chegava à maior empresa estatal brasileira. Naquele dia, o ex-diretor de Abastecimento da Petrobras Paulo Roberto Costa foi preso com R$ 1,1 milhão guardado em sua casa. Além de Costa, outros três ex-diretores da Petrobras foram presos na Lava-Jato: Nestor Cerveró (Internacional), em 14 de janeiro de 2015, Renato Duque (Serviços), em 16 de março, e Jorge Zelada (também da Diretoria Internacional), em 2 de julho.

Durante as investigações, o Ministério Público Federal denunciou à Justiça 36 pessoas suspeitas de participar no esquema de corrupção da Petrobras, sendo 25 ligadas a grandes empreiteiras. A mais recente CPI da Petrobras para investigar o esquema de corrupção na companhia, revelado na Lava-Jato, cujos processos são conduzidos pelo juiz federal do Paraná Sérgio Moro, foi anunciada no dia 5 de fevereiro de 2015 pelo presidente da Câmara dos Deputados, Eduardo Cunha, posteriormente acusado de também estar envolvido no esquema de propinas. Foi em depoimento à CPI, em março daquele ano, que o ex-gerente da Petrobras Pedro Barusco, delator do esquema, afirmou que recebia pagamentos de forma pessoal desde 1997, durante o governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Porém, segundo ele, somente a partir de 2003, já no governo Lula, é que a propina foi “institucionalizada”.

A PF identificou 16 empreiteiras que se organizavam — numa espécie de “clube do cartel” — para fraudar licitações, corromper agentes públicos e desviar recursos da estatal. Entre as acusadas estão grandes empreiteiras, como Camargo Corrêa, Andrade Gutierrez e Odebrecht. Na 14ª fase da operação, realizada em 19 de junho de 2015, a PF prendeu executivos ligados aos principais grupos empresariais supostamente envolvidos, entre eles o presidente da Odebrecht, Marcelo Odebrecht, e da Andrade Gutierrez, Otávio Azevedo.

Em meio aos escândalos de corrupção, a Petrobras divulgou o seu balanço, com cinco meses de atraso, em abril de 2015. O resultado foi um prejuízo de R$ 21,58 bilhões em 2014. Do total, a própria empresa reconhece R$ 6,2 bilhões provocados pelos desvios de recursos.

terça-feira, 7 de janeiro de 2020

E por falar em diplomacia ideológica, eis aqui um exemplo: a luta contra o terrível comunismo

Numa fase em que nem o PCdoB deseja realmente implantar o comunismo no Brasil – eles só querem extorquir os capitalistas, para seu maior conforto material –, ainda tem gente que pensa em buscar chifre em cabeça de cavalo.
Eis aqui um perfeito exemplo.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Ernesto Araújo, Ministro das Relações Exteriores.
Em artigo exclusivo, o ministro das Relações Exteriores, Ernesto Araújo, traça um panorama da ameaça comunista nos países latinos

O intelectual e ativista marxista boliviano Álvaro García Linera, logo após ser eleito vice-Presidente da Bolívia na chapa de Evo Morales, em 2005, declarou: “O horizonte geral da nossa era é o comunismo.”
Não há dúvida de que a América Latina viveu dentro de um horizonte comunista desde 2005, ou possivelmente desde um pouco antes, desde a vitória de Lula em 2002, ou desde a vitória de Chávez em 1999. Na verdade, esse horizonte começou a raiar com a criação do Foro de São Paulo, em 1991.
Veja-se bem a expressão: dentro de um horizonte comunista. Não em um sistema explicitamente comunista. Muitas pessoas ridicularizam a discussão sobre a presença do comunismo na América Latina atual dizendo que os partidos autoproclamados comunistas são fracos ou inexistentes e que em nenhuma parte – exceto um pouco na Venezuela – cogita-se de instaurar um sistema com propriedade coletiva dos meios de produção ou ditadura do proletariado.
Em primeiro lugar, há que observar o seguinte: o comunismo não é a propriedade coletiva dos meios de produção. O comunismo não é a ditadura do proletariado. Propriedade coletiva e ditadura do proletariado – o socialismo – são instrumentos para chegar ao comunismo, que é o estágio último da sociedade humana concebido por Marx, o zero absoluto do ser humano, onde o controle sobre o homem é tão completo que já prescinde do Estado (portanto prescinde da ditadura do proletariado). Um controle sem sujeito, apenas objetos imbecilizados, onde já não há propriedade coletiva nem individual porque já não há diferença entre indivíduo e coletividade, um sistema que se autoperpetua infinitamente, um buraco negro da humanidade, de cujo horizonte já nenhuma luz escapa. O comunismo não é a abolição do capitalismo, o comunismo é (para tomar emprestado um título de C.S.Lewis) a abolição do homem.
O socialismo, dentro da loucura marxista, é apenas um instrumento para chegar ao comunismo, mas isso não significa que não haja outros. Desde 1989-1991, quando desabou o “socialismo real”, o marxismo vem trabalhando para desenhar novos instrumentos de construção do comunismo. O principal desses instrumentos é o globalismo (termo que utilizo numa acepção algo distinta daquela mais corrente que o define como a criação de uma governança mundial; para mim, diferentemente, o globalismo é a captura da economia globalizada pelo aparato ideológico marxista através do politicamente correto, da ideologia de gênero, da obsessão climática, do antinacionalismo). 
Assim, tudo o que os marxistas desde 1989 fazem e pensam é manter aberto o horizonte comunista. Sabem que já não podem pregar abertamente o comunismo porque o mainstream (ainda) o rejeita, mas podem ir-se aproximando, avançando aqui e ali, ganhando terreno e ocupando espaços. Horizonte por definição é um lugar aonde nunca se chega, mas que necessariamente orienta e referencia nossa localização espacial. O objetivo ficou talvez mais distante do que era no tempo da União Soviética, mas continua presente. Talvez tenha ficado mais próximo É isso o que querem dizer com o “horizonte comunista”. 
Essa expressão, aliás, serve de título a um livro da marxista Jodi Dean, publicado em 2012, The Communist Horizon um de tantos trabalhos surgidos desde o final dos anos 90 discutindo justamente as formas de preservar a “utopia” comunista e reinseri-la na realidade política e social concreta de um mundo aparentemente avesso ao comunismo. Na mesma linha vão os três volumes intitulados The Idea of Communism, coleção de ensaios de dezenas de autores marxistas, coordenados pelos dois principais pensadores dessa horripilante corrente na atualidade, Alain Badiou e Slavoj Zizek. O “horizonte comunista”, a “ideia do comunismo” são a mesma coisa: mil maneiras de manter viva a ideologia comunista, tantas vezes derrotada pela realidade. Dizia Mao Tse Tung: “De derrota em derrota, até a vitória final.” Esse é o programa. Aproveitar as aparentes derrotas para fortalecer-se e seguir avançando. Pode-se argumentar que neste Século XXI o projeto comunista está mais forte do que nos anos 80, justamente porque ninguém o vê e pode operar à sombra da sociedade de consumo. Em lugar de combater o capitalismo em nome de uma alternativa socialista claramente fracassada, infiltrar-se de maneira sutil dentro do capitalismo. 
Vão já, portanto, quase trinta anos – mas os últimos 20 são especialmente significativos – em que o marxismo está cavando túneis por baixo da superfície aparentemente segura e tranquila da sociedade liberal. Os marxistas nunca se renderam a essa sociedade. Reúnem-se, pensam, programam, aplicam diferentes estratégias que vão solapando o mundo liberal-democrático, de diferentes modos, com diversas geometrias, explorando de forma inteligente e perversa as fragilidades do sistema liberal.
A principal fragilidade do sistema liberal é a seguinte: o sistema liberal não pensa. Não trabalha no mundo das ideias. Criou uma repulsa por tudo aquilo que chama de “ideológico”. Curiosamente, o sistema liberal em geral – e no Brasil os isentões em particular – aplicam a pecha de “ideológico” àqueles que procuram estudar o marxismo contemporâneo e entender seu “horizonte comunista”. Ou seja, os ideólogos que se esforçam dia e noite por criar os novos instrumentos do comunismo (e que publicam suas ideias em livros amplamente disponíveis) são ignorados e deixados trabalhar em paz, sob uma espécie de indiferença benigna por parte do establishment. Já os amantes da liberdade que lêem esses trabalhos marxistas para entender o novo projeto comunista e assim poder combatê-lo são chamados de “ideológicos”. O mundo isentão lida apenas com a figura fictícia de um certo comunismo “derrotado em 1989” e recusa-se terminantemente a reconhecer – muito menos a enfrentar – o projeto comunista real que atua hoje por toda parte.
O isentismo é antes de mais nada uma forma de preguiça intelectual. 
Também é uma forma de acomodação. O isentismo não enfrenta o comunismo. Não chega nem perto. Não quer enfrentar. Não quer reconhecer que ele existe porque, se reconhecer, vai ter de fazer alguma coisa. Assim, o isentismo se inscreve confortavelmente dentro do horizonte comunista e, no dia em que o comunismo chegar e roubar-lhe a liberdade que ele acredita possuir de graça sem precisar lutar por ela, o isentão não vai nem perceber, pois sua cegueira ideológica – ou seja, sua cegueira para a ideologia que penetra na sua mente – já lhe terá consumido todas as faculdades e sentimentos de resistência. 
Isso na melhor das hipóteses. Em outra hipótese, o isentão sabe conscientemente que seu isentismo se insere dentro do horizonte comunista e está muito feliz com isso. Faz parte voluntariamente do projeto. Não se acha comunista, mas compartilha com o projeto comunista todo o essencial: o materialismo e o ódio ao espírito, a sede insaciável de poder e de controle absoluto. A pressa com que hoje, no Brasil, os isentos correm para os braços da extrema esquerda e vice-versa, formando uma estranha “isentoesquerda”, é o sinal abjeto dessas afinidades profundas.
Então, temos em todo o mundo, a partir da virada do século, a progressiva construção de uma sociedade que é liberal apenas na suferfície, na aparência de uma economia capitalista com instituições democráticas e direitos humanos bem bonitinhos, mas que na sua subestrutura não é nada disso. Debaixo do liberalismo, no porão, os engenheiros do “ideal comunista” manejam suas alavancas. No porão grassa a corrupção, o conluio com o crime organizado, a tolerância para com a violência mais brutal, as drogas (seu tráfico e seu uso), o capitalismo distorcido pelo controle estatal, a repressão ao pensamento e à livre expressão, o anticristianismo e o antiespiritualismo, o furioso moralismo materialista, a manipulação da ciência.
E os isentões, onde estão? Estão jogando pedra justamente naqueles líderes que, no Brasil e no resto do mundo, querem descer ao porão para lutar contra todas essas mazelas. O isentão, quando você aperta, ele não quer uma economia livre, ele não quer uma internet livre, não quer um idioma livre capaz de expressar a complexidade e beleza do espírito humano em sua aventura multidimensional. Quer uma economia direcionada pelo conchavo político, quer o controle social da comunicação pelo monopólio da grande mídia, quer uma novilíngua continuamente empobrecida pela ditadura do politicamente correto que substitui a ditadura do proletariado como instrumento preferencial de construção do comunismo. Sim, o isentão está enclausurado no horizonte comunista. 
No Brasil estamos rompendo o horizonte comunista e reenquadrando o liberalismo no horizonte da liberdade. O horizonte comunista está sendo rompido igualmente em outros lugares, certamente nos EUA, também no Reino Unido, na Hungria e na Polônia, penso que está sendo rompido na África, onde os últimos laivos da associação espúria entre comunismo e libertação, que vigorou por décadas desde as lutas anticoloniais, parecem estar-se dissipando. A Igreja Católica, em parte, se havia inscrito também dentro do horizonte comunista, a partir dos anos 60 e 70, mas ali a verdadeira fé parece estar resistindo e repelindo o avanço marxista sobre a sua doutrina bimilenar. 
O horizonte comunista está sendo rompido na própria Bolívia, onde o povo deu um basta a Evo Morales e García Linera, que queriam continuar arrastando os bolivianos para o abismo à custa da fraude eleitoral. 
Porém o horizonte comunista quer voltar a estrangular-nos. Quer regressar na Bolívia (Evo Morales foi acolhido pelo novo governo e está ali, a poucos quilômetros da fronteira, à espreita). Quer voltar no Chile, no Equador e na Colômbia, quer voltar no Brasil. Quer “iluminar” com suas trevas essas grandes nações que são a Venezuela, o México e a Argentina.
Precisamos olhar para além desse horizonte comunista, que não é um horizonte onde há árvores e campos mas sim as paredes de uma cela, esse horizonte que não é onde a terra encontra o céu mas onde a terra encontra o inferno. Tudo o que temos para combater o avanço dessas paredes e a aproximação desse abismo é o apego à liberdade. A liberdade que, insisto, não é uma ideologia, mas o eixo central do ser humano. 
Para começar, precisamos estudar o comunismo a partir do que dizem e fazem os comunistas, em lugar de sair aos gritos de “ideológico, ideológico” condenando quem o estuda e quem o enfrenta.

A Bolsodiplomacia ideologica contra os interesses do Brasil - Eliane Cantanhede

Entrando de gaiato

Essa guerra não é nossa. O Brasil não tem nada a ganhar, 

só a perder, se entrar nela

Eliane Cantanhêde, O Estado de S.Paulo
07 de janeiro de 2020 | 03h00
Se fosse confirmada a retirada das tropas americanas do Iraque, depois de 17 anos de invasão, estaria encerrada uma das histórias mais inacreditáveis e sujas da política internacional recente. O governo George W. Bush atacou o Iraque unilateralmente, sem o aval do Conselho de Segurança da ONU e baseado em mentiras – caso claro de fake news institucionais. 
Depois de dominar o Iraque por quase duas décadas, sob vistas grossas da ONU e da comunidade internacional, os EUA agora atacam sem cerimônia a capital iraquiana para trucidar o principal líder militar iraniano. Agora, como se estivessem dizendo “até logo”, podem abandonar o país deixando um rastro de destruição e falta de horizonte. Uma terra arrasada. 
Um livro revelador e de fácil compreensão sobre essa tragédia moderna, Curveball, do jornalista norte-americano Bob Drogin, foi escrito com base em manifestações oficiais, documentos, entrevistas e bastidores da decisão de Bush de invadir o Iraque. É estarrecedor como uma decisão dessa dimensão pôde ser tomada pela maior potência mundial sem qualquer cobrança ou punição. O mundo assistiu calado, lavou as mãos. 
Em resumo, sem dar “spoiler”, Drogin conta a história da decisão, que começa com o relato de um desertor iraquiano que se dizia engenheiro químico e descrevia em detalhes, e até desenhava, como o seu país desenvolvia sofisticado programa de armas químicas e biológicas móveis. Espertalhão e viciado em internet, tudo o que ele queria, na verdade, era fugir do Iraque e se asilar na Alemanha. Faria, ou diria, qualquer coisa para isso. 
O espantoso é como a BND da Alemanha comprou a história, repassou para o MI-6 da Inglaterra e o Mossad de Israel e deu de mão beijada para a CIA dos EUA o pretexto para Bush anunciar um ataque daquele porte. A princípio reticente, o secretário de Estado Colin Powell acabou comprando a versão e a invasão foi decretada. E o que os EUA encontraram? Nada. O Iraque não tinha arma químicas e biológica nenhuma. Mal tinha armamento tradicional de guerra, ainda mais contra a potência econômica, política e bélica. 
Com o Iraque transformado em casa da Mãe Joana, foi fácil, quase natural, Washington agora usar um drone sofisticadíssimo para explodir o general iraniano em solo iraquiano. Assim, os EUA saem do Iraque como entraram: tratando o país como se fosse seu quintal, estivesse à sua mercê. 
Nunca vai se saber como o Irã teria evoluído se tivesse vingado o acordo nuclear assinado por ele em 2010, com a mediação de Brasil e Turquia e solapado por EUA e França. Mas todo o mundo, literalmente, sabe que a crise só chegou ao ponto que chegou após os EUA retirarem, em 2015, o aval ao segundo acordo nuclear aceito pelo Irã e sancionado. Sem os EUA, os países europeus que o subscreveram perderam força. E o Irã, isolado, partiu para retaliações e provocações e agora anuncia que vai jogar todo o acordo fora, aprofundando o enriquecimento de urânio e o desenvolvimento de ogivas nucleares. 
Apesar de todos esses erros e de todo esse excesso de pretensão dos EUA, a nota do Brasil sob o conflito abandonou a prudência tradicional da política externa e privilegiou o viés ideológico do governo Bolsonaro, com o danoso alinhamento automático a Trump. Rússia e China de um lado, OTAN de outro, europeus discutindo freneticamente como negociar uma bandeira branca e evitar o pior, ou seja, uma guerra. 
Se a situação degringolar de vez, o Brasil vai ser chamado a se posicionar mais explicitamente e até a agir. Cometerá um erro histórico se ceder ao chamamento, ou pressão, de Trump. Essa guerra não é nossa. O Brasil não tem nada a ganhar, só a perder, se entrar nela de gaiato.

O Brasil cada vez mais isolado no mundo - Oliver Stuenkel (RFI)

“O Brasil está cada vez mais isolado no Ocidente”, diz cientista político (Oliver Stuenkel)

RFI Convida, 31/12/2019 - 18:26

Doutor em Ciências Políticas, Oliver Stuenkel é professor de Relações Internacionais na FGV-SP.
Doutor em Ciências Políticas, Oliver Stuenkel é professor de Relações Internacionais na FGV-SP.Arquivo pessoal
Autor de “O mundo pós-ocidental”, Stuenkel fala do isolamento do Brasil no Ocidente e da natural aproximação com a China, passando por questões comerciais, ambientais e de geopolítica. Confira os principais trechos da entrevista.
Sobre a política externa ao longo de 2019, Oliver Stuenkel pontua: “Este ano, a gente viu a maior ruptura na história da política externa brasileira, porque pela primeira vez o Brasil alterou vários dos pilares que guiam a atuação do país no mundo. O mais importante é o apoio ao multilateralismo, que sempre marcou a política externa brasileira, o apoio para a elaboração e manutenção do direito internacional, tudo isso sempre foi a marca registrada do Brasil e isso deixou de ser o caso em 2019”.
“E a outra questão que mudou muito é que o Brasil teve sempre uma previsibilidade bastante grande da sua atuação diplomática. Mesmo durante a ditadura militar, o Brasil sempre foi visto como um ator previsível no mundo, agora a gente tem vários grupos que participam abertamente do processo de criação de política externa: os ideólogos mais perto do presidente da República, os generais que fazem parte de seu governo e também os economistas que buscam uma liberalização. Então tem uma tensão evidente entre estes três grupos e isso cria uma imprevisibilidade”, afirma.
Por conta disso, ele explica, o Brasil deixou de ser um ator confiável: “Isso fica bastante claro no caso argentino: o novo governo não sabia até o último minuto se haveria ou não um representante do governo brasileiro na posse do presidente [Alberto] Fernández. Isso representa bastante bem esta nova forma de fazer política que a gente viu ao longo do último ano”.
Jerusalém
Sobre a anunciada mudança da embaixada brasileira de Tel-Aviv para Jerusalém, Stuenkel analisa: “Este caso demonstra claramente como funciona a política externa do governo Bolsonaro. Ele quer isso, mas os dois outros grupos que importam na criação da política externa brasileira se opõem. Os militares não querem a embaixada brasileira em Jerusalém porque isso coloca o Brasil no meio de um dos conflitos geopolíticos mais difíceis, mais complexos do mundo”.
“Se isso de fato ocorrer, a relação do Brasil, inclusive de segurança, com o mundo árabe vai piorar bastante. Isso explica por que o vice-presidente Hamilton Mourão tem dito publicamente que ele não apoia esta mudança. Da mesma maneira os economistas neoliberais não apoiam esta medida, porque ela teria possivelmente um impacto negativo para a relação comercial do Brasil com o mundo árabe”, continua.
“A decisão sobre se vai haver ou não essa mudança vai depender da briga interna das facções que compõem o governo Bolsonaro. Eu ainda acho que a mudança traria um custo diplomático enorme. O Brasil sempre foi visto como um ator que consegue manter um diálogo com todos os lados e esta decisão faria o Brasil perder isso, além do impacto comercial importante”, adverte.
Relações com os Estados Unidos
Para Oliver Stuenkel, a aproximação do Brasil com os Estados Unidos é a grande aposta do presidente Bolsonaro. “Isso costuma ser uma empreitada difícil porque, para dar certo, o Brasil precisa oferecer ganhos tangíveis ao governo americano, de natureza sobretudo geopolítica, pelo fato de Brasil não ser uma economia tão grande. No fundo, o que importa para esta parceria ser relevante para um presidente americano é ter algum benefício geopolítico, senão o Brasil simplesmente não é importante o suficiente em Washington”, diz.
“No caso de Bolsonaro com Trump, o americano pediu duas coisas para que esta aproximação pudesse de fato acontecer: a primeira é  apoio para derrubar o regime Maduro, na Venezuela, o grande inimigo do governo americano. Bolsonaro até sugeriu inicialmente o apoio brasileiro a uma possível intervenção militar na Venezuela, mas as Forças Armadas, de novo, conseguiram bloquear isso. E também houve muita resistência no Itamaraty. Então o Brasil não anunciou este apoio e deixou de ter um papel relevante na crise venezuelana”, constata.
“O segundo pedido do governo americano é apoio para reduzir a influência chinesa da América do Sul. Isso é importante para Trump e tornaria o Brasil um aliado importante dos EUA. O problema, obviamente, é que o Brasil depende economicamente da China, é o nosso principal parceiro comercial há dez anos, e muitos grupos econômicos que apoiaram a eleição de Bolsonaro – entre eles a agricultura, têm interesse em manter e fortalecer a relação comercial com a China. Isso dificulta muito para o Brasil reduzir a influência chinesa na região; ao meu ver, isso não vai acontecer, e o governo americano já percebe que esta parceria com o Brasil rende pouco. E Trump, sendo protecionista, tem pouco interesse de permitir mais acesso de produtos brasileiros ao mercado americano”, acrescenta.
Relações com a China
Se com Washington as relações deixam a desejar, com Pequim tudo vai de vento em popa, segundo Stuenkel.
“A princípio, as relações estão ótimas. Eu conversei ao longo do ano com diplomatas chineses e empresários brasileiros que dependem desta relação e acredito que o vice-presidente brasileiro teve um papel fundamental para consertar a relação bilateral entre o Brasil e a China. Havia bastante preocupação no início de 2019 de que esta relação poderia sofrer em função da retórica anti-China de Bolsonaro", conta.
Além disso, ele explica que grupos poderosos que apoiam o governo Bolsonaro deixaram muito claro que “o custo de ter uma relação ruim com a China é altíssimo”. E tem uma outra razão que ajudou o Bolsonaro a parar de falar mal da China: seus eleitores não enxergam a China como uma ameaça, como é o caso dos EUA”, avalia.
“A China é fundamental para atrair investimentos externos e será um parceiro cada vez mais importante. O Brasil exporta para a China mais que o dobro do que exporta para os Estados Unidos. Essa dependência só vai aumentar, porque a China não consegue se alimentar. Isso será o nosso futuro econômico. A China sabe disso e trata o Brasil como um parceiro de longo prazo. Isso explica por que Xi Jinping, ao ser atacado por Bolsonaro, nunca respondeu nem atacou de volta, porque, para ele, a relação com o Brasil é mais importante do que o presidente atual do Brasil”, pontua.
Relações com a França
Para o especialista, as relações com a França e com o continente europeu tendem a piorar, com a exceção dos países governados pela extrema direita, com os quais Bolsonaro se identifica.
“O Brasil a partir de agora é visto como um ator imprevisível. O atual presidente não se deixa controlar facilmente, utiliza muito as mídias sociais – e isso vale também para o presidente americano – e os próprios diplomatas brasileiros ficam sabendo de mudanças da política externa brasileira pelo Twitter”, diz.
“Houve pedidos dos principais assessores de Bolsonaro para que pudesse haver uma distensão da relação do Brasil com a França, sobretudo no auge dos incêndios na Amazônia”, conta.
“Parece que não vai melhorar muito em 2020, porque o tema do meio ambiente é cada vez mais importante, sobretudo na Europa, isso não vale apenas para a França. O tema ambiental é cada vez mais central e isso vai dificultar toda a relação destes países com o Brasil, porque o Brasil é visto como um vilão nesta questão ambiental, em função de vários comentários do presidente e seus assessores questionando a existência da mudança climática”, analisa.
Para Stuenkel, dificilmente o Brasil chegará a ter, nos próximos três anos, uma boa relação com países europeus governados por centristas. “O Brasil tem uma ótima relação com governos de extrema direita, como é o caso da Hungria, mas a relação com a maioria dos outros governos será muito difícil”.
“Dificilmente esta reputação que Bolsonaro adquiriu ao longo do último ano vá mudar. Ele é muito mal visto pela maioria da população europeia e seria um custo muito alto para um presidente francês ou alemão receber Bolsonaro na Europa”, avalia.
Outra novidade da política externa brasileira, segundo o professor, é a inclusão do tema religioso. “Isso também é cada vez mais relevante na política externa de países como Hungria e Polônia. No passado vimos isso também no caso da Itália. Isso certamente vai aumentar ainda mais para satisfazer demandas de grupos internos. Igrejas evangélicas estão tendo participação cada vez maior na articulação da política externa – e este também é o caso nos EUA – então isso me parece que vai se tornar uma nova marca registrada do Brasil”, prevê.
Risco de isolamento?
“Me parece que o Brasil já está bastante isolado, sobretudo no Ocidente. Isso fica bastante claro. Ao longo do último ano eu visitei várias capitais do mundo ocidental e a gente vê claramente que o Brasil é visto como um parceiro difícil, pouco popular em geral, a associação que a maioria dos europeus faz do Brasil hoje é negativa, principalmente pelo tema ambiental. Mas eu não diria que o mesmo é o caso na Ásia, por exemplo, ou na África, onde o tema ambiental não é tao relevante”, explica.
Stuenkel acredita que “por conta desta mudança da reputação brasileira no Ocidente, o governo brasileiro será lembrado por sua aproximação com a Ásia, porque lá esta atuação controversa em relação ao meio ambiente ainda não teve um impacto negativo sobre a reputação do Brasil”.
“O Brasil está cada vez mais solado no Ocidente e isso vai aproximá-lo ainda mais da China”, afirma.
Para ele, em 2020 será importante manter uma boa relação tanto com Washington quanto com Pequim.  
“Outras questões importantes para 2020 é ver como se dará o Brexit, que terá um impacto importante na política global, na economia europeia, que ainda é importante para o Brasil; e qual será o resultado das eleições dos estados Unidos em novembro. Se Trump não for reeleito, me parece que há uma necessidade de reorientar a política externa brasileira porque Bolsonaro perderia sua grande inspiração”, finaliza.

As Relações Internacionais do Brasil aos 100 anos da disciplina - Eduardo Uziel, Gelson Fonseca

Notas sobre o campo das relações internacionais no Brasil no centésimo aniversário da disciplina
Estudios Internacionales, 2019
Gelson Fonseca