¿Por qué no funciona la ayuda externa?
por William Easterly
20 de abril de 2006
Cato Institute, neste link.
William Easterly es académico titular del Cato Institute y director de Cato University. Este ensayo se basa en la contribución del autor al taller "Promoviendo el libre comercio", organizado por el Instituto Liberal de la Fundación Friedrich Naumann en noviembre del 2003. También puede leer este documento en formato PDF aquí.
Estoy manejando hacia las afueras de Addis Ababa, Etiopía. Una fila eterna de mujeres y niñas están desfilando en la dirección opuesta hacia la ciudad. El rango de sus edades es de entre 9 y 59 años. Cada una esta agachada hasta casi la mitad de su altura bajo una carga de leña. La carga pesada las propulsa hacia adelante casi a trote. Se me vienen a la mente esclavos guiados por un dueño de esclavos invisible. Están cargando la leña desde kilómetros afuera de Addis Ababa, donde hay bosques de eucaliptos, a través de tierras despojadas alrededor de la ciudad. Traen la leña al mercado central de la ciudad, donde venderán el bulto por un par de dólares. Eso va a ser todo el ingreso del día, ya que toma todo el día llevar la leña a Addis Ababa y caminar de regreso.
Después me enteré que el noticiero BBC había expuesto la historia de una de las recolectoras de leña. Amaretch, de 10 años, se levantó a las 3 de la madrugada para recoger ramas y hojas de eucalipto y luego empezó la larga y dolorosa marcha hacia la ciudad. Amaretch, cual nombre significa “linda,” es la menor de 4 hijos en su familia. Ella dice:
No quiero tener que cargar la leña toda mi vida. Pero en este momento no tengo otra opción porque somos tan pobres. Todos nosotros [los niños] cargamos leña para ayudar a nuestros padres a comprar nuestra comida. Preferiría solo ir al colegio y no tener que preocuparme de conseguir dinero.1
Las dos tragedias
El Ministro de Economía del Reino Unido Gordon Brown recientemente dio un discurso lleno de compasión sobre la tragedia de la pobreza extrema afligiendo a miles de millones de personas, con millones de niños muriendo de enfermedades que podrían ser fácilmente prevenidas. Ofreció esperanza señalando lo fácil que es hacer el bien. La dosis de medicina que prevendría la mitad de las muertes por malaria cuesta solo 12 centavos. Una maya para la cama que le prevendría la muerte a un niño solo cuesta $4. El prevenir la muerte de 5 millones de niños a través de los próximos 10 años costaría $3 por cada nueva madre. Un programa para permitirle a Amaretch asistir a la escuela costaría poco.
Sin embargo, Gordon Brown se quedó callado sobre la otra tragedia de los pobres a nivel mundial. Esta es la tragedia en la cual el Occidente ya gasto $2.3 trillones en ayuda externa durante las últimas 5 décadas y todavía no ha logrado darle medicinas de 12 centavos a los niños para prevenir la mitad de las muertes causadas por malaria. El Occidente ha gastado $2.3 trillones y todavía no ha logrado darle mayas de cama de $4 a familias pobres. El Occidente ha gastado $2.3 trillones y todavía no ha logrado darle $3 a cada nueva madre para prevenir la muerte de 5 millones de niños. El Occidente ha gastado $2.3 trillones y Amaretch todavía está cargando leña. Es una tragedia que tanta compasión con buenas intenciones no haya rendido estos resultados a la gente necesitada.
Los esfuerzos del Occidente para ayudar al resto han sido aun menos exitosos en cuanto a metas como la de promover un crecimiento económico rápido, lograr cambios en las políticas publicas económicas gubernamentales para facilitar el funcionamiento de los mercados, o en promover la honestidad y la democracia en el gobierno. La evidencia es brutal: $568 miles de millones gastados en ayuda externa a África, y aun el país africano típico no es más rico hoy que hace 40 años. Docenas de préstamos para “ajustes estructurales” (préstamos de ayuda con condiciones de reformar las políticas públicas) a África, la antigua Unión Soviética, y América Latina solo para ver el fracaso de tanto las reformas de políticas públicas como del crecimiento económico. La evidencia sugiere que la ayuda resulta en gobiernos más deshonestos y menos democráticos, no lo contrario. Sin embargo, sin ser escarmentados por esta experiencia, seguimos teniendo cosas tan absurdas como los grandiosos planes de Jeffrey Sachs y de las Naciones Unidas para hacer 449 intervenciones individuales para alcanzar 54 metas distintas para el año 2015 (Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio), acompañados de peticiones urgentes para duplicar el financiamiento para la ayuda.
El desarrollo económico ocurre, no mediante la ayuda externa, sino mediante los esfuerzos cultivados por los empresarios, reformadores sociales y políticos del mismo país. Mientras que el Occidente se estaba agonizando por unas cuantas decenas de miles de millones de dólares en ayuda, los ciudadanos de la India y China aumentaron sus propios ingresos por $715 miles de millones con esfuerzo propio en los mercados libres. Apenas las agencias de ayuda externa se den cuenta de que la ayuda NO PUEDE lograr el desarrollo político y económico general, estas podrían empezar a concentrarse en arreglar el sistema que fracasa en darles medicinas de 12 centavos a las víctimas de malaria.
Retroalimentación y rendición de cuentas
Los dos elementos necesarios claves para que la ayuda sirva son la RETROALIMENTACION y la RENDICIÓN DE CUENTAS—que han estado ausentes y por lo tanto han sido mortal para la eficacia de la ayuda en el pasado. Las necesidades de los ricos se llevan acabo mediante la retroalimentación y la rendición de cuentas. Los consumidores le dicen a la empresa “este producto vale este precio” mediante la compra del producto, o deciden que el producto no vale nada y lo devuelven a la tienda. Los votantes les dicen a sus representantes electos que “los servicios son malos” y el político trata de eliminar el problema.
Por supuesto, la retroalimentación solo sirve si alguien escucha. Las empresas que buscan ganancias hacen productos que ellos creen que están en alta demanda, pero también se responsabilizan por el producto—si el producto envenena al consumidor ellos son responsables o por lo menos quiebran. Los representantes electos se responsabilizan por la calidad de los servicios públicos. Si algo va mal, ellos pagan políticamente, quizás perdiendo su cargo. Si son exitosos, reciben recompensas políticas.
Las agencias de ayuda externa podrían tener que rendir cuentas por tareas específicas, en lugar de estar sujetas a incentivos débiles que resultan en una responsabilidad colectiva de todas las agencias de ayuda externa y de los gobiernos receptores para esas metas extensas que dependen en muchas otras cosas además de los esfuerzos de las agencias. Ejemplos de lo mencionado incluyen las metas tan irresponsables como la campaña de moda de alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio de las Naciones Unidas, o las metas radicales de desarrollo económico, reforma gubernamental, y democracia para los países pobres mencionados anteriormente.
Si una burocracia comparte responsabilidades con otras agencias para alcanzar varias metas generales diversas que dependen de muchas otras cosas, entonces no es responsable para con los beneficiarios pretendidos—los pobres. Ningún agente independiente es individualmente responsable por alcanzar una tarea de manera exitosa en el sistema de ayuda externa actual. Sin un mecanismo de rendición de cuentas, el incentivo para descubrir lo que funciona es débil. La verdadera rendición de cuentas significaría que una agencia de ayuda externa se responsabilice de una tarea específica para ayudar a los pobres que se pueda monitorear, cuyo resultado dependa casi totalmente de lo que hace la agencia. Luego la evaluación independiente de qué tan bien la agencia elabora la tarea crearía incentivos fuertes para lograr un buen rendimiento.
Aunque la ayuda externa ha sido evaluada por mucho tiempo, muchas veces ha sido una evaluación propia, usando reportes de la misma gente que implementó el proyecto. Mis estudiantes en la Universidad de Nueva York no estudiarían mucho si yo les daría el derecho de asignarse sus calificaciones ellos mismos.
El Banco Mundial se esfuerza por lograr una independencia para su Departamento de Evaluación de Operaciones (DEO), el cual se reporta directamente con la junta directiva del Banco Mundial, no con el presidente. No obstante, el personal se mueve continuamente entre el DEO y el resto del Banco—una evaluación negativa podría perjudicar el futuro de la carrera de una persona. La evaluación del DEO es subjetiva. Los métodos poco claros resultan en desconectes de la evaluación como ese delicadamente descrito en Malí:
Se debe de preguntar como los resultados principalmente positivos de las evaluaciones pueden ser reconciliados con los resultados pobres de desarrollo observados durante el mismo periodo (1985-1995) y la opinión desfavorable de los locales. (pg. 26)
Aun cuando las evaluaciones internas señalan un fracaso, ¿será que las agencias hacen que alguien se responsabilice o cambian las prácticas de la agencia de ayuda? Es difícil descubrir esto estudiando el sitio Web de evaluaciones del Banco Mundial. El DEO en el año 2004 indicó como ocho “evaluaciones influenciales” influyeron las acciones del prestatario en 32 formas diferentes, pero mencionaron solo dos ocasiones en las que afectaron el comportamiento interno del Banco (una de ellas negativamente).
Hacia adelante
El camino hacia adelante es difícil políticamente—una evaluación verdaderamente científicamente independiente de iniciativas específicas de ayuda externa. No evaluaciones generales en conjunto de un programa de desarrollo a nivel nacional, pero evaluaciones específicas y continuas de intervenciones particulares de las cuales las agencias pueden aprender. Solo la presión política externa sobre las agencias de ayuda es probable que pueda crear los incentivos para hacer estas evaluaciones. Un estudio del Banco Mundial en el 2000 empezó con la confesión de que “A pesar de los miles de millones de dólares que se han gastado en ayuda externa para el desarrollo cada año, aun se sabe muy poco del impacto real de los proyectos sobre los pobres.”
La solución es tan obvia como impopular—crear un grupo realmente independiente de evaluadores que no tenga conflictos de interés con el Banco Mundial u otros bancos multilaterales de desarrollo. Por supuesto, tienen que haber incentivos para hacer algo respecto a las evaluaciones—la asignación de dinero a los bancos multilaterales de desarrollo debería de subir o bajar dependiendo del rendimiento promedio calificado por los evaluadores independientes. Los bancos multilaterales de desarrollo también deberían de ser acreditados por descontinuar programas fracasados o por cambiarlos si se pueden reparar, mientras que la falta de acción debería de ser penalizada.
Éxito mediante evaluación
En 1997, al subsecretario de egresos de la Secretaría de Hacienda de México, un economista reconocido llamado Santiago Levy, se le ocurrió un programa innovador para ayudar a los pobres a que se ayuden a si mismos. El programa, llamado PROGRESA (Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación), proporciona subvenciones para madres SI ES QUE mantienen a sus hijos en la escuela, participan en programas educacionales sobre la salud, y si llevan a sus hijos a clínicas de salud por suplementos nutricionales y chequeos regulares. Como el presupuesto federal mexicano no tenía suficientes fondos para ayudar a todos, Levy distribuyó los escasos fondos de manera que el programa podría ser científicamente evaluado.
El programa seleccionó dos cientos cincuenta y tres aldeas al azar para darles beneficios, con otras dos cientos cincuenta y tres aldeas (que todavía no recibían beneficios) seleccionadas para propósitos de comparación. La información fue recolectada en todas las 506 aldeas antes y después del comienzo del programa. El gobierno mexicano le otorgó la tarea de evaluación del programa al Instituto Internacional de Investigaciones Políticas Alimentarías (IFPRI, por sus siglas en ingles), quien comisionó la investigación sobre los efectos del programa a académicos.
Las conclusiones académicas confirmaron que el programa funcionó. Los niños que recibieron beneficios de PROGRESA experimentaron una reducción de 23 por ciento en la incidencia de enfermedades, su altura incrementó de 1 a 4 por ciento, y la anemia se redujo por un 18 por ciento. Los adultos redujeron sus días ausentes del trabajo debido a enfermedades por un 19 por ciento. Hubo un incremento de 3.4 por ciento en la matriculación de todos los niños desde la preparatoria hasta primero de básico; el incremento mayor fue un 14.8 por ciento para las niñas que habían completado el sexto año de la primaria.2
Para ilustrar más estos resultados les cuento una anécdota. La gente de una aldea pequeña llamada Buenavista ha notado la diferencia. Una madre dice que ahora le puede dar de comer carne a sus hijos dos veces por semana como suplemento para las tortillas, gracias al dinero que recibe de PROGRESA. El profesor Santiago Días notó que la asistencia ha incrementado en el colegio de Buenavista, cuyo local es una escuela de dos cuartos. Además, Días explica que “porque están mejor alimentados, los niños se pueden concentrar por periodos más largos. Y sabiendo que los beneficios que se les dan a sus madres dependen de su asistencia escolar, los niños están mas entusiasmados de aprender.”3
Porque el programa fue un éxito documentado tan claramente fue continuado a pesar del rechazo por parte de los votantes del partido que gobernó por tantos años hasta la revolución democrática del 2000 en México. Para ese entonces, PROGRESA estaba llegando a 10 por ciento de las familias mexicanas y tenía un presupuesto de $800 millones. El nuevo gobierno lo expandió para que cubriera a los pobres urbanos. Programas similares comenzaron en países vecinos con la ayuda del Banco Mundial.4
La lección para los reformadores de ayuda es: la combinación de la libertad para escoger y la evaluación científica puede construir apoyo para un programa de ayuda externa en donde las cosas que sirven pueden expandirse rápidamente. El dinero para la educación y la salud en si pudiera expandirse con ajustes locales apropiados a más países y a una escala mucho más grande de lo que es ahora. Un programa como este en Etiopía podría eliminar la esclavitud a la leña de Amaretch y de otras niñas de los alrededores de Addis Ababa y las podría ingresar a colegios donde podrían aprender habilidades que las saquen de la pobreza.
¿Ya es hora?
Ya es hora de que se elimine la segunda tragedia de los pobres del mundo, lo cual va a ayudar a progresar con respecto de la primera tragedia. Así, gradualmente se descubrirá cómo los pobres pueden dar más retroalimentación a agentes más responsables sobre sus conocimientos y sobre qué es lo que ELLOS más quieren y necesitan. Los Grandes Sueños Utópicos de acabar con la pobreza mundial, como los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio de las Naciones Unidas no responsabilizan a nadie. ¿Acaso no podemos simplemente responsabilizar a los agentes de la caridad de sus acciones para que en efecto si les den medicinas de 12 centavos a los niños para que no se mueran de malaria, mayas de cama de $4 a los pobres para prevenir la malaria, $3 a cada madre nueva para prevenir muertes infantiles, y para que si ingresen a Amaretch en la escuela?
Notas
*Este artículo es un extracto modificado de mi libro nuevo, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
1. Esta es la foto de Amaretch de la pieza del noticiero BBC.
2. Estoy parafraseando el resumen de Esther Duflo y Michael Kremer, “Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness,” [pdf] MIT y Harvard University, 2004.
3. Jon Egan, “Mexico’s Welfare Revolution,” noticiero BBC en línea, Viernes, 15 de Octubre, 1999.
4. Duflo y Kremer 2004.
Domingo, Abril 30, 2006
Sábado, Abril 29, 2006
74) Democracy from above?
Dá para implantar a democracia a partir de cima, ou de fora? Esta é a reflexão da nota abaixo, de William Anthony Hay, que cita o importante trabalho de Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), mas deixa completamente de lado o importante trabalho de Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship, o que me parece imperdoável. Vale a pena, em todo caso, ler o trabalho.
E-Notes
Democratization, Order, and American Foreign Policy
By William Anthony Hay
April 2006
William Anthony Hay is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University and author of The Whig Revival, 1808-1830 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). This E-note and a related article in the Winter 2006 Orbis are based on a presentation he made to FPRI’s Study Group on America and the West on September 12, 2005, in Philadelphia.
Can democracy be imposed on societies from the outside? Current debates tend to focus on immediate aims without clarifying the terms for discussing them. A historically grounded definition provides a starting point for these discussions. Experience indicates that democracy requires a particular combination of institutions and informed public opinion. Outside efforts to impose change typically bring unforeseen consequences that may result in neither stability nor democracy. Indeed, a comparative overview of the history of democracy points towards a reassessment of current U.S. policy, to bring ends and means in line.
Studies focusing on the historical development of democracy typically compare Great Britain and Germany. The German Sonderweg, or special path, toward authoritarianism thus offers a cautionary tale of how modernization can go wrong, but two world wars and the Nazi era make this an emotionally charged analogy. Its focus on the emergence of German liberalism in the mid nineteenth century, followed by its suppression under Otto von Bismarck and later revival during Konrad Adenauer’s post-1945 ascendancy, imposes a relatively narrow frame of reference. Looking instead to Britain and France, two countries identified as democratic, highlights the impact of public opinion and representative government on democracy while taking a much longer view of how the system emerged. The Anglo-French comparison also engages the way in which institutions stabilize or destabilize countries where the political order must expand to accommodate a larger portion of society. Samuel Huntington set out the problem with reference to the developing world in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), and recent academic literature on the “institutional deficit” plaguing failed states reflects its ongoing importance. The fundamental question connecting these issues to the wider debate is whether and how democracy can provide a stable framework for governing.
Current debate over democratization as a foreign policy objective reflects two conflicting views of democracy with deep roots in American thinking on international relations. Advocates of spreading democracy connect their agenda with a global order favorable to American interests. September 11 shifted the Bush administration toward a more aggressive policy that invoked the memory of Woodrow Wilson. Containment and deterrence had failed to block terrorism, and Bush’s second inaugural speech cast spreading democracy as a moral obligation that would secure domestic peace against tyranny overseas. His rhetoric paralleled Wilson’s request to Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, which argued that only regime change could end the threat Germany’s government posed. Despite the different context for the speeches, both describe tyranny as an aggressive threat to the United States to be countered by spreading democracy.
Defining Democracy?
Liberal, representative democracy, where political parties mobilize and focus public opinion and alternate in power to provide regular accountability, provides the only example of a stable democratic order. It combines institutions with a reinforcing political culture that guarantees the rule of law and ensures that policy follows the considered opinion of the people expressed over time. Other models either mimic some attributes of democracy or simply lapse into anarchy or authoritarianism. Truly democratic institutions and political cultures engage public opinion within a framework of checks and balances that limits both majority rule and government power. Representative bodies oversee executive government, with control over taxation and budgets as leverage. Transparency in public business and debate characterizes liberal regimes. Stable, periodic transfers of power ensure accountability while limiting the costs to those who lose the political contest at any given point. Representative democracy allows people to rule themselves in polities beyond the smallest communities by enabling leaders to mobilize opinion, facilitate consensus, and develop policies they can implement. Democracy works as both a political culture for regulating behavior and governing institution
Democracy grew organically within societies in response to challenges, and parliamentary liberalism as it emerged in nineteenth-century Britain embodies the liberal, representative order that brought stability during a painful transition. It created a system within which potentially incompatible interests—whether classes, nationalities or sects—accepted an overarching code of law that guaranteed each a wide variety of liberties. The combination of representative government and public opinion that formed parliamentary liberalism in Britain provides the archetype for true democracy, but other countries took different paths toward modernization. A comparative historical view sharpens definitions while engaging problems connected with imposing democracy from the outside.
Absolutist France and the Ancien Régime
France’s history from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries demonstrates how institutions fail when they prove unable to manage conflicts or adapt to pressures. Religious disputes from the Reformation, social and economic changes, and external military pressures challenged regimes across Europe. France under Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV responded by developing a centralized royal bureaucracy to mobilize resources and concentrate authority. War had already expanded the responsibilities of royal officials France at the expense of both local institutions and the old military classes, while failure of the Fronde revolt in the 1750s left no alternate authority. Absolutism met challenges that had undermined the older partnership between rulers and social estates, and it worked well enough to provide an appealing model of rational, efficient royal governance that other European rulers copied. Representative government seemed backward and an impediment to progress when measured against the modernizing efforts to absolutist regimes. The fragility of the absolutist state only became apparent as financial crises and forceful popular resistance to state policy emerged during the 1780s.
Financial crisis undermined absolutism in France, but the relationship between public opinion and the state played a crucial role in the government capacity to mobilize resources. French rulers declined to call an Estates General between 1614 and 1789 because such assemblies inevitably led to trouble. While some provincial estates and judicial parlements advised the crown and occasionally acted as a venue for expressing public opinion, these bodies’ narrow focus limited their impact. Public opinion thus emerged as a political category in France from the gap created when representative institutions failed to provide an outlet of criticism and discontent. It acted as an abstract category of authority invoked to give positions the legitimacy that an absolutist political order could not provide. Because only the king could legitimately decide questions on behalf of the community, absolutism precluded a public politics beyond the court. The notion of government as private royal business made unauthorized discussion illegal, but the French crown failed to stop debate, and political contestation forced the government to argue its own case. If French rulers minded public opinion for lack of an alternative, they failed to give it a stabilizing institutional role. Political culture in eighteenth-century France and other absolutist states therefore tended towards polarization. Disengaged from practical concerns and lacking a political role, public opinion under absolutism fostered a culture of critique that turned on society itself.
British Institutions and Parliamentary Liberalism
Britain offered a very different model from France and other ancien régime states in continental Europe. Representative government in England withstood the challenges that marginalized it elsewhere, and an effective partnership between elites and the Crown through parliament defined eighteenth-century British political culture. Britain became a fiscal military state after 1688 as a parliamentary regime able to secure resources through consensual taxation and long-term loans guaranteed by parliament. National politics focused on parliament and the capital, with a parallel local politics operating at the level of parliamentary constituencies that gave politicians at Westminster prestige to bolster their national standing. Constituency politics largely emphasized local concerns before 1812 as rival interests competed for popular support. Elaborate rituals connected with mediated relations between elites and population in a way that shows the limits of authority, and elections tested the standing of candidates or their patrons. The whole process tied local constituencies with the political contest at Westminster, but provincial and national politics remained separate outside those rare occasions when general elections focused on a single issue. Public opinion also played a very different role in Britain’s political culture than under French-style absolutism. Newspapers covered parliamentary debates closely from the mid-eighteenth century, and printing the proceedings tied parliament into a broader discourse that extended beyond the elite or educated classes. Public discussion of affairs in Britain had an accepted place that emphasized specific issues over abstract speculation.
Britain entered the general European crisis of the late eighteenth century with a stronger, more flexible system than most of its counterparts. Representation followed older patterns that did not account for industrialization and demographic change, and the provincial groups demanded a greater voice in policy from the 1780s. Political reforms that recast the constitutional order between 1828 and 1832 followed from confrontations that set the Tory government against a Whig opposition that revived itself through an alliance with provincial interest groups. Where Edmund Burke had constructed a justification for party activity in the 1770s, Henry Brougham applied the concept and extended it beyond Westminster to create an expanded political nation. Brougham, a Whig barrister and politician, mobilized opinion beyond the capital to give his party leverage in parliamentary debates, and his efforts transformed the Whigs into a viable governing party that dominated British politics through 1886. They also expanded the political nation to encompass a wider range of provincial interests and integrate constituency politics with the party contest. Parliamentary liberalism in Britain marked an institution that more effectively linked government with the governed.
Challenges to Parliamentary Liberalism
The need to reconcile competing groups defined Victorian parliamentary liberalism. Where appropriate, the political nation could expand to accommodate new interests. Lord John Russell had equated “the people” with the middle classes in 1831, but by 1861 he expanded its scope to include the respectable working classes. Benjamin Disraeli realized that a wider suffrage would add ballast to the political order by enfranchising working men with conservative sentiments. The writer William Lecky described extended suffrage as reaching “below the regions where crotchets and experiments and crude utopias prevail” to an industrious working class of settled habits and “the deep conservative instincts of the nation.” Broadening the basis of consent could improve stability.
If extending the political nation built a sustainable democratic order, at least in nineteenth-century Britain, failure to accommodate groups threatened it. Parliamentary liberalism broke down when it could not reconcile difference within a framework of law. When the Irish Nationalist party led by Charles Stuart Parnell forced its agenda by obstructing parliamentary business, the political system lacked recourse beyond changing its rules to prevent them being used against it. Irish home rule split William Gladstone’s government in 1886 and ended the Liberal ascendancy, but it also showed that parliamentary government required acceptance of rules, written or otherwise. Stretching the system beyond its breaking point curtailed minority rights and stifled debate. George Dangerfield described the turbulent years in Britain from 1910 to 1914 when suffragettes, trade unions, and Ulster Protestants forced their demands with extra-constitutional as the “death” of liberal England. The period shows how democracy could falter, but in Britain it marked a departure from general patterns of stability.
Illiberal Democracy
Historical challenges to parliamentary liberalism highlight a contrast between liberal and illiberal democracy that is very relevant today. Liberal democracy allows for the expression of public opinion and reconciling competing interests with the rule of law; illiberal democracy preserves institutional forms while hollowing out the substance of representation and accountability. Parliamentary liberalism’s democratic order did not offer the only solution to political transformation. Louis Napoleon established the French Second Empire in 1852 through a plebiscite, a different path toward establishing a national politics with institutional legitimacy. He carefully appealed to the French peasantry over elites that might check his power. Representation meant embodying the nation rather than providing voice to its citizens. Decades later, Henry Cabot Lodge would remark that “[Woodrow] Wilson’s comprehension of government is that of the third Napoleon, an autocrat to be elected by the people through a plebiscite and no representative bodies of any consequence in between.” Lecky concluded from the French case that plebiscitary despotism was “just as natural a form of democracy as a republic”, and he warned that “some of the strongest democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty.”
Populism and the managerial state provide two sides to the authoritarianism that reacted to parliamentary liberalism’s perceived inadequacy. They have a symbiotic relationship. Populist challenges prompt elites to restrict public opinion’s impact, and the consequent lack of accountability may spark a backlash. Populism covers a range of movements that challenged the existing representative order as corrupt and oligarchic while demanding a more direct voice for the people. Far from empowering people, populism typically strengthens leaders claiming to embody the people in their struggle against elites. While challenging some elites, it also helps others manipulate politics in their favor.
Managerialism solves political deadlock by redefining major decisions as problems for experts rather than the political process. Business administration in large corporations provided a model, and, like populism, the managerial state grew from the perceived failure of representative government. Crises brought by World War I and the Great Depression raised its appeal. Karl Lowenstein argued that democracy must become “the application of disciplined authority by liberal minded men, for the ultimate end of liberal government: human dignity and freedom.” Planning defined the new liberalism after World War II and the view that benevolent elites with expertise and vision would give the people what the elites thought best for them shaped policy in the United States and Europe. Resistance grew, however, with the failure of grand projects that cost institutions and elites their legitimacy. A populist backlash where voters use radical parties as a vehicle for protest has marked European politics since 2001, and it reflects the political establishment’s failure to address key issues. A system intended to defuse conflict now promotes it, raising the specter of populism and the managerial state working in a fundamentally anti-democratic cycle.
Promoting Democracy? Civil Society and Group Competition
Democracy cannot be transferred as a package because it developed organically and requires a supportive political culture to operate effectively. Institutions must run along the grain of societies rather than cutting across or against them. A long view suggests that few countries will create sustainable liberal democratic regimes. Copying superficial aspects of democracy typically brings either illiberal or simply unsustainable outcomes. Some countries, like Singapore, sustain a relative liberal order without complete democracy. Other authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan restrict their population’s opportunity for political activity while limiting the scope of state intervention in personal or economic life. Rather than an absolute polarity between democracy and despotism, politics operates at different levels with a variety of systems adapted to particular contexts.
No easy path exists to national cohesion and democratic institutions in developing nations. Forcing democratization’s pace risks unrest, particularly where deep fault lines exist within societies. Sectarian differences and opposing economic interests can both work against the basic level of consensus that democracy requires, and ethnic conflict introduces another volatile factor that often combines with religion and economic disparities. Rapid change and competition for power within a society exacerbate preexisting ethnic tensions, as seen in post-1989 conflicts from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. Populists from the late Slobodan Milosovic to Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez seize upon ethnic resentment as a populist tool for maintaining their power as leaders of populist movements operating behind a quasi-democratic façade. Whether conflict derives fundamentally from ethnic differences or economic conflict matters less than its impact on stability. Civic patriotism cannot establish a demos without social cohesion and a general agreement on rules for public behavior. Public opinion driven by demagogues or ideology exerts a destructive force. Forced democratization that unleashes such forces defeats its own aims, and fosters a backlash that can make the United States less secure.
Current efforts to promote democracy uncannily echo the global meliorism that brought profound disillusionment when it failed during the Vietnam era. Indeed, the Bush administration has backtracked as questions arose regarding the specific policies that would follow from the president’s rhetoric. While the United States prefers democracy over authoritarianism, it also values gradual change over stasis and, above all, friends over adversaries. The present debate offers a reprise of earlier tensions between realist and idealist perspectives. Such cycles typically end with frustrated idealism giving way to a cautious realist focus on stability and protecting American interests. Not only does attempting to export democracy usually fail, but the endeavor distracts resources and attention from other pressing challenges. A more reasonable guide to managing political change involves adapting existing structures in target societies and securing a rough balance among competing groups to provide the order necessary for promoting the growth of civil society. Such an approach fits the means and objectives of American foreign policy more realistically than the grand strategy of promoting democracy in countries where it has no roots.
You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety, attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and include our web address (www.fpri.org). If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.
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E-Notes
Democratization, Order, and American Foreign Policy
By William Anthony Hay
April 2006
William Anthony Hay is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University and author of The Whig Revival, 1808-1830 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). This E-note and a related article in the Winter 2006 Orbis are based on a presentation he made to FPRI’s Study Group on America and the West on September 12, 2005, in Philadelphia.
Can democracy be imposed on societies from the outside? Current debates tend to focus on immediate aims without clarifying the terms for discussing them. A historically grounded definition provides a starting point for these discussions. Experience indicates that democracy requires a particular combination of institutions and informed public opinion. Outside efforts to impose change typically bring unforeseen consequences that may result in neither stability nor democracy. Indeed, a comparative overview of the history of democracy points towards a reassessment of current U.S. policy, to bring ends and means in line.
Studies focusing on the historical development of democracy typically compare Great Britain and Germany. The German Sonderweg, or special path, toward authoritarianism thus offers a cautionary tale of how modernization can go wrong, but two world wars and the Nazi era make this an emotionally charged analogy. Its focus on the emergence of German liberalism in the mid nineteenth century, followed by its suppression under Otto von Bismarck and later revival during Konrad Adenauer’s post-1945 ascendancy, imposes a relatively narrow frame of reference. Looking instead to Britain and France, two countries identified as democratic, highlights the impact of public opinion and representative government on democracy while taking a much longer view of how the system emerged. The Anglo-French comparison also engages the way in which institutions stabilize or destabilize countries where the political order must expand to accommodate a larger portion of society. Samuel Huntington set out the problem with reference to the developing world in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), and recent academic literature on the “institutional deficit” plaguing failed states reflects its ongoing importance. The fundamental question connecting these issues to the wider debate is whether and how democracy can provide a stable framework for governing.
Current debate over democratization as a foreign policy objective reflects two conflicting views of democracy with deep roots in American thinking on international relations. Advocates of spreading democracy connect their agenda with a global order favorable to American interests. September 11 shifted the Bush administration toward a more aggressive policy that invoked the memory of Woodrow Wilson. Containment and deterrence had failed to block terrorism, and Bush’s second inaugural speech cast spreading democracy as a moral obligation that would secure domestic peace against tyranny overseas. His rhetoric paralleled Wilson’s request to Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, which argued that only regime change could end the threat Germany’s government posed. Despite the different context for the speeches, both describe tyranny as an aggressive threat to the United States to be countered by spreading democracy.
Defining Democracy?
Liberal, representative democracy, where political parties mobilize and focus public opinion and alternate in power to provide regular accountability, provides the only example of a stable democratic order. It combines institutions with a reinforcing political culture that guarantees the rule of law and ensures that policy follows the considered opinion of the people expressed over time. Other models either mimic some attributes of democracy or simply lapse into anarchy or authoritarianism. Truly democratic institutions and political cultures engage public opinion within a framework of checks and balances that limits both majority rule and government power. Representative bodies oversee executive government, with control over taxation and budgets as leverage. Transparency in public business and debate characterizes liberal regimes. Stable, periodic transfers of power ensure accountability while limiting the costs to those who lose the political contest at any given point. Representative democracy allows people to rule themselves in polities beyond the smallest communities by enabling leaders to mobilize opinion, facilitate consensus, and develop policies they can implement. Democracy works as both a political culture for regulating behavior and governing institution
Democracy grew organically within societies in response to challenges, and parliamentary liberalism as it emerged in nineteenth-century Britain embodies the liberal, representative order that brought stability during a painful transition. It created a system within which potentially incompatible interests—whether classes, nationalities or sects—accepted an overarching code of law that guaranteed each a wide variety of liberties. The combination of representative government and public opinion that formed parliamentary liberalism in Britain provides the archetype for true democracy, but other countries took different paths toward modernization. A comparative historical view sharpens definitions while engaging problems connected with imposing democracy from the outside.
Absolutist France and the Ancien Régime
France’s history from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries demonstrates how institutions fail when they prove unable to manage conflicts or adapt to pressures. Religious disputes from the Reformation, social and economic changes, and external military pressures challenged regimes across Europe. France under Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV responded by developing a centralized royal bureaucracy to mobilize resources and concentrate authority. War had already expanded the responsibilities of royal officials France at the expense of both local institutions and the old military classes, while failure of the Fronde revolt in the 1750s left no alternate authority. Absolutism met challenges that had undermined the older partnership between rulers and social estates, and it worked well enough to provide an appealing model of rational, efficient royal governance that other European rulers copied. Representative government seemed backward and an impediment to progress when measured against the modernizing efforts to absolutist regimes. The fragility of the absolutist state only became apparent as financial crises and forceful popular resistance to state policy emerged during the 1780s.
Financial crisis undermined absolutism in France, but the relationship between public opinion and the state played a crucial role in the government capacity to mobilize resources. French rulers declined to call an Estates General between 1614 and 1789 because such assemblies inevitably led to trouble. While some provincial estates and judicial parlements advised the crown and occasionally acted as a venue for expressing public opinion, these bodies’ narrow focus limited their impact. Public opinion thus emerged as a political category in France from the gap created when representative institutions failed to provide an outlet of criticism and discontent. It acted as an abstract category of authority invoked to give positions the legitimacy that an absolutist political order could not provide. Because only the king could legitimately decide questions on behalf of the community, absolutism precluded a public politics beyond the court. The notion of government as private royal business made unauthorized discussion illegal, but the French crown failed to stop debate, and political contestation forced the government to argue its own case. If French rulers minded public opinion for lack of an alternative, they failed to give it a stabilizing institutional role. Political culture in eighteenth-century France and other absolutist states therefore tended towards polarization. Disengaged from practical concerns and lacking a political role, public opinion under absolutism fostered a culture of critique that turned on society itself.
British Institutions and Parliamentary Liberalism
Britain offered a very different model from France and other ancien régime states in continental Europe. Representative government in England withstood the challenges that marginalized it elsewhere, and an effective partnership between elites and the Crown through parliament defined eighteenth-century British political culture. Britain became a fiscal military state after 1688 as a parliamentary regime able to secure resources through consensual taxation and long-term loans guaranteed by parliament. National politics focused on parliament and the capital, with a parallel local politics operating at the level of parliamentary constituencies that gave politicians at Westminster prestige to bolster their national standing. Constituency politics largely emphasized local concerns before 1812 as rival interests competed for popular support. Elaborate rituals connected with mediated relations between elites and population in a way that shows the limits of authority, and elections tested the standing of candidates or their patrons. The whole process tied local constituencies with the political contest at Westminster, but provincial and national politics remained separate outside those rare occasions when general elections focused on a single issue. Public opinion also played a very different role in Britain’s political culture than under French-style absolutism. Newspapers covered parliamentary debates closely from the mid-eighteenth century, and printing the proceedings tied parliament into a broader discourse that extended beyond the elite or educated classes. Public discussion of affairs in Britain had an accepted place that emphasized specific issues over abstract speculation.
Britain entered the general European crisis of the late eighteenth century with a stronger, more flexible system than most of its counterparts. Representation followed older patterns that did not account for industrialization and demographic change, and the provincial groups demanded a greater voice in policy from the 1780s. Political reforms that recast the constitutional order between 1828 and 1832 followed from confrontations that set the Tory government against a Whig opposition that revived itself through an alliance with provincial interest groups. Where Edmund Burke had constructed a justification for party activity in the 1770s, Henry Brougham applied the concept and extended it beyond Westminster to create an expanded political nation. Brougham, a Whig barrister and politician, mobilized opinion beyond the capital to give his party leverage in parliamentary debates, and his efforts transformed the Whigs into a viable governing party that dominated British politics through 1886. They also expanded the political nation to encompass a wider range of provincial interests and integrate constituency politics with the party contest. Parliamentary liberalism in Britain marked an institution that more effectively linked government with the governed.
Challenges to Parliamentary Liberalism
The need to reconcile competing groups defined Victorian parliamentary liberalism. Where appropriate, the political nation could expand to accommodate new interests. Lord John Russell had equated “the people” with the middle classes in 1831, but by 1861 he expanded its scope to include the respectable working classes. Benjamin Disraeli realized that a wider suffrage would add ballast to the political order by enfranchising working men with conservative sentiments. The writer William Lecky described extended suffrage as reaching “below the regions where crotchets and experiments and crude utopias prevail” to an industrious working class of settled habits and “the deep conservative instincts of the nation.” Broadening the basis of consent could improve stability.
If extending the political nation built a sustainable democratic order, at least in nineteenth-century Britain, failure to accommodate groups threatened it. Parliamentary liberalism broke down when it could not reconcile difference within a framework of law. When the Irish Nationalist party led by Charles Stuart Parnell forced its agenda by obstructing parliamentary business, the political system lacked recourse beyond changing its rules to prevent them being used against it. Irish home rule split William Gladstone’s government in 1886 and ended the Liberal ascendancy, but it also showed that parliamentary government required acceptance of rules, written or otherwise. Stretching the system beyond its breaking point curtailed minority rights and stifled debate. George Dangerfield described the turbulent years in Britain from 1910 to 1914 when suffragettes, trade unions, and Ulster Protestants forced their demands with extra-constitutional as the “death” of liberal England. The period shows how democracy could falter, but in Britain it marked a departure from general patterns of stability.
Illiberal Democracy
Historical challenges to parliamentary liberalism highlight a contrast between liberal and illiberal democracy that is very relevant today. Liberal democracy allows for the expression of public opinion and reconciling competing interests with the rule of law; illiberal democracy preserves institutional forms while hollowing out the substance of representation and accountability. Parliamentary liberalism’s democratic order did not offer the only solution to political transformation. Louis Napoleon established the French Second Empire in 1852 through a plebiscite, a different path toward establishing a national politics with institutional legitimacy. He carefully appealed to the French peasantry over elites that might check his power. Representation meant embodying the nation rather than providing voice to its citizens. Decades later, Henry Cabot Lodge would remark that “[Woodrow] Wilson’s comprehension of government is that of the third Napoleon, an autocrat to be elected by the people through a plebiscite and no representative bodies of any consequence in between.” Lecky concluded from the French case that plebiscitary despotism was “just as natural a form of democracy as a republic”, and he warned that “some of the strongest democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty.”
Populism and the managerial state provide two sides to the authoritarianism that reacted to parliamentary liberalism’s perceived inadequacy. They have a symbiotic relationship. Populist challenges prompt elites to restrict public opinion’s impact, and the consequent lack of accountability may spark a backlash. Populism covers a range of movements that challenged the existing representative order as corrupt and oligarchic while demanding a more direct voice for the people. Far from empowering people, populism typically strengthens leaders claiming to embody the people in their struggle against elites. While challenging some elites, it also helps others manipulate politics in their favor.
Managerialism solves political deadlock by redefining major decisions as problems for experts rather than the political process. Business administration in large corporations provided a model, and, like populism, the managerial state grew from the perceived failure of representative government. Crises brought by World War I and the Great Depression raised its appeal. Karl Lowenstein argued that democracy must become “the application of disciplined authority by liberal minded men, for the ultimate end of liberal government: human dignity and freedom.” Planning defined the new liberalism after World War II and the view that benevolent elites with expertise and vision would give the people what the elites thought best for them shaped policy in the United States and Europe. Resistance grew, however, with the failure of grand projects that cost institutions and elites their legitimacy. A populist backlash where voters use radical parties as a vehicle for protest has marked European politics since 2001, and it reflects the political establishment’s failure to address key issues. A system intended to defuse conflict now promotes it, raising the specter of populism and the managerial state working in a fundamentally anti-democratic cycle.
Promoting Democracy? Civil Society and Group Competition
Democracy cannot be transferred as a package because it developed organically and requires a supportive political culture to operate effectively. Institutions must run along the grain of societies rather than cutting across or against them. A long view suggests that few countries will create sustainable liberal democratic regimes. Copying superficial aspects of democracy typically brings either illiberal or simply unsustainable outcomes. Some countries, like Singapore, sustain a relative liberal order without complete democracy. Other authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan restrict their population’s opportunity for political activity while limiting the scope of state intervention in personal or economic life. Rather than an absolute polarity between democracy and despotism, politics operates at different levels with a variety of systems adapted to particular contexts.
No easy path exists to national cohesion and democratic institutions in developing nations. Forcing democratization’s pace risks unrest, particularly where deep fault lines exist within societies. Sectarian differences and opposing economic interests can both work against the basic level of consensus that democracy requires, and ethnic conflict introduces another volatile factor that often combines with religion and economic disparities. Rapid change and competition for power within a society exacerbate preexisting ethnic tensions, as seen in post-1989 conflicts from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. Populists from the late Slobodan Milosovic to Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez seize upon ethnic resentment as a populist tool for maintaining their power as leaders of populist movements operating behind a quasi-democratic façade. Whether conflict derives fundamentally from ethnic differences or economic conflict matters less than its impact on stability. Civic patriotism cannot establish a demos without social cohesion and a general agreement on rules for public behavior. Public opinion driven by demagogues or ideology exerts a destructive force. Forced democratization that unleashes such forces defeats its own aims, and fosters a backlash that can make the United States less secure.
Current efforts to promote democracy uncannily echo the global meliorism that brought profound disillusionment when it failed during the Vietnam era. Indeed, the Bush administration has backtracked as questions arose regarding the specific policies that would follow from the president’s rhetoric. While the United States prefers democracy over authoritarianism, it also values gradual change over stasis and, above all, friends over adversaries. The present debate offers a reprise of earlier tensions between realist and idealist perspectives. Such cycles typically end with frustrated idealism giving way to a cautious realist focus on stability and protecting American interests. Not only does attempting to export democracy usually fail, but the endeavor distracts resources and attention from other pressing challenges. A more reasonable guide to managing political change involves adapting existing structures in target societies and securing a rough balance among competing groups to provide the order necessary for promoting the growth of civil society. Such an approach fits the means and objectives of American foreign policy more realistically than the grand strategy of promoting democracy in countries where it has no roots.
You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety, attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and include our web address (www.fpri.org). If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.
If you receive this as a forward and would like to be placed directly on our mailing lists, send email to FPRI@fpri.org. Include your name, address, and affiliation. For further information, contact Alan Luxenberg at (215) 732-3774 x105.
73) Pequena aula de protocolo em tempos de maneiras pouco educadas...
Los intelectuales y el país de hoy
"Kirchner no debería ignorar el protocolo", dice Enrique Quintana
Para el embajador, causa un grave daño
“No hay nada peor que ser male-ducado y no guardar las formas”, dice el embajador Enrique Quintana, que, como director nacional de Ceremonial, estuvo a cargo de los detalles de las asunciones de los presidentes Alfonsín, Menem y De la Rúa. Quintana ocupó dieciséis puestos diplomáticos en sus cincuenta años de brillante carrera.
“El señor Kirchner no puede jugar con la dignidad y la posición del país, porque arriesga el destino de la Nación”, dice Quintana, en alusión al reciente desaire del Presidente a la reina de Holanda. “Fue una grosería sin igual, algo nunca visto”, agrega, sin poder contener su enojo. Y explica: “Lo que el Presidente considera una frivolidad tiene un valor muy importante en los países que poseen otros conceptos y otra seriedad en el protocolo. Y lo peor es que este tipo de barbaridades se ha cometido prácticamente con todos los países, desde Estados Unidos para abajo...”
El embajador Quintana recibió a LA NACION en su departamento de Palermo, modesto y elegante. En mesas, paredes y vitrinas hay recuerdos de sus misiones diplomáticas por todo el mundo y regalos de reyes y presidentes: cajas de plata con escudos reales, dagas de Arabia y puñales de Indonesia. En una pared luce un icono ruso, negro y dorado. En otra, hay fotografías en las que se lo ve con el rey de España, conversando en un avión con el presidente Alfonsín, con Juan Pablo II y presentando credenciales en Moscú y en Suiza.
A los 89 años, lúcido y sin bastón, formal pero afectuoso, Enrique Quintana, cuyo padre y hermano también fueron embajadores, como él, es descendiente del presidente argentino Manuel Quintana. Es el máximo conocedor de protocolo del país. Habla varios idiomas a la perfección, y durante años tuvo a su cargo la cátedra de Introducción a la Diplomacia y Práctica Diplomática en el Instituto del Servicio Exterior de la Nación.
Nació en Washington, cuando su padre, Federico Quintana, era embajador con residencia en esa ciudad. Hizo la primaria en Suiza, la secundaria en Alemania, y realizó su formación profesional en la Universidad Católica de Chile y en la Academia Naval del mismo país. Fue embajador en Austria, Indonesia, Líbano, Rusia, Costa de Marfil, Suiza (dos veces) y Marruecos. Cuando estuvo en el Líbano, fue embajador concurrente en Kuwait, Jordania y Arabia Saudita. Además, ocupó puestos en embajadas, consulados y organismos internacionales en La Paz, Londres, Liverpool, Bogotá, Roma, Ottawa, Oslo, Bruselas y Luxemburgo.
-¿Qué importancia tienen las formas en la diplomacia?
-El protocolo es una ciencia política muy importante. No obstante la democratización y modernización de las maneras y de los países, el protocolo sigue siendo esencial, porque su fin es favorecer las negociaciones entre los países con el uso de buenos modales, simpatía y seriedad formal. Está muy lejos de ser algo frívolo. Es más: si un gobierno ignora el protocolo, se genera una atmósfera de antipatía muy perniciosa para los intereses de una nación. Es lo mismo que ocurre con la relación entre las personas: si alguien es maleducado, prepotente, sin gentileza, es difícil que pueda hacer buenos amigos. Un país necesita de países amigos, es decir, de aliados, para prosperar. Este es el secreto del progreso de países como Chile, que nosotros tanto menospreciábamos, y de Indonesia, país que debe su impresionante avance a su gran capacidad para negociar con otras naciones.
-¿Cuál es su opinión sobre la ausencia del presidente Kirchner en la cena que la reina de Holanda hizo en su honor?
-Mire: es la primera vez que voy a manifestarme públicamente al respecto. No soy amigo de la crítica y siempre he sido cultor de un perfil bajo. No forma parte de mi manera de ser el atacar a nadie. Pero ante tantas cosas que acontecen y siendo, como soy, uno de los diplomáticos argentinos que han tenido una carrera más larga y que ha acompañado a distintos presidentes por todo el mundo, tengo la obligación de decirle que lo que hizo nuestro presidente es la máxima grosería que puede cometerse con la autoridad de otro país. ¿Usted se da cuenta? Nuestro presidente, que representa a todos los argentinos, dejó de ir nada menos que a la comida que la reina de Holanda hizo en su honor como retribución y despedida. ¿Y todo por qué? Porque no se le dio la gana de ir. Pero ¡él no puede hacer algo así! Y ya ve usted que la prensa de Holanda y la misma reina de ese país consideraron el desaire un insulto, que es exactamente lo que fue. Ese país fue insultado por la Argentina, y es algo que estamos haciendo continuamente. Otro ejemplo es lo que le hicimos al presidente Bush durante la conferencia en Mar del Plata, que también es inadmisible. Yo creo que Bush no se tomó el avión y se fue porque es mejor educado que nuestro presidente. Con el presidente de Francia, Jacques Chirac, hicimos lo mismo...
-¿A qué atribuye esta conducta del presidente de la Nación?
-Yo imagino que tendrá un propósito político. El sabe que ese tipo de actitudes groseras es bien recibido por cierto sector de la Argentina que, al verlo obrar como un compadrito, debe pensar: "¡Qué presidente macho que tenemos!", cuando en realidad es algo lamentable y que le hace un enorme daño al país. Yo siento la obligación de decir esto en defensa de la carrera diplomática, del país y de mis colegas, que están siendo humillados como nunca lo habían sido antes.
-¿Por qué dice que sus colegas son humillados?
-Porque los cargos diplomáticos más importantes no los ocupan diplomáticos de carrera. Hay algunos diplomáticos que son brillantes; otros que son menos brillantes y otros con inteligencia normal, pero no tenemos ningún diplomático malo como para que prácticamente ninguno sea convocado a cumplir con su deber. Hoy esos cargos son todos puestos políticos, y es una triste realidad para el país. Fíjese que el director nacional de Ceremonial es hoy una persona demasiado joven como para aconsejar al Presidente. Y ésta es otra cosa gravísima para la diplomacia argentina: que el Presidente se rodee de gente obsecuente que le da la razón en todo y jamás lo cuestiona. No hay un tonto peor que el testarudo que no quiere aprender...
-¿Tienen buena formación los diplomáticos argentinos de carrera?
-Excelente. Nosotros tenemos el Instituto del Servicio Exterior de la Nación, que es una alhaja. Todos nuestros diplomáticos surgen de ahí. Pero hoy el Presidente nombra a quienes están favorecidos por sus cuñas políticas. Los embajadores políticos están llenando todas las embajadas, y le puedo asegurar que la mayoría no tiene formación. Ni siquiera hablan dos idiomas, que es una de las condiciones mínimas indispensables para que un embajador represente a nuestro país en el exterior. Nuestros diplomáticos de carrera, en cambio, hablan obligadamente dos idiomas, y muchos dominan hasta cuatro idiomas, como quien le habla, lo que facilita muchísimo la labor diplomática.
-"Ser diplomático" tiene a veces la connotación negativa de que no se es frontal o directo en el trato. ¿Cuál es su opinión?
-La amabilidad es un código de buenas maneras. Nosotros no somos hipócritas. Se necesita cultura, inteligencia y afecto para entenderse con el prójimo de un modo conveniente. Las buenas formas en el trato son un don, pero también son armas que el diplomático sabe utilizar en provecho de su país. Es como cuando se enamora a una mujer. Se utiliza la seducción para la conquista del otro, y la seducción es parte de la inteligencia humana. Se seduce a las personas igual que a los países. Pero con antipatía no se logra nada. Le voy a dar un dato clave: cuando fui embajador en Rusia, que entonces era la Unión Soviética, sus diplomáticos y gobernantes, que eran ciento por ciento comunistas, guardaban las formas de los zares. Se comportaban como zares. Con otra filosofía, por supuesto, pero eran unos perfectos zares. Nadie comía con desarreglo. No se permitían las palmadas ni los abrazos. Los embajadores se ponían uniforme en todas las recepciones importantes. ¿Y por qué era así? Porque esos hombres conocían la importancia de la educación y la simpatía en el trato con las otras naciones. Jamás consideraron el protocolo una frivolidad. Nunca pensaron que ser comunista era incompatible con ser bien educado.
-¿Cuál es la situación de las embajadas argentinas en el mundo?
-Muchísimas embajadas han sido cerradas, como si el país fuera a ahorrar dinero con eso. Es algo inconcebible. Si se cortan las buenas relaciones con los países, se pierden oportunidades de generar buenos negocios. Además, piense usted que el deber de una embajada, entre muchos otros deberes, es cuidar la imagen del propio país en el exterior. No se extrañe, entonces, de que hoy tengamos una muy mala imagen, que día a día empeora aceleradamente. Nos falta presencia en el mundo y representantes idóneos. Insisto: un gobierno serio no puede prescindir de sus embajadores, porque los embajadores son los que defienden los intereses del propio país en el exterior.
-¿Ha estado usted en alguna situación, como embajador, en la que se vio obligado a ser violento o grosero para ser eficaz?
-No. En cincuenta años de profesión, no he tenido que ser grosero jamás.
-¿Cuál fue el presidente argentino más diplomático que usted haya conocido?
-Arturo Frondizi, que me llamó en su momento para que fuera director nacional de Ceremonial de su gobierno. El fue el único estadista argentino que yo haya conocido, y el más talentoso. A pesar de que era introvertido y de una comunicación difícil, entablaba una excelente relación con sus colaboradores. Una vez lo llamé para consultarle algo y me dijo: "Embajador, yo no lo he nombrado para que me consulte, sino para que me diga". El quería que yo tomara decisiones, que fuera libre en mis pensamientos y que lo aconsejara, porque me había ganado su confianza. Así obra un estadista con los que lo rodean. También debo decir que Alfonsín es un hombre inteligente y amable, de maneras señoriales, y afectuoso, además de muy buen político. Estuve dos veces con él, a pesar de que no soy radical ni de ningún otro partido, porque así me lo exige mi profesión, lo que no significa que no tenga mis preferencias. Pero, como le decía, a Alfonsín nunca lo vi fastidiado ni soberbio. Y lo mismo puedo decir de Menem, al que le renuncié. El también tenía muy buenas maneras.
-¿Puede suceder que las buenas maneras tengan un trasfondo de cinismo y que una suavidad extehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrior oculte una aspereza interior o una mala intención?
-Claro que es posible, pero la amabilidad es siempre algo bueno. El protocolo, como dije al principio, es una ciencia política importantísima, que no puede despreciarse desde ningún aspecto. Y le diré más: quien desprecia el protocolo no sólo lo hace por mala educación, sino por algo más grave: el resentimiento y la envidia. Cuando el Presidente desaira a la reina, lo hace para conformar a quienes están enredados en el odio hacia lo que es mejor que lo nuestro. Estamos siendo envidiosos por nuestra propia incapacidad. Nos sentimos incómodos con nosotros mismos.
-¿Encuentra alguna relación entre las malas maneras de algunos gobernantes y la embriaguez de poder?
-Mire: nadie puede estar tan embriagado de poder o de alcohol que no sepa lo que hace. En todo caso, el ebrio se escuda en su estado para hacer y decir lo que le plazca. Mi padre me dijo una vez: "Tené mucho cuidado, porque cuando un ebrio o un tonto te insulta, sabe muy bien que te está insultando, así que lo tenés que tratar igual que si estuviera sobrio".
Por Sebastián Dozo Moreno
Para LA NACION
LA NACION | 29.04.2006 | Página 1 | Política
"Kirchner no debería ignorar el protocolo", dice Enrique Quintana
Para el embajador, causa un grave daño
“No hay nada peor que ser male-ducado y no guardar las formas”, dice el embajador Enrique Quintana, que, como director nacional de Ceremonial, estuvo a cargo de los detalles de las asunciones de los presidentes Alfonsín, Menem y De la Rúa. Quintana ocupó dieciséis puestos diplomáticos en sus cincuenta años de brillante carrera.
“El señor Kirchner no puede jugar con la dignidad y la posición del país, porque arriesga el destino de la Nación”, dice Quintana, en alusión al reciente desaire del Presidente a la reina de Holanda. “Fue una grosería sin igual, algo nunca visto”, agrega, sin poder contener su enojo. Y explica: “Lo que el Presidente considera una frivolidad tiene un valor muy importante en los países que poseen otros conceptos y otra seriedad en el protocolo. Y lo peor es que este tipo de barbaridades se ha cometido prácticamente con todos los países, desde Estados Unidos para abajo...”
El embajador Quintana recibió a LA NACION en su departamento de Palermo, modesto y elegante. En mesas, paredes y vitrinas hay recuerdos de sus misiones diplomáticas por todo el mundo y regalos de reyes y presidentes: cajas de plata con escudos reales, dagas de Arabia y puñales de Indonesia. En una pared luce un icono ruso, negro y dorado. En otra, hay fotografías en las que se lo ve con el rey de España, conversando en un avión con el presidente Alfonsín, con Juan Pablo II y presentando credenciales en Moscú y en Suiza.
A los 89 años, lúcido y sin bastón, formal pero afectuoso, Enrique Quintana, cuyo padre y hermano también fueron embajadores, como él, es descendiente del presidente argentino Manuel Quintana. Es el máximo conocedor de protocolo del país. Habla varios idiomas a la perfección, y durante años tuvo a su cargo la cátedra de Introducción a la Diplomacia y Práctica Diplomática en el Instituto del Servicio Exterior de la Nación.
Nació en Washington, cuando su padre, Federico Quintana, era embajador con residencia en esa ciudad. Hizo la primaria en Suiza, la secundaria en Alemania, y realizó su formación profesional en la Universidad Católica de Chile y en la Academia Naval del mismo país. Fue embajador en Austria, Indonesia, Líbano, Rusia, Costa de Marfil, Suiza (dos veces) y Marruecos. Cuando estuvo en el Líbano, fue embajador concurrente en Kuwait, Jordania y Arabia Saudita. Además, ocupó puestos en embajadas, consulados y organismos internacionales en La Paz, Londres, Liverpool, Bogotá, Roma, Ottawa, Oslo, Bruselas y Luxemburgo.
-¿Qué importancia tienen las formas en la diplomacia?
-El protocolo es una ciencia política muy importante. No obstante la democratización y modernización de las maneras y de los países, el protocolo sigue siendo esencial, porque su fin es favorecer las negociaciones entre los países con el uso de buenos modales, simpatía y seriedad formal. Está muy lejos de ser algo frívolo. Es más: si un gobierno ignora el protocolo, se genera una atmósfera de antipatía muy perniciosa para los intereses de una nación. Es lo mismo que ocurre con la relación entre las personas: si alguien es maleducado, prepotente, sin gentileza, es difícil que pueda hacer buenos amigos. Un país necesita de países amigos, es decir, de aliados, para prosperar. Este es el secreto del progreso de países como Chile, que nosotros tanto menospreciábamos, y de Indonesia, país que debe su impresionante avance a su gran capacidad para negociar con otras naciones.
-¿Cuál es su opinión sobre la ausencia del presidente Kirchner en la cena que la reina de Holanda hizo en su honor?
-Mire: es la primera vez que voy a manifestarme públicamente al respecto. No soy amigo de la crítica y siempre he sido cultor de un perfil bajo. No forma parte de mi manera de ser el atacar a nadie. Pero ante tantas cosas que acontecen y siendo, como soy, uno de los diplomáticos argentinos que han tenido una carrera más larga y que ha acompañado a distintos presidentes por todo el mundo, tengo la obligación de decirle que lo que hizo nuestro presidente es la máxima grosería que puede cometerse con la autoridad de otro país. ¿Usted se da cuenta? Nuestro presidente, que representa a todos los argentinos, dejó de ir nada menos que a la comida que la reina de Holanda hizo en su honor como retribución y despedida. ¿Y todo por qué? Porque no se le dio la gana de ir. Pero ¡él no puede hacer algo así! Y ya ve usted que la prensa de Holanda y la misma reina de ese país consideraron el desaire un insulto, que es exactamente lo que fue. Ese país fue insultado por la Argentina, y es algo que estamos haciendo continuamente. Otro ejemplo es lo que le hicimos al presidente Bush durante la conferencia en Mar del Plata, que también es inadmisible. Yo creo que Bush no se tomó el avión y se fue porque es mejor educado que nuestro presidente. Con el presidente de Francia, Jacques Chirac, hicimos lo mismo...
-¿A qué atribuye esta conducta del presidente de la Nación?
-Yo imagino que tendrá un propósito político. El sabe que ese tipo de actitudes groseras es bien recibido por cierto sector de la Argentina que, al verlo obrar como un compadrito, debe pensar: "¡Qué presidente macho que tenemos!", cuando en realidad es algo lamentable y que le hace un enorme daño al país. Yo siento la obligación de decir esto en defensa de la carrera diplomática, del país y de mis colegas, que están siendo humillados como nunca lo habían sido antes.
-¿Por qué dice que sus colegas son humillados?
-Porque los cargos diplomáticos más importantes no los ocupan diplomáticos de carrera. Hay algunos diplomáticos que son brillantes; otros que son menos brillantes y otros con inteligencia normal, pero no tenemos ningún diplomático malo como para que prácticamente ninguno sea convocado a cumplir con su deber. Hoy esos cargos son todos puestos políticos, y es una triste realidad para el país. Fíjese que el director nacional de Ceremonial es hoy una persona demasiado joven como para aconsejar al Presidente. Y ésta es otra cosa gravísima para la diplomacia argentina: que el Presidente se rodee de gente obsecuente que le da la razón en todo y jamás lo cuestiona. No hay un tonto peor que el testarudo que no quiere aprender...
-¿Tienen buena formación los diplomáticos argentinos de carrera?
-Excelente. Nosotros tenemos el Instituto del Servicio Exterior de la Nación, que es una alhaja. Todos nuestros diplomáticos surgen de ahí. Pero hoy el Presidente nombra a quienes están favorecidos por sus cuñas políticas. Los embajadores políticos están llenando todas las embajadas, y le puedo asegurar que la mayoría no tiene formación. Ni siquiera hablan dos idiomas, que es una de las condiciones mínimas indispensables para que un embajador represente a nuestro país en el exterior. Nuestros diplomáticos de carrera, en cambio, hablan obligadamente dos idiomas, y muchos dominan hasta cuatro idiomas, como quien le habla, lo que facilita muchísimo la labor diplomática.
-"Ser diplomático" tiene a veces la connotación negativa de que no se es frontal o directo en el trato. ¿Cuál es su opinión?
-La amabilidad es un código de buenas maneras. Nosotros no somos hipócritas. Se necesita cultura, inteligencia y afecto para entenderse con el prójimo de un modo conveniente. Las buenas formas en el trato son un don, pero también son armas que el diplomático sabe utilizar en provecho de su país. Es como cuando se enamora a una mujer. Se utiliza la seducción para la conquista del otro, y la seducción es parte de la inteligencia humana. Se seduce a las personas igual que a los países. Pero con antipatía no se logra nada. Le voy a dar un dato clave: cuando fui embajador en Rusia, que entonces era la Unión Soviética, sus diplomáticos y gobernantes, que eran ciento por ciento comunistas, guardaban las formas de los zares. Se comportaban como zares. Con otra filosofía, por supuesto, pero eran unos perfectos zares. Nadie comía con desarreglo. No se permitían las palmadas ni los abrazos. Los embajadores se ponían uniforme en todas las recepciones importantes. ¿Y por qué era así? Porque esos hombres conocían la importancia de la educación y la simpatía en el trato con las otras naciones. Jamás consideraron el protocolo una frivolidad. Nunca pensaron que ser comunista era incompatible con ser bien educado.
-¿Cuál es la situación de las embajadas argentinas en el mundo?
-Muchísimas embajadas han sido cerradas, como si el país fuera a ahorrar dinero con eso. Es algo inconcebible. Si se cortan las buenas relaciones con los países, se pierden oportunidades de generar buenos negocios. Además, piense usted que el deber de una embajada, entre muchos otros deberes, es cuidar la imagen del propio país en el exterior. No se extrañe, entonces, de que hoy tengamos una muy mala imagen, que día a día empeora aceleradamente. Nos falta presencia en el mundo y representantes idóneos. Insisto: un gobierno serio no puede prescindir de sus embajadores, porque los embajadores son los que defienden los intereses del propio país en el exterior.
-¿Ha estado usted en alguna situación, como embajador, en la que se vio obligado a ser violento o grosero para ser eficaz?
-No. En cincuenta años de profesión, no he tenido que ser grosero jamás.
-¿Cuál fue el presidente argentino más diplomático que usted haya conocido?
-Arturo Frondizi, que me llamó en su momento para que fuera director nacional de Ceremonial de su gobierno. El fue el único estadista argentino que yo haya conocido, y el más talentoso. A pesar de que era introvertido y de una comunicación difícil, entablaba una excelente relación con sus colaboradores. Una vez lo llamé para consultarle algo y me dijo: "Embajador, yo no lo he nombrado para que me consulte, sino para que me diga". El quería que yo tomara decisiones, que fuera libre en mis pensamientos y que lo aconsejara, porque me había ganado su confianza. Así obra un estadista con los que lo rodean. También debo decir que Alfonsín es un hombre inteligente y amable, de maneras señoriales, y afectuoso, además de muy buen político. Estuve dos veces con él, a pesar de que no soy radical ni de ningún otro partido, porque así me lo exige mi profesión, lo que no significa que no tenga mis preferencias. Pero, como le decía, a Alfonsín nunca lo vi fastidiado ni soberbio. Y lo mismo puedo decir de Menem, al que le renuncié. El también tenía muy buenas maneras.
-¿Puede suceder que las buenas maneras tengan un trasfondo de cinismo y que una suavidad extehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrior oculte una aspereza interior o una mala intención?
-Claro que es posible, pero la amabilidad es siempre algo bueno. El protocolo, como dije al principio, es una ciencia política importantísima, que no puede despreciarse desde ningún aspecto. Y le diré más: quien desprecia el protocolo no sólo lo hace por mala educación, sino por algo más grave: el resentimiento y la envidia. Cuando el Presidente desaira a la reina, lo hace para conformar a quienes están enredados en el odio hacia lo que es mejor que lo nuestro. Estamos siendo envidiosos por nuestra propia incapacidad. Nos sentimos incómodos con nosotros mismos.
-¿Encuentra alguna relación entre las malas maneras de algunos gobernantes y la embriaguez de poder?
-Mire: nadie puede estar tan embriagado de poder o de alcohol que no sepa lo que hace. En todo caso, el ebrio se escuda en su estado para hacer y decir lo que le plazca. Mi padre me dijo una vez: "Tené mucho cuidado, porque cuando un ebrio o un tonto te insulta, sabe muy bien que te está insultando, así que lo tenés que tratar igual que si estuviera sobrio".
Por Sebastián Dozo Moreno
Para LA NACION
LA NACION | 29.04.2006 | Página 1 | Política
Quinta-feira, Abril 27, 2006
72) As muitas esquerdas da América Latina (e que Castañeda acha que sao apenas duas...)
Latin America's Left Turn
By Jorge G. Castañeda
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006
Link: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060501faessay85302/jorge-g-castaneda/latin-america-s-left-turn.htm
Summary: With all the talk of Latin America's turn to the left, few have noticed that there are really two lefts in the region. One has radical roots but is now open-minded and modern; the other is close-minded and stridently populist. Rather than fretting over the left's rise in general, the rest of the world should focus on fostering the former rather than the latter -- because it is exactly what Latin America needs.
JORGE G. CASTAÑEDA is the author of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War and Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Having resigned as Mexico's Foreign Minister in 2003, he is currently Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University.
A TALE OF TWO LEFTS
Just over a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him. And at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Latin American leaders were preparing to gather in Miami for the Summit of the Americas, signaling an almost unprecedented convergence between the southern and northern halves of the Western Hemisphere.
What a difference ten years can make. Although the region has just enjoyed its best two years of economic growth in a long time and real threats to democratic rule are few and far between, the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.
Starting with Hugo Chávez's victory in Venezuela eight years ago and poised to culminate in the possible election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico's July 2 presidential contest, a wave of leaders, parties, and movements generically labeled "leftist" have swept into power in one Latin American country after another. After Chávez, it was Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil, then Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, and then, earlier this year, Evo Morales in Bolivia. If the long shot Ollanta Humala wins the April presidential election in Peru and López Obrador wins in Mexico, it will seem as if a veritable left-wing tsunami has hit the region. Colombia and Central America are the only exceptions, but even in Nicaragua, the possibility of a win by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega cannot be dismissed.
The rest of the world has begun to take note of this left-wing resurgence, with concern and often more than a little hysteria. But understanding the reasons behind these developments requires recognizing that there is not one Latin American left today; there are two. One is modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not.
UTOPIA REDEFINED
The reasons for Latin America's turn to the left are not hard to discern. Along with many other commentators and public intellectuals, I started detecting those reasons nearly fifteen years ago, and I recorded them in my book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, which made several points. The first was that the fall of the Soviet Union would help the Latin American left by removing its geopolitical stigma. Washington would no longer be able to accuse any left-of-center regime in the region of being a "Soviet beachhead" (as it had every such government since it fomented the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's administration in Guatemala in 1954); left-wing governments would no longer have to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, because the latter had simply disappeared.
The second point was that regardless of the success or failure of economic reforms in the 1990s and the discrediting of traditional Latin American economic policies, Latin America's extreme inequality (Latin America is the world's most unequal region), poverty, and concentration of wealth, income, power, and opportunity meant that it would have to be governed from the left of center. The combination of inequality and democracy tends to cause a movement to the left everywhere. This was true in western Europe from the end of the nineteenth century until after World War II; it is true today in Latin America. The impoverished masses vote for the type of policies that, they hope, will make them less poor.
Third, the advent of widespread democratization and the consolidation of democratic elections as the only road to power would, sooner or later, lead to victories for the left -- precisely because of the social, demographic, and ethnic configuration of the region. In other words, even without the other proximate causes, Latin America would almost certainly have tilted left.
This forecast became all the more certain once it became evident that the economic, social, and political reforms implemented in Latin America starting in the mid-1980s had not delivered on their promises. With the exception of Chile, which has been governed by a left-of-center coalition since 1989, the region has had singularly unimpressive economic growth rates. They remain well below those of the glory days of the region's development (1940-80) and also well below those of other developing nations -- China, of course, but also India, Malaysia, Poland, and many others. Between 1940 and 1980, Brazil and Mexico, for example, averaged six percent growth per year; from 1980 to 2000, their growth rates were less than half that. Low growth rates have meant the persistence of dismal poverty, inequality, high unemployment, a lack of competitiveness, and poor infrastructure. Democracy, although welcomed and supported by broad swaths of Latin American societies, did little to eradicate the region's secular plagues: corruption, a weak or nonexistent rule of law, ineffective governance, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. And despite hopes that relations with the United States would improve, they are worse today than at any other time in recent memory, including the 1960s (an era defined by conflicts over Cuba) and the 1980s (defined by the Central American wars and Ronald Reagan's "contras").
But many of us who rightly foretold the return of the left were at least partly wrong about the kind of left that would emerge. We thought -- perhaps naively -- that the aggiornamento of the left in Latin America would rapidly and neatly follow that of socialist parties in France and Spain and of New Labour in the United Kingdom. In a few cases, this occurred -- Chile certainly, Brazil tenuously. But in many others, it did not.
One reason for our mistake was that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring about the collapse of its Latin American equivalent, Cuba, as many expected it would. Although the links and subordination of many left-wing parties to Havana have had few domestic electoral implications (and Washington has largely stopped caring anyway), the left's close ties to and emotional dependency on Fidel Castro became an almost insurmountable obstacle to its reconstruction on many issues. But the more fundamental explanation has to do with the roots of many of the movements that are now in power. Knowing where left-wing leaders and parties come from -- in particular, which of the two strands of the left in Latin American history they are a part of -- is critical to understanding who they are and where they are going.
ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES
The left -- defined as that current of thought, politics, and policy that stresses social improvements over macroeconomic orthodoxy, egalitarian distribution of wealth over its creation, sovereignty over international cooperation, democracy (at least when in opposition, if not necessarily once in power) over governmental effectiveness -- has followed two different paths in Latin America. One left sprang up out of the Communist International and the Bolshevik Revolution and has followed a path similar to that of the left in the rest of the world. The Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, Salvadoran, and, before Castro's revolution, Cuban Communist Parties, for example, obtained significant shares of the popular vote at one point or another, participated in "popular front" or "national unity" governments in the 1930s and 1940s, established a solid presence in organized labor, and exercised significant influence in academic and intellectual circles.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, these parties had lost most of their prestige and combativeness. Their corruption, submission to Moscow, accommodation with sitting governments, and assimilation by local power elites had largely discredited them in the eyes of the young and the radical. But the Cuban Revolution brought new life to this strain of the left. In time, groups descended from the old communist left fused with Havana-inspired guerrilla bands. There were certainly some tensions. Castro accused the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party of betraying Che Guevara and leading him to his death in Bolivia in 1967; the Uruguayan and Chilean Communist Parties (the region's strongest) never supported the local Castroist armed groups. Yet thanks to the passage of time, to Soviet and Cuban understanding, and to the sheer weight of repression generated by military coups across the hemisphere, the Castroists and Communists all came together -- and they remain together today.
The origin of the other Latin American left is peculiarly Latin American. It arose out of the region's strange contribution to political science: good old-fashioned populism. Such populism has almost always been present almost everywhere in Latin America. It is frequently in power, or close to it. It claims as its founders historical icons of great mythical stature, from Peru's Vìctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Colombia's Jorge Gaitán (neither made it to office) to Mexico's Lázaro Cárdenas and Brazil's Getúlio Vargas, both foundational figures in their countries' twentieth-century history, and to Argentina's Juan Perón and Ecuador's José Velasco Ibarra. The list is not exhaustive, but it is illustrative: many of these nations' founding-father equivalents were seen in their time and are still seen now as noble benefactors of the working class. They made their mark on their nations, and their followers continue to pay tribute to them. Among many of these countries' poor and dispossessed, they inspire respect, even adulation, to this day.
These populists are representative of a very different left -- often virulently anticommunist, always authoritarian in one fashion or another, and much more interested in policy as an instrument for attaining and conserving power than in power as a tool for making policy. They did do things for the poor -- Perón and Vargas mainly for the urban proletariat, Cárdenas for the Mexican peasantry -- but they also created the corporatist structures that have since plagued the political systems, as well as the labor and peasant movements, in their countries. They nationalized large sectors of their countries' economies, extending well beyond the so-called commanding heights, by targeting everything in sight: oil (Cárdenas in Mexico), railroads (Perón in Argentina), steel (Vargas in Brazil), tin (Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia), copper (Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru). They tended to cut sweetheart deals with the budding local business sector, creating the proverbial crony capitalism that was decried much later. Their justifications for such steps were always superficially ideological (nationalism, economic development) but at bottom pragmatic: they needed money to give away but did not like taxes. They squared that circle by capturing natural-resource or monopoly rents, which allowed them to spend money on the descamisados, the "shirtless," without raising taxes on the middle class. When everything else fails, the thinking went, spend money.
The ideological corollary to this bizarre blend of inclusion of the excluded, macroeconomic folly, and political staying power (Perón was the dominant figure in Argentine politics from 1943 through his death in 1974, the Cárdenas dynasty is more present than ever in Mexican politics) was virulent, strident nationalism. Perón was elected president in 1946 with the slogan "Braden or Perón" (Spruille Braden was then the U.S. ambassador to Buenos Aires). When Vargas committed suicide in 1954, he darkly insinuated that he was a victim of American imperialism. Such nationalism was more than rhetorical. In regimes whose domestic policy platform was strictly power-driven and pragmatic, it was the agenda.
These two subspecies of the Latin American left have always had an uneasy relationship. On occasion they have worked together, but at other times they have been at war, as when Perón returned from exile in June 1973 and promptly massacred a fair share of the Argentine radical left. In some countries, the populist left simply devoured the other one, although peacefully and rather graciously: in Mexico in the late 1980s, the tiny Communist Party disappeared, and former PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) members, such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, and the current presidential front-runner, López Obrador, took over everything from its buildings and finances to its congressional representation and relations with Cuba to form the left-wing PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
More recently, something funny has happened to both kinds of leftist movements on their way back to power. The communist, socialist, and Castroist left, with a few exceptions, has been able to reconstruct itself, thanks largely to an acknowledgment of its failures and those of its erstwhile models. Meanwhile, the populist left -- with an approach to power that depends on giving away money, a deep attachment to the nationalist fervor of another era, and no real domestic agenda -- has remained true to itself. The latter perseveres in its cult of the past: it waxes nostalgic about the glory days of Peronism, the Mexican Revolution, and, needless to say, Castro. The former, familiar with its own mistakes, defeats, and tragedies, and keenly aware of the failures of the Soviet Union and Cuba, has changed its colors.
CASTRO'S UNLIKELY HEIRS
When the reformed communist left has reached office in recent years, its economic policies have been remarkably similar to those of its immediate predecessors, and its respect for democracy has proved full-fledged and sincere. Old-school anti-Americanism has been tempered by years of exile, realism, and resignation.
The best examples of the reconstructed, formerly radical left are to be found in Chile, Uruguay, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Brazil. This left emphasizes social policy -- education, antipoverty programs, health care, housing -- but within a more or less orthodox market framework. It usually attempts to deepen and broaden democratic institutions. On occasion, Latin America's age-old vices -- corruption, a penchant for authoritarian rule -- have led it astray. It disagrees with the United States frequently but rarely takes matters to the brink.
In Chile, former President Ricardo Lagos and his successor, Michelle Bachelet, both come from the old Socialist Party (Lagos from its moderate wing, Bachelet from the less temperate faction). Their left-wing party has governed for 16 consecutive years, in a fruitful alliance with the Christian Democrats. This alliance has made Chile a true model for the region. Under its stewardship, the country has enjoyed high rates of economic growth; significant reductions in poverty; equally significant improvements in education, housing, and infrastructure; a slight drop in inequality; a deepening of democracy and the dismantling of Augusto Pinochet's political legacy; a settling of accounts (although not of scores) regarding human rights violations of the past; and, last but not at all least, a strong, mature relationship with the United States, including a free-trade agreement signed by George W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Congress and Washington's support for the Chilean candidate to head the Organization of American States. U.S.-Chilean ties have continued to prosper despite Chile's unambiguous opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003.
In Uruguay, Vázquez ran for president twice before finally winning a little more than a year ago. His coalition has always been the same: the old Uruguayan Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and many former Marxist Tupamaro guerrillas, who made history in the 1960s and 1970s by, among other things, kidnapping and executing CIA station chief Dan Mitrione in Montevideo in 1970 and being featured in Costa-Gavras' 1973 film State of Siege. There was reason to expect Vázquez to follow a radical line once elected -- but history once again trumped ideology. Although Vázquez has restored Uruguay's relations with Cuba and every now and then rails against neoliberalism and Bush, he has also negotiated an investment-protection agreement with the United States, sent his finance minister to Washington to explore the possibility of forging a free-trade agreement, and stood up to the "antiglobalization, politically correct" groups in neighboring Argentina on the construction of two enormous wood-pulp mills in the Uruguay River estuary. He refused to attend Morales' inauguration as president of Bolivia and has threatened to veto a bill legalizing abortion if it gets to his desk. His government is, on substance if not on rhetoric, as economically orthodox as any other. And with good reason: a country of 3.5 million inhabitants with the lowest poverty rate and the least inequality in Latin America should not mess with its relative success.
Brazil is a different story, but not a diametrically opposed one. Even before his inauguration in 2003, Lula had indicated that he would follow most of his predecessor's macroeconomic policies and comply with the fiscal and monetary targets agreed on with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has done so, achieving impressive results in economic stability (Brazil continues to generate a hefty fiscal surplus every year), but GDP growth has been disappointing, as have employment levels and social indicators. Lula has tried to compensate for his macroeconomic orthodoxy with innovative social initiatives (particularly his "Zero Hunger" drive and land reform). At the end of the day, however, perhaps his most important achievement on this front will be the generalization of the Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) initiative, which was copied directly from the antipoverty program of Mexican Presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. This is a successful, innovative welfare program, but as neoliberal and scantly revolutionary as one can get.
On foreign policy, Brazil, like just about every Latin American country, has had its run-ins with the Bush administration, over issues including trade, UN reform, and how to deal with Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela. But perhaps the best metaphor for the current state of U.S.-Brazilian relations today was the scene in Brasilia last November, when Lula welcomed Bush at his home, while across the street demonstrators from his own party burned the U.S. president in effigy.
The Workers' Party, which Lula founded in 1980 after a long metalworkers' strike in the industrial outskirts of São Paulo, has largely followed him on the road toward social democracy. Many of the more radical cadres of the party, or at least those with the most radical histories (such as José Genoino and José Dirceu), have become moderate reformist leaders, despite their pasts and their lingering emotional devotion to Cuba. (Lula shares this devotion, and yet it has not led him to subservience to Castro: when Lula visited Havana in 2004, Castro wanted to hold a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolución; instead, Castro got a 24-hour in-and-out visit from the Brazilian president, with almost no public exposure.) Lula and many of his comrades are emblematic of the transformation of the old, radical, guerrilla-based, Castroist or communist left. Granted, the conversion is not complete: the corruption scandals that have rocked Brazil's government have more to do with a certain neglect of democratic practices than with any personal attempt at enrichment. Still, the direction in which Lula and his allies are moving is clear.
Overall, this makeover of the radical left is good for Latin America. Given the region's inequality, poverty, still-weak democratic tradition, and unfinished nation building, this left offers precisely what is needed for good governance in the region. If Chile is any example, this left's path is the way out of poverty, authoritarian rule, and, eventually, inequality. This left is also a viable, sensitive, and sensible alternative to the other left -- the one that speaks loudly but carries a very small social stick.
POPULISM REDUX
The leftist leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with few ideological underpinnings -- Chávez with his military background, Kirchner with his Peronist roots, Morales with his coca-leaf growers' militancy and agitprop, López Obrador with his origins in the PRI -- have proved much less responsive to modernizing influences. For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting their countries' real interests in the world. The difference is obvious: Chávez is not Castro; he is Perón with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. López Obrador is neither Lula nor Chávez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverrìa, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.
For all of these leaders, economic performance, democratic values, programmatic achievements, and good relations with the United States are not imperatives but bothersome constraints that miss the real point. They are more intent on maintaining popularity at any cost, picking as many fights as possible with Washington, and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue, including oil, gas, and suspended foreign-debt payments.
Argentina's Kirchner is a classic (although somewhat ambiguous) case. Formerly the governor of a small province at the end of the world, he was elected in the midst of a monumental economic crisis and has managed to bring his country out of it quite effectively. Inflation has been relatively controlled, growth is back, and interest rates have fallen. Kirchner also renegotiated Argentina's huge foreign debt skillfully, if perhaps a bit too boldly. He has gone further than his predecessors in settling past grievances, particularly regarding the "dirty war" that the military and his Peronist colleagues waged in the 1970s. He has become a darling of the left and seems to be on a roll, with approval ratings of over 70 percent.
But despite the left-wing company he keeps, Kirchner is at his core a die-hard Peronist, much more interested in bashing his creditors and the IMF than in devising social policy, in combating the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) than in strengthening Mercosur, in cuddling up to Morales, Castro, and Chávez than in lowering the cost of importing gas from Bolivia. No one knows exactly what will happen when Argentina's commodity boom busts or when the country is forced to return to capital markets for fresh funds. Nor does anyone really know what Kirchner intends to do when his economic recovery runs out of steam. But it seems certain that the Peronist chromosomes in the country's DNA will remain dominant: Kirchner will hand out money, expropriate whatever is needed and available, and lash out at the United States and the IMF on every possible occasion. At the same time, he will worry little about the number of Argentines living under the poverty line and be as chummy with Chávez as he can.
Chávez is doing much the same in Venezuela. He is leading the fight against the FTAA, which is going nowhere anyway. He is making life increasingly miserable for foreign -- above all American -- companies. He is supporting, one way or the other, left-wing groups and leaders in many neighboring countries. He has established a strategic alliance with Havana that includes the presence of nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers, doctors, and cadres in Venezuela. He is flirting with Iran and Argentina on nuclear-technology issues. Most of all, he is attempting, with some success, to split the hemisphere into two camps: one pro-Chávez, one pro-American.
At the same time, Chávez is driving his country into the ground. A tragicomic symbol of this was the collapse of the highway from Caracas to the Maiquetía airport a few months ago because of lack of maintenance. Venezuela's poverty figures and human development indices have deteriorated since 1999, when Chávez took office. A simple comparison with Mexico -- which has not exactly thrived in recent years -- shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.
Although Chávez does very little for the poor of his own country (among whom he remains popular), he is doing much more for other countries: giving oil away to Cuba and other Caribbean states, buying Argentina's debt, allegedly financing political campaigns in Bolivia and Peru and perhaps Mexico. He also frequently picks fights with Fox and Bush and is buying arms from Spain and Russia. This is about as close to traditional Latin American populism as one can get -- and as far from a modern and socially minded left as one can be.
The populist left leaders who are waiting in the wings look likely to deliver much the same. Morales in Bolivia has already made it to power. López Obrador in Mexico is close. Although Humala in Peru is still a long shot, he certainly cannot be dismissed. Such leaders will follow the footsteps of Chávez and Kirchner, because they have the same roots and share the same creed. They will all, of course, be constrained by their national realities -- Morales by the fact that Bolivia is South America's poorest nation, López Obrador by a 2,000-mile border with the United States, Humala by a fragmented country and the lack of an established political party to work with.
Still, they will tread the same path. Morales and Humala have both said that they will attempt either to renationalize their countries' natural resources (gas, oil, copper, water) or renegotiate the terms under which foreign companies extract them. López Obrador has stated that he will not allow private investment in PEMEX, Mexico's state-owned oil company, or in the national electric power company. He has given away money right and left in Mexico City, financing his magnanimity with debt and federal tax revenues. Morales has deftly played on his indigenous origins to ingratiate himself with the majority of his country's population, to whom he is promising everything but giving very little. Morales and Humala have received at least rhetorical support from Chávez, and Morales' first trip abroad was to Havana, his second to Caracas. Humala, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Peruvian army, has confessed to being an admirer of the Venezuelan president. Like Chávez, he started his political career with a failed coup, in his case against Alberto Fujimori in 2000. López Obrador's deputy, certain to be the next mayor of Mexico City, has openly declared his admiration for Chávez and Castro, despite having been a high-level official under Salinas.
What will prove most damaging is that the populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost. Its disregard for democracy and the rule of law is legendary. Often using democratic means, it has often sought to concentrate its power through new constitutions, take control of the media and the legislative and judicial branches of government, and perpetuate its rule by using electoral reforms, nepotism, and the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Chávez is the best example of this left, but certainly not the only one: López Obrador has already committed himself to "cleaning up" Mexico's Supreme Court and central bank and opposes any autonomy for the country's infant regulatory agencies.
This populist left has traditionally been disastrous for Latin America, and there is no reason to suppose it will stop being so in the future. As in the past, its rule will lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality, and confrontation with Washington. It also threatens to roll back the region's most important achievement of recent years: the establishment of democratic rule and respect for human rights.
RIGHT LEFT, WRONG LEFT
Distinguishing between these two broad left-wing currents is the best basis for serious policy, from Washington, Brussels, Mexico City, or anywhere else. There is not a tremendous amount Washington or any other government can actually do to alter the current course of events in Latin America. The Bush administration could make some difference by delivering on its promises to incumbents in the region (on matters such as immigration and trade), thereby supporting continuity without interfering in the electoral process; in South American nations where there is a strong European presence, countries such as France and Spain could help by pointing out that certain policies and attitudes have certain consequences.
But there is a much bolder course, a more statesmanlike approach, that would foster a "right left" instead of working to subvert any left's resurgence. This strategy would involve actively and substantively supporting the right left when it is in power: signing free-trade agreements with Chile, taking Brazil seriously as a trade interlocutor, engaging these nations' governments on issues involving third countries (such as Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela), and bringing their leaders and public intellectuals into the fold. The right left should be able to show not only that there are no penalties for being what it is, but also that it can deliver concrete benefits.
The international community should also clarify what it expects from the "wrong left," given that it exists and that attempts to displace it would be not only morally unacceptable but also pragmatically ineffective. The first point to emphasize is that Latin American governments of any persuasion must abide by their countries' commitments regarding human rights and democracy. The region has built up an incipient scaffolding on these matters over recent years, and any backsliding, for whatever reason or purpose, should be met by a rebuke from the international community. The second point to stress is that all governments must continue to comply with the multilateral effort to build a new international legal order, one that addresses, among other things, the environment, indigenous people's rights, international criminal jurisdiction (despite Washington's continued rejection of the International Criminal Court and its pressure on several Latin American governments to do the same), nuclear nonproliferation, World Trade Organization rules and norms, regional agreements, and the fight against corruption, drug trafficking, and terrorism, consensually defined. Europe and the United States have enormous leverage in many of these countries. They should use it.
Finally, Washington and other governments should avoid the mistakes of the past. Some fights are simply not worth fighting: If Morales wants to squabble with Chile over access to the sea, with Argentina over the price of gas, with Peru over border issues and indigenous ancestry, stand aside. If, for whatever reason, López Obrador wants to build a bullet train from Mexico City to the U.S. border, live and let live. If Chávez really wants to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, let him, as long as he does it under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision and safeguards. Under no circumstances should anyone accept the division of the hemisphere into two camps -- for the United States, against the United States -- because under such a split, the Americas themselves always lose out. Such a division happened over Cuba in the 1960s and over Central America in the 1980s. Now that the Cold War is over, it should never happen again. So instead of arguing over whether to welcome or bemoan the advent of the left in Latin America, it would be wiser to separate the sensible from the irresponsible and to support the former and contain the latter. If done right, this would go a long way toward helping the region finally find its bearings and, as Gabriel García Márquez might put it, end its hundreds of years of solitude.
By Jorge G. Castañeda
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006
Link: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060501faessay85302/jorge-g-castaneda/latin-america-s-left-turn.htm
Summary: With all the talk of Latin America's turn to the left, few have noticed that there are really two lefts in the region. One has radical roots but is now open-minded and modern; the other is close-minded and stridently populist. Rather than fretting over the left's rise in general, the rest of the world should focus on fostering the former rather than the latter -- because it is exactly what Latin America needs.
JORGE G. CASTAÑEDA is the author of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War and Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Having resigned as Mexico's Foreign Minister in 2003, he is currently Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University.
A TALE OF TWO LEFTS
Just over a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him. And at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Latin American leaders were preparing to gather in Miami for the Summit of the Americas, signaling an almost unprecedented convergence between the southern and northern halves of the Western Hemisphere.
What a difference ten years can make. Although the region has just enjoyed its best two years of economic growth in a long time and real threats to democratic rule are few and far between, the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.
Starting with Hugo Chávez's victory in Venezuela eight years ago and poised to culminate in the possible election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico's July 2 presidential contest, a wave of leaders, parties, and movements generically labeled "leftist" have swept into power in one Latin American country after another. After Chávez, it was Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil, then Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, and then, earlier this year, Evo Morales in Bolivia. If the long shot Ollanta Humala wins the April presidential election in Peru and López Obrador wins in Mexico, it will seem as if a veritable left-wing tsunami has hit the region. Colombia and Central America are the only exceptions, but even in Nicaragua, the possibility of a win by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega cannot be dismissed.
The rest of the world has begun to take note of this left-wing resurgence, with concern and often more than a little hysteria. But understanding the reasons behind these developments requires recognizing that there is not one Latin American left today; there are two. One is modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not.
UTOPIA REDEFINED
The reasons for Latin America's turn to the left are not hard to discern. Along with many other commentators and public intellectuals, I started detecting those reasons nearly fifteen years ago, and I recorded them in my book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, which made several points. The first was that the fall of the Soviet Union would help the Latin American left by removing its geopolitical stigma. Washington would no longer be able to accuse any left-of-center regime in the region of being a "Soviet beachhead" (as it had every such government since it fomented the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's administration in Guatemala in 1954); left-wing governments would no longer have to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, because the latter had simply disappeared.
The second point was that regardless of the success or failure of economic reforms in the 1990s and the discrediting of traditional Latin American economic policies, Latin America's extreme inequality (Latin America is the world's most unequal region), poverty, and concentration of wealth, income, power, and opportunity meant that it would have to be governed from the left of center. The combination of inequality and democracy tends to cause a movement to the left everywhere. This was true in western Europe from the end of the nineteenth century until after World War II; it is true today in Latin America. The impoverished masses vote for the type of policies that, they hope, will make them less poor.
Third, the advent of widespread democratization and the consolidation of democratic elections as the only road to power would, sooner or later, lead to victories for the left -- precisely because of the social, demographic, and ethnic configuration of the region. In other words, even without the other proximate causes, Latin America would almost certainly have tilted left.
This forecast became all the more certain once it became evident that the economic, social, and political reforms implemented in Latin America starting in the mid-1980s had not delivered on their promises. With the exception of Chile, which has been governed by a left-of-center coalition since 1989, the region has had singularly unimpressive economic growth rates. They remain well below those of the glory days of the region's development (1940-80) and also well below those of other developing nations -- China, of course, but also India, Malaysia, Poland, and many others. Between 1940 and 1980, Brazil and Mexico, for example, averaged six percent growth per year; from 1980 to 2000, their growth rates were less than half that. Low growth rates have meant the persistence of dismal poverty, inequality, high unemployment, a lack of competitiveness, and poor infrastructure. Democracy, although welcomed and supported by broad swaths of Latin American societies, did little to eradicate the region's secular plagues: corruption, a weak or nonexistent rule of law, ineffective governance, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. And despite hopes that relations with the United States would improve, they are worse today than at any other time in recent memory, including the 1960s (an era defined by conflicts over Cuba) and the 1980s (defined by the Central American wars and Ronald Reagan's "contras").
But many of us who rightly foretold the return of the left were at least partly wrong about the kind of left that would emerge. We thought -- perhaps naively -- that the aggiornamento of the left in Latin America would rapidly and neatly follow that of socialist parties in France and Spain and of New Labour in the United Kingdom. In a few cases, this occurred -- Chile certainly, Brazil tenuously. But in many others, it did not.
One reason for our mistake was that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring about the collapse of its Latin American equivalent, Cuba, as many expected it would. Although the links and subordination of many left-wing parties to Havana have had few domestic electoral implications (and Washington has largely stopped caring anyway), the left's close ties to and emotional dependency on Fidel Castro became an almost insurmountable obstacle to its reconstruction on many issues. But the more fundamental explanation has to do with the roots of many of the movements that are now in power. Knowing where left-wing leaders and parties come from -- in particular, which of the two strands of the left in Latin American history they are a part of -- is critical to understanding who they are and where they are going.
ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES
The left -- defined as that current of thought, politics, and policy that stresses social improvements over macroeconomic orthodoxy, egalitarian distribution of wealth over its creation, sovereignty over international cooperation, democracy (at least when in opposition, if not necessarily once in power) over governmental effectiveness -- has followed two different paths in Latin America. One left sprang up out of the Communist International and the Bolshevik Revolution and has followed a path similar to that of the left in the rest of the world. The Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, Salvadoran, and, before Castro's revolution, Cuban Communist Parties, for example, obtained significant shares of the popular vote at one point or another, participated in "popular front" or "national unity" governments in the 1930s and 1940s, established a solid presence in organized labor, and exercised significant influence in academic and intellectual circles.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, these parties had lost most of their prestige and combativeness. Their corruption, submission to Moscow, accommodation with sitting governments, and assimilation by local power elites had largely discredited them in the eyes of the young and the radical. But the Cuban Revolution brought new life to this strain of the left. In time, groups descended from the old communist left fused with Havana-inspired guerrilla bands. There were certainly some tensions. Castro accused the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party of betraying Che Guevara and leading him to his death in Bolivia in 1967; the Uruguayan and Chilean Communist Parties (the region's strongest) never supported the local Castroist armed groups. Yet thanks to the passage of time, to Soviet and Cuban understanding, and to the sheer weight of repression generated by military coups across the hemisphere, the Castroists and Communists all came together -- and they remain together today.
The origin of the other Latin American left is peculiarly Latin American. It arose out of the region's strange contribution to political science: good old-fashioned populism. Such populism has almost always been present almost everywhere in Latin America. It is frequently in power, or close to it. It claims as its founders historical icons of great mythical stature, from Peru's Vìctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Colombia's Jorge Gaitán (neither made it to office) to Mexico's Lázaro Cárdenas and Brazil's Getúlio Vargas, both foundational figures in their countries' twentieth-century history, and to Argentina's Juan Perón and Ecuador's José Velasco Ibarra. The list is not exhaustive, but it is illustrative: many of these nations' founding-father equivalents were seen in their time and are still seen now as noble benefactors of the working class. They made their mark on their nations, and their followers continue to pay tribute to them. Among many of these countries' poor and dispossessed, they inspire respect, even adulation, to this day.
These populists are representative of a very different left -- often virulently anticommunist, always authoritarian in one fashion or another, and much more interested in policy as an instrument for attaining and conserving power than in power as a tool for making policy. They did do things for the poor -- Perón and Vargas mainly for the urban proletariat, Cárdenas for the Mexican peasantry -- but they also created the corporatist structures that have since plagued the political systems, as well as the labor and peasant movements, in their countries. They nationalized large sectors of their countries' economies, extending well beyond the so-called commanding heights, by targeting everything in sight: oil (Cárdenas in Mexico), railroads (Perón in Argentina), steel (Vargas in Brazil), tin (Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia), copper (Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru). They tended to cut sweetheart deals with the budding local business sector, creating the proverbial crony capitalism that was decried much later. Their justifications for such steps were always superficially ideological (nationalism, economic development) but at bottom pragmatic: they needed money to give away but did not like taxes. They squared that circle by capturing natural-resource or monopoly rents, which allowed them to spend money on the descamisados, the "shirtless," without raising taxes on the middle class. When everything else fails, the thinking went, spend money.
The ideological corollary to this bizarre blend of inclusion of the excluded, macroeconomic folly, and political staying power (Perón was the dominant figure in Argentine politics from 1943 through his death in 1974, the Cárdenas dynasty is more present than ever in Mexican politics) was virulent, strident nationalism. Perón was elected president in 1946 with the slogan "Braden or Perón" (Spruille Braden was then the U.S. ambassador to Buenos Aires). When Vargas committed suicide in 1954, he darkly insinuated that he was a victim of American imperialism. Such nationalism was more than rhetorical. In regimes whose domestic policy platform was strictly power-driven and pragmatic, it was the agenda.
These two subspecies of the Latin American left have always had an uneasy relationship. On occasion they have worked together, but at other times they have been at war, as when Perón returned from exile in June 1973 and promptly massacred a fair share of the Argentine radical left. In some countries, the populist left simply devoured the other one, although peacefully and rather graciously: in Mexico in the late 1980s, the tiny Communist Party disappeared, and former PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) members, such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, and the current presidential front-runner, López Obrador, took over everything from its buildings and finances to its congressional representation and relations with Cuba to form the left-wing PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
More recently, something funny has happened to both kinds of leftist movements on their way back to power. The communist, socialist, and Castroist left, with a few exceptions, has been able to reconstruct itself, thanks largely to an acknowledgment of its failures and those of its erstwhile models. Meanwhile, the populist left -- with an approach to power that depends on giving away money, a deep attachment to the nationalist fervor of another era, and no real domestic agenda -- has remained true to itself. The latter perseveres in its cult of the past: it waxes nostalgic about the glory days of Peronism, the Mexican Revolution, and, needless to say, Castro. The former, familiar with its own mistakes, defeats, and tragedies, and keenly aware of the failures of the Soviet Union and Cuba, has changed its colors.
CASTRO'S UNLIKELY HEIRS
When the reformed communist left has reached office in recent years, its economic policies have been remarkably similar to those of its immediate predecessors, and its respect for democracy has proved full-fledged and sincere. Old-school anti-Americanism has been tempered by years of exile, realism, and resignation.
The best examples of the reconstructed, formerly radical left are to be found in Chile, Uruguay, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Brazil. This left emphasizes social policy -- education, antipoverty programs, health care, housing -- but within a more or less orthodox market framework. It usually attempts to deepen and broaden democratic institutions. On occasion, Latin America's age-old vices -- corruption, a penchant for authoritarian rule -- have led it astray. It disagrees with the United States frequently but rarely takes matters to the brink.
In Chile, former President Ricardo Lagos and his successor, Michelle Bachelet, both come from the old Socialist Party (Lagos from its moderate wing, Bachelet from the less temperate faction). Their left-wing party has governed for 16 consecutive years, in a fruitful alliance with the Christian Democrats. This alliance has made Chile a true model for the region. Under its stewardship, the country has enjoyed high rates of economic growth; significant reductions in poverty; equally significant improvements in education, housing, and infrastructure; a slight drop in inequality; a deepening of democracy and the dismantling of Augusto Pinochet's political legacy; a settling of accounts (although not of scores) regarding human rights violations of the past; and, last but not at all least, a strong, mature relationship with the United States, including a free-trade agreement signed by George W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Congress and Washington's support for the Chilean candidate to head the Organization of American States. U.S.-Chilean ties have continued to prosper despite Chile's unambiguous opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003.
In Uruguay, Vázquez ran for president twice before finally winning a little more than a year ago. His coalition has always been the same: the old Uruguayan Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and many former Marxist Tupamaro guerrillas, who made history in the 1960s and 1970s by, among other things, kidnapping and executing CIA station chief Dan Mitrione in Montevideo in 1970 and being featured in Costa-Gavras' 1973 film State of Siege. There was reason to expect Vázquez to follow a radical line once elected -- but history once again trumped ideology. Although Vázquez has restored Uruguay's relations with Cuba and every now and then rails against neoliberalism and Bush, he has also negotiated an investment-protection agreement with the United States, sent his finance minister to Washington to explore the possibility of forging a free-trade agreement, and stood up to the "antiglobalization, politically correct" groups in neighboring Argentina on the construction of two enormous wood-pulp mills in the Uruguay River estuary. He refused to attend Morales' inauguration as president of Bolivia and has threatened to veto a bill legalizing abortion if it gets to his desk. His government is, on substance if not on rhetoric, as economically orthodox as any other. And with good reason: a country of 3.5 million inhabitants with the lowest poverty rate and the least inequality in Latin America should not mess with its relative success.
Brazil is a different story, but not a diametrically opposed one. Even before his inauguration in 2003, Lula had indicated that he would follow most of his predecessor's macroeconomic policies and comply with the fiscal and monetary targets agreed on with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has done so, achieving impressive results in economic stability (Brazil continues to generate a hefty fiscal surplus every year), but GDP growth has been disappointing, as have employment levels and social indicators. Lula has tried to compensate for his macroeconomic orthodoxy with innovative social initiatives (particularly his "Zero Hunger" drive and land reform). At the end of the day, however, perhaps his most important achievement on this front will be the generalization of the Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) initiative, which was copied directly from the antipoverty program of Mexican Presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. This is a successful, innovative welfare program, but as neoliberal and scantly revolutionary as one can get.
On foreign policy, Brazil, like just about every Latin American country, has had its run-ins with the Bush administration, over issues including trade, UN reform, and how to deal with Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela. But perhaps the best metaphor for the current state of U.S.-Brazilian relations today was the scene in Brasilia last November, when Lula welcomed Bush at his home, while across the street demonstrators from his own party burned the U.S. president in effigy.
The Workers' Party, which Lula founded in 1980 after a long metalworkers' strike in the industrial outskirts of São Paulo, has largely followed him on the road toward social democracy. Many of the more radical cadres of the party, or at least those with the most radical histories (such as José Genoino and José Dirceu), have become moderate reformist leaders, despite their pasts and their lingering emotional devotion to Cuba. (Lula shares this devotion, and yet it has not led him to subservience to Castro: when Lula visited Havana in 2004, Castro wanted to hold a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolución; instead, Castro got a 24-hour in-and-out visit from the Brazilian president, with almost no public exposure.) Lula and many of his comrades are emblematic of the transformation of the old, radical, guerrilla-based, Castroist or communist left. Granted, the conversion is not complete: the corruption scandals that have rocked Brazil's government have more to do with a certain neglect of democratic practices than with any personal attempt at enrichment. Still, the direction in which Lula and his allies are moving is clear.
Overall, this makeover of the radical left is good for Latin America. Given the region's inequality, poverty, still-weak democratic tradition, and unfinished nation building, this left offers precisely what is needed for good governance in the region. If Chile is any example, this left's path is the way out of poverty, authoritarian rule, and, eventually, inequality. This left is also a viable, sensitive, and sensible alternative to the other left -- the one that speaks loudly but carries a very small social stick.
POPULISM REDUX
The leftist leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with few ideological underpinnings -- Chávez with his military background, Kirchner with his Peronist roots, Morales with his coca-leaf growers' militancy and agitprop, López Obrador with his origins in the PRI -- have proved much less responsive to modernizing influences. For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting their countries' real interests in the world. The difference is obvious: Chávez is not Castro; he is Perón with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. López Obrador is neither Lula nor Chávez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverrìa, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.
For all of these leaders, economic performance, democratic values, programmatic achievements, and good relations with the United States are not imperatives but bothersome constraints that miss the real point. They are more intent on maintaining popularity at any cost, picking as many fights as possible with Washington, and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue, including oil, gas, and suspended foreign-debt payments.
Argentina's Kirchner is a classic (although somewhat ambiguous) case. Formerly the governor of a small province at the end of the world, he was elected in the midst of a monumental economic crisis and has managed to bring his country out of it quite effectively. Inflation has been relatively controlled, growth is back, and interest rates have fallen. Kirchner also renegotiated Argentina's huge foreign debt skillfully, if perhaps a bit too boldly. He has gone further than his predecessors in settling past grievances, particularly regarding the "dirty war" that the military and his Peronist colleagues waged in the 1970s. He has become a darling of the left and seems to be on a roll, with approval ratings of over 70 percent.
But despite the left-wing company he keeps, Kirchner is at his core a die-hard Peronist, much more interested in bashing his creditors and the IMF than in devising social policy, in combating the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) than in strengthening Mercosur, in cuddling up to Morales, Castro, and Chávez than in lowering the cost of importing gas from Bolivia. No one knows exactly what will happen when Argentina's commodity boom busts or when the country is forced to return to capital markets for fresh funds. Nor does anyone really know what Kirchner intends to do when his economic recovery runs out of steam. But it seems certain that the Peronist chromosomes in the country's DNA will remain dominant: Kirchner will hand out money, expropriate whatever is needed and available, and lash out at the United States and the IMF on every possible occasion. At the same time, he will worry little about the number of Argentines living under the poverty line and be as chummy with Chávez as he can.
Chávez is doing much the same in Venezuela. He is leading the fight against the FTAA, which is going nowhere anyway. He is making life increasingly miserable for foreign -- above all American -- companies. He is supporting, one way or the other, left-wing groups and leaders in many neighboring countries. He has established a strategic alliance with Havana that includes the presence of nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers, doctors, and cadres in Venezuela. He is flirting with Iran and Argentina on nuclear-technology issues. Most of all, he is attempting, with some success, to split the hemisphere into two camps: one pro-Chávez, one pro-American.
At the same time, Chávez is driving his country into the ground. A tragicomic symbol of this was the collapse of the highway from Caracas to the Maiquetía airport a few months ago because of lack of maintenance. Venezuela's poverty figures and human development indices have deteriorated since 1999, when Chávez took office. A simple comparison with Mexico -- which has not exactly thrived in recent years -- shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.
Although Chávez does very little for the poor of his own country (among whom he remains popular), he is doing much more for other countries: giving oil away to Cuba and other Caribbean states, buying Argentina's debt, allegedly financing political campaigns in Bolivia and Peru and perhaps Mexico. He also frequently picks fights with Fox and Bush and is buying arms from Spain and Russia. This is about as close to traditional Latin American populism as one can get -- and as far from a modern and socially minded left as one can be.
The populist left leaders who are waiting in the wings look likely to deliver much the same. Morales in Bolivia has already made it to power. López Obrador in Mexico is close. Although Humala in Peru is still a long shot, he certainly cannot be dismissed. Such leaders will follow the footsteps of Chávez and Kirchner, because they have the same roots and share the same creed. They will all, of course, be constrained by their national realities -- Morales by the fact that Bolivia is South America's poorest nation, López Obrador by a 2,000-mile border with the United States, Humala by a fragmented country and the lack of an established political party to work with.
Still, they will tread the same path. Morales and Humala have both said that they will attempt either to renationalize their countries' natural resources (gas, oil, copper, water) or renegotiate the terms under which foreign companies extract them. López Obrador has stated that he will not allow private investment in PEMEX, Mexico's state-owned oil company, or in the national electric power company. He has given away money right and left in Mexico City, financing his magnanimity with debt and federal tax revenues. Morales has deftly played on his indigenous origins to ingratiate himself with the majority of his country's population, to whom he is promising everything but giving very little. Morales and Humala have received at least rhetorical support from Chávez, and Morales' first trip abroad was to Havana, his second to Caracas. Humala, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Peruvian army, has confessed to being an admirer of the Venezuelan president. Like Chávez, he started his political career with a failed coup, in his case against Alberto Fujimori in 2000. López Obrador's deputy, certain to be the next mayor of Mexico City, has openly declared his admiration for Chávez and Castro, despite having been a high-level official under Salinas.
What will prove most damaging is that the populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost. Its disregard for democracy and the rule of law is legendary. Often using democratic means, it has often sought to concentrate its power through new constitutions, take control of the media and the legislative and judicial branches of government, and perpetuate its rule by using electoral reforms, nepotism, and the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Chávez is the best example of this left, but certainly not the only one: López Obrador has already committed himself to "cleaning up" Mexico's Supreme Court and central bank and opposes any autonomy for the country's infant regulatory agencies.
This populist left has traditionally been disastrous for Latin America, and there is no reason to suppose it will stop being so in the future. As in the past, its rule will lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality, and confrontation with Washington. It also threatens to roll back the region's most important achievement of recent years: the establishment of democratic rule and respect for human rights.
RIGHT LEFT, WRONG LEFT
Distinguishing between these two broad left-wing currents is the best basis for serious policy, from Washington, Brussels, Mexico City, or anywhere else. There is not a tremendous amount Washington or any other government can actually do to alter the current course of events in Latin America. The Bush administration could make some difference by delivering on its promises to incumbents in the region (on matters such as immigration and trade), thereby supporting continuity without interfering in the electoral process; in South American nations where there is a strong European presence, countries such as France and Spain could help by pointing out that certain policies and attitudes have certain consequences.
But there is a much bolder course, a more statesmanlike approach, that would foster a "right left" instead of working to subvert any left's resurgence. This strategy would involve actively and substantively supporting the right left when it is in power: signing free-trade agreements with Chile, taking Brazil seriously as a trade interlocutor, engaging these nations' governments on issues involving third countries (such as Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela), and bringing their leaders and public intellectuals into the fold. The right left should be able to show not only that there are no penalties for being what it is, but also that it can deliver concrete benefits.
The international community should also clarify what it expects from the "wrong left," given that it exists and that attempts to displace it would be not only morally unacceptable but also pragmatically ineffective. The first point to emphasize is that Latin American governments of any persuasion must abide by their countries' commitments regarding human rights and democracy. The region has built up an incipient scaffolding on these matters over recent years, and any backsliding, for whatever reason or purpose, should be met by a rebuke from the international community. The second point to stress is that all governments must continue to comply with the multilateral effort to build a new international legal order, one that addresses, among other things, the environment, indigenous people's rights, international criminal jurisdiction (despite Washington's continued rejection of the International Criminal Court and its pressure on several Latin American governments to do the same), nuclear nonproliferation, World Trade Organization rules and norms, regional agreements, and the fight against corruption, drug trafficking, and terrorism, consensually defined. Europe and the United States have enormous leverage in many of these countries. They should use it.
Finally, Washington and other governments should avoid the mistakes of the past. Some fights are simply not worth fighting: If Morales wants to squabble with Chile over access to the sea, with Argentina over the price of gas, with Peru over border issues and indigenous ancestry, stand aside. If, for whatever reason, López Obrador wants to build a bullet train from Mexico City to the U.S. border, live and let live. If Chávez really wants to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, let him, as long as he does it under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision and safeguards. Under no circumstances should anyone accept the division of the hemisphere into two camps -- for the United States, against the United States -- because under such a split, the Americas themselves always lose out. Such a division happened over Cuba in the 1960s and over Central America in the 1980s. Now that the Cold War is over, it should never happen again. So instead of arguing over whether to welcome or bemoan the advent of the left in Latin America, it would be wiser to separate the sensible from the irresponsible and to support the former and contain the latter. If done right, this would go a long way toward helping the region finally find its bearings and, as Gabriel García Márquez might put it, end its hundreds of years of solitude.
Quarta-feira, Abril 26, 2006
71) Emb. Marcos de Azambuja: conferência sobre política externa
CONFERÊNCIA INSTITUTO TANCREDO NEVES / abril de 06
Embaixador Marcos Castríoto de Azambuja
1) Minhas premissas – e elas servirão como fio condutor deste papel - são as de que a política externa brasileira tem uma longa trajetória marcada pela racionalidade e pela prudência e o Itamaraty - instrumento principal de sua execução - uma reputação consolidada de eficácia e profissionalismo.
2) Admitidas essas premissas pareceria evidente que a continuidade e atualização das grandes linhas da política externa do Brasil e o fortalecimento de seu braço executor devam ser objetivos que interessam ao país em seu conjunto e às diferentes correntes políticas através das quais se organiza a vida política nacional.
3) Farei assim – e em primeiro lugar - a defesa de que o tratamento das grandes questões de política externa continue a se fazer – para alem de interesses setoriais ou partidários - pela identificação segura e serena de objetivos nacionais - permanentes e circunstanciais - em torno dos quais seja possível criar, sempre que possível, um amplo consenso reunindo as grandes tendências culturais, econômicas, políticas e sociais do nosso país.
4) Apesar de estar falando hoje no Instituto Tancredo Neves, não seria defensor de uma política externa para o Brasil que pudesse ser rotulada como uma “política do PFL”. Isso se aplica, naturalmente, ao PSDB, ao PT ou a qualquer outra grande corrente que pretendesse se substituir ao que me parece ser o nosso vetor central e indispensável: o de que a política externa do Brasil seja rigorosa e profundamente do Brasil no seu todo e não – exclusiva ou dominantemente - de uma das correntes ou tendências em que o país, democraticamente, se expressa.
5) O Brasil soube - e não de hoje - fazer com que sua política externa fosse uma força de aglutinação e convergência de interesses e legítimas ambições nacionais e não o terreno em que, por razões diversas, tendências e objetivos apenas sectários se manifestassem.
6) Temos sabido evitar, como regra, que a política externa seja contagiada por personalismos, voluntarismos, amadorismos, emocionalismos e vários outros “ismos” que, se tolerados, costumam fazer com que a política exterior de um país seja errática, ziguezagueante e contraditória ou, contrario sensu, rígida e inflexível e que, em decorrência, gere incertezas e desconfianças desnecessárias e contraproducentes entre vizinhos, parceiros e na comunidade internacional como um todo.
7) É preciso continuar atentos para poder reagir de forma apropriada cada vez que a política externa pareça estar sendo utilizada como instrumento através do qual se busquem essencialmente ganhos de política interna. Não sugiro – é evidente – que a política interna e a política externa sejam compartimentos estanques. Isto não é possível nem, a rigor, desejável. Há muitos terrenos em que ambas interagem com naturalidade. O que acho que se deve evitar é dissipar crédito e prestigio externos para a obtenção de pequenas vantagens políticas ou eleitorais internas com efêmeros e enganosos resultados.
8) Evito exagerar. A nossa trajetória em política externa tem tido – e não é de agora - seus equívocos e tropeços. Apoiamos muito alem do que devíamos o então colonialismo de Portugal; nosso voto na resolução sobre o “sionismo” nas Nações Unidas foi, simplesmente, um erro. Encontraria sem dificuldade não poucos outros exemplos no passado próximo ou distante.
9) Estou consciente de que uma política externa definida pela busca da consensualidade, com rigorosa execução profissional acima dos embates naturais dos jogos político-partidários apresenta, também, alguns problemas que é preciso desde logo apontar.
10) Em primeiro lugar, uma política externa, assim formulada e executada tende a ser lenta na sua resposta a novas circunstâncias e oportunidades. Embora se erre pouco, muitas vezes se demora muito a acertar. Uso, como exemplo, o fato de que o Brasil, durante muitos anos, resistiu às novas tendências internacionais para a defesa do meio-ambiente e dos direitos humanos, em parte porque continuávamos casados com idéias de repudio a quaisquer ingerências externas, mesmo depois que essas atitudes foram superadas pelo fato de que certos temas passaram a ser objeto legítimo da ação e da preocupação internacionais.
11) Vivemos anos – porque não dizer décadas – em que a política externa do Brasil sofria os constrangimentos e os engessamentos da Guerra Fria no plano internacional e os limites que impunha o autoritarismo doméstico. Hoje não poderíamos invocar - para desculpar nossos desacertos – nem essas circunstâncias nem essas atenuantes.
12) Em segundo lugar, existe sempre o risco de que um profissionalismo rigoroso possa levar a um corporativismo estéril. O Itamaraty tem que estar permanentemente atento para não transformar-se em um sistema fechado de ação e reflexão e permanecer, pelo contrário, aberto e sensível às tendências que vão sendo desenhadas, de forma irresistível pela opinião pública nacional e internacional.
13) O problema sempre residirá em conciliar tradição com inovação; estabilidade com criatividade; ortodoxia com a rápida adequação a novas circunstâncias.
14) Antonio Francisco Azevedo da Silveira, que foi Chanceler do Brasil – e nada conservador por temperamento e convicção – disse de forma memorável: “A melhor tradição do Itamaraty é saber renovar-se”. Esta indispensável conciliação entre o respeito pelas boas regras e pelos bons procedimentos e a necessidade imperiosa de ajustar o país a um mundo em acelerada mutação, faz com que a política externa do Brasil deva ser objeto de uma permanente reflexão da qual devem participar, naturalmente, governo, a oposição e todos os segmentos da sociedade civil.
15) A concepção e execução da política externa brasileira tem sido um exercício relativamente fácil. Tivemos ao longo da nossa historia sorte e juízo. Vivemos atrás de fronteiras bem desenhadas e bem definidas em relação cooperativa com vizinhos não belicosos e a nossa massa crítica desestimula veleidades agressivas e garante que tenhamos um peso extraordinário nas tomadas de decisão regionais.
16) Não estamos nem nos sentimos ameaçados pelos que nos rodeiam. Nossos gastos com defesa são muito pequenos em termos absolutos e em proporção ao nosso PIB. Espero e desejo que assim continuem a ser.
17) A América do Sul é um remanso estratégico e estamos distantes das grandes zonas de conflito e turbulências internacionais. Somos paises com uma longa história de instabilidade interna embora de bom e previsível comportamento no cenário internacional. As raras exceções apenas confirmam a regra.
18) Não precisamos falar, no nosso entorno, de uma real ou suposta liderança brasileira que, a rigor, não estamos desejosos nem a exercer nem a custear. Uma suposta liderança brasileira gera não pequeno ressentimento e desconfiança e basta deixar que os fatos da nossa geografia, demografia e poder agro-industrial, científico e tecnológico falem por si mesmos,
19) Não temos dívidas históricas a resgatar com os vizinhos. Não temos ameaças ou cobranças a fazer. É no nosso interesse coibir o comércio ilícito de bens, o tráfico de drogas e o terrorismo em todas as suas formas. Estamos, com naturalidade, do lado das boas causas.
20) O momento, contudo, requer muita sensibilidade, já que assistimos ao inicio de um novo ciclo populista na América do Sul que traz consigo uma carga de exaltação felizmente mais retórica e verbal do que real, mas que reclama de nossa parte administração cautelosa e algum distanciamento,
21) Será preciso sempre perseguir os nossos interesses estáveis e de longo prazo com paises como a Venezuela, Bolívia, Peru – onde o fenômeno populista se manifesta - sem nos identificarmos com desmandos ou excessos das lideranças atuais ou futuras desses países.
22) Sobretudo com o atual governo da Venezuela, uma prudente e cordial distancia é a melhor opção: desconfio do “bolivarianismo” de Hugo Chávez e da capacidade que o governante venezuelano tem, de promover controvérsias e polêmicas e de causar mal-estar e desconforto a seus vizinhos continentais ou hemisféricos.
23) Fizemos bem em defender a legitimidade democrática na Venezuela quando esta se viu ameaçada. Faremos melhor ao nos dissociar da retórica cada vez mais estridente de Chávez cuja administração, essencialmente incompetente, é camuflada pelo “boom” dos preços do petróleo.
24) Por seu lado nossos interesses com a Bolívia - cada vez maiores em conseqüência da presença da Petrobras a de outras empresas brasileiras naquele país e da operação do gasoduto - requerem a construção de uma relação eficaz e pragmática marcada, também, pelo necessário distanciamento de algumas posições e causas de Evo Morales.
25) Dito em outras e simples palavras, o Brasil é sócio natural e permanente de seus vizinhos, mas não é interlocutor solidário de eventuais governantes cujas agendas não nos dizem respeito e nos causam, em alguns casos, evidente embaraço e constrangimento.
26) É importante destacar o que está dito acima: um Brasil crescentemente maduro e racional terá que conviver com lideranças de rumo incerto em alguns paises próximos e terá que separar a legitimidade desses governos – democraticamente eleitos – de bandeiras e sentimentos que não são os nossos e que muitas vezes sequer nos convêm.
27) Embora prefira o conceito de América do Sul tão claro em sua definição geográfica ao de América Latina, que contém um número não-pequeno de ambigüidades, acho que não devemos repudiar essa latinidade (inclusive em sua projeção ibérica) e que devemos construir, sobretudo com o México, uma relação privilegiada.
28) Não encontramos ainda com o México o terreno comum para um diálogo construtivo. Há mal-entendidos de lado a lado e é pena que as duas maiores economias ao sul dos Estados Unidos não tenham identificado os grandes temas de aproximação. Coloco a revalorização da relação com o México no alto da agenda daquilo a que deveríamos conceder atenção especial nos próximos anos.
29) Hoje as prioridades declaradas da política externa brasileira são a América do Sul e a África. Não tenho nenhuma dúvida de que a América do Sul (ou Latina) deva ser o objetivo central das nossas preocupações já que o Brasil é essencialmente uma potência regional, embora com significativas projeções e interesses em escala mundial. A América do Sul é o nosso entorno e a nossa circunstância.
30) A escolha da África como segunda área prioritária me parece essencialmente discutível. Não porque pretenda reduzir a importância da África – sobretudo a parte ao sul do Saara para nós – mas porque não consigo atribuir àquele continente um peso maior do que a outros com pelo menos igual densidade e relevância para o Brasil em todos os sentidos.
31) A escolha da África é arbitrária e poderíamos, talvez e com tão boas razões apontar a Europa, a Ásia ou a América do Norte como áreas prioritárias de ação de nossa política externa.
32) O volume de nossas transações, interesses e intercâmbio com essas outras áreas é significativamente maior do que as que temos com o continente africano e não vejo na linha do horizonte, uma alteração importante desses fluxos que deverão manter – senão ampliar – a sua importância para nós.
33) A conclusão, portanto, é de que o Brasil deveria evitar – como regra geral - a identificação de áreas prioritárias, exceção feita àquela em que geograficamente nos inscrevemos. Será útil recordar sempre que o Brasil, como ator global não deve e não pode estabelecer hierarquias entre as diferentes regiões com as quais mantêm um relacionamento cada vez mais intenso e diversificado.
34) Ao procurar defender para a ação diplomática brasileira um sentido de inovação dentro da continuidade busco corrigir uma tendência um pouco ingênua e não menos irritante da atual administração; a de pretender-se iniciadora ou criadora de processos que já têm longa trajetória.
35) É natural que cada governo busque aparecer como inventor de algumas senão de todas as rodas. Isso é da natureza mesma do jogo e não há talvez como corrigir. Registro, entretanto, minha impaciência com um comportamento que sugere que a nossa história não conta ou não houve e que o Brasil com trajetória de mais de cinco séculos teria sido inventado ontem.
36) A política externa como expressão mesma da identidade profunda da Nação e do Estado se fortalece quando apresentada não como invenção do momento e sim como formulação atualizada de interesses e objetivos que vem de longe e vão longe e que foram amadurecidos por uma longa experiência e reflexão.
37) O fortalecimento econômico do Brasil e a sua consolidação democrática, além da prática de políticas essencialmente racionais macroeconômicas é somatório de conquistas de longo curso e que devem muito aos últimos governos brasileiros. Concentro-me neles embora muitos de nossos acertos antecedam mesmo a nossa existência como nação independente no começo do século XIX.
38) Ao Presidente Sarney se deve a aproximação com a Argentina, o desmonte dos suspeitos programas nucleares paralelos e o esboço da arquitetura essencial do Mercosul.
39) Ao Governo Itamar Franco o reforço dessas tendências e, com o Plano Real, o ingresso do Brasil no círculo dos países com conduta macroeconômica racional.
40) Coube ao Presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso, em dois mandatos, através de uma vigorosa e esclarecida política presidencial dar ao Brasil uma nova fisionomia como país com aspirações legítimas e razoáveis para ascender aos mais exclusivos círculos de tomada de decisão internacionais e apresentar-nos como parceiro essencialmente confiável.
41) O Presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva e sua equipe puderam levar adiante essas políticas e teve ele a vantagem não-insignificante de que a oposição a seu governo nunca pretendeu retirar legitimidade de seu ativismo como ator internacional à maneira do que fizera com tanto zelo o Partido dos Trabalhadores sobre a política presidencial externa de seus antecessores.
42) O Brasil mais forte, mais estável, mais racional e mais maduro que herdou deu ao atual Presidente da República atual os meios para que, aproveitando seu temperamento expansivo, continuássemos com toda uma linha de projetos que buscam, em seu conjunto, elevar a hierarquia do Brasil na vida internacional.
43) Defendo, sem ambigüidades, a pretensão brasileira de ter um assento permanente no Conselho de Segurança e integrar um G-8 ampliado. Defendo também que o Brasil se aproxime cada vez mais da OCDE e, eventualmente, se faça membro-pleno daquela organização.
44) Minhas reservas são essencialmente de método e procedimento. É preciso que não fiquemos reféns de nossas ambições e candidaturas e que não transformemos aquilo que nos chegará, naturalmente, quando formos tudo que pretendemos ser, em um jogo oneroso e essencialmente desnecessário. Nossa diplomacia sofre, no momento, de hiper-atividade. Poderíamos e deveríamos ser mais seletivos na seleção de nossas ambições e objetivos.
45) Fico, naturalmente, satisfeito ao ver o Brasil no G-20, cuja criação tanto deve à nossa iniciativa.
46) É prestigioso também estarmos entre os quatro grandes postulantes a assentos permanentes no Conselho de Segurança. É agradável ver o Brasil, com naturalidade, ao lado de três outros pesos-pesados: o Japão, a Alemanha e a Índia.
47) Não creio que devamos insistir muito no “processo eleitoral” – por assim dizer – para o Conselho de Segurança. O que importa, certamente, é transmitir à comunidade internacional, através de um crescimento robusto, da adoção de políticas sociais apropriadas; de reforço dos direitos humanos entre nós; de busca de um desenvolvimento sustentável - com especial atenção para nossas responsabilidades amazônicas - que somos um país essencial para a construção e consolidação da paz e da segurança internacionais. Isso feito, nossas credenciais se tornarão ainda mais eloqüentes, até que, em determinado momento, sejamos convocados a assumir o lugar que nos espera.
48) Acredito que há uma outra causa que poderíamos acolher, desde já, e que seria, ao mesmo tempo, útil e virtuosa. Refiro-me a buscar para o Brasil a categoria de “investment grade” na avaliação das agências internacionais de crédito. Desejo sublinhar este ponto.
49) Nada simbolizaria melhor a nossa confiabilidade do que esse novo status, que significa que o país não representa mais, graças à previsibilidade de sua conduta, à solidez e transparência de seu comportamento um risco para os que investiram ou apostaram em nós.
50) Essa poderia tornar-se, para a próxima administração brasileira, a partir de 2007, uma bandeira e um desafio que traria enormes dividendos internos e externos e que nos colocaria onde buscamos estar: no círculo estreito dos países plenamente confiáveis em suas operações com a comunidade financeira internacional.
51) Para chegar lá, temos que abandonar tudo o que nos faz menos confiáveis e menos previsíveis. Procuro indicar, a seguir alguns outros caminhos que deveríamos percorrer a partir de 2007.
52) A política nuclear brasileira deve responder às novas inquietações causadas pelo que acontece no Irã e na Coréia do Norte, e para preservar a nossa credibilidade, devemos assinar os protocolos adicionais ao Tratado de Não Proliferação, tranqüilizando a comunidade internacional e resguardando assim o nosso programa de enriquecimento do urânio para fins exclusivamente pacíficos. A nossa transparência e a qualidade do nosso relacionamento com a AIEA devem ser preservadas com o máximo vigor.
53) É importante e urgente a revalorização do Tratado de Cooperação Amazônica (TCA). Sua sede já está em Brasília. Opera, contudo, com poucos recursos e baixa visibilidade. Deveríamos transferi-la para Belém ou Manaus, dando-lhe meios humanos e materiais adicionais e usar, no quadro da proteção de nossos interesses amazônicos, o regionalismo em contraposição ao universalismo.
54) Devíamos indicar ao Secretário-Geral das Nações Unidas que em data certa nosso contingente deixaria o Haiti, quaisquer que sejam as circunstâncias. O processo de recuperação daquele país será, na melhor das hipóteses, longo e incerto e, já dada a nossa contribuição, é hora de anunciar a partida. Talvez o fim do ano de 2007 pudesse ser uma data apropriada.
55) A diplomacia comercial brasileira tem aumentado a cada ano sua eficácia. Aprendemos a melhor defender nossos interesses na OMC e em outros foros e, dentro e fora do Itamaraty começamos a ter um know-how sobre como avançar nossos objetivos jogando melhor as cartas em tabuleiros em que antes operávamos com pouca perícia.
56) É essencial continuar a aperfeiçoar a teoria e a prática dessa política comercial que é o terreno onde enfrentamos hoje nossos principais desafios.
57) A diplomacia sozinha não é suficiente e é preciso estimular cada vez mais as parcerias com associações comerciais, com entidades públicas ou privadas e com os grandes escritórios de advocacia e consultoria que operam no comércio internacional.
58) O MERCOSUL deve ser equipado para acolher novos sócios e enfrentar novos desafios. Precisa de um grau maior de institucionalização e parece-me esgotado o ciclo em que - para que funcionasse – bastava contar com a disposição informal e flexível de seus dois grandes sócios. Há um déficit de idéias que sejam ao mesmo tempo realistas e visionárias,
59) É preciso tratar futuras possibilidades de associação – sobretudo a ALCA – com um realismo rigoroso e não sermos levados nem pela ingenuidade nem pela paranóia. Os interesses se identificam e se defendem com objetividade sem que seja preciso transformar esses interesses em causas contaminadas por considerações ideológicas em que predomine a paixão e a emoção.
60) Minhas maiores inquietações incidem hoje, contudo, sobre uma arquitetura administrativa que me parece claramente desaconselhável.
61) Há em andamento um programa de expansão dos quadros do Itamaraty, que prevê a absorção, nos próximos quatro anos, de quatrocentos novos diplomatas. Não acredito que precisemos desses números e, sobretudo, não acredito que precisemos fazer a incorporação de novos quadros nessa escala e velocidade. Temo que ocorra – em conseqüência - uma perda importante de qualidade na seleção e na formação do pessoal.
62) Não me parece que a diplomacia brasileira esteja carente hoje de números e que se deveria buscar um aproveitamento e uma qualificação profissional cada vez maior dos funcionários que já existem e não a ampliação tão explosiva de seus números.
63) Se por um lado é desejável que o acesso à carreira diplomática seja o mais aberto e democrático possível não é menos verdade que as exigências de qualificação acadêmica e intelectual não podem ser colocadas em um patamar inferior. O diplomata deve continuar a ser um agente cosmopolita do interesse nacional. Deve poder defender o Brasil em vários campos e vários idiomas e, sobretudo, no inglês que é a língua franca do nosso tempo.
64) Vejo nesse aumento exagerado e apressado de quadros, uma manifestação adicional da tendência tão característica do momento político atual brasileiro, de fazer crescer o aparelho do Estado e criar posições e vagas não requeridas pela realidade atual ou pelas mais projeções mais razoáveis para o futuro próximo.
65) Interromper logo o processo em curso e fazer com que o Instituto Rio Branco – continue a formar pequenas turmas de alta qualificação é objetivo que vai muito além de sua definição administrativa. Uma diplomacia inchada e com critérios mais frouxos de admissão e qualificação é um passo em sentido contrário à busca da excelência que temos perseguido. Ao oferecer a miragem de emprego para muitos estamos sacrificando a idéia da qualidade dos poucos necessários para que se possa conduzir bem a nossa política externa.
66) Chego ao fim destes comentários. Os termos da nossa equação fundamental continuam os mesmos: procuramos acesso aos mercados protegidos, às tecnologias de ponta e aos diretórios do poder internacional.
67)A nossa contrapartida é oferecer à sociedade internacional uma credibilidade assentada na democracia, no respeito aos contratos, na racionalidade macroeconômica e na transparência em matéria de política nuclear.
68) É indispensável prosseguir no rumo certo e dar provas permanentes de confiabilidade e previsibilidade. Não perdemos o rumo embora tenhamos perdido posições nos últimos anos para a Rússia, a China e a Índia que são aqueles grandes paises emergentes com os quais somos comparados. Não podemos nos distanciar desse pelotão cuja cadência deveria ser a nossa em crescimento, abertura e integração na economia mundial. Um nacionalismo à moda antiga; um estatismo anacrônico; uma visão simplista do conceito de soberania e a substituição de uma gestão rigorosa da coisa pública por uma retórica retumbante não nos ajudarão.
69) É com essa exortação que termino essas reflexões em que procurei me valer de uma longa experiência para antever algumas dificuldades e oportunidades futuras. É sempre mais fácil perceber o passado do que antecipar o futuro. Os historiadores acertam mais do que os profetas.
Procurei, contudo – sem fugir ao desafio do tema – identificar certas linhas de reflexão e ação que permitam que no próximo quatriênio, em matéria de política externa, o Brasil não se afaste do que tradicionalmente tem feito e abandone, sem qualquer hesitação, tudo aquilo que virou peso morto, excesso de bagagem ou resíduo descartável.
Marcos Castríoto de Azambuja
Embaixador Marcos Castríoto de Azambuja
1) Minhas premissas – e elas servirão como fio condutor deste papel - são as de que a política externa brasileira tem uma longa trajetória marcada pela racionalidade e pela prudência e o Itamaraty - instrumento principal de sua execução - uma reputação consolidada de eficácia e profissionalismo.
2) Admitidas essas premissas pareceria evidente que a continuidade e atualização das grandes linhas da política externa do Brasil e o fortalecimento de seu braço executor devam ser objetivos que interessam ao país em seu conjunto e às diferentes correntes políticas através das quais se organiza a vida política nacional.
3) Farei assim – e em primeiro lugar - a defesa de que o tratamento das grandes questões de política externa continue a se fazer – para alem de interesses setoriais ou partidários - pela identificação segura e serena de objetivos nacionais - permanentes e circunstanciais - em torno dos quais seja possível criar, sempre que possível, um amplo consenso reunindo as grandes tendências culturais, econômicas, políticas e sociais do nosso país.
4) Apesar de estar falando hoje no Instituto Tancredo Neves, não seria defensor de uma política externa para o Brasil que pudesse ser rotulada como uma “política do PFL”. Isso se aplica, naturalmente, ao PSDB, ao PT ou a qualquer outra grande corrente que pretendesse se substituir ao que me parece ser o nosso vetor central e indispensável: o de que a política externa do Brasil seja rigorosa e profundamente do Brasil no seu todo e não – exclusiva ou dominantemente - de uma das correntes ou tendências em que o país, democraticamente, se expressa.
5) O Brasil soube - e não de hoje - fazer com que sua política externa fosse uma força de aglutinação e convergência de interesses e legítimas ambições nacionais e não o terreno em que, por razões diversas, tendências e objetivos apenas sectários se manifestassem.
6) Temos sabido evitar, como regra, que a política externa seja contagiada por personalismos, voluntarismos, amadorismos, emocionalismos e vários outros “ismos” que, se tolerados, costumam fazer com que a política exterior de um país seja errática, ziguezagueante e contraditória ou, contrario sensu, rígida e inflexível e que, em decorrência, gere incertezas e desconfianças desnecessárias e contraproducentes entre vizinhos, parceiros e na comunidade internacional como um todo.
7) É preciso continuar atentos para poder reagir de forma apropriada cada vez que a política externa pareça estar sendo utilizada como instrumento através do qual se busquem essencialmente ganhos de política interna. Não sugiro – é evidente – que a política interna e a política externa sejam compartimentos estanques. Isto não é possível nem, a rigor, desejável. Há muitos terrenos em que ambas interagem com naturalidade. O que acho que se deve evitar é dissipar crédito e prestigio externos para a obtenção de pequenas vantagens políticas ou eleitorais internas com efêmeros e enganosos resultados.
8) Evito exagerar. A nossa trajetória em política externa tem tido – e não é de agora - seus equívocos e tropeços. Apoiamos muito alem do que devíamos o então colonialismo de Portugal; nosso voto na resolução sobre o “sionismo” nas Nações Unidas foi, simplesmente, um erro. Encontraria sem dificuldade não poucos outros exemplos no passado próximo ou distante.
9) Estou consciente de que uma política externa definida pela busca da consensualidade, com rigorosa execução profissional acima dos embates naturais dos jogos político-partidários apresenta, também, alguns problemas que é preciso desde logo apontar.
10) Em primeiro lugar, uma política externa, assim formulada e executada tende a ser lenta na sua resposta a novas circunstâncias e oportunidades. Embora se erre pouco, muitas vezes se demora muito a acertar. Uso, como exemplo, o fato de que o Brasil, durante muitos anos, resistiu às novas tendências internacionais para a defesa do meio-ambiente e dos direitos humanos, em parte porque continuávamos casados com idéias de repudio a quaisquer ingerências externas, mesmo depois que essas atitudes foram superadas pelo fato de que certos temas passaram a ser objeto legítimo da ação e da preocupação internacionais.
11) Vivemos anos – porque não dizer décadas – em que a política externa do Brasil sofria os constrangimentos e os engessamentos da Guerra Fria no plano internacional e os limites que impunha o autoritarismo doméstico. Hoje não poderíamos invocar - para desculpar nossos desacertos – nem essas circunstâncias nem essas atenuantes.
12) Em segundo lugar, existe sempre o risco de que um profissionalismo rigoroso possa levar a um corporativismo estéril. O Itamaraty tem que estar permanentemente atento para não transformar-se em um sistema fechado de ação e reflexão e permanecer, pelo contrário, aberto e sensível às tendências que vão sendo desenhadas, de forma irresistível pela opinião pública nacional e internacional.
13) O problema sempre residirá em conciliar tradição com inovação; estabilidade com criatividade; ortodoxia com a rápida adequação a novas circunstâncias.
14) Antonio Francisco Azevedo da Silveira, que foi Chanceler do Brasil – e nada conservador por temperamento e convicção – disse de forma memorável: “A melhor tradição do Itamaraty é saber renovar-se”. Esta indispensável conciliação entre o respeito pelas boas regras e pelos bons procedimentos e a necessidade imperiosa de ajustar o país a um mundo em acelerada mutação, faz com que a política externa do Brasil deva ser objeto de uma permanente reflexão da qual devem participar, naturalmente, governo, a oposição e todos os segmentos da sociedade civil.
15) A concepção e execução da política externa brasileira tem sido um exercício relativamente fácil. Tivemos ao longo da nossa historia sorte e juízo. Vivemos atrás de fronteiras bem desenhadas e bem definidas em relação cooperativa com vizinhos não belicosos e a nossa massa crítica desestimula veleidades agressivas e garante que tenhamos um peso extraordinário nas tomadas de decisão regionais.
16) Não estamos nem nos sentimos ameaçados pelos que nos rodeiam. Nossos gastos com defesa são muito pequenos em termos absolutos e em proporção ao nosso PIB. Espero e desejo que assim continuem a ser.
17) A América do Sul é um remanso estratégico e estamos distantes das grandes zonas de conflito e turbulências internacionais. Somos paises com uma longa história de instabilidade interna embora de bom e previsível comportamento no cenário internacional. As raras exceções apenas confirmam a regra.
18) Não precisamos falar, no nosso entorno, de uma real ou suposta liderança brasileira que, a rigor, não estamos desejosos nem a exercer nem a custear. Uma suposta liderança brasileira gera não pequeno ressentimento e desconfiança e basta deixar que os fatos da nossa geografia, demografia e poder agro-industrial, científico e tecnológico falem por si mesmos,
19) Não temos dívidas históricas a resgatar com os vizinhos. Não temos ameaças ou cobranças a fazer. É no nosso interesse coibir o comércio ilícito de bens, o tráfico de drogas e o terrorismo em todas as suas formas. Estamos, com naturalidade, do lado das boas causas.
20) O momento, contudo, requer muita sensibilidade, já que assistimos ao inicio de um novo ciclo populista na América do Sul que traz consigo uma carga de exaltação felizmente mais retórica e verbal do que real, mas que reclama de nossa parte administração cautelosa e algum distanciamento,
21) Será preciso sempre perseguir os nossos interesses estáveis e de longo prazo com paises como a Venezuela, Bolívia, Peru – onde o fenômeno populista se manifesta - sem nos identificarmos com desmandos ou excessos das lideranças atuais ou futuras desses países.
22) Sobretudo com o atual governo da Venezuela, uma prudente e cordial distancia é a melhor opção: desconfio do “bolivarianismo” de Hugo Chávez e da capacidade que o governante venezuelano tem, de promover controvérsias e polêmicas e de causar mal-estar e desconforto a seus vizinhos continentais ou hemisféricos.
23) Fizemos bem em defender a legitimidade democrática na Venezuela quando esta se viu ameaçada. Faremos melhor ao nos dissociar da retórica cada vez mais estridente de Chávez cuja administração, essencialmente incompetente, é camuflada pelo “boom” dos preços do petróleo.
24) Por seu lado nossos interesses com a Bolívia - cada vez maiores em conseqüência da presença da Petrobras a de outras empresas brasileiras naquele país e da operação do gasoduto - requerem a construção de uma relação eficaz e pragmática marcada, também, pelo necessário distanciamento de algumas posições e causas de Evo Morales.
25) Dito em outras e simples palavras, o Brasil é sócio natural e permanente de seus vizinhos, mas não é interlocutor solidário de eventuais governantes cujas agendas não nos dizem respeito e nos causam, em alguns casos, evidente embaraço e constrangimento.
26) É importante destacar o que está dito acima: um Brasil crescentemente maduro e racional terá que conviver com lideranças de rumo incerto em alguns paises próximos e terá que separar a legitimidade desses governos – democraticamente eleitos – de bandeiras e sentimentos que não são os nossos e que muitas vezes sequer nos convêm.
27) Embora prefira o conceito de América do Sul tão claro em sua definição geográfica ao de América Latina, que contém um número não-pequeno de ambigüidades, acho que não devemos repudiar essa latinidade (inclusive em sua projeção ibérica) e que devemos construir, sobretudo com o México, uma relação privilegiada.
28) Não encontramos ainda com o México o terreno comum para um diálogo construtivo. Há mal-entendidos de lado a lado e é pena que as duas maiores economias ao sul dos Estados Unidos não tenham identificado os grandes temas de aproximação. Coloco a revalorização da relação com o México no alto da agenda daquilo a que deveríamos conceder atenção especial nos próximos anos.
29) Hoje as prioridades declaradas da política externa brasileira são a América do Sul e a África. Não tenho nenhuma dúvida de que a América do Sul (ou Latina) deva ser o objetivo central das nossas preocupações já que o Brasil é essencialmente uma potência regional, embora com significativas projeções e interesses em escala mundial. A América do Sul é o nosso entorno e a nossa circunstância.
30) A escolha da África como segunda área prioritária me parece essencialmente discutível. Não porque pretenda reduzir a importância da África – sobretudo a parte ao sul do Saara para nós – mas porque não consigo atribuir àquele continente um peso maior do que a outros com pelo menos igual densidade e relevância para o Brasil em todos os sentidos.
31) A escolha da África é arbitrária e poderíamos, talvez e com tão boas razões apontar a Europa, a Ásia ou a América do Norte como áreas prioritárias de ação de nossa política externa.
32) O volume de nossas transações, interesses e intercâmbio com essas outras áreas é significativamente maior do que as que temos com o continente africano e não vejo na linha do horizonte, uma alteração importante desses fluxos que deverão manter – senão ampliar – a sua importância para nós.
33) A conclusão, portanto, é de que o Brasil deveria evitar – como regra geral - a identificação de áreas prioritárias, exceção feita àquela em que geograficamente nos inscrevemos. Será útil recordar sempre que o Brasil, como ator global não deve e não pode estabelecer hierarquias entre as diferentes regiões com as quais mantêm um relacionamento cada vez mais intenso e diversificado.
34) Ao procurar defender para a ação diplomática brasileira um sentido de inovação dentro da continuidade busco corrigir uma tendência um pouco ingênua e não menos irritante da atual administração; a de pretender-se iniciadora ou criadora de processos que já têm longa trajetória.
35) É natural que cada governo busque aparecer como inventor de algumas senão de todas as rodas. Isso é da natureza mesma do jogo e não há talvez como corrigir. Registro, entretanto, minha impaciência com um comportamento que sugere que a nossa história não conta ou não houve e que o Brasil com trajetória de mais de cinco séculos teria sido inventado ontem.
36) A política externa como expressão mesma da identidade profunda da Nação e do Estado se fortalece quando apresentada não como invenção do momento e sim como formulação atualizada de interesses e objetivos que vem de longe e vão longe e que foram amadurecidos por uma longa experiência e reflexão.
37) O fortalecimento econômico do Brasil e a sua consolidação democrática, além da prática de políticas essencialmente racionais macroeconômicas é somatório de conquistas de longo curso e que devem muito aos últimos governos brasileiros. Concentro-me neles embora muitos de nossos acertos antecedam mesmo a nossa existência como nação independente no começo do século XIX.
38) Ao Presidente Sarney se deve a aproximação com a Argentina, o desmonte dos suspeitos programas nucleares paralelos e o esboço da arquitetura essencial do Mercosul.
39) Ao Governo Itamar Franco o reforço dessas tendências e, com o Plano Real, o ingresso do Brasil no círculo dos países com conduta macroeconômica racional.
40) Coube ao Presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso, em dois mandatos, através de uma vigorosa e esclarecida política presidencial dar ao Brasil uma nova fisionomia como país com aspirações legítimas e razoáveis para ascender aos mais exclusivos círculos de tomada de decisão internacionais e apresentar-nos como parceiro essencialmente confiável.
41) O Presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva e sua equipe puderam levar adiante essas políticas e teve ele a vantagem não-insignificante de que a oposição a seu governo nunca pretendeu retirar legitimidade de seu ativismo como ator internacional à maneira do que fizera com tanto zelo o Partido dos Trabalhadores sobre a política presidencial externa de seus antecessores.
42) O Brasil mais forte, mais estável, mais racional e mais maduro que herdou deu ao atual Presidente da República atual os meios para que, aproveitando seu temperamento expansivo, continuássemos com toda uma linha de projetos que buscam, em seu conjunto, elevar a hierarquia do Brasil na vida internacional.
43) Defendo, sem ambigüidades, a pretensão brasileira de ter um assento permanente no Conselho de Segurança e integrar um G-8 ampliado. Defendo também que o Brasil se aproxime cada vez mais da OCDE e, eventualmente, se faça membro-pleno daquela organização.
44) Minhas reservas são essencialmente de método e procedimento. É preciso que não fiquemos reféns de nossas ambições e candidaturas e que não transformemos aquilo que nos chegará, naturalmente, quando formos tudo que pretendemos ser, em um jogo oneroso e essencialmente desnecessário. Nossa diplomacia sofre, no momento, de hiper-atividade. Poderíamos e deveríamos ser mais seletivos na seleção de nossas ambições e objetivos.
45) Fico, naturalmente, satisfeito ao ver o Brasil no G-20, cuja criação tanto deve à nossa iniciativa.
46) É prestigioso também estarmos entre os quatro grandes postulantes a assentos permanentes no Conselho de Segurança. É agradável ver o Brasil, com naturalidade, ao lado de três outros pesos-pesados: o Japão, a Alemanha e a Índia.
47) Não creio que devamos insistir muito no “processo eleitoral” – por assim dizer – para o Conselho de Segurança. O que importa, certamente, é transmitir à comunidade internacional, através de um crescimento robusto, da adoção de políticas sociais apropriadas; de reforço dos direitos humanos entre nós; de busca de um desenvolvimento sustentável - com especial atenção para nossas responsabilidades amazônicas - que somos um país essencial para a construção e consolidação da paz e da segurança internacionais. Isso feito, nossas credenciais se tornarão ainda mais eloqüentes, até que, em determinado momento, sejamos convocados a assumir o lugar que nos espera.
48) Acredito que há uma outra causa que poderíamos acolher, desde já, e que seria, ao mesmo tempo, útil e virtuosa. Refiro-me a buscar para o Brasil a categoria de “investment grade” na avaliação das agências internacionais de crédito. Desejo sublinhar este ponto.
49) Nada simbolizaria melhor a nossa confiabilidade do que esse novo status, que significa que o país não representa mais, graças à previsibilidade de sua conduta, à solidez e transparência de seu comportamento um risco para os que investiram ou apostaram em nós.
50) Essa poderia tornar-se, para a próxima administração brasileira, a partir de 2007, uma bandeira e um desafio que traria enormes dividendos internos e externos e que nos colocaria onde buscamos estar: no círculo estreito dos países plenamente confiáveis em suas operações com a comunidade financeira internacional.
51) Para chegar lá, temos que abandonar tudo o que nos faz menos confiáveis e menos previsíveis. Procuro indicar, a seguir alguns outros caminhos que deveríamos percorrer a partir de 2007.
52) A política nuclear brasileira deve responder às novas inquietações causadas pelo que acontece no Irã e na Coréia do Norte, e para preservar a nossa credibilidade, devemos assinar os protocolos adicionais ao Tratado de Não Proliferação, tranqüilizando a comunidade internacional e resguardando assim o nosso programa de enriquecimento do urânio para fins exclusivamente pacíficos. A nossa transparência e a qualidade do nosso relacionamento com a AIEA devem ser preservadas com o máximo vigor.
53) É importante e urgente a revalorização do Tratado de Cooperação Amazônica (TCA). Sua sede já está em Brasília. Opera, contudo, com poucos recursos e baixa visibilidade. Deveríamos transferi-la para Belém ou Manaus, dando-lhe meios humanos e materiais adicionais e usar, no quadro da proteção de nossos interesses amazônicos, o regionalismo em contraposição ao universalismo.
54) Devíamos indicar ao Secretário-Geral das Nações Unidas que em data certa nosso contingente deixaria o Haiti, quaisquer que sejam as circunstâncias. O processo de recuperação daquele país será, na melhor das hipóteses, longo e incerto e, já dada a nossa contribuição, é hora de anunciar a partida. Talvez o fim do ano de 2007 pudesse ser uma data apropriada.
55) A diplomacia comercial brasileira tem aumentado a cada ano sua eficácia. Aprendemos a melhor defender nossos interesses na OMC e em outros foros e, dentro e fora do Itamaraty começamos a ter um know-how sobre como avançar nossos objetivos jogando melhor as cartas em tabuleiros em que antes operávamos com pouca perícia.
56) É essencial continuar a aperfeiçoar a teoria e a prática dessa política comercial que é o terreno onde enfrentamos hoje nossos principais desafios.
57) A diplomacia sozinha não é suficiente e é preciso estimular cada vez mais as parcerias com associações comerciais, com entidades públicas ou privadas e com os grandes escritórios de advocacia e consultoria que operam no comércio internacional.
58) O MERCOSUL deve ser equipado para acolher novos sócios e enfrentar novos desafios. Precisa de um grau maior de institucionalização e parece-me esgotado o ciclo em que - para que funcionasse – bastava contar com a disposição informal e flexível de seus dois grandes sócios. Há um déficit de idéias que sejam ao mesmo tempo realistas e visionárias,
59) É preciso tratar futuras possibilidades de associação – sobretudo a ALCA – com um realismo rigoroso e não sermos levados nem pela ingenuidade nem pela paranóia. Os interesses se identificam e se defendem com objetividade sem que seja preciso transformar esses interesses em causas contaminadas por considerações ideológicas em que predomine a paixão e a emoção.
60) Minhas maiores inquietações incidem hoje, contudo, sobre uma arquitetura administrativa que me parece claramente desaconselhável.
61) Há em andamento um programa de expansão dos quadros do Itamaraty, que prevê a absorção, nos próximos quatro anos, de quatrocentos novos diplomatas. Não acredito que precisemos desses números e, sobretudo, não acredito que precisemos fazer a incorporação de novos quadros nessa escala e velocidade. Temo que ocorra – em conseqüência - uma perda importante de qualidade na seleção e na formação do pessoal.
62) Não me parece que a diplomacia brasileira esteja carente hoje de números e que se deveria buscar um aproveitamento e uma qualificação profissional cada vez maior dos funcionários que já existem e não a ampliação tão explosiva de seus números.
63) Se por um lado é desejável que o acesso à carreira diplomática seja o mais aberto e democrático possível não é menos verdade que as exigências de qualificação acadêmica e intelectual não podem ser colocadas em um patamar inferior. O diplomata deve continuar a ser um agente cosmopolita do interesse nacional. Deve poder defender o Brasil em vários campos e vários idiomas e, sobretudo, no inglês que é a língua franca do nosso tempo.
64) Vejo nesse aumento exagerado e apressado de quadros, uma manifestação adicional da tendência tão característica do momento político atual brasileiro, de fazer crescer o aparelho do Estado e criar posições e vagas não requeridas pela realidade atual ou pelas mais projeções mais razoáveis para o futuro próximo.
65) Interromper logo o processo em curso e fazer com que o Instituto Rio Branco – continue a formar pequenas turmas de alta qualificação é objetivo que vai muito além de sua definição administrativa. Uma diplomacia inchada e com critérios mais frouxos de admissão e qualificação é um passo em sentido contrário à busca da excelência que temos perseguido. Ao oferecer a miragem de emprego para muitos estamos sacrificando a idéia da qualidade dos poucos necessários para que se possa conduzir bem a nossa política externa.
66) Chego ao fim destes comentários. Os termos da nossa equação fundamental continuam os mesmos: procuramos acesso aos mercados protegidos, às tecnologias de ponta e aos diretórios do poder internacional.
67)A nossa contrapartida é oferecer à sociedade internacional uma credibilidade assentada na democracia, no respeito aos contratos, na racionalidade macroeconômica e na transparência em matéria de política nuclear.
68) É indispensável prosseguir no rumo certo e dar provas permanentes de confiabilidade e previsibilidade. Não perdemos o rumo embora tenhamos perdido posições nos últimos anos para a Rússia, a China e a Índia que são aqueles grandes paises emergentes com os quais somos comparados. Não podemos nos distanciar desse pelotão cuja cadência deveria ser a nossa em crescimento, abertura e integração na economia mundial. Um nacionalismo à moda antiga; um estatismo anacrônico; uma visão simplista do conceito de soberania e a substituição de uma gestão rigorosa da coisa pública por uma retórica retumbante não nos ajudarão.
69) É com essa exortação que termino essas reflexões em que procurei me valer de uma longa experiência para antever algumas dificuldades e oportunidades futuras. É sempre mais fácil perceber o passado do que antecipar o futuro. Os historiadores acertam mais do que os profetas.
Procurei, contudo – sem fugir ao desafio do tema – identificar certas linhas de reflexão e ação que permitam que no próximo quatriênio, em matéria de política externa, o Brasil não se afaste do que tradicionalmente tem feito e abandone, sem qualquer hesitação, tudo aquilo que virou peso morto, excesso de bagagem ou resíduo descartável.
Marcos Castríoto de Azambuja
70) Um balanço da política externa de Lula: resumo de conferência
Neste post, e no seguinte, coloco primeiro o resumo e depois a própria conferência efetuada pelo embaixador Marcos Azambuaja, hoje aposentado, sobre os rumos atuais de nossa política externa.
Coluna: Um balanço da política externa de Lula
Cristiano Romero
Valor Econômico, 26 abril 2006
Durante conferência proferida no Instituto Tancredo Neves, na segunda-feira, o genial embaixador Marcos Azambuja fez contundente avaliação dos três anos e quatro meses da política externa do governo Lula. Frasista célebre, Azambuja, pode-se dizer, até que pegou leve com a cúpula do Itamaraty. Nada, no entanto, escapou ao seu escrutínio.
O seminário foi promovido pelo PFL, mas, o embaixador procurou deixar claro que jamais defenderia uma política externa do PFL, assim como não deveria haver uma do PSDB ou do PT.
Aqui, a primeira cutucada nos petistas, que, capturando setores do Itamaraty, fizeram da política externa do Brasil a política externa do partido. "O Brasil soube - e não de hoje - fazer com que sua política externa fosse uma força de aglutinação e convergência de interesses e legítimas ambições nacionais, e não o terreno em que, por razões diversas, tendências e objetivos apenas sectários se manifestassem", disse ele.
No governo Lula, o Itamaraty ressoou a idéia de que o Brasil, gigante, mas sem recursos de poder (dinheiro e/ou poder bélico), deve exercer liderança na América do Sul. O plano não funcionou. E criou expectativas de financiamento regional que se frustraram. Com cofres cheios, Hugo Chávez tem feito na prática - registre-se: com enorme irresponsabilidade - o que Lula planejara.
"Não precisamos falar, no nosso entorno, de uma real ou suposta liderança brasileira que, a rigor, não estamos desejosos nem a exercer nem a custear. Uma suposta liderança brasileira gera não pequeno ressentimento e desconfiança e basta deixar que os fatos da nossa geografia, demografia e poder agroindustrial, científico e tecnológico falem por si mesmos", assinalou Azambuja.
O embaixador explicou que a forte onda populista que assola a América do Sul exige do Brasil "muita sensibilidade". O país, sugeriu ele, deve administrar a situação com cautela e impor algum distanciamento. Azambuja elogiou a posição brasileira em defesa da democracia venezuelana, ao tempo em que Chávez perdeu o cargo num malsinado golpe, mas propôs distância da retórica cada vez mais "estridente" do presidente venezuelano, cuja administração, criticou, "essencialmente incompetente, é camuflada pelo 'boom' dos preços do petróleo".
Cautela e pragmatismo devem ser dispensados também à Bolívia, onde o governo Evo Morales, premido por uma realidade de difíceis contornos e a cobrança das promessas nacionalistas que fez durante a campanha, ensaia passos contrários aos interesses brasileiros. "Um Brasil crescentemente maduro e racional terá que conviver com lideranças de rumo incerto em alguns países próximos e terá que separar a legitimidade desses governos - democraticamente eleitos - de bandeiras e sentimentos que não são os nossos e que muitas vezes sequer nos convêm", observou o ex-embaixador.
Azambuja reverenciou a escolha da América do Sul como uma das prioridades da política externa, defendeu maior engajamento numa possível aproximação com o México, mas criticou duramente a opção da diplomacia pela África. Por causa dessa agenda, Lula já fez inúmeras e inúteis viagens ao continente africano. "A escolha da África é arbitrária e poderíamos, talvez e com tão boas razões, apontar a Europa, a Ásia ou a América do Norte como áreas prioritárias de ação de nossa política externa."
Em sua palestra, Azambuja só foi um pouco mais ácido, embora não sem razão, quando falou da estranha mania petista de atribuir ao seu governo a invenção da roda. Disse ele: "Ao procurar defender para a ação diplomática brasileira um sentido de inovação dentro da continuidade, busco corrigir uma tendência um pouco ingênua e não menos irritante da atual administração: a de pretender-se iniciadora ou criadora de processos que já têm longa trajetória".
Azambuja lembrou que o governo Sarney teve o mérito da aproximação com a Argentina, com o fim dos programas nucleares paralelos e a criação do Mercosul. Itamar Franco, com o Plano Real, introduziu o Brasil no círculo dos países com "conduta macroeconômica racional".
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, com sua diplomacia presidencial, perseguiu a idéia de que o Brasil, dada a sua nova fisionomia econômica, tem aspirações legítimas e razoáveis para participar das decisões internacionais e apresentar-se como parceiro "essencialmente confiável".
O governo Lula pôde levar essas políticas adiante, disse ele, "com a vantagem não insignificante de que a oposição a seu governo nunca pretendeu retirar legitimidade de seu ativismo como ator internacional à maneira do que fizera com tanto zelo o PT sobre a política presidencial externa de seus antecessores".
O Brasil tem o direito à pretensão de obter assentos em foros políticos (Conselho de Segurança da ONU, G-8) e econômicos (OMC, OCDE etc.). O problema, na atual gestão diplomática, é que o país entrou, com enorme sede de protagonismo, em inúmeras candidaturas simultaneamente. "Nossa diplomacia sofre, no momento, de hiperatividade", ironizou o embaixador.
Olhando adiante, Azambuja propôs que o Brasil assine os protocolos adicionais do Tratado de Não-Proliferação Nuclear, revalorize o Tratado de Cooperação Amazônica, avise à ONU que tem data marcada para deixar o Haiti (ele sugeriu o fim de 2007), institucionalize o Mercosul e negocie, com "realismo rigoroso", possibilidades de integração comercial, como a Alca.
"Os termos da nossa equação fundamental continuam os mesmos: procuramos acesso aos mercados protegidos, às tecnologias de ponta e aos diretórios do poder internacional", resumiu. "A nossa contrapartida é oferecer à sociedade internacional uma credibilidade assentada na democracia, no respeito aos contratos, na racionalidade macroeconômica e na transparência em matéria de política nuclear.
Um nacionalismo à moda antiga; um estatismo anacrônico; uma visão simplista do conceito de soberania e a substituição de uma gestão rigorosa da coisa pública por uma retórica retumbante não nos ajudarão." É desaconselhável não prestar atenção ao que diz o embaixador Marcos Azambuja.
Coluna: Um balanço da política externa de Lula
Cristiano Romero
Valor Econômico, 26 abril 2006
Durante conferência proferida no Instituto Tancredo Neves, na segunda-feira, o genial embaixador Marcos Azambuja fez contundente avaliação dos três anos e quatro meses da política externa do governo Lula. Frasista célebre, Azambuja, pode-se dizer, até que pegou leve com a cúpula do Itamaraty. Nada, no entanto, escapou ao seu escrutínio.
O seminário foi promovido pelo PFL, mas, o embaixador procurou deixar claro que jamais defenderia uma política externa do PFL, assim como não deveria haver uma do PSDB ou do PT.
Aqui, a primeira cutucada nos petistas, que, capturando setores do Itamaraty, fizeram da política externa do Brasil a política externa do partido. "O Brasil soube - e não de hoje - fazer com que sua política externa fosse uma força de aglutinação e convergência de interesses e legítimas ambições nacionais, e não o terreno em que, por razões diversas, tendências e objetivos apenas sectários se manifestassem", disse ele.
No governo Lula, o Itamaraty ressoou a idéia de que o Brasil, gigante, mas sem recursos de poder (dinheiro e/ou poder bélico), deve exercer liderança na América do Sul. O plano não funcionou. E criou expectativas de financiamento regional que se frustraram. Com cofres cheios, Hugo Chávez tem feito na prática - registre-se: com enorme irresponsabilidade - o que Lula planejara.
"Não precisamos falar, no nosso entorno, de uma real ou suposta liderança brasileira que, a rigor, não estamos desejosos nem a exercer nem a custear. Uma suposta liderança brasileira gera não pequeno ressentimento e desconfiança e basta deixar que os fatos da nossa geografia, demografia e poder agroindustrial, científico e tecnológico falem por si mesmos", assinalou Azambuja.
O embaixador explicou que a forte onda populista que assola a América do Sul exige do Brasil "muita sensibilidade". O país, sugeriu ele, deve administrar a situação com cautela e impor algum distanciamento. Azambuja elogiou a posição brasileira em defesa da democracia venezuelana, ao tempo em que Chávez perdeu o cargo num malsinado golpe, mas propôs distância da retórica cada vez mais "estridente" do presidente venezuelano, cuja administração, criticou, "essencialmente incompetente, é camuflada pelo 'boom' dos preços do petróleo".
Cautela e pragmatismo devem ser dispensados também à Bolívia, onde o governo Evo Morales, premido por uma realidade de difíceis contornos e a cobrança das promessas nacionalistas que fez durante a campanha, ensaia passos contrários aos interesses brasileiros. "Um Brasil crescentemente maduro e racional terá que conviver com lideranças de rumo incerto em alguns países próximos e terá que separar a legitimidade desses governos - democraticamente eleitos - de bandeiras e sentimentos que não são os nossos e que muitas vezes sequer nos convêm", observou o ex-embaixador.
Azambuja reverenciou a escolha da América do Sul como uma das prioridades da política externa, defendeu maior engajamento numa possível aproximação com o México, mas criticou duramente a opção da diplomacia pela África. Por causa dessa agenda, Lula já fez inúmeras e inúteis viagens ao continente africano. "A escolha da África é arbitrária e poderíamos, talvez e com tão boas razões, apontar a Europa, a Ásia ou a América do Norte como áreas prioritárias de ação de nossa política externa."
Em sua palestra, Azambuja só foi um pouco mais ácido, embora não sem razão, quando falou da estranha mania petista de atribuir ao seu governo a invenção da roda. Disse ele: "Ao procurar defender para a ação diplomática brasileira um sentido de inovação dentro da continuidade, busco corrigir uma tendência um pouco ingênua e não menos irritante da atual administração: a de pretender-se iniciadora ou criadora de processos que já têm longa trajetória".
Azambuja lembrou que o governo Sarney teve o mérito da aproximação com a Argentina, com o fim dos programas nucleares paralelos e a criação do Mercosul. Itamar Franco, com o Plano Real, introduziu o Brasil no círculo dos países com "conduta macroeconômica racional".
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, com sua diplomacia presidencial, perseguiu a idéia de que o Brasil, dada a sua nova fisionomia econômica, tem aspirações legítimas e razoáveis para participar das decisões internacionais e apresentar-se como parceiro "essencialmente confiável".
O governo Lula pôde levar essas políticas adiante, disse ele, "com a vantagem não insignificante de que a oposição a seu governo nunca pretendeu retirar legitimidade de seu ativismo como ator internacional à maneira do que fizera com tanto zelo o PT sobre a política presidencial externa de seus antecessores".
O Brasil tem o direito à pretensão de obter assentos em foros políticos (Conselho de Segurança da ONU, G-8) e econômicos (OMC, OCDE etc.). O problema, na atual gestão diplomática, é que o país entrou, com enorme sede de protagonismo, em inúmeras candidaturas simultaneamente. "Nossa diplomacia sofre, no momento, de hiperatividade", ironizou o embaixador.
Olhando adiante, Azambuja propôs que o Brasil assine os protocolos adicionais do Tratado de Não-Proliferação Nuclear, revalorize o Tratado de Cooperação Amazônica, avise à ONU que tem data marcada para deixar o Haiti (ele sugeriu o fim de 2007), institucionalize o Mercosul e negocie, com "realismo rigoroso", possibilidades de integração comercial, como a Alca.
"Os termos da nossa equação fundamental continuam os mesmos: procuramos acesso aos mercados protegidos, às tecnologias de ponta e aos diretórios do poder internacional", resumiu. "A nossa contrapartida é oferecer à sociedade internacional uma credibilidade assentada na democracia, no respeito aos contratos, na racionalidade macroeconômica e na transparência em matéria de política nuclear.
Um nacionalismo à moda antiga; um estatismo anacrônico; uma visão simplista do conceito de soberania e a substituição de uma gestão rigorosa da coisa pública por uma retórica retumbante não nos ajudarão." É desaconselhável não prestar atenção ao que diz o embaixador Marcos Azambuja.
Terça-feira, Abril 25, 2006
69) Continuando um debate penoso (para muitos): a profissionalização em relações internacionais
Os comentários abaixo devem ser lidos na seqüência do meu post 61, neste mesmo blog, e se referem a uma entrevista que dei a propósito da profissionalização em relações internacionais, no âmbito da qual um repórter pinçou uma frase infeliz, que gerou inusitadas (e legítimas) reações por parte dos alunos que se sentiram atingidos.
Reproduzo primeiro os argumentos do meu correspondente, Fábio Simão Alves (RI-USP, 4º ano), seguidos de meus próprios comentários em resposta.
===========
"Caro Embaixador Paulo Roberto de Almeida (PRA: corrijo imediatamente, sou apenas ministro de segunda classe, e não de primeira, comumente conhecido como "embaixador")
Suas opiniões acerca dos cursos de Relações Internacionais têm sido objeto de difusão, debate e, diria mesmo, aborrecimento entre aqueles que, como eu, são estudantes de Relações Internacionais na Universidade de São Paulo. Pretendo apenas compartilhar com o senhor dois ou três pontos de vista estritamente pessoais acerca de algumas delas.
Em primeiro lugar, o que me move a escrever ao senhor é a respeitabilidade por alguém que, como o senhor, entende profundamente do assunto. Em segundo lugar, conta também minha admiração pelos diplomatas deste País, especialmente por aqueles que contam com uma carreira bem-sucedida, longa, e de valiososo serviços prestados ao país.
Sou quarto-anista de RI na USP e, desde o primeiro momento que ingressei na faculdade - até mesmo antes, para ser sincero - aspirante à carreira diplomática. Não me move nenhum idealismo, nenhuma vontade de mudar o mundo; o que me move é o desejo de trabalhar pela minha Nação e uma vocação inquestionável.
Evidentemente, não são elementos que garantirão meu lugar em um dos assentos do tão almejado Insituto Rio Branco. O que o fará será minha competência, meus estudos e minha dedicação.
Pouca coisa do que o senhor escreveu no artigo "As relações internacionais como oportunidade profissional: Respostas a algumas das questões mais colocadas pelos jovens que se voltam para as carreiras de relações internacionais" me agradaram. Resultado, talvez, pela quase impossibilidade de ler o artigo de forma desapaixonado. Nós, RIanos, internacionalistas ou seja lá como nos rotulam (nossos conhecimentos dispensam rótulos fáceis), não conseguimos aceitar boa parte daquelas críticas.
Não, senhor Embaixador, nós não fechamos os olhos à realidade: sabemos das dificuldades que nos esperam em nossa inserção no mercado de trabalho - como, aliás, acontece com todos aqueles que a ele se lançam no Brasil atual. Tampouco cremos estar acima dos demais - não são poucos os que nos atribuem um ar esnobe...Aquilo em que cremos, ou melhor, aquilo em que eu creio é nossa formação, nossos quatro árduos anos passados numa das melhores universidades do país. E, certamente, em nossa dedicação e nossos esforços, que acompanham sempre um homem que, nas palavras do senhor, "quer ser alguém na vida".
O que me animou muito, enfim, foi a última frase de seu artigo: "Acho que é hora de deixar de ser passivos: arregacem as mangas, jovens, mãos à obra, construam suas próprias vidas!". Um belo chamado a que, a despeito de críticas, preconceitos, palavras de desânimo e dificuldades - reais ou imaginados - nos impele a acreditar em nós mesmos. E a não desistir de nossos sonhos, nem resistir aos chamados de nossa vocação, da voz interior que nos conduz ao caminho de nossas vidas.
Obrigado
Fábio Simão Alves
22 anos
Estudante de Relações Internacionais da Universidade de São Paulo"
====================
Fico aborrecido ao saber que minhas palavras estão sendo lidas com "aborrecimento", mas se ouso retrucar, eis aqui o que respondi a meu correspondente:
"Meu caro Fabio,
Muito grato pelas suas palavras e pelo contato.
Certamente que minhas palavras não agradaram à quase totalidade dos alunos de RI: eu reconheço que fui muito brutal e franco, com o que me parece um exagero de oferta num mercado muito restrito. Sinto que essa febre por RI pode levar muitos jovens à frustração – o que certamente não é o caso da maior parte dos alunos da USP, mas pode o de muitas outras faculdades – mas achei que deveria fazê-lo, no espírito de um alerta preventivo, digamos assim.
Como você diz, a diferença é feita de competência, estudos e dedicação, com o que eu concordo inteiramente. Isso será feito com o esforço individual, mais até que com os cursos oficiais, mas as relações pessoais e sociais também fazem diferença.
Se você me permite, e aguardo sua autorização, pretenderia incorporar seus comentários ao meu blog.
O abraço do
PRA"
Reproduzo primeiro os argumentos do meu correspondente, Fábio Simão Alves (RI-USP, 4º ano), seguidos de meus próprios comentários em resposta.
===========
"Caro Embaixador Paulo Roberto de Almeida (PRA: corrijo imediatamente, sou apenas ministro de segunda classe, e não de primeira, comumente conhecido como "embaixador")
Suas opiniões acerca dos cursos de Relações Internacionais têm sido objeto de difusão, debate e, diria mesmo, aborrecimento entre aqueles que, como eu, são estudantes de Relações Internacionais na Universidade de São Paulo. Pretendo apenas compartilhar com o senhor dois ou três pontos de vista estritamente pessoais acerca de algumas delas.
Em primeiro lugar, o que me move a escrever ao senhor é a respeitabilidade por alguém que, como o senhor, entende profundamente do assunto. Em segundo lugar, conta também minha admiração pelos diplomatas deste País, especialmente por aqueles que contam com uma carreira bem-sucedida, longa, e de valiososo serviços prestados ao país.
Sou quarto-anista de RI na USP e, desde o primeiro momento que ingressei na faculdade - até mesmo antes, para ser sincero - aspirante à carreira diplomática. Não me move nenhum idealismo, nenhuma vontade de mudar o mundo; o que me move é o desejo de trabalhar pela minha Nação e uma vocação inquestionável.
Evidentemente, não são elementos que garantirão meu lugar em um dos assentos do tão almejado Insituto Rio Branco. O que o fará será minha competência, meus estudos e minha dedicação.
Pouca coisa do que o senhor escreveu no artigo "As relações internacionais como oportunidade profissional: Respostas a algumas das questões mais colocadas pelos jovens que se voltam para as carreiras de relações internacionais" me agradaram. Resultado, talvez, pela quase impossibilidade de ler o artigo de forma desapaixonado. Nós, RIanos, internacionalistas ou seja lá como nos rotulam (nossos conhecimentos dispensam rótulos fáceis), não conseguimos aceitar boa parte daquelas críticas.
Não, senhor Embaixador, nós não fechamos os olhos à realidade: sabemos das dificuldades que nos esperam em nossa inserção no mercado de trabalho - como, aliás, acontece com todos aqueles que a ele se lançam no Brasil atual. Tampouco cremos estar acima dos demais - não são poucos os que nos atribuem um ar esnobe...Aquilo em que cremos, ou melhor, aquilo em que eu creio é nossa formação, nossos quatro árduos anos passados numa das melhores universidades do país. E, certamente, em nossa dedicação e nossos esforços, que acompanham sempre um homem que, nas palavras do senhor, "quer ser alguém na vida".
O que me animou muito, enfim, foi a última frase de seu artigo: "Acho que é hora de deixar de ser passivos: arregacem as mangas, jovens, mãos à obra, construam suas próprias vidas!". Um belo chamado a que, a despeito de críticas, preconceitos, palavras de desânimo e dificuldades - reais ou imaginados - nos impele a acreditar em nós mesmos. E a não desistir de nossos sonhos, nem resistir aos chamados de nossa vocação, da voz interior que nos conduz ao caminho de nossas vidas.
Obrigado
Fábio Simão Alves
22 anos
Estudante de Relações Internacionais da Universidade de São Paulo"
====================
Fico aborrecido ao saber que minhas palavras estão sendo lidas com "aborrecimento", mas se ouso retrucar, eis aqui o que respondi a meu correspondente:
"Meu caro Fabio,
Muito grato pelas suas palavras e pelo contato.
Certamente que minhas palavras não agradaram à quase totalidade dos alunos de RI: eu reconheço que fui muito brutal e franco, com o que me parece um exagero de oferta num mercado muito restrito. Sinto que essa febre por RI pode levar muitos jovens à frustração – o que certamente não é o caso da maior parte dos alunos da USP, mas pode o de muitas outras faculdades – mas achei que deveria fazê-lo, no espírito de um alerta preventivo, digamos assim.
Como você diz, a diferença é feita de competência, estudos e dedicação, com o que eu concordo inteiramente. Isso será feito com o esforço individual, mais até que com os cursos oficiais, mas as relações pessoais e sociais também fazem diferença.
Se você me permite, e aguardo sua autorização, pretenderia incorporar seus comentários ao meu blog.
O abraço do
PRA"
Sábado, Abril 22, 2006
68) Diplomacia presidencial: viagens e visitas do presidente Lula, de 2002 a 2007
Transcrevo abaixo cronologia que venho mantendo sobre as visitas e viagens do presidente Lula, desde antes de sua posse, como presidente eleito, e até o dia 12 de novembro de 2006 (mas já com previsão de eventos em 2007).
Não foi feita aqui a distinção estilística que adotei no documento elaborado originalmente, entre visitas recebidas no Brasil de autoridades estrangeiras (em formato normal) das viagens efetuadas ao exterior pelo presidente da República (em estilo itálico), o que pode ser conferido no documento em pdf que coloquei em meu site pessoal, neste link: http://www.pralmeida.org/05DocsPRA/1584ViagVisitLula02a06.pdf).
Diplomacia presidencial: cronologia de viagens e visitas, 2002-2007
Viagens efetuadas pelo presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva ao exterior,
visitas de personalidades estrangeiras de alto nível ao Brasil
e participação do Presidente da República em eventos multi- e plurilaterais
2002
(como presidente eleito):
1. Visita de cortesia à Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2 dezembro)
2. Visita de cortesia ao Chile (Santiago, 3 dezembro)
3. Reunião a convite do presidente George Bush (Washington, 10 dezembro)
2003
4. Posse e inauguração do mandato presidencial, com a presença de chefes de Estado e de governo e representantes diplomáticos de dezenas de países (Brasília, 1º janeiro)
5. Encontros com os presidentes da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; de Portugal, Jorge Sampaio; com os primeiro-ministros da Suécia, Goran Persson; da República da Guiné-Bissau, Marco Antonio Avelino Reis Pires, e da Guiana, Samuel Hinds; com o príncipe de Astúrias, Felipe de Borbón y Grécia; com o Alto Comissário das Nações Unidas para Direitos Humanos, Sérgio Vieira de Mello (Brasília, 2 janeiro)
6. Visita do presidente do BID, Enrique Iglesias (Brasília, 9 janeiro)
7. Visita do presidente da Argentina, Eduardo Duhalde (Brasília, 14 janeiro)
8. Visita do príncipe de Astúrias, Felipe de Borbón y Garcia (Brasília, 14 janeiro)
9. Posse do presidente do Equador, Lúcio Gutierrez Borba (Quito, 15-16 janeiro)
10. Café da manhã com do presidente do Equador, Lúcio Gutierrez Borba; encontros com os presidentes da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; do Chile, Ricardo Lagos; da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe; do Peru, Alejandro Toledo; e com o SG da OEA, César Gavíria; constituição do “grupo de amigos” para ajudar a OEA na crise política da Venezuela (Quito, 16 janeiro)
11. Visita do diretor-geral da OIT, Juan Somavia (Brasília, 20 janeiro)
12. Pronunciamento no Foro Social Mundial; encontro com o ex-presidente de Portugal, Mário Soares (Porto Alegre, 24 janeiro)
13. Participação no XXXIII Foro Econômico Mundial e encontro com investidores (Davos, Suíça, 26 janeiro)
14. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente da Alemanha, Johannes Rau, com o primeiro-ministro, chanceler Gerhard Schroeder e com o diretor-geral do FMI, Horst Köhler (Berlim, 27 janeiro)
15. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente da França, Jacques Chirac, e com o primeiro-ministro francês, Pierre Raffarin (Paris, 28 janeiro)
16. Visita de cortesia do comissário de comércio da União Européia, Pascal Lamy (31 janeiro)
17. Visita de cortesia do relator especial da ONU sobre Direito Alimentar, Jean Ziegler (Brasília, 4 fevereiro)
18. Visita do diretor-geral da FAO, Jacques Diouf (Brasília, 14 fevereiro)
19. Diplomacia ativa: telefonemas e cartas a líderes das Américas e da Europa, assim como ao Papa e ao SG-ONU, para encontrar uma solução política e pacífica à crise do Iraque e tentar impedir a invasão pelos EUA (13-14 e 25 fevereiro; 5 março)
20. Visita do presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Brasília, 7 março)
21. Visita do primeiro-ministro do Estado Alemão de Baden Wüttemberg, Erwin Teufel (11 março)
22. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Malásia, Mahatir Mohamad (Brasília, 17 março)
23. Visita da rainha Beatrix, dos Países Baixos (Brasília, 24 março)
24. Visita do presidente do Peru, Alejandro Toledo (Brasília, 11 abril)
25. Discurso na abertura da Conferência Internacional de Lançamento da Rede 10 - Luta Contra a Pobreza Urbana (São Paulo, 14 abril)
26. Visita de cortesia do secretário do Tesouro dos EUA, John Snow (Brasília, 23 abril)
27. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; cerimônia de inauguração dos bustos do libertador Simon Bolívar e do general Abreu e Lima (Recife, 25 abril)
28. Visita do presidente da Bolívia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (Brasília, 28 abril)
29. Visita de cortesia do candidato presidencial argentino, Nestor Kirchner (Brasília, 8 maio)
30. Visita do presidente do Uruguai, Jorge Battle (Brasília, 12 maio)
31. Visita da vice-presidente do Banco Mundial, Anne Kruger (Brasília, 20 maio)
32. XVII Encontro de chefes de Estado do Grupo do Rio; reunião com o presidente da Bolívia, Gonzalo Sanches de Lozada (Cusco, Peru, 23-24 maio)
33. Posse do presidente Nestor Kirchner (Buenos Aires, 25 maio)
34. Visita do presidente do Equador, Lucio Gutiérrez (Brasília, 27 maio)
35. Visita de cortesia do presidente eleito do Paraguai, Nicanor Frutos Duarte (Brasília, 28 maio)
36. Diálogo ampliado no contexto da cúpula do G-8 em Evian, com a participação de outros chefes de Estado e governo de países emergentes (França, 1º junho)
37. Café da manhã com o Presidente da China, Hu Jintao e outros líderes de países em desenvolvimento, como o primeiro-ministro da Índia (Lausanne, Suíça, 2 junho)
38. Reunião especial da Organização Internacional do Trabalho – OIT (Genebra, 2 junho)
39. Visita do presidente do Conselho do Líbano, Rafik Hariri (Brasília, 10 junho)
40. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner (Brasília, 11 junho)
41. Visita do presidente de Cabo Verde, Pedro Verona Rodrigues Pires (Brasília, 13 junho)
42. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, Bolívia e Chile (Assunção, 17-18 junho)
43. Visita aos Estados Unidos, com diversos ministros; reuniões com o presidente George Bush, privada e ampliada; encontros com o Secretário do Tesouro, John Snow, com o príncipe Bandar, Embaixador da Árabia Saudita, com o diretor-geral do FMI, Horst Kohler, com os presidentes do Banco Mundial, James Wolfensohn, da AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, e do BID, Enrique Iglesias (Washington, 20 junho)
44. Visita de cortesia do candidato presidencial da coalizão Frente Amplio do Uruguai, Tabaré Vasquez (Brasília, 25 junho)
45. Visita bilateral à Colômbia e participação no XIV Conselho da Comunidade Andina (Rio Negro, Colômbia, 27-28 junho)
46. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Noruega, Kjell Magne Bondevik; visita de cortesia do vice-presidente do Conselho de Estado de Cuba, Carlos Lages D’Avila, e do ministro cubano das relações exteriores, Pérez Roque (Brasília, 3 julho)
47. Visita bilateral a Portugal, encontros com dirigentes políticos portugueses e reunião da Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa (Lisboa, 10-12 julho)
48. Reunião de cúpula da Governança Progressista; encontros de trabalho com os primeiro-ministros do Reino Unido, Tony Blair, e da Alemanha, chanceler Gerhard Schroeder, e com os presidentes da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e do Chile, Ricardo Lagos (Londres, 13-14 julho)
49. Visita bilateral, oficial, à Espanha, recebido pelo rei Juan Carlos; reuniões com o presidente do governo espanhol, José Maria Aznar; com o vice-presidente do governo e ministro da Economia, Rodrigo Rato; encontros com o ex-presidente de governo Felipe Gonzaléz, com o secretário-geral do PSOE, José Luiz Rodrigues Zapatero, e com sindicalistas da UGT e das Comisiones Obreras (Madrid, 15-16 julho)
50. Visita do presidente do Suriname, Runaldo Ronald Venetiaan (Brasília, 22 julho)
51. Visita do presidente da República Cooperativista da Guiana, Bharrat Jagdeo (Brasília, 30 julho)
52. Reunião de cúpula extraordinária dos presidentes do Mercosul; encontro bilateral com presidente da Argentina Nestor Kirchner (Assunção, 15 agosto)
53. Reunião bilateral Brasil-Paraguai (Foz de Iguaçu, 16 agosto)
54. Visita de trabalho do presidente do Chile, Ricardo Lagos (Brasília, 19 agosto)
55. Encontro com a Delegação brasileira nos XIV Jogos Pan-Americanos de Santo Domingo (República Dominicana, 22 agosto)
56. Visita de trabalho ao presidente do Peru, Alejandro Toledo (Lima, 24 agosto)
57. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente Hugo Chávez (Caracas e Ciudad Guyana, 26-27 agosto)
58. Visita do presidente de Burkina Faso, Blaise Campaoré; visita de cortesia do ex-primeiro-ministro português e presidente da Internacional Socialista, António Guterres (Brasília, 3 setembro)
59. Participação na 89ª sessão do Conselho Internacional do Café e 40º aniversário da Organização Internacional do Café; encontro com o presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Cartagena de Índias, Colômbia, 16 setembro)
60. Participação no encontro “Combatendo o Terrorismo em Prol da Humanidade”; almoço oferecido ao SG-ONU Kofi Annan; encontro bilateral com o presidente da França, Jacques Chirac (Nova York, 22 setembro)
61. Abertura da 58ª Assembléia Geral da ONU; encontros com o presidente de Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano, com o chefe de governo da Alemanha, chanceler Gerhard Schroeder; reunião do Grupo do Rio (Nova York, 23 setembro)
62. Encontros com os presidentes da Argélia, Abelaziz Bouteflika, da Rússia, Vladimir Putin, da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e com lideranças sindicais dos EUA (Nova Iorque, 24 setembro)
63. Pronunciamento no Conselho de Relações Exteriores (Nova York, 25 setembro); doação para o fundo mundial de combate à fome e à miséria (Nova York, 25 setembro)
64. Visita de trabalho ao México e encontro com o presidente Vicente Fox (25 setembro)
65. Visita bilateral a Cuba, encontros privados e ampliados com Fidel Castro (Havana, 26-27 setembro)
66. Visita da rainha Sofia, da Espanha (Brasília, 6 outubro)
67. Visita do rei Harald V e da rainha Sonja, da Noruega (Brasília, 7 outubro)
68. Visita do presidente do Paraguai, Nicanor Duarte Frutos (Brasília, 14 outubro)
69. Visita oficial à Argentina e encontros com o presidente Nestor Kirchner (Buenos Aires e El Calafate, Patagonia, 16-17 outubro); declaração sobre o “Consenso de Buenos Aires” (Buenos Aires, 16 outubro)
70. Visita do presidente da Ucrânia, Leonid Koutchma (Brasília, 21 outubro)
71. Viagem à Espanha: concedido Prêmio Príncipe de Astúrias; encontros com a rainha D. Sofia e com o Príncipe de Astúrias, Felipe de Borbón y Grécia (Oviedo, Espanha, 23-24 outubro; prêmio atribuído a FHC em 2000)
72. Abertura do Congresso da Internacional Socialista; encontros com o presidente da África do Sul, Thabo Mbeki; com o primeiro-ministro de Cabo Verde, José Maria Neves; com o ex-chefe de governo da Espanha, Felipe Gonzalez, e com diversos chanceleres de países participantes (São Paulo, 27 outubro)
73. Encontros com dirigentes políticos da Mongólia, do Montenegro, da Romênia, da Sérvia, da Polônia e da Suécia e com o ex-presidente da Nicarágua, Daniel Ortega (São Paulo, 28 outubro)
74. Visita do presidente de Governo da Espanha, José María Aznar, por ocasião de encontro Mercosul-UE (Brasília, 29 outubro)
75. Visita da presidente da Finlândia, Tarja Halonen (Brasília, 31 outubro)
76. Visita bilateral a São Tomé e Príncipe, encontro com o presidente Fradique de Menezes (São Tomé, 2 novembro)
77. Visita bilateral a Angola e encontro com o presidente José Eduardo dos Santos (Luanda, 3-4 novembro)
78. Visita bilateral a Moçambique e encontro com o presidente Joaquim Chissano (Maputo, 5 novembro)
79. Visita bilateral à Namíbia e encontro com o presidente Sam Nujoma (Windhoek, 6-7 novembro)
80. Visita bilateral à África do Sul e encontro com o presidente Thabo Mbeki (Pretória, 7-8 novembro)
81. Visita de trabalho à Bolívia; encontros com o presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, e com o Secretário Geral das Nações Unidas, Kofi Annan (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 14 novembro)
82. XIII Cúpula Ibero-Americana de Chefes de Estado e de Governo (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 15 novembro)
83. Visita do presidente da República Dominicana, Hipólito Mejia (Brasília, 17 novembro)
84. Visita do presidente da Guiana, Bharrat Jagdeo (Brasília, 17 novembro)
85. Visita do presidente da Bolívia, Carlos Mesa (Brasília, 18 novembro)
86. Visita da rainha Sílvia, da Suécia (Brasília, 24 novembro)
87. Visita do presidente da Alemanha, Johannes Rau (Brasília, 27 novembro)
88. Visita bilateral à Síria e encontro com o presidente Bashar Al-Assad (3 dezembro)
89. Visita bilateral ao Líbano e encontro com o primeiro-ministro Rafik Hariri (5 dezembro)
90. Visita bilateral aos Emirados Árabes Unidos (7 dezembro)
91. Visita bilateral ao Egito (8 dezembro)
92. Visita de cortesia à Liga Árabe e encontro com o Secretário-Geral, Amre Moussa (Cairo, 9 dezembro)
93. Visita bilateral à Líbia e encontro com o líder Muhamar Kadafi (10 dezembro)
94. Pronunciamento em reunião ministerial do G-20; visita de cortesia do comissário europeu de comércio exterior, Pascal Lamy (Brasília, 12 dezembro)
95. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, Bolívia e Chile; encontros privados com o presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e com o presidente da Comissão de Representantes do Mercosul, Eduardo Duhalde (Montevidéu, 16 dezembro)
2004
96. Reunião extraordinária de cúpula das Américas; encontros privados com o presidente dos EUA, George Bush, do Paraguai, Nicanor Duarte, e da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Monterrey, México, 12-13 janeiro)
97. Visita bilateral à Índia (Nova Delhi, Agra e Mumbai, 25-27 janeiro)
98. Pronunciamento em seminário com investidores estrangeiros (Genebra, 29 janeiro)
99. Encontro de trabalho com Ricardo Lagos (Chile), Jacques Chirac (França) e SG-ONU Kofi Annan: discussão sobre um fundo mundial de combate à pobreza (Genebra, 30 janeiro)
100. Visita do presidente do Líbano, Emile Lahoud (Brasília, 17 fevereiro)
101. Visita de trabalho do príncipe da Árabia Saudita, Bandar Bin Sultan (Brasília, 25 fevereiro)
102. Reunião de cúpula do G-15 (Caracas, 27 fevereiro); encontro com o presidente do Irã, Seyed Mohammed Khatami (Caracas, 29 fevereiro)
103. Visita do primeiro-ministro de Portugal, José Manuel Durão Barroso, e 7ª reunião de cúpula Brasil-Portugal (Brasília, 7-8 março)
104. Visita do presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner (Rio de Janeiro, 15-16 março)
105. Visita da presidente da Irlanda, Mary McAleese (Brasília, 29 março)
106. Visita do vice-primeiro-ministro da China, Hui Liangyu (Brasília, 19 abril)
107. Visita de cortesia à Ucrânia, encontro com presidente Leonid Kutchma (Kiev, 21 maio)
108. Visita bilateral à China, com grande delegação (Beijing-Xangai, 22-26 maio)
109. Participação na 3ª conferência de cúpula Europa-América Latina (Guadalajara, México, 28 maio)
110. Pronunciamento na abertura da XI UNCTAD; encontros com os presidentes do Paraguai, Nicanor Duarte; da Bolívia, Carlos Mesa; do Urugua, Jorge Battle; da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; e SG-ONU Kofi Annan (São Paulo, 14 junho)
111. Visita do presidente de Uganda, Yoweri Koguta Museveni; visita de cortesia do presidente eleito da República Dominicana, Leonel Fernandez (Brasília, 15 junho)
112. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Tailândia, Thaksin Shinawatra (Brasília, 16 junho)
113. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente da Namíbia, Sam Nujoma, e com o presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (São Paulo, 21 junho)
114. Pronunciamento no Global Compact e encontro com investidores da América do Norte (Nova York, 24 junho)
115. Pronunciamento na abertura do Fórum Cultural Mundial (São Paulo, 29 junho)
116. Visita de trabalho do presidente do México, Vicente Fox (Brasília, 7 julho)
117. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul (Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, 7-8 julho)
118. Encontro de trabalho com o Presidente Carlos Mesa, da Bolívia (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 9 julho)
119. Abertura do 4º Congresso Mundial da Internacional da Educação (Porto Alegre, 22 julho)
120. Vª Conferência de Chefes de Estado e de Governo da Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa (São Tomé e Príncipe, 26-27 julho)
121. Visita oficial ao Gabão e encontro com o presidente Omar Ondimba Bongo (Libreville, 27-28 julho)
122. Visita oficial a Cabo Verde, encontro com o presidente Pedro Verona Rodrigues Pires (Ilha do Sal, Cidade da Praia, 29-30 julho)
123. Visita de cortesia do candidato do Frente Amplio à presidência do Uruguai, Tabaré Vasquez, (Brasília, 3 agosto)
124. Visita de trabalho à Bolívia, inauguração de ponte fronteiriça (Cobija, 11 agosto)
125. Visita ao Paraguai, cerimônia de instalação do Tribunal Permanente de Revisão do Mercosul (Assunção, 13 agosto)
126. Posse do novo presidente da República Dominicana (Santo Domingo, 15 agosto)
127. Encontro com os presidentes do Uruguai, da Costa Rica, de Honduras, da Guatemala, do Haiti (provisório) e da República Dominicana e com os primeiro-ministros de Antigua e Barbuda, dos Países Baixos e das Ilhas Turkas e Caicos; Declaração de Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo, 17 agosto)
128. Visita de trabalho ao Haiti: futebol e missão de paz da ONU; encontro com o presidente Boniface Alexandre (Porto Príncipe, 18 agosto)
129. Visita oficial ao Chile e encontro com presidente Ricardo Lagos (Santiago, 23 e 24 agosto)
130. Visita de Estado ao Equador e encontro com o presidente Lucio Gutiérrez (Quito, 25 agosto)
131. Visita de trabalho do presidente do Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano (Brasília, 31 agosto)
132. Visita de cortesia do diretor-geral do FMI, Rodrigo Rato (Brasília, 3 setembro)
133. Visita de trabalho do primeiro-ministro do Japão, Junichiro Koizumi (Brasília, 16 setembro)
134. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (Manaus, 15 setembro)
135. Reunião de líderes mundiais para a Ação Mundial contra a Fome e a Pobreza e reunião da Comissão Mundial da OIT sobre a Dimensão Social da Globalização (Nova Iorque, 20 setembro)
136. Abertura da 59ª Assembléia Geral da ONU (Nova Iorque, 21 setembro); encontros com os presidentes da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, da França, Jacques Chirac, com o primeiro-ministro da Suécia, Goran Persson; com o SG da ONU, Kofi Annan; reunião do G-4 (Alemanha, Brasil, Índia e Japão)
137. Visita do Secretário de Estado dos EUA, Colin Powell (Brasília, 5 outubro)
138. Visita do diretor-geral da FAO, Jacques Diouf; almoço com o presidente da Comissão de Representantes do Mercosul, Eduardo Duhalde (Brasília, 7 outubro)
139. 18ª Cúpula do Grupo do Rio; encontros privados com os presidentes do México, Vicente Fox; da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; da Bolívia, Carlos Mesa; e do Peru, Alejandro Toledo (Rio de Janeiro, 4-5 de novembro)
140. Visita de trabalho do presidente da China, Hu Jintao (Brasília, 12 novembro)
141. Visita oficial do Presidente da República Socialista do Vietnã, Tran Duc Luong (Brasília, 17 novembro)
142. Visita do Presidente da República da Coréia, Roh Moo-Hyun (Brasília, 18 novembro)
143. Reunião de Cúpula Ibero-Americana (São José, Costa Rica, 19-20 novembro)
144. Visita de Estado do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin (Brasília, 22 novembro)
145. Visita do Primeiro-Ministro do Canadá, Paul Martin (Brasília, 23 novembro)
146. Visita ao Brasil do Rei do Marrocos, Mohammed VI (Brasília, 25-26 novembro)
147. Visita ao Brasil do Presidente do Paquistão, Pervez Musharraf (Brasília, 29-30 novembro)
148. Terceira Reunião de presidentes sul-americanos para a criação da Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações (Aiacucho, Peru, 9 dezembro)
149. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, Bolívia e Chile (Ouro Preto, MG, 17 dezembro)
2005
150. Visita do presidente da Bulgária, Georgi Parvánov (Brasília, 11 janeiro).
151. Encontro de trabalho com o presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez (Letícia, 19 janeiro)
152. Visita oficial do Presidente do Governo da Espanha, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Brasília, 24 janeiro).
153. Reunião com o Conselho Internacional do Fórum Social Mundial e conferência na Chamada Global para a Ação Contra a Pobreza, no FSM (Porto Alegre, 26-27 janeiro)
154. Participação no Fórum Econômico Mundial: encontros com o presidente da Comissão Européia, José Manuel Durão Barroso; com o Chefe de Governo da Alemanha, Chanceler Gerhard Schroeder; com o presidente da Confederação Helvética, Samuel Schmid; com o presidente da África do Sul, Thabo Mbeki e com investidores internacionais (Davos, 27 a 29 janeiro)
155. Visita de trabalho à Venezuela, encontro com o presidente Hugo Chávez (Caracas, 14 fevereiro)
156. Visita de trabalho à Guiana, encontro com o presidente Bharrat Jagdeo (Georgetown, 15 fevereiro)
157. Visita de trabalho ao Suriname, encontro com o presidente Runaldo Venetiaan (Paramaribo, 15 fevereiro)
158. Participação na 16ª Conferência de Chefes de Governo da Comunidade do Caribe, Caricom (Paramaribo, 16 fevereiro)
159. Posse do presidente Tabaré Vasquez e visita de trabalho ao Uruguai (Montevidéu, 1º março)
160. Encontros de trabalho com os presidentes do Peru, Alejandro Toledo, da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (Montevidéu, 2 março)
161. Visita de cortesia do Secretário da Defesa dos EUA, Donald Rumsfeld (Brasília, 23 março)
162. Encontro de trabalho com os presidentes da Colômbia, Venezuela e Espanha (Ciudad Guyana, Venezuela, 29 março)
163. Visita oficial do presidente do Uruguai, Tabaré Vasquez (Brasília, 1º abril)
164. Visita do primeiro-ministro de São Cristovão e Névis, Denzil Douglas (Brasília, 6 abril)
165. Cerimônia de exéquias do Papa João Paulo II (Praça São Pedro, Vaticano, 8 abril)
166. Encontros com o presidente da Assembléia Nacional da República de Cuba, Ricardo Alarcón; com o presidente da República da Áustria, Heinz Fischer; com o presidente da República de Moçambique, Armando Emílio Guebuza (Embaixada do Brasil em Roma, 8 abril)
167. Encontro com os governadores das regiões da Toscana, Emilia Romana e Marche (Perugia, Itália, 9 abril)
168. Visita à República de Camarões e encontro com o presidente Paul Biya (Iaundé, 11 abril)
169. Visita à Nigéria e encontros com presidente Olosegun Obasanjo (Abuja, 11-12 abril)
170. Encontro com o Secretário-Executivo da Ecowas (Comunidade Econômica dos Estados da África Ocidental), Mohamed Ibn Chambas, (Abuja, 12 abril)
171. Visita a Gana e encontro com o presidente John Agyekum Kufuor (Acra, 12 abril)
172. Visita à Guiné-Bissau e encontros com o presidente, Henrique Rosa, com o primeiro-ministro, Carlos Gomes Jr. e com o presidente da Assembléia Nacional Popular, deputado Francisco Benante (Bissau, 13 de abril)
173. Visita ao Senegal e encontro com o presidente Abdoulaye Wade (Dakar e ilha de Gorée, 13-14 de abril)
174. Encontro de cortesia com o presidente do Chile, Ricardo Lagos (São Paulo, 18 abril)
175. Pronunciamento no encontro de chanceleres da Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações (São Paulo, 19 abril)
176. Cerimônia de inauguração do 16º Congresso Continental Ordinário da Organização Regional Interamericana de Trabalhadores (Brasília, 20 abril)
177. Visita de trabalho da Secretária de Estado dos EUA, Condoleezza Rice (Brasília, 26 abril)
178. Visita oficial do presidente de Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos (Brasília, 3 maio)
179. Visita do presidente de Honduras, Ricardo Maduro (Brasília, 4 maio)
180. Reunião de cúpula países árabes e países sul-americanos; encontros privados com diversos dirigentes árabes e da América do Sul (Brasília, 9-12 maio)
181. Visita oficial do presidente da Argélia, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Brasília, 12 maio)
182. Visita de trabalho à Rússia, em trânsito para a Coréia do Sul.
183. Visita à Coréia e encontros com presidente Roh Moo-Hyun (Seul, 24-25 de maio)
184. Visita oficial ao Japão e encontros com o primeiro-ministro Junishiro Koizumi e com o Imperador Akihito (Tóquio, 26-27 maio)
185. Encontro com o presidente da República Portuguesa, Jorge Sampaio (Tóquio, 27 maio)
186. Visita e encontro com a comunidade brasileira em Nagóia (Nagóia, 28 maio)
187. Abertura do IV Fórum Global de Combate à Corrupção; visita de cortesia do primeiro-ministro de Belize (Brasília, 7 junho)
188. Visita do presidente da República do Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso (Brasília, 13 de junho)
189. Reunião de Cúpula do Mercosul e encontro de trabalho com o presidente Nicanor Frutos Duarte (Assunção, Paraguai, 19-20 junho)
190. Visita à Colômbia, acompanhado de delegação empresarial para o “II Encontro Empresarial Brasil-Colômbia: Comércio e Investimentos” (27 junho)
191. Celebração dos 15 anos do Foro de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2 de julho)
192. Reunião do G-8 e Chefes de Estado e/ou de Governo da África do Sul, Brasil, China, Índia e México (Gleneagles, Glasgow, Escócia, Reino Unido, 7 de julho)
193. Visita oficial à França e participação nas festividades da data nacional francesa; encontros com o presidente Jacques Chirac, primeiro-ministro Dominique de Villepin e prefeito de Paris, Bertrand Delanoë (Paris, 13-15 julho)
194. Visita oficial do Presidente da República de Botsuana, Festus Mogae (Brasília, 26 julho)
195. Visita de cortesia do Secretário do Tesouro dos EUA, John Snow (Brasília, 1º agosto)
196. Visita oficial do presidente da República da Gâmbia, Yahya Jammeh (Brasília, 9 de agosto)
197. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (Brasília, 11 agosto)
198. Visita do presidente da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe, Fradique de Menezes (Brasília, 18 de agosto)
199. Visita de trabalho do primeiro-ministro de Cabo Verde, José Maria Pereira Neves (Brasília, 22 agosto)
200. Visita de presidente da República da Nigéria, Olusegun Obasanjo (Brasília, 6-7 de setembro)
201. Visita ao Peru, para início das obras da Rodovia Interoceânica; encontro com presidentes do Peru e da Bolívia (Puerto Maldonado, Peru, 8 setembro)
202. Visita bilateral de trabalho à Guatemala, encontro com o presidente Oscar Berger Perdomo e participação na reunião dos chefes de Estado do Sistema Integrado de Integração Centro-Americana (Cidade da Guatemala, 12-13 setembro)
203. Cerimônias especiais do 60º aniversário da ONU: debate de alto nível sobre financiamento ao desenvolvimento; reunião de cúpula do Conselho de Segurança e reunião de alto nível da Assembléia Geral sobre as Metas do Milênio; encontros com o SG Kofi Annan e com investidores internacionais (Nova York, 14-15 setembro)
204. Encontro de trabalho com os presidentes do IBAS, Índia e África do Sul (Nova Iorque, 14 setembro)
205. Visita de Estado do presidente da República da Áustria, Heinz Fischer (Brasília, 19 setembro)
206. Abertura da II Conferência Mundial do Café, com a participação do presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Salvador, 24 setembro)
207. Reunião de cúpula dos países membros da Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações (Brasília, 29-30 setembro)
208. Visita trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, e assinatura de acordo entre os presidentes, prevendo a construção conjunta, pelas companhias de petróleo dos dois países, de refinaria de petróleo em Pernambuco (Brasília, 29 setembro).
209. Visita do presidente da República de Cabo Verde, Pedro Verona Rodrigues Pires (Brasília, 4 outubro).
210. Visita bilateral a Portugal, 8ª Cimeira Brasil-Portugal (Porto, 13 outubro)
211. 15ª Cúpula Ibero-Americana, criação de Secretaria-Executiva (Salamanca, Espanha, 14-15 outubro)
212. Visita de trabalho à Itália, encontro com presidente Carlo Azeglio Ciampi e reunião comemorativa dos 60 anos da FAO (Roma, 16-17 outubro)
213. Visita de trabalho à Rússia, encontro com presidente Vladimir Putin (Moscou, 17-18 outubro)
214. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Jamaica, Percival Patterson (Brasília, 1º novembro)
215. Participação na IV Cúpula das Américas (Mar del Plata, 4-5 novembro)
216. Visita de trabalho do presidente George W. Bush (Brasília, 6 novembro)
217. Visita de cortesia do príncipe herdeiro do Reino da Bélgica, Philippe Léopold Louis Marie (Brasília, 21 novembro)
218. Encontro comemorativo dos 20 anos do processo de integração Brasil-Argentina e assinatura de atos pelos presidentes Lula e Kirchner, com a presença dos ex-presidentes José Sarney e Raúl Alfonsin (Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, 30 novembro)
219. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, com decisão política pela aceitação da Venezuela como membro pleno do bloco (Montevidéu, Uruguai, 8 e 9 dezembro)
220. Visita de trabalho à Colômbia e reunião com presidente Álvaro Uribe (Bogotá, 14 dezembro)
221. Visita do presidente do Banco Mundial, Paul Wolfowitz (Brasília, 15 dezembro).
222. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, para o lançamento da pedra inaugural da futura refinaria binacional Abreu e Lima (Porto de Suape, PE, 16 dezembro)
2006
224. Visita ao Brasil do diretor-gerente do FMI, Rodrigo Rato, para o pagamento antecipado do saldo de US$ 15,57 bilhões (10, 789 DES) devidos pelo Brasil como parte do pacote de ajuda contratado em 2003 (Brasília, 10 janeiro)
225. Visita de cortesia do presidente eleito da Bolívia, Evo Morales (Brasília, 13 janeiro)
226. Visita de Estado do presidente Nestor Kirchner (Brasília, 18 janeiro)
227. Encontro Presidencial Trilateral Brasil-Argentina-Venezuela e reunião de trabalho dos presidentes Lula, Kirchner e Hugo Chávez, sobre cooperação energética na América do Sul (construção de gasoduto) e criação de um Banco do Sul (Brasília, 19 janeiro)
228. Inauguração de ponte binacional entre o Brasil e o Peru, em presença do presidente Alejandro Toledo (Assis Brasil, Acre, 21 janeiro)
229. Viagem à Bolívia para a posse do presidente Evo Morales (La Paz, 22 janeiro)
230. Viagem à Argélia, encontro com o presidente Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Alger, 8-9 fevereiro)
231. Viagem ao Benin; visita a Uidá (Cotonou, 9-10 fevereiro)
232. Viagem ao Botsuana, encontro com presidente Festus Mogae (Gaborone, 11 fevereiro)
233. Viagem à República da África do Sul: participação na reunião de cúpula da Governança Progressista, com chefes de governo de outros 13 países (Pretória, 11-12 fevereiro)
234. Visita do primeiro-ministro da República Tcheca, Jiri Paroubek (Brasília, 3 março)
235. Viagem de Estado ao Reino Unido, encontros com a rainha Elizabeth II e o primeiro-ministro Tony Blair (Londres, 6-9 março)
236. Visita de cortesia do presidente eleito do Haiti, René Préval (Brasília, 10 março)
237. Posse da presidente do Chile Michelle Bachelet (Santiago, 11 março)
238. Visita do presidente da Guatemala, Oscar Beger Perdomo (Brasília, 13 março)
239. Visita do do presidente do Uruguai, Tabaré Vázquez (Brasília, 16 março)
240. Abertura do segmento de alto nível da Oitava Conferência das Partes da Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica - COP-8 (Curitiba, 27 março)
241. Visita do presidente de Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (Brasília, 3 de abril)
242. Visita do presidente do Governo da Federação da Rússia, Mikhail Fradkóv (Brasília, 4 abril)
243. Vista de Estado da presidente do Chile, Michelle Bachelet (Brasília, 10-11 de abril)
244. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Colômbia, Alvaro Uribe (25 abril)
245. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner (São Paulo, 25 abril)
246. Encontro tripartite dos presidentes do Brasil e da Argentina e da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (São Paulo, 26 abril)
247. Encontro quadripartite dos presidentes do Brasil, da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, da Bolívia, Evo Morales, e da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, para tratar da crise energética ente o Brasil e a Bolívia (Puerto Iguazú, Argentina 4 maio)
248. Participação na IV reunião de cúpula Europa-América Latina e Caribe e encontro UE-Mercosul (Viena, 11 e 12 maio)
249. Visita de Estado à Áustria, a convite do Presidente Heinz Fischer (Viena, 13 maio)
250. Visita de Estado do presidente da França, Jacques Chirac (Brasília, 24-26 de maio)
251. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Comissão Européia, José Manuel Durão Barroso (Brasília, 31 de maio)
252. Visita de cortesia do Presidente eleito do Peru, Alan García (Brasília, 13 junho)
253. Viagem de trabalho à Venezuela para a cerimônia de assinatura do protocolo de adesão da Venezuela ao Mercosul, com a presença dos demais presidentes do bloco e da Bolívia, como país associado (Caracas, 4 julho).
254. Visita de trabalho do presidente de Gana, John Kufuor (Brasília, 10 julho)
255. Participação na II Conferência de Intelectuais da África e da Diáspora (Salvador, 12 julho)
256. Participação em reunião ampliada do G-8 (São Petersburgo, Rússia, 15-17 julho)
257. Viagem para participar na XXX Cúpula do Mercosul e reunião ampliada com chefes de Estado com países associados, com a presença do presidente Fidel Castro, para assinatura de acordo comercial do Mercosul com Cuba (Córdoba, 21 julho).
258. Posse do presidente do Peru, Alan Garcia (Lima, 28 julho)
259. Visita oficial do primeiro-ministro de Portugal, José Sócrates (Brasília, 9 agosto)
260. Visita de trabalho do presidente do Uruguai, Tabaré Vázquez, que veio comunicar decisão de seu país de negociar acordo de liberalização comercial com os EUA (Canoas, RS, 8 setembro)
261. Visita oficial ao Brasil do Primeiro Ministro da Índia, Manmohan Singh (Brasília, 12 setembro)
262. I Cúpula do Fórum de Diálogo Índia, Brasil, África do Sul - IBAS (G-3), com a presença do Primeiro Ministro da Índia, Manmohan Singh, e do presidente da República da África do Sul, Thabo Mbeki (Brasília, 13 setembro).
263. Discurso na abertura do debate na 61ª Assembléia-Geral da ONU; lançamento da Central Internacional de Compra de Medicamentos; cerimônia de entrega do prêmio “Estadista do Ano” pela Fundação Apelo à Consciência (Nova Iorque, 19 setembro)
264. Visita oficial do presidente do Peru, Alan García; assinados diversos acordos de cooperação (Brasília, 9 novembro).
265. Visita bilateral de trabalho à Venezuela, para cerimônia de inauguração da segunda ponte sobre o Rio Orinoco, em Puerto Ordaz (Ciudad Guayana, 13 novembro)
266. Viagem multilateral à Nigéria, para a reunião de chefes de Estado e de Governo da África e da América do Sul (AFRAS) (Abuja, 29-30 novembro).
267. Viagem multilateral de trabalho à Bolívia: II Cúpula da Comunidade Sul-americana de Nações (Cochabamba, 8-9 novembro).
268. Conselho do Mercosul (Brasília, prevista originalmente para 14-15 dezembro; a ser realizada, possivelmente, em janeiro de 2007).
2007
269. Inauguração do segundo mandato presidencial do presidente Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, com presença de chefes de Estado e de governo e representantes diplomáticos de diversos países (Brasília, 1º janeiro 2007)
270. Conselho do Mercosul (Brasília, ??-?? janeiro 2007).
Fontes: Dados em princípio exaustivos, coletados em diversos sites oficiais (Presidência da República, Agência Brasil da Radiobrás e Ministério das Relações Exteriores) e nos meios de comunicação. Não existe uma única informação pública, agregada exclusiva e completa, sobre todos os eventos diplomáticos (viagens efetuadas, visitas recebidas, encontros realizados e participação em reuniões multilaterais ou eventos plurilaterais) envolvendo o presidente da República; todas as fontes e sites citados são lacunares, incompletos e parciais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Atualizado em 12 de novembro de 2006
Não foi feita aqui a distinção estilística que adotei no documento elaborado originalmente, entre visitas recebidas no Brasil de autoridades estrangeiras (em formato normal) das viagens efetuadas ao exterior pelo presidente da República (em estilo itálico), o que pode ser conferido no documento em pdf que coloquei em meu site pessoal, neste link: http://www.pralmeida.org/05DocsPRA/1584ViagVisitLula02a06.pdf).
Diplomacia presidencial: cronologia de viagens e visitas, 2002-2007
Viagens efetuadas pelo presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva ao exterior,
visitas de personalidades estrangeiras de alto nível ao Brasil
e participação do Presidente da República em eventos multi- e plurilaterais
2002
(como presidente eleito):
1. Visita de cortesia à Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2 dezembro)
2. Visita de cortesia ao Chile (Santiago, 3 dezembro)
3. Reunião a convite do presidente George Bush (Washington, 10 dezembro)
2003
4. Posse e inauguração do mandato presidencial, com a presença de chefes de Estado e de governo e representantes diplomáticos de dezenas de países (Brasília, 1º janeiro)
5. Encontros com os presidentes da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; de Portugal, Jorge Sampaio; com os primeiro-ministros da Suécia, Goran Persson; da República da Guiné-Bissau, Marco Antonio Avelino Reis Pires, e da Guiana, Samuel Hinds; com o príncipe de Astúrias, Felipe de Borbón y Grécia; com o Alto Comissário das Nações Unidas para Direitos Humanos, Sérgio Vieira de Mello (Brasília, 2 janeiro)
6. Visita do presidente do BID, Enrique Iglesias (Brasília, 9 janeiro)
7. Visita do presidente da Argentina, Eduardo Duhalde (Brasília, 14 janeiro)
8. Visita do príncipe de Astúrias, Felipe de Borbón y Garcia (Brasília, 14 janeiro)
9. Posse do presidente do Equador, Lúcio Gutierrez Borba (Quito, 15-16 janeiro)
10. Café da manhã com do presidente do Equador, Lúcio Gutierrez Borba; encontros com os presidentes da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; do Chile, Ricardo Lagos; da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe; do Peru, Alejandro Toledo; e com o SG da OEA, César Gavíria; constituição do “grupo de amigos” para ajudar a OEA na crise política da Venezuela (Quito, 16 janeiro)
11. Visita do diretor-geral da OIT, Juan Somavia (Brasília, 20 janeiro)
12. Pronunciamento no Foro Social Mundial; encontro com o ex-presidente de Portugal, Mário Soares (Porto Alegre, 24 janeiro)
13. Participação no XXXIII Foro Econômico Mundial e encontro com investidores (Davos, Suíça, 26 janeiro)
14. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente da Alemanha, Johannes Rau, com o primeiro-ministro, chanceler Gerhard Schroeder e com o diretor-geral do FMI, Horst Köhler (Berlim, 27 janeiro)
15. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente da França, Jacques Chirac, e com o primeiro-ministro francês, Pierre Raffarin (Paris, 28 janeiro)
16. Visita de cortesia do comissário de comércio da União Européia, Pascal Lamy (31 janeiro)
17. Visita de cortesia do relator especial da ONU sobre Direito Alimentar, Jean Ziegler (Brasília, 4 fevereiro)
18. Visita do diretor-geral da FAO, Jacques Diouf (Brasília, 14 fevereiro)
19. Diplomacia ativa: telefonemas e cartas a líderes das Américas e da Europa, assim como ao Papa e ao SG-ONU, para encontrar uma solução política e pacífica à crise do Iraque e tentar impedir a invasão pelos EUA (13-14 e 25 fevereiro; 5 março)
20. Visita do presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Brasília, 7 março)
21. Visita do primeiro-ministro do Estado Alemão de Baden Wüttemberg, Erwin Teufel (11 março)
22. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Malásia, Mahatir Mohamad (Brasília, 17 março)
23. Visita da rainha Beatrix, dos Países Baixos (Brasília, 24 março)
24. Visita do presidente do Peru, Alejandro Toledo (Brasília, 11 abril)
25. Discurso na abertura da Conferência Internacional de Lançamento da Rede 10 - Luta Contra a Pobreza Urbana (São Paulo, 14 abril)
26. Visita de cortesia do secretário do Tesouro dos EUA, John Snow (Brasília, 23 abril)
27. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; cerimônia de inauguração dos bustos do libertador Simon Bolívar e do general Abreu e Lima (Recife, 25 abril)
28. Visita do presidente da Bolívia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (Brasília, 28 abril)
29. Visita de cortesia do candidato presidencial argentino, Nestor Kirchner (Brasília, 8 maio)
30. Visita do presidente do Uruguai, Jorge Battle (Brasília, 12 maio)
31. Visita da vice-presidente do Banco Mundial, Anne Kruger (Brasília, 20 maio)
32. XVII Encontro de chefes de Estado do Grupo do Rio; reunião com o presidente da Bolívia, Gonzalo Sanches de Lozada (Cusco, Peru, 23-24 maio)
33. Posse do presidente Nestor Kirchner (Buenos Aires, 25 maio)
34. Visita do presidente do Equador, Lucio Gutiérrez (Brasília, 27 maio)
35. Visita de cortesia do presidente eleito do Paraguai, Nicanor Frutos Duarte (Brasília, 28 maio)
36. Diálogo ampliado no contexto da cúpula do G-8 em Evian, com a participação de outros chefes de Estado e governo de países emergentes (França, 1º junho)
37. Café da manhã com o Presidente da China, Hu Jintao e outros líderes de países em desenvolvimento, como o primeiro-ministro da Índia (Lausanne, Suíça, 2 junho)
38. Reunião especial da Organização Internacional do Trabalho – OIT (Genebra, 2 junho)
39. Visita do presidente do Conselho do Líbano, Rafik Hariri (Brasília, 10 junho)
40. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner (Brasília, 11 junho)
41. Visita do presidente de Cabo Verde, Pedro Verona Rodrigues Pires (Brasília, 13 junho)
42. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, Bolívia e Chile (Assunção, 17-18 junho)
43. Visita aos Estados Unidos, com diversos ministros; reuniões com o presidente George Bush, privada e ampliada; encontros com o Secretário do Tesouro, John Snow, com o príncipe Bandar, Embaixador da Árabia Saudita, com o diretor-geral do FMI, Horst Kohler, com os presidentes do Banco Mundial, James Wolfensohn, da AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, e do BID, Enrique Iglesias (Washington, 20 junho)
44. Visita de cortesia do candidato presidencial da coalizão Frente Amplio do Uruguai, Tabaré Vasquez (Brasília, 25 junho)
45. Visita bilateral à Colômbia e participação no XIV Conselho da Comunidade Andina (Rio Negro, Colômbia, 27-28 junho)
46. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Noruega, Kjell Magne Bondevik; visita de cortesia do vice-presidente do Conselho de Estado de Cuba, Carlos Lages D’Avila, e do ministro cubano das relações exteriores, Pérez Roque (Brasília, 3 julho)
47. Visita bilateral a Portugal, encontros com dirigentes políticos portugueses e reunião da Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa (Lisboa, 10-12 julho)
48. Reunião de cúpula da Governança Progressista; encontros de trabalho com os primeiro-ministros do Reino Unido, Tony Blair, e da Alemanha, chanceler Gerhard Schroeder, e com os presidentes da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e do Chile, Ricardo Lagos (Londres, 13-14 julho)
49. Visita bilateral, oficial, à Espanha, recebido pelo rei Juan Carlos; reuniões com o presidente do governo espanhol, José Maria Aznar; com o vice-presidente do governo e ministro da Economia, Rodrigo Rato; encontros com o ex-presidente de governo Felipe Gonzaléz, com o secretário-geral do PSOE, José Luiz Rodrigues Zapatero, e com sindicalistas da UGT e das Comisiones Obreras (Madrid, 15-16 julho)
50. Visita do presidente do Suriname, Runaldo Ronald Venetiaan (Brasília, 22 julho)
51. Visita do presidente da República Cooperativista da Guiana, Bharrat Jagdeo (Brasília, 30 julho)
52. Reunião de cúpula extraordinária dos presidentes do Mercosul; encontro bilateral com presidente da Argentina Nestor Kirchner (Assunção, 15 agosto)
53. Reunião bilateral Brasil-Paraguai (Foz de Iguaçu, 16 agosto)
54. Visita de trabalho do presidente do Chile, Ricardo Lagos (Brasília, 19 agosto)
55. Encontro com a Delegação brasileira nos XIV Jogos Pan-Americanos de Santo Domingo (República Dominicana, 22 agosto)
56. Visita de trabalho ao presidente do Peru, Alejandro Toledo (Lima, 24 agosto)
57. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente Hugo Chávez (Caracas e Ciudad Guyana, 26-27 agosto)
58. Visita do presidente de Burkina Faso, Blaise Campaoré; visita de cortesia do ex-primeiro-ministro português e presidente da Internacional Socialista, António Guterres (Brasília, 3 setembro)
59. Participação na 89ª sessão do Conselho Internacional do Café e 40º aniversário da Organização Internacional do Café; encontro com o presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Cartagena de Índias, Colômbia, 16 setembro)
60. Participação no encontro “Combatendo o Terrorismo em Prol da Humanidade”; almoço oferecido ao SG-ONU Kofi Annan; encontro bilateral com o presidente da França, Jacques Chirac (Nova York, 22 setembro)
61. Abertura da 58ª Assembléia Geral da ONU; encontros com o presidente de Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano, com o chefe de governo da Alemanha, chanceler Gerhard Schroeder; reunião do Grupo do Rio (Nova York, 23 setembro)
62. Encontros com os presidentes da Argélia, Abelaziz Bouteflika, da Rússia, Vladimir Putin, da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e com lideranças sindicais dos EUA (Nova Iorque, 24 setembro)
63. Pronunciamento no Conselho de Relações Exteriores (Nova York, 25 setembro); doação para o fundo mundial de combate à fome e à miséria (Nova York, 25 setembro)
64. Visita de trabalho ao México e encontro com o presidente Vicente Fox (25 setembro)
65. Visita bilateral a Cuba, encontros privados e ampliados com Fidel Castro (Havana, 26-27 setembro)
66. Visita da rainha Sofia, da Espanha (Brasília, 6 outubro)
67. Visita do rei Harald V e da rainha Sonja, da Noruega (Brasília, 7 outubro)
68. Visita do presidente do Paraguai, Nicanor Duarte Frutos (Brasília, 14 outubro)
69. Visita oficial à Argentina e encontros com o presidente Nestor Kirchner (Buenos Aires e El Calafate, Patagonia, 16-17 outubro); declaração sobre o “Consenso de Buenos Aires” (Buenos Aires, 16 outubro)
70. Visita do presidente da Ucrânia, Leonid Koutchma (Brasília, 21 outubro)
71. Viagem à Espanha: concedido Prêmio Príncipe de Astúrias; encontros com a rainha D. Sofia e com o Príncipe de Astúrias, Felipe de Borbón y Grécia (Oviedo, Espanha, 23-24 outubro; prêmio atribuído a FHC em 2000)
72. Abertura do Congresso da Internacional Socialista; encontros com o presidente da África do Sul, Thabo Mbeki; com o primeiro-ministro de Cabo Verde, José Maria Neves; com o ex-chefe de governo da Espanha, Felipe Gonzalez, e com diversos chanceleres de países participantes (São Paulo, 27 outubro)
73. Encontros com dirigentes políticos da Mongólia, do Montenegro, da Romênia, da Sérvia, da Polônia e da Suécia e com o ex-presidente da Nicarágua, Daniel Ortega (São Paulo, 28 outubro)
74. Visita do presidente de Governo da Espanha, José María Aznar, por ocasião de encontro Mercosul-UE (Brasília, 29 outubro)
75. Visita da presidente da Finlândia, Tarja Halonen (Brasília, 31 outubro)
76. Visita bilateral a São Tomé e Príncipe, encontro com o presidente Fradique de Menezes (São Tomé, 2 novembro)
77. Visita bilateral a Angola e encontro com o presidente José Eduardo dos Santos (Luanda, 3-4 novembro)
78. Visita bilateral a Moçambique e encontro com o presidente Joaquim Chissano (Maputo, 5 novembro)
79. Visita bilateral à Namíbia e encontro com o presidente Sam Nujoma (Windhoek, 6-7 novembro)
80. Visita bilateral à África do Sul e encontro com o presidente Thabo Mbeki (Pretória, 7-8 novembro)
81. Visita de trabalho à Bolívia; encontros com o presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, e com o Secretário Geral das Nações Unidas, Kofi Annan (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 14 novembro)
82. XIII Cúpula Ibero-Americana de Chefes de Estado e de Governo (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 15 novembro)
83. Visita do presidente da República Dominicana, Hipólito Mejia (Brasília, 17 novembro)
84. Visita do presidente da Guiana, Bharrat Jagdeo (Brasília, 17 novembro)
85. Visita do presidente da Bolívia, Carlos Mesa (Brasília, 18 novembro)
86. Visita da rainha Sílvia, da Suécia (Brasília, 24 novembro)
87. Visita do presidente da Alemanha, Johannes Rau (Brasília, 27 novembro)
88. Visita bilateral à Síria e encontro com o presidente Bashar Al-Assad (3 dezembro)
89. Visita bilateral ao Líbano e encontro com o primeiro-ministro Rafik Hariri (5 dezembro)
90. Visita bilateral aos Emirados Árabes Unidos (7 dezembro)
91. Visita bilateral ao Egito (8 dezembro)
92. Visita de cortesia à Liga Árabe e encontro com o Secretário-Geral, Amre Moussa (Cairo, 9 dezembro)
93. Visita bilateral à Líbia e encontro com o líder Muhamar Kadafi (10 dezembro)
94. Pronunciamento em reunião ministerial do G-20; visita de cortesia do comissário europeu de comércio exterior, Pascal Lamy (Brasília, 12 dezembro)
95. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, Bolívia e Chile; encontros privados com o presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e com o presidente da Comissão de Representantes do Mercosul, Eduardo Duhalde (Montevidéu, 16 dezembro)
2004
96. Reunião extraordinária de cúpula das Américas; encontros privados com o presidente dos EUA, George Bush, do Paraguai, Nicanor Duarte, e da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Monterrey, México, 12-13 janeiro)
97. Visita bilateral à Índia (Nova Delhi, Agra e Mumbai, 25-27 janeiro)
98. Pronunciamento em seminário com investidores estrangeiros (Genebra, 29 janeiro)
99. Encontro de trabalho com Ricardo Lagos (Chile), Jacques Chirac (França) e SG-ONU Kofi Annan: discussão sobre um fundo mundial de combate à pobreza (Genebra, 30 janeiro)
100. Visita do presidente do Líbano, Emile Lahoud (Brasília, 17 fevereiro)
101. Visita de trabalho do príncipe da Árabia Saudita, Bandar Bin Sultan (Brasília, 25 fevereiro)
102. Reunião de cúpula do G-15 (Caracas, 27 fevereiro); encontro com o presidente do Irã, Seyed Mohammed Khatami (Caracas, 29 fevereiro)
103. Visita do primeiro-ministro de Portugal, José Manuel Durão Barroso, e 7ª reunião de cúpula Brasil-Portugal (Brasília, 7-8 março)
104. Visita do presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner (Rio de Janeiro, 15-16 março)
105. Visita da presidente da Irlanda, Mary McAleese (Brasília, 29 março)
106. Visita do vice-primeiro-ministro da China, Hui Liangyu (Brasília, 19 abril)
107. Visita de cortesia à Ucrânia, encontro com presidente Leonid Kutchma (Kiev, 21 maio)
108. Visita bilateral à China, com grande delegação (Beijing-Xangai, 22-26 maio)
109. Participação na 3ª conferência de cúpula Europa-América Latina (Guadalajara, México, 28 maio)
110. Pronunciamento na abertura da XI UNCTAD; encontros com os presidentes do Paraguai, Nicanor Duarte; da Bolívia, Carlos Mesa; do Urugua, Jorge Battle; da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; e SG-ONU Kofi Annan (São Paulo, 14 junho)
111. Visita do presidente de Uganda, Yoweri Koguta Museveni; visita de cortesia do presidente eleito da República Dominicana, Leonel Fernandez (Brasília, 15 junho)
112. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Tailândia, Thaksin Shinawatra (Brasília, 16 junho)
113. Encontros de trabalho com o presidente da Namíbia, Sam Nujoma, e com o presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (São Paulo, 21 junho)
114. Pronunciamento no Global Compact e encontro com investidores da América do Norte (Nova York, 24 junho)
115. Pronunciamento na abertura do Fórum Cultural Mundial (São Paulo, 29 junho)
116. Visita de trabalho do presidente do México, Vicente Fox (Brasília, 7 julho)
117. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul (Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, 7-8 julho)
118. Encontro de trabalho com o Presidente Carlos Mesa, da Bolívia (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 9 julho)
119. Abertura do 4º Congresso Mundial da Internacional da Educação (Porto Alegre, 22 julho)
120. Vª Conferência de Chefes de Estado e de Governo da Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa (São Tomé e Príncipe, 26-27 julho)
121. Visita oficial ao Gabão e encontro com o presidente Omar Ondimba Bongo (Libreville, 27-28 julho)
122. Visita oficial a Cabo Verde, encontro com o presidente Pedro Verona Rodrigues Pires (Ilha do Sal, Cidade da Praia, 29-30 julho)
123. Visita de cortesia do candidato do Frente Amplio à presidência do Uruguai, Tabaré Vasquez, (Brasília, 3 agosto)
124. Visita de trabalho à Bolívia, inauguração de ponte fronteiriça (Cobija, 11 agosto)
125. Visita ao Paraguai, cerimônia de instalação do Tribunal Permanente de Revisão do Mercosul (Assunção, 13 agosto)
126. Posse do novo presidente da República Dominicana (Santo Domingo, 15 agosto)
127. Encontro com os presidentes do Uruguai, da Costa Rica, de Honduras, da Guatemala, do Haiti (provisório) e da República Dominicana e com os primeiro-ministros de Antigua e Barbuda, dos Países Baixos e das Ilhas Turkas e Caicos; Declaração de Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo, 17 agosto)
128. Visita de trabalho ao Haiti: futebol e missão de paz da ONU; encontro com o presidente Boniface Alexandre (Porto Príncipe, 18 agosto)
129. Visita oficial ao Chile e encontro com presidente Ricardo Lagos (Santiago, 23 e 24 agosto)
130. Visita de Estado ao Equador e encontro com o presidente Lucio Gutiérrez (Quito, 25 agosto)
131. Visita de trabalho do presidente do Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano (Brasília, 31 agosto)
132. Visita de cortesia do diretor-geral do FMI, Rodrigo Rato (Brasília, 3 setembro)
133. Visita de trabalho do primeiro-ministro do Japão, Junichiro Koizumi (Brasília, 16 setembro)
134. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (Manaus, 15 setembro)
135. Reunião de líderes mundiais para a Ação Mundial contra a Fome e a Pobreza e reunião da Comissão Mundial da OIT sobre a Dimensão Social da Globalização (Nova Iorque, 20 setembro)
136. Abertura da 59ª Assembléia Geral da ONU (Nova Iorque, 21 setembro); encontros com os presidentes da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, da França, Jacques Chirac, com o primeiro-ministro da Suécia, Goran Persson; com o SG da ONU, Kofi Annan; reunião do G-4 (Alemanha, Brasil, Índia e Japão)
137. Visita do Secretário de Estado dos EUA, Colin Powell (Brasília, 5 outubro)
138. Visita do diretor-geral da FAO, Jacques Diouf; almoço com o presidente da Comissão de Representantes do Mercosul, Eduardo Duhalde (Brasília, 7 outubro)
139. 18ª Cúpula do Grupo do Rio; encontros privados com os presidentes do México, Vicente Fox; da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez; da Bolívia, Carlos Mesa; e do Peru, Alejandro Toledo (Rio de Janeiro, 4-5 de novembro)
140. Visita de trabalho do presidente da China, Hu Jintao (Brasília, 12 novembro)
141. Visita oficial do Presidente da República Socialista do Vietnã, Tran Duc Luong (Brasília, 17 novembro)
142. Visita do Presidente da República da Coréia, Roh Moo-Hyun (Brasília, 18 novembro)
143. Reunião de Cúpula Ibero-Americana (São José, Costa Rica, 19-20 novembro)
144. Visita de Estado do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin (Brasília, 22 novembro)
145. Visita do Primeiro-Ministro do Canadá, Paul Martin (Brasília, 23 novembro)
146. Visita ao Brasil do Rei do Marrocos, Mohammed VI (Brasília, 25-26 novembro)
147. Visita ao Brasil do Presidente do Paquistão, Pervez Musharraf (Brasília, 29-30 novembro)
148. Terceira Reunião de presidentes sul-americanos para a criação da Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações (Aiacucho, Peru, 9 dezembro)
149. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, Bolívia e Chile (Ouro Preto, MG, 17 dezembro)
2005
150. Visita do presidente da Bulgária, Georgi Parvánov (Brasília, 11 janeiro).
151. Encontro de trabalho com o presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez (Letícia, 19 janeiro)
152. Visita oficial do Presidente do Governo da Espanha, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Brasília, 24 janeiro).
153. Reunião com o Conselho Internacional do Fórum Social Mundial e conferência na Chamada Global para a Ação Contra a Pobreza, no FSM (Porto Alegre, 26-27 janeiro)
154. Participação no Fórum Econômico Mundial: encontros com o presidente da Comissão Européia, José Manuel Durão Barroso; com o Chefe de Governo da Alemanha, Chanceler Gerhard Schroeder; com o presidente da Confederação Helvética, Samuel Schmid; com o presidente da África do Sul, Thabo Mbeki e com investidores internacionais (Davos, 27 a 29 janeiro)
155. Visita de trabalho à Venezuela, encontro com o presidente Hugo Chávez (Caracas, 14 fevereiro)
156. Visita de trabalho à Guiana, encontro com o presidente Bharrat Jagdeo (Georgetown, 15 fevereiro)
157. Visita de trabalho ao Suriname, encontro com o presidente Runaldo Venetiaan (Paramaribo, 15 fevereiro)
158. Participação na 16ª Conferência de Chefes de Governo da Comunidade do Caribe, Caricom (Paramaribo, 16 fevereiro)
159. Posse do presidente Tabaré Vasquez e visita de trabalho ao Uruguai (Montevidéu, 1º março)
160. Encontros de trabalho com os presidentes do Peru, Alejandro Toledo, da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, e da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (Montevidéu, 2 março)
161. Visita de cortesia do Secretário da Defesa dos EUA, Donald Rumsfeld (Brasília, 23 março)
162. Encontro de trabalho com os presidentes da Colômbia, Venezuela e Espanha (Ciudad Guyana, Venezuela, 29 março)
163. Visita oficial do presidente do Uruguai, Tabaré Vasquez (Brasília, 1º abril)
164. Visita do primeiro-ministro de São Cristovão e Névis, Denzil Douglas (Brasília, 6 abril)
165. Cerimônia de exéquias do Papa João Paulo II (Praça São Pedro, Vaticano, 8 abril)
166. Encontros com o presidente da Assembléia Nacional da República de Cuba, Ricardo Alarcón; com o presidente da República da Áustria, Heinz Fischer; com o presidente da República de Moçambique, Armando Emílio Guebuza (Embaixada do Brasil em Roma, 8 abril)
167. Encontro com os governadores das regiões da Toscana, Emilia Romana e Marche (Perugia, Itália, 9 abril)
168. Visita à República de Camarões e encontro com o presidente Paul Biya (Iaundé, 11 abril)
169. Visita à Nigéria e encontros com presidente Olosegun Obasanjo (Abuja, 11-12 abril)
170. Encontro com o Secretário-Executivo da Ecowas (Comunidade Econômica dos Estados da África Ocidental), Mohamed Ibn Chambas, (Abuja, 12 abril)
171. Visita a Gana e encontro com o presidente John Agyekum Kufuor (Acra, 12 abril)
172. Visita à Guiné-Bissau e encontros com o presidente, Henrique Rosa, com o primeiro-ministro, Carlos Gomes Jr. e com o presidente da Assembléia Nacional Popular, deputado Francisco Benante (Bissau, 13 de abril)
173. Visita ao Senegal e encontro com o presidente Abdoulaye Wade (Dakar e ilha de Gorée, 13-14 de abril)
174. Encontro de cortesia com o presidente do Chile, Ricardo Lagos (São Paulo, 18 abril)
175. Pronunciamento no encontro de chanceleres da Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações (São Paulo, 19 abril)
176. Cerimônia de inauguração do 16º Congresso Continental Ordinário da Organização Regional Interamericana de Trabalhadores (Brasília, 20 abril)
177. Visita de trabalho da Secretária de Estado dos EUA, Condoleezza Rice (Brasília, 26 abril)
178. Visita oficial do presidente de Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos (Brasília, 3 maio)
179. Visita do presidente de Honduras, Ricardo Maduro (Brasília, 4 maio)
180. Reunião de cúpula países árabes e países sul-americanos; encontros privados com diversos dirigentes árabes e da América do Sul (Brasília, 9-12 maio)
181. Visita oficial do presidente da Argélia, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Brasília, 12 maio)
182. Visita de trabalho à Rússia, em trânsito para a Coréia do Sul.
183. Visita à Coréia e encontros com presidente Roh Moo-Hyun (Seul, 24-25 de maio)
184. Visita oficial ao Japão e encontros com o primeiro-ministro Junishiro Koizumi e com o Imperador Akihito (Tóquio, 26-27 maio)
185. Encontro com o presidente da República Portuguesa, Jorge Sampaio (Tóquio, 27 maio)
186. Visita e encontro com a comunidade brasileira em Nagóia (Nagóia, 28 maio)
187. Abertura do IV Fórum Global de Combate à Corrupção; visita de cortesia do primeiro-ministro de Belize (Brasília, 7 junho)
188. Visita do presidente da República do Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso (Brasília, 13 de junho)
189. Reunião de Cúpula do Mercosul e encontro de trabalho com o presidente Nicanor Frutos Duarte (Assunção, Paraguai, 19-20 junho)
190. Visita à Colômbia, acompanhado de delegação empresarial para o “II Encontro Empresarial Brasil-Colômbia: Comércio e Investimentos” (27 junho)
191. Celebração dos 15 anos do Foro de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2 de julho)
192. Reunião do G-8 e Chefes de Estado e/ou de Governo da África do Sul, Brasil, China, Índia e México (Gleneagles, Glasgow, Escócia, Reino Unido, 7 de julho)
193. Visita oficial à França e participação nas festividades da data nacional francesa; encontros com o presidente Jacques Chirac, primeiro-ministro Dominique de Villepin e prefeito de Paris, Bertrand Delanoë (Paris, 13-15 julho)
194. Visita oficial do Presidente da República de Botsuana, Festus Mogae (Brasília, 26 julho)
195. Visita de cortesia do Secretário do Tesouro dos EUA, John Snow (Brasília, 1º agosto)
196. Visita oficial do presidente da República da Gâmbia, Yahya Jammeh (Brasília, 9 de agosto)
197. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (Brasília, 11 agosto)
198. Visita do presidente da República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe, Fradique de Menezes (Brasília, 18 de agosto)
199. Visita de trabalho do primeiro-ministro de Cabo Verde, José Maria Pereira Neves (Brasília, 22 agosto)
200. Visita de presidente da República da Nigéria, Olusegun Obasanjo (Brasília, 6-7 de setembro)
201. Visita ao Peru, para início das obras da Rodovia Interoceânica; encontro com presidentes do Peru e da Bolívia (Puerto Maldonado, Peru, 8 setembro)
202. Visita bilateral de trabalho à Guatemala, encontro com o presidente Oscar Berger Perdomo e participação na reunião dos chefes de Estado do Sistema Integrado de Integração Centro-Americana (Cidade da Guatemala, 12-13 setembro)
203. Cerimônias especiais do 60º aniversário da ONU: debate de alto nível sobre financiamento ao desenvolvimento; reunião de cúpula do Conselho de Segurança e reunião de alto nível da Assembléia Geral sobre as Metas do Milênio; encontros com o SG Kofi Annan e com investidores internacionais (Nova York, 14-15 setembro)
204. Encontro de trabalho com os presidentes do IBAS, Índia e África do Sul (Nova Iorque, 14 setembro)
205. Visita de Estado do presidente da República da Áustria, Heinz Fischer (Brasília, 19 setembro)
206. Abertura da II Conferência Mundial do Café, com a participação do presidente da Colômbia, Álvaro Uribe (Salvador, 24 setembro)
207. Reunião de cúpula dos países membros da Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações (Brasília, 29-30 setembro)
208. Visita trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, e assinatura de acordo entre os presidentes, prevendo a construção conjunta, pelas companhias de petróleo dos dois países, de refinaria de petróleo em Pernambuco (Brasília, 29 setembro).
209. Visita do presidente da República de Cabo Verde, Pedro Verona Rodrigues Pires (Brasília, 4 outubro).
210. Visita bilateral a Portugal, 8ª Cimeira Brasil-Portugal (Porto, 13 outubro)
211. 15ª Cúpula Ibero-Americana, criação de Secretaria-Executiva (Salamanca, Espanha, 14-15 outubro)
212. Visita de trabalho à Itália, encontro com presidente Carlo Azeglio Ciampi e reunião comemorativa dos 60 anos da FAO (Roma, 16-17 outubro)
213. Visita de trabalho à Rússia, encontro com presidente Vladimir Putin (Moscou, 17-18 outubro)
214. Visita do primeiro-ministro da Jamaica, Percival Patterson (Brasília, 1º novembro)
215. Participação na IV Cúpula das Américas (Mar del Plata, 4-5 novembro)
216. Visita de trabalho do presidente George W. Bush (Brasília, 6 novembro)
217. Visita de cortesia do príncipe herdeiro do Reino da Bélgica, Philippe Léopold Louis Marie (Brasília, 21 novembro)
218. Encontro comemorativo dos 20 anos do processo de integração Brasil-Argentina e assinatura de atos pelos presidentes Lula e Kirchner, com a presença dos ex-presidentes José Sarney e Raúl Alfonsin (Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, 30 novembro)
219. Reunião de cúpula do Mercosul, com decisão política pela aceitação da Venezuela como membro pleno do bloco (Montevidéu, Uruguai, 8 e 9 dezembro)
220. Visita de trabalho à Colômbia e reunião com presidente Álvaro Uribe (Bogotá, 14 dezembro)
221. Visita do presidente do Banco Mundial, Paul Wolfowitz (Brasília, 15 dezembro).
222. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, para o lançamento da pedra inaugural da futura refinaria binacional Abreu e Lima (Porto de Suape, PE, 16 dezembro)
2006
224. Visita ao Brasil do diretor-gerente do FMI, Rodrigo Rato, para o pagamento antecipado do saldo de US$ 15,57 bilhões (10, 789 DES) devidos pelo Brasil como parte do pacote de ajuda contratado em 2003 (Brasília, 10 janeiro)
225. Visita de cortesia do presidente eleito da Bolívia, Evo Morales (Brasília, 13 janeiro)
226. Visita de Estado do presidente Nestor Kirchner (Brasília, 18 janeiro)
227. Encontro Presidencial Trilateral Brasil-Argentina-Venezuela e reunião de trabalho dos presidentes Lula, Kirchner e Hugo Chávez, sobre cooperação energética na América do Sul (construção de gasoduto) e criação de um Banco do Sul (Brasília, 19 janeiro)
228. Inauguração de ponte binacional entre o Brasil e o Peru, em presença do presidente Alejandro Toledo (Assis Brasil, Acre, 21 janeiro)
229. Viagem à Bolívia para a posse do presidente Evo Morales (La Paz, 22 janeiro)
230. Viagem à Argélia, encontro com o presidente Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Alger, 8-9 fevereiro)
231. Viagem ao Benin; visita a Uidá (Cotonou, 9-10 fevereiro)
232. Viagem ao Botsuana, encontro com presidente Festus Mogae (Gaborone, 11 fevereiro)
233. Viagem à República da África do Sul: participação na reunião de cúpula da Governança Progressista, com chefes de governo de outros 13 países (Pretória, 11-12 fevereiro)
234. Visita do primeiro-ministro da República Tcheca, Jiri Paroubek (Brasília, 3 março)
235. Viagem de Estado ao Reino Unido, encontros com a rainha Elizabeth II e o primeiro-ministro Tony Blair (Londres, 6-9 março)
236. Visita de cortesia do presidente eleito do Haiti, René Préval (Brasília, 10 março)
237. Posse da presidente do Chile Michelle Bachelet (Santiago, 11 março)
238. Visita do presidente da Guatemala, Oscar Beger Perdomo (Brasília, 13 março)
239. Visita do do presidente do Uruguai, Tabaré Vázquez (Brasília, 16 março)
240. Abertura do segmento de alto nível da Oitava Conferência das Partes da Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica - COP-8 (Curitiba, 27 março)
241. Visita do presidente de Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (Brasília, 3 de abril)
242. Visita do presidente do Governo da Federação da Rússia, Mikhail Fradkóv (Brasília, 4 abril)
243. Vista de Estado da presidente do Chile, Michelle Bachelet (Brasília, 10-11 de abril)
244. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Colômbia, Alvaro Uribe (25 abril)
245. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner (São Paulo, 25 abril)
246. Encontro tripartite dos presidentes do Brasil e da Argentina e da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (São Paulo, 26 abril)
247. Encontro quadripartite dos presidentes do Brasil, da Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, da Bolívia, Evo Morales, e da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, para tratar da crise energética ente o Brasil e a Bolívia (Puerto Iguazú, Argentina 4 maio)
248. Participação na IV reunião de cúpula Europa-América Latina e Caribe e encontro UE-Mercosul (Viena, 11 e 12 maio)
249. Visita de Estado à Áustria, a convite do Presidente Heinz Fischer (Viena, 13 maio)
250. Visita de Estado do presidente da França, Jacques Chirac (Brasília, 24-26 de maio)
251. Visita de trabalho do presidente da Comissão Européia, José Manuel Durão Barroso (Brasília, 31 de maio)
252. Visita de cortesia do Presidente eleito do Peru, Alan García (Brasília, 13 junho)
253. Viagem de trabalho à Venezuela para a cerimônia de assinatura do protocolo de adesão da Venezuela ao Mercosul, com a presença dos demais presidentes do bloco e da Bolívia, como país associado (Caracas, 4 julho).
254. Visita de trabalho do presidente de Gana, John Kufuor (Brasília, 10 julho)
255. Participação na II Conferência de Intelectuais da África e da Diáspora (Salvador, 12 julho)
256. Participação em reunião ampliada do G-8 (São Petersburgo, Rússia, 15-17 julho)
257. Viagem para participar na XXX Cúpula do Mercosul e reunião ampliada com chefes de Estado com países associados, com a presença do presidente Fidel Castro, para assinatura de acordo comercial do Mercosul com Cuba (Córdoba, 21 julho).
258. Posse do presidente do Peru, Alan Garcia (Lima, 28 julho)
259. Visita oficial do primeiro-ministro de Portugal, José Sócrates (Brasília, 9 agosto)
260. Visita de trabalho do presidente do Uruguai, Tabaré Vázquez, que veio comunicar decisão de seu país de negociar acordo de liberalização comercial com os EUA (Canoas, RS, 8 setembro)
261. Visita oficial ao Brasil do Primeiro Ministro da Índia, Manmohan Singh (Brasília, 12 setembro)
262. I Cúpula do Fórum de Diálogo Índia, Brasil, África do Sul - IBAS (G-3), com a presença do Primeiro Ministro da Índia, Manmohan Singh, e do presidente da República da África do Sul, Thabo Mbeki (Brasília, 13 setembro).
263. Discurso na abertura do debate na 61ª Assembléia-Geral da ONU; lançamento da Central Internacional de Compra de Medicamentos; cerimônia de entrega do prêmio “Estadista do Ano” pela Fundação Apelo à Consciência (Nova Iorque, 19 setembro)
264. Visita oficial do presidente do Peru, Alan García; assinados diversos acordos de cooperação (Brasília, 9 novembro).
265. Visita bilateral de trabalho à Venezuela, para cerimônia de inauguração da segunda ponte sobre o Rio Orinoco, em Puerto Ordaz (Ciudad Guayana, 13 novembro)
266. Viagem multilateral à Nigéria, para a reunião de chefes de Estado e de Governo da África e da América do Sul (AFRAS) (Abuja, 29-30 novembro).
267. Viagem multilateral de trabalho à Bolívia: II Cúpula da Comunidade Sul-americana de Nações (Cochabamba, 8-9 novembro).
268. Conselho do Mercosul (Brasília, prevista originalmente para 14-15 dezembro; a ser realizada, possivelmente, em janeiro de 2007).
2007
269. Inauguração do segundo mandato presidencial do presidente Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, com presença de chefes de Estado e de governo e representantes diplomáticos de diversos países (Brasília, 1º janeiro 2007)
270. Conselho do Mercosul (Brasília, ??-?? janeiro 2007).
Fontes: Dados em princípio exaustivos, coletados em diversos sites oficiais (Presidência da República, Agência Brasil da Radiobrás e Ministério das Relações Exteriores) e nos meios de comunicação. Não existe uma única informação pública, agregada exclusiva e completa, sobre todos os eventos diplomáticos (viagens efetuadas, visitas recebidas, encontros realizados e participação em reuniões multilaterais ou eventos plurilaterais) envolvendo o presidente da República; todas as fontes e sites citados são lacunares, incompletos e parciais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Atualizado em 12 de novembro de 2006
Sexta-feira, Abril 21, 2006
67) John Stuart Mill: 200 anos de seu nascimento
A revista britanica Prospect traz um artigo especial sobre John Stuart Mill, aos 200 anos de seu nascimento, neste link:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7439
Trata-se de um grande pensador britânico e um dos grandes defensores do pensamento liberal, em sua época e válido para a nossa também.
O autor é Richard Reeves, que está publicando a biografia: "John Stuart Mill: A Life"
John Stuart Mill
by Richard Reeves
Mill left no systematic legacy— there is no "Millism." But 200 years after his birth, his liberalism is still relevant. And Britain's greatest ever public intellectual was often surprisingly contrarian
Richard Reeves's book "John Stuart Mill: A Life" is forthcoming from Atlantic Books
In May 1873, the British establishment was shaken by a bitter row. It concerned the legacy of John Stuart Mill, who had just died. The Times had printed an obituary which was an exercise in posthumous character assassination. It was written by Abraham Hayward, a Tory lawyer and fierce critic of liberals, feminists and philosophers. Mill (who was guilty on all three counts) had been a target of Hayward's vitriol ever since the two had faced each other in the London Debating Society half a century earlier and Mill, in the words of one observer, had "gone over Hayward as a ploughshare goes over a mouse."
The Thunderer's obit caused a retaliatory strike by the liberal cleric Stopford Brooke, during his Sunday sermon at St James's. This provoked Hayward to print an even more savage attack, focusing on an incident from 1823, when the 17-year-old Mill had been arrested for the distribution of literature on contraception. More articles and pamphlets appeared, on both sides, and the controversy raged for weeks. One of the unfortunate by-products of the row was the decision by William Gladstone to withdraw his support from a committee to erect a monument to Mill's memory, an act of cowardice for which he has been condemned by even his most eulogistic biographers. It was Gladstone who called Mill "the saint of rationalism," which, though meant affectionately, contributed to the false picture of Mill handed down to us today: a boy crammed with facts who grew into an ascetic, dry, humourless, sexless, lofty intellectual.
The furious exchanges following Mill's death point to the inadequacy of this caricature. Mill's greatness does not in fact lie in the power of his intellectual endeavour: he is far from being Britain's greatest thinker. Nor does it lie in his political skills—by traditional criteria he was a political failure. The greatness of John Stuart Mill lies in his refusal to separate thought and action. He was a man who, like his godson Bertrand Russell, went to jail for his beliefs. He said that "ideas have consequences"—but was rarely content to limit himself to the former.
He wrote one of the definitive 19th-century works on political economy—and also worked tirelessly for Irish land reform. He produced a landmark argument for equal rights for women, and throughout his life pushed for legal and political reform on their behalf—Millicent Fawcett described him as the "principal originator" of the women's movement. Mill made, in his famous On Liberty, a timeless case for freedom of speech and action that has inspired generation after generation around the world. But as an elderly MP he also led the successful campaign against Disraeli's attempt to ban demonstrations in public parks, especially Hyde park—a corner of which remains a symbol of free speech to this day.
Mill was a man who saw little value in ideas unless they were tethered to human improvement, and was brilliantly successful at using his intellectual stature to influence the politics and culture of his age. He is the greatest public intellectual in British history. This fact—or claim—alone makes his life worthy of re-examination in the light of the current debate about the status of public thinkers, prompted by the Prospect league tables of public intellectuals and books such as Stefan Collini's Absent Minds. Moreover, this May marks the bicentenary of Mill's birth, allowing his admirers the world over to gather in conferences and seminars, including a three-day Mill-fest at University College London.
Mill occupies an iconic status in contemporary political discourse. Now that he is no longer seen as dangerously partisan, his name is dropped by politicians and commentators of all stripes. He was often quoted, for example, during the debate on the ban on smoking in public places—on both sides, which would have pleased him. Simon Jenkins, opposing the ban in the Guardian, quoted Mill's famous harm principle: "The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Chris Huhne MP cited the same principle in favour of the ban. Mill's ghost has hovered over many such debates. The 1960s dispute between the Wolfenden committee and Lord Devlin about the legal status of homosexuality turned into an argument about the robustness of Mill's definition of liberty.
Another reason for Mill's appearance in 21st-century political speeches and op-ed pages was his ability to coin a telling phrase. He was an early master of the soundbite: "Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"; "There remain no legal slaves except the mistress of every house"; England is "the ballast of Europe, France its sail"; and, of course, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative."
But it was Mill's lifelong attempt to define and promote individual liberty which most powerfully calls us back to his work, not least because it represents his break for freedom from his own upbringing. His childhood was an experiment in rational utilitarianism conducted by his father, James Mill, and godfather Jeremy Bentham. Thanks to the intense, bullying attentions of his father he became an infant prodigy. He was steeped in classical language, history and culture, and an accomplished logician and political economist by his mid-teens. He also had no friends, no toys and little love. At 20 he suffered a "mental crisis," from which he eventually recovered with the help of Wordsworth's poetry. But the result of his breakdown was the beginning of a long, slow desertion from utilitarian ranks. Compare his views about Socrates, fools and pigs with this from Bentham: "Call them monks, call them soldiers, call them machines; so they were but happy ones, I should not care."
Mill wrote a famous essay called "Utilitarianism," but he ended up not as a proselytiser on behalf of the utilitarian principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" but as the most eloquent advocate of human freedom ever to write in the English language. Mill was a second-rate utilitarian, but a first-rate liberal. He retained many of his father's and Bentham's views about psychology, especially that the avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure were the primary human springs for action. But he never saw happiness as more important than freedom—an important consideration today, when a new science of happiness is being fashioned in university economics and psychology departments. He quoted Bentham's opinion that "pushpin was as good as poetry," but only as evidence of his godfather's short-sightedness.
Mill's philosophical vision derives both its power and its weakness from his various attempts to knit together a number of diverse threads. He certainly wanted to preserve a space for individual action which should be free from interference. But he also wanted to fill the idea of freedom with a rich conception of a good life. He was convinced that people should be masters and mistresses of their own lives—but also that some forms of life are better than others. The resulting zigzag trajectory of Mill's work destroys any attempt to construct a coherent system from his voluminous writings (the newly reissued Collected Works run to 33 volumes). But Mill would not have been too bothered. For all his francophilia, he had an English mistrust of philosophical systems claiming to provide, once and for all, the answers to all economic, social and political difficulties. He learned from the sensible bits of Comte and Fourier, but it is impossible to imagine him as grand pontiff of a new religion of humanity. He liked one of Marx's later speeches—on working-class attitudes towards the Franco- Prussian war—but would have abhorred Marxism. There is no "Millism."
But if he left no systematic legacy, he addressed a number of issues and in a fashion that remains topical—often startlingly so. When is freedom of speech trumped by national security? What is the place of religion in secular politics? When and on what basis can the state interfere in the behaviour of individuals? How should gambling, drinking and prostitution be licensed or regulated? Mill was asking and answering these questions 150 years ago.
Thinking politicians are aware of the attractions of Mill's liberal heritage. David Miliband calls himself a "liberal socialist"; David Cameron is a "liberal conservative." David Willetts has argued that the Conservatives need to regroup around a concept of human liberty drawn from Mill. The Liberal Democrats are trying to work out what it means to be liberal and several of their leading thinkers are dusting off their Mill. Roy Hattersley has been a long-standing Mill fan (although stretches him too far towards socialism). Gordon Brown, however, took a more critical view in his Hugo Young memorial lecture last December, rejecting Mill's "extreme view of liberty" as a "crude libertarianism" and accusing him of underestimating the importance of community, belonging and collective loyalties.
But Mill's intellectual life was spent in rebellion against the individualist philosophies of the 18th century. He said of his own father that "as Brutus was called the last of the Romans, so was he the last of the 18th century." It is true that libertarians often try to claim Mill as their own. Yet the briefest acquaintance with Mill's work shows that his version of human freedom went far beyond non-interference—what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty." Mill saw an important role for government, believing that people needed educational and economic resources to lead their lives along paths of their own construction.
Brown should add to his sizeable reading pile both On Liberty and "Centralisation," a little-read 1862 essay by Mill on the need to protect voluntary organisations and local initiative—vital incubators of liberty and diversity—from the power of the central state. Labour should not allow Mill's inspiring vision of human freedom to be stolen by the Tories. John Stuart Mill was an eclectic, open-minded thinker. But he was emphatically, irrefutably, of the left.
When Mill entered parliament in 1865, Disraeli exclaimed: "Ah, the finishing governess!" The barb captured something of Mill's moralistic tone. But the comment also reflects his position as the pre-eminent intellectual of the time, as the thinking man's (and woman's) writer. Walter Bagehot described his position with regard to 19th-century political economy as "monarchical." More recently, Stefan Collini has written that his "account of the nature and methods of 'science,' in the broadest sense, attained an authority in England that was positively papal." And Arthur Balfour—a harsh late 19th-century critic of Mill—complained that his authority in the universities "was comparable to that wielded 40 years earlier by Hegel in Germany and in the middle ages by Aristotle."
How did he come to acquire this status? Like most public intellectuals, he had one breakthrough book that brought him to wide attention. He did not expect his "scholastic" System of Logic, published in 1843, to sell very well. In fact, it sold out within a few weeks, becoming the standard text at both Oxford and Cambridge and retaining canonical status for most of the rest of the century. Mill's success rested on three factors. First, he wrote clearly and attractively. Second, he managed to attract liberal opinion without provoking too much opposition from the church, by simply putting to one side questions of supernatural power. Third, he appealed to the Romantics by giving poetry and art a vital role in establishing many of the goals for human improvement while remaining firmly on the side of reason and science against "intuitionism"—the idea that certain truths are known a priori without any need for experimental proof.
Mill used his new status as the brain of liberal Britain to beat away at the complacency of the ruling class in the face of the tragedy of the Irish famine. In 1846 he wrote 52 newspaper articles—39 of them headed "The Condition of Ireland." For Mill, the Irish situation was "the most unqualified instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English people has exhibited." He tore into schemes to promote emigration, compensate landlords, or offer paltry amounts of poor relief to starving peasants. Redistribution of common land was the only solution to Ireland's problems. And he boiled over at Victoria's proclamation of a day of devout fasting as a "piece of empty mummery… on the occasion of a public calamity."
Mill's torrent of words and argument made not the slightest difference to policy towards Ireland. As he recognised in his autobiography (a classic work in its own right), here he "entirely failed." It was one of the many moments in Mill's life when he was made sharply aware of the limits of outside influence on the House of Commons and on government policy. Public intellectuals can help to shape the general climate of ideas, but are rarely able to effect specific changes in law: one of the reasons why Mill later became an MP.
The Irish debacle encouraged Mill to complete his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, which was a bestseller running to 32 editions. Most of the work is an eloquent restatement of Ricardo. But there are a couple of prophetic flashes. First, he spoke of the environmental dangers of economic growth and advocated a "stationary state" in the economy once sufficient affluence was secured. Second, Mill issued a sharp warning about the long-run risks of economic competition. Unlike many Victorian intellectuals, he was not opposed to factories and trains and real income growth. But he was concerned, like Keynes 80 years later, that the habits of competition might become entrenched: "I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels… are the most desirable lot of human kind."
Mill himself was freed from the need for any trampling or elbowing thanks to a comfortable position as an "examiner" with the East India Company—a kind of civil servant governing the colony (which he never visited) by remote control. The dispatches from India House, as well as giving him a secure income and filling at most half of each working day, also gave him a daily lesson in the need for practicality. By his own reckoning, the Indian work was a defence against the debilitating perfectionism of so many intellectuals: "I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything."
But Indian affairs had little influence on Mill's thinking. He was certainly no supporter of Indian independence or democracy. For Mill, self-government and democracy had to be earned—and should only be granted to a nation or class that had reached the necessary level of social and intellectual maturity. So while he supported self-government for Canada, he felt differently about less developed nations: "I myself have always been for a good stout Despotism—for governing Ireland like India. But it cannot be done. The spirit of democracy has got too much head there, too prematurely." These "imperialist" views (expressed privately, it should be added) are foreign to the modern liberal mind. But if Mill was an imperialist, he was also deeply internationalist, with a particularly profound (and rare) knowledge of the history, culture and politics of France (he is buried in Avignon) and a fascination with the emerging democracy of the US. He constantly berated his own countrymen for their insularity and unwillingness to learn from other nations. The very conservatism which protected the nation from revolution also immunised it against innovation. "England has never had any general break-up of old associations," he complained. "Hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head."
But Mill was respectful of the thoughtful conservatives of his era. He admired Wordsworth. And although he fell out with Thomas Carlyle—over what Carlyle famously called the "Nigger question" in Jamaica—he drew on his ideas about individual character. The opium-raddled Coleridge provided Mill with several important insights: the need to understand what institutions stand for before simply sweeping them away; the potential for an intellectual elite—what the poet called a "clerisy"—to guide the nation; the importance of respecting what Goethe called the "many-sided" nature of most problems; and the unifying significance of national culture.
This last strain in his thinking has a particular resonance today, given the attempt to reconcile the collective idea of "Britishness" with a diverse and individualistic culture—and it is another reason why Gordon Brown should reconsider his view of Mill. Mill was an enemy of jingoism and the adulation of military heroes—he persistently attacked Wellington, a national hero. But he did see the need for a common national locus, whether provided by religions, secular political values or individuals: "In all political societies which have had a durable existence, there has been some fixed point; something which men agreed in holding sacred… We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government… that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigner with regard to another part… that they… feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together."
Mill's willingness to take conservative ideas seriously lost him countless friends and allies. On topical political issues, Mill was still usually to be found on the radical side of the argument, being in favour of extending the suffrage, removing all aristocratic and ecclesiastical privileges, introducing compulsory national education and repealing the corn laws. In some areas, such as his insistence on equality for women, he was far ahead of even advanced liberal opinion. But Mill was also happy to disagree with the liberal consensus. He supported the secret ballot when the majority were against it—but become an opponent as it gained in popularity, to the fury of his old radical friends. His opposition to voting in secret was, nonetheless, consistent with his mature reflections on human liberty. The danger with voting in secret was that people would vote out of self-interest rather than the broader public interest. And as individuals, people should stand up for their beliefs rather than scribble them furtively in booths.
Mill relished his reputation as a contrarian, even before he become famous. His friend Henry Cole, the man behind the 1851 Great Exhibition—reported a conversation with Mill: "With utilitarians, said he, he was a mystic—with mystics a utilitarian—with logicians a sentimentalist and with the latter a logician."
These apparent contradictions in Mill's thinking also reflect the fact that he was often operating on two different timescales. On the one hand, he was concerned to bring about certain changes in the short term—wider suffrage, greater freedom of speech, the rationalisation of welfare and government, freer trade—and on the other was concerned about the longer-term consequences of the measures he was advocating: collective mediocrity, a tyranny of public opinion, an overweaning state and wasteful competitiveness. He supported the centralising poor law amendments, while writing about the dangers of state centralisation. He supported a wider electorate (not quite universal—he wanted a basic educational qualification), but worried that mass democracy might drive down standards in public life. He wanted the widest possible dissemination of ideas, but was concerned about how public opinion might hamper freedom just as effectively as despotic governments.
Mill's concern with the way today's solutions could be creating tomorrow's problems finds its fullest expression in his most famous and enduring work, On Liberty. Plenty of ground is covered, including a rich argument for freedom of speech and a meditation on the role of government. It is most famous, however, for the "simple" harm principle cited earlier, which guides the limits of interference in a person's actions. But the harm principle is a poor summary of the essay taken as a whole, and a small ingredient in Mill's liberalism. The principle is, to this day, a powerful counterpoint to paternalism. But for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. "He who lets the world… choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties." For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.
Mill's principal target was not state coercion. A potentially bigger threat to individual freedom was the constricting effects of public opinion, or what he variously called "the despotism of custom" and the "tyranny of public opinion." Mill had been greatly influenced by Tocqueville's assessment that American democracy and freedom were homogenising, rather than diversifying, opinions and lifestyles.
For some, the value of the essay was immediate. Charles Kingsley, the radical clergyman, wrote to Mill to say that reading On Liberty had made him "a clearer-headed, braver-minded man on the spot." But the general reception in 1859 was cooler (although not as cool as for The Origin of Species, published in the same year). Many agreed with Macaulay that Mill was overstating in On Liberty the dangers of conformism and the power of public opinion to hobble individuality. The Whig historian scribbled in his diary after reading the essay that "He is really crying 'Fire!' in Noah's flood." Mill knew this, arguing that On Liberty contained more lessons for the future and that the danger of an "oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and practice, might easily have looked chimerical to those who looked more at present facts than at tendencies." There may also be a biographical factor at work here: Mill spent most of his adult life in love with Harriet Taylor, who was inconveniently married to someone else. The prevailing social mores about divorce was probably the greatest barrier to their union; they were able to marry only in 1851, after her husband's death two years earlier.
Some modern critics—especially those hostile to the excesses of the 1960s—accuse Mill of undervaluing in On Liberty the importance of social custom and order as a source of security and even freedom. I think Mill would have conceded some of this argument—as we have seen, he argued elsewhere for a consensus around certain "fixed points." In On Liberty he writes of "moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term" acting as a useful check against anti-social behaviour (such as a father squandering his wages on gambling). It is true that he stressed the tyrannical dangers of opinion and custom, rather than their positive aspects. But the point is that "whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called." The individual can be lost in the crowd as well as crushed by the state.
Mill's liberalism is also weakened, in some eyes, by his unrealistically optimistic view of human nature. He assumes that humans are conditioned to engage in a continuous search for personal development via "experiments in living," resulting in a great diversity of lifestyles, personalities and viewpoints. The 19th- century Mill certainly has a rosier view of humanity than most of his 21st-century readers, at least in part because of the events of the intervening century. It is this optimism which explains why so many thinkers—John Gray is a striking contemporary example—are initially inspired by Mill, only to turn against him later. His unquenchable optimism is attractive to the hopeful young but often fails to survive mature scepticism.
On Liberty also addresses freedom of thought and discussion in terms that remain instructive. His view is that progress depends on truth, that the truth is most likely to emerge from a constant collision of opinions, and that freedom of speech is necessary to generate such collisions. There are three essential components to his argument that free discussion is truth-generative. First, any opinion may be true, no matter how eccentric it seems at first, and so to suppress it is to slow the march of knowledge. Second, few opinions contain the whole truth, while many contain a "portion" of it—and only by bringing them into contact and conflict can any approximation of the whole truth be constructed. In an echo of Coleridge, he declares that usually "conflicting doctrines, instead being one true and the other false, share the truth between them." Third, even if a received doctrine happens to be true, it becomes less vitally so unless subjected to open critique: "both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field." (He certainly would have opposed the jailing of David Irving.)
Mill insists that religion should be subject to the same criticism as any other system of thought, regardless of the offence caused. I think we can be confident that Mill would be disappointed by the progress made on this issue in the last century and a half, and by the regress of the last half decade. He certainly anticipated those who wanted to turn only "intemperate" expressions of religious criticism into crimes. Mill gave no ground, pointing out that serious offence is taken "whenever the attack is telling and powerful." There is no doubt where he would stand on the current debates on religious hatred, or on publication of the cartoons of Muhammad.
There are weaknesses in Mill's free speech arguments, of course. It is not clear, as Bernard Williams pointed out in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, that an absolutely free exchange of opinion is indeed the surest route to the production of truth, or its dissemination. But Mill's case has considerable force in the contemporary debates about speech crimes. And it is all the stronger for its reliance on instrumental outcomes rather than on "human rights" grounds. I am not at all sure that I have a "right" to freedom of speech, but I am absolutely clear that it is to the detriment of us all if I am denied it.
Mill's liberalism also made him a staunch advocate of local government and associations rather than central control. He saw the primary role of central government as "a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials." He thought parents should be obliged to educate their children, but was fiercely opposed to a central, state-run education system: a "national curriculum" would have appalled him.
Mill being Mill, setting out his intellectual stall so beautifully in On Liberty was not enough. Six years after the publication of his great book, he stood for the constituency of Westminster, which he represented for the next three years. Once in parliament, he introduced an amendment to the Reform bill, giving women equal voting rights—the first attempt to do so—and won, to everyone's surprise, 73 votes to the cause. He loudly denounced the suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland; saved Epping forest and the elm trees of Piccadilly; and introduced a bill to establish a corporation for London. He also relentlessly pursued Governor Edward Eyre, who had brutally suppressed an uprising in Jamaica—a struggle in which he was pitted against not only Carlyle but also Ruskin, an inspirer of the young Labour party (Mill did get him to change sides later). In many of these initiatives Mill was unsuccessful in the short term. But his reputation meant that he was able to use the Commons, as he had prophesied decades earlier, as "a teacher's chair for instructing and impelling the public mind."
He was not a natural politician; he lacked the clubability and ruthlessness of a political great. But by insisting on taking his ideas to their conclusions, he marked out a place for himself as one of the giants of the 19th century, and someone able to inspire as much by his living deeds as by his timeless words.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7439
Trata-se de um grande pensador britânico e um dos grandes defensores do pensamento liberal, em sua época e válido para a nossa também.
O autor é Richard Reeves, que está publicando a biografia: "John Stuart Mill: A Life"
John Stuart Mill
by Richard Reeves
Mill left no systematic legacy— there is no "Millism." But 200 years after his birth, his liberalism is still relevant. And Britain's greatest ever public intellectual was often surprisingly contrarian
Richard Reeves's book "John Stuart Mill: A Life" is forthcoming from Atlantic Books
In May 1873, the British establishment was shaken by a bitter row. It concerned the legacy of John Stuart Mill, who had just died. The Times had printed an obituary which was an exercise in posthumous character assassination. It was written by Abraham Hayward, a Tory lawyer and fierce critic of liberals, feminists and philosophers. Mill (who was guilty on all three counts) had been a target of Hayward's vitriol ever since the two had faced each other in the London Debating Society half a century earlier and Mill, in the words of one observer, had "gone over Hayward as a ploughshare goes over a mouse."
The Thunderer's obit caused a retaliatory strike by the liberal cleric Stopford Brooke, during his Sunday sermon at St James's. This provoked Hayward to print an even more savage attack, focusing on an incident from 1823, when the 17-year-old Mill had been arrested for the distribution of literature on contraception. More articles and pamphlets appeared, on both sides, and the controversy raged for weeks. One of the unfortunate by-products of the row was the decision by William Gladstone to withdraw his support from a committee to erect a monument to Mill's memory, an act of cowardice for which he has been condemned by even his most eulogistic biographers. It was Gladstone who called Mill "the saint of rationalism," which, though meant affectionately, contributed to the false picture of Mill handed down to us today: a boy crammed with facts who grew into an ascetic, dry, humourless, sexless, lofty intellectual.
The furious exchanges following Mill's death point to the inadequacy of this caricature. Mill's greatness does not in fact lie in the power of his intellectual endeavour: he is far from being Britain's greatest thinker. Nor does it lie in his political skills—by traditional criteria he was a political failure. The greatness of John Stuart Mill lies in his refusal to separate thought and action. He was a man who, like his godson Bertrand Russell, went to jail for his beliefs. He said that "ideas have consequences"—but was rarely content to limit himself to the former.
He wrote one of the definitive 19th-century works on political economy—and also worked tirelessly for Irish land reform. He produced a landmark argument for equal rights for women, and throughout his life pushed for legal and political reform on their behalf—Millicent Fawcett described him as the "principal originator" of the women's movement. Mill made, in his famous On Liberty, a timeless case for freedom of speech and action that has inspired generation after generation around the world. But as an elderly MP he also led the successful campaign against Disraeli's attempt to ban demonstrations in public parks, especially Hyde park—a corner of which remains a symbol of free speech to this day.
Mill was a man who saw little value in ideas unless they were tethered to human improvement, and was brilliantly successful at using his intellectual stature to influence the politics and culture of his age. He is the greatest public intellectual in British history. This fact—or claim—alone makes his life worthy of re-examination in the light of the current debate about the status of public thinkers, prompted by the Prospect league tables of public intellectuals and books such as Stefan Collini's Absent Minds. Moreover, this May marks the bicentenary of Mill's birth, allowing his admirers the world over to gather in conferences and seminars, including a three-day Mill-fest at University College London.
Mill occupies an iconic status in contemporary political discourse. Now that he is no longer seen as dangerously partisan, his name is dropped by politicians and commentators of all stripes. He was often quoted, for example, during the debate on the ban on smoking in public places—on both sides, which would have pleased him. Simon Jenkins, opposing the ban in the Guardian, quoted Mill's famous harm principle: "The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Chris Huhne MP cited the same principle in favour of the ban. Mill's ghost has hovered over many such debates. The 1960s dispute between the Wolfenden committee and Lord Devlin about the legal status of homosexuality turned into an argument about the robustness of Mill's definition of liberty.
Another reason for Mill's appearance in 21st-century political speeches and op-ed pages was his ability to coin a telling phrase. He was an early master of the soundbite: "Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"; "There remain no legal slaves except the mistress of every house"; England is "the ballast of Europe, France its sail"; and, of course, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative."
But it was Mill's lifelong attempt to define and promote individual liberty which most powerfully calls us back to his work, not least because it represents his break for freedom from his own upbringing. His childhood was an experiment in rational utilitarianism conducted by his father, James Mill, and godfather Jeremy Bentham. Thanks to the intense, bullying attentions of his father he became an infant prodigy. He was steeped in classical language, history and culture, and an accomplished logician and political economist by his mid-teens. He also had no friends, no toys and little love. At 20 he suffered a "mental crisis," from which he eventually recovered with the help of Wordsworth's poetry. But the result of his breakdown was the beginning of a long, slow desertion from utilitarian ranks. Compare his views about Socrates, fools and pigs with this from Bentham: "Call them monks, call them soldiers, call them machines; so they were but happy ones, I should not care."
Mill wrote a famous essay called "Utilitarianism," but he ended up not as a proselytiser on behalf of the utilitarian principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" but as the most eloquent advocate of human freedom ever to write in the English language. Mill was a second-rate utilitarian, but a first-rate liberal. He retained many of his father's and Bentham's views about psychology, especially that the avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure were the primary human springs for action. But he never saw happiness as more important than freedom—an important consideration today, when a new science of happiness is being fashioned in university economics and psychology departments. He quoted Bentham's opinion that "pushpin was as good as poetry," but only as evidence of his godfather's short-sightedness.
Mill's philosophical vision derives both its power and its weakness from his various attempts to knit together a number of diverse threads. He certainly wanted to preserve a space for individual action which should be free from interference. But he also wanted to fill the idea of freedom with a rich conception of a good life. He was convinced that people should be masters and mistresses of their own lives—but also that some forms of life are better than others. The resulting zigzag trajectory of Mill's work destroys any attempt to construct a coherent system from his voluminous writings (the newly reissued Collected Works run to 33 volumes). But Mill would not have been too bothered. For all his francophilia, he had an English mistrust of philosophical systems claiming to provide, once and for all, the answers to all economic, social and political difficulties. He learned from the sensible bits of Comte and Fourier, but it is impossible to imagine him as grand pontiff of a new religion of humanity. He liked one of Marx's later speeches—on working-class attitudes towards the Franco- Prussian war—but would have abhorred Marxism. There is no "Millism."
But if he left no systematic legacy, he addressed a number of issues and in a fashion that remains topical—often startlingly so. When is freedom of speech trumped by national security? What is the place of religion in secular politics? When and on what basis can the state interfere in the behaviour of individuals? How should gambling, drinking and prostitution be licensed or regulated? Mill was asking and answering these questions 150 years ago.
Thinking politicians are aware of the attractions of Mill's liberal heritage. David Miliband calls himself a "liberal socialist"; David Cameron is a "liberal conservative." David Willetts has argued that the Conservatives need to regroup around a concept of human liberty drawn from Mill. The Liberal Democrats are trying to work out what it means to be liberal and several of their leading thinkers are dusting off their Mill. Roy Hattersley has been a long-standing Mill fan (although stretches him too far towards socialism). Gordon Brown, however, took a more critical view in his Hugo Young memorial lecture last December, rejecting Mill's "extreme view of liberty" as a "crude libertarianism" and accusing him of underestimating the importance of community, belonging and collective loyalties.
But Mill's intellectual life was spent in rebellion against the individualist philosophies of the 18th century. He said of his own father that "as Brutus was called the last of the Romans, so was he the last of the 18th century." It is true that libertarians often try to claim Mill as their own. Yet the briefest acquaintance with Mill's work shows that his version of human freedom went far beyond non-interference—what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty." Mill saw an important role for government, believing that people needed educational and economic resources to lead their lives along paths of their own construction.
Brown should add to his sizeable reading pile both On Liberty and "Centralisation," a little-read 1862 essay by Mill on the need to protect voluntary organisations and local initiative—vital incubators of liberty and diversity—from the power of the central state. Labour should not allow Mill's inspiring vision of human freedom to be stolen by the Tories. John Stuart Mill was an eclectic, open-minded thinker. But he was emphatically, irrefutably, of the left.
When Mill entered parliament in 1865, Disraeli exclaimed: "Ah, the finishing governess!" The barb captured something of Mill's moralistic tone. But the comment also reflects his position as the pre-eminent intellectual of the time, as the thinking man's (and woman's) writer. Walter Bagehot described his position with regard to 19th-century political economy as "monarchical." More recently, Stefan Collini has written that his "account of the nature and methods of 'science,' in the broadest sense, attained an authority in England that was positively papal." And Arthur Balfour—a harsh late 19th-century critic of Mill—complained that his authority in the universities "was comparable to that wielded 40 years earlier by Hegel in Germany and in the middle ages by Aristotle."
How did he come to acquire this status? Like most public intellectuals, he had one breakthrough book that brought him to wide attention. He did not expect his "scholastic" System of Logic, published in 1843, to sell very well. In fact, it sold out within a few weeks, becoming the standard text at both Oxford and Cambridge and retaining canonical status for most of the rest of the century. Mill's success rested on three factors. First, he wrote clearly and attractively. Second, he managed to attract liberal opinion without provoking too much opposition from the church, by simply putting to one side questions of supernatural power. Third, he appealed to the Romantics by giving poetry and art a vital role in establishing many of the goals for human improvement while remaining firmly on the side of reason and science against "intuitionism"—the idea that certain truths are known a priori without any need for experimental proof.
Mill used his new status as the brain of liberal Britain to beat away at the complacency of the ruling class in the face of the tragedy of the Irish famine. In 1846 he wrote 52 newspaper articles—39 of them headed "The Condition of Ireland." For Mill, the Irish situation was "the most unqualified instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English people has exhibited." He tore into schemes to promote emigration, compensate landlords, or offer paltry amounts of poor relief to starving peasants. Redistribution of common land was the only solution to Ireland's problems. And he boiled over at Victoria's proclamation of a day of devout fasting as a "piece of empty mummery… on the occasion of a public calamity."
Mill's torrent of words and argument made not the slightest difference to policy towards Ireland. As he recognised in his autobiography (a classic work in its own right), here he "entirely failed." It was one of the many moments in Mill's life when he was made sharply aware of the limits of outside influence on the House of Commons and on government policy. Public intellectuals can help to shape the general climate of ideas, but are rarely able to effect specific changes in law: one of the reasons why Mill later became an MP.
The Irish debacle encouraged Mill to complete his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, which was a bestseller running to 32 editions. Most of the work is an eloquent restatement of Ricardo. But there are a couple of prophetic flashes. First, he spoke of the environmental dangers of economic growth and advocated a "stationary state" in the economy once sufficient affluence was secured. Second, Mill issued a sharp warning about the long-run risks of economic competition. Unlike many Victorian intellectuals, he was not opposed to factories and trains and real income growth. But he was concerned, like Keynes 80 years later, that the habits of competition might become entrenched: "I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels… are the most desirable lot of human kind."
Mill himself was freed from the need for any trampling or elbowing thanks to a comfortable position as an "examiner" with the East India Company—a kind of civil servant governing the colony (which he never visited) by remote control. The dispatches from India House, as well as giving him a secure income and filling at most half of each working day, also gave him a daily lesson in the need for practicality. By his own reckoning, the Indian work was a defence against the debilitating perfectionism of so many intellectuals: "I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything."
But Indian affairs had little influence on Mill's thinking. He was certainly no supporter of Indian independence or democracy. For Mill, self-government and democracy had to be earned—and should only be granted to a nation or class that had reached the necessary level of social and intellectual maturity. So while he supported self-government for Canada, he felt differently about less developed nations: "I myself have always been for a good stout Despotism—for governing Ireland like India. But it cannot be done. The spirit of democracy has got too much head there, too prematurely." These "imperialist" views (expressed privately, it should be added) are foreign to the modern liberal mind. But if Mill was an imperialist, he was also deeply internationalist, with a particularly profound (and rare) knowledge of the history, culture and politics of France (he is buried in Avignon) and a fascination with the emerging democracy of the US. He constantly berated his own countrymen for their insularity and unwillingness to learn from other nations. The very conservatism which protected the nation from revolution also immunised it against innovation. "England has never had any general break-up of old associations," he complained. "Hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head."
But Mill was respectful of the thoughtful conservatives of his era. He admired Wordsworth. And although he fell out with Thomas Carlyle—over what Carlyle famously called the "Nigger question" in Jamaica—he drew on his ideas about individual character. The opium-raddled Coleridge provided Mill with several important insights: the need to understand what institutions stand for before simply sweeping them away; the potential for an intellectual elite—what the poet called a "clerisy"—to guide the nation; the importance of respecting what Goethe called the "many-sided" nature of most problems; and the unifying significance of national culture.
This last strain in his thinking has a particular resonance today, given the attempt to reconcile the collective idea of "Britishness" with a diverse and individualistic culture—and it is another reason why Gordon Brown should reconsider his view of Mill. Mill was an enemy of jingoism and the adulation of military heroes—he persistently attacked Wellington, a national hero. But he did see the need for a common national locus, whether provided by religions, secular political values or individuals: "In all political societies which have had a durable existence, there has been some fixed point; something which men agreed in holding sacred… We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government… that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigner with regard to another part… that they… feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together."
Mill's willingness to take conservative ideas seriously lost him countless friends and allies. On topical political issues, Mill was still usually to be found on the radical side of the argument, being in favour of extending the suffrage, removing all aristocratic and ecclesiastical privileges, introducing compulsory national education and repealing the corn laws. In some areas, such as his insistence on equality for women, he was far ahead of even advanced liberal opinion. But Mill was also happy to disagree with the liberal consensus. He supported the secret ballot when the majority were against it—but become an opponent as it gained in popularity, to the fury of his old radical friends. His opposition to voting in secret was, nonetheless, consistent with his mature reflections on human liberty. The danger with voting in secret was that people would vote out of self-interest rather than the broader public interest. And as individuals, people should stand up for their beliefs rather than scribble them furtively in booths.
Mill relished his reputation as a contrarian, even before he become famous. His friend Henry Cole, the man behind the 1851 Great Exhibition—reported a conversation with Mill: "With utilitarians, said he, he was a mystic—with mystics a utilitarian—with logicians a sentimentalist and with the latter a logician."
These apparent contradictions in Mill's thinking also reflect the fact that he was often operating on two different timescales. On the one hand, he was concerned to bring about certain changes in the short term—wider suffrage, greater freedom of speech, the rationalisation of welfare and government, freer trade—and on the other was concerned about the longer-term consequences of the measures he was advocating: collective mediocrity, a tyranny of public opinion, an overweaning state and wasteful competitiveness. He supported the centralising poor law amendments, while writing about the dangers of state centralisation. He supported a wider electorate (not quite universal—he wanted a basic educational qualification), but worried that mass democracy might drive down standards in public life. He wanted the widest possible dissemination of ideas, but was concerned about how public opinion might hamper freedom just as effectively as despotic governments.
Mill's concern with the way today's solutions could be creating tomorrow's problems finds its fullest expression in his most famous and enduring work, On Liberty. Plenty of ground is covered, including a rich argument for freedom of speech and a meditation on the role of government. It is most famous, however, for the "simple" harm principle cited earlier, which guides the limits of interference in a person's actions. But the harm principle is a poor summary of the essay taken as a whole, and a small ingredient in Mill's liberalism. The principle is, to this day, a powerful counterpoint to paternalism. But for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. "He who lets the world… choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties." For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.
Mill's principal target was not state coercion. A potentially bigger threat to individual freedom was the constricting effects of public opinion, or what he variously called "the despotism of custom" and the "tyranny of public opinion." Mill had been greatly influenced by Tocqueville's assessment that American democracy and freedom were homogenising, rather than diversifying, opinions and lifestyles.
For some, the value of the essay was immediate. Charles Kingsley, the radical clergyman, wrote to Mill to say that reading On Liberty had made him "a clearer-headed, braver-minded man on the spot." But the general reception in 1859 was cooler (although not as cool as for The Origin of Species, published in the same year). Many agreed with Macaulay that Mill was overstating in On Liberty the dangers of conformism and the power of public opinion to hobble individuality. The Whig historian scribbled in his diary after reading the essay that "He is really crying 'Fire!' in Noah's flood." Mill knew this, arguing that On Liberty contained more lessons for the future and that the danger of an "oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and practice, might easily have looked chimerical to those who looked more at present facts than at tendencies." There may also be a biographical factor at work here: Mill spent most of his adult life in love with Harriet Taylor, who was inconveniently married to someone else. The prevailing social mores about divorce was probably the greatest barrier to their union; they were able to marry only in 1851, after her husband's death two years earlier.
Some modern critics—especially those hostile to the excesses of the 1960s—accuse Mill of undervaluing in On Liberty the importance of social custom and order as a source of security and even freedom. I think Mill would have conceded some of this argument—as we have seen, he argued elsewhere for a consensus around certain "fixed points." In On Liberty he writes of "moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term" acting as a useful check against anti-social behaviour (such as a father squandering his wages on gambling). It is true that he stressed the tyrannical dangers of opinion and custom, rather than their positive aspects. But the point is that "whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called." The individual can be lost in the crowd as well as crushed by the state.
Mill's liberalism is also weakened, in some eyes, by his unrealistically optimistic view of human nature. He assumes that humans are conditioned to engage in a continuous search for personal development via "experiments in living," resulting in a great diversity of lifestyles, personalities and viewpoints. The 19th- century Mill certainly has a rosier view of humanity than most of his 21st-century readers, at least in part because of the events of the intervening century. It is this optimism which explains why so many thinkers—John Gray is a striking contemporary example—are initially inspired by Mill, only to turn against him later. His unquenchable optimism is attractive to the hopeful young but often fails to survive mature scepticism.
On Liberty also addresses freedom of thought and discussion in terms that remain instructive. His view is that progress depends on truth, that the truth is most likely to emerge from a constant collision of opinions, and that freedom of speech is necessary to generate such collisions. There are three essential components to his argument that free discussion is truth-generative. First, any opinion may be true, no matter how eccentric it seems at first, and so to suppress it is to slow the march of knowledge. Second, few opinions contain the whole truth, while many contain a "portion" of it—and only by bringing them into contact and conflict can any approximation of the whole truth be constructed. In an echo of Coleridge, he declares that usually "conflicting doctrines, instead being one true and the other false, share the truth between them." Third, even if a received doctrine happens to be true, it becomes less vitally so unless subjected to open critique: "both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field." (He certainly would have opposed the jailing of David Irving.)
Mill insists that religion should be subject to the same criticism as any other system of thought, regardless of the offence caused. I think we can be confident that Mill would be disappointed by the progress made on this issue in the last century and a half, and by the regress of the last half decade. He certainly anticipated those who wanted to turn only "intemperate" expressions of religious criticism into crimes. Mill gave no ground, pointing out that serious offence is taken "whenever the attack is telling and powerful." There is no doubt where he would stand on the current debates on religious hatred, or on publication of the cartoons of Muhammad.
There are weaknesses in Mill's free speech arguments, of course. It is not clear, as Bernard Williams pointed out in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, that an absolutely free exchange of opinion is indeed the surest route to the production of truth, or its dissemination. But Mill's case has considerable force in the contemporary debates about speech crimes. And it is all the stronger for its reliance on instrumental outcomes rather than on "human rights" grounds. I am not at all sure that I have a "right" to freedom of speech, but I am absolutely clear that it is to the detriment of us all if I am denied it.
Mill's liberalism also made him a staunch advocate of local government and associations rather than central control. He saw the primary role of central government as "a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials." He thought parents should be obliged to educate their children, but was fiercely opposed to a central, state-run education system: a "national curriculum" would have appalled him.
Mill being Mill, setting out his intellectual stall so beautifully in On Liberty was not enough. Six years after the publication of his great book, he stood for the constituency of Westminster, which he represented for the next three years. Once in parliament, he introduced an amendment to the Reform bill, giving women equal voting rights—the first attempt to do so—and won, to everyone's surprise, 73 votes to the cause. He loudly denounced the suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland; saved Epping forest and the elm trees of Piccadilly; and introduced a bill to establish a corporation for London. He also relentlessly pursued Governor Edward Eyre, who had brutally suppressed an uprising in Jamaica—a struggle in which he was pitted against not only Carlyle but also Ruskin, an inspirer of the young Labour party (Mill did get him to change sides later). In many of these initiatives Mill was unsuccessful in the short term. But his reputation meant that he was able to use the Commons, as he had prophesied decades earlier, as "a teacher's chair for instructing and impelling the public mind."
He was not a natural politician; he lacked the clubability and ruthlessness of a political great. But by insisting on taking his ideas to their conclusions, he marked out a place for himself as one of the giants of the 19th century, and someone able to inspire as much by his living deeds as by his timeless words.
Quinta-feira, Abril 20, 2006
66) Kyoto Protocol and Global Warming
After Kyoto: Alternative Mechanisms to Control Global WarmingWilliam D. Nordhaus | March 2006
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
Abstract: This paper reviews different approaches to the political and economic control of global public goods like global warming. It compares quantity-oriented control mechanisms like the Kyoto Protocol with price-type control mechanisms such as internationally harmonized carbon taxes. The pros and cons of the two approaches are compared, focusing on such issues as performance under conditions of uncertainty, volatility of the induced carbon prices, the excess burden of taxation and regulation, accounting finagling, corruption, and implementation. Although virtually all policies involving economic global public goods rely upon quantitative approaches, price-type approaches are likely to be more effective and more efficient.
After more than a decade of negotiations and planning under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), the first binding international agreement to control the emissions of greenhouse gases has come into effect in the Kyoto Protocol. The first budget period of 2008-2012 is at hand. Moreover, the scientific evidence on greenhouse warming strengthens steadily as observational evidence of warming accumulates. The institutional framework of the Protocol has taken hold solidly in the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which covers almost half of Europe's CO2 emissions.
Notwithstanding this apparent success, the Kyoto Protocol is widely seen as somewhere between troubled and terminal. Early troubles came with the failure to include the major developing countries along with lack of an agreed-upon mechanism to include new countries and extend the agreement to new periods. The major blow came when the United States withdrew from the Treaty in 2001. By 2002, the Protocol covered only 30% of global emissions, while the hard enforcement mechanism in the ETS accounts for about 8% of global emissions. Even if the current Protocol is extended, models indicate that it will have little impact on global temperature change. Unless there is a dramatic breakthrough or a new design, the Protocol threatens to be seen as a monument to institutional overreach.
Nations are now beginning to consider the structure of climate-change policies for the period after 2008-2012. Some countries, states, cities, companies, and even universities are adopting their own climate-change policies. Are there in fact alternatives to the scheme of tradable emissions permit embodied in the Protocol? The fact is that alterative approaches have not had a serious hearing among natural scientists or among policymakers.
What are some alternatives? 1
For global public goods, there are three potential approaches: command-and-control regulation, quantity-oriented market approaches, and tax- or price-based regimes. Of these, only the tradable-quantity and the price-like regimes have any hope of being reasonably efficient.
Under a tradable quantity approach, an agreement proceeds by setting limits on emissions by different countries. The limits are partially or wholly transferable among countries. This is the approach taken under the Kyoto Protocol. This approach has very limited international experience under existing protocols such as the CFC mechanisms and somewhat broader experience under national trading regimes, such as the U.S. SO2 regime.
A radically different approach is to use harmonized prices, fees, or taxes as a method of coordinating policies among countries. This approach has no international experience in the environmental area, although it has modest experience nationally in such areas as the U.S. tax on ozone-depleting chemicals. On the other hand, the use of harmonized price-type measures has extensive international experience in fiscal and trade policies, such as with the harmonization of taxes in the EU and harmonized tariffs in international trade.
Price-Type Approaches to Climate Change
Price-type approaches (or hybrids that combine price and quantity controls) have been discussed in a handful of papers in the economics literature, but much careful analysis remains to be done. I will highlight a few of the details.
For concreteness, I will discuss harmonized carbon taxes (HCT). Under HTC, there are no international emissions limits; rather, countries would agree to penalize carbon emissions domestically at an agreed-upon and harmonized "carbon tax." This is essentially a dynamic Pigovian pollution tax for a global public good. The carbon tax is negotiated, but conceptually it is determined by weighing environmental and economic objectives. This might involve aiming to limit changes in GHG concentrations or global mean temperature below some level, or it might use some kind of cost-benefit approach. Unlike the quantitative approach under the Kyoto Protocol, there are no country emissions quotas, no emissions trading, and no base period emissions levels. The efficient tax would be equalized across space and
growing over time at approximately the "real carbon interest rate."
It would be critical to have a fair burden of the cost of emissions reductions among nations. It would be reasonable to allow participation to depend upon the level of economic development. For example, countries might be expected to participate fully when their incomes reach a given threshold (perhaps $10,000 per capita), and poor countries would receive transfers to encourage early participation. The issues of sanctions, the location of taxation, international-trade treatment, and transfers to developing countries under an HCT are important details that are subject to discussion and refinement. If carbon prices are equalized across participating
countries, there will be no need for tariffs or border tax adjustments among
participants. While much work on the details would be required, this is familiar terrain because countries have been dealing with problems of tariffs, subsidies, and differential tax treatment for many years. The issues are elementary compared to those of a quantity-based regime.
The literature on regulatory mechanisms entertains a much richer set of approaches than the polar quantity and price types that are examined here. Important combinations or hybrids include quantity controls with price caps and floors, or harmonized taxes with quantity caps. This discussion focuses on the price-type mechanism because it is so superior in so many respects.
Comparison of Price and Quantity Approaches
Policymakers, environmentalists, and economists are so accustomed to quantity constraints in environmental policy that the fundamental advantages of price-type approaches have been largely overlooked. The price-type approach is particularly advantageous for "stock global public goods" such as global warming. Some points are familiar to environmental economists, but others have particular force in an international regime.
1. The fundamental defect of the Kyoto Protocol lies in its objective of reducing emissions relative to a baseline of 1990 emissions for high-income countries. This policy lacks any connection to ultimate economic or environmental policy objectives. The approach of freezing emissions at a given historical level for a group of countries is not related to any identifiable goal for concentrations, temperature, costs, damages, or "dangerous interferences." It is not inevitable that quantity-type arrangements are inefficient. The target might be set to ensure that global temperature increase does not exceed 2 or 3 degrees C or for some other well-defined and well-designed economic and environmental objectives. That would be a welcome alternative to the current structure.
2. A related issue concerns the baseline policy against which countries set their policies. Quantity limits are particularly troublesome in a world of growing economies, differential economic growth, and uncertain technological change. These problems have become evident under the Kyoto Protocol, which set its targets thirteen years before the control period and used baseline emissions from twenty years before the control period. Base year emissions have become increasingly obsolete as the economic and political fortunes of different countries have changed. The 1990 base year penalizes efficient countries (like Sweden) or rapidly growing countries (such as Korea and the United States). It also gives a premium to countries with slow growth or with historically high carbon-energy use (such as Britain, Russia, and Ukraine).
The baselines for future budget periods and for new participants are deep problems for the Kyoto Protocol. The natural baseline, were it feasible to calculate, is the zero-restraint level of emissions. That level is in practice impossible to calculate or predict with accuracy. Problems would arise in the future as to how to adjust baselines for changing conditions and to take into account the extent of past emissions reductions.
Under a price approach, the natural baseline is a zero-carbon-tax level of emissions, which is a straightforward calculation for old and new countries. Countries' efforts are then judged relative to that baseline. It is not necessary to construct a historical base year of emissions. Countries are not advantaged or disadvantaged by their past policies or the choice of arbitrary dates for the baseline. Moreover, there is no asymmetry between early joiners and late joiners.
3. One key difference between price and quantity instruments concerns the structure of the uncertainties - and uncertainty is clearly a central feature of climate-change policy. As is well known, if the curvature of the benefit function is small relative to the curvature of the cost function, then price-type regulation is more efficient; and the converse holds.
While this issue has received little attention in the design of climate-change policies, the structure of the costs and damages in climate change gives a strong presumption to price-type approaches. The reason is that the benefits are related to the stock of greenhouse gases, while the costs are related to the flow of emissions. This implies that the marginal costs of emissions reductions are highly sensitive to the level of reductions, while the marginal benefits of emissions reductions are
essentially invariant to the current level of emissions reductions.
More generally, where the damages are caused by stock externalities (as is the case for climate change because damages are a complicated function of the stock of greenhouse gases), then the damage function is likely to be close to linear with respect to current emissions. Abatement costs, by contrast, are likely to be highly nonlinear as a function of emissions. This combination of relative nonlinearities means that emissions fees or taxes are likely to be much more efficient than quantitative standards or auctionable quotas when there is considerable uncertainty, as is clearly the case for climate change.
4. Closely related to the point about uncertainty is that quantity-type regulations are likely to show extremely volatile prices for the trading prices of carbon emissions. Carbon prices are likely to be extremely volatile because of the complete inelasticity of supply of permits in the quantity case along with the presumption of quite inelastic demand for permits in the short run.
We have preliminary indications that European trading prices for CO2 are highly volatile, fluctuating in a band at plus or minus 50% over the last year. More extensive evidence comes from the history of the U.S. sulfur-emissions trading program. SO2 trading prices have varied from a low of $70 per ton in 1996 to $1,550 per ton in late 2005. This is analogous to a carbon-trading program because the supply is virtually fixed and the demand is inelastic because of the low substitutability of other inputs for sulfur in the short run. Both programs build in some banking features, which can in principle moderate price volatility.
Such rapid fluctuations would be extremely undesirable, particularly for an input (carbon) whose aggregate costs might be as great as petroleum in the coming decades. An analogous situation occurred in the U.S. during the "monetarist" period of 1979-82, when the Federal Reserve targeted quantities (monetary aggregates) rather than prices (interest rates). During that period, interest rates were extremely volatile. In part due to the increased volatility, the Fed changed back to a price-type approach after a short period of experimentation. This experience suggests that a regime of strict quantity limits might become extremely unpopular with market participants and economic policymakers as price variability caused significant changes in price levels and import and export values.
5. An important advantage of tax mechanisms is the strong fiscal-policy preference for using revenue-raising measures rather than quantitative or regulatory measures. When prices are raised and real incomes are reduced by regulations, this increases the inefficiency losses from the overall tax system. This effect is the "double burden" of taxation (misnamed as the "double dividend" from green taxes). If the carbon constraints are imposed through taxes that are then rebated in taxes that have approximately the same marginal deadweight loss as the carbon taxes, then the overall efficiency loss from taxation will be unchanged. If the constraints under a
quantity-based system are imposed by allocations that do not raise revenues, then the conventionally calculated abatement costs will underestimate the economic costs and the efficiency losses from the price-raising elements should be added to the abatement costs. Rough estimates indicate that the losses here are likely to be large.
While it is possible that emissions permits will be auctioned (thereby retaining the revenues and removing the double burden of taxation), history and current proposals suggest that most or all of the permits are likely to be allocated at zero cost to "deserving" parties, or will be distributed to reduce political frictions. In the cases of SO2 allowances and CFC production allowances, all the permits were allocated to producers. The point here is that using tax approaches rather than quantity approaches will help promote a more efficient collection and recycling of the revenues from the carbon constraints.
6. A final question applies particularly to international environmental agreements and concerns the administration of programs in a world of where governments vary in terms of honesty, transparency, and effective administration. One of the subtle problems with quantity-type systems is that they are much more susceptible to corruption than are price-type regimes. An emissions-trading system creates valuable tradable assets in the form of tradable emissions permits and allocates these to different countries. Limiting emissions creates a scarcity where none previously
existed and in essence prints money for those in control of the permits.
Such wealth creation is potentially dangerous because the value of the permits can be used by the country's leaders for non-environmental purposes rather than to reduce emissions. If oil ministers in corrupt countries pocket oil export revenues, why would they not pocket emissions permits as well (perhaps after suitable "privatizations").
A price approach gives less room for corruption because it does not create artificial scarcities and monopolies. There are no permits handed over to countries or leaders of countries, so they cannot be sold abroad for wine or guns. Any revenues would need to be raised by taxation on domestic consumption of fuels. In fact, a carbon tax would add absolutely nothing to the instruments that countries have today. The only difference would be the international approval of carbon taxes, which probably adds little to their acceptability in corrupt countries. The dangers of quantity as compared to price approaches have been shown frequently when quotas are compared to tariffs in international trade interventions.
Conclusion
The coming years will undoubtedly witness intensive negotiations on global warming as concerns mount and the quantitative approach under the Kyoto Protocol makes little difference. As policy makers search for more effective and efficient ways to slow the trends, they should consider the fact that harmonized environmental taxes on carbon are powerful tools for coordinating policies and slowing climate change.
1. There is a vast literature on the economics of climate change as well as on alternative institutional mechanisms. Some of the most important work is referred to in other papers in this session. For a background paper with a more complete discussion and references, see the background paper on the author's web site at http://soros.c.topica.com/maaeHMVabpNyhbRHD37b/ or http://soros.c.topica.com/maaeHMVabpNyibRHD37b/
William D. Nordaus is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. This paper was originally presented at the American Economic Association Session on Global Warming and the Kyoto Protocol, January 2006, and is reprinted with permission by Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
Abstract: This paper reviews different approaches to the political and economic control of global public goods like global warming. It compares quantity-oriented control mechanisms like the Kyoto Protocol with price-type control mechanisms such as internationally harmonized carbon taxes. The pros and cons of the two approaches are compared, focusing on such issues as performance under conditions of uncertainty, volatility of the induced carbon prices, the excess burden of taxation and regulation, accounting finagling, corruption, and implementation. Although virtually all policies involving economic global public goods rely upon quantitative approaches, price-type approaches are likely to be more effective and more efficient.
After more than a decade of negotiations and planning under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), the first binding international agreement to control the emissions of greenhouse gases has come into effect in the Kyoto Protocol. The first budget period of 2008-2012 is at hand. Moreover, the scientific evidence on greenhouse warming strengthens steadily as observational evidence of warming accumulates. The institutional framework of the Protocol has taken hold solidly in the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which covers almost half of Europe's CO2 emissions.
Notwithstanding this apparent success, the Kyoto Protocol is widely seen as somewhere between troubled and terminal. Early troubles came with the failure to include the major developing countries along with lack of an agreed-upon mechanism to include new countries and extend the agreement to new periods. The major blow came when the United States withdrew from the Treaty in 2001. By 2002, the Protocol covered only 30% of global emissions, while the hard enforcement mechanism in the ETS accounts for about 8% of global emissions. Even if the current Protocol is extended, models indicate that it will have little impact on global temperature change. Unless there is a dramatic breakthrough or a new design, the Protocol threatens to be seen as a monument to institutional overreach.
Nations are now beginning to consider the structure of climate-change policies for the period after 2008-2012. Some countries, states, cities, companies, and even universities are adopting their own climate-change policies. Are there in fact alternatives to the scheme of tradable emissions permit embodied in the Protocol? The fact is that alterative approaches have not had a serious hearing among natural scientists or among policymakers.
What are some alternatives? 1
For global public goods, there are three potential approaches: command-and-control regulation, quantity-oriented market approaches, and tax- or price-based regimes. Of these, only the tradable-quantity and the price-like regimes have any hope of being reasonably efficient.
Under a tradable quantity approach, an agreement proceeds by setting limits on emissions by different countries. The limits are partially or wholly transferable among countries. This is the approach taken under the Kyoto Protocol. This approach has very limited international experience under existing protocols such as the CFC mechanisms and somewhat broader experience under national trading regimes, such as the U.S. SO2 regime.
A radically different approach is to use harmonized prices, fees, or taxes as a method of coordinating policies among countries. This approach has no international experience in the environmental area, although it has modest experience nationally in such areas as the U.S. tax on ozone-depleting chemicals. On the other hand, the use of harmonized price-type measures has extensive international experience in fiscal and trade policies, such as with the harmonization of taxes in the EU and harmonized tariffs in international trade.
Price-Type Approaches to Climate Change
Price-type approaches (or hybrids that combine price and quantity controls) have been discussed in a handful of papers in the economics literature, but much careful analysis remains to be done. I will highlight a few of the details.
For concreteness, I will discuss harmonized carbon taxes (HCT). Under HTC, there are no international emissions limits; rather, countries would agree to penalize carbon emissions domestically at an agreed-upon and harmonized "carbon tax." This is essentially a dynamic Pigovian pollution tax for a global public good. The carbon tax is negotiated, but conceptually it is determined by weighing environmental and economic objectives. This might involve aiming to limit changes in GHG concentrations or global mean temperature below some level, or it might use some kind of cost-benefit approach. Unlike the quantitative approach under the Kyoto Protocol, there are no country emissions quotas, no emissions trading, and no base period emissions levels. The efficient tax would be equalized across space and
growing over time at approximately the "real carbon interest rate."
It would be critical to have a fair burden of the cost of emissions reductions among nations. It would be reasonable to allow participation to depend upon the level of economic development. For example, countries might be expected to participate fully when their incomes reach a given threshold (perhaps $10,000 per capita), and poor countries would receive transfers to encourage early participation. The issues of sanctions, the location of taxation, international-trade treatment, and transfers to developing countries under an HCT are important details that are subject to discussion and refinement. If carbon prices are equalized across participating
countries, there will be no need for tariffs or border tax adjustments among
participants. While much work on the details would be required, this is familiar terrain because countries have been dealing with problems of tariffs, subsidies, and differential tax treatment for many years. The issues are elementary compared to those of a quantity-based regime.
The literature on regulatory mechanisms entertains a much richer set of approaches than the polar quantity and price types that are examined here. Important combinations or hybrids include quantity controls with price caps and floors, or harmonized taxes with quantity caps. This discussion focuses on the price-type mechanism because it is so superior in so many respects.
Comparison of Price and Quantity Approaches
Policymakers, environmentalists, and economists are so accustomed to quantity constraints in environmental policy that the fundamental advantages of price-type approaches have been largely overlooked. The price-type approach is particularly advantageous for "stock global public goods" such as global warming. Some points are familiar to environmental economists, but others have particular force in an international regime.
1. The fundamental defect of the Kyoto Protocol lies in its objective of reducing emissions relative to a baseline of 1990 emissions for high-income countries. This policy lacks any connection to ultimate economic or environmental policy objectives. The approach of freezing emissions at a given historical level for a group of countries is not related to any identifiable goal for concentrations, temperature, costs, damages, or "dangerous interferences." It is not inevitable that quantity-type arrangements are inefficient. The target might be set to ensure that global temperature increase does not exceed 2 or 3 degrees C or for some other well-defined and well-designed economic and environmental objectives. That would be a welcome alternative to the current structure.
2. A related issue concerns the baseline policy against which countries set their policies. Quantity limits are particularly troublesome in a world of growing economies, differential economic growth, and uncertain technological change. These problems have become evident under the Kyoto Protocol, which set its targets thirteen years before the control period and used baseline emissions from twenty years before the control period. Base year emissions have become increasingly obsolete as the economic and political fortunes of different countries have changed. The 1990 base year penalizes efficient countries (like Sweden) or rapidly growing countries (such as Korea and the United States). It also gives a premium to countries with slow growth or with historically high carbon-energy use (such as Britain, Russia, and Ukraine).
The baselines for future budget periods and for new participants are deep problems for the Kyoto Protocol. The natural baseline, were it feasible to calculate, is the zero-restraint level of emissions. That level is in practice impossible to calculate or predict with accuracy. Problems would arise in the future as to how to adjust baselines for changing conditions and to take into account the extent of past emissions reductions.
Under a price approach, the natural baseline is a zero-carbon-tax level of emissions, which is a straightforward calculation for old and new countries. Countries' efforts are then judged relative to that baseline. It is not necessary to construct a historical base year of emissions. Countries are not advantaged or disadvantaged by their past policies or the choice of arbitrary dates for the baseline. Moreover, there is no asymmetry between early joiners and late joiners.
3. One key difference between price and quantity instruments concerns the structure of the uncertainties - and uncertainty is clearly a central feature of climate-change policy. As is well known, if the curvature of the benefit function is small relative to the curvature of the cost function, then price-type regulation is more efficient; and the converse holds.
While this issue has received little attention in the design of climate-change policies, the structure of the costs and damages in climate change gives a strong presumption to price-type approaches. The reason is that the benefits are related to the stock of greenhouse gases, while the costs are related to the flow of emissions. This implies that the marginal costs of emissions reductions are highly sensitive to the level of reductions, while the marginal benefits of emissions reductions are
essentially invariant to the current level of emissions reductions.
More generally, where the damages are caused by stock externalities (as is the case for climate change because damages are a complicated function of the stock of greenhouse gases), then the damage function is likely to be close to linear with respect to current emissions. Abatement costs, by contrast, are likely to be highly nonlinear as a function of emissions. This combination of relative nonlinearities means that emissions fees or taxes are likely to be much more efficient than quantitative standards or auctionable quotas when there is considerable uncertainty, as is clearly the case for climate change.
4. Closely related to the point about uncertainty is that quantity-type regulations are likely to show extremely volatile prices for the trading prices of carbon emissions. Carbon prices are likely to be extremely volatile because of the complete inelasticity of supply of permits in the quantity case along with the presumption of quite inelastic demand for permits in the short run.
We have preliminary indications that European trading prices for CO2 are highly volatile, fluctuating in a band at plus or minus 50% over the last year. More extensive evidence comes from the history of the U.S. sulfur-emissions trading program. SO2 trading prices have varied from a low of $70 per ton in 1996 to $1,550 per ton in late 2005. This is analogous to a carbon-trading program because the supply is virtually fixed and the demand is inelastic because of the low substitutability of other inputs for sulfur in the short run. Both programs build in some banking features, which can in principle moderate price volatility.
Such rapid fluctuations would be extremely undesirable, particularly for an input (carbon) whose aggregate costs might be as great as petroleum in the coming decades. An analogous situation occurred in the U.S. during the "monetarist" period of 1979-82, when the Federal Reserve targeted quantities (monetary aggregates) rather than prices (interest rates). During that period, interest rates were extremely volatile. In part due to the increased volatility, the Fed changed back to a price-type approach after a short period of experimentation. This experience suggests that a regime of strict quantity limits might become extremely unpopular with market participants and economic policymakers as price variability caused significant changes in price levels and import and export values.
5. An important advantage of tax mechanisms is the strong fiscal-policy preference for using revenue-raising measures rather than quantitative or regulatory measures. When prices are raised and real incomes are reduced by regulations, this increases the inefficiency losses from the overall tax system. This effect is the "double burden" of taxation (misnamed as the "double dividend" from green taxes). If the carbon constraints are imposed through taxes that are then rebated in taxes that have approximately the same marginal deadweight loss as the carbon taxes, then the overall efficiency loss from taxation will be unchanged. If the constraints under a
quantity-based system are imposed by allocations that do not raise revenues, then the conventionally calculated abatement costs will underestimate the economic costs and the efficiency losses from the price-raising elements should be added to the abatement costs. Rough estimates indicate that the losses here are likely to be large.
While it is possible that emissions permits will be auctioned (thereby retaining the revenues and removing the double burden of taxation), history and current proposals suggest that most or all of the permits are likely to be allocated at zero cost to "deserving" parties, or will be distributed to reduce political frictions. In the cases of SO2 allowances and CFC production allowances, all the permits were allocated to producers. The point here is that using tax approaches rather than quantity approaches will help promote a more efficient collection and recycling of the revenues from the carbon constraints.
6. A final question applies particularly to international environmental agreements and concerns the administration of programs in a world of where governments vary in terms of honesty, transparency, and effective administration. One of the subtle problems with quantity-type systems is that they are much more susceptible to corruption than are price-type regimes. An emissions-trading system creates valuable tradable assets in the form of tradable emissions permits and allocates these to different countries. Limiting emissions creates a scarcity where none previously
existed and in essence prints money for those in control of the permits.
Such wealth creation is potentially dangerous because the value of the permits can be used by the country's leaders for non-environmental purposes rather than to reduce emissions. If oil ministers in corrupt countries pocket oil export revenues, why would they not pocket emissions permits as well (perhaps after suitable "privatizations").
A price approach gives less room for corruption because it does not create artificial scarcities and monopolies. There are no permits handed over to countries or leaders of countries, so they cannot be sold abroad for wine or guns. Any revenues would need to be raised by taxation on domestic consumption of fuels. In fact, a carbon tax would add absolutely nothing to the instruments that countries have today. The only difference would be the international approval of carbon taxes, which probably adds little to their acceptability in corrupt countries. The dangers of quantity as compared to price approaches have been shown frequently when quotas are compared to tariffs in international trade interventions.
Conclusion
The coming years will undoubtedly witness intensive negotiations on global warming as concerns mount and the quantitative approach under the Kyoto Protocol makes little difference. As policy makers search for more effective and efficient ways to slow the trends, they should consider the fact that harmonized environmental taxes on carbon are powerful tools for coordinating policies and slowing climate change.
1. There is a vast literature on the economics of climate change as well as on alternative institutional mechanisms. Some of the most important work is referred to in other papers in this session. For a background paper with a more complete discussion and references, see the background paper on the author's web site at http://soros.c.topica.com/maaeHMVabpNyhbRHD37b/ or http://soros.c.topica.com/maaeHMVabpNyibRHD37b/
William D. Nordaus is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. This paper was originally presented at the American Economic Association Session on Global Warming and the Kyoto Protocol, January 2006, and is reprinted with permission by Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).
Quarta-feira, Abril 19, 2006
65) Good-bye, old clock? At least, the wrist-watch...
Adieu vieille cloche? Pas encore, mais ça sera pour bientôt...
Relógio se torna vítima da tecnologia
Público jovem prefere ver as horas nos telefones móveis ou nos iPods e as vendas do produto caem
Leslie Earnest
Pesquisas e números de vendas mostram que os jovens consumidores estão trocando os relógios de pulso por engenhocas mais "descoladas" para ver as horas, como telefones celulares e os iPods.
Sem contabilizar o universo paralelo dos Rolex e Patek Philippe, o número de pessoas que comprou relógios no ano passado caiu 12% em relação ao ano anterior, segundo pesquisa de mercado. A atual fabricante favorita dos jovens americanos, a Fossil Inc., do Texas, registrou queda de 18,6% nas vendas no atacado. A Oakley Inc., de Orange County, Califórnia, também viu caírem suas vendas em 11%, mas justificou informando ter retirado progressivamente modelos digitais que não estavam vendendo bem.
Para os jovens da geração dos celulares, usar relógio no pulso é coisa dos vovôs. Na semana passada, no The Lab, shopping center de Costa Mesa (Califórnia), os jovens vasculhavam bolsas e bolsos atrás dos celulares para informar as horas. E quando lhes perguntavam por que não usavam relógio, respondiam simplesmente: "Para quê?"
"É como um chapéu", disse Francis Eagan, um garçom de 21 anos. "Ele não serve para nada, como os brincos." Kamlyn Snyder, outra jovem, disse que não usava um relógio de pulso desde que havia tirado um de uma caixa de cereais, há muitos anos. "É inconveniente prendê-lo no pulso de manhã", disse um estudante de 21 anos. "Minha avó usa, é como ela diz as horas. Ela não é tão velha assim. Tem perto de 60, mas..."
DIFICULDADE
De acordo com Marshall Cohen, analista da NPD Group, empresa que pesquisa tendências de consumo, muitas pessoas mais velhas também usariam o celular para ver as horas se isso não significasse ter de procurar os óculos de leitura. "Quando os fabricantes de telefones celulares perceberem que nem todo mundo tem visão de raios X, eles começarão a fazer o relógio do telefone celular um pouquinho maior e ele rapidamente substituirá o relógio elegante como recurso principal para ver as horas."
Cohen começou a pesquisar consumidores sobre o uso de relógios de pulso depois de perceber que ele próprio deixara de usá-los. As conclusões dele tiveram o suporte do banco de investimento Piper Jaffray, que produz um relatório semestral sobre preferências de adolescentes. No último estudo, cresceu de 48% para 59% o porcentual de jovens que afirmam jamais ter usado um relógio de pulso. E mais: caiu 13% o número dos que deixaram de colocar um relógio no pulso.
Conforme a pesquisa, realizada entre março e junho (primavera no Hemisfério Norte), com resultados comparados com a pesquisa anterior, feita entre setembro e dezembro (outono no Hemisfério Norte), 82% afirmaram que não pretendem comprar um relógio de pulso nos próximos seis meses - eram 76% na pesquisa anterior.
"Algumas pessoas simplesmente compram relógios bonitos para exibir", disse o skatista Hayden Navarro, no shopping center The Camp, em Costa Mesa. "É uma razão besta para comprar um relógio." Atitudes como essas poderiam fazer os fabricantes de relógios desejar uma volta no tempo.
Os resultados desalentadores da pesquisa fizeram a Piper Jaffray manter a classificação "neutra para cautelosa" para as ações da Fossil.
"De qualquer ângulo que se analisasse os dados, a situação parecia cada vez pior para o setor de relógios finos no que diz respeito ao público adolescente", disse Neely J. N. Tamminga, um dos autores do relatório. "A grande sacada para nós é que os adolescentes estão claramente usando outras maneiras de saber as horas."
Quando uma outra empresa de pesquisa, a Teen Research Unlimited, de Illinois, perguntou a adolescentes como eles usam seus celulares, 87% disseram que era para saber as horas, conta Rob Callender, o diretor de Tendências da organização. "O relógio de pulso virou algo completamente incidental em suas vidas", conclui ele.
EXTINÇÃO
A vasta maioria das pessoas ainda usa relógios de pulsos para saber as horas e poucas pessoas acham que estes dispositivos vão entrar na lista dos acessórios ameaçados de extinção. Mas muitas pensam que eles estão mais relacionados com status e moda do que com função.
"As pessoas geralmente não compram um Rolex só para saber que horas são", disse Nitin Gupta, um analista de empresa de pesquisa Yankee Group.
Para Cohen, o analista da NPD, a pesquisa mostra que o número de pessoas que compram relógios com valor acima de US$ 1 mil - como os Rolex, Breguet e Patek Philippe, que podem custar centenas de milhares de dólares - também caiu 2% no ano passado.
Mas os suíços, que certamente não seriam neutros nesse tópico, não acham que o setor esteja com os dias contados.
A fabricante suíça de relógios Swatch Group, dona de 19 empresas de relógios, entre as quais Longines e Omega, disse que 2005 foi um ano excepcional para os negócios, inclusive para seu relógio lavável em máquina para crianças Swatch Flik Flak.
Mas os celulares têm outras vantagens sobre o relógio de pulso, entre elas as atualizações automáticas quando muda o fuso horário. Muitas pessoas usam os celulares como despertadores e calculadoras. Algumas usam o celular para assistir televisão. E outras até usam para fazer ligações telefônicas.
Não se pode fazer isso tudo com o relógio de pulso... A menos que você seja o Dick Tracy, o herói de quadrinhos quase tão antigo quanto os relógios de pulso.
(Agência Estado, 19/04/2006)
Relógio se torna vítima da tecnologia
Público jovem prefere ver as horas nos telefones móveis ou nos iPods e as vendas do produto caem
Leslie Earnest
Pesquisas e números de vendas mostram que os jovens consumidores estão trocando os relógios de pulso por engenhocas mais "descoladas" para ver as horas, como telefones celulares e os iPods.
Sem contabilizar o universo paralelo dos Rolex e Patek Philippe, o número de pessoas que comprou relógios no ano passado caiu 12% em relação ao ano anterior, segundo pesquisa de mercado. A atual fabricante favorita dos jovens americanos, a Fossil Inc., do Texas, registrou queda de 18,6% nas vendas no atacado. A Oakley Inc., de Orange County, Califórnia, também viu caírem suas vendas em 11%, mas justificou informando ter retirado progressivamente modelos digitais que não estavam vendendo bem.
Para os jovens da geração dos celulares, usar relógio no pulso é coisa dos vovôs. Na semana passada, no The Lab, shopping center de Costa Mesa (Califórnia), os jovens vasculhavam bolsas e bolsos atrás dos celulares para informar as horas. E quando lhes perguntavam por que não usavam relógio, respondiam simplesmente: "Para quê?"
"É como um chapéu", disse Francis Eagan, um garçom de 21 anos. "Ele não serve para nada, como os brincos." Kamlyn Snyder, outra jovem, disse que não usava um relógio de pulso desde que havia tirado um de uma caixa de cereais, há muitos anos. "É inconveniente prendê-lo no pulso de manhã", disse um estudante de 21 anos. "Minha avó usa, é como ela diz as horas. Ela não é tão velha assim. Tem perto de 60, mas..."
DIFICULDADE
De acordo com Marshall Cohen, analista da NPD Group, empresa que pesquisa tendências de consumo, muitas pessoas mais velhas também usariam o celular para ver as horas se isso não significasse ter de procurar os óculos de leitura. "Quando os fabricantes de telefones celulares perceberem que nem todo mundo tem visão de raios X, eles começarão a fazer o relógio do telefone celular um pouquinho maior e ele rapidamente substituirá o relógio elegante como recurso principal para ver as horas."
Cohen começou a pesquisar consumidores sobre o uso de relógios de pulso depois de perceber que ele próprio deixara de usá-los. As conclusões dele tiveram o suporte do banco de investimento Piper Jaffray, que produz um relatório semestral sobre preferências de adolescentes. No último estudo, cresceu de 48% para 59% o porcentual de jovens que afirmam jamais ter usado um relógio de pulso. E mais: caiu 13% o número dos que deixaram de colocar um relógio no pulso.
Conforme a pesquisa, realizada entre março e junho (primavera no Hemisfério Norte), com resultados comparados com a pesquisa anterior, feita entre setembro e dezembro (outono no Hemisfério Norte), 82% afirmaram que não pretendem comprar um relógio de pulso nos próximos seis meses - eram 76% na pesquisa anterior.
"Algumas pessoas simplesmente compram relógios bonitos para exibir", disse o skatista Hayden Navarro, no shopping center The Camp, em Costa Mesa. "É uma razão besta para comprar um relógio." Atitudes como essas poderiam fazer os fabricantes de relógios desejar uma volta no tempo.
Os resultados desalentadores da pesquisa fizeram a Piper Jaffray manter a classificação "neutra para cautelosa" para as ações da Fossil.
"De qualquer ângulo que se analisasse os dados, a situação parecia cada vez pior para o setor de relógios finos no que diz respeito ao público adolescente", disse Neely J. N. Tamminga, um dos autores do relatório. "A grande sacada para nós é que os adolescentes estão claramente usando outras maneiras de saber as horas."
Quando uma outra empresa de pesquisa, a Teen Research Unlimited, de Illinois, perguntou a adolescentes como eles usam seus celulares, 87% disseram que era para saber as horas, conta Rob Callender, o diretor de Tendências da organização. "O relógio de pulso virou algo completamente incidental em suas vidas", conclui ele.
EXTINÇÃO
A vasta maioria das pessoas ainda usa relógios de pulsos para saber as horas e poucas pessoas acham que estes dispositivos vão entrar na lista dos acessórios ameaçados de extinção. Mas muitas pensam que eles estão mais relacionados com status e moda do que com função.
"As pessoas geralmente não compram um Rolex só para saber que horas são", disse Nitin Gupta, um analista de empresa de pesquisa Yankee Group.
Para Cohen, o analista da NPD, a pesquisa mostra que o número de pessoas que compram relógios com valor acima de US$ 1 mil - como os Rolex, Breguet e Patek Philippe, que podem custar centenas de milhares de dólares - também caiu 2% no ano passado.
Mas os suíços, que certamente não seriam neutros nesse tópico, não acham que o setor esteja com os dias contados.
A fabricante suíça de relógios Swatch Group, dona de 19 empresas de relógios, entre as quais Longines e Omega, disse que 2005 foi um ano excepcional para os negócios, inclusive para seu relógio lavável em máquina para crianças Swatch Flik Flak.
Mas os celulares têm outras vantagens sobre o relógio de pulso, entre elas as atualizações automáticas quando muda o fuso horário. Muitas pessoas usam os celulares como despertadores e calculadoras. Algumas usam o celular para assistir televisão. E outras até usam para fazer ligações telefônicas.
Não se pode fazer isso tudo com o relógio de pulso... A menos que você seja o Dick Tracy, o herói de quadrinhos quase tão antigo quanto os relógios de pulso.
(Agência Estado, 19/04/2006)
Terça-feira, Abril 18, 2006
64) Espécies ameaçadas de extinção (desenvolvimentistas...)
Um debate entre "neoliberais" e "desenvolvimentistas": primeiro foi publicado, na Folha de São Paulo, o artigo abaixo, de Roberto Troster, que reproduzi no mesmo dia.
Depois, em 30 de abril, saiu a resposta de dois "desenvolvimentistas", que reproduzo mais abaixo.
Temo que não haja, verdadeiramente, um debate, mas acusações recíprocas sobre responsabilidades respectivas pelo não-crescimento, pelas desigualdades, pelas inúmeras disfunções de nosso processo de desenvolvimento.
Enfim, duas peças do dossiê estão dadas...
Gravatazeiros
Roberto Luis Troster
Folha de São Paulo, 18.4.06 – pág. A3
Os gravatazeiros, pássaros ameaçados de extinção, não existem no resto do mundo e só sobrevivem em algumas regiões do interior da Bahia e de Minas Gerais. A degradação da caatinga e da mata Atlântica fez com que o número dessas aves se reduzisse drasticamente. Sua perpetuação é de interesse de muitos e é motivo de celebração.
Os desenvolvimentistas estão em extinção, não existem no resto do mundo e só sobrevivem em algumas regiões do Brasil e de alguns países vizinhos. O baixo crescimento das economias que seguiram seus preceitos e o bom desempenho dos países que perseveraram em políticas responsáveis fizeram com que o número desses economistas se reduzisse drasticamente. Sua perpetuação é de nenhum interesse e é motivo de preocupação.
Há uma ligação forte entre os gravatazeiros e o gravatá, espécie de bromélia terrestre. Há uma ligação forte entre os desenvolvimentistas e os políticos populistas. O discurso de ambos é imediatista. As propostas são reduções rápidas de juros, altas artificiais do câmbio e elevações aceleradas de gastos públicos, que impulsionam a economia a curto prazo e cativam os incautos. A médio e longo prazo, o resultado é mais concentração de renda, taxas de crescimento baixas e juros reais elevados.
Seu receituário é o seguinte tripé: aumento do déficit fiscal, metas de inflação flexíveis e administração imediatista do câmbio.
Uma elevação de gastos públicos tem um impacto positivo na economia ao gerar uma alta da demanda. O problema é que seu financiamento é feito ou mediante mais impostos, ou por meio de um crescimento da dívida pública, aumentando os juros para toda a economia. Resumindo, um crescimento agora ocasionando uma retração maior no futuro.
O segundo apoio do tripé é a lassitude com as metas de inflação. Uma elevação da inflação estimul a atividade econômica tirando renda dos que recebem preços – leia-se “assalariados”- e transferindo aos que fixam preços – leia-se “empresários”. Concentra a renda e desestimula investimento para aumentar os lucros, pois se ganha mais com a remarcação de preços. A evidência empírica é contundente, não há um exemplo sequer de crescimento sustentado com inflação.
O terceiro pé é uma elevação artificial do câmbio, com a compra de divisas, incentivando exportações pelo efeito preço. A barreira é o custo fiscal alto, pois se gastam recursos vultosos para adquirir reservas internacionais, além do desestímulo a investimentos em produtividade. Funciona enquanto o custo fiscal puder ser financiado e o efeito preço não exigir mais desvalorizações. Uma política que não se perpetua.
O tripé de políticas desenvolvimentistas foi aplicado no Brasil e em seus vizinhos nas últimas décadas do século passado. O resultado foi desastroso: bolhas de crescimento seguidas de crises. A conseqüência é que a renda per capita média latino-americana, que correspondia a 35% da dos países da OCDE há 25 anos, atualmente é de apenas 20% e permanece concentrada. Lastimável!
Os desenvolvimentistas debatem com fantasmas, contrapõem suas idéias às de monetaristas, ortodoxos e outras correntes de pensamento ultrapassadas, sem defensores.
Em contraposição, o crescimento sustentado tem como condição necessária o tripé oposto ao dos desenvolvimentistas: responsabilidade fiscal, comprometimento com metas de inflação e câmbio flexível. As outras condições são as que propiciam a geração de riquezas, em vez de sua apropriação. Estão baseadas em três pilares: pessoas, empresas e infra-estrutura.
O pilar mais importante para o crescimento sustentado são as pessoas. A riqueza de uma nação é feita por gente que, quanto mais capacitada estiver, mais poder[a contribuir e usufruir. A educação é a prioridade em qualquer política de desenvolvimento consistente. O segundo pilar são as empresas. Há obstáculos contra a produção que têm que ser superados: simplificar e diminuir a tributação, racionalizar a burocracia, flexibilizar a contratação de mão-de-obra etc. Quanto mais fácil for produzir riquezas, mais rico será o país.
A infra-estrutura é o terceiro pilar. Para crescer, é necessária uma infra-estrutura adequada em todas as suas dimensões: física (estradas, telefonia etc.), social (protegendo os desfavorecidos), institucional (execução de contratos, definição clara de direitos etc.) e de segurança (pessoal e legal).
O cenário atual é apropriado para aplicar políticas duradouras. A inflação está em baixa, as taxas de juros estão em queda, as exportações estão altas, as contas públicas controladas, e a economia está blindada. É um quadro adequado para que a economia brasileira deslanche de forma consistente.
Os gravatazeiros estão sendo preservados, pelo esforço de ambientalistas, no interior da Bahia. O crescimento sustentável depende do esforço de toda a sociedade brasileira exigindo uma política econômica responsável. Não há esperança nos desenvolvimentistas.
Roberto Luis Troster, doutor em economia pela USP, professor titular do departamento de economia da PUC-SP, é o economista-chefe da Febraban (Federação Brasileira dos Bancos). E-mail: troster@febraban.org.br
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Os desenvolvimentistas e as aves de rapina
Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa e Ricardo Amorim
Folha de São Paulo, 28.4.06 - pág. A3
A suposta extinção dos gravatazeiros - denunciada pelo economista Roberto Luis Troster, em artigo publicado nesta Folha em 18 de abril - merece realmente a preocupação não apenas de zoólogos, mas da sociedade brasileira. Da preservação desta espécie de pássaros, e de suas saudáveis utopias soberanas, depende o Brasil se quiser se tornar uma nação mis pujante no plano externo e um país solidário e justo internamente.
Essa espécie de desenvolvimentistas floresceu no Brasil no pós-2a. Guerra Mundial e inclui um seleto grupo de aves raras de nossa cultura intelectual: Celso Furtado, Ignácio Rangel, Rômulo de Almeida, San Thiago Dantas, Darcy Ribeiro e outros que deixaram extensa prole de intérpretes e seguidores. Tiveram papel decisivo na industrialização, na estruturação de políticas de desenvolvimento, na definição de linhas estratégicas para a redução da pobreza e da desigualdade e para a afirmação da nossa soberania, destacando-se como homens públicos voltados para a ação transformadora da realidade brasileira.
A ditadura militar os exilou a todos e quando, aos poucos, voltaram, ao menos aqueles que não ficaram pelo caminho, acabaram tendo uma participação importante no processo de redomocratização, ainda que já figurassem, como convinha ao consenso liberal que estava por assumir o poder, como fõsseis de um passado a ser soterrado.
Hoje, aqui e ali, e cada vez mais, ouve-se o canto amuado dos herdeiros desses gravatazeiros, que se recusam a aceitar a naturalização da desigualdade, a impossibilidade do crescimento e a padronização opressiva imposta pelos mercados desregulados. Observam que o mesquinho interesse da supremacia financeira, travestido de responsabilidade econômica, vai além dos bancos, e se ramifica em segmentos importantes do empresariado, das classes médias e da mídia. Enfim, percebem que se destrói o que fora duramente construído no país, e que não encontra paralelo na América Latina, em troca de uma visão centrada no curto prazo e da posição pouco honrosa de pátria da finança global.
Não nos esqueçamos tampouco que as aves de rapina, para a sustentação da sua atual riqueza usurária, dependem dos esforços da geração passada, que logrou construir um mercado interno vigoroso, uma indústria de base, uma classe média vultosa e um aparelho estatal minimamente diversificado. Só a partir dessa base é que foi possível gerar as pérolas do mercado global de hoje, como a Vale do Rio Doce, a Petrobrás e a Embraer.
Por isso, Mr. Troster, não cometa a falãcia de jogar nas costas dos desenvolvimentistas ou daqueles que o senhor acredita estar menosprezando, quando assim os caracteriza, a culpa pelo baixo crescimento, pela exclusão social amplificada, pelo endividamento do Estado e pelos níveis de investimento na lona. Mais lastimável ainda é o senhor não perceber que nesses últimos 15 anos não passou nenhum economista desenvolvimentista sequer próximo do edifício do Ministério da Fazenda! Por isso, os liberais devem assumir o seu ônus enquanto senhores da política econômica e parar com esta história marota de componentes do spread bancário, de que os brasileiros são caloteiros e de que o futuro do Brasil pertence, bastando paciência e docilidade para com as premissas interesseiras da ortodoxia econômica. Até quando?
Senão, responda: quem fabricou o déficit em conta corrente e o populismo cambial do Plano Real? Quem multiplicou a dívida pública na década passada? Quem elevou o desemprego e taxas nunca vistas no país? Quem falou que os ganhos de produtividade eram sustentáveis e que estávemos, em 1995 - lembra-se, Mr. Troster? - à beira de um novo ciclo de crescimento? Quem produziu os juros mais altos do mundo e, pior ainda, fez a sua defesa?
Mais quem disse que os desenvolvimentistas estão em extinção no mundo inteiro? Talvez o senhor esteja lendo apenas as análises requentadas do Banco Mundial, do FMI e afins. Afinal, economistas do establishment como Joseph Stiglitz e Jeffrey Sachs estão inclusive defendendo uma maior atuação do Estado na economia, por meio de políticas ativas para enfrentar a globalização. Na verdade, a população gravatazeira cresce e vem influenciando a economia de outros solos. Basta olhar para Índia e China, países até há pouco pobres, mas hoje, dinâmicos, e que têm se inserido no mercado internacional partindo da defesa de seus interesses nacionais.
Enfim, não se trata de uma discussão em torno dos princípios da ciência econômica, que o senhor crê serem universais, porque sustentam seus interesses, mas sobre que tipo de nação e sociedade queremos construir. Mas sabemos que esses conceitos lhe são desconhecidos, sequer são considerados como variáveis nas suas contas repletas de juros compostos.
Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa, 35, é doutor em economia aplicada pelo Instituto de Economia da Unicamp. Ricardo Amorim, 35, é doutorando em teoria econômica pelo Instituto de Economia da Unicamp.
Depois, em 30 de abril, saiu a resposta de dois "desenvolvimentistas", que reproduzo mais abaixo.
Temo que não haja, verdadeiramente, um debate, mas acusações recíprocas sobre responsabilidades respectivas pelo não-crescimento, pelas desigualdades, pelas inúmeras disfunções de nosso processo de desenvolvimento.
Enfim, duas peças do dossiê estão dadas...
Gravatazeiros
Roberto Luis Troster
Folha de São Paulo, 18.4.06 – pág. A3
Os gravatazeiros, pássaros ameaçados de extinção, não existem no resto do mundo e só sobrevivem em algumas regiões do interior da Bahia e de Minas Gerais. A degradação da caatinga e da mata Atlântica fez com que o número dessas aves se reduzisse drasticamente. Sua perpetuação é de interesse de muitos e é motivo de celebração.
Os desenvolvimentistas estão em extinção, não existem no resto do mundo e só sobrevivem em algumas regiões do Brasil e de alguns países vizinhos. O baixo crescimento das economias que seguiram seus preceitos e o bom desempenho dos países que perseveraram em políticas responsáveis fizeram com que o número desses economistas se reduzisse drasticamente. Sua perpetuação é de nenhum interesse e é motivo de preocupação.
Há uma ligação forte entre os gravatazeiros e o gravatá, espécie de bromélia terrestre. Há uma ligação forte entre os desenvolvimentistas e os políticos populistas. O discurso de ambos é imediatista. As propostas são reduções rápidas de juros, altas artificiais do câmbio e elevações aceleradas de gastos públicos, que impulsionam a economia a curto prazo e cativam os incautos. A médio e longo prazo, o resultado é mais concentração de renda, taxas de crescimento baixas e juros reais elevados.
Seu receituário é o seguinte tripé: aumento do déficit fiscal, metas de inflação flexíveis e administração imediatista do câmbio.
Uma elevação de gastos públicos tem um impacto positivo na economia ao gerar uma alta da demanda. O problema é que seu financiamento é feito ou mediante mais impostos, ou por meio de um crescimento da dívida pública, aumentando os juros para toda a economia. Resumindo, um crescimento agora ocasionando uma retração maior no futuro.
O segundo apoio do tripé é a lassitude com as metas de inflação. Uma elevação da inflação estimul a atividade econômica tirando renda dos que recebem preços – leia-se “assalariados”- e transferindo aos que fixam preços – leia-se “empresários”. Concentra a renda e desestimula investimento para aumentar os lucros, pois se ganha mais com a remarcação de preços. A evidência empírica é contundente, não há um exemplo sequer de crescimento sustentado com inflação.
O terceiro pé é uma elevação artificial do câmbio, com a compra de divisas, incentivando exportações pelo efeito preço. A barreira é o custo fiscal alto, pois se gastam recursos vultosos para adquirir reservas internacionais, além do desestímulo a investimentos em produtividade. Funciona enquanto o custo fiscal puder ser financiado e o efeito preço não exigir mais desvalorizações. Uma política que não se perpetua.
O tripé de políticas desenvolvimentistas foi aplicado no Brasil e em seus vizinhos nas últimas décadas do século passado. O resultado foi desastroso: bolhas de crescimento seguidas de crises. A conseqüência é que a renda per capita média latino-americana, que correspondia a 35% da dos países da OCDE há 25 anos, atualmente é de apenas 20% e permanece concentrada. Lastimável!
Os desenvolvimentistas debatem com fantasmas, contrapõem suas idéias às de monetaristas, ortodoxos e outras correntes de pensamento ultrapassadas, sem defensores.
Em contraposição, o crescimento sustentado tem como condição necessária o tripé oposto ao dos desenvolvimentistas: responsabilidade fiscal, comprometimento com metas de inflação e câmbio flexível. As outras condições são as que propiciam a geração de riquezas, em vez de sua apropriação. Estão baseadas em três pilares: pessoas, empresas e infra-estrutura.
O pilar mais importante para o crescimento sustentado são as pessoas. A riqueza de uma nação é feita por gente que, quanto mais capacitada estiver, mais poder[a contribuir e usufruir. A educação é a prioridade em qualquer política de desenvolvimento consistente. O segundo pilar são as empresas. Há obstáculos contra a produção que têm que ser superados: simplificar e diminuir a tributação, racionalizar a burocracia, flexibilizar a contratação de mão-de-obra etc. Quanto mais fácil for produzir riquezas, mais rico será o país.
A infra-estrutura é o terceiro pilar. Para crescer, é necessária uma infra-estrutura adequada em todas as suas dimensões: física (estradas, telefonia etc.), social (protegendo os desfavorecidos), institucional (execução de contratos, definição clara de direitos etc.) e de segurança (pessoal e legal).
O cenário atual é apropriado para aplicar políticas duradouras. A inflação está em baixa, as taxas de juros estão em queda, as exportações estão altas, as contas públicas controladas, e a economia está blindada. É um quadro adequado para que a economia brasileira deslanche de forma consistente.
Os gravatazeiros estão sendo preservados, pelo esforço de ambientalistas, no interior da Bahia. O crescimento sustentável depende do esforço de toda a sociedade brasileira exigindo uma política econômica responsável. Não há esperança nos desenvolvimentistas.
Roberto Luis Troster, doutor em economia pela USP, professor titular do departamento de economia da PUC-SP, é o economista-chefe da Febraban (Federação Brasileira dos Bancos). E-mail: troster@febraban.org.br
==========
Os desenvolvimentistas e as aves de rapina
Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa e Ricardo Amorim
Folha de São Paulo, 28.4.06 - pág. A3
A suposta extinção dos gravatazeiros - denunciada pelo economista Roberto Luis Troster, em artigo publicado nesta Folha em 18 de abril - merece realmente a preocupação não apenas de zoólogos, mas da sociedade brasileira. Da preservação desta espécie de pássaros, e de suas saudáveis utopias soberanas, depende o Brasil se quiser se tornar uma nação mis pujante no plano externo e um país solidário e justo internamente.
Essa espécie de desenvolvimentistas floresceu no Brasil no pós-2a. Guerra Mundial e inclui um seleto grupo de aves raras de nossa cultura intelectual: Celso Furtado, Ignácio Rangel, Rômulo de Almeida, San Thiago Dantas, Darcy Ribeiro e outros que deixaram extensa prole de intérpretes e seguidores. Tiveram papel decisivo na industrialização, na estruturação de políticas de desenvolvimento, na definição de linhas estratégicas para a redução da pobreza e da desigualdade e para a afirmação da nossa soberania, destacando-se como homens públicos voltados para a ação transformadora da realidade brasileira.
A ditadura militar os exilou a todos e quando, aos poucos, voltaram, ao menos aqueles que não ficaram pelo caminho, acabaram tendo uma participação importante no processo de redomocratização, ainda que já figurassem, como convinha ao consenso liberal que estava por assumir o poder, como fõsseis de um passado a ser soterrado.
Hoje, aqui e ali, e cada vez mais, ouve-se o canto amuado dos herdeiros desses gravatazeiros, que se recusam a aceitar a naturalização da desigualdade, a impossibilidade do crescimento e a padronização opressiva imposta pelos mercados desregulados. Observam que o mesquinho interesse da supremacia financeira, travestido de responsabilidade econômica, vai além dos bancos, e se ramifica em segmentos importantes do empresariado, das classes médias e da mídia. Enfim, percebem que se destrói o que fora duramente construído no país, e que não encontra paralelo na América Latina, em troca de uma visão centrada no curto prazo e da posição pouco honrosa de pátria da finança global.
Não nos esqueçamos tampouco que as aves de rapina, para a sustentação da sua atual riqueza usurária, dependem dos esforços da geração passada, que logrou construir um mercado interno vigoroso, uma indústria de base, uma classe média vultosa e um aparelho estatal minimamente diversificado. Só a partir dessa base é que foi possível gerar as pérolas do mercado global de hoje, como a Vale do Rio Doce, a Petrobrás e a Embraer.
Por isso, Mr. Troster, não cometa a falãcia de jogar nas costas dos desenvolvimentistas ou daqueles que o senhor acredita estar menosprezando, quando assim os caracteriza, a culpa pelo baixo crescimento, pela exclusão social amplificada, pelo endividamento do Estado e pelos níveis de investimento na lona. Mais lastimável ainda é o senhor não perceber que nesses últimos 15 anos não passou nenhum economista desenvolvimentista sequer próximo do edifício do Ministério da Fazenda! Por isso, os liberais devem assumir o seu ônus enquanto senhores da política econômica e parar com esta história marota de componentes do spread bancário, de que os brasileiros são caloteiros e de que o futuro do Brasil pertence, bastando paciência e docilidade para com as premissas interesseiras da ortodoxia econômica. Até quando?
Senão, responda: quem fabricou o déficit em conta corrente e o populismo cambial do Plano Real? Quem multiplicou a dívida pública na década passada? Quem elevou o desemprego e taxas nunca vistas no país? Quem falou que os ganhos de produtividade eram sustentáveis e que estávemos, em 1995 - lembra-se, Mr. Troster? - à beira de um novo ciclo de crescimento? Quem produziu os juros mais altos do mundo e, pior ainda, fez a sua defesa?
Mais quem disse que os desenvolvimentistas estão em extinção no mundo inteiro? Talvez o senhor esteja lendo apenas as análises requentadas do Banco Mundial, do FMI e afins. Afinal, economistas do establishment como Joseph Stiglitz e Jeffrey Sachs estão inclusive defendendo uma maior atuação do Estado na economia, por meio de políticas ativas para enfrentar a globalização. Na verdade, a população gravatazeira cresce e vem influenciando a economia de outros solos. Basta olhar para Índia e China, países até há pouco pobres, mas hoje, dinâmicos, e que têm se inserido no mercado internacional partindo da defesa de seus interesses nacionais.
Enfim, não se trata de uma discussão em torno dos princípios da ciência econômica, que o senhor crê serem universais, porque sustentam seus interesses, mas sobre que tipo de nação e sociedade queremos construir. Mas sabemos que esses conceitos lhe são desconhecidos, sequer são considerados como variáveis nas suas contas repletas de juros compostos.
Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa, 35, é doutor em economia aplicada pelo Instituto de Economia da Unicamp. Ricardo Amorim, 35, é doutorando em teoria econômica pelo Instituto de Economia da Unicamp.
Segunda-feira, Abril 10, 2006
63) Municipios economicamente deprimidos
Será que eles precisariam de psicanalistas ou de psiquiatras?
Eles se eles também ficassem politicamente deprimidos? Nós poderiamos pensar em eliminá-los do mapa? Calma: não estou pensando em nenhuma solução radical, apenas em juntá-los a outros municípios, de maneira a que eles deixem de viver de "mensalão" governamental...
Nordeste concentra maioria esmagadora dos municípios economicamente deprimidos
Por Paulo R. Haddad
Jornal Valor Econômico - 10.4.06 - pág. A14
Em 2003, coordenamos um estudo para definir quais seriam os municípios brasileiros que poderiam ser classificados como economicamente deprimidos. Inicialmente, dos 5.507 municípios (situação de 2000), 2.625 apresentaram baixo nível de desenvolvimento, baixo ritmo de crescimento na década de 90 e também baixo potencial de desenvolvimento, sempre em relação aos indicadores médios nacionais.
Em seguida, estes 2.625 municípios foram classificados segundo o seu grau de endogenia, sua capacidade de organização social e política para modelar o seu próprio futuro. Há pelo menos três grandes obstáculos para definir o grau de endogenia de determinado município. Dada a importância dos capitais intangíveis (capital social, capital institucional, capital sinergético etc.) no processo de desenvolvimento endógeno, ainda é muito difícil obter indicadores quantitativos que possam caracterizá-los em nível local. Mesmo para aqueles indicadores passíveis de quantificação, há problemas de disponibilidade de informações atualizadas para todos os municípios brasileiros. Finalmente, não há experiência internacional consolidada que possa nortear a mensuração de indicadores de endogenia local.
Para se avaliar o grau de capacidade endógena, foram utilizados três indicadores: o grau de educação da população do município, suas condições de saúde e os riscos de mortalidade prevalecentes, e a qualidade institucional do município. O índice de qualidade institucional de um município será tanto maior quanto maior for o grau de participação das comunidades locais na gestão do município, quanto maior a capacidade financeira do município e quanto melhor a capacidade gerencial do município.
Assim, chegou-se a 1.785 municípios economicamente deprimidos e com baixo potencial endógeno por não apresentarem nenhum indicador socioinstitucional acima dos respectivos indicadores do país. São, pois, municípios pobres, que crescem lentamente, que apresentam baixo potencial econômico dada a sua experiência recente e, principalmente, sinalizam dificuldades para a superação endógena de seus problemas socioeconômicos. Literalmente, são municípios deprimidos num sentido amplo.
Onde estão estes municípios? Eles se concentram pesadamente no Nordeste (particularmente no agreste e no sertão) onde ainda se pode vislumbrar algumas ilhas de prosperidade, assim como em áreas pontilhadas nos Estados do Pará (Terra do Meio), de Minas Gerais (no norte e no leste) e no leste de Tocantins. É importante destacar que há um elemento comum em quase todos estes 1.785 municípios. Eles se encontram em áreas geográficas onde ocorreu, desde o Período Colonial, um intenso processo de uso predatório de seus ecossistemas, reduzindo drasticamente a produtividade dos recursos naturais dos municípios, ou seja, a destruição de seu capital natural.
Ao todo, 1578 cidades do país sobrevivem à custa de transferências do excedente gerado em regiões mais prósperas
Como sobrevivem as populações destes municípios? Por que os seus indicadores sociais e econômicos não se assemelham aos dos países mais pobres da África? Uma hipótese plausível para explicar esta situação talvez seja que estes municípios estão sobrevivendo à custa de transferências que são extraídas a partir do excedente econômico gerado nos municípios mais prósperos do país. Estas transferências se manifestam, em nível da renda das famílias, pela aposentadoria rural, pelo Bolsa-Família, pelo sistema assistencial da LOAS etc., e, em nível das finanças públicas municipais, pelas regras adotadas pelo FPM, pela cota-parte livre do ICMS etc.
Se por alguma motivação politicamente perversa fossem fechadas as comportas destes mecanismos de transmissão de benefícios compensatórios, provavelmente teríamos as nossas Somálias e as nossas Ganas. Basta lembrar que, de 1991 a 2000, enquanto o PIB per capita do Brasil cresceu a uma taxa anual de 1,39% e a renda per capita cresceu 2,88% ao ano, o crescimento das transferências per capita foi de 6,9% ao ano. Ou seja, a renda per capita local pode crescer (como continua a crescer no século XXI) sem que tenha necessariamente ocorrido um processo de crescimento econômico no município.
Quando partimos para um indicador-síntese para medir o grau de depressão econômica e socioinstitucional dos municípios, surge, de fato, uma "questão nordestina", pois os 1.555 piores resultados são basicamente dos municípios do Nordeste brasileiro. Neles, em média, os indicadores são menores do que 30% dos indicadores nacionais. Para estes, as políticas sociais compensatórias, ainda que absolutamente indispensáveis e mesmo quando focadas para os seus grupos sociais de baixa renda, não têm capacidade de reverter minimamente as distâncias abissais que os separam dos municípios desenvolvidos e em expansão do Sul e do Sudeste.
Uma das lições do budismo nos ensina que não há nada mais democrático do que o Sol, pois quando se levanta ilumina igualmente todas as regiões. Entretanto, em algumas regiões, para que esta luz se transforme em energia do seu desenvolvimento, é fundamental que as comunidades locais se organizem e mobilizem seus recursos latentes, vencendo o seu estado de apatia, de inércia e de conformismo. Como muitas destas comunidades não dispõem de recursos de mobilização e de familiaridade com modelos de ação coletiva organizada, o seu envolvimento terá de ser mais induzido por políticas públicas.
Enfim, para evitar a formação de um Brasil que viva, crescente e permanentemente, de mesadas transferidas de sua parte mais desenvolvida, é preciso que se estruture, nos municípios deprimidos, um processo de ativação e canalização de suas forças sociais, de melhoria da capacidade associativa e de exercício da iniciativa criativa.
Paulo R. Haddad é professor do Ibmec e ex-ministro do Planejamento e da Fazenda.
Eles se eles também ficassem politicamente deprimidos? Nós poderiamos pensar em eliminá-los do mapa? Calma: não estou pensando em nenhuma solução radical, apenas em juntá-los a outros municípios, de maneira a que eles deixem de viver de "mensalão" governamental...
Nordeste concentra maioria esmagadora dos municípios economicamente deprimidos
Por Paulo R. Haddad
Jornal Valor Econômico - 10.4.06 - pág. A14
Em 2003, coordenamos um estudo para definir quais seriam os municípios brasileiros que poderiam ser classificados como economicamente deprimidos. Inicialmente, dos 5.507 municípios (situação de 2000), 2.625 apresentaram baixo nível de desenvolvimento, baixo ritmo de crescimento na década de 90 e também baixo potencial de desenvolvimento, sempre em relação aos indicadores médios nacionais.
Em seguida, estes 2.625 municípios foram classificados segundo o seu grau de endogenia, sua capacidade de organização social e política para modelar o seu próprio futuro. Há pelo menos três grandes obstáculos para definir o grau de endogenia de determinado município. Dada a importância dos capitais intangíveis (capital social, capital institucional, capital sinergético etc.) no processo de desenvolvimento endógeno, ainda é muito difícil obter indicadores quantitativos que possam caracterizá-los em nível local. Mesmo para aqueles indicadores passíveis de quantificação, há problemas de disponibilidade de informações atualizadas para todos os municípios brasileiros. Finalmente, não há experiência internacional consolidada que possa nortear a mensuração de indicadores de endogenia local.
Para se avaliar o grau de capacidade endógena, foram utilizados três indicadores: o grau de educação da população do município, suas condições de saúde e os riscos de mortalidade prevalecentes, e a qualidade institucional do município. O índice de qualidade institucional de um município será tanto maior quanto maior for o grau de participação das comunidades locais na gestão do município, quanto maior a capacidade financeira do município e quanto melhor a capacidade gerencial do município.
Assim, chegou-se a 1.785 municípios economicamente deprimidos e com baixo potencial endógeno por não apresentarem nenhum indicador socioinstitucional acima dos respectivos indicadores do país. São, pois, municípios pobres, que crescem lentamente, que apresentam baixo potencial econômico dada a sua experiência recente e, principalmente, sinalizam dificuldades para a superação endógena de seus problemas socioeconômicos. Literalmente, são municípios deprimidos num sentido amplo.
Onde estão estes municípios? Eles se concentram pesadamente no Nordeste (particularmente no agreste e no sertão) onde ainda se pode vislumbrar algumas ilhas de prosperidade, assim como em áreas pontilhadas nos Estados do Pará (Terra do Meio), de Minas Gerais (no norte e no leste) e no leste de Tocantins. É importante destacar que há um elemento comum em quase todos estes 1.785 municípios. Eles se encontram em áreas geográficas onde ocorreu, desde o Período Colonial, um intenso processo de uso predatório de seus ecossistemas, reduzindo drasticamente a produtividade dos recursos naturais dos municípios, ou seja, a destruição de seu capital natural.
Ao todo, 1578 cidades do país sobrevivem à custa de transferências do excedente gerado em regiões mais prósperas
Como sobrevivem as populações destes municípios? Por que os seus indicadores sociais e econômicos não se assemelham aos dos países mais pobres da África? Uma hipótese plausível para explicar esta situação talvez seja que estes municípios estão sobrevivendo à custa de transferências que são extraídas a partir do excedente econômico gerado nos municípios mais prósperos do país. Estas transferências se manifestam, em nível da renda das famílias, pela aposentadoria rural, pelo Bolsa-Família, pelo sistema assistencial da LOAS etc., e, em nível das finanças públicas municipais, pelas regras adotadas pelo FPM, pela cota-parte livre do ICMS etc.
Se por alguma motivação politicamente perversa fossem fechadas as comportas destes mecanismos de transmissão de benefícios compensatórios, provavelmente teríamos as nossas Somálias e as nossas Ganas. Basta lembrar que, de 1991 a 2000, enquanto o PIB per capita do Brasil cresceu a uma taxa anual de 1,39% e a renda per capita cresceu 2,88% ao ano, o crescimento das transferências per capita foi de 6,9% ao ano. Ou seja, a renda per capita local pode crescer (como continua a crescer no século XXI) sem que tenha necessariamente ocorrido um processo de crescimento econômico no município.
Quando partimos para um indicador-síntese para medir o grau de depressão econômica e socioinstitucional dos municípios, surge, de fato, uma "questão nordestina", pois os 1.555 piores resultados são basicamente dos municípios do Nordeste brasileiro. Neles, em média, os indicadores são menores do que 30% dos indicadores nacionais. Para estes, as políticas sociais compensatórias, ainda que absolutamente indispensáveis e mesmo quando focadas para os seus grupos sociais de baixa renda, não têm capacidade de reverter minimamente as distâncias abissais que os separam dos municípios desenvolvidos e em expansão do Sul e do Sudeste.
Uma das lições do budismo nos ensina que não há nada mais democrático do que o Sol, pois quando se levanta ilumina igualmente todas as regiões. Entretanto, em algumas regiões, para que esta luz se transforme em energia do seu desenvolvimento, é fundamental que as comunidades locais se organizem e mobilizem seus recursos latentes, vencendo o seu estado de apatia, de inércia e de conformismo. Como muitas destas comunidades não dispõem de recursos de mobilização e de familiaridade com modelos de ação coletiva organizada, o seu envolvimento terá de ser mais induzido por políticas públicas.
Enfim, para evitar a formação de um Brasil que viva, crescente e permanentemente, de mesadas transferidas de sua parte mais desenvolvida, é preciso que se estruture, nos municípios deprimidos, um processo de ativação e canalização de suas forças sociais, de melhoria da capacidade associativa e de exercício da iniciativa criativa.
Paulo R. Haddad é professor do Ibmec e ex-ministro do Planejamento e da Fazenda.
62) Next stop: Teheran?
THE IRAN PLANS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH (The New Yorker)
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be "wiped off the map." Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. "That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ "
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." He added, "I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ "
The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. "So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely," Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. "The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?"
When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that "this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy." However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad "sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates." Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as "industrial accidents." But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, "given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec."
One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of "coercion" aimed at Iran. "You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond," the officer said. "You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down." He added, "People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11," but, "in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran." (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, "As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution"; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through "diplomatic channels" but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were "inaccuracies" in this account but would not specify them.)
"This is much more than a nuclear issue," one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. "That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years."
A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. "This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war," he said. The danger, he said, was that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability." A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: "Hezbollah comes into play," the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. "And here comes Al Qaeda."
In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been "no formal briefings," because "they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively."
The House member said that no one in the meetings "is really objecting" to the talk of war. "The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?" (Iran is building facilities underground.) "There’s no pressure from Congress" not to take military action, the House member added. "The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it." Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, "The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision."
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions-rapid ascending maneuvers known as "over the shoulder" bombing-since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for "continuity of government"-for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. "The ‘tell’ "-the giveaway-"was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised," the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that "only nukes" could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. "We see a similarity of design," specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.
A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to "go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure-it’s feasible." The former defense official said, "The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go." He added, "We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous-put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep."
But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, "say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath-to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know." The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," the former senior intelligence official said. " ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."
He went on, "Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout-we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out"-remove the nuclear option-"they’re shouted down."
The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran-without success, the former intelligence official said. "The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ "
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it "a juggernaut that has to be stopped." He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. "There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the adviser told me. "This goes to high levels." The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. "The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks," the adviser said. "And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen."
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation," he said.
The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability "for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons." Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. "The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country," he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: "What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?"
With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because "Iran is a much tougher target" than Iraq. But, he added, "If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems."
The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that "ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate"-that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.
If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops "are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds," the consultant said. One goal is to get "eyes on the ground"-quoting a line from "Othello," he said, "Give me the ocular proof." The broader aim, the consultant said, is to "encourage ethnic tensions" and undermine the regime.
The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.
" ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. "The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran," he said. "We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want."
The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.
Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government "are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles-you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off."
Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as "a white coup," with ominous implications for the West. "Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out," he said. "We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution." He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was "To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like."
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. "Ahmadinejad is not in control," one European diplomat told me. "Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval."
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that "allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous." He added, "The whole internal debate is on which way to go"-in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans-and forestall the American action. "God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen."
While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, "Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away" from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, "If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it"-bomb Iran-"without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble."
Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that "Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter." In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: "There are two parallel nuclear programs" inside Iran-the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, "I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program-I believe it, but I don’t know it."
In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. "The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ " the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been "singing like a canary.") The concern, the former senior official said, is that "Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear"-or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.
"I think Khan’s leading us on," the former intelligence official said. "I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources- sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ "
The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled "Fool Me Twice," Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, "The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war." He noted several parallels:
The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.
Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran "questionable" or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, "What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?" The answer, he said, "is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A." (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)
Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, "RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS."
I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic "walk-in."
A European intelligence official said, "There was some hesitation on our side" about what the materials really proved, "and we are still not convinced." The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, "but had the character of sketches," the European official said. "It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun."
The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but "nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran," the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. "But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride," the diplomat said. "The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy."
In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: "We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. "
Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. "All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases-one hundred per cent totally certified nuts," the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders "want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side"-in Washington. "At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians."
The central question-whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium-is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, "there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end."
Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, "Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table." A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, "If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system-if you don’t trust them-you can only bomb."
There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. "We’re quite frustrated with the director-general," the European diplomat told me. "His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk."
The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. "Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change," a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, "The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable."
"The Brits think this is a very bad idea," Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, "but they’re really worried we’re going to do it." The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, "short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran." He said that the British "are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise."
The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but "to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges" to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. "The regime acts in its best interests," he said. Iran’s leaders "take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff," believing that "the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold." But, he said, "From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off."
The diplomat went on, "You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed"-in sanctions-"is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route." He added, "If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic."
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was "inconceivable." Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.
Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. "The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically," the European intelligence official told me. "He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse." An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. "Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it," he said. "If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run."
Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. "It’s always the same guys," he said, with a resigned shrug. "There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short."
A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a "serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace." He added, "I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel."
Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: "What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally-that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?"
Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. "It’s impossible to block passage," he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.
Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. "They would be at risk," he said, "and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world."
Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks "is consuming a lot of time" at U.S. intelligence agencies. "The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years," the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. "This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us." (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, "Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.")
The adviser went on, "If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle." The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, "the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck."
"If you attack," the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, "Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians."
The diplomat went on, "There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking." He added, "The window of opportunity is now."
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060417fa_fact
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH (The New Yorker)
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be "wiped off the map." Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. "That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ "
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." He added, "I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ "
The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. "So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely," Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. "The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?"
When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that "this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy." However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad "sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates." Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as "industrial accidents." But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, "given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec."
One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of "coercion" aimed at Iran. "You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond," the officer said. "You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down." He added, "People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11," but, "in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran." (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, "As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution"; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through "diplomatic channels" but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were "inaccuracies" in this account but would not specify them.)
"This is much more than a nuclear issue," one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. "That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years."
A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. "This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war," he said. The danger, he said, was that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability." A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: "Hezbollah comes into play," the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. "And here comes Al Qaeda."
In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been "no formal briefings," because "they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively."
The House member said that no one in the meetings "is really objecting" to the talk of war. "The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?" (Iran is building facilities underground.) "There’s no pressure from Congress" not to take military action, the House member added. "The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it." Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, "The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision."
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions-rapid ascending maneuvers known as "over the shoulder" bombing-since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for "continuity of government"-for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. "The ‘tell’ "-the giveaway-"was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised," the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that "only nukes" could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. "We see a similarity of design," specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.
A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to "go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure-it’s feasible." The former defense official said, "The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go." He added, "We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous-put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep."
But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, "say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath-to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know." The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," the former senior intelligence official said. " ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."
He went on, "Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout-we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out"-remove the nuclear option-"they’re shouted down."
The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran-without success, the former intelligence official said. "The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ "
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it "a juggernaut that has to be stopped." He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. "There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the adviser told me. "This goes to high levels." The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. "The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks," the adviser said. "And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen."
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation," he said.
The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability "for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons." Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. "The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country," he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: "What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?"
With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because "Iran is a much tougher target" than Iraq. But, he added, "If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems."
The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that "ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate"-that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.
If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops "are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds," the consultant said. One goal is to get "eyes on the ground"-quoting a line from "Othello," he said, "Give me the ocular proof." The broader aim, the consultant said, is to "encourage ethnic tensions" and undermine the regime.
The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.
" ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. "The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran," he said. "We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want."
The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.
Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government "are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles-you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off."
Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as "a white coup," with ominous implications for the West. "Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out," he said. "We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution." He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was "To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like."
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. "Ahmadinejad is not in control," one European diplomat told me. "Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval."
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that "allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous." He added, "The whole internal debate is on which way to go"-in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans-and forestall the American action. "God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen."
While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, "Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away" from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, "If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it"-bomb Iran-"without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble."
Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that "Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter." In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: "There are two parallel nuclear programs" inside Iran-the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, "I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program-I believe it, but I don’t know it."
In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. "The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ " the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been "singing like a canary.") The concern, the former senior official said, is that "Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear"-or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.
"I think Khan’s leading us on," the former intelligence official said. "I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources- sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ "
The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled "Fool Me Twice," Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, "The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war." He noted several parallels:
The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.
Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran "questionable" or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, "What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?" The answer, he said, "is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A." (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)
Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, "RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS."
I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic "walk-in."
A European intelligence official said, "There was some hesitation on our side" about what the materials really proved, "and we are still not convinced." The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, "but had the character of sketches," the European official said. "It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun."
The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but "nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran," the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. "But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride," the diplomat said. "The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy."
In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: "We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. "
Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. "All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases-one hundred per cent totally certified nuts," the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders "want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side"-in Washington. "At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians."
The central question-whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium-is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, "there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end."
Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, "Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table." A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, "If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system-if you don’t trust them-you can only bomb."
There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. "We’re quite frustrated with the director-general," the European diplomat told me. "His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk."
The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. "Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change," a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, "The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable."
"The Brits think this is a very bad idea," Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, "but they’re really worried we’re going to do it." The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, "short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran." He said that the British "are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise."
The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but "to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges" to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. "The regime acts in its best interests," he said. Iran’s leaders "take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff," believing that "the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold." But, he said, "From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off."
The diplomat went on, "You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed"-in sanctions-"is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route." He added, "If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic."
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was "inconceivable." Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.
Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. "The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically," the European intelligence official told me. "He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse." An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. "Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it," he said. "If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run."
Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. "It’s always the same guys," he said, with a resigned shrug. "There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short."
A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a "serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace." He added, "I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel."
Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: "What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally-that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?"
Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. "It’s impossible to block passage," he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.
Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. "They would be at risk," he said, "and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world."
Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks "is consuming a lot of time" at U.S. intelligence agencies. "The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years," the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. "This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us." (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, "Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.")
The adviser went on, "If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle." The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, "the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck."
"If you attack," the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, "Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians."
The diplomat went on, "There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking." He added, "The window of opportunity is now."
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060417fa_fact
Segunda-feira, Abril 03, 2006
61) Que frase mais infeliz...
Que frase mais infeliz...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Depois de uma tremenda frase infeliz, o que mais posso fazer, me digam?
Me penitenciar, ajoelhar no milho, fornecer textos gratuitos de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil pelo resto da minha vida, dar consultoria de graça – o que aliás já faço, em bases informais – pelos próximos seis meses, fazer contrição, pedir remissão dos pecados, viajar a Canossa, arrastar uma pedra de Sísifo em alguma favela carioca, prometer comparecer, com despesas pagas por mim mesmo, a todos os encontros do ENERI, FENERI, ENEPRI, IRWI, ABRI, FECHA e outros mais, pelos próximos dez anos?
Pois é, estou tremendamente envergonhado – e até diria arrasado – pela frase transcrita abaixo, em letras garrafais – mais uma maneira de penitência – que nunca deveria ter sido pronunciada ou escrita:
"NÃO TENHO CERTEZA DE QUE ESSE SEJA O MELHOR CAMINHO PARA QUEM ASPIRA A SER ALGUMA COISA NA VIDA, POIS SE TRATA DE UMA ÁREA RELATIVAMENTE NOVA E NÃO SUFICIENTEMENTE "TESTADA" NOS MERCADOS DE TRABALHO"
(a matéria toda, para quem ainda não teve a oportunidade de ler, figura neste link: http://diplomaticas.blogspot.com/2006/03/303-os-novos-internacionalistas.html#links)
Sempre poderia alegar que a frase foi retirada do contexto, que fui mal interpretado, pedir que esqueçam o que eu escrevi (o que disse), que não era bem isso o que vocês e eu estamos pensando, que o repórter foi maldoso, que ele distorceu as minhas palavras, mais isso e mais aquilo, patati-patatá, mas isso não vai, obviamente, consertar o estrago já feito na minha reputação e na auto-estima dos estudantes de relações internacionais.
Sim, pois era deles que eu estava falando.
Minha única desculpa, a ser comprovada pelos que me conhecem, é, de verdade, o cansaço físico, depois de mais um desses dias extenuantes, quando somos assediados por gregos e goianos à procura de ajuda didática, o in-box lotado de dezenas de mensagens pedindo algo, e ainda vem o repórter querendo fechar a matéria “naquela quinta”, para o suplemento de fim de semana.
Fois apenas o cansaço físico, literal e lateral, que me fez perpetrar essa frase, da qual aliás sí vim “tomar conhecimento” depois que ela estava impressa no jornal – suplemento para “jovens e aborrecentes” FolhaTeen, da segunda-feira, 27 de março – e aí já não tinha mais volta. Juro que foi, mas isso não deve consertar o estrago do lado dos mais severos, cruéis e vingativos dos alunos que esperam um brilhante futuro pela frente com seus cursos de relações internacionais.
É evidente que se me fosse dado reler ou ouvir aquela mísera frase – selecionada entre dezenas de outras do material preparado para a matéria – eu não a teria “liberado”, pelo menos daquela forma.
E haveria alguma outra forma? Certamente que sim e, se me permite a indulgência dos que me leram até aqui, eu gostaria de explicar o que estava “por detrás do meu pensamento” – como diria algum gênio da língua – e que acabou saindo da forma mais arrevesada possível.
Explico, mas antes remeto ao conjunto de meus argumentos para que meus leitores possam constatar por si mesmos a “extensão” do meu “raciocínio” (palavra generosa, quando se está cansado e se pretende liquidar uma matéria o mais rapidamente possível). Os que desejarem ler essa peça singular, dotada de uma única frase atravessada, podem ver o trabalho “As relações internacionais como oportunidade profissional”, que está fracionado em cinco posts do meu blog “Cousas Diplomáticas” (começa por este link http://diplomaticas.blogspot.com/2006/03/282-as-relaes-internacionais-como.html#links e termina por este outro: http://diplomaticas.blogspot.com/2006/03/286-as-relaes-internacionais-como.html#links, sendo que a frase indigitada deve estar lá pelo meio).
Quem escreve demais, sempre corre o risco de dizer alguma besteira; aliás, deveria ter o direito de falar alguma bobagem de vez em quando, mas essa parece que foi forte e destroçou o coração de alguns idealistas e infundiu raiva nos corações de outros, mais implacáveis e pouco propensos a virtudes cristãs...
Pois bem, o que eu quis dizer com essa frase, se me permitem esta correção tardia e se aceitam meu pedido de complacência?
Antes de mais nada, caberia transcrever aqui, pelo menos, o trecho em questão, pergunta e começo de resposta (que depois segue para as condições de ingresso na carreira):
“4. Existe a discussão sobre a relevância do curso para quem quer seguir carreira diplomática. É mesmo o melhor caminho ou o primeiro passo para o Instituto Rio Branco e o Itamaraty?
PRA: Não tenho certeza de que este seja o melhor caminho para os indivíduos que aspiram a ser alguma coisa na vida, pois se trata de uma área relativamente nova, ainda não suficientemente “testada” nos mercados de trabalho. O que ocorreu, nos últimos anos, levado pelos ventos da globalização e da regionalização, foi um fenômeno “anormal” de expansão “geométrica” dos cursos de relações internacionais, provavelmente sem qualquer relação com a demanda efetiva do mercado. Havia uma demanda da parte dos jovens, atraídos pelo que parece ser um campo novo e talvez vasto – mas provavelmente não suficientemente “elástico” como o desejado pelos jovens – e as instituições privadas de ensino se encarregaram de satisfazer essa demanda por cursos de “aspecto” internacional.”
A despeito da crueldade da frase – “que aspiram ser alguma coisa na vida” – não pretendi com isso relegar ao limbo dos projetos gorados todo e qualquer curso de relações internacionais, ainda que muitos deles possam tropeçar em algum exame de qualidade da Consultoria Tabajara, nem quis com isso dizer que todo jovem que entra num desses cursos pode estar adentrando naquele quinto ou sexto círculo do inferno, de que falou conhecido visitante de paragens mais animadas no lago sul de Brasília.
Minha intenção foi, tão simplesmente, chamar a atenção para o caráter ainda precário, não de todo sedimentado, da maior parte desses cursos, Brasil afora, sendo que a maior parte do “supply-side economics” dessa história toda pode responder bem mais a um efeito de moda – não que ela seja passageira – do que a uma demanda real pelos provedores naturais de empregos nessa área. Como expliquei diversas vezes, a oferta de emprego nas áreas governamental e acadêmica será necessariamente limitada, o que deveria canalizar a maior parte dos egressos para o único setor que cria riquezas, que gera emprego e renda neste país (como em qualquer outro): o setor privado.
Como tentei explicar, os business executives não sabem lidar muito bem com esses certificados de conclusão de cursos de RI, pois estão mais acostumados com as tradicionais disciplinas de direito, economia e administração.
Ainda nos falta uma pesquisa de campo sobre o destino profissional dos – quantos mesmo?: algumas centenas, vários milhares? – egressos desses cursos, para poder determinar com precisão quantos, de fato, encontram-se trabalhando em áreas afins com seu objeto de estudo e suposta especialidade. Não creio, empiricamente chutando, que cheguem a 30% dos formados, o que alguns poderia alegar que já se trata de uma boa média, já que dos “zilhões” de “advogados” que se formam neste país, quantos, de verdade, encontram-se exercendo a profissão da qual receberam um canudo (mas nem sempre uma formação condigna)?
Pode ser que eu seja pessimista demais, que o campo é mais vasto do que sonha minha vã filosofia “realista”...
Pode ser. Não pretendo, em todo caso, abdicar de minha capacidade crítica, de certa experiência de vida, de um relativo tino observador no triângulo isóceles das oportunidades desiguais na academia, no goverrno e no setor privado, para edulcorar a realidade, criar esperanças indevidas em tantos jovens que buscam não apenas um emprego e um meio de vida, mas uma realização pessoal e uma satifação intelectual na futura atividade profissional.
Espero, ao terminar este humilde pedido de perdão, que todos aqueles que me conhecem, que adivinham ou que já tinham percebido minhas reais intenções, me tenham a esta altura perdoado, e que aqueles que ainda não o fizeram, possam ler, ou reler, atentamente minhas palavras para saber que meus argumentos não são, de modo geral, capciosos, enganosos ou depreciativos de sua formação e futura profissão.
Como sou um autodidata radical, e um contrarianista aprendiz, sempre estou achando que os indivíduos devem mesmo é contar consigo mesmos, e traçarem por si próprios sua formação e destino, medindo cuidadosamente cada passo escolhido no caminho. Aqueles que vivem de “mensalão” familiar até uma idade adulta talvez não meçam bem a distância entre os sonhos da juventude e as realidades do mercado de trabalho, mas aqueles que foram obrigados a combinar, desde muito cedo, trabalho e estudos, devem saber muito bem do que estou falando.
Desejo, sinceramente, a todos os jovens que estudam relações internacionais no Brasil, em quaisquer faculdades que sejam, muita felicidade nos estudos, muito sucesso na vida, e um pouco de sorte no futuro trajeto profissional. Mas desejo mais ainda que eles possam realizar seus sonhos tendo plena consciência de todas as implicações das escolhas feitas em momento talvez precoce de suas vidas.
Voilà, foi apenas com esta singela intenção que escrevi aquele longo trabalho, que tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 3 de abril de 2006
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Depois de uma tremenda frase infeliz, o que mais posso fazer, me digam?
Me penitenciar, ajoelhar no milho, fornecer textos gratuitos de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil pelo resto da minha vida, dar consultoria de graça – o que aliás já faço, em bases informais – pelos próximos seis meses, fazer contrição, pedir remissão dos pecados, viajar a Canossa, arrastar uma pedra de Sísifo em alguma favela carioca, prometer comparecer, com despesas pagas por mim mesmo, a todos os encontros do ENERI, FENERI, ENEPRI, IRWI, ABRI, FECHA e outros mais, pelos próximos dez anos?
Pois é, estou tremendamente envergonhado – e até diria arrasado – pela frase transcrita abaixo, em letras garrafais – mais uma maneira de penitência – que nunca deveria ter sido pronunciada ou escrita:
"NÃO TENHO CERTEZA DE QUE ESSE SEJA O MELHOR CAMINHO PARA QUEM ASPIRA A SER ALGUMA COISA NA VIDA, POIS SE TRATA DE UMA ÁREA RELATIVAMENTE NOVA E NÃO SUFICIENTEMENTE "TESTADA" NOS MERCADOS DE TRABALHO"
(a matéria toda, para quem ainda não teve a oportunidade de ler, figura neste link: http://diplomaticas.blogspot.com/2006/03/303-os-novos-internacionalistas.html#links)
Sempre poderia alegar que a frase foi retirada do contexto, que fui mal interpretado, pedir que esqueçam o que eu escrevi (o que disse), que não era bem isso o que vocês e eu estamos pensando, que o repórter foi maldoso, que ele distorceu as minhas palavras, mais isso e mais aquilo, patati-patatá, mas isso não vai, obviamente, consertar o estrago já feito na minha reputação e na auto-estima dos estudantes de relações internacionais.
Sim, pois era deles que eu estava falando.
Minha única desculpa, a ser comprovada pelos que me conhecem, é, de verdade, o cansaço físico, depois de mais um desses dias extenuantes, quando somos assediados por gregos e goianos à procura de ajuda didática, o in-box lotado de dezenas de mensagens pedindo algo, e ainda vem o repórter querendo fechar a matéria “naquela quinta”, para o suplemento de fim de semana.
Fois apenas o cansaço físico, literal e lateral, que me fez perpetrar essa frase, da qual aliás sí vim “tomar conhecimento” depois que ela estava impressa no jornal – suplemento para “jovens e aborrecentes” FolhaTeen, da segunda-feira, 27 de março – e aí já não tinha mais volta. Juro que foi, mas isso não deve consertar o estrago do lado dos mais severos, cruéis e vingativos dos alunos que esperam um brilhante futuro pela frente com seus cursos de relações internacionais.
É evidente que se me fosse dado reler ou ouvir aquela mísera frase – selecionada entre dezenas de outras do material preparado para a matéria – eu não a teria “liberado”, pelo menos daquela forma.
E haveria alguma outra forma? Certamente que sim e, se me permite a indulgência dos que me leram até aqui, eu gostaria de explicar o que estava “por detrás do meu pensamento” – como diria algum gênio da língua – e que acabou saindo da forma mais arrevesada possível.
Explico, mas antes remeto ao conjunto de meus argumentos para que meus leitores possam constatar por si mesmos a “extensão” do meu “raciocínio” (palavra generosa, quando se está cansado e se pretende liquidar uma matéria o mais rapidamente possível). Os que desejarem ler essa peça singular, dotada de uma única frase atravessada, podem ver o trabalho “As relações internacionais como oportunidade profissional”, que está fracionado em cinco posts do meu blog “Cousas Diplomáticas” (começa por este link http://diplomaticas.blogspot.com/2006/03/282-as-relaes-internacionais-como.html#links e termina por este outro: http://diplomaticas.blogspot.com/2006/03/286-as-relaes-internacionais-como.html#links, sendo que a frase indigitada deve estar lá pelo meio).
Quem escreve demais, sempre corre o risco de dizer alguma besteira; aliás, deveria ter o direito de falar alguma bobagem de vez em quando, mas essa parece que foi forte e destroçou o coração de alguns idealistas e infundiu raiva nos corações de outros, mais implacáveis e pouco propensos a virtudes cristãs...
Pois bem, o que eu quis dizer com essa frase, se me permitem esta correção tardia e se aceitam meu pedido de complacência?
Antes de mais nada, caberia transcrever aqui, pelo menos, o trecho em questão, pergunta e começo de resposta (que depois segue para as condições de ingresso na carreira):
“4. Existe a discussão sobre a relevância do curso para quem quer seguir carreira diplomática. É mesmo o melhor caminho ou o primeiro passo para o Instituto Rio Branco e o Itamaraty?
PRA: Não tenho certeza de que este seja o melhor caminho para os indivíduos que aspiram a ser alguma coisa na vida, pois se trata de uma área relativamente nova, ainda não suficientemente “testada” nos mercados de trabalho. O que ocorreu, nos últimos anos, levado pelos ventos da globalização e da regionalização, foi um fenômeno “anormal” de expansão “geométrica” dos cursos de relações internacionais, provavelmente sem qualquer relação com a demanda efetiva do mercado. Havia uma demanda da parte dos jovens, atraídos pelo que parece ser um campo novo e talvez vasto – mas provavelmente não suficientemente “elástico” como o desejado pelos jovens – e as instituições privadas de ensino se encarregaram de satisfazer essa demanda por cursos de “aspecto” internacional.”
A despeito da crueldade da frase – “que aspiram ser alguma coisa na vida” – não pretendi com isso relegar ao limbo dos projetos gorados todo e qualquer curso de relações internacionais, ainda que muitos deles possam tropeçar em algum exame de qualidade da Consultoria Tabajara, nem quis com isso dizer que todo jovem que entra num desses cursos pode estar adentrando naquele quinto ou sexto círculo do inferno, de que falou conhecido visitante de paragens mais animadas no lago sul de Brasília.
Minha intenção foi, tão simplesmente, chamar a atenção para o caráter ainda precário, não de todo sedimentado, da maior parte desses cursos, Brasil afora, sendo que a maior parte do “supply-side economics” dessa história toda pode responder bem mais a um efeito de moda – não que ela seja passageira – do que a uma demanda real pelos provedores naturais de empregos nessa área. Como expliquei diversas vezes, a oferta de emprego nas áreas governamental e acadêmica será necessariamente limitada, o que deveria canalizar a maior parte dos egressos para o único setor que cria riquezas, que gera emprego e renda neste país (como em qualquer outro): o setor privado.
Como tentei explicar, os business executives não sabem lidar muito bem com esses certificados de conclusão de cursos de RI, pois estão mais acostumados com as tradicionais disciplinas de direito, economia e administração.
Ainda nos falta uma pesquisa de campo sobre o destino profissional dos – quantos mesmo?: algumas centenas, vários milhares? – egressos desses cursos, para poder determinar com precisão quantos, de fato, encontram-se trabalhando em áreas afins com seu objeto de estudo e suposta especialidade. Não creio, empiricamente chutando, que cheguem a 30% dos formados, o que alguns poderia alegar que já se trata de uma boa média, já que dos “zilhões” de “advogados” que se formam neste país, quantos, de verdade, encontram-se exercendo a profissão da qual receberam um canudo (mas nem sempre uma formação condigna)?
Pode ser que eu seja pessimista demais, que o campo é mais vasto do que sonha minha vã filosofia “realista”...
Pode ser. Não pretendo, em todo caso, abdicar de minha capacidade crítica, de certa experiência de vida, de um relativo tino observador no triângulo isóceles das oportunidades desiguais na academia, no goverrno e no setor privado, para edulcorar a realidade, criar esperanças indevidas em tantos jovens que buscam não apenas um emprego e um meio de vida, mas uma realização pessoal e uma satifação intelectual na futura atividade profissional.
Espero, ao terminar este humilde pedido de perdão, que todos aqueles que me conhecem, que adivinham ou que já tinham percebido minhas reais intenções, me tenham a esta altura perdoado, e que aqueles que ainda não o fizeram, possam ler, ou reler, atentamente minhas palavras para saber que meus argumentos não são, de modo geral, capciosos, enganosos ou depreciativos de sua formação e futura profissão.
Como sou um autodidata radical, e um contrarianista aprendiz, sempre estou achando que os indivíduos devem mesmo é contar consigo mesmos, e traçarem por si próprios sua formação e destino, medindo cuidadosamente cada passo escolhido no caminho. Aqueles que vivem de “mensalão” familiar até uma idade adulta talvez não meçam bem a distância entre os sonhos da juventude e as realidades do mercado de trabalho, mas aqueles que foram obrigados a combinar, desde muito cedo, trabalho e estudos, devem saber muito bem do que estou falando.
Desejo, sinceramente, a todos os jovens que estudam relações internacionais no Brasil, em quaisquer faculdades que sejam, muita felicidade nos estudos, muito sucesso na vida, e um pouco de sorte no futuro trajeto profissional. Mas desejo mais ainda que eles possam realizar seus sonhos tendo plena consciência de todas as implicações das escolhas feitas em momento talvez precoce de suas vidas.
Voilà, foi apenas com esta singela intenção que escrevi aquele longo trabalho, que tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 3 de abril de 2006
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