Conselho de Seguranca: mudancas e paralisias - Antonio Patriota

Globalizing the Security Council

Antonio de Aguiar Patriota *

Project Syndicate, 3 June 2013

BRASILIA – The 1945 United Nations Charter represented a historic breakthrough in the pursuit of peace on a multilateral basis. At the end of a global war that claimed more than 50 million lives, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s two major powers. The UN Charter, initially negotiated by the US, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom during World War II, established a Security Council containing five permanent members, including France and the Republic of China.

At its inception, the UN brought together 51 countries; it now has 193 member states. But, although the Security Council was enlarged in 1965 by increasing the number of non-permanent seats from six to ten, its permanent members have not changed since 1945.

The world has gone through extraordinary transformations since then. In addition to interstate conflict and the proliferation of weapons – particularly weapons of mass destruction – new challenges have emerged, such as terrorism and the involvement of non-state actors in internal conflicts. Meanwhile, the global distribution of economic and political power has undergone a radical reconfiguration, setting the stage for the emergence of a multipolar international order.

In this environment, the Security Council’s frozen composition is imposing significant limits on the international community’s capacity to address global challenges. Conflicts drag on without proper action from the body created to resolve them. Thousands of civilians die, are displaced, or are subjected to appalling human-rights abuses, while the Security Council proves unable or unwilling to act. Reform of the Council is thus urgent and indispensable.

A majority of UN member states are in favor of creating a new Council with an expanded roster of both permanent and non-permanent members. This majority reflects a growing perception that the world would be more stable and more secure with a strengthened and updated multilateral system. That means adding new voices to reflect the world in which we now live. Only then will the Security Council have the legitimacy to act on today’s manifold conflicts.

A reformed Security Council would reflect the emergence of new powers and their readiness to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security. In the financial and economic arena, this new multipolarity has already led to quota reforms at the International Monetary Fund and resulted in the consolidation of the G-20 as the premier venue for multilateral economic-policy coordination.

The contrast with matters of peace and security is stark. Entire regions of the world, such as Africa and Latin America, are excluded from the nucleus of decision-making. A governing body that is not representative fuels uncertainty and frustration among those subject to its decisions, undermining the legitimacy – and thus the effectiveness – of its actions.

The greatest risk that we run is erosion of the Security Council’s credibility, and, with it, a diminishing capacity to confront grave threats to peace. We all stand to lose if new international crises end up being addressed by coalitions of countries at the margins of the Security Council and in a manner that flouts international law.

The lessons of the recent past are clear. In any conflict, neighboring countries’ participation and commitment are indispensable to the achievement of peace. Only an expanded Security Council can enable effective conflict resolution worldwide.

The international community cannot afford to postpone reform. It is our duty to preserve the multilateral system of peace and security – an achievement of the international community that, despite its shortcomings, has helped save the planet from another war on a global scale.

Only an increase in the number of permanent and non-permanent seats can remedy the representation deficit within the Security Council and adapt it to the realities of the twenty-first century. If new members and regions are not offered a seat at the table, the Council will face increasing irrelevance – and the world, more than ever in need of effective conflict resolution, will be far worse off.

* Antonio de Aguiar Patriota is Foreign Minister of Brazil.

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Apenas um comentario sobre esta frase do artigo do ministro:

"But, although the Security Council was enlarged in 1965 by increasing the number of non-permanent seats from six to ten, its permanent members have not changed since 1945."

Mudou sim. E bastante. Primeiro aceitando a França, ainda em 1945, um país diminuído pela derrota contra a Alemanha, em 1940, e apenas restaurado graças à energia de um homem, De Gaulle, e sua decisão de mandar tropas francesas para ocupar a Alemanha em 1945. Depois recusando o Brasil, que era apoiado pelos EUA, em 1945, mas que não passou no teste das grandes potências em termos de capacidadde militar, tendo em conta a oposição da Grã-Bretanha e da URSS.

Mudou depois em 1971-72: quando expulsou a República da China, então reduzida a Formosa, e aceitou a República Popular da China, como única representante do povo chinês, e portanto herdeira dos aliados anti-potências agressoras de 1940-45,

O Conselho de Segurança tem mudado, talvez não no sentido desejado pelo Brasil, mas ele tem mudado...

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Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

A frase do dia, segundo Ricardo Noblat - contraditorio, pode-se agregar...

FRASE DO DIA

Quero dizer que a inflação jamais vai voltar e está sob controle. Por isso, peço a vocês que não deem ouvidos a esses que jogam sempre no quanto pior melhor. Todo mundo tem que ter a humildade de aguentar as críticas, mas terrorismo, não.

Dilma Rousseff
Blog de Ricardo Noblat, 15/06/2013

Isso foi num dia. No dia seguinte, a mema frasista lançou o programa demagógico e eleitoreiro de financiamento de compra de eletrodomésticos, à altura de 18 bilhões de reais, financiados por aumento da dívida pública e emissão monetária.

Pergunto: o que é isto senão um estímulo inflacionário? 

A presidente ou seus assessores econômicos pensam que somos idiotas?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Velho do Restelo e o bode expiatorio - Chico Caruso

Sem palavras, ou apenas uma: certas pessoas precisam de uma razão externa às suas próprias ações...

1940: Hesitation year (as America stays apart...) - book review, Susan Dunn

The Year of Hesitation

With European armies on the march, America seemed a world apart.

The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2013

1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election Amid the Storm

By Susan Dunn
Yale, 418 pages, $30

By DAVID M. SHRIBMAN

It was the Year Before. The year before Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio would light up the baseball world with the numbers .406 and 56. The year before the Jeep was invented and the Manhattan Project was started, the year before Mount Rushmore was completed, the year before Joan Baez was born, the year before 2,402 victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor would die.

But 1940 was more than the Year Before. It was a time and era all its own: the Luftwaffe bombing assault on London, the assassination of Trotsky, the discovery of Stone Age carvings in a cave in France, the appearance of nylons on the market. The Bears beat the Redskins, 73-0, in the NFL championship game. Byron Nelson won the PGA Championship.

And it was the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in the White House. It is this presidential drama that is the centerpiece of Susan Dunn's volume with the pithy, strangely evocative title of "1940.'' The book is a meticulous reconstruction of several battles: the one between FDR and Wendell Willkie, naturally, but also the struggle between those who believed in isolationism and those who believed in engagement. And the clash between those who believed the best answer to Hitler and Mussolini was appeasement and those who believed instead in forceful response and rearmament.

Few years—1941, of course, and surely 1776 and 1861, and maybe 1968 and 2001—offer so rich an American canvas, and Ms. Dunn, a prolific historian at Williams College, uses it to paint a brilliant portrait of an America in transition, not only between war and peace but also between a country content to stick to its knitting and one that would soon sew together alliances and assume obligations across the globe.

Ms. Dunn's story begins with Japan at war in China, Germany on the move through Europe, and Americans registering for the draft and taking jobs in the growing defense industry. From the start it is clear that this was a time of transformation—and crisis.

The year was dominated by two questions whose answers would change the country. Would Roosevelt run for the third term that none of his predecessors dared undertake? And would the United States, possessed of the world's 18th biggest army, only slightly bigger than Bulgaria's, be drawn into the war that was darkening the globe?

On the war, FDR took what you might call a lean-in position, observing in his State of the Union address that there was a "vast difference'' between "keeping out of war and pretending that this war is none of our business.'' On the question of the third term, Hitler all but resolved Roosevelt's conundrum, and the nation's.

One of the long shadows of the year (and, it turns out, of the year ahead, too) was cast by Charles Lindbergh: hero of Le Bourget, seatmate of Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, "intensely pleased''—his words—by the Nazi experience. FDR thought him a Nazi, but perhaps he was simply shallow and narrow. Lindbergh, whose relationship with FDR also is a principal theme of another book this season, Lynne Olson's "Those Angry Days," stands out for his ignorance but not for his isolationism, a creed embraced by, among many others, the old Herbert Hoover and the young Gerald Ford, the reigning president of the University of Chicago (Robert Maynard Hutchins), and the future president of Yale (Kingman Brewster), all suffering from what the playwright Robert Sherwood described as an "isolationist fetish.'' Their brand of isolationism was a mixture of pacifism and defeatism in the face of fascism and totalitarianism, with a few of them throwing in a sprinkle of anti-Semitism as seasoning.

Then there was Willkie himself, the chairman of the Commonwealth and Southern Utilities Corp. He won the Republican nomination by beating out Thomas Dewey (fabled gangster-buster), Robert Taft (first in his class at both Yale and Harvard Law and a noted isolationist), Arthur Vandenberg ("abstruse,'' she tells us, "with his overly subtle distinction between isolationism and insulationism''), and Herbert Hoover ("out of touch'').

A onetime Democrat and longtime internationalist, Willkie battled the Ku Klux Klan, made a fortune on Wall Street, and made some women, and a handful of powerful publishers, swoon. "I am utterly devoid, I believe, of political ambition,'' he said, which of course positioned him perfectly to attain his ambition, the Republican presidential nomination.

Willkie's appeal was on the economic side, offering a humane alternative to the New Deal he reviled, one concentrating on competition and free markets. "The true liberal,'' he said, "is as much opposed to excessive concentration of power in the hands of government as . . . in the hands of business.'' This was a challenge both to the New Dealers and to the Republican Old Guard. At the Republican National Convention he was, as Ms. Dunn puts it, "a colorful maverick in a sea of gray.''

Willkie never quite fit in the party that nominated him, referring in his acceptance speech to "you Republicans'' and prompting Lindbergh to describe him as a "problem child.'' If politics were a matter of logic, Willkie's nomination would have removed the rationale for FDR's third term, but the long history of American politics is a treatise against logic, which is why books like Ms. Dunn's—primarily a colorful account of that most colorful American art form, the presidential campaign, with its banners, bands, bunting and bunkum—are so captivating.

For his part, Roosevelt—no revisionism here, just the customary heroic but enigmatic FDR—encouraged multiple worthies to become presidential candidates. As a result, no single alternative emerged, and the party that had stoutly resisted a third term for Grover Cleveland gladly offered one to Franklin Roosevelt. "It's been grand fun, hasn't it!'' the president said to Sherwood and adviser Sam Rosenman the Sunday night before the election, and it was.

But there would be little in the way of grand fun for Roosevelt or anyone else in the years to come—even in the year to come. FDR had won every large city except Cincinnati, but the office he continued to occupy soon took on the burden of preserving American democracy, American freedoms and American independence. The man whom Carl Sandburg on the night before the election had described as "a not perfect man and yet more precious than fine gold'' faced rearmament, Lend-Lease, continued struggles against isolationists and appeasers, and, after Pearl Harbor, a two-front war against formidable foes whose leaders possessed more personal power, and for a time more firepower, than he.

After the election Willkie became a sturdy supporter of engagement, an effective emissary for FDR and a powerful pugilist against Lindbergh, whose attacks only escalated. The victor, and the country he had sought to lead through the woes of war, thus benefited from the broad-mindedness and personal generosity of the vanquished. "For the good of the country and the survival of democracy around the world,'' Ms. Dunn writes, "the former rivals sought to work together and probably came to respect each other.'' Few years turn out to be as perilous as 1940, or as portentous.

—Mr. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press.

A version of this article appeared June 15, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Year of Hesitation.

1913: Globalization year (Argentina was very rich) - book review, Charles Emmerson, 1913

Uma informação retirada de minhas pesquisas: exatamente cem anos atrás, em 1913, a Argentina era um país muito rico. Medindo pela escala dos Estados Unidos, já então o país de mais alta renda per capita do mundo, os argentinos exibiam nada menos do que 73% da renda dos americanos, à frente da França e de vários outros países europeus. O Brasil, coitadinho, era muito pobre, apenas 10 ou 11 % da renda americana, ou seja, muitas vezes atrás dos americanos.
Atualmente, depois de mais ou menos 80 anos de decadência, a renda argentina não alcança 30% da renda dos americanos, e se situa apenas um quarto ou um terço acima da média brasileira . Isso é decadência para ninguém botar defeito.
Um livro para mostrar como o mundo era globalizado e pacífico, antes da guerra, e para mostrar como tudo pode degringolar num instante. O problema, em 1913, eram os belicosos europeus e os novos imperialistas agressivos japoneses. Cem anos depois, temos americanos e chineses como protagonistas quase exclusivos do grande jogo geopolítico. Creio que a coisa não vai degringolar desta vez, pelo menos não em proporções catastróficas como em 1014.
Mas, isso não exclui outros processos de decadência: a Argentina de maneira continuada, e o Brasil de maneira acentuada. A degradação moral do Brasil e no Brasil é muito mais avançada, e mentalmente perturbadora, do que a decadência material. Esperamos que não dure 80 anos como no caso argentino.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Charles Emmerson:
1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
(Public Affairs, 526 pages, $ 30)

The Year of Globalization

The year before World War I, the world enjoyed a peaceful productivity

 so dependent on international trade and cooperation that general war seemed impossible.

The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2013

Enlarge Image

David McMacken

By MARK ARCHER

Charles Emmerson's book anticipating next year's centenary of the beginning of World War I is ambitious in scope. Each of "1913's" 20 chapters is dedicated to a different city and not just to future belligerent capitals like Berlin, Paris and London but also to Beijing, Buenos Aires, Detroit, Tehran, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Algiers and Mumbai. Mr. Emmerson's aim is "to paint a truly global picture of the world in 1913," and he asks that we resist seeing it "through the prism of what happened after it."

In this, "1913" contrasts with the best-known account of the period, Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914" (1966), in which she argued that the drumbeat of war sounded increasingly loudly in the decade up to 1914. Written not long after the Cuban missile crisis, "The Proud Tower" more closely reflected the Cold War anxieties of her own time than the general optimism of the prewar years. Had a "hot line" existed between the European powers in 1914, as was installed between Moscow and Washington after Cuba, it is very likely that war could have been avoided during the five weeks of diplomatic crisis that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on June 28, 1914.

In reality, when war came, it came out of a sky that had seemed cloudless to most people in the world, who knew almost nothing of war of any kind and had been raised to doubt that it could ever trouble them again. This is the world Mr. Emmerson describes—"as it might have looked through contemporary eyes, in its full colour and complexity, with a sense of the future's openness." He does this by drawing upon an impressive range of contemporary source material, ranging from travel guides and memoirs to unpublished diaries, newspaper reports and diplomatic memos. They give a vivid portrait of the rapid changes occurring in daily life around the globe.

"Thank God for Now!" Mr. Emmerson quotes one enthusiastic Winnipegger in May 1913, "these present times are the greatest and the best the world has ever seen." This is not the war-haunted world that Tuchman portrayed, but it too bears the uncanny imprint of the time in which it is written. Like today, the world in 1913 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international trade and cooperation that the impossibility of general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms. Mr. Emmerson points out that the volume of world trade reached a share of global output in 1913 that it was not to surpass until the 1970s. He quotes an advertisement for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. in "The China Yearbook 1913"; it listed its branches around the world and promised a global banking service to facilitate the lives of its globe-trotting customers. "Plus ça change," Mr. Emmerson remarks.

Thanks to intercontinental telephone cables, transcontinental railway lines and faster oil-fired ships, the world had never seemed more connected and more frontier-less. Globalization, Mr. Emmerson writes of 1913, quoting the economist John Maynard Keynes, was considered "normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement." Travel, previously a pastime of the rich, had become a middle-class pleasure as well, thanks to the railway revolution and the hotel industry it fueled. Annual world trade fairs, such as the Exposition Universelle et Internationale held in Ghent in Belgium in 1913, and the proliferation of international trade associations and standards committees were a sign to many that the commercial interdependence of nations made war unprofitable as well as unthinkable. Indeed, the willingness of the great powers to act together had been shown as early as 1900 in the response to the Boxer Rebels surrounding the Western embassies in Beijing. An international relief expedition comprising soldiers from Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Japan and the U.S. successfully lifted the siege.

Two peace conferences in 1899 and 1907 had sown the seeds for an international court to arbitrate between states, and in August 1913 it found a home in the newly built Peace Palace in the Hague, funded by the U.S. steel magnate and peace activist Andrew Carnegie. The detail that Mr. Emmerson fails to add is that its convening was to be voluntary. It was expected that states would choose the court over the battlefield. Yet when localized disputes arose, as they did in Morocco between France and Germany (in 1905 and 1911) or in the Balkans between Austria and Serbia (in 1912 and 1913), none of the great powers invoked the ideal of supranational peacemaking enshrined at the Hague. They instead settled for side treaties with other states that, while temporarily preserving peace, proved the catalyst for the greater conflagration in 1914.

Population growth, Mr. Emmerson explains, was the major impetus for world trade. In the 30 years to 1913, he notes, Britain's population increased to 45 million from 35 million and Germany's to 68 million from 50 million. France's population, on the other hand, only grew by two million to 41 million—a fact not lost on German military planners or, he says, on the French president, Raymond Poincaré, who successfully campaigned in 1913 to extend conscription from two to three years to maintain the nation's fighting parity with Germany.

The growing demand for foodstuffs and commodities in developed nations wrought many an economic miracle in less developed countries. Winnipeg in the Canadian prairies grew rich on exported grain, Melbourne in Australia boomed from sheep and gold. Argentina was importing wheat in 1870, but, by 1913, was one of the world's largest exporters of grain and frozen beef—shipments of which (largely to Europe) increased five times in the first decade of the century.

To get grain and beef to the coast from its large inland estates, Argentina needed railways, for which the City of London was happy to provide the financing. In 1913, nearly half of the world's foreign direct investment came from Britain, "as much," Mr. Emmerson notes, "as the United States at its peak in 1960." Indefatigable in his references, he even mentions that the Buenos Aires "Baedeker" recommended that tourists visit the La Negra slaughterhouse to marvel at the efficiency of its system of slaughter and refrigeration, which the guidebook considered every bit as impressive as Henry Ford's world-famous automobile plant in Detroit.

When, in 1913, Britain's Royal Navy stole a march on Germany by switching its fleet's fuel from coal to oil—so as to build bigger, faster ships that could re-fuel at sea rather than at coaling stations around the world—it led directly to the British government buying a share in the fledging oil concession in Persia to secure its long-term supply. That company eventually became BP. In 1912, Mr. Emmerson explains, China had overthrown its emperor, whose forebears had ruled for 4,000 years, and in the space of four months established a modern democracy. In 1913, the U.S. became the first of the major powers formally to recognize the Republic of China amid much hope of growing trade opportunities. Plus ça change?

In 1913, Ford's Model T became the world's first global consumer brand. It was being driven in Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand and even Mongolia. Mr. Emmerson describes a cartoon showing a startled Martian looking through a telescope at Earth—to see it swarming with Model T's. Industrial and personal efficiency had become the "all-American cult," in Mr. Emmerson's words. The 1913 Sears catalog, he writes, was "eloquent testimony for the emergence of a society of mass consumption, with new and varied tastes." Its hair-care products included "Gervaise Graham's Hair Color to dye hair, Princess Hair Tonic to grow it and De-Miracle Non-Irritant Depilatory to remove it."

Huge income inequalities existed in society, of course, and Mr. Emmerson's chapter on New York describes how the city was already being criticized as the "New Babylon," a place where prodigious economic and demographic growth had given rise to an out-of-touch ruling class and a vast underclass of working poor. Urban sanitation systems had improved around the world, but cholera outbreaks were not uncommon in cities such as St. Petersburg, where Mr. Emmerson tells us the death rate was higher than in Constantinople and where in 1913 the czar's own daughter contracted the disease. New laws restricting Japanese immigrants from owning land in California or resident Asians from trading in South Africa were a foretaste of racial tensions that were to intensify after World War I.

After 1918, Mr. Emmerson explains in the book's epilogue, world-wide trade atrophied, not least because countries tried to re-adopt the gold standard:

Internationalism had been a fact of life before the Great War. Now it became a cause in itself. . . . Worse, as countries re-entered the Gold Standard at pre-war rates of exchange which no longer reflected their true economic and financial position—forcing themselves onto a financial straitjacket which no longer fitted—the Gold Standard came to be seen as a mechanism for generating economic insecurity rather than one for generating financial stability. In 1931, in the face of the Great Depression, Britain left. The principles of liberal free trade—and of the economic interdependence which this implied—were replaced with aspirations to economic self-sufficiency. . . . Somehow, somewhere, the world of 1913 had gone.

The reader seeking an explanation for the World War I will not find it in Mr. Emmerson's book, something he readily acknowledges. Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" is a much better guide to how geopolitical rivalries and an arms race based on advances in weaponry and the widespread introduction of mass conscription were almost bound to result in cataclysm, and Christopher Clark's recent "Sleepwalkers" is a superlative account of the path to European war in 1914. And yet World War I was not inevitable, and the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms. Charles Emmerson captures all the world's hope and excitement as it experienced an economic El Dorado. "1913" is history without hindsight at its best.

—Mr. Archer is a writer living in London.

A version of this article appeared June 15, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Year of Globalization.

Iran: flamenguistas e fluminenses votaram certo, e unidos, desta vez...

Resta saber se os mullahs teocráticos e os pasdarans negocistas vão deixá-lo governar e fazer as reformas que se impõem, inclusive no plano externo (ou seja, das negociações em torno do programa nuclear), para melhorar a vida da população iraniana.
Podemos estar assistindo ao começo do começo do renascimento de um processo tendencialmente democratizante no Irã, ou seja, os progressos serão lentos, e durarão provavelmente mais de uma geração para que a vibrante sociedade civil iraniana retome o caminho das liberdades democráticas e o de uma sociedade marcada pela tolerância religiosa e cultural, não pelo obscurantismo dos fundamentalistas chiitas.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

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BREAKING NEWS New York Times, Saturday, June 15, 2013 12:04 PM EDT

Hasan Rowhani, a Moderate Candidate, Declared Winner of Iran’s Presidential Vote In a striking repudiation of the ultra-conservatives who wield power in Iran, Iranian voters overwhelmingly elected a mild-mannered cleric seeking greater personal freedoms for the public and a more conciliatory approach with the world. Iran’s interior minister, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, announced that Hassan Rowhani, 64, had more than 50 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff in the race to succeed the outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose tenure was defined largely by provocation with the west and a seriously hobbled economy at home. The hardline conservatives aligned with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei placed at the back of the pack of six candidates, indicating that Iranian’s were looking to their next president to change the tone, if not the direction of the nation, by choosing a cleric who served as the lead nuclear negotiator under reformist Mohammad Khatami. READ MORE » http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/middleeast/iran-election.html?emc=edit_na_20130615

Dez anos de "governos" lulo-petistas - Ricardo Velez-Rodriguez

Dez anos de lulopetismo 

RICARDO VÉLEZ RODRÍGUEZ *

O Estado de S. Paulo, 5 de junho de 2013

Passada uma década de exercício do governo pelo Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), é possível fazer uma avaliação das suas realizações e fracassos, à luz do que os anglo-americanos chamam de "a prova da história".

O Partido dos Trabalhadores chegou ao poder com duas cartas de navegação. Uma, inspirada num modelo social-democrático e elaborada rapidamente por recomendação dos marqueteiros políticos de Lula, tendo sido publicada com o título de Carta ao Povo Brasileiro, ou simplesmente Carta do Recife, em junho de 2002. Outra, datada de dezembro de 2001, é denominada de Carta de Olinda, escrita nos laboratórios da direção do Partido dos Trabalhadores, sob a influência de José Dirceu e com a aprovação de Lula. Nela, a militância do partido deixava claro o modelo de governo que pretendia pôr em prática: um socialismo estatizante inspirado no regime cubano e próximo do ideal bolivariano que Hugo Chávez buscava implantar na Venezuela.

Na Carta ao Povo Brasileiro, elaborada pelos assessores de marketing eleitoral de Lula, sob a coordenação de Antonio Palocci (que logo depois seria ministro da Fazenda do primeiro governo Lula), ficava claro que o candidato petista, caso fosse eleito presidente da República, honraria os contratos internacionais assinados pelo Brasil, manteria o regime democrático de liberdades e de tripartição de poderes, respeitando a Constituição vigente, a rotatividade do poder entre os partidos, bem como a economia de mercado e os marcos da política macroeconômica fixados no Plano Real e implementados nos dois governos social-democráticos de Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Seriam respeitados os tratados internacionais, bem como a gestão democrática da política externa administrada pelo Itamaraty, seguindo a tradição de não intervenção na política interna dos outros países e o convívio pacífico do Brasil com as demais nações. A classe média foi conquistada pela Carta ao Povo Brasileiro.

Contrariamente ao que tinha ocorrido nas eleições presidenciais anteriores (de 1990, 1994 e 1998), a opinião pública deu decisivo apoio ao candidato Lula. Nos seus programas eleitorais anteriores, ele tinha apresentado plataformas inspiradas num modelo de socialismo à maneira cubana, polarizadas pelo marxismo-leninismo. A Carta de Olinda repetia esse modelo. A duplicidade de "cartas de navegação" somente se revelaria à opinião pública após a posse de Lula em 2003, mais concretamente depois da divulgação do affaire do "mensalão", em 2005, e serviria sempre como uma espécie de chantagem do partido sobre a opinião pública, com o governo ameaçando colocar na rua os "movimentos sociais" para efetivar reformas radicais.

O que os petistas procuravam, segundo a Carta de Olinda, era, em primeiro lugar, no terreno econômico, instaurar um sistema produtivo de tipo socialista centrado na intervenção direta do Estado como empresário. Isso implicava a escolha, por cooptação, daqueles empresários que deveriam ser os "campeões de bilheteria" e a aproximação direta do governo com o povão, mediante políticas sociais distribuidoras de renda, mantendo numa espécie de limbo a classe burguesa identificada como inimiga dos pobres. Ponto-chave das políticas sociais petistas foi o programa Bolsa Família. Era a reedição do velho modelo elaborado pelo Marquês de Pombal, na segunda metade do século 18, e que o primeiro-ministro português recomendava pôr em prática no Brasil ao seu sobrinho governador do Maranhão.

Nestes dez anos de governo petista, observa-se que o partido sob o comando do Lula foi se afastando aos poucos do programa social-democrático original expresso na Carta ao Povo Brasileiro para se alinhar com a Carta de Olinda, num crescente fortalecimento do Executivo sobre os demais poderes públicos e com um claro estatismo na área econômica.

O principal programa da área social, o Bolsa Família, se bem beneficiou 50 milhões de brasileiros pobres, tornou-os reféns da dádiva oficial, ao ter ficado em segundo plano a geração de empregos que garantissem a continuidade da saída da pobreza. A angústia vivida pelos beneficiários desse programa nas últimas semanas, diante do boato de que o benefício seria cortado, revela a sua precariedade. O mecanismo institucional que tornou possível financiar os empresários cooptados foi o Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES), com operações de financiamento pouco transparentes, que abrem a porta ao desperdício do dinheiro público e à corrupção. O "mensalão" revelou a face perversa do estatismo na área política, com o Executivo comprando o apoio da base aliada num esquema de corrupção jamais visto. Foi conferido um caráter mais político do que técnico a uma próspera estatal como a Petrobrás, descapitalizando-a e afastando o País da autossuficiência energética.

O que, no fundo, inspirou os petistas não foi o reforço ao capitalismo, mas a construção do que eufemisticamente se chama de "capitalismo de Estado", que, em realidade, não é mais do que o reforço ao patrimonialismo, com a volta da inflação. O PT busca tornar-se um partido hegemônico, constituindo-se, sob a inspiração da filosofia gramsciana, como o "novo príncipe" da política brasileira.

Em conclusão: o Brasil passou a viver, na última década, uma espécie de esquizofrenia política proveniente da duplicidade de programas em conflito, adotados pelas duas cartas de navegação referidas. Um programa que conduziria ao reforço do modelo social-democrático está sendo socavado por outro, de índole declaradamente patrimonialista. Esse é o mal que, a meu ver, atrapalha hoje em dia a administração petista.

* RICARDO VÉLEZ RODRÍGUEZ É MEMBRO DO CENTRO DE PESQUISAS ESTRATÉGICAS ‘PAULINO SOARES DE SOUSA’, DA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE JUIZ DE FORA (MG), É PROFESSOR EMÉRITO DA ECEME. E-MAIL: RIVE2001@GMAIL.COM.