Retiro uma passagem, do artigo abaixo apresentado, que recomendo leitura, do conhecido jornalista Robert Kaplan, sobre a "fatalidade" da liderança americana. Interessa-me menos esse projeto geopolítico do que as considerações históricas que ele faz ao longo do texto, inclusive no que respeita os imponderáveis da história, ou seja, os famosos "what ifs?", que poderiam ter determinado outro curso a determinados eventos, alguns very big (Hitler e a Segunda Guerra, por exemplo), outros de consequências incomensuráveis para a toda a humanidade (o sucesso do putsch de Lênin, e a criação da União Soviética).
Mas, interessou-me esta passagem sobre a futilidade da "exportação" da democracia, o que nos deixa um pouco pessimistas sobre a evolução da nossa, no momento presente:
"
Just consider the case of promoting democracy abroad: it took England
nearly half a century to hold the first meeting of a parliament after the
signing of the Magna Carta, and more than seven hundred years to achieve
women’s suffrage. What we in the West define as a healthy democracy took
England the better part of a millennium to achieve. A functioning democracy is
not a toolkit that can be easily exported, but an expression of culture and
historical development. Great Britain’s democracy did not come from
civil-society programs taught by aid workers: it was the offshoot of bloody
dynastic politics and uprisings in the medieval and early modern eras. In a
similar spirit, whatever indigenous cultural elements India possessed for the
establishment of democracy, the experience of almost two hundred years of British
imperial rule under the colonial civil service was crucial. Certain other
countries in Asia had many years of economic and social development under
enlightened authoritarians to prepare them for democracy. In Latin America, the
record of democracy remains spotty, with virtual one-man rule in some places,
and near chaos and social and economic upheaval in others. African democracies
are often that in name only, with few or no governing authorities outside of
the capital cities. Holding elections is easy; it is building institutions that
counts. Given this evidence, and with the Arab world having suffered the most
benighted forms of despotism anywhere in the world, how can one expect to
export democracy overnight to the Middle East?
"
O texto completo do artigo de Robert Kaplan está aqui, e reproduzo só a parte inicial:
America is Fated to Lead
Robert Kaplan
The National Interest, january-february
2015
Culture and geography
really do matter. Great statesmen may attempt to rebel against these limits,
but their skillful diplomacy constitutes an implicit acceptance that they
exist.
(December
22, 2014)
THE SLEEP of any president, prime
minister or statesman is haunted by what
ifs.
What if I had only fired that defense secretary sooner, or
replaced that general in Iraq with the other one before it was too late? What
if I had not wholly believed the air force when they told me that the war in
southern Lebanon could be won from the skies? What if I had more troops on the
ground in Iraq from the start? What if I had called off those fruitless
negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians a few months—or even a few
weeks—earlier than I did? What if I had asked more questions at that meeting,
and listened sooner to the pleas of my assistant secretary or whoever it was
that said something could be done about Rwanda? The whole world, and my
reputation, would be different.
Counterfactuals haunt us all in the
policy community. We all want to be right, and assign failure to someone else.
We all want to deny fate, even as we recognize that it exists. For example, we
know that despite Isaiah Berlin’s admonition against the very idea of vast impersonal forces, such
as geography and culture, these forces really do matter, and they affect the
tasks ahead: whatever the intervention strategy, Iraqis will never behave like
Swedes, and Afghans or Libyans will never behave like Canadians. And sometimes
it is that simple. While individuals are more real and concrete than the national
groups to which they belong, group characteristics actually do exist and must
play a role in the foresight of any analyst. For group characteristics are
merely the sum total of a people’s experience on a given landscape throughout
hundreds or thousands of years of history.
But that is only the half of it. We
also know that grand historical events can turn on a hair’s breadth, on this or
that contingency. While the destiny of Afghanistan or Libya might never be that
of Canada, better or worse outcomes in such places are possible depending upon
the choices of individual policy makers, so that all of us, as Berlin rightly
suggests, must take moral responsibility for our actions. And because wrong
choices and unfortunate opinions are part and parcel of weighing in on foreign
policy, we go on torturing ourselves with counterfactuals.
WHAT IS fate—what the Greeks called moira, “the dealer-out of
portions”? Does it exist? If it does, Herodotus best captures its complexities:
from his geographical determinism regarding the landmasses of Greece and Asia
Minor and the cultures they raise up to his receptivity to the salience of
human intrigues, he skillfully conveys how self-interest is often calculated
within a disfiguring whirlwind of passion, so that the most epic events emerge
from the oddest of incidents and personal dramas. With such a plethora of
factors, fate is inscrutable. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short tale “The Lottery in
Babylon,” fate means utter randomness: a person can get rich, be executed or
tortured, provided with a beautiful woman or be thrown into prison solely
because of a roll of the dice. Nothing appears to be predetermined, but neither
is there moral responsibility. I find this both unsatisfying and unacceptable,
despite the story’s allegorical power.
How can a great episode in history
be determined in advance? It seems impossible. The older I get, with the
experience of three decades as a foreign correspondent behind me, the more I
realize that outside of a class of brilliantly intuitive minds—including the
late Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger—political science is still mainly an aspiration, and that
Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories offer a much better guide to the bizarre
palace maneuverings of the last Romanov czar and czarina of Russia, of Nicolae
and Elena Ceausescu of Romania, of Slobodan Milosevic and Mirjana Markovic of
Yugoslavia, or of Zviad and Manana Gamsakhurdia of Georgia. In short, there is
no scientific formula to understanding international relations. There is
primarily insight, which by definition is Shakespearean.
Yes, geography and culture matter.
Tropical abundance produces disease, just as temperate climates with good
natural harbors produce wealth. But these are merely the backdrops to the
immense and humming beehive of human calculation, the details of which can
never be known in advance. And yet, over the course of my life I have known
people who are abrasive and confrontational, and generate one crisis after
another to the detriment of themselves and their relations, even as I have
known others who are unfailingly considerate and modest, who go from one
seemingly easy success to another. Character, which itself is partly
physiological, can indeed be destiny, and that is fate.
It is this very contradiction
concerning fate that produces our finest historians: men and women who discern
grand determinative patterns, but only within an impossible-to-predict chaos of
human interactions, themselves driven by the force of vivid personalities
acting according to their own agency, for better and for worse. A classic work
that comes to mind is University of London historian Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian
Revolution, 1891–1924. “It was by no means inevitable that the [Russian]
revolution should have ended in the Bolshevik dictatorship,” he writes.
“There
were a number of decisive moments, both before and during 1917, when Russia
might have followed a more democratic course.”
Nevertheless, Figes adds, Russia’s democratic failure was
deeply rooted in its political culture and social history
. . .
[for example, in] the absence of a state-based counterbalance to the despotism
of the Tsar; the isolation and fragility of liberal civil society; the
backwardness and violence of the Russian village that drove so many peasants to
go and seek a better life in the industrial towns; and the strange fanaticism
of the Russian radical intelligentsia.
Figes gives us the determinative forces, but then,
like a good novelist, he provides in capacious detail the other factors,
without any one of which such seemingly determinative forces might have been
stayed. Had only Czar Alexander III not died of kidney disease at the age of
forty-nine, long before his son Nicholas II was temperamentally ready to rule.
Had only Nicholas truly supported Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and recognized
the talent of another bureaucrat, Prince Lvov, early on. Had only the
Czarevitch Alexei not had hemophilia, forcing the royal family to rely for
treatment on the mystic Grigory Rasputin, whose baleful influence fatally
weakened the regime. Had only Alexander Kerensky been better grounded
emotionally and less in love with his own rhetoric, and had only his
provisional government not bet its fortunes so completely on the spring 1917
offensive against the Germans. Had only Lenin’s past as a member of the
nobility not awarded him such a “dogmatic” and “domineering manner,” and had
Lenin only been arrested or even temporarily detained by a nighttime patrol
while he walked in disguise to the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, to take
control of the squabbling Bolsheviks and declare an insurrection in October
1917. And so on. Again, we are in the realm of geography and culture, until we
are in the realm of Shakespeare, and finally in the realm of sheer chance.
Although Figes says that “historians should not really concern themselves with
hypothetical questions,” his textured rendition of history allows the reader to
ponder other outcomes.
(...)
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