219) A historia do comunismo

Communism
Dead end
The Economist, July 2, 2009

Mankind’s biggest mistake

The Rise and Fall of Communism
Archie Brown.
Ecco; 736 pages; $35.99. The Bodley Head; £25

WHY did communism take root? Given its sorrowful harvest, why did it keep spreading? And what ever enabled it to last so long? Archie Brown’s new history of communism identifies three big questions, perhaps even the biggest, of the past century.

At first sight, all seem puzzling. Communism was an impractical mishmash of ideas, imposed by squabbling zealots that promised much, delivered little and cost millions of lives. It is striking that 36 countries at one time or another adopted this system and that five—Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam and the biggest of them all, China—still pay lip service to it.

Communism’s first big advantage was that it played on two human appetites—the noble desire for justice and the baser hunger for vengeance. Mr Brown, emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University, traces communism’s idealistic roots in the struggle against feudal oppression and beastly working conditions. The moral weight of Karl Marx’s criticisms of 19th-century capitalism even won him praise from the high priest of Western liberalism, Karl Popper, a Viennese-born philosopher who emigrated to London. But the intoxicating excitement of revolutionary shortcuts attracted the ruthless and dogmatic, who saw the chance to put into practice Marx’s muddled Utopian notions—and settle some scores on the way. “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in killing, the better,” wrote Lenin in 1922. Even so, many still resist the idea that the founding fathers of communism were murderous maniacs. Revolutions against corrupt and ossified regimes in countries such as Russia and China stoked a steamy enthusiasm that took decades to dissipate.

The communist block also had two bits of good fortune. The economic slump of the 1930s discredited democracy and capitalism. Then came Hitler’s disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. The victory over fascism in Europe gave the Soviet Union, an ally of America and Britain, renewed moral weight. Given what had happened in Russia under Stalin in the 1930s, that hardly seemed deserved. As Mr Brown notes, Stalin trusted the Nazi leader more than he trusted his own generals. The Soviet Union killed more top German communists than Hitler’s regime did. Yet in some countries, Czechoslovakia for example, Soviet forces were initially welcomed as liberators, and Stalinist regimes took power with a degree of popular consent. In other countries, such as Poland and the Baltic states, it looked different: one occupation gave way to another.

The promised communist nirvana brought a mixture of mass murder, lies and latterly the grey reality of self-interested rule by authoritarian bureaucrats. But it was a bit late for second thoughts. Communist regimes proved remarkably durable, partly thanks to the use of privileges for the docile and intimidation of the independent-minded. Another source of strength was tight control of language and information that deemed most criticism unpatriotic. Cracks came as information spread, especially about the system’s bogus history and economic failings. Nationalism was a potent solvent too, particularly in places such as the Baltic states, that felt they were captive nations of a foreign empire.

Mr Brown deals conscientiously with communism in Asia and the solitary Latin American outpost of Cuba. But his main expertise, acquired over decades of scholarly study, is in the Soviet Union and its east European empire. His account is studded with delightfully pertinent and pithy personal observations and anecdotes: the censors in tsarist Russia decided that Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was so boring that it wasn’t worth banning. Lenin thought 1917 was too early for revolution in Russia. At the Battle of Stalingrad, 50,000 Soviet citizens, including turncoats, volunteers and conscripts, were fighting on the German side. An American communist agitator once began a speech with the immortal lines: “Workers and peasants of Brooklyn”. Nikita Khrushchev hated putting things in writing because he couldn’t spell.

It is easy to be polemical about communism. Mr Brown strives to be fair-minded. He gives careful weight to the achievements of the Soviet regime, particularly in bringing mass literacy to Russia, and unparalleled social mobility. But he is sometimes too lenient. Was the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev really just an authoritarian regime, rather than a totalitarian one? Saying that the Soviet Union “repossessed” the Baltic states in the secret Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 would strike most people there as a glaring misreading of history. And his discussion of economics is skimpy and clichéd.

Yet as a single-volume account of mankind’s biggest mistake, Mr Brown’s book is hard to beat. Readers over the age of 40 will find it an uncomfortable reminder of a dangerous and dismal past. For most younger readers, it will seem all but unimaginable.

218) Desconstruindo Ha-Joon Chang, um samaritano simplesmente equivocado

O Mito do Protecionismo Esclarecido
Rodrigo Constantino

Uma coletânea de falácias econômicas. Assim pode ser resumido “Maus
Samaritanos”, o novo livro do economista de Cambridge Ha-Joon Chang,
que é também o autor de “Chutando a Escada”. Ele tomou emprestada essa
expressão de Friedrich List, o economista do século XIX que defendia o
nacionalismo mercantilista. O novo livro de Chang ataca o livre
comércio e defende o protecionismo estatal, através tanto de subsídios
como de tarifas alfandegárias. O prefácio da edição brasileira foi
escrito por Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, que foi ministro das Finanças
durante o governo Sarney e adotou o congelamento de preços como meio
para combater a inflação galopante. Bresser denomina a estratégia
pregada por Chang de “novo desenvolvimentismo”. Na verdade, trata-se
do velho mercantilismo de List.

A principal tese do livro é que os países atualmente desenvolvidos
chegaram neste patamar de desenvolvimento graças ao protecionismo
estatal, e não ao livre comércio. Uma vez no topo, eles pretendem
“chutar a escada” e impedir o acesso aos demais países pobres. Contam
com um grande e poderoso aparato de economistas neoliberais – os “maus
samaritanos” – para defender essa estratégia. Assim, a privatização, a
redução da burocracia, um banco central menos politizado, a meta de
inflação, a abertura comercial e o equilíbrio orçamentário do governo
seriam medidas prejudiciais aos países pobres, defendidas pelos
neoliberais por auto-interesse ou ignorância. A “Trindade Profana”,
representada pelo FMI, OMC e Banco Mundial, seria o principal
mecanismo para derrubar essa escada de acesso ao desenvolvimento.

O desenvolvimentismo de Chang é muito similar ao nacionalismo de List,
economista que representava o oposto daquilo que Adam Smith defendia.
Contra a “mão invisível” do mercado, seria necessária a “mão
benevolente” do governo. O protecionismo de Chang é o mercantilismo
com um véu novo. Retirando o eufemismo, resta o velho dirigismo
estatal, a crença de que o Estado deve assumir a locomotiva do
desenvolvimento econômico. Friedrich List já dizia que somente onde o
interesse dos indivíduos estivesse subordinado ao da nação, haveria
desenvolvimento decente. A nação era vista como um ente concreto, com
desejos e interesses, que justificavam inclusive o sacrifício dos
indivíduos. Quem saberia dizer quais os verdadeiros interesses da
nação? Com certeza, os “sábios”, entre eles List. A glória futura da
nação valeria mais que tudo. Nesse aspecto ao menos, Hitler não foi
muito criativo.

O nacionalismo de Chang parece um marxismo exportado para nações. Os
países ricos exploram os países pobres. Portanto, as regras do jogo
não podem ser iguais. Seria injusto, segundo o autor, tratar da mesma
forma países desiguais. Os países ricos deveriam aceitar o
protecionismo dos mais pobres sem reclamar, pois são mais ricos.
Justiça, por esta ótica, é garantir um tratamento diferencial com base
na renda. Um dos problemas disso é que o protecionismo não beneficia
os países pobres, mas sim alguns grupos ricos desses países, à custa
do restante do povo. É análogo ao próprio marxismo dentro de cada
nação: atacar os mais ricos não favorece os mais pobres, e sim o
contrário. Outro problema desse raciocínio é que o protecionismo
seria, então, desejável dentro da nação também. Cada estado deveria
proteger suas indústrias para garantir seu desenvolvimento. A lógica
poderia continuar: cada bairro deveria fazer o mesmo, para estimular
seu desenvolvimento. Afinal, o que há de tão especial no conceito de
nação? No extremo, acaba-se na conclusão de que a auto-subsistência do
indivíduo pode ser desejável.

Chang parece confundir correlação com causalidade. Ele cita que fases
protecionistas e com intervenção estatal forte apresentaram bons
resultados, enquanto reformas neoliberais geraram crises. A falácia
desse raciocínio é que o crescimento desenvolvimentista apenas
hipotecou o futuro. O autor chega a defender abertamente essa
política, quando afirma que “faz sentido para um país em
desenvolvimento ‘emprestar das gerações futuras’, assumindo déficits
orçamentários para investir por seus próprios meios no presente e,
portanto, acelerar o crescimento econômico”. Após uma era de
crescimento artificialmente criado pelos gastos estatais sem lastro,
um duro ajuste se faz necessário. Mas Chang prefere condenar o
termômetro pela febre. Ele ataca os sintomas expostos pelo livre
mercado, em vez das causas plantadas pelo desenvolvimentismo. Não
obstante essa falácia estatística, resta questionar qual país não está
em desenvolvimento. O autor trata os países mais desenvolvidos como
países que chegaram ao patamar máximo de desenvolvimento, e não mais
tivessem que se desenvolver.

O autor defende até mesmo os programas de substituição das
importações, que nos remete ao caso brasileiro da “Lei da
Informática”, que condenou o país ao atraso tecnológico. Como pode ser
bom para o desenvolvimento de uma economia comprar verdadeiras
carroças pelo preço de uma Ferrari? Chang defende ainda que uma
inflação de até 40% ao ano pode ser desejável. Ele afirma: “A inflação
baixa e a prudência do governo podem ser prejudiciais ao
desenvolvimento econômico”. Dificilmente um brasileiro poderá
concordar com isso, se tem alguma memória.

O caso da Coréia, terra natal de Chang, é freqüentemente citado no
livro. Fica a impressão de que o protecionismo comercial seletivo e a
clarividência do governo foram responsáveis pelo sucesso relativo do
país, e não a maior abertura comercial e o investimento na educação,
respeitando-se a meritocracia. As falhas do modelo coreano acabam
transformadas pelo autor nas causas do sucesso. Nenhuma vez é citada
no livro a palavra “chaebols”, por exemplo. O autor fala da ajuda
estatal à Samsung, mas esquece que os grandes conglomerados ajudados
pelo governo estiveram no epicentro da grande crise de 1997. O modelo
da Coréia deu certo a despeito do protecionismo, não por causa dele.

Outra falácia comum praticada pelo autor chama-se non sequitur: de
premissas verdadeiras, ele conclui coisas que não seguem delas. Se há
protecionismo nos países desenvolvidos, então ele é causa do sucesso,
afirma Chang. No livro, “aprendemos” que Taiwan, Cingapura, Irlanda,
Estados Unidos, Inglaterra e Suíça são exemplos de sucesso do
protecionismo esclarecido, e que Argentina, Brasil e Rússia são casos
de fracassos do neoliberalismo. Quanta inversão!

O autor afirma que o livre-comércio pode trazer benefícios no curto
prazo, mas condena o país pobre no longo prazo. É justamente o
contrário: proteger empresas nacionais pode gerar algum ganho
artificial no curto prazo, mas sacrifica o desenvolvimento do país no
futuro.

Como todo desenvolvimentista, o autor se coloca sempre do lado do
poder. Ele parece acreditar que um “déspota esclarecido” irá decidir
qual protecionismo é desejável, e tomar medidas sempre com o
“bem-comum” em mente. O governante será clarividente e honesto, uma
espécie de “rei filósofo” platônico. Chang chega a afirmar: “O
desenvolvimento econômico requer pessoas como Henrique VII, que
constroem um futuro novo, em vez de pessoas como Robinson Crusoé, que
vivem o dia de hoje”. Em outras palavras, os indivíduos não conseguem,
através da sua liberdade, gerar desenvolvimento econômico por conta
própria. Eles precisam da sabedoria dos governantes, sob o auxílio dos
conselheiros, Chang incluído. A arrogância vem à tona quando o autor
diz: “O comércio é simplesmente muito importante para o
desenvolvimento econômico para ser deixado por conta dos economistas
do livre-comércio”. Ou seja, o comércio não deve ser livre, mas sim
controlado pelos economistas “esclarecidos”, os desenvolvimentistas,
como o próprio Chang. Apenas eles sabem quais são os “interesses da
nação”, e estão dispostos a sacrificar seus próprios interesses por
este fim.

O paternalismo está presente na mentalidade desenvolvimentista também.
O governo é o pai que ama seu filho – o povo, e que irá cuidar dele.
De fato, Chang usa a analogia para defender o protecionismo das
“empresas nascentes”, alegando que cuida de seu filho de seis anos,
protegendo-o da concorrência até sua maturidade. Getúlio Vargas, o
“pai dos pobres”, não faria uso de uma metáfora diferente. De fato,
esses paternalistas são mesmo os “pais dos pobres”, já que suas
políticas costumam parir muita pobreza.

Em um abuso da linguagem orwelliana, Chang chega a afirmar que,
“paradoxalmente, a política de livre-comércio reduz a liberdade dos
países em desenvolvimento que a praticam”. Bota paradoxo nisso! Como
um povo pode perder liberdade ao receber mais liberdade para escolher
de quem comprar os bens e serviços demandados, independente da
nacionalidade do vendedor? Eis um mistério que somente o “duplipensar”
pode explicar.

Chang entende os problemas da gestão estatal, como o uso do dinheiro
da “viúva”, o orçamento ilimitado e a falta de incentivos adequados.
Mas ele acha que o mesmo se dá no setor privado, na mesma escala. Para
defender esta estranha premissa, ele cita exemplos de fracassos no
setor privado, como a WorldCom, e supostos casos de sucesso de
empresas estatais, como a Petrobrás e Embraer no Brasil, e a POSCO na
Coréia. Ele apela para a falácia de usar alguns casos isolados para
concluir algo generalizado. Além disso, ele ignora o custo de
oportunidade, ou seja, como teriam sido utilizados os recursos
drenados pelo governo para sustentar por tanto tempo essas estatais.
Como já alertava Bastiat, existe aquilo que se vê e aquilo que não se
vê. Para a Petrobrás atingir uma tecnologia de ponta em águas
profundas, quanto custou ao país suas décadas de monopólio garantido
pelo governo? Como estaria o setor atualmente se o governo tivesse
permitido a livre concorrência desde cedo, incluindo empresas
estrangeiras? O caso da Embraer é ainda mais enganoso: o governo
sustentou a empresa deficitária por anos, e apenas com sua
privatização ela realmente deslanchou. A POSCO foi privatizada como um
conglomerado bastante ineficiente, que investia em diversos setores
sem ligação alguma.

A inversão que Chang faz em relação ao foco no longo prazo é total.
Para ele, apenas o governo tem esse foco, enquanto o capitalista quer
somente o lucro imediato. É justamente o contrário. O político foca
nas próximas eleições, pois precisa ser eleito para sobreviver como
político; enquanto o capitalista foca na maximização do valor presente
dos fluxos de caixa, muitas vezes distantes no tempo.

Para Chang, entre as principais causas da corrupção estão a baixa
receita tributária do governo e os salários baixos dos funcionários
públicos (que no Brasil ganham, na média, o triplo do que ganha o
setor privado). Reduzir as regulamentações, a burocracia e a
quantidade de recursos que transita pelo governo levaria a um aumento
da corrupção! Ele diz com todas as letras: “A corrupção normalmente
existe porque há muitas forças de mercado, não poucas”. A Rússia que o
diga! Ou o Brasil também, um país com problema crônico de corrupção e
um governo totalmente inchado. Chang parece defender o uso de
sanguessugas para curar a leucemia.

Chang se coloca como o “bom samaritano” em defesa dos países pobres,
mas, na verdade, ele é apenas o defensor dos ricos dos países pobres.
Seu discurso nacionalista e protecionista seria abraçado com
empolgação pelos grandes empresários da FIESP, por exemplo,
interessados em barrar a livre concorrência que vem de fora. Nenhum
“lobista” dos grandes grupos de interesse dos países pobres poderia
contar com um apoio mais sintonizado que aquele oferecido por Chang.
Após expor tantas falácias, pode-se concluir apenas uma coisa: com
“bons samaritanos” como o senhor Chang, os pobres dos países
subdesenvolvidos não precisam de inimigos!

217) Banqueiros centrais: como produzir uma boa crise

Resenha New York Times Review of Books, February 15, 2009


Flying Blind
By JOE NOCERA

LORDS OF FINANCE
The Bankers Who Broke the World
By Liaquat Ahamed
Illustrated. 564 pp. The Penguin Press. $32.95

“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

So wrote the great economic iconoclast John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” published in December of that year. Thirteen months had passed since the crash of 1929; the world was living, in Keynes’s words, in “the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.”

I shuddered when I read this quotation in “Lords of Finance,” a magisterial work by Liaquat Ahamed, a veteran hedge fund manager and Brookings Institution trustee. A grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, the book describes a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.

The “delicate machine” Keynes referred to was of course the global economy. By 1930, when he wrote his essay, the West was in bad shape. A combination of divisive postwar politics, a refusal to abandon economic orthodoxy and a series of policy errors by the world’s four most important central banks — the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the German Reichsbank and the Banque de France — had led to the near collapse of capitalist economies in the West. “Industrial production had fallen 30 percent in the United States, 25 percent in Germany and 20 percent in Britain,” Ahamed writes. “Over 5 million men were looking for work in the United States, another 4.5 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain.”

And yet — and this is why I shuddered — it was also a moment not unlike the one we’re living through now. As scary as things were, it was clear that the abyss had not yet been reached, and there was still a chance that the global economy could pull back from the brink. With the right moves from the central bankers — and a little luck — the Western economies might yet right themselves. In December 1930, the world was holding its breath.

Alas, it was not to be. Six months later, an Austrian bank collapsed, resulting in a run on the rest of Austria’s banks. The central bankers responded both belatedly and tepidly, failing to stem the run and then making a new round of policy errors that compounded matters. By 1932, the United States had entered the worst year of the Great Depression — while in Germany Hitler’s ascent was assured.

The lords of finance who constitute the title of this book are the four central bankers who dominated that postwar era: Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Montagu Norman, the longtime head of the Bank of England; Émile Moreau of the Banque de France; and Hjalmar Schacht, who headed the Reichsbank. Ahamed says he got the idea for this book when he read a 1999 Time magazine cover story headlined “The Committee to Save the World,” about Alan Greenspan (then the Federal Reserve chairman), Robert Rubin (Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary) and Lawrence Summers (Rubin’s No. 2). He realized that in the 1920s, the four top central bankers had acquired a similar mystique and fame; they were sometimes described as “the most exclusive club in the world.” He decided to tell the story of “the descent from the roaring boom of the ’20s into the Great Depression” by “looking over the shoulders” of these four men.

From a literary point of view — and let me pause to note that this is a beautifully written book; Ahamed has a gift for phrase-making and storytelling that most full-time writers would envy — the decision to build “Lords of Finance” around these four men is a brilliant conceit. Each of them was a powerful personality, with the full range of strengths and weaknesses, insights and eccentricities. Because much of the book concerns decisions, for instance, to raise or lower interest rates, you need great characters to pull the story along, and Ahamed not only has them but also knows how to make them come alive. Strong is the domineering American; Schacht the arrogant, headstrong German; Norman and Moreau the prideful Europeans. Strong and Norman became close friends, and their letters to each other are a rich source of material, sometimes quite touching.

But as Ahamed’s narrative makes clear, it’s also a little unfair to portray these men as “the bankers who broke the world,” as the subtitle phrases it. For one thing, by the middle of 1931, Norman was the only one of the four still in his job. (Strong, who for all intents and purposes invented the role of Federal Reserve chairman, died in 1928.) For another, they each became famous not because of their mistakes but because of their triumphs. To take the most striking example, Schacht, a prosperous banker, was made Germany’s “currency commissioner” in November 1923, when that country’s hyperinflation was completely out of control. (How bad was it? “On Nov. 5,” Ahamed writes, “the price of a two-kilo loaf of bread had soared from 20 billion marks to 140 billion, sparking off nationwide riots.”) In a brilliant stroke, Schacht created a new currency, the Rentenmark, then chose the exact right moment to fix it to the mark (at 1 trillion marks to one!). In so doing, he restored faith in Germany’s currency and beat back inflation. The German press took to calling him the “Miracle Man.”

Besides, the central bankers were prisoners of the economic orthodoxy of their time: the powerful belief that sound monetary policy had to revolve around the gold standard. That is, each country’s reserve bank had to have a certain amount of gold in its vaults to back up its currency — and indeed, “all paper money was legally obligated to be freely convertible into its gold equivalent,” as Ahamed says. Again and again, this straitjacket caused the central bankers — especially Norman, gold’s most fervent advocate — to make moves, like raising interest rates, that would allow their countries to hold on to their dwindling gold supplies, even though the larger economy desperately needed help in the form of lower interest rates.

Finally, Ahamed lays the blame for much of the economic turmoil of the 1930s on an issue the central bankers had no control over: the insistence by the Allies that Germany pay war reparations far beyond its means.Norman in particular was fiercely opposed to the size of the reparations the Allies were demanding, arguing that they would bring down the German economy — which is precisely what happened. By the early 1930s, less than eight years after hyperinflation had been brought under control, Germany was effectively bankrupt, and German resentment over the onerous efforts to extract billions in reparations helped pave the way for Hitler.

You read Ahamed’s sections on reparations — and there are lots of them because the issue dogged the world for more than a decade — with a growing sense of horror, knowing how it all turns out. But you also read this book with a growing sense of recognition. As you learn how the world spiraled into depression, about the interconnectedness of the banking system, where a failure in one country led to problems in other countries, about the way economic orthodoxy caused brilliant central bankers to make mistake after mistake, and on and on — you can’t help thinking about the economic crisis we’re living through now.

The central bankers of the 1920s and ’30s were flying blind; Ahamed makes that quite clear. They could only hope the moves they made would help the economy instead of hurting it. Sometimes they were right, but often they were wrong. We like to think that today we have a better grasp of the machinery that moves an economy — but do we? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson were much quicker than the earlier lords of finance to throw money at the banking system to prevent it from collapsing, a lesson they learned from the inaction of the Federal Reserve in the 1930s. But Paulson also allowed Lehman Brothers to default, an event that set off a contagion of failure around the world.

Here at this critical moment, with a new administration having just taken office, and with so much riding on its policy responses to the current crisis, “Lords of Finance” poses an unsettling question. Do we really understand the workings of that delicate machine any better than our forebears did? Or do we only think we do?

Joe Nocera writes the Talking Business column for The Times.

==============

First Chapter
‘Lords of Finance’
By LIAQUAT AHAMED

Introduction

On August 15, 1931, the following press statement was issued: "The Governor of the Bank of England has been indisposed as a result of the exceptional strain to which he has been subjected in recent months. Acting on medical advice he has abandoned all work and has gone abroad for rest and change." The governor was Montagu Collet Norman, D.S.O. — having repeatedly turned down a title, he was not, as so many people assumed, Sir Montagu Norman or Lord Norman. Nevertheless, he did take great pride in that D.S.O after his name — the Distinguished Service Order, the second highest decoration for bravery by a military officer.

Norman was generally wary of the press and was infamous for the lengths to which he would go to escape prying reporters — traveling under a false identity; skipping off trains; even once, slipping over the side of an ocean vessel by way of a rope ladder in rough seas. On this occasion, however, as he prepared to board the liner Duchess of York for Canada, he was unusually forthcoming. With that talent for understatement that came so naturally to his class and country, he declared to the reporters gathered at dockside, "I feel I want a rest because I have had a very hard time lately. I have not been quite as well as I would like and I think a trip on this fine boat will do me good."

The fragility of his mental constitution had long been an open secret within financial circles. Few members of the public knew the real truth — that for the last two weeks, as the world financial crisis had reached a crescendo and the European banking system teetered on the edge of collapse, the governor had been incapacitated by a nervous breakdown, brought on by extreme stress. The Bank press release, carried in newspapers from San Francisco to Shanghai, therefore came as a great shock to investors everywhere.

It is difficult so many years after these events to recapture the power and prestige of Montagu Norman in that period between the wars — his name carries little resonance now. But at the time, he was considered the most influential central banker in the world, according to the New York Times, the "monarch of [an] invisible empire." For Jean Monnet, godfather of the European Union, the Bank of England was then "the citadel of citadels" and "Montagu Norman was the man who governed the citadel. He was redoubtable."

Over the previous decade, he and the heads of the three other major central banks had been part of what the newspapers had dubbed "the most exclusive club in the world." Norman, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Émile Moreau of the Banque de France had formed a quartet of central bankers who had taken on the job of reconstructing the global financial machinery after the First World War.

But by the middle of 1931, Norman was the only remaining member of the original foursome. Strong had died in 1928 at the age of fifty-five, Moreau had retired in 1930, and Schacht had resigned in a dispute with his own government in 1930 and was flirting with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. And so the mantle of leadership of the financial world had fallen on the shoulders of this colorful but enigmatic Englishman with his "waggish" smile, his theatrical air of mystery, his Van Dyke beard, and his conspiratorial costume: broad-brimmed hat, fl owing cape, and sparkling emerald tie pin.

For the world's most important central banker to have a nervous breakdown as the global economy sank yet deeper into the second year of an unprecedented depression was truly unfortunate. Production in almost every country had collapsed — in the two worst hit, the United States and Germany, it had fallen 40 percent. Factories throughout the industrial world — from the car plants of Detroit to the steel mills of the Ruhr, from the silk mills of Lyons to the shipyards of Tyneside — were shuttered or working at a fraction of capacity. Faced with shrinking demand, businesses had cut prices by 25 percent in the two years since the slump had begun.

Armies of the unemployed now haunted the towns and cities of the industrial nations. In the United States, the world's largest economy, some 8 million men and women, close to 15 percent of the labor force, were out of work. Another 2.5 million men in Britain and 5 million in Germany, the second and third largest economies in the world, had joined the unemployment lines. Of the four great economic powers, only France seemed to have been somewhat protected from the ravages of the storm sweeping the world, but even it was now beginning to slide downward.

Gangs of unemployed youths and men with nothing to do loitered aimlessly at street corners, in parks, in bars and cafés. As more and more people were thrown out of work and unable to afford a decent place to live, grim jerry-built shantytowns constructed of packing cases, scrap iron, grease drums, tarpaulins, and even of motor car bodies had sprung up in cities such as New York and Chicago — there was even an encampment in Central Park. Similar makeshift colonies littered the fringes of Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden. In the United States, millions of vagrants, escaping the blight of inner-city poverty, had taken to the road in search of some kind — any kind — of work.

Unemployment led to violence and revolt. In the United States, food riots broke out in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and across the central and southwestern states. In Britain, the miners went out on strike, followed by the cotton mill workers and the weavers. Berlin was almost in a state of civil war. During the elections of September 1930, the Nazis, playing on the fears and frustrations of the unemployed and blaming everyone else — the Allies, the Communists, and the Jews — for the misery of Germany, gained close to 6.5 million votes, increasing their seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107 and making them the second largest parliamentary party after the Social Democrats. Meanwhile in the streets, Nazi and Communist gangs clashed daily. There were coups in Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Spain.

The biggest economic threat now came from the collapsing banking system. In December 1930, the Bank of United States, which despite its name was a private bank with no official status, went down in the largest single bank failure in U.S. history, leaving frozen some $200 million in depositors' funds. In May 1931, the biggest bank in Austria, the Creditanstalt, owned by the Rothschilds no less, with $250 million in assets, closed its doors. On June 20, President Herbert Hoover announced a one-year moratorium on all payments of debts and reparations stemming from the war. In July, the Darmstadt and National Bank, the third largest in Germany, foundered, precipitating a run on the whole German banking system and a tidal wave of capital out of the country. The chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, declared a bank holiday, restricted how much German citizens could withdraw from their bank accounts, and suspended payments on Germany's short-term foreign debt. Later that month the crisis spread to the City of London, which, having lent heavily to Germany, found these claims now frozen. Suddenly, faced with the previously unthinkable prospect that Britain itself might be unable to meet its obligations, investors around the world started withdrawing funds from London. The Bank of England was forced to borrow $650 million from banks in France and the United States, including the Banque de France and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, to prevent its gold reserves from being completely depleted.

As the unemployment lines lengthened, banks shut their doors, farm prices collapsed, and factories closed, there was talk of apocalypse. On June 22, the noted economist John Maynard Keynes told a Chicago audience, "We are today in the middle of the greatest catastrophe — the greatest catastrophe due almost to entirely economic causes — of the modern world. I am told that the view is held in Moscow that this is the last, the culminating crisis of capitalism, and that our existing order of society will not survive it." The historian Arnold Toynbee, who knew a thing or two about the rise and fall of civilizations, wrote in his annual review of the year's events for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, "In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work."

During the summer a letter that Montagu Norman had written just a few months before to his counterpart at the Banque de France, Clément Moret, appeared in the press. "Unless drastic measures are taken to save it, the capitalist system throughout the civilized world will be wrecked within a year," declared Norman, adding in the waspish tone that he reserved for the French, "I should like this prediction to be filed for future reference." It was rumored that before he went off to convalesce in Canada, he had insisted that ration books be printed in case the country reverted to barter in the wake of a general currency collapse across Europe.

At times of crisis, central bankers generally believe that it is prudent to obey the admonition that mothers over the centuries have passed on to their children: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." It avoids the recurring dilemma that confronts financial officials dealing with a panic — they can be honest in their public statements and thereby feed the frenzy or they can try to be reassuring, which usually entails resorting to outright untruths. That a man in Norman's position was willing to talk quite openly about the collapse of Western civilization signaled loud and clear that, in the face of the "economic blizzard," monetary leaders were running out of ideas and ready to declare defeat.

Not only was Norman the most eminent banker in the world, he was also admired as a man of character and judgment by financiers and officials of every shade of political opinion. Within that bastion of the plutocracy the partnership of the House of Morgan, for example, no one's advice or counsel was more highly valued — the firm's senior partner, Thomas Lamont, would later acclaim him as "the wisest man he had ever met." At the other end of the political spectrum, the British chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Snowden, a fervent Socialist who had himself frequently predicted the collapse of capitalism, could write gushingly that Norman "might have stepped out of the frame of the portrait of the most handsome courtier who ever graced the court of a queen," that "his sympathy with the suffering of nations is as tender as that of a woman for her child," and that he had "in abundant measure the quality of inspiring confidence."

Norman had acquired his reputation for economic and financial perspicacity because he had been so right on so many things. Ever since the end of the war, he had been a fervent opponent of exacting reparations from Germany. Throughout the 1920s, he had raised the alarm that the world was running short of gold reserves. From an early stage, he had warned about the dangers of the stock market bubble in the United States.

But a few lonely voices insisted that it was he and the policies he espoused, especially his rigid, almost theological, belief in the benefits of the gold standard, that were to blame for the economic catastrophe that was overtaking the West. One of them was that of John Maynard Keynes. Another was that of Winston Churchill. A few days before Norman left for Canada on his enforced holiday, Churchill, who had lost most of his savings in the Wall Street crash two years earlier, wrote from Biarritz to his friend and former secretary Eddie Marsh, "Everyone I meet seems vaguely alarmed that something terrible is going to happen financially. . . . I hope we shall hang Montagu Norman if it does. I will certainly turn King's evidence against him."

The collapse of the world economy from 1929 to 1933 — now justly called the Great Depression — was the seminal economic event of the twentieth century. No country escaped its clutches; for more than ten years the malaise that it brought in its wake hung over the world, poisoning every aspect of social and material life and crippling the future of a whole generation. From it fl owed the turmoil of Europe in the "low dishonest decade" of the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, and the eventual slide of much of the globe into a Second World War even more terrible than the First. The story of the descent from the roaring boom of the twenties into the Great Depression can be told in many different ways. In this book, I have chosen to tell it by looking over the shoulders of the men in charge of the four principal central banks of the world: the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Reichsbank, and the Banque de France. When the First World War ended in 1918, among its innumerable casualties was the world's financial system. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, an elaborate machinery of international credit, centered in London, had been built upon the foundations of the gold standard and brought with it a remarkable expansion of trade and prosperity across the globe. In 1919, that machinery lay in ruins. Britain, France, and Germany were close to bankruptcy, their economies saddled with debt, their populations impoverished by rising prices, their currencies collapsing. Only the United States had emerged from the war economically stronger. Governments then believed matters of finance were best left to bankers; and so the task of restoring the world's finances fell into the hands of the central banks of the four major surviving powers: Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.

This book traces the efforts of these central bankers to reconstruct the system of international finance after the First World War. It describes how, for a brief period in the mid-1920s, they appeared to succeed: the world's currencies were stabilized, capital began fl owing freely across the globe, and economic growth resumed once again. But beneath the veneer of boomtown prosperity, cracks began to appear and the gold standard, which all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability, proved to be a straitjacket. The final chapters of the book describe the frantic and eventually futile attempts of central bankers as they struggled to prevent the whole world economy from plunging into the downward spiral of the Great Depression.

The 1920s were an era, like today's, when central bankers were invested with unusual power and extraordinary prestige. Four men in particular dominate this story: at the Bank of England was the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman; at the Banque de France, Émile Moreau, xenophobic and suspicious; at the Reichsbank, the rigid and arrogant but also brilliant and cunning Hjalmar Schacht; and finally, at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong, whose veneer of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man.

These four characters were, for much of the decade, at the center of events. Their lives and careers provide a distinctive window into this period of economic history, which helps to focus the complex history of the 1920s — the whole sorry and poisonous story of the failed peace, of war debts and reparations, of hyperinflation, of hard times in Europe and bonanza in America, of the boom and then the ensuing bust — to a more human, and manageable, scale.

Each in his own way illuminates the national psyche of his time. Montagu Norman, with his quixotic reliance on his faulty intuition, embodied a Britain stuck in the past and not yet reconciled to its newly diminished standing in the world. Émile Moreau, in his insularity and rancor, reflected all too accurately a France that had turned inward to lick the terrible wounds of war. Benjamin Strong, the man of action, represented a new generation in America, actively engaged in bringing its financial muscle to bear in world affairs. Only Hjalmar Schacht, in his angry arrogance, seemed out of tune with the weak and defeated Germany for which he spoke, although perhaps he was simply expressing a hidden truth about the nation's deeper mood.

There is also something very poignant in the contrast between the power these four men once exerted and their almost complete disappearance from the pages of history. Once styled by newspapers as the "World's Most Exclusive Club," these four once familiar names, lost under the rubble of time, now mean nothing to most people.

The 1920s were a time of transition. The curtain had come down on one age and a new age had yet to begin. Central banks were still privately owned, their key objectives to preserve the value of the currency and douse banking panics. They were only just beginning to espouse the notion that it was their responsibility to stabilize the economy.

During the nineteenth century, the governors of the Bank of England and the Banque de France were shadowy figures, well known in financial circles but otherwise out of the public eye. By contrast, in the 1920s, very much like today, central bankers became a major focus of public attention. Rumors of their decisions and secret meetings filled the daily press as they confronted many of the same economic issues and problems that their successors do today: dramatic movements in stock markets, volatile currencies, and great tides of capital spilling from one financial center to another.

They had to operate, however, in old-fashioned ways with only primitive tools and sources of information at their disposal. Economic statistics had only just begun to be collected. The bankers communicated by mail — at a time when a letter from New York to London took a week to arrive — or, in situations of real urgency, by cable. It was only in the very last stages of the drama that they could even contact one another on the telephone, and then only with some difficulty.

The tempo of life was also different. No one fl ew from one city to another. It was the golden age of the ocean liner when a transatlantic crossing took fi ve days, and one traveled with one's manservant, evening dress being de rigueur at dinner. It was an era when Benjamin Strong, head of the New York Federal Reserve, could disappear to Europe for four months without raising too many eyebrows — he would cross the Atlantic in May, spend the summer crisscrossing among the capitals of Europe consulting with his colleagues, take the occasional break at some of the more elegant spas and watering holes, and finally return to New York in September.

The world in which they operated was both cosmopolitan and curiously parochial. It was a society in which racial and national stereotypes were taken for granted as matters of fact rather than prejudice, a world in which Jack Morgan, son of the mighty Pierpont Morgan, might refuse to participate in a loan to Germany on the grounds that Germans were "second rate people" or oppose the appointment of Jews and Catholics to the Harvard Board of Overseers because "the Jew is always a Jew first and an American second, and the Roman Catholic, I fear, too often, a Papist first and an American second." In finance, during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, whether in London or New York, Berlin or Paris, there was one great divide. On one side stood the big Anglo-Saxon banking firms: J. P. Morgan, Brown Brothers, Barings; on the other the Jewish concerns: the four branches of the Rothschilds, Lazards, the great German Jewish banking houses of Warburgs and Kuhn Loeb, and mavericks such as Sir Ernest Cassel. Though the WASPs were, like so many people in those days, casually anti-Semitic, the two groups treated each other with a wary respect. They were all, however, snobs who looked down on interlopers. It was a society that could be smug and complacent, indifferent to the problems of unemployment or poverty. Only in Germany — and that is part of this story — did those undercurrents of prejudice eventually become truly malevolent.

As I began writing of these four central bankers and the role each played in setting the world on the path toward the Great Depression, another figure kept appearing, almost intruding into the scene: John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of his generation, though only thirty-six when he first appears in 1919. During every act of the drama so painfully being played out, he refused to keep quiet, insisting on at least one monologue even if it was from offstage. Unlike the others, he was not a decision maker. In those years, he was simply an independent observer, a commentator. But at every twist and turn of the plot, there he was holding forth from the wings, with his irreverent and playful wit, his luminous and constantly questioning intellect, and above all his remarkable ability to be right.

Keynes proved to be a useful counterpoint to the other four in the story that follows. They were all great lords of finance, standard-bearers of an orthodoxy that seemed to imprison them. By contrast, Keynes was a gadfly, a Cambridge don, a self-made millionaire, a publisher, journalist, and best-selling author who was breaking free from the paralyzing consensus that would lead to such disaster. Though only a decade younger than the four grandees, he might have been born into an entirely different generation.

To understand the role of central bankers during the Great Depression, it is first necessary to understand what a central bank is and a little about how it operates. Central banks are mysterious institutions, the full details of their inner workings so arcane that very few outsiders, even economists, fully understand them. Boiled down to its essentials, a central bank is a bank that has been granted a monopoly over the issuance of currency.* This power gives it the ability to regulate the price of credit — interest rates — and hence to determine how much money flows through the economy.

Despite their role as national institutions determining credit policy for their entire countries, in 1914 most central banks were still privately owned. They therefore occupied a strange hybrid zone, accountable primarily to their directors, who were mainly bankers, paying dividends to their shareholders, but given extraordinary powers for entirely nonprofi t purposes. Unlike today, however, when central banks are required by law to promote price stability and full employment, in 1914 the single most important, indeed overriding, objective of these institutions was to preserve the value of the currency.

At the time, all major currencies were on the gold standard, which tied a currency in value to a very specific quantity of gold. The pound sterling, for example, was defined as equivalent to 113 grains of pure gold, a grain being a unit of weight notionally equal to that of a typical grain taken from the middle of an ear of wheat. Similarly, the dollar was defined as 23.22 grains of gold of similar fineness. Since all currencies were fixed against gold, a corollary was that they were all fixed against one another. Thus there were 113/23.22 or $4.86 dollars to the pound. All paper money was legally obligated to be freely convertible into its gold equivalent, and each of the major central banks stood ready to exchange gold bullion for any amount of their own currencies

Gold had been used as a form of currency for millennia. As of 1913, a little over $3 billion, about a quarter of the currency actually circulating around the world, consisted of gold coins, another 15 percent of silver, and the remaining 60 percent of paper money. Gold coinage, however, was only a part, and not the most important part, of the picture.

Most of the monetary gold in the world, almost two-thirds, did not circulate but lay buried deep underground, stacked up in the form of ingots in the vaults of banks. In each country, though every bank held some bullion, the bulk of the nation's gold was concentrated in the vaults of the central bank. This hidden treasure provided the reserves for the banking system, determined the supply of money and credit within the economy, and served as the anchor for the gold standard.

While central banks had been granted the right to issue currency — in effect to print money — in order to ensure that that privilege was not abused, each one of them was required by law to maintain a certain quantity of bullion as backing for its paper money. These regulations varied from country to country. For example, at the Bank of England, the first $75 million equivalent of pounds that it printed were exempt, but any currency in excess of this amount had to be fully matched by gold. The Federal Reserve (the Fed), on the other hand, was required to have 40 percent of all the currency it issued on hand in gold — with no exemption floor. But varied as these regulations were, their ultimate effect was to tie the amount of each currency automatically and almost mechanically to its central banks' gold reserves.

In order to control the flow of currency into the economy, the central bank varied interest rates. It was like turning the dials up or down a notch on a giant monetary thermostat. When gold accumulated in its vaults, it would reduce the cost of credit, encouraging consumers and businesses to borrow and thus pump more money into the system. By contrast, when gold was scarce, interest rates were raised, consumers and businesses cut back, and the amount of currency in circulation contracted.

Because the value of a currency was tied, by law, to a specific quantity of gold and because the amount of currency that could be issued was tied to the quantity of gold reserves, governments had to live within their means, and when strapped for cash, could not manipulate the value of the currency. Inflation therefore remained low. Joining the gold standard became a "badge of honor," a signal that each subscribing government had pledged itself to a stable currency and orthodox financial policies. By 1914, fifty-nine countries had bound their currencies to gold.

Few people realized how fragile a system this was, built as it was on so narrow a base. The totality of gold ever mined in the whole world since the dawn of time was barely enough to fill a modest two-story town house. Moreover, new supplies were neither stable nor predictable, coming as they did in fits and starts and only by sheer coincidence arriving in sufficient quantities to meet the needs of the world economy. As a result, during periods when new gold finds were lean, such as between the California and Australian gold rushes of the 1850s and the discoveries in South Africa in the 1890s, prices of commodities fell across the world.

The gold standard was not without its critics. Many were simply cranks. Others, however, believed that allowing the growth of credit to be restricted by the amount of gold, especially during periods of falling prices, hurt producers and debtors — especially farmers, who were both.

The most famous spokesman for looser money and easier credit was Williams Jennings Bryan, the populist congressman from the farm state of Nebraska. He campaigned tirelessly to break the privileged status of gold and to expand the base upon which credit was created by including silver as a reserve metal. At the Democratic convention of 1896 he made one of the great speeches of American history — a wonderfully overripe fl ight of rhetoric delivered in that deep commanding voice of his — in which, addressing Eastern bankers, he declared, "You came to tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile plains. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the city. . . . You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

It was a message whose time had come and gone. Ten years before he delivered that speech, two gold prospectors in South Africa, while out for a Sunday walk on a farm in the Witwatersrand, stumbled across a rocky formation that they recognized as gold-bearing reef. It proved to be an outcrop of the largest goldfield in the world. By the time of Bryan's speech, gold production had jumped 50 percent, South Africa had overtaken the United States as the world's largest producer, and the gold drought was over. Prices for all goods, including agricultural commodities, once again began to rise. Bryan won the Democratic nomination then and twice more, in 1900 and 1908, but he was never elected president.

Though prices rose and fell in great cycles under the gold standard due to ebbs and flows in the supply of the precious metal, the slope of these curves was gentle and at the end of the day prices returned to where they began. While it may have succeeded in controlling inflation, the gold standard was incapable of preventing the sort of financial booms and busts that were, and continue to be, such a feature of the economic landscape. These bubbles and crises seem to be deep-rooted in human nature and inherent to the capitalist system. By one count there have been sixty different crises since the early seventeenth century — the first documented bank panic can, however, be dated to A.D. 33 when the Emperor Tiberius had to inject one million gold pieces of public money into the Roman financial system to keep it from collapsing.

Each of these episodes differed in detail. Some originated in the stock market, some in the credit market, some in the foreign exchange market, occasionally even in the world of commodities. Sometimes they affected a single country, sometimes a group of countries, very occasionally the whole world. All, however, shared a common pattern: an eerily similar cycle from greed to fear.

Financial crises would generally begin innocently enough with a surge of healthy optimism among investors. Over time, reinforced by cavalier attitudes to risk among bankers, this optimism would transform itself into overconfidence, occasionally even into a mania. The accompanying boom would go on for much longer than anyone expected. Then would come a sudden shock — a bankruptcy, a surprisingly large loss, a financial scandal involving fraud. Whatever the event, it would provoke a sudden and dramatic shift in sentiment. Panic would ensue. As investors were forced to liquidate into a falling market, losses would mount, banks would cut back their loans, and frightened depositors would start pulling their money out of banks.

If all that happened during these periods of so-called distress was that foolish investors and lenders lost money, no one else would have cared. But a problem in one bank raised fears of problems at other banks. And because financial institutions were so interconnected, borrowing large amounts of money from one another even in the nineteenth century, difficulties in one area would transmit themselves through the entire system. It was precisely because crises had a way of spreading, threatening to undermine the integrity of the whole system, that central banks became involved. In addition to keeping their hands on the levers of the gold standard, they therefore acquired a second role — that of forestalling bank panics and other financial crises.

The central banks had powerful tools to deal with these outbursts — specifically their authority to print currency and their ability to marshal their large concentrated holdings of gold. But for all of this armory of instruments, ultimately the goal of a central bank in a financial crisis was both very elusive — to reestablish trust in banks.

Such breakdowns are not some historical curiosity. As I write this in October 2008, the world is in the middle of one such panic — the most severe for seventy-five years, since the bank runs of 1931–1933 that feature so prominently in the last few chapters of this book. The credit markets are frozen, financial institutions are hoarding cash, banks are going under or being taken over by the week, stock markets are crumbling. Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm. Watching the world's central bankers and finance officials grapping with the current situation — trying one thing after another to restore confidence, throwing everything they can at the problem, coping daily with unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment shift — reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics. In trying to calm anxious investors and soothe skittish markets, central bankers are called upon to wrestle with some of the most elemental and unpredictable forces of mass psychology. It is the skill that they display in navigating these storms through uncharted waters that ultimately makes or breaks their reputation.

*The monopoly need not be complete. In Britain, while the Bank of England was granted a monopoly of currency in 1844, Scottish banks continued to issue currency and existing English banks with the authority to issue currency were grandfathered. The last private English banknotes were issued in 1921 by Fox, Fowler and Company, a Somerset bank.

Excerpted from LORDS OF FINANCE by Liaquat Ahamed. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Liaquat Ahamed, 2009.

216) Dicionario de Relacoes Internacionais

Resenha de
SILVA, Guilherme A.; GONÇALVES, Williams
Dicionário de Relações Internacionais
(Barueri, SP: Manole, 2005. ISBN 85-204-1945-3)

Ricardo dos Santos Poletto
Bacharelando em Relações Internacionais pela Universidade de Brasília UnB (rspoletto@yahoo.com)

Um dicionário temático consiste em uma seleção de termos de uma dada ciência ou área de estudos com a finalidade de oferecer um referencial de conceitos reputados como instrumentais. Ainda que não sejam consideradas uma ciência, as Relações Internacionais é um campo de estudos em franca expansão, de forma que não faria mais sentido reservar a elas modestas linhas estancadas em grandes volumes de Ciências Sociais ou Ciência Política. Considerados o instrumental teórico particular e a constituição de núcleos semânticos assimilados por sua literatura, as RI alcançaram um grau de maturidade que lhes permitiram requerer um ambiente específico de domínio léxico. O Dicionário de Relações Internacionais vem, portanto, responder a uma demanda decorrente do crescente interesse profissional e intelectual por temas com implicações globais. É nesse quadro que se insere a oportuna obra de Guilherme Silva e William Gonçalves.

No prefácio da obra, os autores explicitam algumas noções prévias, dentre as quais destaca-se a idéia de que os conceitos capturam contextos sociais e, logo, são sujeitos à dinâmica do ambiente político e sócio-cultural. Ao partir da lógica de que conceitos apresentados estão longe de serem absolutos, os autores se defrontam com o desafio de lidar com polissemias, resultado de orientações variadas e circunstancialidades temporais, cujos exemplos clássicos são os vocábulos "desenvolvimento" e "segurança". Da mesma maneira, os autores não se furtam ao movediço terreno de termos como "globalização" e "terrorismo".

O corpo do dicionário é constituído por cerca de oitenta verbetes. A seleção contempla com justiça e eficiência o grosso das Relações Internacionais. Entretanto, em função de sua opção pela acessibilidade, não há espaço aos debates teóricos e conceituais mais profundos. Há uma tendência clara no sentido de apresentar uma terminologia prática para as questões contemporâneas, o que, em alguma medida, ocorreu em detrimento de um resgate histórico mais completo; Alca, Consenso de Washington e Grupo de Cairns ocuparam espaço nessa esteira, ao passo que a Santa Aliança (1815) foi o mais longe na História que o dicionário optou por abarcar. Muitos leitores sentirão a falta de um verbete próprio para a Paz de Westfália (1648) que, muito embora seja citada no verbete "Diplomacia", teve sua importância conceitual reduzida. As ausências da Escola Inglesa, Governança, Cooperação Internacional e do Behavioralismo, embora tangenciados, são também significativas. De forma geral, contudo, há um balanceamento nos termos do dicionário que conferem equilíbrio à obra, passando dos insumos básicos (Estado, Anarquia, Poder, Hegemonia, Diplomacia) aos constructos teóricos fundamentais (Idealismo, Realismo, Construtivismo, Regimes, Teoria dos Jogos). A inclusão do verbete Armas de Destruição em Massa (ADM), incorporado em definitivo ao vocabulário dos noticiários internacionais, representa bem o esforço pragmático dos autores, atentos aos debates atuais, voltados para um público leitor quase que irrestrito.

Os textos que acompanham os verbetes são, via de regra, diretos e, como convém a um dicionário, eficientes na transmissão das idéias. Quando exigidos, datas, eventos, autores e exemplificações são escalados para inteirar os significados em perspectiva. Vale notar também o elogiável esforço de relacionamento dos verbetes nos textos analíticos, compondo um quadro de conexões terminológicas que favorece a percepção de que, de fato, existe um instrumental próprio para a reflexão integrada das RI.

Em linhas gerais, a contribuição do Dicionário de Relações Internacionais é expressiva, na medida em que constitui um canal para a compreensão dos fenômenos internacionais com abertura, sem as tecnicidades que repelem o grande público interessado em compreendê-los. O perfil norteador do dicionário o distancia das proposições de manual e sua utilidade para um iniciado em RI e para um leigo são, naturalmente, bem distintas. Ainda assim, caberia aludir que, em edições futuras, os verbetes fossem acompanhados da bibliografia diretamente relacionada, a partir da qual o leitor pudesse buscar o aprofundamento de conceitos e temas, habituando-se à literatura de RI e potencializando o uso da obra de referência. Há, em suma, um passo importante para a melhoria da qualidade da reflexão sobre temas globais no Brasil, garantindo às RI o devido reconhecimento de sua relevância para a produção do conhecimento no mundo contemporâneo.

215) A ascensão do dinheiro (com algumas recaidas...)

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane £25 pp464
The Sunday Times review by Edward Chancellor
From The Sunday Times, October 26, 2008

More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith described bankers' credit as providing “a sort of wagon-way through the air”. Our modern bankers have displayed the recklessness of Phaethon in recent years and their soaring chariots are currently hurtling towards the earth. But now that they are universally blamed for the global financial crisis, it is refreshing to find someone springing to their defence. Far from being excoriated, maintains the historian Niall Ferguson, financiers should be celebrated as the source of our wealth and prosperity.

Ferguson bolsters his bold argument about the importance of finance with 500 years of historical analysis. In the late Middle Ages, he points out, the northern Italians begat banking, book-keeping and bonds, and with their wealth patronised Renaissance painters such as Botticelli. In the 17th century, the Dutch pioneered central banking and joint-stock companies, and gave birth to Rembrandt and Vermeer. Britain's rise to greatness owed as much to its early financial revolution as to any other factor. The Bank of England, established in 1694, kept interest rates low, provided a ready market for government bonds, and enabled the country to finance what would otherwise have been ruinously expensive wars. Countries such as China that failed to develop modern monetary methods, Ferguson reminds us, fell far behind over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Economies that have combined banking, bond and stock markets, insurance and secure property rights have “performed better over the long run than those that did not”, writes Ferguson. But financial innovation, as the world has recently rediscovered to its cost, can also be perilous. Take the case of France in the early 18th century when John Law, a Scottish-born gambler and convicted murderer, persuaded the regent, Louis d'Orleans, to embark on the boldest financial experiment in history.

Law claimed to have discovered the philosopher's stone. He believed that credit could turn paper money into gold. Establishing a national bank in Paris, he used this institution to support an extraordinary business venture which took over the great French trading companies, the farming of the tax revenues, the tobacco monopoly and sundry other activities. Shares were issued to pay for these acquisitions and loans from Law's bank supported their value. A bubble then inflated in the stock of the Mississippi Company. But as this bubble began to deflate, Law resorted to desperate measures - attempting vainly to stop the share price falling and outlawing the personal possession of gold.
Related Internet Links

* Buy the book here

The collapse of the Mississippi bubble in 1720 produced a long-lasting dislike among the French for central banks and paper credit. Well into the 20th century, French peasants preferred to hoard gold at home rather than deposit their savings in a bank. The political and economic consequences of this bust were profound. While the financial revolution paved the way for Britain's industrial revolution, France's ancien régime crumpled under the weight of its expensive debts. Had Law succeeded, Ferguson suggests, history would have turned out differently.

Ferguson refers to Law as a “con man”. Yet over the following centuries, he points out, much of Law's vision has been realised. Private companies that raise capital in the stock market are generally accepted as more efficient than government-run corporations. Paper money, supported by central banks, has freed modern economies from an atavistic dependence on gold.

The breakdown of the post-war Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s heralded a second financial revolution. During this period, there has been an extraordinary burst of innovation in the field of finance - mortgage and myriad other types of loans have been turned into tradable securities and sold on in the market, insurance has been invented to protect against the threat of default on bonds, and derivatives have allowed many other types of financial and economic risks to be hedged.

Until recently, economists and regulators celebrated the ability of banks to originate loans and sell them on to willing buyers. Risk was said to be better distributed through the system and the economic cycle was apparently less volatile. We all benefited from cheaper credit. However, the subprime debacle that broke out in the summer of 2007 has changed such rosy perceptions. In recent weeks, the financial system has teetered on the brink of collapse, saved only by hugely expensive government bail-outs. The techniques of modern finance seem as as discredited today as Law's innovations appeared in his time.

In truth, both these crises, the modern one and the 18th-century French one, share a common origin. Law deliberately encouraged the inflation of the Mississippi Company's stock, lending increasing amounts of money to speculators who bought shares at ever higher prices. His “system”, as it was called, couldn't survive the bursting of the bubble. The recent advances in modern finance - securitisation, credit-default swaps and so forth - likewise fuelled a global property bubble and are, in turn, threatened with obsolescence by the losses produced by the housing bust.

In The Ascent of Money, Ferguson claims that we need history to understand finance. Now that our current crisis is compared daily with the Great Depression, nobody would deny that the lessons of history should have been better heeded. Ferguson's own contribution, however, might have had more heft. The book bears the hallmarks of a work written to accompany a television documentary. Furthermore, the dramatic events of recent weeks have made some of Ferguson's claims appear outdated. He praises the hedge-fund industry for “hedging” its clients against market decline. Recent evidence suggests that is not the case. It is no longer tenable to argue that “we seem to have been living through the ascent of man the banker”.

Ferguson proposes that finance is an evolutionary process, in which the fittest activities survive. Yet unlike the natural world, the financial world suffers from adverse selection. During the late boom, those who took on the most debt accumulated the largest fortunes. This crisis is serving as an extinction event for the over-leveraged. The next generation of financiers will be less ambitious and earn smaller bonuses. But they will probably do a better job at allocating capital. That is progress of sorts.

214) Uma nova historia dos EUA, David Reynolds

America, Empire of Liberty: A New History
by David Reynolds
Allen Lane £30 p. 704

Review by Max Hastings
The Sunday Times, January 25, 2009

Americans have quaint delusions that they are anti-imperialist, though they created on their own continent the greatest empire in history. David Reynolds takes his title from Thomas Jefferson's line about building "an empire of liberty". The belief that actions deemed aggressive, expansionist or oppressive by other nations become acceptable if undertaken by a people with such high purposes as those asserted by Americans persists into George Bush's 2004 line: "We're not an imperial power. We are a liberating power."

George Washington wrote without irony on the eve of the great independence struggle in 1774: "The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us till custom and use will make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway."

David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge, probably knows more about America than any other British writer. He is the author of In Command of History, an exemplary study of Churchill as war leader and war memoir-writer. His latest book is linked to his current BBC radio series. It would be mistaken, however, to see this merely as a tie-in work. Reynolds has done a masterly job on the radio, but his book is even better, providing a panoramic political and social history of America from earliest times to Barack Obama.

His admiration for American achievement is undiminished by the clear-sightedness with which he dispels its historical myths, chronicles its failures and remarks on its ruthlessness. America created an empire mostly by war: against France, Spain, Britain, Mexico and above all the wretched "Indians" that the white newcomers dispossessed.

White immigrants, though, did not occupy an empty land: archeological evidence suggests that some native American communities in the 11th century were remarkably advanced builders. From the 17th century onwards, the new Americans slaughtered the old ones wholesale, first by infecting them with plagues against which they possessed no immunity, then in the course of expansionist wars.

Reynolds records the exhilaration of a colonist arriving from Inverness in the 1770s: "The price of land is so low...that 40 or 50 pounds will purchase as much ground as one thousand in this country...There are few or no taxes at present...The climate in general is very healthy...Lastly, there are no titled, proud lords to tyrannise over the lower sort of people, men there being upon a level and more valued in proportion to their abilities than they are in Scotland."

Contrast this euphoria with the unspeakable misery of John Ross, chief of the Cherokees (his name came from his Scottish father), whose people were herded west across the Mississippi in the late 1830s, dying in their hundreds, to make way for land-hungry settlers. Ever since white men arrived in America, wrote Ross, "we have been made to drink of the bitter cup of humiliation; treated like dogs; our lives, our liberties, the sport of the white men; our country and the graves of our Fathers torn from us".

Beyond the native Americans, there were also, of course, a multitude of shackled blacks. Both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, who accounted for 700,000 of the 3.9m population of the new United States in 1790. The most costly conflict in the nation's history - more people died in the 1860s civil war than America lost in the two 20th-century global struggles put together - was fought over slavery.

Yet a century on, as Reynolds vividly describes, a civil-rights struggle had to be fought, to make black Americans truly free and end racial segregation. Lyndon Johnson is today chiefly remembered as the president who "escalated" America's disastrous Vietnam war. Yet he deserves recognition instead as the unlikely Texan who made black American freedom a reality.

The people of the New World have always possessed startling self-confidence, exemplified by New York editor John L Sullivan, who in 1845 looked forward a century to "the 250 or 300 millions - and American millions - destined to gather together beneath the fluttering stripes and stars in the fast-hastening year of the Lord 1945". Sullivan denounced British efforts to thwart American expansion, "checking the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions".

America acquired space relentlessly, by migration westwards and by purchase: of Louisiana from France in 1803 when Napoleon needed hard cash to fund his invasion of England; of New Mexico and California from Mexico for $15m in 1848; of Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2m. Many Americans thought this a lousy deal. As late as the 1950s, when there was talk of oil in the frozen wastes, a senior executive scoffed that it would cost $5 a barrel to extract, "and oil will never get to $5 a barrel in our lifetime".

Part of the pleasure in Reynolds's book are its moments of serendipity. He handles the big political set pieces superbly, but also offers many whimsical vignettes. For instance, the American depression of the 1890s prompted a wave of xenophobia towards immigrants, and a choleric New York newspaper editorial: "The floodgates are open. The bars are down. The sally-ports unguarded. The dam is washed away. The sewer is choked...The scum of immigration is viscerating upon our shores. The horde of $9.60 steerage slime is being siphoned upon us from Continental mud tanks."

I had never heard of Bill and Alfred Levitt, who in the 1950s did for American suburban housing what Henry Ford achieved for motoring a generation earlier with his model T. The Levitts offered two standard designs - a four-room Cape Cod box and a single-storey ranch house, each with a free Bendix washing machine thrown in, at prices millions could afford, in new garden communities with curved streets and no fences. In those Red-fixated times, Bill Levitt said: "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do."

In Reynolds's book, you will also find the tale of the late 19th-century railroad boom; of Henry Heinz and his canned beans; the fact that 134 British peers sold coronets for cash in marriage to American heiresses between 1870 and 1914; and details of that dazzling engineering achievement completed in 1825, the 363-mile Erie Canal that opened navigation from the Great Lakes to the sea. The canal rose 600ft from the Hudson river through its chain of 83 locks.

It is a brave but mildly perilous undertaking to carry the story right through the Iraq war to Obama's inauguration. Journalism takes over from history in the last pages of the book. But that is a quibble. Reynolds declares as his theme: "It makes sense to see the United States in a continuum with earlier imperial powers, rather than to accept the doctrines of American exceptionalism - the idea that the United States is both historically unique and morally exemplary." He carries this to a triumphant conclusion.

The author stands beside Simon Schama as a populariser of history whose work also represents the widest knowledge and highest scholarship. This is the best single-volume account of the world's greatest society for many years. Even those of us who think we know America well are reminded anew what an awesome place it is, even if its record is a trifle less noble than its citizens like to think.

Related Links:
In Defence of America by Bronwen Maddox
The American Future: A History by Simon Schama - The Sunday Times review
America, Empire of Liberty: A New History by David Reynolds

213) Mercosul, depoimento de um dos pais fundadores

O Mercosul na sua fase ascendente (e, talvez, única)

Resenha de:
Renato L. R. Marques
Mercosul 1989-1999: depoimentos de um negociador
(Kiev: s.e., 2008, 280 p.; ISBN: 978-966-171-170-1)

Trata-se de uma edição de autor: uma coleção de artigos, de entrevistas ou de depoimentos feitos pelo diplomata gaúcho durante o período em que ele ocupou, sucessivamente, os cargos de chefe da Divisão Econômica Latino-Americana do MRE, de Secretário de Comércio Exterior do MDIC e de chefe do Departamento de Integração do MRE, entre 1989 e 1999. São duas dúzias de textos, cada um trazendo a data e o local de sua publicação ou “emissão” (no caso de depoimentos gravados), mas não, infelizmente, as circunstâncias e o contexto no qual foram produzidos. A produção amadora explica, assim, alguns dos problemas formais da obra, mas que em nada diminui o interesse para os aspectos substantivos dos temas tratados.
O autor ficou devendo uma introdução geral e talvez uma divisão temática, ou por seções, de molde a situar cada um dos textos no quadro mais geral da evolução do Mercosul em seus primeiros dez anos de existência. Outra questão organizacional é a da relativa imprecisão cronológica: a despeito de Marques situar sua compilação entre os anos de 1989 a 1999, os limites inicial e final dos textos correspondem, de fato, ao período que vai de 1991 a 2001, sendo que a última fase trata bem mais da Alca e das opções de política comercial do Brasil do que propriamente do Mercosul. Mas mesmo sem ater-se a uma estrutura temática mais racional, que poderia permitir um melhor aproveitamento dos muitos materiais aqui recolhidos, o autor prestou um bom serviço à comunidade de historiadores e de estudiosos dos fundamentos e do desenvolvimento do Mercosul, até aqui carente de estudos rigorosos nas áreas da ciência política e da história. Recomenda-se, talvez, para o futuro, uma segunda edição de características profissionais, de maneira a sanar as muitas falhas formais que apresenta este volume, feito por iniciativa do próprio autor e distribuído, provavelmente, a seus custos.
Mesmo à falta de uma inserção de cada um desses textos na história mais geral do Mercosul, os trabalhos selecionados pelo autor são importantes, na medida em que permitem uma aproximação ao que seria uma primeira “história oral” desse esquema de integração, ainda hoje carente – pelo menos no Brasil – de uma história oficial ou oficiosa que reconstitua, minuciosamente, suas diferentes etapas desde os anos de integração bilateral com a Argentina até o período atual, marcado por uma espécie de Entzauberung integracionista. O tom de vários textos é marcadamente otimista e “defensivo”, como corresponde, talvez, a questionamentos da imprensa ou da comunidade de negócios a respeito dos benefícios reais do Mercosul para a sociedade e para a economia brasileiras. Em vários outros, possivelmente voltados para platéias não especializadas, os objetivos didáticos aparecem mais explícitos, com extensas explicações sobre o funcionamento de determinados mecanismos do bloco, em face das regras multilaterais de comércio e da pequena selva burocrática na normatividade mercosuliana que o autor ajudou a construir.
Alguns dos textos tratam das relações do Mercosul com parceiros próximos – como o Chile, a Venezuela e outros países do Grupo Andino – ao passo que outros abordam problemas específicos: fundos regionais, aplicação das normas do Mercosul pelos juízes nacionais ou, ainda, o sempre presente problema institucional. Se o Brasil sempre se mostrou “ofensivo” na expansão comercial do Mercosul em direção de novos mercados, ele também se mostrou arredio em matéria institucional, opondo-se a sucessivas demandas – dos demais sócios, ou atendendo a sugestões de juristas – por maior grau de institucionalidade (que, para alguns, queria dizer supranacionalidade).
Parece ser uma regra das instituições burocráticas o fato de que problemas complexos não são jamais resolvidos: eles apenas entram no rol de itens da “agenda permanente” que passam a figurar em cada reunião do bloco: tais podem ser os casos do regime automotivo do Mercosul (mais exatamente bilateral, Brasil-Argentina), ou da eterna salvaguarda argentina imposta ao açúcar do Brasil. Aliás, falar em “regime automotivo do Mercosul” seria conceder-lhe um status superior ao merecido, como sistema de comércio bilateral administrado que de fato é, como nos velhos tempos do mercantilismo. Quanto ao açúcar, não há nada de especificamente mercosuliano em sua inadequação aos padrões do livre-comércio: trata-se, certamente, do primeiro produto na história mundial das commodities a gozar de regras especiais de proteção e subsídio em vários países da primeira revolução industrial – mais exatamente a partir do açúcar de beterraba surgido com a revolução francesa e o bloqueio continental operado pela Inglaterra – e que será, provavelmente, o último dos produtos a entrar num regime normal de comércio, talvez daqui a mais 150 anos. Bem, espera-se que, até lá, o Mercosul tenha chegado ao prometido mercado comum.
À falta de uma divisão temática ou “institucional” para este livro, o leitor é obrigado a percorrer linearmente os textos, para deles extrair alguns ensinamentos e esclarecimentos sobre aspectos pouco visíveis da história – até aqui quase secreta – do Mercosul. Essa trajetória linear corresponde, aliás, à organização mais simples do livro, sem que se possa, entretanto, discutir exaustivamente determinados problemas estruturais ou constitutivos do modelo sui generis que adotou o Mercosul ao longo de seus primeiros dez anos de existência (e ele acaba de completar a sua maioridade).
No conjunto, porém, os textos representam uma contribuição útil para a construção de uma futura história do Mercosul, com os cuidados devidos à manipulação de idéias ou opiniões que correspondem a um dos protagonistas oficiais do processo. Sim, cabe esclarecer que mesmo se o autor explicita, numa nota preliminar, que os seus argumentos representam unicamente a sua opinião pessoal, pode-se presumir que ele estivesse, cada vez, defendendo a posição oficial do governo brasileiro sobre cada um dos problemas abordados. Não é de se presumir que um representante do Itamaraty tenha idéias próprias sobre todas essas questões, ou que ele tenha “escolhido” certas “soluções” aos problemas da tarifa externa comum ou dos regimes setoriais em fase de adequação à abertura recíproca na ausência de consulta a todas as autoridades do governo. Depreende-se, aqui e ali, indiretamente, certa perplexidade ou insatisfação dos atores privados, o que revelaria carência de consulta ou coordenação com aqueles mesmos que deveriam operar a integração na prática diária: industriais, agricultores, empresários em geral, para nada falar dos estudiosos acadêmicos, provavelmente pouco consultados em todas as fases do processo.
Claramente, os textos precisam ser lidos e inseridos em seu contexto original, que é o da construção de um bloco de integração numa fase ainda ascendente, com pretensões a transformar-se em mercado comum (objetivo até agora frustrado; mas muitos duvidam que ele venha a ser concretizado um dia). Mesmo lidos com todo o cuidado de um historiador ou especialista acadêmico, não deixa de ser curioso, ao observador contemporâneo – em 2009, ou seja, uma década depois da data terminal que o autor colocou em se livro –, fazer uma leitura retrospectiva do que poderia ter sido o Mercosul e o que, efetivamente, ele veio a converter-se ao atingir a maioridade, praticamente congelado nas etapas examinadas neste livro de um dos protagonistas originais.
Um dos textos, por exemplo, datado de março de 1996, explica que “Não é o momento” de criar órgãos supranacionais, em especial um tribunal com poderes próprios (já que esse passo não seria constitucionalmente aceitável para o Brasil). Em outro, que faz um balanço da presidência brasileira e que comemora a passagem da “prova de fogo” que foi a instituição (sic) da união aduaneira, se lê que o Mercosul “consolidou-se como um agrupamento de crescente coesão interna e indiscutível capacidade de negociação externa” (p. 141). Sem comentários, nesta resenha...
Mais para o final do período, o argumento dominante na chancelaria era o de que o Brasil, sim, negociava a Alca, mas priorizava o Mercosul, por se tratar de um bloco com pretensões mais abrangentes e profundas, como o projeto de mercado comum. O temor, então (estávamos ainda 1997), era o de que a Alca provocasse “atraso, desvio ou interrupção no processo ora em curso de aperfeiçoamento da união aduaneira” (p. 169). Nunca houve, ao que parece, real interesse do Brasil pela Alca, que seria alegremente enterrada no cemitério de projetos irrealizáveis por ocasião da reunião de cúpula hemisférica de Mar del Plata, em novembro de 2005.
Naquela mesma conjuntura, o Brasil recusava a constituição de “fundos” ou a adoção de “medidas compensatórias”, sob a justificativa de que os recursos alocados competiriam com aplicações nacionais ou que esse tipo de mecanismo implicaria em instituições burocráticas onerosas (p. 217-218). A partir de 2003, como se sabe, o Brasil passou não apenas a aceitar, como a promover ativamente esse tipo de “fundo compensatório”, do qual é o maior contribuinte líquido – 70% por cento do volume global, recentemente aumentado em 100%, por decisão própria –, sem ser, obviamente, o maior beneficiário (a despeito das mesmas diferenças e desigualdades internas que justificavam a recusa no momento em que Renato Marques desenvolvia seus argumentos).
Incidentalmente – ou seja, sem que isto tenha a ver com o objeto do livro –, a comparação entre o período coberto pelo autor, todo ele voltado para a negociação e implementação dos objetivos primários do Mercosul – isto é, o acabamento da união aduaneira e o caminho na direção do mercado comum – e a fase subsequente, e atual, de abandono quase completo dessas metas “comercialistas” e a ênfase colocada em aspectos políticos ou sociais do bloco, muito nos diz sobre a inflexão que ele sofreu ao longo dos dez anos seguintes ao período aqui coberto. Teses que antes o governo do Brasil rejeitava por não pertinentes ao “espírito” ou à “essência” do Mercosul passaram a ser aceitas e até implementadas voluntariamente, como a já referida opção pela constituição de fundos compensatórios e mecanismos corretores, ou a “fuga para a frente” – tendente a construir novas instituições políticas e sociais –, em lugar de resolver questões ainda pendentes dos fundamentos econômicos incompletos e do baixo grau de abertura recíproca (paradoxalmente) do bloco.
Não se deve esperar, obviamente, um diagnóstico da situação do Mercosul, mesmo ao cabo do período coberto pelo livro, inclusive porque a natureza puramente “compilatória” da obra e a já referida lacuna de introdução ou de capítulo conclusivo não permitem tirar ensinamentos mais aprofundados. O que se tem aqui são materiais primários, minérios não processados, que devem aguardar outros insumos históricos ou lapidação por especialistas para que, a partir desses discursos a favor do Mercosul, se possa organizar uma discussão sobre os fins e os meios mobilizados para construir o bloco e se tentar uma explicação para o evidente insucesso na consecução das metas explicitadas no artigo primeiro do Tratado de Assunção.
O autor não é claramente responsável pelo que veio depois, mas muitos dos impasses atuais se devem, provavelmente, às escolhas feitas naquela época, como, por exemplo, a opção pela continuidade da “internalização” ad hoc – ou seja, sujeitas ao arbítrio nacional – das resoluções e decisões adotadas conjuntamente. Diz-se que a estrutura constitucional brasileira não permitiria a existência de um tribunal dotado de poderes supranacionais, mas não se examinou, em detalhe, as condições de existência de uma corte arbitral permanente par aplicar o patrimônio jurídico já em vigor no bloco. Pode ser que uma instituição desse tipo viesse a perder legitimidade, como foi o caso no Grupo Andino, mas é também possível que as barreiras ainda numerosas tivessem começado a ser desmanteladas na fase ainda ascendente do Mercosul.
No conjunto, os textos são relevantes para permitir um retrato do Mercosul numa fase determinada de seu desenvolvimento, embora este conceito seja um tanto irônico ao se considerar o que veio depois. De fato, pode-se ler com alguma dose de ceticismo, um argumento do autor, segundo o qual, o Brasil é o país mais aberto do Mercosul” (p. 250). Não tenho certeza de que os demais sócios e outros países associados concordariam com a afirmação. Em todo caso, à falta de uma história do Mercosul, este livro constitui uma das fontes primárias – processadas politicamente, é verdade – para que um dia se possa escrever uma.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 4-12 de janeiro de 2009.

212) Central bankers: the gods that failed

Duas resenhas do mesmo livro:

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
Liaquat Ahamed
Penguin, 2008, 576 p.

Central bankers
Lords of finance
The Economist, Jan 8th 2009

The central bankers of the Great Depression were obsessed with a single idea, rather like their successors today

CENTRAL bankers were compelling figures in the 1920s, not least because they preferred to operate in secret. The cloak was peculiarly attractive to Sir Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, who adopted a false identity when he travelled, though this sometimes attracted attention rather than deflecting it. Asked for his reasons for promoting a policy, Norman replied: “I don’t have reasons. I have instincts.” Benjamin Strong, Norman’s principal collaborator, ran the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was responsible for America’s international financial relationships. In the mid-1920s, Strong decided the American economy was sufficiently prosperous that he could widen his brief to promote economic stability. Liaquat Ahamed suggests that Strong more than anyone else “invented the modern central banker”.
Norman and Strong were wedded to the gold standard. Emile Moreau, the less clubable governor of the Banque de France, was an obsessive hoarder of gold and tended to do his nation’s own thing. The arrogant Hjalmar Schacht (above left), a spiky German nationalist who headed the Reichsbank, had, by a remarkable sleight of hand, ended Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, but he was unable to persuade his fellow central bankers to forget reparations, even though they all appreciated that heavy post-war payments were “bleeding Germany white”.
The quartet, united by a belief that they knew best, had persuaded the great powers to leave the fate of their economies to the antique workings of the gold standard—“a barbarous relic” in the view of John Maynard Keynes. They had the power, in a legendary phrase, to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”, and they did so. The problem was that there was not enough gold to finance world trade. Stocks were concentrated in America and France, and countries like Britain, where it was scarce, had to borrow heavily, and to adjust interest rates and government spending at the expense of employment in order to replenish gold reserves.
A loan organised by Strong enabled Norman to get Britain back onto the gold standard in 1926 (it had slipped off during the first world war). Norman’s advice helped persuade Strong to lower interest rates in 1927, which only increased irrational exuberance on Wall Street.
These early central bankers were an odd lot. Norman, who dabbled with spiritualism, apparently informed a colleague that he could walk through walls. He suffered regular nervous breakdowns, and was actually on sick leave when Britain left the gold standard again in 1931. Strong suffered from permanent ill health and was often affected by the generous use of morphine to control pain. He died in October 1928 before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, but Mr Ahamed does not appear to believe that things would have turned out any differently had he lived: in a crushing conclusion, he writes that the Great Depression was “the direct result of a series of misjudgments by economic policymakers…by any measure the most dramatic series of collective blunders ever made by financial officials.” Looking back in 1948, Norman’s judgment was no less harsh. “We achieved absolutely nothing,” he said, “except that we collected a lot of money from a lot of poor devils and gave it to the four winds.”
Politicians were left to clear up the mess they left. One of them was Hitler, who readily instigated a series of measures to combat German unemployment which were similar to those Gordon Brown is adopting today. (Schacht later joined the anti-Hitler resistance.) Britain’s prospects brightened as soon as the gold standard was dropped. The French, less troubled, remained loyal to gold until 1936.
But the most original solution was that of President Franklin Roosevelt, soon after his inauguration in 1933. Mr Ahamed resurrects a 59-year-old agricultural economist from Cornell University by the name of George Warren, whose study of long-term trends in commodity prices led him to believe that, since falling prices were associated with depression, recovery ought to be encouraged by rising prices. The president liked the idea and decided to devalue the dollar—despite vigorous opposition from the gold bugs—simply by increasing the gold price. One of his own economic advisers lamented: “This is the end of Western civilisation.” For a number of weeks, the president would consult his advisers over boiled eggs at breakfast and randomly drive up the gold price, beginning at $31.36 an ounce until it settled at $35. By then a recovery was under way.
This absorbing study of the first collective of central bankers is provocative, not least because it is still relevant. Mr Ahamed, who was a World Bank economist and now manages investments in America, likens central bankers to Sisyphus. This was the man whom the gods condemned to roll a large stone up a steep hill only for it to roll down again when it reached the peak. These great central bankers were so wedded to a dogma that they were incapable of imagining its failure.
Perhaps this kind of single-mindedness is endemic to central bankers; since the early 1990s the idea of controlling inflation at all costs has been so compelling that central bankers have ignored such unintended consequences as bubbles in the housing and stock markets. But these were big enough, when they burst, to trigger a worldwide slump. Not lords of finance surely; more like high priests.

===========

A grande crise, 94 anos atrás
Por Nial Ferguson, do Financial Times

Valor Econômico, 08/01/2009

"Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World" - Liaquat Ahamed. Penguin. 576 págs.

Quando a história da atual crise financeira for escrita, a batalha do índice de verbetes certamente será vencida pelos presidentes de bancos centrais, e não por políticos. O nome Bernanke aparecerá em muito mais páginas do que Bush, King mais freqüentemente do que Brown e Trichet suplantará até mesmo Sarkozy. Durante a maior parte do tempo, bancos centrais se empenham em ser lugares enfadonhos; as pessoas que os dirigem cultivam sua obscuridade. Mas quando a crise ataca, os holofotes brilham.
A última grande crise de liqüidez que impactou o sistema financeiro mundial aconteceu 94 anos atrás, no fim de julho de 1914. Paralisou o mercado financeiro de curto prazo, fechou os mercado acionários em todo o mundo durante meses e exigiu intervenções governamentais sem precedentes no sistema bancário. É esse o ponto de partida de Liaquat Ahamed.
Gestor de investimentos semi-aposentado, Ahamed propôs-se relatar a história dos quatro banqueiros centrais dominantes no período entre as guerras mundiais. Ele não poderia ter previsto em que medida seu livro seria oportuno. Diferente da maioria das obras sobre as origens da Grande Depressão, "Lords of Finance" permite uma leitura extremamente interessante e fluente, animada por vívidos detalhes biográficos, mas fundamentadamente baseada na bibliografia.
Os quatro personagens centrais de Ahamed são Émile Moreau, governador do Banque de France; Montagu Norman, governador do Bank of England; Hjalmar Schacht, presidente do German Reichsbank; e Benjamin Strong, governador do Federal Reserve Bank de New York. Em 1926, eles constituiam "o mais exclusivo clube do mundo", mas em 1914 eram praticamente desconhecidos.
Norman era um sócio na afiliada britânica do Brown Brothers, um banco de investimentos. Neurótico e tendente a surtos de colapso mental, vivia numa casa grande e sombria nas imediações de Holland Park, cercado de mobiliário que ele próprio projetara, ouvindo Brahms e dado a um envolvimento com espiritualismo.
Schacht era um hamburguês com o andar rígido de um oficial prussiano, a quem não faltavam bigode característico, colarinho alto de celulóide e olhar feroz. Em 1914, estava em ascensão no Dresdner Bank.
Dos quatro, Benjamin Strong ocupava o cargo mais elevado: presidente da Bankers Trust Company, originada do império financeiro de JPMorgan. Seus problemas eram puramente pessoais: sua primeira mulher cometera suicídio e o surgimento de uma tuberculose que acabou matando-o. Moreau era um funcionário público alegre e saudável, cuja carreira tinha tomado um rumo errado. Tendo atuado como "chef de cabinet" do ministro das Finanças Maurice Rouvier, envolvido em escândalos, Moreau foi marginalizado no banco central argelino.
A guerra e o período traumático que se seguiu transformaram as carreiras de todos eles. Arquiteto do Federal Reserve System, Strong aceitou o comando do Fed de New York em 1914. Norman entrou para o Bank of England em 1915 e tornou-se seu governador cinco anos mais tarde.
Schacht teve uma guerra menos boa, mas reiniciou sua carreira em 1923, quando a hiperinflação havia reduzido a moeda alemã a pó: tendo promovido a adoção bem-sucedida da nova moeda, o rentenmark, foi nomeado presidente do Reichsbank antes do apagar das luzes desse ano. Dois anos e meio mais tarde, a crise política impulsionou Moreau ao cargo mais elevado no Banque de France.
A tarefa com que se defrontavam esses quatro homens não era pequena. Após a Primeira Guerra, tanto vitoriosos como perdedores arcavam com imensas dívidas externas; todas as moedas européias tinham se depreciado. A miríade de novas barreiras comerciais tornava cada vez mais difícil para os devedores acumular moeda forte com exportações.
Publicamente, como mostra Ahamed, os banqueiros bancos centrais pareciam cooperar. Suas freqüentes peregrinações cruzando o canal da Mancha e o Atlântico atraíam a especulação da imprensa (os repórteres estavam tão atentos que Norman chegou a viajar sob nome falso). Tornaram-se amigos. "Caro Strong" e "Caro Norman" transformaram-se em "Caro Ben" e "Caro Monty". Norman empenhou-se em cultivar seu relacionamento com Schacht. A exceção foi Moreau, que Norman insultava e que recusou o convite que Strong fez a todos eles para que viessem a Nova York em 1927, um ano antes de sua morte.
Apesar da comunicabilidade, não conseguiram chegar a uma resolução ótima para os problemas financeiros do mundo. Strong incentivou a fé quase religiosa de Norman na restauração do padrão-ouro e ajudou a financiar os britânicos para que sua moeda voltasse a uma patamar cambial em relação ao dólar que vigorara no período anterior à guerra. Mas Strong nunca permitiu que o padrão-ouro funcionasse como deveria, esterilizando o efeito dos afluxos de ouro sobre a oferta monetária. Moreau promoveu a desvalorização do franco, assegurando superávits de exportações e rápido crescimento das reservas do Banque de France. Schacht obcecava-se com os afluxos de capital especulativo para a Alemanha e o continuado ônus das indenizações de guerra no balanço de pagamentos do país.
O resultado foi que o que atualmente denominaríamos "desequilíbrios globais" não foram reduzidos, mesmo quando as condições econômicas estavam relativamente boas. Quando Wall Street inchou a bolha que explodiria em 1928 e 1929, os europeus subestimaram sua própria vulnerabilidade. Norman viu o colapso de Wall Street como uma bênção para a libra esterlina e reivindicou crédito por ter causado a onda de vendas em Nova York ao elevar a taxa de juros britânica no mês anterior.
No início do segundo semestre de 1931, porém, até mesmo Norman começou a dar-se conta de que a economia mundial estava despencando. Em vista das enormes falências bancárias nos dois lados do Atlântico, ficou claro que os Mestres das Finanças tinham "melado" as coisas. "A menos que medidas drásticas sejam tomadas para salvá-lo", escreveu Norman ao sucessor de Moreau no Banque de France, "o sistema capitalista será destroçado no prazo de um ano". (Com um floreio característico, prosseguiu: "Eu gostaria que esta previsão ficasse registrada para consulta futura".)
Esses temores apocalípticos não eram novos. Já em novembro de 1918 Strong tinha advertido Norman para um "período de barbárie econômica que ameaçará nossa prosperidade". A ironia foi que as profilaxias preferidas de Strong e Norman tinham, combinadas, tornado o Apocalipse mais provável. Em 1931, o sistema capitalista estava de joelhos, e com ele a democracia. Schacht logo começou a flertar com a estrela em ascensão da direita alemã, Adolf Hitler, de quem viria a ser ministro da Economia.

Agora que o mundo balança à beira de outro grande precipício, podemos apenas torcer para que os "Senhores das Finanças" contemporâneos cooperem com melhores resultados. Desconfio que, atualmente, ninguém tem muito tempo para leitura antes de dormir. Mas se Bernanke, King e Trichet precisam de um lembrete sobre o que deu errado quando banqueiros centrais conseguiram apenas uma aparência de cooperação, "Lords of Finance" é o livro que deveriam ler.
Como questão de urgência, uma tradução para o chinês também deveria ser enviada para Zhou Xiaochuan, presidente do Banco do Povo da China.
Tradução de Sergio Blum)

211) Dois livros sobre o poder nuclear

Apocalípticos e desintegrados
Livros recém-lançados no Brasil ressuscitam o pesadelo do holocausto nuclear
Claudio Angelo
Folha de S.Paulo, 4.01.2009

Homens do Fim do Mundo
Peter D. Smith
(Cia das Letras, tradução de José Viegas Filho)

Relatório
Um Mundo ou Nenhum
(Paz e Terra, 230 págs., tradução de Patrícia Zimbres)

Saíram no Brasil dois livros espetaculares sobre aquilo que talvez seja a maior ameaça ao futuro da humanidade. E não, não estamos falando do efeito estufa, e sim da única
invenção humana capaz de pôr fim instantâneo à civilização: a bomba atômica.

Quem acha que a ameaça de um holocausto nuclear acabou com a queda do Muro pode considerar apenas um fato: em meados deste ano, a IBM lançou o supercomputador mais rápido do mundo, o RoadRunner -não para fazer pesquisas científicas, mas para monitorar o arsenal atômico dos EUA. Melhor nem pensar na quantidade de ogivas cujo monitoramento demanda uma máquina dessas, que roda quatrilhões de operações por segundo.

O britânico Peter D. Smith ressuscita o demônio atômico no inquietante "Homens do Fim do Mundo" (Cia das Letras, R$ 68, tradução de José Viegas Filho). O calhamaço de 576 páginas faz uma historiografia das armas de destruição em massa que é minuciosa mas, ao mesmo tempo, prende o leitor da primeira à última página. Um "Harry Potter" do apocalipse, se quiser.

A narrativa começa com a descoberta do rádio por Marie Curie, em 1903, passa pela invenção das armas químicas pelo prussiano Fritz Haber, na Primeira Guerra, e termina
com a proposta aterradora -e que ainda paira sobre o globo, ao menos como possibilidade teórica- da "bomba do fim do mundo", um artefato termonuclear revestido de cobalto-60 cuja detonação espalharia uma nuvem de poeira radioativa capaz de acabar com a vida.

A bomba de cobalto, imortalizada no imaginário popular em 1964 pelo filme de humor negro "Dr. Fantástico", de Stanley Kubrick, foi delineada teoricamente 14 anos antes
pelo físico húngaro Leo Szilard.

Szilard é o personagem central da história de Smith. Primeiro, porque sem ele talvez não houvesse bomba. Emigrado para os EUA com a ascensão de Hitler, foi ele quem
primeiro imaginou a reação em cadeia da fissão do urânio e convenceu Albert Einstein a escrever a famosa carta ao presidente Franklin Roosevelt em 1939 pedindo que os EUA
fizessem a bomba antes dos nazistas.

Szilard também ilustra o que talvez seja o maior diferencial de "Homens do Fim do Mundo": a relação próxima e frequentemente premonitória da ficção científica com a ciência. O livro é repleto de referências a histórias de ficção que antecipam o
desenvolvimento da ciência e seu uso na guerra.

Duas delas são de especial importância na história da bomba: "Fausto", de Goethe -a metáfora do escambo da alma pelo conhecimento era tão perfeita que os pioneiros
da física nuclear encenaram uma versão da peça em 1932, com Niels Bohr no papel de Deus- e "The World Set Free", de H.G. Wells. Escrito em 1913, o livro de Wells
emprega pela primeira vez a expressão "bomba atômica", imaginando uma arma composta por um elemento radioativo cujo poder de destruição seria tão imenso que
tornaria as guerras inviáveis.

Wells antecipa no mesmo livro o uso de aviões para lançar bombas atômicas e a ameaça representada por "qualquer pequeno grupo de descontentes" que poderia carregar
"numa mala de mão a energia potencial suficiente para destruir metade de uma cidade". Hiroshima e a guerra ao terror previstos na mesma obra, escrita antes da Primeira
Guerra. (Numa passagem perturbadora, Smith leva o leitor a pensar se o "Dr. Fantástico" de Stanley Kubrick não estaria antecipando algo também.)

Smith argumenta que Szilard ficou impressionado com a promessa do livro: a utopia baseada no poder do átomo. A física daria à humanidade uma arma capaz de acabar com
todas as guerras.
Foi sob essa promessa que ele e outros físicos, como Bohr, o italiano Enrico Fermi, os húngaros John von Neumann e Edward Teller e o alemão Hans Bethe aceitaram trabalhar no
projeto Manhattan.

Fora da garrafa
Mas o plano dos físicos de construir uma superarma pacificadora, como sabemos, deu errado. Em seu arrebatamento faustiano, quase nenhum deles percebeu que, embora a física tivesse conseguido controlar o núcleo atômico, ela não controlara outra variável crucial: a cabeça dos políticos.

Já em 1946, Szilard, Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer e outros se deram conta da burrada. Como ninguém conseguiria "desinventar" a energia atômica, os físicos trataram de propor formas de controlá-la. Num relatório editado agora no Brasil, "Um Mundo ou Nenhum" (Paz e Terra, 230 págs., R$ 45, tradução de Patrícia Zimbres), 15 dos pais da bomba alertam o mundo para o risco de uma corrida armamentista nuclear.

É um livro atualíssimo. Aqui vemos Harold Urey, descobridor da fusão nuclear, pedindo o banimento da energia atômica até que se desenvolvesse um sistema de controle dos materiais físseis -e prevendo as restrições à liberdade dos cidadãos americanos numa corrida armamentista. Vemos Louis Ridenour, que desenvolveu os radares na Segunda Guerra, dizendo que não há defesa possível contra ataques atômicos, pois um erro de 10% já seria uma catástrofe -um recado para os atuais proponentes do escudo antimísseis dos EUA.

E vemos Szilard em um flagrante tocante de ingenuidade, propondo que potências atômicas acolhessem em seu território cientistas-inspetores das nações inimigas.

Difícil não voltar à ficção e lembrar a cena da comédia de animação com marionetes "Team America" (2004) na qual o ditador norte-coreano Kim Jong-il, o maluco atômico da vez, exclama: "Inspecione isto, Hans Blix"! -e atira o inspetor de armas das Nações Unidas aos tubarões.

(Folha de SP, 4/1)

210) Dez Anos do Centro Brasileiro de Relacoes Internacionais: um dossiê sobre a política externa brasileira

Para comemorar os seus primeiros dez anos de existência, o CEBRI organizou no Rio de Janeiro, em setembro de 2008, um seminário com estudiosos e protagonistas, do qual resultou um dossiê, que pode ser encontrado neste link.
Este é o índice do volume:

Introdução 7
1. A Agenda Externa: impulsos e tendências 9
Amado Luiz Cervo
2. América do Sul: tão perto, tão longe 13
Amaury de Souza
3. Uma Política Externa do Tamanho do Brasil 17
Celso Amorim
4. Novas Oportunidades 21
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
5. Nações Unidas: desafi os 25
Gelson Fonseca
6. O CEBRI e a Geopolítica da Energia 29
Georges D. Landau
7. Integração Sul-Americana 33
Helio Jaguaribe
8. A Política Externa do Brasil nos Próximos 10 anos:
maiores responsabilidades, maiores compromissos 35
Henrique Rzezinski
9. Desafi os da Política Externa nos Próximos 10 anos 37
João Clemente Baena Soares
10. O Desafi o da Integração Sul-Americana 39
José Aldo Rebelo Figueiredo
11. Voltar a ser Confi ável: o maior desafi o do Brasil 43
José Augusto Guilhon Albuquerque
12. Desafi os da Política Externa 47
José Botafogo Gonçalves
13. Os Próximos 10 anos – Energia 51
José Luiz Alquéres
14. Mudanças Climáticas 53
Luiz Felipe Lampreia
15. O Futuro Previsível 55
Manoel Felix Cintra Neto
16. O Lugar do Brasil no Mundo 59
Marcos Castrioto de Azambuja
17. O Brasil e as Relações Sul-Sul 63
Maria Regina Soares de Lima
18. Segurança Regional 65
Mario Cesar Flores
19. Brasil Globalizado: da adolescência à vida adulta 67
Octavio de Barros
20. A Convergência Macroeconômica como um dos Desafi os
da Política Externa Brasileira nos Próximos 10 Anos 71
Pedro S. Malan
21. A Propriedade Intelectual nos Acordos de Livre Comércio 73
Peter Dirk Siemsen e Sandra Leis
22. Esperanças, Desafi os 77
Roberto Abdenur
23. Desafi os da Política Externa nos Próximos 10 Anos 81
Roberto Teixeira da Costa
24. Política Externa e a Sociedade Civil 85
Rubens Barbosa
25. Situação do Mercado Internacional do Petróleo: segurança
energética e desenvolvimento nacional 89
Sebastião do Rego Barros
26. Educação, Investimento Prioritário 93
Tomas Zinner

www.cebri.com.br/midia/documentos/dossie_2008_10_anos.pdf

209) Livro sobre a Rodada Doha e a reforma agricola

Delivering on Doha: Farm Trade and the Poor
Kimberly Ann Elliott
Washington, DC: Peterson Institute, 2006, 148 p.
ISBN 0881323926, 9780881323924

It is frequently asserted that agricultural liberalization by the United States, European Union, and other rich countries is the key to making the global trade negotiations launched in Doha, Qatar, in 2001 a "development round." Agricultural market liberalization is essential in achieving a successful Doha Round agreement because these are the most protected markets remaining in most rich countries. But the implications for developing countries, especially the poorest, are more complex than the current debate suggests. This volume examines the structure of agricultural support in rich countries and explores the challenges as well as opportunities that developing countries might face if the Doha Round succeeds in reforming OECD agriculture policies.

Read more at this link.

Contents:

Introduction, 1
Doha Round, Cairns Group, developing countries Rich Countries Supporting Rich Farmers, 13
OECD, European Union, TRQs Lessons from US and European, 35
OECD, blue box, countercyclical Opportunities and Challenges for Developing Countries. 63
World Bank, Bangladesh, cocoa The Devil in the Doha Details, 91
countercyclical, blue box, food aid
Delivering on Dohas Promise, 115

Glossary, 133

208) Um livro sobre a socializacao dos diplomatas

Mana
Print ISSN 0104-9313
Mana vol.14 no.2 Rio de Janeiro Oct. 2008
doi: 10.1590/S0104-93132008000200017

RESENHAS
Tatiana Oliveira Siciliano
Doutoranda PPGAS/MN/UFRJ

MOURA, Cristina Patriota de
O Instituto Rio Branco e a diplomacia brasileira. Um estudo de carreira e socialização
Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2007, 136pp.

Como o próprio título sugere, O Instituto Rio Branco e a diplomacia brasileira. Um estudo de carreira e socialização trata, principalmente, do processo de interação social e aprendizado na carreira de diplomata. Os indivíduos não se tornam diplomatas quando aprovados no concorrido Concurso de Admissão do Instituto Rio Branco, mas aprendem a sê-lo através de um longo processo de socialização, transformação subjetiva e formação profissional, no qual a vivência com professores e colegas nos primeiros anos de Instituto Rio Branco – no Programa de Formação e Aperfeiçoamento, Primeira Fase – é capital.

Este livro é o resultado, quase na íntegra, da dissertação de mestrado, então intitulada Jovens colegas: um estudo de carreira e socialização no Instituto Rio Branco, defendida em 1999, no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social do Museu Nacional da UFRJ, por Cristina Patriota de Moura, hoje professora do Departamento de Antropologia da Universidade de Brasília (UnB). O "mundo da diplomacia" entrelaça-se à trajetória da autora, ela própria neta, filha e sobrinha de diplomatas, e o seu interesse em "observar o familiar" com um olhar antropológico acompanha-a desde sua monografia de graduação em antropologia na UnB, cujo foco eram as identidades dos filhos de diplomatas.

Quando da defesa de Cristina de Moura, a carreira diplomática quase não era investigada academicamente. Há dez anos, época em que realizou seu trabalho de campo, o único estudo disponível, com o qual inclusive a autora dialogou bastante, era a dissertação de mestrado de Zairo Borges Cheibub, Diplomacia, diplomatas e política externa: aspectos do processo de institucionalização no Itamaraty, defendida em 1984, no IUPERJ. Atualmente, como a própria autora assinala na "Apresentação" do livro, o quadro vem mudando: cresceu tanto o interesse pela diplomacia como profissão como o número de pesquisas acadêmicas sobre o tema.

Outra contribuição do trabalho de Cristina Moura é o modo como ela se beneficia da leitura dos "estudos sobre carreira" de autores ligados à Escola de Chicago – como Everett Hughes, Erving Goffman e Howard Becker, as principais referências teóricas sobre o assunto – em sua abordagem sobre a construção da carreira dos jovens diplomatas pesquisados. A carreira é aqui entendida como um ciclo, um fluxo, um processo, no qual ator, instituição e acontecimentos encontram-se inevitavelmente imbricados. Assim, tornar-se um diplomata não é uma "conformação" aos preceitos do Instituto Rio Branco (IRBr), mas uma permanente "negociação da realidade", nos termos de Schutz. Naturalmente, a diplomacia apresenta peculiaridades, é um "campo" formal e hierárquico com fortes características institucionalizantes, cujo acesso à profissão e o seu controle se dão, via burocracia do Estado nacional, através do Ministério das Relações Exteriores.

Para exercer a profissão é preciso, primeiro, ser aprovado no concurso do IRBr; a partir de então, o "neófito" passará a constar do quadro funcional do Ministério das Relações Exteriores como terceiro secretário, o primeiro estágio das seis fases que estruturam a carreira diplomática. Como observa a autora, tal situação deve ser percebida não como um sistema predeterminado, mas como, na acepção de Gilberto Velho, um "campo de possibilidades" no qual os atores constantemente (re)elaboram seus "projetos" a partir de suas experiências e da interação com seus "pares" e "superiores".

A pesquisa de campo, ampla e minuciosa, merece destaque especialmente por se tratar de uma dissertação de mestrado, cujo tempo para a sua consecução é exíguo. A fim de entender e descrever não só o processo de incorporação do ethos profissional, mas também a "visão de mundo" compartilhada pelos jovens diplomatas, a autora recorreu a diversas fontes de informação, tanto primárias quanto secundárias. Fez um ano de observação participante dentro do Instituto Rio Branco, em Brasília, assistindo a várias aulas no PROFA-I junto com os diplomatas recém-aprovados na casa, conversou informalmente nos corredores com alunos e professores, além de assistir a cerimônias oficiais e formais como a do "Dia do Diplomata".

A sua observação não se restringiu, todavia, ao Itamaraty, pois freqüentou também um curso, no Rio de Janeiro, que preparava candidatos para o concurso, visando investigar este "momento traumático" de que tanto os diplomatas falavam. Além de conversas informais, usou entrevistas estruturadas e aplicou 39 questionários junto aos alunos do IRBr com o intuito de levantar as principais tendências e os perfis das turmas. Os arquivos e os currículos formais do IRBr, assim como os trabalhos acadêmicos disponíveis, constituíram as demais fontes de informações consultadas.

Por perceber a carreira do diplomata como uma trajetória, a autora mostra que ela se inicia antes da admissão do candidato ao IRBr. O "projeto" de tornar-se diplomata começa a se configurar, para alguns, ainda no Ensino Fundamental ou Médio; para outros, um pouco mais tarde, ou após o exercício de outra profissão. Em todos os casos, contudo, é um processo longo, no qual são investidos tempo, esforços físicos e mentais e recursos financeiros. Assim, existem algumas etapas bem delimitadas no aprendizado da carreira diplomática. A primeira é contar com uma boa formação prévia, ou direcionar seus esforços nesse sentido, visto que, para ingressar nos quadros do Ministério das Relações Exteriores, é preciso ter diploma de nível superior reconhecido pelo MEC, ser bem informado, ter bom domínio do inglês e português "impecável". A segunda é preparar-se para as provas do concurso, o que requer um estudo intenso e, por vezes, a freqüência a cursos preparatórios ou a aulas particulares.

Depois de "enfrentar" e vencer a tensão das cinco fases do concurso, o "calouro" inicia o Programa de Formação e Aperfeiçoamento, Primeira Fase (PROFA-I) com duração de dois anos. O primeiro ano está voltado para o desenvolvimento teórico e o segundo, mais centrado nas atividades profissionais, é o período de estágios na Secretaria das Relações Exteriores ou em postos fora do país. Percorrido todo esse caminho e aprovado no PROFA-I, vem a consagração na formatura, ocorrida no "Dia do Diplomata", após a qual o ex-aluno muda de status, transformando-se em "jovem colega" aos olhos de seus superiores.

O "Dia do Diplomata" consiste em um dos rituais mais representativos para a compreensão da "cosmologia" e do "sistema classificatório" do mundo diplomático, por ser composto de várias ações coletivas que visam institucionalizar a diplomacia brasileira e definir o seu papel junto à nação. Cristina Moura argumenta, apoiando-se nos conceitos de Tambiah, que as práticas rituais do "Dia do Diplomata", bem como a crença na sua eficácia, são fundamentais na incorporação do ethos e no compartilhamento da "visão de mundo" dos diplomatas.

Trata-se de uma cerimônia oficial e anual, cujo ritual é marcado pelos seguintes momentos: chegada do Presidente da República, execução do Hino Nacional, entrega de medalhas e insígnias pelo Presidente, cerimônia de formatura e encerramento com um almoço com o Presidente, no qual estão presentes os formandos. É uma "tradição inventada", nos termos de Hobsbawn, em 1970, ano da inauguração do Palácio do Itamaraty na capital federal e transferência da sede do Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Rio de Janeiro para Brasília. A escolha do dia 20 de abril é uma homenagem ao nascimento do Barão do Rio Branco, "patrono da diplomacia".

Para os principiantes, o "Dia do Diplomata" é um marco. É quando institucionalmente são considerados diplomatas, não mais alunos do Instituto Rio Branco. Assinala o fim do treinamento e a entrada no dia-a-dia da profissão. Além de ser um momento especial, de distinção, ele oferece a oportunidade de, ao final das comemorações, os jovens diplomatas compartilharem um almoço com o chefe da nação e conversarem informalmente com os "chefes da casa".

A fase do treinamento, experimentada no PROFA-I, é fundamental na "metamorfose" de neófito à diplomata de carreira. É nesse período que o ethos diplomático é incorporado, uma vez que no seu decorrer o aluno "deixa de ser quem era" e passa a fazer parte da instituição. E, para isso, é preciso aprender os códigos que não são ensinados nos livros, como o conhecimento das regras de etiqueta e dos protocolos, o uso formal da linguagem, o domínio da hexis corporal e a adequação do vestuário. Ao interagirem com os colegas de turma, professores e diplomatas hierarquicamente superiores, os alunos absorvem muito mais do que conceitos teóricos, construindo um sentimento de pertencimento institucional, uma adesão ao status diplomático que lhes permite ver como "naturais" os processos formais da "casa".

Cristina Moura mostra que optar pela carreira diplomática transcende à escolha de uma profissão, representando uma aderência a um estilo de vida, ao "espírito" de uma corporação, o que inclui novas responsabilidades, privilégios e deveres extensivos à família nuclear, existente ou a ser formada. Daí a importância do fato, para ser bem-sucedido, de que se escolha um cônjuge à altura dos requisitos profissionais: sociável, sofisticado e com boa escolaridade, além de flexível, uma vez que deverá aceitar seguir o(a) companheiro(a) nas constantes transferências de posto inerentes ao ofício, exigências estas que, por vezes, propiciam o casamento "endogâmico" entre diplomatas ou entre diplomata homem e filha de diplomatas. Afinal, nas palavras da autora, "a instituição engloba a família nuclear, definindo seus membros em um sistema classificatório tríplice: diplomata, filho de diplomata e cônjuge de diplomata" (:102).

A leitura do trabalho de Cristina Moura, agora publicado e acessível a um público maior, interessa não somente aos que estudam setores da burocracia do Estado brasileiro, mas a todos que desejam compreender a complexidade de certas dimensões culturais do país nas quais concepções formais e comportamentos "aristocráticos" convivem, lado a lado, com o "moderno" conceito de "meritocracia". Ademais, o livro certamente agradará a quem se sente atraído por "estudos sobre carreira". Trata-se de uma etnografia bem escrita, que sublinha a heterogeneidade das experiências no processo de construção de uma carreira. Um livro que faz lembrar, por sua vivacidade, o processo de "socialização" dos estudantes de medicina descritos por Howard Becker em Boys in white. Student culture in medical school.

© 2008 Mana

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207) Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, duas resenhas

Duas resenhas do mesmo livro:


Can You Spare a Dime?
By Robert Skidelsky
The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009

Niall Ferguson:
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Penguin, 442 pp., $29.95

1.
The historian Alan Taylor used to say, mischievously, that the only point of history is history. The idea that one could use it to predict the future, still more to avoid past mistakes, was pure illusion. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a history of financial innovation written as a television documentary[1] as well as a book, offers a neat test of Taylor's theory. Ferguson can claim some powers of anticipation. History convinced him in 2006 that the good times could not last "indefinitely." This was an insight to which the Nobel Prize–winning mathematical economists who devised the Black-Scholes formula—the complicated model for pricing share options used by the highly leveraged firm Long-Term Capital Management, which famously crashed in 1998—were oblivious. Their formula persuaded them that a massive sell-off could occur only once in four million years.
History has alerted Ferguson to the perils of the state relying on the bond market for its financing. On Lou Dobbs Tonight on November 13, 2008, he said:
How much can the international bond market absorb of new ten-year treasuries?... And if yields go up, the cost of government borrowing goes up, and the thing begins to spiral out of control....That's why you need the historical perspective....
Between the two opposed views that history can teach us nothing and that the future is simply a reflection of the past lies the sensible middle position that history, like any other way of experiencing the past, can give us "vague" knowledge of what may lie in store for humanity. Only history-free economists could have bought the "efficient market hypothesis," which claims that the market will price shares correctly, with deviations from accurate prediction occurring only at random. But knowledge of history would not have enabled anyone to predict the timing and extent of the present meltdown. Above all, history cannot settle the question of what our attitude should be toward money, which is at root a moral question.
The Ascent of Money is a superb book, which illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of history for understanding what is happening now. It is written with the narrative flair, eye for detail, range of reference, and playfulness of language that we have come to expect from this exceptionally versatile historian. Ferguson is clearly fascinated by the subject of finance, knows a huge amount about it, and communicates his enthusiasm to the reader. Many parts of the story will be familiar enough to specialists, but Ferguson has a special ability to color even the familiar with strange and unusual examples, and he weaves together the separate strands of the financial tapestry with great skill. Some of the financial material is quite technical, but there is no attempt to "dumb down." The book is an all too rare example of good, even dense, scholarship finding a way to engage the larger public.
Ferguson's strategically themed structure starts with the origins of money, and shows, in successive chapters, how money found a way of multiplying itself through the development of banking, bond, equity, and insurance markets, and derivative instruments of all kinds until the world economy came to resemble what Charles Morris has called an inverted pyramid of debt resting on an increasingly narrow base of real assets.[2] The large claim Ferguson makes is that we owe our prosperity more to finance than to technology. Throughout history men have been more ingenious at finding ways to make money than to make things. As Gibbon shrewdly noted, without the "incitement" given by money to the "powers and passions of human nature," societies could scarcely have emerged "from the grossest barbarism."[3]
Money, according to Ferguson, is not a thing but a relationship—above all, a relationship between creditor and debtor. As soon as time and distance start to elapse between exchanges of things of value—which happened at the start of civilization—people needed something more than barter. Farmers needed to borrow while they waited for the harvest to ripen; merchants needed to borrow while they waited for shipments to arrive; above all governments needed to borrow to finance their wars. The three functions of money—as a means of exchange, a unit of accounting, and a store of value—developed to bridge the interval between purchase and payment. Bills of exchange or "promises to pay" seem to have been used for the settlement of debts from the earliest times to overcome the inconvenience of shipping the precious metals.
Primitive banks, or safe depositories, must also have existed from the earliest times. The actual word "bank" originated from the Italian banca, or bench, at which the medieval moneychangers sat to do their business. Bankers soon learned how to augment their profits by lending out their deposits at interest. The Medici of fifteenth-century Florence were the first famous banking family. They made their fortune by buying and selling "bonds," the debts issued by cash-strapped monarchs. These bits of paper bound the borrower to repay within a specified period of time. The bond market started when these bonds became tradable. The bond market, the first truly modern financial market, was perfected in eighteenth-century England; great merchant bank underwriters of loans like the Rothschilds dominated the public finance of nineteenth-century Europe. Fractional reserve banking, an early innovation, starting with Sweden's Riksbank in 1656, enabled banks to make loans in excess of the money deposited with them—on the assumption that "depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money."
Ferguson rightly points out that the early growth of European finance was driven more by the needs of the state than by those of commerce. His thesis, familiar from his two volumes on the Rothschilds,[4] is that state policy determines the development of finance, not vice versa. This reverses the usual Marxist argument that finance controls governments. The Rothschilds started as court bankers. The Bank of England was created in 1694, mainly to help the government with war finance, by converting a portion of the government's debt into shares, in return for which the bank was given special privileges, such as a partial monopoly on issuing banknotes.
England's rise to world power in the eighteenth century was based on the ability of the British government to borrow larger sums at cheaper rates than any of its rivals; hence the importance for the nineteenth-century public mind of maintaining the state's creditworthiness by balancing the government budget. In the twentieth century it was the eagerness of democratic governments to extend home ownership—as an antidote to revolution—that later led to the practice by which home mortgages are converted into securities and sold around the world.
Long-term investment needed a different financing structure, and this was found in the development of the joint-stock, limited-liability company and the emergence of stock markets. By enabling many individuals to pool their resources by buying shares of a particular enterprise, while protecting them from losing everything if the project failed, the limited-liability company was one of the greatest innovations in financial history. The Dutch East India Company, formally chartered in 1602, was the first company to issue its own stock and bonds through the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Over its two-hundred-year history the average dividend it paid out to its 358 shareholders was 18 percent a year. It helped that it was a chartered monopoly, with the power of the government behind it.
Ferguson notes that the history of stock markets has been punctuated by spectacular bubbles and crashes. Some of these have been caused by fraudulent company promoters: Kenneth Lay of Enron had a worthy predecessor in John Law, whose Mississippi Company went spectacularly bust in 1720. Many fraudsters, like Ivar Kreuger, the "Swedish match king" who committed suicide in 1932, were men of vision who turned to crime only to rescue great projects that had gone wrong. But the fraudsters could get away with it—for a time—because of what Alan Greenspan called the "irrational exuberance" of investors. Why are stock markets so volatile? Ferguson believes it is because they are mirrors of the human psyche. Like homo sapiens, they can become depressed. They can even suffer complete breakdowns. Yet hope—or is it amnesia?—always seems able to triumph over such bad experiences.
This is a good analogy, but, as I shall argue, it is not an explanation.
As Ferguson tells it, volatility is inherent in financial markets, but bad monetary policy can make it worse. Central banks were created, in part, to stop the "over-issue" of notes by private banks, and to act as "lender of the last resort." Following Milton Friedman, Ferguson believes that the Great Depression of 1929–1933 was caused by bad monetary policy—money was kept so cheap that a huge stock market bubble formed, and, when it burst, the Federal Reserve Board failed to provide the banking system with sufficient liquidity. This view that monetary policy alone is sufficient to keep economies relatively stable is unlikely to survive its harsh confrontation with present reality.
The next step in money's ascent is the development of insurance markets to guard against risk. Ferguson tells the story through three central episodes. The start of insurance depended on the work of the mathematicians at Port-Royal in eighteenth-century France, who laid the basis for the modern theory of probability. Provided that the relative frequency of an occurrence was known from past information, it would be possible to insure people against the risk of it happening to them. This insight was applied by the two clergymen founders of the Scottish Ministers' Widows' Fund in Glasgow (Ferguson's hometown) in 1743. They worked out the premiums required to create a fund that, when invested, would cover payments to beneficiaries on the deaths of their husbands. As conditions of life eased, and people demanded greater protection against its hazards, insurance and pension funds "would rise to become some of the biggest investors in the world—the so-called institutional investors who today dominate global financial markets."
From the late nineteenth century onward, the state increasingly took on the "insurance" function, providing social security and health benefits to the whole population through the tax system. This was because private insurance companies left a sizable fraction of the population uninsured and uninsurable. Ferguson unusually, but effectively, uses Japan rather than Germany or Britain as his main example of the way the state nationalized risk—mainly, one suspects, because it bests illustrates his favorite thesis that financial systems grew up to serve the military needs of the state. Social security, in this view, was the reward for military sacrifice. This was particularly so in Japan.
Ferguson's third example comes from Chile, which he uses to illustrate the return from government social insurance to private—albeit compulsory—insurance. The tax-financed welfare state had never been fully accepted by conservatives, who believed it rotted the character by removing the incentive to save and by separating benefit from individual contribution. Influenced by Milton Friedman and the "Chicago boys," José Piñera, General Augusto Pinochet's minister of labor from 1979 to 1981, privatized Chile's cumbersome state pension scheme. According to Piñera, "What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today's contributions being used to pay today's benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future use."

The Chilean reform encouraged workers to opt out of tax-financed state pensions into personal retirement accounts, managed by licensed but competing pension funds, and financed by compulsory deductions from wages. Although most Western countries remained wedded to their traditional single-payer welfare states, set up during and after World War II, the Chilean model was imitated across Latin America and emerging market economies. Despite what he calls its "shadow side"—it "leaves a substantial proportion of the population with no pension coverage at all"—Ferguson clearly approves of the Chilean reform, traveling to Santiago to see firsthand what he considers its beneficent results. It will be interesting to see whether the provision for universal health care promised by the Obama administration follows the European model—by extending tax-financed Medicare for everyone along the lines proposed by Paul Krugman[5]—or the Chilean/Singapore model in which compulsory insurance premiums, paid out of wages, provide the contributors with individual entitlements.
Land and the buildings on it—or in modern parlance "bricks and mortar"—have played a crucial part in the development of the financial (and economic) system, because "the land can't run away," and is therefore easy to use as collateral. Mortgaging their property became the way improvident landowners maintained extravagant lifestyles and, in later, more sober times, the way house owners raised money to start businesses. The spread of home ownership in the twentieth century—largely promoted by government in an attempt to make capitalism more popular—made possible a vast expansion of collateralized debt, and was the main stimulus to the development of the conversion of debt into securities.
Ferguson points out that property "is a security only to the person who lends you money.... By contrast, the borrower's sole security against the loss of his property to such creditors is his income." This is not quite true. The lender's security also depends on the income—actual or expected—of the borrower, because, although the property cannot "run away," it may lose its value, or it may be costly, and even impossible, for the creditor to get possession of it. Ferguson might have told the story of the costly mistake made by France's Credit Lyonnais, which set up its own proprietary credit-rating agency in the late nineteenth century. Its mistake was to rate the credit-worthiness of governments not on their debt-to-income but on their debt-to-property ratios. The imperial government of Russia got top rating, because, despite its disordered finances, of all governments it owned the most property. On the basis of this rating, French investors snapped up tsarist bonds. They lost all their money, not because the property disappeared but because the government did. Credit Lyonnais failed to take into account "political risk."
The tsarist government would now be considered a subprime borrower. Yet today's vastly more sophisticated credit-rating agencies made the same mistake in giving triple-A ratings to bonds that took no account of the income of the borrowers—what the professionals called "toxic waste." Ferguson notes that a disproportionate number of sub-prime borrowers were ethnic minorities and wonders whether subprime is a new euphemism for black. Both Democratic and Republican administrations brought pressure on lenders to relax their rules in order to spread home ownership—for example, not to press borrowers for full documentation. And indeed home ownership—or bank ownership of homes—did expand greatly in the last ten years. The bubble burst in 2007 when a rise in the federal funds rate from 1 percent to 5.4 percent coincided with the expiring of the enticing "teaser" rate periods that lenders had offered subprime borrowers. Repayments were then set at much higher interest rates and many could not pay.
The sober conclusion Ferguson draws from this fascinating story of financial incontinence and skullduggery is that property ownership is not the "magic bullet" it is often claimed to be. This is the basis of his criticism of the exaggerated claim of the economist Hernando de Soto that the path to Latin American prosperity lies in secure property rights.[6] "In short, there was irrational exuberance about bricks and mortar and the capital gains they could yield."
Ferguson's last chapter, "From Empire to Chimerica," argues convincingly that it was the investment of billions of dollars of Chinese savings in US Treasury bonds that fueled the US debt binge, by enabling Greenspan to keep money so cheap for so long. In a bravura passage that rounds off his story of money's ascent, Ferguson writes:
"Chimerica"—China plus America—seemed like a marriage made in heaven. The East Chimericans did the saving. The West Chimericans did the spending. [Cheap] Chinese imports kept down US inflation. Chinese savings kept down US interest rates. Chinese labour kept down US wage costs. As a result, it was remarkably cheap to borrow money and remarkably profitable to run a corporation. Thanks to Chimerica, global real interest rates...sank by more than a third below their average over the past fifteen years. Thanks to Chimerica, US corporate profits in 2006 rose by the same proportion above their average share of GDP....
The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. Chimerica, in other words, is the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge fund population explosion. [It] was the underlying reason why the US mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that you could get a 100 per cent mortgage with no income, no job or assets.

2.
In the long sweep of history, the failures of money seem trivial in comparison with its triumphs, mere incidents on the road of financial innovation that leads to universal prosperity. Yet the failures have been extremely damaging to the generations that experienced them. The famous criticism made by John Maynard Keynes about the economics of his day can be applied to Ferguson's history:
In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.[7]
Ferguson, of course, is aware of the storms—in fact he writes brilliantly about them—but he never doubts that the journey has been worth it. The "ascent" of which he writes owes more to Reagan-Thatcher triumphalism than to the more sober assessments of the performance of markets currently in vogue. It also leaves out an important part of the drama of finance—the constant struggle between financial innovation and government attempts to protect populations from financial rapacity.
It is not till he comes to his "Afterword," interestingly, if ambiguously, entitled "The Descent of Money," that Ferguson seriously considers the question of why the "ascent" of money he celebrates is linked to extreme financial instability. Here he pays brief homage to the distinction made by the economist Frank Knight (and also Keynes) between "risk" and "uncertainty"—with risk referring to a situation in which the probabilities of different random outcomes can be determined, as in roulette, whereas uncertainty pertains when no such probabilities are possible, such as the prospect of a future war. And he concedes that Keynes may have been "thinking along the right lines" when he talked of investors falling back on "conventions" to disguise from themselves the fact that they do not know what the future will bring—the main convention being to behave like everyone else is behaving.
But he fails to follow up these crucial insights. The distinction between "uncertainty" and "risk" is essential, in my view, to a proper understanding not only of the present crisis but of the whole "roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes" that have punctuated economic history. The point is that the future cannot be decomposed into measurable risk, however much risk is spread across intermediary instruments. The illusion that it can be blinds investors to the ever-present possibility that the world may change in ways which set all their calculations at nought. The credit mountain was built on the belief that house prices would always go up; when they started to fall the balloon was pricked.
Ferguson realizes that mainstream economics is flawed, but then veers away to what I think is the dead end of "behavioral economics" and false analogies between financial evolution and Darwinian natural selection. Behavioral economics claims that we are "wired" to behave "irrationally"; theories purporting to derive from Darwinism claim that finance follows the law of the "survival of the fittest," whereby firms fitted to their environment flourish and weaker ones go to the wall—a process that inevitably involves "creative destruction." These attempts to explain the rise of money in terms of natural processes strike me as being both morally and philosophically naive.
Ferguson's mistake, I suggest, comes from an incomplete appreciation of the role of money. Evidently money is more than just a facilitator of trades. It is a way of coping with changing views about an uncertain future. Why, Keynes asked, should any rational person wish to "hold money" rather than spend it? Precisely because it is a way of postponing spending when confidence is low and the "conventions" promising a secure future have broken down. Keynes writes:
The desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future.... It operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude.[8]
Even a (modestly) depreciating currency may at moments of high uncertainty seem more "secure" (carry a higher premium) than any other asset. We are seeing the truth of this today. The failure to take account of this aspect of money is the missing dimension from an otherwise splendid book.
A final reflection on Ferguson as a historian. He is overimpressed by economics. Many historians feel that history is in some way inferior to the more exact sciences; the thought that he can "do" economics gives the historian an expanding sense of mastery. I know the feeling, because I've lived through it myself. Economics, especially in its mathematicized form, purveys a peculiar vision of society. Society to the mathematicians is a market imperfection. Among other imperfections, the idea is that allocation of resources is not as efficient and information for making choices is not as complete as they should be.
This delusive, but powerful, idea suggests that behind the imperfection lies perfection, a world in which the future will be perfectly known and therefore hold no surprises. Mathematics is the inheritor of the platonic ideal; and mathematically driven financial innovation is its handmaiden. At one time philosophers projected their utopias, and the early economists followed suit. Keynes was perhaps the last one who indulged in utopia building. In his essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (1930), he looked forward to a time when the economic problem was solved and an age of abundance and leisure had arrived in which people would cultivate the arts of life.[9]
Instead, Keynes's grandchildren face a rerun of the Great Depression, and President-elect Obama promises a new New Deal. On December 6, he pledged to create an estimated 2.5 million jobs in the first two years of his administration by large-scale investments in infrastructure projects, including bridges, mass transit, and electrical grids. Estimates of the costs by members of Congress range from $400 to $700 billion.
Having taken on $7.8 trillion in financial obligations over the last year—roughly half the size of the entire American economy—the US government is now represented in some form on the boards of most major American companies. Obama has promised to help those facing foreclosure on their mortgages and those hit by the relocation of jobs overseas. He has vowed to curb the excesses enjoyed by those at the pinnacle of deregulated credit. While not addressing the fundamental direction of economic theory, ad hoc policies such as these may help to ensure that the ascent of money does not lead to the descent of man.

—December 17, 2008
Notes
[1]The two-hour documentary The Ascent of Money airs on PBS on January 13, 2009.
[2]Charles R. Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash (PublicAffairs, 2008), p. xii.
[3]Quoted in The Oxford Book of Money, edited by Kevin Jackson (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 18; from Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Book I (1776).
[4]The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798–1848 (Viking, 1998) and The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1849–1999 (Viking, 1999); reviewed in these pages by Robert Skidelsky, December 16, 1999.
[5]See Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (Norton, 2007), pp. 236–237; reviewed in these pages by Michael Tomasky, November 22, 2007.
[6]In Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic Books, 2000).
[7]John Maynard Keynes, "A Tract on Monetary Reform" (1923), in Collected Writings (Macmillan/St. Martin's/Royal Economic Society, 1971), Vol. 4, p. 65.
[8]Keynes, "General Theory of Unemployment" (February 1937), in Collected Writings, Vol. 14, p. 116.
[9]Keynes, Collected Writings, Vol. 9, p. 321.

==========

Follow the Money
By MICHAEL HIRSH
The New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 28, 2008

THE ASCENT OF MONEY
A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
Illustrated. 442 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95

Niall Ferguson, it is fair to say, is a one-man book factory. In fact, if the American economy cranked out goods as prolifically as Ferguson does histories, we might not be in half the fix we are in right now. But then Ferguson wouldn’t have nearly as much to write about. The onetime enfant terrible of the Oxbridge historical establishment, Ferguson specializes in finding fault with great powers, especially the way they mismanage their empires. Ferguson first came to notice a decade ago with “The Pity of War,” a revisionist tour de force arguing that Britain made a world-historical error by entering World War I (and thereby destroying its empire) when it should have simply waited out the swift German conquest of Europe and remained a superpower, with Europe the better for it. More recently the Scottish-born Ferguson, who now spends half the year teaching at Harvard and the other half at Oxford, has turned his attention to the prodigal young heir to the British imperial crown, the United States. In “The Cash Nexus” (2001) and “Colossus” (2004), he urged Americans to emerge from their self-denial and fulfill their obvious destiny as the next “liberal” empire spreading the light of democracy and Anglo-­Saxon legalism across the globe. “The greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century,” Ferguson concluded in “The Cash Nexus” (published in the opening months of the Bush presidency), is that “the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.” Ferguson later supported the Iraq war as evidence that Washington had finally gotten up its courage, imperially speaking.
Whatever one thinks of his arguments, it’s impossible to ignore Niall Ferguson. He’s like the brightest kid in the debating club, the one who pulls all-nighters in the library and ferrets out facts no one thought to uncover. And in his latest book, “The Ascent of Money” — humbly subtitled “A Financial History of the World” — Ferguson takes us on an often enlightening and enjoyable spelunking tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money. “The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man,” he writes, making a conscious reference to the BBC production he loved as a boy, Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man.” (In fact, like Ferguson’s three previous books, “Colossus,” “Empire” and “The War of the World,” “The Ascent of Money” was written as a companion to a TV documentary series.)
“Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” Ferguson says. He goes into fascinating detail about how “it was Nathan Roth­schild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo” by selling bonds and stockpiling gold for the British Army. The richest bankers on the Continent in the 19th century, the Rothschilds became known as die Finanzbonaparten (the Bonapartes of finance). And, as Ferguson argues, they also played a crucial part in the South’s defeat in the Civil War by declining to invest in Confederate cotton-­collateralized bonds. Imperial Spain amassed vast amounts of bullion from the New World, but it faded as a power while the British and Dutch empires prospered because they had sophisticated banking systems and Spain did not. Similarly, the French Revolution was made all but inevitable by the machinations of an unscrupulous Scotsman named John Law, whom the deeply indebted French monarchy recklessly placed in charge of public finance. “It was as if one man was simultaneously running all 500 of the top U.S. corporations, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System,” Ferguson writes. Law proceeded to single-handedly create the subprime mortgage bubble of his day. When it collapsed, the fallout “fatally set back France’s financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for generations.” Wilhelmine Germany, meanwhile, came up short in World War I because it “did not have access to the international bond market,” Ferguson writes. Every one of these episodes sounds like a warning shot: Will America be the next great power to fall because of unsound finance?
The question is particularly pressing in the midst of what is widely seen as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And Ferguson’s conclusions are troubling. Only a few years after accusing Washington of “imperial understretch” for failing to flex its muscles — and without any hint of irony — Ferguson now argues that the United States may be succumbing to financial overstretch. Deeply in debt to the rest of the world, it has become part of a “dual country” that he calls “Chimerica.” “In effect, the People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America,” he writes. Until the current global financial crisis, this seemed to be a fairly reliable relationship. American consumers over-bought goods and over-borrowed from China, and the Chinese in turn accumulated huge dollar surpluses that they plowed back into Wall Street investments, thereby supplying profligate Americans with the financing we needed to consume and sustain ourselves as the lone superpower. “For a time it seemed like a marriage made in heaven,” Ferguson writes. “The East Chimericans did the saving. The West Chimericans did the spending.”
Suddenly, however, it’s looking more like a marriage made in hell. According to Ferguson, much of the current crisis stems from this increasingly uneasy symbiosis. It turns out “there was a catch. The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow.” This cascade of easy money, he argues, “was the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. . . . And Chimerica — or the Asian ‘savings glut,’ as Ben Bernanke called it — was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job or assets.” Going forward, the system seems likely to be increasingly unstable, as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson suggested recently when he warned that unless fundamental changes are made, “the pressure from global imbalances will simply build up again until it finds another outlet.”
Previous periods of global stability and peace had relied on judicious mechanisms like the Congress of Vienna or the Bretton Woods agreements. Now the international system — and America’s position within it — has come to depend on what looks more like a global Rube Goldberg machine running on hot money. And though Ferguson doesn’t come out and say it, the Chinese may now have the upper hand in this chimerical Chimerica. While so far it’s worked in Beijing’s interest to under­write America’s rampant consumerism — because we buy so many of their goods — the Chinese also have the option of recycling some of their surplus billions into their own huge population. We, on the other hand, don’t have the option not to borrow from them. Indeed, it’s no secret on Wall Street and in Washington that the real targets of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout plan were the foreign funds, including “sovereign wealth funds,” that keep America’s financial system afloat. Unless these foreign financiers — principally China and Japan — get reassurance that the global financial system can function properly again, Ameri­ca’s long period of growth and power may be coming to a close.
Perhaps, then, the conclusion should be that Americans need to flex our muscles less as an empire and fight a little harder for fiscal sobriety and balance in our foreign policy. To be fair, Ferguson was early in seeing that America’s fiscal problems were serious. In “Colossus,” he warned presciently of America’s increasing reliance on Chinese capital, although he argued then that we should be mainly worried about domestic entitlements like Medicare and Social Security — indicating that he, like the Bush administration, seriously underestimated the ultimate cost of the Iraq war.
As with Ferguson’s three previous documentary efforts, “The Ascent of Money” sometimes feels as if it were laid out like a shooting script. Ferguson will depart from an exegesis on the 17th century or the Great Depression to pop up in post-Katrina New Orleans or Memphis (for a report on bankruptcies), and we surmise it’s to record another on-scener for PBS. The book, whose main text comprises a scant 360 pages (a light effort for Ferguson, especially considering the ambitious subtitle), is also reductionist at times. Is it really fair to say Chimerica is mainly at the root of our current problems? (A lack of oversight and regulation of the subprime mortgage market here at home had a lot to do with it as well.) China’s backwardness between the 1700s and 1970s was largely due to its dearth of financial innovation, he suggests, but other historians have pointed equally to the absence of technological innovation of the kind that arose in Europe’s close-quartered patchwork of states because of repeated wars.
And in the end, as Ferguson himself seems to acknowledge, the scope of the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today calls into question the book’s premise — that the “trajectory” of finance through history, while “jagged and irregular,” is “unquestionably upwards.” Our increasingly sophisticated finance clearly contains self-destructive tendencies, and its very complexity may have become our undoing. Ferguson wonders whether the cruel realities of biological evolution are the model for what is happening now. Contemplating the financial Armageddon that has devastated Wall Street and set back globalization, he asks: “Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world — one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Here we thought we were making all this progress as a species, and suddenly we find our supposed innovations lumped with Tyrannosaurus rex. Doesn’t sound like much of an ascent to me.

Michael Hirsh is Newsweek’s national economics correspondent and the author of “At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.”

206) Os melhores livros de 2008, segundo The Economist

Books of the year
Pick of the pile
The Economist, December 4th 2008

The best books of 2008 covered the Iraq war, Chinese capitalism, Mississippi blues, fishing in Sweden, ayatollahs, human waste and the secret life of words
_____________________________
Politics and current affairs
_____________________________

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
By Noah Feldman
Princeton University Press; 200 pages; $22.95 and £13.50
A short, incisive and elegant book by a Harvard specialist in Islamic political thought, which analyses the dilemma posed by the huge popular support, among many Muslims, for explicitly Islamic forms of government.

A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
By Lawrence Freedman.
PublicAffairs; 624 pages; $29.95. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £20
The region's key events provide ample material for this subtle re-examination: the fall of the shah, the three wars in the Persian Gulf, jihad in Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter's half-success at peacemaking at Camp David in 1978 and Bill Clinton's failure there two decades later.

Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy
By David Marquand.
Weienfeld & Nicolson; 496 pages; £25
A rich, compelling and convincing account of recent British political history by a man who has experienced it as a member of parliament, a journalist and a distinguished academic historian.

The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Norton; 311 pages; $22.95. Allen Lane; £20
With the patience of auditors and the passion of polemicists, two academics, one a Nobel prize-winning economist and the other a public-finance expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, take an unflinching look at the hidden cost of invading Iraq.

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
By Jane Mayer
Doubleday; 400 pages; $27.50 and £22.85
A comprehensive and compelling examination of how a handful of officials, working in extreme secrecy, even from their colleagues, prosecuted the war on terror, undermining America's civil liberties.

Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror
By Benjamin Wittes
Penguin Press; 305 pages; $25.95
How the Bush administration came to adopt the tactics that became the hallmark of its struggle against al-Qaeda and its ilk.

India: The Emerging Giant
By Arvind Panagariya
Oxford University Press; 544 pages; $39.95 and £19.99
An analysis of how Manmohan Singh, first as finance minister and now as prime minister, sought to fight India's poverty with sweeping reforms aimed at promoting rapid economic growth.

Dinner with Mugabe: The Untold Story of a Freedom Fighter Who Became a Tyrant
By Heidi Holland
Penguin; 280 pages; $30 and £17.99
The most intimate account yet published of Robert Mugabe's transformation from liberation hero to reviled despot.

_______________________

Economics and business
_______________________

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
By Charles R. Morris
PublicAffairs; 224 pages; $22.95 and £13.99
The first big book on the credit crunch saw the crisis coming three years ago. Freak-out-onomics for I-told-you-sos.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State
By Yasheng Huang
Cambridge University Press; 366 pages; $30 and £15.99
Convincingly overturns the usual analyses of the nature of China's economy, and brilliantly predicts, a year ahead of other commentators, its steep decline.

When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change
By Mohamed El-Erian
McGraw Hill; 304 pages; $27.95 and £15.99
Ignore the in-your-face cover. This is a fluent and intelligent account of the credit crisis: why it happened and how to survive it. Winner of the 2008 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs business book of the year award.

The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World
By Amar Bhidé
Princeton University Press; 520 pages; $35 and £19.95
A counterintuitive view of technology and globalisation that will delight those who believe that American innovation is insulated from economic ups and downs.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
By Tim Harford
Random House; 272 pages; $25. Little, Brown; £18.95
Neither too lofty nor dumbed down, this is a fascinating study of how society is shaped by hidden pay-offs and punishments.

Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World
By Don Tapscott
McGraw-Hill; 384 pages; $27.95 and £15.99
A management guru explains why the net generation, who grew up playing video games and spending time on the internet, are not all messed up, as many people suspect, but have actually been improved by the experience.

Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything
By Hal Sirkin, Jim Hemerling and Arindam Bhattacharya
Business Plus; 304 pages; $26.99 and £18.99
Hal Sirkin and two colleagues explore how rich-country multinationals face increasingly effective competition from new emerging-market corporate champions, which compete not just on lower costs but also on greater ingenuity and efficiency.

The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs
By Charles D. Ellis
Penguin Press; 752 pages; $37.95. Allen Lane; £25
Goldman Sachs has long set the gold standard in finance, even though the current crisis nearly brought it down. With unprecedented access to insiders, Charles Ellis provides the best account yet of the rise of this investment bank and what makes it tick.

________

History
________

The Return of History and the End of Dreams
By Robert Kagan
Knopf; 128 pages; $19.95. Atlantic Books; £12.99
A short, simple book arguing that we are now back in a world of clashing national ambitions and interests; not so different from the 19th century.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
By William J. Bernstein
Atlantic Monthly Press; 467 pages; $30. Atlantic Books; £22
Globalisation often gets a bad press, so it is interesting to read this hymn to commercial exchange that shows how, largely for better, sometimes for worse, our world has been defined by trade.

Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
By Anthony Lewis
Basic Books; 240 pages; $25 and £14.99
A concise and wise presentation of the history and scope of freedom of thought in the United States, with conclusions that are well worth pondering.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes
Harper Press; 380 pages; £20. To be published in America by Pantheon Books in July
A dazzling cornucopia exploring the impact of discovery upon such great Romantic writers as Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats.

Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West
By Andrew Roberts
Allen Lane; 720 pages; £25. To be published in America by Harper in May
Andrew Roberts lays claim to the title of Britain's finest contemporary military historian with this important analysis of grand strategy during the second world war, which, among other delights, vindicates that much maligned British way of doing things: the committee.

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China
By Philip P. Pan
Simon & Schuster; 368 pages; $28. Picador; £14.99
Detailed profiles of 11 Chinese, mostly present day, which together provide a not very pretty snapshot of China's political development. One of the best descriptions of what life has been like for many Chinese citizens during the past 15 years.

Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present
By Jonathan Fenby
Ecco Books; 816 pages; $34.95. Published in Britain as "The Penguin History of Modern China"; Allen Lane; £30
The extraordinary growth in China's population, economic productivity and military grasp has not been matched, to anything like the same extent, by developments in the way the country is governed. Jonathan Fenby has written a much-needed new history that points to a coming crisis.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
By Mark Thompson
Faber & Faber; 464 pages; £25. To be published in America by Basic Books in March
A startling indictment of the Italian state's conduct during the first world war, which shows how Italy's nationalist dream of expansion would turn into the Fascist nightmare.

The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
By Sarah Wise
The Bodley Head; 240 pages; £20
An affecting history of life in the crowded slums of 19th-century London which traces, with great restraint, the links between poor housing, poverty and criminality.

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Centre of the World
By Roger Crowley
Random House; 368 pages; $30. Faber and Faber; £20
How the clash of civilisations between Christianity and Islam came to be fought out during the Ottoman sieges of Rhodes and Malta and the battle of Lepanto, with some fairly familiar faults on both sides already becoming visible more than 500 years ago.

American Rifle: A Biography
By Alexander Rose
Delacorte Press; 512 pages; $30
How and why American soldiers have learnt to shoot straight.

__________
Biography
__________

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
By Rick Perlstein
Scribner; 896 pages; $37.50 and £25
Americans supported Richard Nixon because of his anger and resentment, not despite it. Rick Perlstein offers compelling evidence for a simple but convincing thesis about Nixon's appeal.

The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V.S. Naipaul
By Patrick French
Knopf; 576 pages; $30. Picador; £20
An elegant and insightful study of the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate who made his name as a novelist and chronicler of India and the Islamic world. A singular example of how good authorised biographies can, and should, be.

Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare
By Jonathan Bate
Random House; 496 pages; $35. Viking; £25
It is almost impossible to write something fresh about William Shakespeare. Yet Jonathan Bate has succeeded, with a sparkling and arresting portrait of the Bard and his world as discovered in his writings.

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson
By Brenda Wineapple
Knopf; 432 pages; $27.95 and £27.95
A portrait of a friendship that is also a sweeping cultural and political history of the lead-in to the American civil war and its aftermath.

Chagall: A Biography
By Jackie Wullschlager
Knopf; 608 pages; $40. Allen Lane; £30
Manages to be both magical and utterly credible in describing an artist who put fiddlers on the roof and made lovers fly through the air.

______________________

Science and technology
______________________

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
By Rose George
Metropolitan Books; 304 pages; $26. Portobello Books; £12.99
A frank and illuminating look at a generally neglected, but very important, aspect of human life.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
Edited by Timothy Gowers, June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader
Princeton University Press; 1,008 pages; $99 and £60
This is a panoramic view of modern mathematics. It is tough going in some places, but much of it is surprisingly accessible. A must for budding number-crunchers.

Bad Science
By Ben Goldacre
Fourth Estate; 352 pages; £12
A fine lesson in how to skewer the enemies of reason and the peddlers of cant and half-truths.

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Duelling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York
By Matthew Goodman
Basic Books; 384 pages; $26 and £15.99
In retelling the story of how, in the 1830s, the New York Sun tried to persuade its readers there was life on the moon, Matthew Goodman vividly brings to life a town on the brink of becoming a world-class city.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Yale University Press; 304 pages; $26 and £18
How behavioural economics affects everything—from what we eat in restaurants to our investments and pension choices.

Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
By Matthew Connelly
Harvard University Press/Belknap; 544 pages; $35 and £22.95
A vivid account of how the road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
By Sudhir Venkatesh
Penguin Press; 320 pages; $25.95. Allen Lane; £18.99
A rich portrait of the urban poor, drawn not from statistics but from vivid tales of some of the 30,000 residents of Robert Taylor Homes, America's biggest public housing scheme, on Chicago's South Side.

_______________________
Culture and digressions
_______________________

Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts
By Joseph Horowitz
HarperCollins; 480 pages; $27.50 and £27.50
A many-layered account, focusing on the interwar years, of the European immigrants, particularly those from Germany and Russia, who helped create American culture.

Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History: Volume I, 1863-1959
Edited by Bruce Altshuler
Phaidon; 410 pages; $90 and £45
The story of the medium through which most art lovers have experienced modern art: the big group show. A must for anyone interested in art, politics and taste in the 20th century.

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English
By Henry Hitchings
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 440 pages; $27. John Murray; £16.99
A globe-trotting survey of the world's lingua franca, which includes such nuggets as the word "chagrin", derived from the Turkish for roughened leather, or scaly sharkskin, and "lens", which comes from the Latin for "lentil", or "window" meaning "eye of wind" in old Norse.

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 288 pages; $24. Jonathan Cape; £16.99
Displaying a playful exuberance wonderfully at odds with the dry, jargon-strewn tradition of academic criticism, this deft, slender volume analyses how novelists pull rabbits out of hats.

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music
By Ted Gioia
Norton; 448 pages; $27.95 and £16.99
A way of life as much as music, the passionate blues singing of Mississippi's steamy cotton fields ultimately gave rise to rock 'n' roll. Ted Gioia expertly traces its colourful history and heroes.

Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes
By Ferdinand Mount
Bloomsbury; 384 pages; £15
A beautifully written, poignant and, at times, very funny memoir by a man who describes himself at different points in his life as idle, supercilious, incompetent and emotionally retarded.

____________________

Fiction and memoirs
___________________

Sea of Poppies: A Novel
By Amitav Ghosh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 528 pages; $26. John Murray; £18.99
Set in India in 1838, this rich and panoramic adventure tells the intricate stories of a cast of hundreds in lustrous and mesmerising prose. The first of a promised trilogy from a master of fiction.

Breath: A Novel
By Tim Winton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 224 pages; $23. Picador; £14.99
Two teenagers get caught up with a dangerous surfer, his wife and the waves in this Australian coming-of-age novel that perfectly balances youthful romanticism and disillusion.

Lush Life
By Richard Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 464 pages; $26. Bloomsbury; £12.99
The wry bartenders, brusque cops and gritty rhythmic dialogue of Manhattan's Lower East Side turn this fast-paced murder-mystery into a whodunnit with literary heft.

The Secret Scripture
By Sebastian Barry
Viking; 304 pages; $24.95. Faber and Faber; £16.99
An elderly female inhabitant of a mental hospital and her psychiatrist tell their stories through their journals. A moving and memorable novel about conflicting versions of Ireland's past.

Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared
By Andrew Brown
Granta Books; 352 pages; £16.99
Fishing, journalism and the death throes of the Swedish social system are the unpromising ingredients of this thought-provoking and evocative autobiographical memoir.

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
By Hooman Majd
Doubleday; 288 pages; $24.95
A Western-educated son of an ayatollah portrays the intricacies of Iranian society in this illuminating, critical and affectionate memoir of his homeland.

Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape
By Raja Shehadeh
Scribner; 200 pages; $15. Profile Books; £7.99
This superbly written and sad memoir tells the story of a lawyer's fight against Israel's seizure of Palestinian land and how he seeks solace by walking in the wild countryside of the West Bank.

The Three of Us: A Family Story
By Julia Blackburn
Pantheon; 313 pages; $26. Jonathan Cape; £16.99
A raw and moving story about a chaotic family and a lost childhood. Beautifully crafted and brave, this book is surprisingly full of forgiveness and humour.

205) The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History

From: Book Reviews in Economic and Business History
Date: 3 de dezembro de 2008 11h28min58s GMT-02:00
To: eh.net-review@eh.net
Subject: Richardson on Hetzel, _The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History_
Reply-To: admin@eh.net

------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (December 2008)

Robert L. Hetzel, _The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvi + 390 pp. $50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-521-88132-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gary Richardson, Department of Economics, University of California -- Irvine.

_The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History_ by Robert Hetzel studies the evolution of monetary policy from the beginning of the Federal Reserve until the end of the Greenspan Era. The title claims the book is a history, and it is that, but it is much more. As a history, Hetzel’s book details the conduct of monetary policy over nearly ninety years, and sets that conduct in the context of the intellectual and
political environment of the time. As an economic synthesis, Hetzel’s book views the evolution of monetary policies as a series of experiments useful for understanding fundamental issues concerning money, prices, and macroeconomic policy. The past serves as a laboratory for understanding the present. The emergence of modern monetary policy and prospects for our nation’s financial future are understood by studying
the learning-curve of the leaders of the Federal Reserve, the painful process of replacing the gold standard with a fiat money standard, and the recurrent monetary instability during the decades following the Second World War.

Enough for the sales pitch. Let me get to the details.
The book contains 26 chapters and an appendix listing the data that the FOMC saw during the “stop-go” period from 1963 to 1982. Chapter 3, “From Gold to Fiat Money,” examines policy from the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 through the end of the Great Depression. Chapters 4 and 9 examine the creation of the postwar monetary system (note that one of my few suggestions to the author would have been to place most of the material in Chapter 9 in the fourth chapter). Chapters 10 through 14
discuss the Great Inflation of the 1970s, Volcker’s disinflation at the tail end of the 1970s and beginning of the next decade, and monetary policies during the early 1980s. Chapters 15 through 25 focus on monetary policies during the Greenspan Era. The distribution of time across chapters reveals the focus of the book, which is largely on postwar monetary policy and particularly on recent decades. As a student
of the Great Depression, I desired more analysis of earlier decades, but I realize that the author’s research and experience make his insights on the later decades more valuable, and believe that his decisions about emphasis and pacing reflect carefully considered judgments about his marginal product. In other words, he made sensible choices about where he should devote his time and attention.

A strength of the book is its integrative chapters, including Chapters 1, 2, 23, and 26. These shed light on broad policy issues that cut across time and elaborate on his insight that monetary policy during the twentieth century consisted of a series of policy experiments whose outcomes we are just beginning to understand.

Chapter 1 examines the evolution of the monetary standard. It points out the importance of this issue. Monetary instability coincided with social upheaval and political disorder throughout the twentieth century. An example is the rise of Nazism in Germany after the hyperinflation of the 1920s and during the depression of the 1930s. The success of society in the twenty-first century may depend on whether societies learn the lessons from the twentieth century. “One of the ‘grand’ monetary
experiments of the last century was the replacement of the gold standard with a fiat money standard.”
Initially, central banks did not understand their new powers and responsibilities, and failed to provide a nominal anchor for prices. Keynesian economists tried to exploit expectations of price stability and fine tune the economy. Their stop-go aggregate demand management led to gradually increasing inflation during the 1950s and 1960s and the spectacular monetary failures of the 1970s. Eventually, central banks realized the importance of nominal anchoring, and adopted policies that promoted price stability. This period coincided with Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan’s reigns over the Federal Reserve. From this experience, the author concludes that “The central bank cannot predictably manipulate real variables -- real money or unemployment. It can control
trend inflation, but it must do so through consistent (rule-like) behavior that creates the expectation of unchanging trend inflation.”

Chapter 2 continues the overview of the monetary experiments of the twentieth century and the author’s conclusions. The chapter discusses disagreements over the nature of monetary policy and the political advantages of policy ambiguity relative to the confusion that ambiguity causes about the appropriate role for monetary policy.
Chapter 26 summarizes “a century of monetary experiments.” The chapter emphasizes three key lessons. (1) Inflation and deflation are monetary phenomenon. In a world with fiat money, the behavior of the central bank determines the level and rate of change of prices. (2) To stabilize inflation, central banks must maintain a consistent and credible policy designed to fight inflation. (3) The government must allow the price system to operate and relative prices to allocate resources among competing opportunities.

Overall, I find Hetzel’s book cogent and comprehensive. Hetzel participated in many of the monetary experiments that he describes. His seminal innovation is the Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) program. Returns on half of these securities are fixed in nominal terms. Returns on the other half are indexed to the price level. The difference in the prices of these securities provides a market measure of expected
inflation, providing the Federal Reserve with the information it needs to establish a nominal anchor for the price level. The importance of this innovation and the quality of Hetzel’s book insure that it will be widely read for many years to come.

Gary Richardson is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California in Irvine who studies the causes and consequences of the banking panics of the Great Depression.

Copyright (c) 2008 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). Published by EH.Net (December 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

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204) Brazil since 1930: Cambridge History last volume

Apenas 150 dolares, uma barganha. A colecao toda por 1.950 dolares, uma pechincha.
Bem, vamos esperar que as bibliotecas o comprem...
-------------
Paulo Roberto de Almeida



New book: The Cambridge History of Latin America Volume IX: Brazil since 1930
*********************

The Cambridge History of Latin America Volume IX: Brazil since 1930 - the final volume of the 12-volume History edited by Leslie Bethell - has been published by Cambridge University Press.

Part I Politics:
1. Politics in Brazil under Vargas 1930–1945
Leslie Bethell
2. Politics in Brazil under the Liberal Republic 1945–1964
Leslie Bethell
3. Politics in Brazil under military rule 1964-85
Leslie Bethell and Celso Castro
4. Politics in Brazil 1985-2002
Leslie Bethell and Jairo Nicolau

Part II Economy and Society:
5. The Brazilian economy 1930–1980
Marcelo de Paiva Abreu
6 The Brazilian economy 1980–1994
Marcelo de Paiva Abreu
7. The Brazilian economy 1994-2004: an interim assessment
Marcelo de Paiva Abreu and Rogerio L. F. Werneck
8. Brazilian society: continuity and change 1930–2000
Nelson do Valle Silva
Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.

ISBN: 978-0-521-39524-3
Hardback/632 pages
2008/List: $150.00

The Cambridge History of Latin America
Edited by Leslie Bethell
Complete 12-Volume Set
ISBN: 978-0-521-51596-2
12 Hardbacks/10,325 pages
List: $2200.00
Limited Time Price: $1950
Discount Available through December 31, 2008
http://cambridge.org/us/series/sSeries.asp?code=CHLA

203) Vida e carreira de Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The man who saved his country, and the world
From The Economist, Oct 30th 2008

If he is to succeed, America’s next president needs to inherit at least a modicum of the character and talent that FDR brought to his tasks

Book:
H.W. Brands:
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(November 2008)

“MY POLICY is as radical…as the constitution,” said FDR during the 1932 election campaign when he was accused of wanting to nationalise the utilities. In this impressive new biography, H.W. Brands, who has written books about Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin, stresses the contrast between Roosevelt’s aristocratic origins and his radical politics.

Roosevelt’s ancestor, Philippe De La Noye, joined the Pilgrim Fathers on the Fortune, the next ship to arrive in Plymouth after the Mayflower. He was descended from Hudson Valley landed gentry and millionaire New York merchants, and went to Groton and Harvard. He grew up in the world of Edith Wharton. His fifth cousin, Theodore, was president of the United States, and he married Theodore’s niece, Eleanor. (Mr Brands paints an understanding portrait of Eleanor and handles the couple’s infidelities with tact.)

Though he had patrician self-confidence, there was no snobbery in Roosevelt. Mr Brands quotes FDR’s friend, Ray Moley, as saying that there was nothing flabby about his charm: “When crossed he is hard, stubborn, resourceful, relentless.”

Roosevelt was prepared to be radical to meet dangerous circumstances. Yet his instincts and the outcomes of many of his policies were often conservative. As a radical, he saved the old order—and advanced American power more than any other president since Jefferson.

In short, he was an extraordinarily complicated man, and the author copes skilfully with his complexity. Roosevelt became assistant secretary of the navy at 31 but eight years later was struck by polio. Mr Brands does not give too much credence to the theory that its onset was somehow connected with the shame Roosevelt felt about his bureaucratic responsibility for a scandal involving the homosexual entrapment of sailors.

He was in any event severely crippled, even for a time paralysed and incontinent. But by 1924, three years after he became ill, he had emerged again as one of the big beasts of the Democratic Party. His resurgence owed something to the success with which he concealed his disability, something to an age when journalism was less intrusive than it has since become. But more than anything else, it was due to his titanic determination. In 1928 he was elected governor of New York and in 1932, at the height of America’s economic crisis, he was elected president.

Courage, charm, resourceful cunning and a hidden hardness enabled him to save American capitalism, though, as he said himself, it was Dr Win-the-War, not Dr New Deal, that ended the Depression. Mr Brands is masterly in describing the patience with which FDR brought the country to understand the danger of fascism. He is a bit less sure in his handling of international politics, adopting the traditional view that, in the strategic arguments over the second front, the American generals were right and Winston Churchill deluded by imperial nostalgia. He dismisses John Maynard Keynes as an “English intellectual”, in whom it was impertinence to offer advice to an American president, apparently unaware that Keynes was a player at the Paris peace conference.

Roosevelt was determined to destroy imperialism. Mr Brands gives perhaps too much weight to a late night conversation recorded by his son Elliott, in which FDR claimed that Churchill and De Gaulle were conspiring to preserve the British and French empires. There may have been some warrant for Roosevelt’s suspicions, but he was more aware than his son of the ambiguities of the Grand Alliance.

He possessed the subtlest political mind of his generation. At the same time he was a master of point-to-point navigation, moving not by plan but by instinct, tempered by experience.

Roosevelt was the greatest American president since Lincoln, his colossal abilities tested by personal illness, economic catastrophe and world war. He used every tool to hand to direct the United States in peace and war: party, bureaucracy, Congress and the media of the day. Whoever wins the presidential election of 2008 will find those levers rusted, weakened or twisted. His task will be to reconnect the presidency to the country and to the world—something that will take the talent and character Franklin Roosevelt brought to lead America from the nadir of economic distress to the zenith of power.

H.W. Brands writes about history and politics: about events past and present and people dead and living. He attended a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2005 he returned to the University of Texas, where he is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History and Professor of Government.
Books:
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (November 2008)
The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar (2006)
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (2005)
Lone Star Nation: The Epic Story of the Battle for Texas Independence (2004)
Woodrow Wilson (2003)
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (2002)
The Strange Death of American Liberalism (2001)
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000)
Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey (1999)
What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (1998)

202) Uma historia da Europa contemporanea

Pós-Guerra - Um história da Europa desde 1945
Autor(es): Tony Judt
Editora: Objetiva
Área(s): História
880 pág.
Preço: R$ 79,90
enciclopédia. Brilhante.? ? New York Review of Books

O inglês Tony Judt, um dos historiadores e intelectuais mais respeitados da atualidade, dedicou pelo menos uma década de pesquisa e reflexão à desafiadora tarefa de escrever a primeira História da Europa contemporânea. Ao longo de novecentas páginas, Pós-Guerra vai de Portugal à Rússia, abrangendo 34 países e cobrindo um período de sessenta anos em uma só narrativa.

Com uma abordagem inovadora, Judt trata praticamente todo o século XX como "o epílogo da Segunda Guerra" e considera o ano de 1989, marcado pelo colapso do comunismo e a queda do muro de Berlim, este sim o começo do fim do pós-guerra.

Apesar do tamanho e complexidade do continente, Judt criou um relato coeso de seu passado recente. Sofisticado e ao mesmo tempo acessível leigos no assunto, Pós-guerra reúne relações internacionais, políticas internas, pensamentos e teorias, mudanças sociais e aspectos culturais numa grandiosa narrativa.

Cada país tem seu momento de entrar em cena, ainda que os chamados grandes temas estejam sempre em foco ? a guerra fria, a relação de amor e ódio dos países europeus com os Estados Unidos, a decadência e o renascimento cultural e econômico, o mito e a realidade da unificação econômica na Comunidade Européia, nenhum deles ofusca o grande personagem que é este continente como um todo.

Uma das conclusões mais interessantes a que Judt chega é apresentada no último capítulo, "Da casa dos mortos", no qual analisa o efeito do Holocausto sobre a personalidade coletiva do continente. Ainda que tenha levado mais de quarenta anos para ser assimilada, é exatamente a tragédia da Segunda Guerra que confere unidade à Europa.

Seguindo essa linha de raciocínio, o autor critica também a atual posição política de Israel, que, apoiado pelos Estados Unidos, distorce o significado do Holocausto e o simplifica ao nível de uma matança de judeus. Judt, que também é judeu e viveu o período do pós-guerra na Europa, afirma que, com isso, o momento histórico fica esvaziado de significado. Para ele, a compreensão da importância do Holocausto passa pela percepção da universalidade do mal que um povo pode impingir a outro em qualquer genocídio. Ele destaca o drama do Kosovo e da Iugoslávia, por exemplo, como um alerta: a lição ainda está por ser aprendida.

Mas Pós-Guerra não se detém a uma só conclusão. Judt analisa assuntos tão diferentes e tão importantes na formação e na unificação do caráter da Europa contemporânea ? os movimentos estudantis, culturais e de independência, o cinema e até o futebol.

Pós-Guerra foi eleito um dos dez melhores livros do ano de 2005 pelo New York Times e escolhido pela revista Time como o melhor livro do ano.

Sobre o autor:
TONY JUDT nasceu em Londres, em 1948. Formou-se pelo King?s College, em Cambridge, e pela École Normale Supérieure, em Paris, e já lecionou em Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley e na Universidade de Nova York, onde fundou, em 1995, o Remarque Institute, que se dedica ao estudo da Europa. Judt é atualmente professor titular de Estudos Europeus, ocupando cátedra instituída em homenagem a Erich Maria Remarque, veterano da Primeira Guerra Mundial e autor do romance Nada de Novo no Front.

Autor e organizador de 11 livros, Judt é articulista freqüente em vários periódicos, como The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic e The New York.

Há um grande livro na praça, é "Pós-Guerra'
ARTIGO DE ELIO GASPARI
Folha de São Paulo - 30/04/2008

Tony Judt escreveu uma preciosa história da Europa, da ruína de 1945 à prosperidade de hoje

SAIU UM DAQUELES livros que entram na vida de quem os lê e não saem mais. É "Pós-Guerra - Uma História da Europa desde 1945", do professor anglo-americano Tony Judt. São 848 páginas (1,2 kg) com o majestoso painel de um mundo que em pouco mais de meio século passou da ruína ao controle de mais de um terço da produção mundial. A Segunda Guerra custou à Europa 36 milhões de vidas e desalojou 30 milhões de pessoas. Hoje a União Européia forma um bloco de 500 milhões de cidadãos livres, educados e prósperos, capazes de fazer do século 21 sua hora e vez.
"Pós-Guerra" será útil para quem não viveu o período, pois passa longe da matraca das falsificações produzidas durante a Guerra Fria . Judt vira pelo avesso diversas certezas. Stálin poderia invadir a Europa? Difícil. Em 1946, o generalíssimo cometeu um dos erros de sua vida. Achava que a guerra era inevitável, mas teria os Estados Unidos de um lado, a Inglaterra de outro e ele de fora. Entre 1945 e 1947, a União Soviética baixou seu efetivo militar de 11,4 milhões para 2,9 milhões de soldados. Socialismo? Não houve esse tipo de coisa, o que existiu foi o estado ditatorial leninista.
Judt parece um malabar da política, da economia e da cultura. Vai da filosofia (o escritor francês Jean Paul Sartre chamava a violência comunista de "humanismo proletário") ao cinema (a Ponte do Rio Kwai é um sinal de que os ingleses passaram a ver a guerra de outra forma).
Quando joga números no meio da narrativa, consegue o improvável: aumenta o prazer da leitura. Algumas vezes surpreende: a guerra destruiu apenas 20% da capacidade industrial da Alemanha e tanto ela quanto a Itália, a França, o Japão saíram com mais máquinas e equipamentos do que tinham antes do conflito. A Alemanha administrou a França mandando para lá apenas 1.500 funcionários. (Em 1953, a máquina de propaganda do governo americano tinha 13 mil empregados.)
"Pós-Guerra" conta a história de duas Europas. A Ocidental, vigorosa, e a socialista, estagnada. Em 1957, só 2% das casas italianas tinham geladeira. Em 1974, eram 94%. Segundo Judt, diversos fatores contribuíram para o renascimento europeu, da ajuda americana à liberalização do comércio. Mesmo assim, decisivos mesmo foram o otimismo e o leite grátis. Mais gente, mais trabalhadores, mais produtos e mais consumidores transformaram as cidades arruinadas na Europa moderna.
O livro tem dois capítulos excepcionais. "O fantasma da Revolução" conta os anos 60 da juventude do Ocidente. O seguinte, "O fim de caso" narra os 60 do outro lado do Muro. Judt desmonta a mitologia sessentona com muita erudição, alguma ironia e nenhuma piedade. Ele gosta mais da garotada de Praga do que dos cabeludos de Paris. Sua conclusão: "Os 60 acabaram mal em todos os lugares".
Dois personagens do fim do século estão muito bem retratados. Margaret Thatcher, por quem Judt tem uma ponta de admiração, mesmo detestando sua política, e Mikhail Gobarchev, a quem maltrata, gostando do que fez. O governante soviético admitia que tocassem rock, desde que fosse "melodioso, coerente e bem executado". "Era isso que Gorbachev queria, um comunismo melodioso, coerente e bem executado", diz Judt.

201) Um livro por dia...

Esta era a recomendação do livreiro americano, sediado em Paris, George Whitman, que criou a Shakespeare and Company Bookshop (37, rue de la Bucherie, Paris), cuja trajetoria foi objeto do livro abaixo.


Jeremy Mercer:
Um Livro Por Dia
Tradução: Alexandre Martins
Casa da Palavra - 320 págs. - R$ 39,90

Resenhas:

Os sonhadores
André Rodrigues
Revista RollingStone, 19.10.2007

Numa tarde cinzenta do inverno parisiense de 2000, uma chuva fina logo se trnsforma em temporal. Jeremy Mercer, jovem jornalista canadense ameaçado de morte, caminha sem dinheiro ou esperança perto da cadetral de Notre-Dame quando é surpreendido pelas fortes gotas. Avista do outro lado do Sena o minguado letreiro da livraria Shakespeare and Company, para onde corre em busca de refúgio. Horas depois, adquire um exemplar de Um Retratro do Artista Quando Jovem, toma chá com estranhos e descobre que irá morar numa espécie de ilha da fantasia para os amantes de livros e aventuras. Assim começa Um Livro por Dia, as memórias do período em que Mercer ficou sob os cuidados de George Whitman (hoje com 93 anos), lendário proprietário dessa loja cinquentona que virou cartão-postal da cidade dos sonhos. Velho comunista cheio de manias, Whitman já abrigou - de graça - mais de 40 mil aspirantes a escritor, mochileiros e celebridades. Todos em busca de um canto onde possam curtir uma Paris cinematográfica. As narrativas sobre essa verdadeira Torre de Babel misturam-se ao emocionante perfil que Mercer faz de Whitman, homem raro e admirável, que “acredita que pode mudar o mundo e mudar as pessoas que ele recebe em sua loja”. O endereço: 37, rue de la Bucherie, Paris.

Duas vidas irreverentes
Geraldo Galvao Ferraz, 10.10.2007

Muitas vezes, escritores acham que suas histórias pessoais, sobretudo de infância e juventude, darão grandes livros. A perspectiva do autor se perde com a proximidade dos fatos reais. Mas, claro, há quem acerte. Dois exemplos disso são livros escritos em tom agridoce, que relembram momentos da vida dos escritores Bill Bryson e Jeremy Mercer. O primeiro conta sua infância e adolescência, Jeremy Mercer relata como viveu quatro meses numa livraria parisiense, aos 28 anos. Bryson nasceu em 1951 e depois assumiu a identidade de um super-herói, o Kid Trovão, especializado em detonar professores chatos com seu raio da morte. Suas memórias englobam muito do cotidiano americano, especialmente nessa época do após-guerra. Como ele diz: “Não consigo imaginar época ou lugar mais gratificante para se estar vivo.Nenhum país jamais conhecera tamanha prosperidade (...) Tudo o que as companhias americanas tinham de fazer era parar de construir tanques e encouraçados e começar a construir Buicks e Frigidaires - e, rapaz, construíram para valer.”
A vida do pequeno Bill poderia estar nos Simpsons. O mundo, para ele, é um lugar cheio de perigos e obstáculos, mas também de aventuras e tentações. O livro de Jeremy Mercer também tem muito humor, muita irreverência e uma montanha russa de altos e baixos na vida do narrador-protagonista. Antes, é preciso falar de Shakespeare & Co., uma das livrarias mais famosas do mundo. Ela é a sucessora da loja de Sylvia Beach, em Paris, com o mesmo nome, que publicou a primeira edição de Ulysses, de James Joyce (para saber mais, ler Shakespeare and Company, de Sylvia Beach, recentemente relançado pela Casa da Palavra).
Jeremy tem de sair às pressas do seu Canadá natal. Com pouquíssimo dinheiro, vai parar na tal livraria, que vive da fama da sua antecessora, mas garante a alguns autores-em-progresso, cama e sopa em troca de trabalho. Uma fauna estranhíssima frequenta a livraria e não menos estranho é seu dono. Jeremy Mercer tem bom olho para detalhes e seu livro é uma delícia.

Clássicos literários, percevejos e pães mofados em Paris
Vivian Rangel
Jornal do Brasil, 18.08.2007

Seja gentil com estranhos, pois eles podem ser anjos disfarçados. Foi com este conselho que o livreiro George Whitman recebeu o canadense Jeremy Mercer para o tradicional chá dos domingos na Shakespeare and Company e ofereceu-lhe uma cama entre as estantes repletas. Eram duas as condições: ler um livro por dia e ajudar nas tarefas da livraria. Mercer, que não tinha dinheiro nem rumo, não titubeou, mudou-se para o colchonete infestado de percevejos e encarou a rotina de falta de banho e escassez de comida. A trajetória é narrada no misto de diário, romance e reportagem Um livro por dia, recém-traduzido (por Alexandre Martins) no Brasil.
Antes de chegar a Paris, o repórter de polícia canadense sequer havia ouvido falar da livraria, herdeira ideológica do histórico ponto fundado por Sylvia Beach na década de 20. Americana de Nova Jersey, Sylvia abriu as portas em 1919 e inaugurou uma espécie de bunker da intelligentsia. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald e Simone de Beavoir foram alguns dos associados. Foi Sylvia quem enfrentou a censura e publicou Ulisses , de James Joyce. Ernest Hemingway - que dedica algumas páginas de Paris é uma festa à livraria - foi ainda responsável por reabri-la no fim da 2ª Guerra, chegando em uma caravana de jipes e gritando o nome de Sylvia antes de retirar os últimos alemães de cima do telhado.
As memórias e o acervo de Sylvia foram herdados por George Whitman - livreiro americano que não tem qualquer parentesco com o poeta mas que já tirou várias fotos como neto de Walt. Seguindo o ideal marxista e o impulso bibliófilo, expandiu a livraria em três andares, todos com camas para acomodar poetas, escritores e escapistas interessados em respirar o ar denso de sonhos da capital francesa. Como os beatniks William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg e George Corso - este ladrão de vários exemplares, sustento de outros vícios. E também Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller e Anäis Nin - de quem, aliás, George foi mais do que amigo. O livreiro não negava abrigo a quem compartilhasse de suas paixões literárias. E suportasse as condições da livraria.
Poeira, pães mofados, ausência de chuveiros e as mudanças de humor de George foram alguns dos obstáculos enfrentados por Mercer, que usou o diário do período morando na livraria como bloco de anotações para iniciar seu livro.
- A livraria tem uma atmosfera caótica, algo de albergue espanhol, exótico e excitante, embora nem sempre um ambiente criativo - pondera Mercer. - Mas a Shakespeare and Company de hoje é muito mais acessível do que a original, não importa se você é apenas um turista ou tem reais ambições como escritor.
Repórter de polícia numa pacata cidade canadense, Mercer revelou nomes de uma fonte criminosa em um de seus livros de reportagem. Praticamente fugiu do país sob ameaça de retaliação. Paris foi o destino, supostamente escolhido porque lá poderia completar os créditos que faltavam para receber o diploma de jornalista. Sem dinheiro e vagando pela cidade, num dia de chuva adentrou a Shakespeare and Company e começou a ler.
- O melhor livro que descobri por lá foi O céu que nos protege, de Paul Bowles - elege Mercer. - Citaria outros como A trilogia de Nova York, de Paul Auster, e Viagem ao fim da noite, de Céline. Ler é um exercício. Agora, por exemplo, estou lendo Moby Dick, mas só consigo ler 50 páginas por dia. Se estivesse na Shakespeare and Company terminaria em dois dias.
De forma leve e divertida, Mercer intercala sua rotina na livraria em 2001 - que garante ser a versão fiel dos fatos - com dados da história da livraria e da vida pessoal de George. Por vezes o relato perde o rumo na tentativa de emular a vida errante dos beatniks em contraste com a mentalidade classe-média de Mercer. Ou no grand finale, quando o repórter heroicamente garante a permanência da livraria.
Com o sucesso do livro - como relata Mercer em seu blog, 23 livrarias visitadas em 44 dias na época do lançamento - ele abandonou o jornalismo e finaliza When the guillotine fell, sobre o último homem a perder a cabeça na França, um libelo contra a pena de morte. A Shakespeare and Company é atualmente dirigida por Sylvia - filha de Whitman batizada em homenagem à criadora da livraria - e, embora seja mais seletiva ao receber os hóspedes, mantém os rituais de leitura obrigatória e o chá aos domingos.
O lado jornalista de Mercer só volta a pulsar quando perguntam se ele pretende escrever novamente sobre a livraria.
- Alguns críticos me julgaram ingênuo, o que de fato eu era ao chegar a Paris - admite. - Espero que, um dia, alguém faça uma biografia definitiva da Shakespeare and Company, pois não sou a pessoa adequada. Afeiçoei-me a George, minha vida foi transformada pela livraria e não poderia escrever algo tão objetivo.

À sombra das estantes
Olga de Mello
Valor Econômico. 17.08.2007

Na foto, a livraria Shakespeare and Company, em Paris: dois livros tratam da lendária livraria, ponto de encontro de escritores do início do século XX e abrigo recente para um jornalista canadense
Quando tenho algum dinheiro, compro livros; se me sobrar um pouco, compro roupas e comida. Assim o pensador holandês Erasmo de Roterdã (1455-1536) explicava seu amor pelos livros, produtos cujo consumo em larga escala foi iniciado durante sua infância, quando o alemão Johannes Guttemberg, por volta de 1545, criou a primeira prensa. Depois de popularizar-se ao longo dos séculos e enfrentar a era da informática, o livro firma-se cada vez mais como objeto de culto, alcançando o nível de tema literário de sucesso em países onde tradicionalmente a leitura é um luxo para poucos. Apenas no Brasil, quatro títulos estrangeiros freqüentam, simultaneamente, as listas de mais vendidos, seguindo bons desempenhos em outros mercados. Ao lado de dois romances a respeito de crianças que procuram - ou furtam - livros, relatos semijornalísticos sobre livreiros que hospedam escritores vêm conquistando os leitores brasileiros.
Desde seu lançamento há cinco meses, A Menina Que Roubava Livros (Intrínseca, 494 págs., R$ 39,90) vendeu 150 mil exemplares e aumentou em 500% o faturamento da editora, revela o presidente da Intrínseca, Jorge Oaquim, que vê no romance um clássico contemporâneo: Será igual a O Mundo de Sofia, um livro para jovens leitores que conquistou os adultos, diz. O público brasileiro também se entusiasmou com A Sombra do Vento, do espanhol Carlos Ruiz Zafón, (Suma de Letras, 399 págs., R$ 39,90), um fenômeno literário que permaneceu mais de cinco anos na lista de best-sellers na Espanha e vendeu mais de 6,5 milhões de cópias em todo o mundo, sendo 35 mil no Brasil.
Há 54 semanas O Livreiro de Cabul (Record, 316 págs., R$ 42), da jornalista norueguesa Âsne Seierstad permanece nas listas dos mais vendidos, que estão abrindo espaço também para Um Livro por Dia - Minha Temporada Parisiense na Shakespeare and Company (Casa da Palavra, 320 págs., R$ 39,90). Irritado com a abordagem de Âsne, a quem hospedou por três meses, sobre a rotina doméstica de sua família, Shah Muhammad Rais escreveu Eu Sou o Livreiro de Cabul (Bertrand, 96 págs., R$ 26,00), com outra versão sobre o modo de vida no país de maioria muçulmana, arrasado pela guerra. Em Um Livro por Dia, o jornalista canadense Jeremy Mercer trata com humor a falta de higiene e a desorganização administrativa da Shakespeare and Company, onde viveu a convite do excêntrico livreiro George Whitman. Há cerca de 20 anos, outro livreiro, o britânico Frank Doer, foi imortalizado pela escritora americana Helene Hanff. Durante décadas, eles mantiveram uma intensa correspondência descrita no livro 84 Charing Cross Road, mais conhecido no Brasil depois do filme Nunca Te Vi, Sempre Te Amei, com Anne Bancroft e Anthony Hopkins. Não é raro encontrar apaixonados por livros protagonizando tramas ficcionais que, por vezes, pouco têm de eruditas. O escritor de policiais John Dunning criou um detetive especialista em obras raras. A resistência ao obscurantismo está tanto no clássico Farenheit 451, de Ray Bradbury, em que bombeiros incineram livros, que passam a ser memorizados para que não se perca a cultura, quanto em Balzac e a Costureirinha Chinesa - que a Alfaguara relança em setembro (R$ 28,90). Este mostra dois rapazes desafiando o regime maoísta ao ler uma mala repleta de obras clássicas ocidentais, consideradas subversivas pelo governo.
O protagonista de A Confissão, (Rocco, R$ 31), de Flávio Rodrigues, valoriza os livros porque tira deles seu sustento: ladrão, rouba volumes que revende em sebos. Livreiros e livrarias estão em A Décima Terceira História (Record, 420 págs., R$ 50,00), o romance gótico da inglesa Diane Setterfield que ficou semanas na lista dos mais vendidos do The New York Times, e em Desvarios no Brooklyn (Companhia das Letras, 328 págs., R$ 49,50), de Paul Auster.
Nada mais natural que a literatura aproveite como ambiente o palco do encontro entre o leitor e o livro, diz Rui Campos, um dos sócios da Livraria da Travessa, que determinou um espaço exclusivo para livros sobre bibliofilia. Laura Gasparian, da Livraria Argumento, acha que o livreiro merece ser imortalizado na pele de astros do cinema como Hugh Grant (Notting Hill) ou Johnny Depp (O Último Portal, de Roman Polanski, baseado na novela O Club Dumas, de Artur Pérez-Reverte): É uma profissão muito charmosa, porque vende o conhecimento. É uma satisfação perceber o crescimento de títulos sobre bibliofilia no Brasil, embora não esteja surgindo um nicho nem um filão. Antes, nem tínhamos concorrência, brinca Martha Ribas, gerente-editorial da Casa da Palavra, que tem 18% de seu catálogo dedicado ao gênero. O primeiro lançamento da editora, O Bibliófilo Aprendiz, de Rubens Borba de Moraes (207 págs., R$ 32,00), continua em catálogo. O maior sucesso, A Paixão pelos Livros (152 págs., R$ 32,00) está na quinta reimpressão. Junto com Um Livro por Dia, a Casa da Palavra relançou Shakespeare and Company, uma Livraria na Paris do Entre-Guerras (272 págs., R$ 42,00), a autobiografia da livreira Sylvia Beach, proprietária da Shakespeare and Company original. Conseguimos transformar uma paixão em negócio lucrativo, com uma excelente receptividade, afirma Martha. Em 2005, o Atelier Editorial lançou Philobiblon (181 págs., R$ 27,00), o primeiro livro sobre bibliofilia, escrito pelo inglês Richard de Bury em 1344. As vendas foram modestas, mas o editor Plínio Martins Filho não desanima. É importante termos esses títulos disponíveis, mesmo com um público pequeno, acredita, informando que ainda este ano o conto O Inferno do Bibliófilo, do francês Charles Asselineau, será o segundo volume da coleção O Prazer de Ler, iniciada com Philobiblon.
A exemplo de Virginia Woolf, para quem ler sistematicamente com o objetivo de tornar-se um especialista ou uma autoridade poderia matar a paixão mais humana pela leitura pura e desinteressada, o mais renomado bibliófilo brasileiro, José Mindlin, acha que a formação deve ser mais conseqüência que objetivo do leitor: Não se pode pensar em educação sem leitura, mas só é inoculado pelo vírus da leitura quem obtém prazer nela. O refinamento vem aos poucos, diz Mindlin, um entusiasta das bibliotecas populares que têm sido montadas em garagens de diversas cidades do Brasil, sem registro formal nem catálogo das obras. Iniciativas que merecem elogio semelhante do argentino Alberto Maguel, em A Biblioteca, à Noite (Companhia das Letras, 301 págs., R$ 47,00), em que destaca o esforço do governo colombiano, que criou um sistema dinâmico de bibliotecas itinerantes que alcança locais inacessíveis por automóveis usando os biblioburros - sacolas com livros carregadas em lombos de burros.

Histórias de uma livraria
Jornal de Brasília, 29.07.2007
LIVROS
Histórias de uma livraria

Editora Casa da Palavra lança no Brasil dois livros que repassam a história da charmosa livraria parisiense Shakespeare and Co.

Shakespeare and Company – Uma Livraria na Paris do entre-guerras Sylvia Beach.
Editora Casa da Palavra. 272 páginas. Preço médio: R$ 42.

"Lemos para não morrer idiotas". A célebre frase do contista Jorge Luís Borges pode definir, para alguns, a razão da leitura como hobby. Para muitos, porém, literatura pode ser um esporte, uma necessidade, um vício. E no extremo da paixão, ler pode não ser suficiente. É preciso ter o livro, guardá-lo na estante, acumulá-los. Em 1919 uma jovem americana, apaixonada por litertura e livros, já tinha esse desejo de colecionar seus pequenos mundos de aventura encadernados. O motivo, porém, era mais nobre do que apenas colecionar obras. A jovem era Sylvia Beach, e seu sonho era montar uma biblioteca onde os franceses pudessem encontrar obras de língua inglesa, folhear clássicos e conhecer novos autores. Tudo isso, bem acomodados em poltronas espalhadas pelos corredores de livros. Beach concretizou seu sonho, fundou a lendária livraria Shakespeare and Company e fez daquele refúgio, na rua Dupuytren, em Paris, ponto de encontro para escritores da Geração Perdida como Hemingway, Gertrude Stein e o incrível James Joyce.

Filha de um reverendo presbiteriano, Sylvia Woodbridge Beach nasceu na costa Leste dos EUA, em 14 de março de 1887. Era tempo de Stravinsky e Picasso e a França estava em guerra quando a menina Beach foi para Paris. Sonhava em devorar toda a poesia francesa e fazer jornalismo literário. Dizia não o ter conseguido. Ledo engano de quem concordar com ela. De fato, nunca exerceu o jornalismo, mas deixou como legado, não só a livraria mais charmosa de Paris, mas também um livro de memórias, recém lançado no Brasil pela editora Casa da Palavra, que já é um artefato de colecionador. Shakespeare and Company – Uma Livraria na Paris do Entre-Guerras permite ao leitor uma viagem impagável no tempo. As maravilhosas buscas por livros raros, o conhecimento de obras recém editadas e que, hoje, são clássicos da literatura moderna. Seu encontro com Joyce e os dramas que viveu para conseguir, em meio à tantas reclamações, exigências e peculiaridades do autor irlandês, publicar seu livro homérico: Ulisses. Sim, a primeira edição do clássico que revolucionou a literatura do século 20 é assinada pela Shakespeare and Company, até então, inexperiente como editora.

Nada é mais jornalístico e mais literário que as confissões que Sylvia narra em suas memórias. "Joyce era de altura mediana, magro, um pouco curvado, gracioso. Suas mãos chamavam atenção. Eram muito estreitas. Nos dedos médios e anular da mão esquerda, ostentava grandes anéis com pedras. Seus olhos, de um azul profundo, nos quais brilhava a luz do gênio, eram de extrema beleza." Suas impressões nos deixam o mais perto que se pode chegar de um autor e sua obra.

Hospedado entre os livros
A livraria Shakespeare and Co. original foi fechada por força da ocupação nazista. Conta Sylvia que, um dia, um oficial alemão apareceu querendo comprar o exemplar de Finnegas Wake, autografado por Joyce, que estava exposto na vitrine. Diante da recusa, o soldado ameaçou confiscar todo o estoque da livraria. A Shakespeare fechou na mesma tarde. Seus livros foram escondidos, e depois todos comprados por George Whitman, segundo dono da livraria, aberta até hoje no número 37 da rue de la Bûcherie, ao lado da catedral de Notre Dame, em Paris, onde Whitman tenta perpetuar o charme da livraria fundada por Sylvia Beach (1887-1962).

Um dos costumes herdados, são as camas vagas. A atual Shakespeare possui treze leitos vagos. Vagos, bem a verdade, não estão. Existem muitos interessados em pousar na livraria mais cult do mundo. Existe sempre a possibilidade de estar passeando por lá, lendo um livro ou tomando um chá com algum aspirante à Joyce desse século. George Whitman, de 93 anos, herdou da primeira dona, a mania de fazer dos afazeres da loja, parte da rotina dos transeuntes. Todos são convidados a limpar o chão, arrumar as prateleiras, "em troca da tal infinita promessa do desconhecido". Muitos viajam milhares de quilômetros e vêm procurar abrigos nos corredores da Shakespeare. Whitman deixa, mas com uma condição: ler um livro por dia. O jornalista Jeremy Mercer topou a troca. Morou e trabalhou na livraria por meses, ganhou estadia gratuita, convivência com bibliófilos, bibliomaníacos e curiosos de todas as partes do mundo. O resultado disso, Um Livro Por Dia, Minha temporada parisiense na Shakespeare and Company, outra novidade da editora Casa da Palavra. Os lançamentos são o tipo de livro que os bibliomaníacos não podem perder. Lemos para não morrer incompletos.

Relato de escritor vê Shakespeare and Company como refúgio
Adriano Shwartz
Folha de S. Paulo, 12.07.2007

Crítica e memória
A Shakespeare and Company, em Paris, é uma das livrarias mais famosas do mundo. O sucesso se deve a uma série de peculiaridades e, acima de tudo, à criadora da loja, Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), e a seu sucessor, George Whitman (1913). Este, com suas manias e sua sabedoria, gera boa parte da força de Um Livro por Dia, as memórias dos meses em que o jornalista e escritor Jeremy Mercer morou no lugar.
Inaugurada em 1919, para ser um local em que se encontrassem livros em inglês em Paris, a loja logo se tornou ponto de encontro de autores como F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein e Ezra Pond. Foi lá também que se arrumou dinheiro para a primeira publicação de Ulisses, de James Joyce, recusado anteriormente por inúmeros editores. Essa primeira vida da livraria durou até 1941, quando os nazistas ocuparam a cidade.
Dez anos depois, do outro lado do Sena, em frente à Notre-Dame, George abria Le Mistral, rebatizada, em 1964, como Shakespeare and Company. Devoto de Sylvia Beach, como afirma Mercer, o livreiro fazia uma homenagem e reafirmava um estilo de levar adiante um negócio no qual o dinheiro é sempre o fator menos importante. Nessa segunda vida, que dura até hoje, passaram por lá Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg e outros escritores (segundo George, mais de 40 mil), muitos dos quais convidados, depois de apresentar uma autobiografia, a ficar por ali, em uma das camas espalhadas pela labiríntica loja, ajudar no trabalho, ler o máximo possível e escrever.
Foi o que aconteceu com Mercer, um jornalista policial canadense com a vida então bem estilhaçada, em janeiro de 2000.
Gente estranha
Um Livro por Dia está montado com cenas alternadas do dia-a-dia da livraria e de lembranças de vivências dos personagens que circulam no lugar - o que propicia ao autor dezenas de ótimas histórias, já que não faltam ali homens e mulheres exóticas e casos curiosos. A grande figura, contudo, é mesmo George Whitman, que reaparece a todo instante no texto, com seu ideário anarquista e comunista e com uma paixão intensa por livros e mulheres. Daí a boa definição de Mercer: No final, sim, é uma livraria famosa, e, sim, sua importância literária não é pequena. Mas, acima de tudo, a Shakespeare and Company é um refúgio, como a igreja do outro lado do rio. Um lugar onde o proprietário permite que todos peguem o que precisam e dêem o que podem.
ADRIANO SCHWARTZ é professor de literatura da Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades da USP

A livraria mais charmosa do mundo
Ivan Cláudio
IstoÉ, 04.07.2007

Nesses tempos atuais de shopping centers e megastores, a sobrevivência em Paris de uma livraria como a Shakeaspeare and Company parece um milagre de preservação – tanto de patrimônio histórico quanto literário. Fundada em 1951, ela se mantém firme num charmoso quarteirão da rive guache, às margens do Sena e com vista para a catedral de Notre Dame. Pelas suas salas entulhadas de livros raros já circularam escritores do porte de Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett e Anaïs Nin.
George Whitman
Em seus concorridos saraus de leitura ecoaram as vozes de Lawrence Durrell e de beatniks como Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs e Gregory Corso – sendo que alguns desses escritores chegaram a morar no local, uma vez que, além de livraria, a Shakespeare and Company funciona como hotel barato para autores iniciantes – estima-se que nesses 56 anos de vida ela tenha recebido mais de 40 mil escritores. Foi numa das 13 camas distribuídas pelos três andares do prédio que o jornalista e escritor canadense Jeremy Mercer se acomodou no inverno de 2000. Decidiu narrar essa sua experiência em Um livro por dia – minha temporada parisiense na Shakespeare and Company (322 págs., R$ 39,90), que chega esta semana às livrarias brasileiras.

O lema da livraria, em duas frases: “Seja gentil com estranhos, pois eles podem ser anjos disfarçados” e “Dê o que pode, pegue o que precisar”. Essas são as máximas do americano George Whitman, 93 anos, fundador da loja, que pedia a seus hóspedes que ajudassem na limpeza e no atendimento a clientes. Mais importante: pedia que lessem um livro por dia. Ele não tem o menor parentesco com o poeta americano Walt Whitman, mas sempre se aproveitou da coincidência nos sobrenomes para impressionar os freqüentadores da casa – dizia que era neto ilegítimo do autor de Folhas da relva. Mulherengo e sedutor, quem não resistiu aos encantos de Whitman foi Anaïs Nin, amante de Henry Miller. “Miller e Anaïs estavam sempre lá e a intimidade do rela- FREGUESES FAMOSOS ALLEN GINSBERG O poeta beatnik, autor de Uivo, precisava se embriagar para declamar a obra JAMES JOYCE Foi graças a Sylvia Beach, da antiga livraria Shakespeare and Co., que Ulisses foi publicado ANAÏS NIN A amante de Henry Miller foi uma das conquistas de George Whitman, dono da livraria SAMUEL BECKETT Econômico nas palavras como mostram seus livros, ele não falava: ficava só olhando Whitman HENRY MILLER O autor de Sexus era freqüentador assíduo da livraria, “o país das maravilhas dos livros” ERNEST HEMINGWAY Em Paris é uma festa ele dedica um capítulo à primeira Shakespeare and Company cionamento de George com ela ainda é tema de grande especulação”, escreve Mercer.

Era debaixo de colchões ou entre livros que Whitman guardava a maior parte do dinheiro que ganhava e essa mania fez com que o local se tornasse um dos alvos prediletos de ladrões. Havia também os “ladrões” letrados como o beatnik Gregory Corso, que gatunava edições raras para vender e, assim, abastecer o seu vício em heroína. Entre os títulos que hoje estão na Shakespeare and Company figuram as primeiras edições de Ulisses (James Joyce), que foram lançadas com o selo da própria livraria – não a atual, da rue da la Bûcherie 37, mas sua antecessora, que ficava no bairro de Saint- German-des-Prés. Criada por Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), essa casa original, cujo nome vinha do fato de vender livros em inglês, era visitada por Ernest Hemingway, que lhe dedicou um capítulo em Paris é uma festa. Em 1941 ela foi fechada pelos nazistas e, três anos depois, reaberta pessoalmente pelo próprio Hemingway, após a desocupação alemã. Whitman comprou então todo o acervo e adotou o mesmo nome Shakespeare and Company. Ele diz que “administra uma utopia socialista disfarçada em livraria”.

200) Dois livros sobre a civilização anglo-americana e sua dominação "natural"

O que a escolha presidencial poderia significar para o mundo
Martin Wolf
Financial Times, 2.09.2008

Walter Russell Mead:
God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World
(Nova York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Robert Kagan:
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
(Londres: Atlantic; 2008).

Agora todos nós somos americanos. Ao dizer isso eu não quero apenas dizer que a liderança dos Estados Unidos molda o mundo em que vivemos. O mundo em que vivemos é o mundo que os americanos ou, mais precisamente, os anglo-americanos criaram. Os Estados Unidos manterão uma influência imensa. Como eles a usarão? Esta é a questão que devemos perguntar sobre a eleição presidencial. A escolha também parece clara: é entre aqueles que esperam um mundo de conflito e aqueles que acreditam em buscar a cooperação.

Em um novo livro brilhante, Walter Russell Mead, do Conselho de Relações Exteriores, coloca os Estados Unidos atuais em uma tradição de poder global nascida na Holanda do século 17, desenvolvida no Reino Unido dos séculos 18 e 19 e mantida pelos Estados Unidos do século 20.* Segundo ele, o sistema deles é o "anglo-americano".

O que é este sistema? Ele tem três características centrais: é marítimo; é global; e combina comércio com poder militar. Os anglo-americanos têm uma civilização distinta: civil, mas belicosa, comercial, mas moralista, individualista, mas organizada, inovadora, mas conservadora, e idealista, mas impiedosa. Para seus adversários, é brutal, superficial e hipócrita. Para seus amigos, é uma fonte de liberdade e democracia.

Ao longo dos últimos três séculos, os anglo-americanos trouxeram ao mundo o governo de grandes países por executivos que respondem a assembléias eleitas. Eles trouxeram o capitalismo guiado pelo mercado e as revoluções industrial e tecnológica. Eles também derrotaram muitos inimigos poderosos: o império espanhol; a França real e imperial; a Alemanha imperial e nazista e o Japão militarista; e mais recentemente, o comunismo soviético. Eles destruíram o império Mughal na Índia, o xogunato no Japão e, indiretamente, a última dinastia imperial da China.

Os anglo-americanos também enfrentaram muitas ideologias opostas. O marxismo foi apenas a ideologia alternativa mais importante da modernidade. Sua queda como sistema ideológico ofereceu a Francis Fukuyama a chance de escrever o "fim da história". A democracia liberal, ele argumentou, tinha provado ser o único sistema consistente com a modernidade.

A grande narrativa histórica dos últimos três séculos é a da revolução anglo-americana e das reações que provocou entre os povos e civilizações que destruiu, derrotou, humilhou e, acima de tudo, transformou. Pois esta mudança no poder global não foi apenas externa. Os britânicos e americanos trouxeram consigo transformação interna. As maiores civilizações - islâmica, indiana e até mesmo a chinesa - foram sobrepujadas. Os britânicos e americanos são propensos a considerar suas intervenções como bem-intencionadas e seu impacto como beneficente. Mas não é assim, para colocar de forma suave, que parece para o restante da humanidade. Uma das virtudes deste livro é sua avaliação do desprezo e ódio sentidos, de Luís 14 a Osama Bin Laden e Vladimir Putin, em relação aos anglo-americanos.

Logo, qual é o futuro deste sistema e do mundo que moldou, no século 21? E o que isso tem a ver com a eleição presidencial em andamento?

O primeiro e principal ponto é que o mundo em grande parte ingressou na economia de mercado e seu corolário de globalização. Isso agora está transformando os dois gigantes mundiais, a China e a Índia. Como conseqüência, os Estados Unidos estão em relativo declínio econômico.

Segundo, os Estados Unidos ainda assim manterão a economia mais poderosa, mais tecnologicamente avançada e mais inovadora do mundo ao longo do próximo quarto de século. É igualmente certo que possuirão as forças armadas mais fortes do mundo e assim manterão o maior poder global ao longo desse período. Eles permanecerão a única potência global.

Terceiro, Barack Obama e John McCain são ambos americanos. Dentro dos Estados Unidos, o que parece chamar mais atenção são suas diferenças. Para grande parte do restante do mundo, o que é óbvio são suas semelhanças. Ambos representam a tradição anglo-americana, esta sendo uma questão de cultura, não de ancestralidade. Ambos acreditam no destino americano e na beneficência de seu grande poder.

Mas eles também refletem elementos divergentes na tradição: os instintos por conflito e cooperação. O primeiro busca inimigos e o segundo acordos. O primeiro é maniqueísta e o segundo conciliador.

O governo Bush tem sido um devoto do primeiro ponto de vista. Ele até mesmo abraçou o mal - mais notadamente a tortura - visando combatê-lo. McCain também é um guerreiro contra o mal. Em outro livro fascinante, Robert Kagan, o mais inteligente dos neoconservadores, estabeleceu a base para uma nova era de conflito.** Kagan argumenta que as democracias do mundo devem se unir para moldá-lo, contra a oposição dos "grandes poderes autocráticos, juntamente com as forças reacionárias do radicalismo islâmico". Este é um impressionante "eixo do mal", um que liga a China à Rússia, Irã e Osama Bin Laden.

Esta visão é sedutora, plausível e perigosa. É perigosa porque poderia se tornar uma profecia que cumpre a si mesma. É perigosa porque, à medida que o mundo se torna menor e os desafios de administrar os bens comuns globais se tornam maiores, a cooperação é essencial. É perigosa também porque as chamadas novas autocracias não representam uma ameaça existencial e não oferecem uma nova ideologia atraente. Esta é uma reação imensamente exagerada a uma ameaça modesta.

É razoável que um ocidental não goste dos sistemas de governo da China e da Rússia. Mas é evidente para qualquer observador não passional que elas estão longe de serem os países que eram há três décadas. Isto é particularmente verdadeiro em relação à China, que fez uma grande aposta na integração na economia mundial e a concomitante abertura da sociedade chinesa. Se isso no final levará a uma China democrática ninguém sabe. Mas uma pessoa precisaria ser realmente corajosa para descartá-la.

Esta eleição presidencial poderia muito bem determinar o caráter da próxima época, possivelmente final, da hegemonia global anglo-americana. A questão é se o povo americano escolherá o instinto pelo conflito ou pela cooperação.

Nem McCain e nem Obama, na prática, adotarão apenas uma alternativa. Nem apenas uma abordagem será a única resposta. Mas a diferença na tendência é clara. Os Estados Unidos estão se preparando para outra grande cruzada contra o mal? Ou estão se preparando para se sentarem com o restante do mundo e conversar. A abordagem certa para o mundo complexo atual não é a daqueles que consideram acordo e apaziguamento como sinônimos. A escolha parece clara. Ela moldará nossa era.

*God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (Nova York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); **The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Londres: Atlantic; 2008).

199) Nas origens da cliometria

John S. Lyons, Louis P. Cain and Samuel H. Williamson, editors:
Reflections on the Cliometrics Revolution: Conversations with Economic Historians
New York: Routledge, 2008. xiv + 491 pp. $160 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-415-70091-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Michael Haupert, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.

A better set of editors could not have been selected for the assemblage of this volume. John Lyons, Lou Cain and Sam Williamson certainly know the story of cliometrics. All three have extensive experience in the running of the Cliometric Society and deep roots in the annual conferences. Williamson was the original executive director of the society, PI for the NSF grant, and editor of the association’s newsletter; Cain and Lyons were associate editors for the newsletter during Williamson’s term; and Williamson and Cain were among the earliest attendees at the annual Clio meetings, then known as the Conference on the Application of Economic Theory and Quantitative Methods, held on the Purdue University campus.

There is little new here, with the bulk of the text consisting of reprints of the ever popular newsletter interviews. Having said that, there is little else with which to find fault in this effort. The hefty price tag will unfortunately deter many potential buyers, but the volume does pull together a nice selection of the interviews along with a well researched history of the cliometrics revolution and economic history in general. All in all the value added by the editors to the interviews is considerable.

The bibliography alone, stretching nearly forty pages, makes this book a worthy addition to any economic historian’s library. It is a reference of every fundamental building block of economic history and every serious study of the role, evolution, and critical review of the discipline of economics from a historical perspective.

The interviews themselves have little new material, but pulling them all together is a valuable contribution. They are not merely the first several published in the newsletter. Rather, they represent a carefully selected collection, logically organized to help tell the story of the “new economic history” revolution that changed the face of the discipline and spawned a generation of cliometricians.

The interviews are not all reproduced verbatim. Some have been updated with recent additions by the subjects. However, these are few in number and for the most part update the reader on what he or she probably already knew: the recent research interests of the subjects.

After a concise but thorough history of the discipline of economic history, the interviews are organized into chapters that detail the revolution that became cliometrics. The editors start with a recognition of the preconditions for the new economic history. In “Before the New Economic History: North America” and its companion chapter for Great Britain, we meet the forefathers in interviews with the likes of Walt Rostow, Moses Abramovitz and Phyllis Deane. These are followed with a chapter focusing on the acknowledged elders of cliometrics, Douglass North and William Parker. There are separate chapters of interviews focusing on the cradle of clio at Purdue (Lance Davis, Jonathan Hughes and Nate Rosenberg), as well as the workshops of two of the most heralded economic historians, Simon Kuznets and Alexander Gerschenkron. Finally, there is a chapter focusing on noted expatriates R.M. Hartwell, Eric Jones and Charles Feinstein. Each of these chapters of interviews is preceded by an introductory chapter that sets the interviewees’ contributions to economic history, and the cliometric revolution in particular, in context. Patrick K. O’Brien then provides a critical but fair appraisal of the achievements and shortcomings of cliometrics to round off the story.

When it is all added together, we have a book that, while mostly reprinted material from the Newsletter of the Cliometric Society, still makes a worthwhile contribution. The bringing together and organizing of the interviews in a logical order is of itself a value, especially to younger scholars looking to get a sense of the history of the discipline, or more seasoned economic historians looking to refresh their memories. The most important contribution made by _Reflections on the Cliometrics Revolution_ is the perspective it provides on the discipline from the viewpoints of some of its major contributors.

Lyons, Cain and Williamson are to be commended for their efforts. The organization and compilation of this material has brought together for the first time the necessary ingredients for telling the story of the growth of our discipline. If you haven’t spent time meeting your intellectual ancestors, this is the perfect opportunity to do so.


Mike Haupert (University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) was editor of the Newsletter of the Cliometric Society from 2000-08 and recently succeeded Lee Craig as the Executive Director of the Cliometric Society.

Copyright (c) 2008 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). Published by EH.Net (August 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

198) Comercio internacional no longo prazo

Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke:
Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xxvi + 619 pp.
$39.50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-11854-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Sevket Pamuk, London School of Economics and Bogaziçi-Bosphorus University.

Ronald Findlay of Columbia University and Kevin H. O’Rourke of Trinity College, Dublin have written a magisterial account of the history of international trade during the last millennium. They provide a theoretically coherent account of the interaction between the patterns and evolution of inter-regional trade, on the one hand, and long-term global economic and political developments, on the other. The two way interaction between power and plenty as formulated by Jacob Viner but going back much earlier in its origins, constitutes the analytical backbone of the volume. Findlay and O’Rourke argue convincingly that no history of international trade can ignore conflict, use of force, military exploits, and in turn, geopolitics. They draw upon a large volume of secondary historical and political literature as well as economic theory and succeed in integrating a vast amount of detail as well as their own research into their conceptual framework.

A large part of the exposition and analysis of the major developments in international trade proceeds in terms of the interaction between the seven regions of Eurasia as defined by the authors and the contributions arising from these interactions, in terms of the movements of people, crops, ideas, and techniques as well as commodities. A good deal of emphasis is placed on the importance of geography in explaining the interactions between the seven regions with very different physical features and endowments. This skillfully written volume is a work of extraordinary scope, a major achievement.

For the first half of the millennium, the authors should be commended for focusing on two key events, the Pax Mongolica and the Black Death, both of which involved most, if not all, of the seven regions. The unification of the central Eurasian landmass by the Mongols in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries facilitated the interaction of Western Europe and different regions of Asia from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Mongols encouraged trade and made the routes across Eurasia safer and busier. Arguably, this was the first episode of globalization in history. Moreover, it was the disintegration of the Pax Mongolica and the shift of the trade to the southern routes across the Indian Ocean and the Middle East that led to the search for alternative ways of reaching Asia by western Europeans. As the authors point out, the ultimate legacy of the Pax Mongolica was not, perhaps, the increase in the interaction between Europe and Asia but the mutual discovery of Europeans and native Americans.

The Black Death, which originated in Mongol-controlled Asia but ended up in the Middle East and Europe, brought about far-reaching consequences for these regions. The sharp decline in the population led to an even sharper rise in wages. This high-wage environment, which lasted for at least two centuries, brought about very different demographic, economic, social and other responses not only between Europe and Asia but also within Europe, between the northwest and the south. As the authors make clear, the long-term consequences of the Black Death have not been fully analyzed and deserve more attention from economic historians.

For the second half of the millennium the focus of the volume is on the rise of an international economy and its contribution to the Industrial Revolution. The authors see the Industrial Revolution as the culmination of a long historical process involving the interaction of all the world’s regions through trade and transfer of technology. Findlay and O’Rourke emphasize that any account of the “Rise of the West” that focuses purely on domestic developments -- such as western institutions, cultural attributes or endowments and ignores the vast web of interrelationships between Western Europe and the rest of the world -- is hopelessly inadequate. They argue that the Industrial Revolution needs to be understood as the outcome of a historical process with multiple causes going back to the medieval era in which international movements of commodities, warriors, microbes and technologies all played important roles. They also make clear that the Industrial Revolution not only transfor
med the international trading system but also gave rise to huge disparities around the globe as the spread of industrialization has been very uneven in the two centuries since.

Plunder or primitive accumulation may not have fueled the Industrial Revolution directly, but the authors emphasize that by expanding markets and ensuring the supply of raw materials, mercantilism and imperialism were an important part of the story. Violence did matter and often shaped the environment in which this exceptional event took place. The authors acknowledge that Asians and those from other regions of the world were not passive actors. They also ask two key questions with regard to the Industrial Revolution: why Britain and why Europe? The answers to both include not only the domestic factors but also control of long distance trade, overseas markets and raw materials. They emphasize in many parts of the text the key role played by the British navy in a world in which nations systematically excluded their enemies from protected markets.

The remaining chapters of the book are devoted to the analysis of the unprecedented expansion of international trade during the last two centuries, based on the “Great Specialization” (manufactures vs. agriculture) that emerged in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and remained in place until recently. The ratio of world trade to GDP is sharply higher today than it was two centuries ago, but this rise has not been continuous. The powerful trend for globalization during the nineteenth century was followed by the collapse of world trade or deglobalization after 1914 and a more or less steady expansion of trade once more or reglobalization since the end of World War II.

One theme that is conspicuously absent in this volume is institutions -- which have occupied center stage not only in the economic history literature but also in economic theory in recent years -- and their impact on trade and economic development. While the authors emphasize the importance of international trade for the “Rise of the West,” they could have focused more explicitly on the linkages between international trade and institutional change. One can think of at least two major channels through which long distance trade facilitated institutional change in Europe. During the period before 1000 and even until 1500, trade with other regions allowed Europe to learn about and then adapt some commercial, monetary and financial institutions. The transmission of the Islamic institution of business partnership or the _mudaraba_ to the north of the Mediterranean in the form of the _commenda_ is an important example of such borrowing and adaptation. These exchanges were very impor
tant for the development of western European institutions and the authors mention some of them. In the early modern era (that is after 1500) trade with other regions of the world led to institutional change in Europe through another mechanism. By giving greater power to merchants, long distance trade enabled them to shape the institutions in early modern Europe more forcefully in the direction of capitalism, as Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson have recently emphasized. Arguably, greater political as well as economic power for merchants is an important characteristic that sets Europe apart from the other regions. It also provides another dimension to Viner’s power and plenty couple which is at the analytical center, as well as the title, of this book.

This is a well researched volume which is simply delightful to read. In most of the topics about which I have some knowledge, I found the analyses and the judgments offered by the authors both balanced and insightful. I expect this book will remain the standard text for many years to come.


Sevket Pamuk teaches economic history and political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Bogaziçi-Bosphorus University, Istanbul. His recent publications include _A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire_ (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and “The Black Death and the Origins of the Great Divergence inside Europe, 1300-1600,” _European Review of Economic History_, 2007. s.pamuk@lse.ac.uk

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197) O Pacto de Varsovia: quem se lembra?

Resenha de livro, neste link.

A Cardboard Castle?: An inside history of the Warsaw Pact
Vojtech Mastny e Malcolm Byrne
2005

Por Flávio Augusto Lira Nascimento, 16/7/2008


Publicado em 2005 por Vojtech Mastny e Malcolm Byrne, “A Cardboard Castle? An inside history of the Warsaw Pact” é uma obra que se destaca por sua ousadia e bom planejamento ao fornecer ao leitor uma alta gama de materiais de boa qualidade. Publicado pela Central European University Press, a proposta do livro é levar ao público documentos dos arquivos de países-membros do Pacto de Varsóvia durante a Guerra Fria. Apesar de os arquivos de Moscou seguirem fechados à consulta pública até hoje, a utilização das atas e documentos de reuniões do Pacto presentes nos arquivos oficiais de seus ex-satélites dá um grande panorama da funcionalidade do bloco.

A Guerra Fria é vista como um momento singular na história, pois foi um período durante o qual duas superpotências, Estados Unidos e União Soviética, foram capazes, pela primeira vez na história, de se enfrentarem com um risco de aniquilação total. Durante a Guerra Fria, que se iniciou durante a década de 1940 e perdurou por mais de quatro décadas, a oposição ideológica entre Moscou e Washington levou à criação de blocos que representavam essa divisão, em especial em solo europeu. A Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte (OTAN) foi criada em 1949 e o Pacto de Varsóvia, em 1955, constituído por União Soviética, Bulgária, Romênia, Albânia (até 1968), Polônia, Hungria, Tchecoslováquia e Alemanha Oriental.

Para além da unidade que se percebia em relação ao bloco controlado por Moscou, os autores surpreendem ao mostrar, por meio de documentos, as dinâmicas internas que faziam com que as suas políticas não fossem tão monolíticas assim, ainda em se tratando dos governos aliados a Moscou. A análise pré-documental do livro pode ser vista em duas partes.

Primeiramente, e talvez mais ostensivamente, mostra-se as ações do Pacto de Varsóvia como contraponto às ações da OTAN. Os autores apresentam o desejo soviético, em especial durante a era de Krushov (1953-1964), de que se desmantelasse a OTAN antes mesmo da criação do bloco do leste. Isto não ocorreria e ainda após a criação do Pacto era claro o desejo, por parte de Moscou, de que ambos os grupamentos fossem desfeitos. Porém, a aposta de Moscou na desunião dos aliados atlânticos não era verificável. Conquanto a OTAN enfrentasse crises, como a retirada das forças francesas do comando militar da aliança em 1959 e os desentendimentos entre Grécia e Turquia sobre a questão cipriota em 1974, sua unidade ideológica, preponderantemente pautada em sua oposição à expansão da área de influência soviética, manteve-os unidos.

Em segundo lugar, apresentam-se as pressões sociais que levaram o Pacto de Varsóvia a ter uma dinâmica tão diferente da OTAN. A constante insatisfação das populações dos países-membros levavam a inquietudes como as observadas na Hungria (1956) e na Tchecoslováquia (1968), as quais foram suprimidas por forças do Pacto. Intervenções de países-membros do bloco em outros países-membros não condiziam com o próprio Tratado fundador do Pacto, e as desculpas utilizadas por Moscou para a intervenção são tão interessantes quanto os documentos dos países a serem invadidos clamando pela não-intervenção. A contraposição de documentos é outro caráter interessante da obra, que os dispõe de forma cronológica.

Quanto aos documentos traduzidos para o inglês, eles não apenas se referem a atas de reuniões ou descrições de operações militares do Pacto, mas também às interações entre centro e satélites. Durante a crise húngara, Imre Nagy foi rápido ao enviar suas condições de que não se contraporia a Moscou, apesar de desejar se retirar do bloco. O mesmo com os acontecimentos de Praga em 1968. A obra expõe tais documentos cronologicamente, mas também de uma maneira causal, para que se entenda, a partir de cada um deles, no que resultou cada ação descrita. Os comentários e visões dos autores, focados nas tentativas perenes de Moscou de salvaguardar sua preponderância, são percebidos, mormente, na introdução histórica do livro, sendo que as intervenções nos documentos são feitas por notas de rodapé, mais ou menos discretas.

O ineditismo de um livro que compila os documentos mais relevantes para a compreensão do bloco do leste na Guerra Fria faz com que entendamos mais a fundo o comportamento político-militar dos países leste-europeus: desde a teimosia da Romênia de Ceauşescu, que fazia de suas desobrigações um mantra para divergir de Moscou, até o comportamento oportunista da Alemanha Oriental ao defender o bloco sempre que possível, disputando com a Polônia a preferência de Moscou. Isto mostra a falácia em se afirmar um comportamento comum do bloco; se este existia, era porque as decisões de Moscou eram sempre de última instância. As discrepâncias entre seus países-membros sempre foram presentes.

O ponto fraco do livro, contudo, é a grafia. Erros de digitação e de inglês não são poucos, e isto compromete, em alguma medida, a confiabilidade do material. Em se tratando de documentos, isto traz um risco a leitores que não podem pesquisá-los em suas línguas originais. Estudantes do tema que não têm domínio dos idiomas da Europa do Leste encontram apenas neste livro, atualmente, a oportunidade de entrar em contato com tais fontes. Sendo esta a primeira edição, porém, espera-se que tais problemas sejam sanados futuramente.

Um ponto negativo talvez de maior impacto, mas que foge às possibilidades dos editores, são os arquivos de Moscou. Embora as decisões dos blocos resultassem em documentos que seriam guardados pelos governos de cada país-membro, é intrigante pensar que havia uma absoluta distribuição de material entre os membros. A relutância de Moscou em abrir seus arquivos ao público pode ser uma prova disso, e resta a dúvida se bases relevantes ainda se encontram a sete chaves.

Os autores apóiam, pela leitura que se faz, a existência da OTAN e a utilização da história do Pacto de Varsóvia como um estudo de um caso mal-sucedido. Pretende-se que a derrocada do bloco de defesa do leste, juntamente com a União Soviética em fins da década de 1980 e início da década de 1990, sirva de alerta para que a OTAN seja a mais inclusiva e participativa possível, apesar da preponderância dos Estados Unidos.

Vojtech Mastny é membro-sênior do National Security Archive, coordenando o “Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact” (PHP), que busca uma nova visão acerca dos dois blocos antagônicos durante a Guerra Fria. Entre sua extensa bibliografia, destacam-se “War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West” (CSS Studies in Security and International Relations, 2006), “The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years” (Oxford University Press,1998) e “The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe: Analysis and Documentation” (New York University Press, 1992). “A Cardboard Castle?” é uma boa seqüência para um autor que fez dos estudos de segurança européia sua razão acadêmica.

Malcolm Byrne é diretor de pesquisa também do National Security Archive, no qual coordena acadêmicos russos e leste-europeus em pesquisas documentais. É autor de “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents” (CEU Press, 2003), “From Solidarity to Martial Law: The Polish Crisis of 1980-1981: a Documentary History” (id., 2008).

A união de dois autores com forte experiência acadêmica na área de estudos de segurança leste-européia é bem-sucedida ao irradiar uma nova luz sobre as empoeiradas visões que se tem da Guerra Fria e de seus atores. Fugindo da clássica e enviesada análise que faz de Moscou o único centro pensante no bloco comunista, percebe-se uma fluidez que, embora não se refletisse em políticas efetivas de defesa (as quais eram sempre únicas), delineava diversas decisões tomadas por Moscou e, como corolário, pelo bloco. Uma leitura altamente recomendada a todos que seguem a história da Europa Oriental, seus problemas de defesa e segurança antigos e atuais, suas relações com a Rússia e, como contraponto, o atual afã de muitos ex-membros do Pacto de Varsóvia que têm entrado para a OTAN.

Flávio Augusto Lira Nascimento, bolsista da CAPES, é mestrando do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais San Tiago Dantas (Unesp/Unicamp/Puc-SP). E-mail.

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196) Origens da divisao do Libano: trajetoria familiar de Amin Maalouf

Ancestral Journeys
By JONATHAN WILSON
The New York Times Book Review, July 6, 2008

ORIGINS
By Amin Maalouf.
Translated by Catherine Temerson.
404 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

The attributes of Arab identity have proved quite a challenge for Americans in the last decade. Throughout the 20th century most United States citizens went along quite happily without expending a thought to, say, the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. This was of a piece with a general climate of nonchalance about all things foreign. In a speech in Brasilia in 1982, Ronald Reagan infamously offered a toast to “the people of Bolivia,” a gaffe that probably did him more good than harm on his home turf. Since 9/11, the days of willful ignorance about the Arab world are gone forever, or at least there is a pretense they are. Now, just when it looked as if more or less everyone, politicians included, was close to getting the Sunni-Shiite thing down, along comes Amin Maalouf with his lovely, complex memoir, “Origins,” to remind us that Arab identity is as fluid, unsettled and ever-changing as the Mediterranean Sea where it kisses the shores of Lebanon, his country of origin, and France, where he has lived for the last 30 years.

Maalouf is a writer of historical fiction (his novel “The Rock of Tanios” won the 1993 Prix Goncourt), a sometime opera librettist and a quirky historian — in “The Crusades Through Arab Eyes,” he brilliantly reconstituted a semi-documentary narrative from “the other side.” He is also a polemicist on behalf of the mongrel life. His 1998 book “Les Identités Meurtrières” (translated into English two years later as “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong”), about the vagaries of identity and the dangers in cleaving too hard to the national model, took on a trenchant identity of its own after 9/11. Here was the clear, calm, cogent and persuasive voice from the Arab world that it seemed everyone in the West had been waiting for. In that book, Maalouf argued, like Primo Levi in “The Periodic Table,” for the salience of marginalized groups, “frontier dwellers,” to the societies they inhabit. By paying attention to the mix and match of minority life, majorities smugly entrenched in fixed identities might be encouraged to get a grip on their own, almost certainly diverse, selves. The dangers of not doing so are clear. “Those who cannot accept their own diversity may be among the most virulent of those prepared to kill for the sake of identity, attacking those who embody that part of themselves which they would like to see forgotten,” he wrote. In “Origins,” Maalouf puts theory into practice by charting the wayward journey of his own family.

The Maalouf family on the cusp and into the first decades of the 20th century is a challenging and charming blend of Catholics, Protestants, open thinkers and Freemasons, and sometimes a satisfyingly incongruent combination of two or more of these affiliations. There is even a Mormon branch in Utah. But the family’s allegiance is first and foremost to the mountain villages of Lebanon, and from that unrolls a variety of commitments to place, family, religion, region, state, language, business, poetry and high thought. The Maaloufs are also somewhat taken with the idea of exile as an experience to broaden the mind rather than a loss of home to be endlessly lamented.

In “Origins,” Maalouf focuses mainly on his grandfather Botros, a schoolteacher who, having failed in business (he wanted to grow tobacco in the Bekaa plain), lives instead “between notebooks and inkwells”; and on his more successfully entrepreneurial great uncle Gebrayel (his grandfather’s younger brother), who left Lebanon in late 1895 for the United States and three years later for Cuba. They are a study in contrasts. Botros, a dandified intellectual determined to bring enlightenment to his corner of the mountains, scandalously refuses to have his children baptized, sets up a “Universal School” and roams his village bareheaded in a suit and cape, while Gebrayel establishes a successful retail business in Havana, only to die there under tragic circumstances.

Amin Maalouf’s forebears include a Melkite priest, Theodoros, and a tragic hunger artist, Botros’s unnamed nephew, who starves himself to death because his father will not let him study literature. The memoir is also flecked with delicious family anecdotes: a young aunt unwinds her tresses on her way to bed when her excited father calls out from the kitchen where negotiations have been in progress, “Zalfa, do up your hair again; we’ve married you off!”

Why look back? William Blake strongly advised driving your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead, and Maalouf is frequently tempted by the idea as he travels from his home in Paris to fill the gaps in his ancestors’ stories. In Cuba, where he locates his great uncle Gebrayel’s home and discovers newspaper reports of his death, Maalouf often gets that “I should have stayed home and watched sports on TV” feeling, but he persists in his research. The descriptions of his brief sojourn in Havana — frustrations and impasses followed by an unexpected denouement involving a long-lost cousin — are the most gripping and evocative chapters in the memoir. In Cuba, Maalouf feels home but not at home. He drinks local rum, invites the Caribbean breeze to caress his face and ruminates on what might have been if his grandfather Botros and not his great uncle Gebrayel had made his way to Havana. Yet in the end, Maalouf doesn’t only want to illuminate family history or amplify stories barely whispered for a hundred years; instead, he strives to reveal the fecund variety of his own family, of Arab life and history, of history itself. In doing so, he offers a lesson in the value of impermanence and shifting sands. “Barely a hundred years ago, Lebanese Christians readily proclaimed themselves Syrian, Syrians looked to Mecca for a king, Jews in the Holy Land called themselves Palestinian ... and my grandfather Botros liked to think of himself as an Ottoman citizen,” he writes. “None of the present-day Middle Eastern states existed, and even the term ‘Middle East’ hadn’t been invented. The commonly used term was ‘Asian Turkey.’ Since then, scores of people have died for allegedly eternal homelands, and many more will die tomorrow.”

Identity is writ not in stone but on water. All the more absurd, then, when it is used — in a manner increasingly common, especially among our hopeful politicians — as a credential. Am I, for example, suitably qualified to represent the unemployed in contemporary Poland because my grandfather hailed from Piotrokow more than a century ago and never had a job in his life?

In her old age, Amin Maalouf’s grandmother Nazeera knitted him a white winter scarf so long that on chilly Paris nights he has to wrap it around his shoulders “several times so it won’t drag on the floor.” Maalouf wants nothing more than to unwind the long scarf of memory and history, not to make a claim, but in celebration of human dignity, endeavor and “wanderers who have lost their way.” He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis.

Jonathan Wilson is director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University.

195) Construindo o imperio: a expansao dos EUA

Exploring What Lies Beyond Manifest Destiny
By JOHN STEELE GORDON
The New York Times Book Review, June 26, 2008

HABITS OF EMPIRE: A History of American Expansion
By Walter Nugent
Illustrated. 387 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

The United States is today the third-largest country in the world, behind only Russia and Canada. More than that, its territory could hardly be richer, more diverse or more advantageously placed on the globe. While much of the land of Russia and Canada is arctic or subarctic, most American territory is in the Temperate Zone. The United States is the only great power with coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific, placing it effectively at the center of the world.

How this immense and fecund national territory came to be assembled is the story of “Habits of Empire” by Walter Nugent, a professor for many years at Notre Dame and earlier at Indiana University. He divides this history into three phases. The first, which he calls Empire I, takes up most of the book and is concerned with what is now the lower 48 states. While most people remember maps from school and the occasional catchy phrase, like “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” and “manifest destiny,” the details are probably hazy at best. And these details are often fascinating and well delineated by Professor Nugent.

The United States acquired much of its present territory by aggressive means, notably what is now the Southwest, when it defeated Mexico in a war and forced it to cede a huge chunk of its almost empty northern reaches (although to be sure America paid Mexico more than it had paid France, in an arm’s-length deal, for the Louisiana Purchase). But United States aggression also failed in some cases, notably Canada. Thomas Jefferson thought that its acquisition would be “a mere matter of marching” and that the Canadians would greet the Americans with open arms. They did not, and the United States was very lucky to get out of the War of 1812 with a burned capital and a draw.

In other cases, like those of Florida and Texas, the land was acquired by the simple expedient of American settlers pouring into largely unsettled areas. Spain, facing incipient revolt in both Mexico and South America, realized that it could not hold Florida anyway and sold it. Mexico, a few years later, tried to hold Texas but, led by a remarkably incompetent general, Santa Anna, lost it at the Battle of San Jacinto, where Santa Anna was captured and his army soundly defeated by Sam Houston and his Texas militia.

By 1853 the continental United States was complete and what Professor Nugent calls Empire II began. Empire I had been acquired with the idea of settlement, which occurred in the American West with astonishing speed. Empire II, however, was not meant for settlement, at least at first. The biggest part of Empire II was Alaska, which became American for much the same reason that Louisiana had about 60 years earlier: a European empire wanted to be rid of it and didn’t want Britain to get it.

The rest of Empire II was added in the late 19th century and, except for the Philippines, consisted mostly of small islands in the Pacific, like Guam, American Samoa and Hawaii. Puerto Rico and, finally, the Virgin Islands, bought from Denmark in 1917, rounded out this overseas empire.

But a major part of Empire II was the control the United States exercised over foreign countries that were nominally independent. American protectorates were established in many countries in the Caribbean basin, with the Marines sent to keep peace (and, of course, safeguard American commercial interests). But with the end of World War I the American taste for foreign empire began to evaporate. By the middle of the 1930s the Marines were out of places like Nicaragua, and the Philippines was self-governing and on its way to independence.

Up to this point “Habits of Empire” is both a readable and valuable work in American history. Unfortunately the author felt compelled to add a postscript, “The Global Empire,” on the United States in the post-World War II world. He calls this phase of American history Empire III, and his depiction of it is somewhere between highly tendentious and simply, well, silly.

For one thing, he covers 63 years of enormous global change in a mere 12 pages, which doesn’t leave much room for explaining extremely complex events or providing context. For instance, Professor Nugent writes, quoting with obvious approval another historian (Robert Kagan), that globalization is simply “ ‘a process whereby American-style market economics engulfed nearly the entire world’ in a manner similar to how white Americans put Indians’ land ‘to better use’ in the 1800s.” To describe globalization as nothing more than American economic imperialism is ludicrous. He might at least have noted that globalization has enormously enriched the entire world, not just the United States.

For another, he is often wrong on his facts. He writes that “there was no significant peace dividend” after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, and that there were no military base closings. In fact the total Department of Defense budget, in constant dollars, fell by more than 30 percent between 1989 and 1998, and there have been five rounds of base closings, enacted despite considerable political pain.

In short, he buys completely into the visceral anti-Americanism, seeing American self-aggrandizing imperialism everywhere while scarcely noting that the free world was engaged in a decades-long, worldwide struggle against a ruthless tyranny.

In all, “Habits of Empire” is an excellent book as long as one ignores the historical claptrap of the postscript, which is an embarrassment to the author and publisher and an insult to the reader.

John Steele Gordon is the author of “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power” (HarperCollins, 2004).

194) Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman

Capitalism and Freedom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Capitalism and Freedom
Milton Friedman
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 202
ISBN ISBN 0-226-26421-1 (Fortieth anniversary edition)

Capitalism and Freedom is a book by Milton Friedman originally published in 1962 which discusses the role of economic capitalism in liberal society. It has sold over 400,000 copies in 18 years[1] and more than half a million since 1962. It has been translated into 18 languages. In accessible, jargon-free language, Friedman makes the case for economic freedom as a precondition for political freedom. He defines liberal in European Enlightenment terms, contrasting with an American usage that he believes has been corrupted since the Great Depression. Many North Americans usually categorized as conservative or libertarian have adopted some of his views. The book finds several realistic places in which a free market can and should be promoted for both philosophical and practical reasons, with several surprising conclusions.[citation needed] Among other concepts, Friedman advocates ending the mandatory licensing of doctors and introducing a system of vouchers for school education.

Context
Capitalism and Freedom is written from the perspective of the United States. It was published nearly two decades after World War II, a time when the Great Depression was still in collective memory and the Cold War had just begun. Under the Kennedy and preceding Eisenhower administrations, federal expenditures were growing at a quick pace in the areas of national defence, social welfare and infrastructure. Both major parties, Democratic and Republican, supported increased spending in different ways. This, as well as the New Deal, was supported by most intellectuals with the justification of Keynesian economics.

Chapter summaries

Introduction
The introduction lays out the principles of Friedman's archetypal liberal, a man who supports limited and dispersed governmental power. Friedman opts for the continental European, rather than American, definition of the term.

i. The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom
In this chapter, Friedman promotes economic freedom as both a necessary freedom in itself and also as a vital means for political freedom. He argues that, with the means for production under the auspices of the government, it is nearly impossible for real dissent and exchange of ideas to exist. Additionally, economic freedom is important, since any "bi-laterally voluntary and informed" transaction must benefit both parties to the transaction.

ii. The Role of Government in a Free Society
According to the author, the government of a liberal society should enforce law and order and property rights, as well as take action on certain technical monopolies and diminish negative "neighborhood effects." The government should also have control over money, as has long been recognized in the constitution and society.

iii. The Control of Money
He discusses the evolution of money in America, culminating in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Far from acting as a stabilizer, the Federal Reserve failed to act as it should have in several circumstances. Friedman proposes that the Federal Reserve have a consistent rule to increase the money supply by 3-5% annually.

iv. International Financial and Trade Arrangements
This chapter advocates the end of the Bretton Woods system in favor of a floating exchange rate system and the end of all currency controls and trade barriers, even "voluntary" export quotas. Friedman says that this is the only true solution to the balance of trades problem.

v. Fiscal Policy
Friedman argues against the continual government spending justified to "balance the wheel" and help the economy to continue to grow. On the contrary, federal government expenditures make the economy less, not more stable. Friedman uses concrete evidence from his own research, demonstrating that the rise in government expenditures results in a roughly equal rise in GDP, contrasting with the Keynsian multiplier theory. Many reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.

vi. The Role of Government in Education
The policy advocated here is vouchers which students may use for education at a private school of their choice. The author believes that everyone, in a democracy, needs a basic education for citizenship. Though there is underinvestment in human capital (in terms of spending at technical and professional schools), it would be foolish of the government to provide free technical education. The author suggests several solutions, some private, some public, to stop this underinvestment.

vii. Capitalism and Discrimination
In a capitalist society, Friedman argues, it costs money to discriminate, and it is very difficult, given the impersonal nature of market transactions. However, the government should not make fair employment practices laws (eventually embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1964), as these inhibit the freedom to employ someone based on whatever qualifications the employer wishes to use. For the same reason, right-to-work laws should be abolished.

viii. Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor
Friedman states, there are three alternatives for a monopoly: public monopoly, private monopoly, or public regulation. None of these is desirable or universally preferable. Monopolies come from many sources, but direct and indirect government intervention is the most common, and it should be stopped wherever possible. The doctrine of "social responsibility", that corporations should care about the community and not just profit, is highly subversive to the capitalist system and can only lead towards totalitarianism.

ix. Occupational Licensure
This economist takes a radical stance against all forms of state licensure. The biggest advocates for licenses in an industry are, usually, the people in the industry, wishing to keep out potential competitors. The author defines registration, certification, and licensing, and, in the context of doctors, explains why the case for each one of these is weaker than the previous one. There is no liberal justification for licensing doctors; it results in inferior care and a medical cartel.

x. The Distribution of Income
Friedman examines the progressive income tax, introduced in order to redistribute income to make things more fair, and finds that, in fact, the rich take advantage of numerous loopholes, nullifying the redistributive effects. It would be far more just to have a uniform flat tax with no deductions, which could meet the 1962 tax revenues with a rate only slightly greater than the lowest tax bracket at that time.

xi. Social Welfare Measures
Though well-intentioned, many social welfare measures don't help the poor as much as some think. Friedman focuses on Social Security as a particularly large and unfair system.

xii. Alleviation of Poverty
He advocates a negative income tax to fix the issue, giving everyone a guaranteed minimum income, rather than current measures, which he sees as misguided and inefficient.

xiii. Conclusion
The conclusion to the book centers on how, time and time again, government intervention often has an effect opposite of that intended. Most good things in the United States and the world come from the free market, not the government, and they will continue to do so. The government, despite its good intentions, should stay out of areas where it does not need to be.

Impact
The effects of Capitalism and Freedom were great yet varied in the realm of political economics. Some of Friedman's suggestions are being tested and implemented in many places, such as the flat income tax in Slovakia, a floating exchange rate which has almost fully replaced the Bretton Woods system, and school vouchers for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, to cite a few prominent examples. However, many other ideas have scarcely been considered, such as the end of licensing, and the abolition of corporate income tax (in favor of an income tax on the stock holder). Though politicians often claim that they are working towards "free trade," an idea the book supports, no one has considered taking his suggestion of phasing out all tariffs in 10 years. Nevertheless, Friedman popularized many ideas previously unknown to most outside economics. This and other works helped Milton Friedman to become a household name. The Times Literary Supplement called it "one of the most influential books published since the war." However, many of the ideas described in this book are considered controversial or even radical to this day.

Capitalism and Freedom made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Best Books of the Twentieth Century and also was placed tenth on the list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the twentieth century compiled by National Review.

References
1. ^ 1982 edition preface of Capitalism and freedom, p. xi of the 2002 edition
See also: Free to Choose

External links:
* Capitalism and Freedom, 1962
* A Tract for the Times — contemporary review from The Economist, 16 February 1963.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Freedom"
Categories: 1962 books | Capitalist books | Classical liberalism | Economics books |

193) Uma breve história do futuro, Jacques Attali

Sobre o amanhã que nos espera
Economista e autor francês, Jacques Attali faz previsões alarmantes em Uma Breve História do Futuro
Leonardo Trevisan
O Estado de São Paulo, domingo, 29 de junho de 2008, Caderno 2

Jacques Attali:
Uma Breve História do Futuro
Tradução de Renata Cordeiro
Novo Século, 224 págs., R$ 45,90

Investigar o futuro é mania antiga. Aliás, o bicho homem sempre foi muito atormentado pela idéia das previsões. Os métodos para domar esse medo do amanhã, atávico à espécie, são muitos, incluindo sacrifícios humanos, muito utilizados para acalmar os deuses que mandam no que virá. Por outro lado, é curioso, mas nos últimos tempos a prospecção do futuro misturou esse medo com a ansiedade por progresso. As incertezas do amanhã, portanto, só devem assustar os que não se preocupam com os avanços, com as melhorias, principalmente as econômicas.

Jacques Attali, assessor de François Mitterand, ex-presidente do Banco Europeu para a Reconstrução e Desenvolvimento, seguiu esse caminho, o de pensar o futuro pela via da conquista do progresso. Em Uma Breve História do Futuro - Capítulo Especial Sobre o Brasil, publicado pela Novo Século Editora, ele identificou um momento essencial para entender os mecanismos das previsões: por volta de 1300 a.C., depois que os egípcios consolidaram a idéia de império, algumas tribos vindas da Ásia se instalam em ilhas do Mediterrâneo, e, em vez de ficarem fechados em fortalezas pelas exigências da agricultura, micênicos, fenícios e judeus passaram a pensar o tempo todo em mudanças, que chamaram de “progresso”. Para esses, comércio e dinheiro eram suas melhores armas e mares e portos seus verdadeiros terrenos de caça.

Apesar de toda atenção à História, Attali garante que “hoje se decide como será o mundo em 2050”. Ele está convencido de que as forças de mercado dominam o planeta e o que chamou de “marcha triunfante do dinheiro” tem tanto poder que acabará com tudo que pode prejudicá-lo. Transformado em lei única do mundo, o mercado formará na sua visão o “hiperimpério”, em que tudo será privado. Porém, se a humanidade interromper a globalização “pela violência” enfrentará grandes batalhas opondo Estados, grupos religiosos, terroristas e piratas privados. Será o que Attali chamou de “hiperconflito”. Já se a globalização puder ser contida sem ser recusada, se o mercado for circunscrito sem ser abolido, se a democracia for global, ele acredita que o mundo chegará à “hiperdemocracia”, com todas as tecnologias usadas “no rumo da abundância”. Para conhecer qual será o rumo dessa caminhada, se sombria ou apenas feliz, Attali prospecta o futuro partindo de uma certeza: as tribos, que instituíram os primeiros mercados e as primeiras democracias 12 séculos antes de Cristo, formaram depois uma sólida ordem comercial. Para ele, ainda estamos nessa ordem, e sua história e leis serão também as do futuro. O corte cronológico que interessa ao economista francês é o surgimento das primeiras cidades-feira da cristandade no século 9º. Só as crises do próprio mercado, ou guerras, levariam à substituição de um “núcleo” de comércio por outro. Para Attali, desde então, nove “núcleos” se sucederam: Bruges, Veneza, Antuérpia, Gênova, Amsterdã, Londres, Boston, Nova York e, hoje, Los Angeles. Para Attali, o essencial da história dos últimos sete séculos se explica pelas estratégias empregadas pelas potências para tornarem-se “núcleo” dessa ordem comercial.

Cada um desses núcleos acumulou sua especificidade de poder. Veneza tomou o espaço de Bruges, pela posição geográfica privilegiada, para receber a prata que acabara de ser descoberta nas minas alemãs. Quando a prata alemã terminou e a pressão turca aumentou, Antuérpia e depois Gênova substituíram Veneza. Londres, que desde o 16 já lucrava com o algodão, tomará o lugar de Gênova. A origem da riqueza inglesa está nos tratados de livre comércio assinados até com a inimiga França em 1776. Nessa época, a libra já era nova moeda do comércio mundial. A grande recessão de 1870 demole o poder de “núcleo” de Londres. De 1890 a 1929, Boston dará as cartas pela grande explosão das máquinas. Depois da Grande Depressão de 1929, Nova York ocupa o poder de núcleo, na grande vitória da eletricidade. Depois que serviços viraram indústria, Attali cria a expressão “objetos nômades”, os que ajudam as pessoas a “viver em viagem”, o principal deles o computador.

Há novos donos no mundo. A Europa declina e a Ásia volta a subir: entre 1980 e 2006 a parte dos EUA no PIB mundial permanece inalterada em 21%, mas a da Europa cai de 28% para 21%, enquanto a do leste asiático, incluindo China, Japão, Coréia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, passa de 16% para 28%. A questão central para o futuro é: como surgirá a décima cidade-núcleo. Há no horizonte 11 novas potências: China, Índia, Rússia, Japão, Indonésia, Coréia, Austrália, Canadá, República Sul-Africana, Brasil e México. Sobre a China a percepção de que o Partido Comunista chinês será cada vez menos capaz de organizar a vida urbana. Attali faz o vaticino de que o Brasil estará à frente do Japão. Para gerir o tempo como mercadoria duas indústrias devem crescer muito: seguros e entretenimento, uma vez que “divertir-se será proteger-se do presente”. Quanto à operacionalidade do futuro, Attali vê duas perspectivas. Primeiro, uma fase mais sombria em que o capitalismo atingirá sua meta: “Destruirá tudo que não for como ele.” Ele teme a tentação do isolacionismo teocrático nos EUA e a inserção do cristianismo na constituição européia como defesa à expansão islâmica. Porém, depois, ele também considera que a hiperdemocracia poderá triunfar.

É preciso coragem para mexer com o futuro. O que mais assusta nele não são as previsões, mas as convicções que as construíram. A maior delas é a atual mistura entre progresso e felicidade. Aliás, vale lembrar que essa mesma mistura já vitimou as previsões, tanto otimistas como pessimistas, de muita gente.

192) No centenario da imigracao japonesa, um romance do sofrimento dos primeiros imigrantes

Saga da imigração japonesa
Por Adelto Gonçalves
11/6/2008

SÔBÔ – UMA SAGA DA IMIGRAÇÃO JAPONESA
de Tatsuzô Ishikawa.
Tradução direta do japonês de Maria Fusako Tomimatsu, Monica Setuyo Okamoto e Takao Namekata.
Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 259 págs., 2008, R$ 36,00.
Site: www.atelie.com.br; E-mail: atelie@atelie.com.br

Há um século, mais exatamente no dia 18 de junho de 1908, o navio Kasato Maru ancorou em frente ao armazém 14 do Porto de Santos, depois de 52 dias de viagem, trazendo a bordo 781 japoneses que compunham 165 famílias. Eram camponeses, carpinteiros, pequenos comerciantes e donos de fabriquetas à beira da falência, que haviam deixado a cidade de Kobe a 28 de abril, dispostos a fugir da miséria em que viviam em seu país, imaginando reconstruir a vida com o trabalho na lavoura.

Para marcar esses cem anos de intercâmbio – que nem sempre foi mantido dentro dos limites do respeito aos direitos humanos, tanto lá como cá –, as autoridades dos dois países programaram uma série de festividades que inclui a visita ao Brasil do príncipe Nahurito, da família real japonesa, a São Paulo e Santos.

Dentro desse espírito de confraternização, acaba de sair o livro Sôbô – Uma Saga da Imigraç ão Japonesa, de Tatsuzô Ishikawa (1905-1985), que conta uma parte significativa dessa história de um século que, nos últimos anos, teve a sua contrapartida com a aventura dos dekasseguis no Japão: hoje, cerca de 30 mil brasileiros descendentes de japoneses, para fugir de uma situação difícil, optaram por trabalhar no Japão em serviços que, normalmente, os japoneses já não querem fazer.

Vivendo em alojamentos e em condições precárias, muitos conseguiram amealhar um pé-de-meia e voltar para o Brasil, onde procuraram abrir um negócio, mas outros retornaram também com muitas queixas do tratamento que receberam. Até porque, apesar do aspecto físico igual, sempre foram considerados estrangeiros.

II

A história de Ishikawa começa em 1930, quando, aos 24 anos, recebeu o convite de um amigo para inscrever-se no programa de imigração para o Brasil. Fez um acordo com a revi sta para a qual trabalhava, comprometendo-se a enviar artigos sobre sua viagem em companhia de uma leva de imigrantes que deixariam Kobe a bordo do navio La Plata Maru.

Ao chegar à hospedaria de imigrantes, em Kobe, Ishikawa depara-se com a miséria de seu povo – trabalhadores que haviam deixado para trás seus lares, embalados pelo sonho do trabalho e melhores condições de vida além-mar. Abalado com o espetáculo triste que vê, toma a decisão de escrever um romance a partir de sua experiência como imigrante.

Mas não teve forças para colocar de imediato no papel o que via. E adiou a decisão por mais alguns anos. Permaneceu no Brasil, trabalhando seis meses numa fazenda no interior do Estado de São Paulo, até que decidiu retornar ao Japão e à atividade literária. E, finalmente, escreveu Sôbô – Uma Saga da Imigração Japonesa, que, em 1935, ganhou o Prêmio Akutagawa de Literatura Japonesa, de grande renome no Japão.

O título, de difícil tradução, traz dois ideogramas: sô remete a sôsei, “povo”, mas também pode significar “cor de capim”, “apressar-se” ou “envelhecer”, acepções que podem estar relacionadas à imagem de um povo desprezado. Já bô comporta os significados “imigrante” e “povo subjugado ou massacrado”.

III

A verdade é que poucos escritores japoneses conseguiram reproduzir com tanta fidelidade o drama das classes baixas japonesas, especialmente o dos trabalhadores rurais. Foi nesse contexto que Ishikawa derrubou convenções literárias, já que até então os demais escritores preocupavam-se apenas em exaltar a família real, a tradição cultural do antigo Japão e, depois, a classe média urbana e seu acendrado individualismo.

Sob a forma de diário, Ishikawa narra a trajetória de imigrantes – dependentes de uma magra ajuda de custo do governo japonês e sujeitos à safadeza de agenciad ores, pois sempre há quem queira lucrar com a desgraça alheia. O relato detalhado da viagem coloca a nu a miséria, a corrupção e a discriminação por detrás dos procedimentos sanitaristas e dos interesses mercantis da época. E cresce à medida que os dramas existenciais dos personagens ganham corpo, ao serem obrigados a conviver com outras famílias, ou mesmo passageiros da primeira classe do navio ou até mesmo com os costumes ocidentais.

São muitos os dramas, desde as doenças que infestam os porões do navio – doenças de pele, beribéri, sarna, piolhos – até a melancolia e a resignação que aumentam com o tédio que têm de suportar por quase dois meses. Eis um trecho do relato de Ishikawa:

“Agora, no espírito dos imigrantes, as fendas começavam a se abrir. Elas eram raras em idosos e casais: era um tipo de solidão que assolava os solteiros. Continuamente começavam a surgir problemas de comportamento moral”.

Em outros momentos, a ignorância cedia lugar a um sopro de consciência social: “Se ainda estivesse em sua terra natal, continuaria sendo um trabalhador rural honesto e virtuoso, que não tinha consciência de nada”.

IV

Tatsuzô Ishikawa nasceu na província de Akita, região norte do Japão, e cursou Letras na Universidade Waseda, em Tóquio, o que indica que não pertencia exatamente à classe social que retratou em Sôbô. Mas não concluiu o curso, preferindo dedicar-se ao jornalismo como repórter e, depois, à literatura. No prefácio, Sakae Ishikawa, professor doutor da Universidade Sophia, de Tóquio, seu filho, lembra que o pai sempre foi uma alma movida pelo sentido de justiça social, produzindo obras que o tornaram um dos romancistas mais populares de seu país exatamente pelo cunho social que impregnou em seus livros.

Ishikawa publicou ainda Hikage no mura (Aldeia à Sombra), de 1937, em que descreve uma aldeia que submerge com a construção de uma represa. Em Kinkanshorku, de 1975, trata da corrupção no poder conservador. Em Kizudarake no Sanga, de 1964, discorre sobre a destruição ambiental pelo crescimento do sistema econômico. E em Ikiteru Heitai (Os Soldados Sobreviventes), de 1945, divulgou os atos bárbaros praticados pelo exército japonês no continente chinês, durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Por esta obra, foi condenado criminalmente pelas autoridades da época.

Depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, ainda escreveu artigos críticos sobre o comportamento do exército norte-americano, que tiveram a sua publicação proibida por determinação do comando geral das forças de ocupação. “Todos esses fatos demonstram a postura firme e única de Tatsuzô. E o ponto de partida e desenvolvimento de sua produção literária encontram-se em Sôbo”, diz Sakae Ishikawa que, em 1992, teve a oportunidade de viajar para o Brasil e visitar a fazenda em que seu pai trabalhou e viveu.

Adelto Gonçalves é doutor em Literatura Portuguesa pela Universidade de São Paulo e autor de Gonzaga, um Poeta do Iluminismo (Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 1999), Barcelona Brasileira (Lisboa, Nova Arrancada, 1999; São Paulo, Publisher Brasil, 2002) e Bocage – o Perfil Perdido (Lisboa, Caminho, 2003). E-mail: adelto@unisanta.br

191) Desastres econômicos do seculo XX

Um livro interessante sobre os desastres econômicos do século XX, como abaixo resenhado.
Creio que se pode aprender mais com desastres, fracassos e derrotas, do que propriamente com sucessos e vitórias. Estes podem ter várias causas, nem sempre detectáveis ou identificáveis plenamente, enquanto que os primeiros geralmente redundam de equívocos na implementação de políticas econômicas, na condução dos negócios, na administração de crises -- que sempre existem, pois pertencem à dinâmica da própria vida. Sucessos, sobretudo, nem sempre são imitáveis, ou reprodutíveis, pois nem todas as condições estão dadas ou são oferecidas a todo mundo, ou a todos os paises.
Mas, se pode aprender um bocado com as derrotas, pois erros de administração ou de gestão são evitáveis, ou contornáveis, justamente, com base no aprendizado do passado.
Não estou seguro de concordar com a apreciação feita por Niall Ferguson sobre o "sucesso" econômico do modelo soviético pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial. Conheço sua análise da Segunda Guerra, feita em "The War of the World", inclusive de suas causas e implicações econômicas, mas tendo a discordar dessa equivalência que ele faz entre o capitalismo concorrencial americano e o modelo de planejamento centralizado como responsáveis pelo crescimento econômico posterior. Devemos lembrar que a ajuda americana (e inglesa) foi essencial para que o exército soviético suportasse a terrivel ofensiva hitlerista e pudesse depois recuperar o terreno. Por outro lado, a imposição do modelo econômico soviético pode ter servido para concentrar recursos nas tarefas de recuperação econômica e de repartição econômica dos custos da reconstrução, mas o desenvolvimento econômico na base da industrialização pesada e de comando centralizado deixou essas economias incapazes de sustentar a concorrência no plano global, sem considerar aqui os imensos custos humanos desse gigantesco experimento.
Caberia ler, em todo caso.
-------------
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
pralmeida@mac.com www.pralmeida.org
http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/


Rockoff on Oliver and Aldcroft, eds., _Economic Disasters of the Twentieth Century_

Michael J. Oliver and Derek H. Aldcroft, editors, _Economic Disasters of the Twentieth Century_. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007. ix + 361 pp. $125 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-84064-589-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Hugh Rockoff, Department of Economics, Rutgers University.

This is a great idea for a book: economic disasters of the twentieth century. The editors, Michael Oliver and Derek Aldcroft, have written chapters on Financial Crises (Oliver) and the African Growth Disaster (Aldcroft). And they have recruited seven scholars to write chapters on other twentieth-century disasters: the First World War (John Singleton), the Great Depression (W.R. Garside), the Second World War (Niall Ferguson), OPEC Price Increases (Michael Beenstock), Inflation (Forrest Capie), Stock Market Crashes (Geoffrey E. Wood), and the Demise of the Command Economies of the Soviet Union and its Outer Empire (Steven Morewood). It is a stellar cast. Each author is an authority in his field and would make anyone's list of the best people to write a particular essay.

The book is intended, first of all, for economic historians. These are what might be called creative surveys. The authors summarize the literature in their field, but they also try to push things forward a bit by addressing a few broad questions that haven't been addressed fully in the literature. It is, therefore, worth looking at an essay even if it falls within your area of research. I was familiar, for example, with many of the references in Niall Ferguson's chapter on World War II, but I still learned a lot from his extraordinary command of the literature, and his reflections on the origins, conduct, and consequences of the war. The greatest value added for me, however, came from reading Derek Aldcroft's essay on the development failures in southern Africa, a subject about which I knew little beyond what I have read in the _New York Times_ and the _Wall Street Journal_.

The book would make a good text or supplemental reading for a course in the economic history of the twentieth century, either at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level. Students love disasters. So a whole semester when they could go from one recent economic disaster to another would make for a very popular course. All of the essays would be accessible to advanced undergraduates. Only Michael Beenstock's essay on OPEC employs algebra and graphical analysis. Many of the essays, however, assume some familiarity with the historical background and are densely packed with economic reasoning. Therefore, many undergraduates would need help mastering the essays.

Are the authors optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to learn from these economic disasters and avoid similar mistakes in the future? On the whole, the authors dealing mainly with the advanced industrial countries draw optimistic conclusions. Either the economically advanced countries will avoid economic disasters or, at a minimum, cope with them. John Singleton sets the tone in his essay on the First World War. (It is the first essay: they are arranged chronologically.) Singleton catalogs the enormous costs of the war. These include not only direct costs such as battlefield casualties and expenditures for weapons, but also indirect costs, such as the exacerbation of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. But Singleton also points out that there were winners as well as losers. He sees Japan as (arguably) "the main economic beneficiary" of the war (p. 23). And he concludes that "The First World War was an economic disaster but, paradoxically, it also demonstrated the resilience of industrial capitalism" (p. 43). Niall Ferguson concludes his essay about World War II on an even more positive note: "Two new models of state-led production -- the American and the Soviet -- were put to the test of total war and passed it with flying colours. Those new models were then exported around the northern hemisphere, generating major improvement in economic performance nearly everywhere they were adopted or imposed" (p. 124).

W.R. Garside's essay on the Great Depression sees an important lesson of the 1930s being applied in the 1970s: political pressure to prevent a recurrence of the high unemployment of 1930s, even at the cost of abandoning economic orthodoxies. Michael Beenstock traces fluctuations in the price of oil and in OPEC's role in the oil market. He ends his essay by enumerating the reasons why oil price shocks are likely to be less disruptive today than they were in the 1970s. The most important factor, in his view, is improved macroeconomic policies.

Forrest Capie's essay on inflation shows that periods of hyperinflation or very high inflation are almost always the product of "civil war or revolution or at a minimum serious social unrest" (p. 172). Weak governments faced with threats to their existence resort to the printing press. The implication is that we are unlikely to see very high inflation in advanced industrialized nations. Capie ends his essay by enumerating the many ways that nations have found to limit the potential for inflation: independent central banks, dollarization, currency boards, monetary unions and so on. Geoffrey Wood sees stock market crashes as an inevitable part of the economic scene. But he argues they need not produce macroeconomic disasters. Disasters happen when a stock market crash is combined with "banking and monetary system failures" (p. 254). The message is that we may not be able to avoid the waves of optimism and pessimism that capture the stock market from time to time, but we can avoid the policy mistakes that turn stock market crashes into macroeconomic disasters.

On the other hand, when the focus shifts to less economically advanced nations, the conclusions become pessimistic. Michael Oliver, after surveying the literature on international financial crises concludes: "... it is a sobering thought to conclude that whatever reforms are made to the international financial architecture and however robust domestic financial systems are made, economists and policy-makers will still be dealing with financial crises 100 years hence" (p. 227). Steven Morewood is not at all sure that the end of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites was a good thing economically. "Time will tell" (p. 308) is as far as he is willing to go. The most pessimistic essay is Aldcroft's on the African growth disaster: "Thus we can say confidently that, short of a miracle, the prospects for most of the very poor nations, and especially the SSA [Sub-Saharan Africa] group, will continue to remain very bleak indeed" (p. 348).

This is a fine collection of essays. There is no point in playing the game of awarding gold, silver, and bronze medals, as reviewers often do, because all the essays reach a high level of quality. Each of the authors is a well-regarded expert in his field and clearly capable of producing a well-crafted essay. The surprising thing, given the variability that characterizes most collected volumes, is that all of the authors came through. Each wrestled with important questions and developed his answers in detail. There were no slackers. The authors and editors are to be congratulated.


Hugh Rockoff is a professor of economics at Rutgers University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He recently published (with Leonard Caruana) "An Elephant in the Garden: The Allies, Spain, and Oil in World War II" in the _European Review of Economic History_.

Copyright (c) 2008 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). Published by EH.Net (June 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

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190) A negacao do Holocausto: uma "abjecao" historica

Infelizmente ainda são muitos aqueles que pretendem negar as evidências do extermínio de judeus (e outras categorias) na imensa máquina de aniquilação nazista. Este livro pode contribuir com a tarefa de "exterminar" (metaforicamente) os "holocaust deniers".

Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?
(S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies)
by Michael Shermer (Author), Alex Grobman (Author)
University of California Press, 330 pages; 1 edition: May 3, 2002
ISBN-10: 0520234693; ISBN-13: 978-0520234697

Denying History is a courageous and accessible study of "a looking-glass world where black is white, up is down, and the normal rules of reason no longer apply." Authors Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the conferences, literature, and Web culture of Holocaust deniers; they have engaged the pseudo-historians in debate; and they have visited the concentration camps in Europe to investigate the truth of what happened there. Denying History presents Shermer and Grobman's findings. The book refutes, in detail, the Holocaust deniers' claims, and it demonstrates conclusively that the Holocaust did happen.It also explores the fundamental historical issue in all debates over the truth of the Holocaust: the question of "how we know that any past event happened." Thus, Denying History is a doubly useful book; it sets the record straight on one of history's most terrible events, and it instructs readers in the scientific, logical, and historiographical principles that can help us make wise judgments about history on our own. --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Holocaust denial - back in the news since the British courts shot down David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt (for her groundbreaking book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory) in April - gets an inventively thorough treatment in this important book. Keeping their focus on larger questions about historical rigor and public memory, Shermer (a professor of the history of science at Occidental College and publisher of Skeptic magazine) and Grobman (Rekindling the Flame) look closely at the methods employed by deniers and those used by legitimate historians. "Holocaust denial," they argue, "is not just a Jewish issue. It is an attack on all history and the way we transmit the past to the future." Drawing on a wide array of evidence - interviews they conducted with famous deniers (including Irving himself) and text from their Web sites and literature - the authors explore the difference between legitimate historical revisionism and pseudohistorical denial. They note that historians interested in revising accepted knowledge depend on a wide variety of sources to draw a picture of an event or period - if some of that evidence is contradictory, then respectful scholarly debate ensues; if new evidence surfaces, then the historical record gets revised. Deniers, on the contrary, use the barest of evidence - one contradiction, for example - to discount entire arguments; meanwhile, they bolster their own arguments with out-of-context phrases and mistranslations. Using the deniers' own words to tear down their arguments, Shermer and Grobman provide a clear method for determining the reality of past events and supply a powerful weapon for anyone who cares about learning from the credible historical record. 42 b&w photos. (June)

========

Vejam três comentários no site da Amazon.com:

1) By Robert Helmerichs (Minneapolis, MN USA)

Denying History succeeds on two levels. First, it is a thorough demolition of the arguments of Holocaust deniers, presenting the overwhelming evidence for the systematic and deliberate murder of about 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis during World War II. On this level, it is a very painful book at times, but clear and utterly convincing.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is an exploration of historical method intended to show how not only Holocaust deniers, but fringe groups of all kinds, distort and pervert history to make their points. The book is a virtual guide to BS detection, displaying the techniques used by pseudo-historians and how the conclusions drawn by these techniques evaporate in the light of a careful, objective evaluation of the evidence.

In a sense, it is too bad that the Holocaust, a very emotional topic (and this book can be quite angry at times), is the test case; less of a hot-button issue might have made for a calmer (and at times less disturbing) book. But the Holocaust deniers need to be denied, and Shermer and Grobman do a masterful job of it, without losing sight of the larger historiographical issues involved. Denying History is intense, readable, valuable, and for anybody who has ever been upset by bizarre historical claims, essential.

2) By Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States)

It is both puzzling and painful to recognize that there are still serious(?) people abroad in the world who loudly deny the veracity of the historical record concerning the Holocaust. As if to extend the unconscionable cruelty of the world yet longer for the millions of victims of this century's most heinous and tragic phenomenon, some actually continue to claim that either the Holocaust never happened, or that its dimensions and scope were much more limited and constrained that so-called Jewish revisionist historians would like the public to believe. This book puts the lie to all this nonsense, giving those who would deny the truth and accuracy of the history of the Holocaust an exceptionally thorough trip to the intellectual back shed to give them the whipping of their cranial careers.

With this volume, historians Michael Shermier and Alex Grobman have presented a virtual tidal wave of substantiating evidence of the nature of the complex social movement that the Holocaust deniers comprise. The authors trudge through a depressing tour of every aspect of this social movement, and go deeper into every aspect of the deniers and their social network in an effort to both better understand what motivates them as well as how to finally and authoritatively refute their claims. In so doing, they not only illustrate how shallow, self-serving, disingenuous, and disreputable these claims and positions are, but also provide much more substantial proof of the existence of the Holocaust.

In some ways this tour into the deep underbelly of continuing hate, bigotry, and ignorance is a descent into a Dante-like inferno, one the reader tends to recoil from because of its `in-your-face' portrayal of such rampant and continuing racial hate and conflict. In other ways it seems more like an impromptu visit to the comical land of the Keystone cops, or the gang who couldn't shoot straight. Anyone falling for this grab-bag crack-pot mixture of conspiracy theories, racial suspicions, and social paranoia isn't likely to be sitting next to anyone in a graduate course in history, anyway. Still, one must remember that Hitler graduated from the ranks of the likes of these cretins.

This is a profoundly disturbing but altogether necessary book. To suggest that after fifty years serious people could still question the historical record regarding the savage and murderous events collectively referred to as the Holocaust is but one more painful indicator of how far the world must go to reach any kind of intellectual maturity or cosmopolitan compassion. One of the most interesting sidelights of the book is the fact that the authors have devised an ingenious framework that both contemporary and future historians and social scientists can employ to verify and virtually any historical event. I highly recommend it for anyone who has ever had someone say (as I have heard a number of times), "The Holocaust never happened."

3) By Jonathan Kay (Toronto, Ontario Canada)

You will not find a more straightforward Holocaust book than Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It. The authors' basic argument is this: The extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War is a historical fact. Those who deny it are wrong.

It's hardly a provocative thesis. But ask yourself this: Would you be able to refute a Holocaust denier? The fact of the Holocaust is like the spherical Earth: Every reasonable person accepts it, but few can prove it. That is why Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer teamed up with historian Alex Grobman to write Denying History. They believe thinking people have a duty to fight Holocaust denial head on; and they want them to come to the battle armed with historical facts.

When the eyes of the public are upon them -- such as during the 1985 trial of Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, or the famous 1994 Donahue episode that pitted two Holocaust deniers against Shermer and an Auschwitz survivor -- deniers often get the best of staged confrontations. The most prominent deniers know a lot about the Holocaust, especially arcane subjects like the chemistry of Zyklon-B gas and the architecture of gas chambers. Many of the sound bites they spit out are quite true. It is a fact, for instance, that the Nazis never manufactured soap from Jewish bodies on a mass scale -- contrary to urban legend. Deniers are also correct when they claim that there is no known Holocaust order bearing Hitler's signature. David Irving, the on-again off-again denier who recently lost a defamation suit in Britain, has never had to make good on his $1,000 challenge to any historian who could produce such a document.

But, as Denying History makes clear, there is still a mountain of evidence proving the nature and scale of the Holocaust. The Nazis' use of gas chambers has been established by, among countless other sources, the 1946 Nuremberg confession of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, as well as the 250-page autobiographical manuscript he wrote while awaiting execution. The estimate of six million killed is supported by a spate of historical studies, and also by Nazi physician Wilhelm Hoettel, who testified at Nuremberg that: "In the various concentration camps approximately four million Jews had been killed, while about two million were killed in other ways." None of this evidence convinces the true denier, of course. He is, by necessity, a conspiracy theorist. To him, every confession was coerced, every photograph faked. As the authors of Denying History demonstrate in psychological profiles of today's most prominent deniers, they see the "holohoax" as a plot by Jews (or, "the traditional enemies of truth" as they are commonly referred to in denier circles) to discredit the Nazi regime and the German people. "There are certain aspects of the Third Reich that are very admirable [such as its eugenics and euthanasia programs] and I want to call people's attention to these," Zündel told Shermer and Grobman in an interview. What the Holocaust has done, he argues, is to "bar so many thinkers from re-looking at the options that National Socialism German-style offers."

It is tempting to mock these confused men (there is a great essay to be written on why there does not exist a single preeminent female denier). But Denying History betrays no contempt for its subjects. The authors believe everyone has a right to be heard; and they treat Holocaust deniers with clinical detachment. This attitude reflects the authors'position of intellectual strength. Hatred for Holocaust deniers is compounded by the helpless fear that the pseudo-historians' specious lies may spread. When one is armed with concrete knowledge, however, that fear is lessened and hatred gives way to pity.

189) A oposicao economica ataca outra vez

Brasil Delivery: servidão financeira e estado de emergência econômico
Leda Paulani
Rio de Janeiro, Boitempo, 2008, 152 páginas
R$ 32,00

A política econômica conservadora adotada por Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ao chegar à Presidência é o ponto de partida de Brasil Delivery, novo livro da economista Leda Paulani, publicado pela Boitempo. A primeira reação, não esconde a autora, é de perplexidade - atitude que não foi incomum entre os intelectuais que participaram da construção do Partido dos Trabalhadores. Superado o baque inicial, Leda Paulani se dispõe a entender as razões que levaram a essa guinada conservadora de Lula e as conseqüências da continuidade da política neoliberal.

A autora desenvolve sua argumentação e crítica ao que entende, em linhas gerais, como a transformação do país em uma plataforma de valorização financeira internacional. Para Leda Paulani, o abandono de perspectivas de desenvolvimento e soberania determinou a entrega do Brasil a interesses alheios à maioria da população. É esse o mote do título do livro: um Brasil para entrega, o Brasil Delivery.

Abordagem consistente e aprofundada da política econômica petista, a obra analisa o desenvolvimento do capitalismo brasileiro e da industrialização, além de retomar a história do neoliberalismo enquanto doutrina. Um de seus objetivos é demonstrar que Lula fez uso de um instrumento singular para levar adiante sua política conservadora: a decretação de um estado de emergência econômico.

Os seis artigos que compõem Brasil Delivery resultam de palestras e debates protagonizados pela autora, além de textos publicados em veículos como o periódico acadêmico da Sociedade Brasileira de Economia Política (SEP) e a revista alemã Prokla. A obra faz parte da Coleção Estado de Sítio, coordenada por Paulo Arantes, autor da orelha do livro.

Sobre a autora
Leda Paulani, economista e doutora em Economia pelo IPE-USP, é professora do Departamento de Economia da FEA-USP e da pós-graduação em Economia do IPE-USP. Tem artigos publicados em revistas acadêmicas nacionais e estrangeiras e é membro do conselho editorial da Revista de Economia Política. É autora, entre outras obras, de Modernidade e discurso econômico, lançado pela Boitempo.

188) Ascensao do terrorismo islamico

The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists
By Malise Ruthven
The New York Reviw of Books, Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008


Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century
by Marc Sageman
University of Pennsylvania Press,200 pp., $24.95

The Talibanization of Southeast Asia: Losing the War on Terror to Islamist Extremists
by Bilveer Singh
Praeger Security International, 229 pp., $49.95

Al Qaeda in Its Own Words
edited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, translated from the Arabic by Pascale Ghazaleh
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 363 pp., $27.95

The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected Writings on Politics, Religion, and Society
edited by Albert J. Bergesen
Routledge, 175 pp., $135.00; $34.95 (paper)

Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11
by Matthias Küntzel, translated from the German by Colin Meade
Telos, 180 pp., $29.95

Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri
by Brynjar Lia
Columbia University Press, 510 pp., $28.95

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
by Noah Feldman
Princeton University Press, 189 pp., $22.95

Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a
by Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na'im
Harvard University Press, 324 pp., $35.00

How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan
by Roy Gutman
United States Institute of Peace, 321 pp., $26.00

1.

In London eight men—all British nationals—are currently on trial for an alleged 2006 plot to destroy seven transatlantic aircraft in mid-air, using liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. According to the prosecution they could have killed some 1,500 people, nearly half the number of those who died in the September 11 attacks. The airport security staff were to have their attentions distracted by "dirty" magazines in the would-be suicide bombers' hand luggage—a neat example of jihad-by-pornography, fighting the infidel West with its own salacious habits.

In a video testament intended for posthumous transmission, one of the would-be martyrs berates the British people for their apathy toward their government's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan:

This is revenge for the actions of the USA in the Muslim lands and their accomplices such as the British and the Jews.... Most of you [are] too busy...watching Home and Away and EastEnders [two popular TV soaps], complaining about the World Cup, drinking your alcohol, to even care anything.... I know because I've come from that.

What are the forces that drive young men such as these to commit mass murder? The question is addressed from different perspectives in all of the books under review.

A convincing analysis is offered by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant to the US government, in his Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century. After examining some five hundred individual cases using "open source" data from court proceedings, media accounts, academic writings, and selected Internet materials, Sageman sets his gaze on what he calls the "middle range." These are the social networks and intellectual milieus through which defendants in terrorist trials are recorded as operating. Contrary to widespread assumptions, he finds that they are not to be distinguished from their nonterrorist peers by extremes of hatred for the West:
New York Review Books Children

It is actually difficult to convince people to sacrifice themselves just because they hate their target.... On the contrary, it appears that it is much more common to sacrifice oneself for a positive reason such as love, reputation, or glory.

A common theme, however, was geographical displacement. A very high proportion of his sample—84 percent—belonged to the Muslim diasporas, with a majority joining global Islamist terrorist movements in a country where they did not grow up. The Hamburg cell that provided the leadership for September 11 was typical of his wider sample: they were Middle Eastern students in Germany, who traveled to Afghanistan to join the fight against America.

Sageman pays close attention to family networks, with about one fifth of his sample having close family ties with other global Islamic activists. His point is strongly reinforced by Bilveer Singh in The Talibanization of Southeast Asia, his study of jihadist groups in Southeast Asia. Singh sees kinship as being a vital element in the makeup of al-Jamaat al-Islamiyah—the organization responsible for the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. The people who form terror groups have to know and trust one another. In most Muslim societies it is kinship, rather than shared ideological values, that generates relations of trust.

Although drawn from the professional middle classes, the terrorists and "wannabes" studied by Sageman are not pious intellectuals who may be persuaded—or dissuaded—by religious arguments. Most of them—especially those belonging to the younger generation or "third wave" of Islamist terrorists—are less well educated than earlier generations, especially in religious matters. Indeed he suggests that this very ignorance contributes to their susceptibility to extremism. Sageman writes:

The defendants in terrorism trials around the world would not have been swayed by an exegesis of the Quran. They would simply have been bored and would not have listened.[1]

In Sageman's view the appeal of jihad is not so much narrowly religious as broadly romantic and consonant with the aspirations of youth everywhere. The young Moroccans with whom he spoke outside the mosque where the Madrid bombers used to worship equated Osama bin Laden with the soccer superstars they most admired. Their utopian aspirations are inspired as much by iconography as ideology. The images of Sheikh Osama, the rich civil engineer, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, once a promising physician from an elite Cairo family—both of whom are seen to have sacrificed everything for the sake of their beliefs—send powerful messages to aspirants far removed from the grimy realities of tribal Waziristan.

As Omar Saghi, a scholar of Islam at Sciences Po, points out in his introduction to Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words, the Harvard University Press selection of al-Qaeda statements and writings, bin Laden's first appearance after September 11 dressed in Afghan garb sitting cross-legged at the mouth of a cave sent a powerful message to the Muslim umma—or world community—by means of a "'psycho-acoustic bubble,'...floating like gas through cyberspace":

The challenge he posed to America as an ascetic stripped of all worldly goods and hiding out in Afghan-istan's miserable mountains was multiplied by the gaping breach that—as he delighted in emphasizing—separated him from the United States' predatory opulence.

The cave has powerful symbolic resonances: the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation in a cave, and took refuge in one during his journey from Mecca to Medina.

None of this means, of course, that the new jihad is devoid of theological content. The collections produced by Harvard and Routledge, which has published a Sayyid Qutb Reader, usefully link the new jihad with the ideas of its founders and the anchoring of these ideas in classical sources. Bin Laden's statements have already appeared in a more comprehensive volume in English.[2] Although the Harvard reader contains a much smaller selection of his utterances, it has the advantage of tying them to the works of his close associates, including his former mentor Abdallah Azzam (assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1989) and al-Zawahiri. Some eighty pages of explanatory notes usefully flesh out the political and contextual details with citations in the Koran and Hadith (sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad passed down over the centuries).

The bin Laden section includes his famous "World Islamic Front Statement," co-signed by two qualified Islamic scholars, declaring the jihad an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, because the Americans and their allies are supposedly occupying both of Islam's holy places, Jerusalem and Mecca. Al-Zawahiri's contribution includes excerpts from the much-quoted Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, published by the Saudi-financed daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat in London in December 2001. Knights contains this chilling threat:

It is always possible to track an American or a Jew, to kill him with a bullet or a knife, a simple explosive device, or a blow with an iron rod.

More pertinent for political analysis are the excerpts from al-Zawahiri's Loyalty and Separation, a polemical 2002 tract whose title is borrowed from a text by the nephew of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, co-founder of the original eighteenth-century Saudi theocracy and primary source of religious legitimacy for the kingdom's current rulers. All these writings are laced with Koranic references and citations from the Hadiths, carefully chosen to hark back to Islam's heroic age while containing tropes culled from Western sources, such as the Nazi fantasy that Jews are ruling the world. The language is deliberately archaic and patriarchal, weaving contemporary events into the fabric of salvation history.
2.

It is now widely acknowledged that Sayyid Qutb, born in 1906 and hanged by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966 on trumped-up charges of subversion, is the intellectual godfather of modern Islamist activism and an enduring influence on Islamic radicalism. Qutb popularized the term jahil-iyya in his writings, taking it to mean a condition of contemporary arrogance, ignorance, and irreligion. Traditional mainstream scholarship viewed jahil-iyya as the condition of barbarism that prevailed among the Arabian tribes before the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. Although he had been an admirer of Western literature and especially the English Romantics, Qutb's sojourn in America in 1949 crystallized his disdain for Western culture. His is the paradigmatic case of the "born-again" Muslim who, having adopted or absorbed many modern or foreign influences, makes a show of discarding them in his search for personal identity and cultural authenticity.

The term "fundamentalism" that Albert Bergesen applies to Qutb's thought in his introduction to The Sayyid Qutb Reader, however, is open to question. Far from espousing received theological certainties in order to defend "Muslim society" against foreign encroachments, Qutb's understanding of Islam is almost Kierkegaardian in its individualism. His "authentic" Muslim is one who espouses a very modern kind of revolution against the deification of men, against injustice, and against political, economic, racial, and religious prejudice.

Bergesen says that

from a civilizational perspective, Qutb doesn't seemed to have hijacked Islam for political purposes as much as called for a return to Islam's original religio-political compact.

Although this is true so far as it goes, he undervalues the way Qutb and other Muslim ideologues absorb values and influences derived from the Enlightenment while professing to deny them. One of Qutb's statements that Bergesen cites should be challenged explicitly:

It is not possible to find a basis for Islamic thought in the modes and products of European thought, nor to construct Islamic thought by borrowing from Western modes of thought or its products.

This claim—which crassly denies a vast history of cultural borrowings—might have been balanced with a reference to Leonard Binder's important 1988 book Islamic Liberalism, which teases out the Western lineages and resonances in Qutb's thought.

A more serious omission from Bergesen's reader is Qutb's notorious 1950 diatribe Our Struggle with the Jews, republished in 1970 and distributed throughout the world by the government of Saudi Arabia. In Jihad and Jew-Hatred Matthias Küntzel, a political scientist and former adviser to Germany's Green Party, argues that this text, which has been available in English since 1987, blends traditional Islamic Judeophobia with imported Nazi ideas.

In Qutb's analysis Jews appear inherently decadent and antireligious. They are actually worse than the idolators fought by Muhammad, since they are cunningly able to undermine and destroy Islam, the only true religion, from within. During Muhammad's struggles in Medina, they joined the "hypocrites" in resisting his divine authority and made treacherous alliances with the polytheists. Qutb wrote that

the Muslim community continues to suffer from the same Jewish machinations and double-dealing.... This is a war which has not been extinguished...for close on fourteen centuries, and it continues to this moment, its blaze raging in all the corners of the earth.

Although there are no explicit references to Nazi sources, the Saudi editor of the 1970 edition helpfully appended references to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as "proof" of the correctness of Qutb's ideas. Imported European anti-Semitism is now embedded in the charter of Hamas, whose thirty-second article explicitly cites the Protocols as "proof" of Israeli conduct. As Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher and former PLO representative in Jerusalem, has observed, Hamas's charter "sounds as if it were copied out from the pages of Der Stürmer."

In drawing attention to the anti-Semitic writings of Qutb and others, Küntzel has performed a necessary task. His analysis, however, draws the wrong conclusions. His statement that al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups are "guided by an anti-Semitic ideology that was transferred to the Islamic world in the Nazi period" is overdrawn. It would be more correct to say that the Islamists exploit traditional theological Judeophobia, mixed with a sprinkling of imported Nazi ideas, in pursuit of their own, more ambitious, purposes. Bin Laden and his associates uniformly couple Jews with the Christians or Crusaders in their polemics.

Conventional wisdom generally holds that a resolution of the problems of Palestine and Jerusalem is the sine qua non for addressing wider geopolitical issues afflicting relations between the Islamic and Western worlds. By removing images of Palestinian persecution from Muslim television screens, a peace settlement would take the sting out of an issue that carries a formidable symbolic charge. But the Israeli occupation, though a constant source of pain and humiliation, is only one of many issues the global jihadists have in their sights.

Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, the Syrian ideologue who is the subject of a fas-cinating study by the Norwegian scholar Brynjar Lia, is quite explicit about this. In his Global Islamic Resistance Call—a 1,600-page document that is widely available on jihadist Web sites and now translated by Lia, he states:

Israel creates a motive for a global Islamic cause, and the American occupation [of Iraq] adds a revolutionary dimension, which is an excellent key to jihad.

The broader agenda, according to al-Suri, is to drive the Americans from the region, "to fight the Jews, remove idolators from the Arabian Peninsula and to free its oil and other resources from the American hegemony" and to remove all the "injustices and afflictions" caused by the occupation of the Islamic lands by America and its allies.

Al-Suri, who was captured in Pakistan in 2005 and is believed to have been repatriated to his native Syria, is the most articulate exponent of the modern jihad and its most sophisticated strategist. A mechanical engineer from Aleppo, his russet hair and fair complexion lend him a European look. He claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad through both his grandfathers—a claim that gives him high social status among the jihadis. He has Spanish citizenship and a Spanish wife and uses numerous aliases. His fellow jihadis teasingly call him "James Bond."

A veteran of the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Syria in 1982 when the city of Hama was virtually destroyed by the Baathist regime of Hafez al-Assad, al-Suri has been a persistent critic of bin Laden's strategy and approach to jihad. Holding to the view that the "road to Jerusalem lies through Cairo" (meaning that Palestine could only be liberated after the Mubarak regime had been toppled and replaced by an "Islamic" one), he was quick to criticize al-Qaeda's 1998 attacks on the US embassies in East Africa. The centralized structure the jihadis had built in Afghanistan, with its emphasis on training camps, made them vulnerable to US missile attacks.

Al-Suri was dismayed by the disdain with which bin Laden and the "Afghan- Arabs"—especially the Saudis among them—treated the Taliban rulers in Afghan-istan, and by their habit of making unilateral decisions without regard for the feelings of their hosts. He was cautiously critical of the Sep-tember 11 operation, which put a "catastrophic end" to the jihadist struggle that had started in the 1960s. For al-Suri the new condition imposed by the "war on terror" calls for a new strat-egy. Al-Qaeda and the jihadis must abandon the "Tora-Bora mentality" of holding on to physical bases with a top-down command structure and opt for a "secret guerrilla war" using "unconnected cells" of varying and different types.

Al-Suri's new strategy neatly fits into the conception of "leaderless jihad" or third-wave terrorism described by Sageman, where jihadists recruit each other in chat rooms and can download bomb-making materials from the Internet. Sageman makes the plausible argument that the dangers are greater in Europe than in America, a milieu less amenable to home-grown terrorism because of its traditions of community policing and the fact that a majority of Muslim immigrants in the US belong to the professional middle classes and are more inclined than their European counter-parts to identify with American values. When Sageman's book went to press there had been 2,300 arrests for terrorist offenses in Europe compared to sixty in the US. When the differences in population are taken into account, the rate of arrest is six times higher in Europe than in the United States.
3.

Jihadis are not the only political activists seeking an Islamic state that will restore the Sharia—the holy law of Islam—to the position it held in pre-colonial times. In a short but masterful exposition, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman seeks to answer a question that puzzles most Western observers: Why do so many Muslims demand the "restoration" of a legal system that most Occidentals associate with "medieval" punishments such as amputation for theft and stoning for sexual transgressions? What do they mean by, and expect from, an Islamic state?

Feldman's analysis focuses on the crucial responsibility of the Ottoman state for the decline of the Sharia. Pre-modern Islamic societies were for the most part governed according to an informal division of authority between the military rulers (often outsiders such as the Mamelukes, recruited from warrior societies, which were far removed from Islam's cultural centers) and the religiously trained class of legal scholars conversant with the law. The informal compact comparable to, but different from, the feudal arrangements in the West conferred legitimacy on the military men on condition that they upheld the authority of the scholars. The system of scholarly control over law encouraged "stability, executive restraint, and legitimacy." Feldman writes:

Through their near monopoly on legal affairs in a state where God's law was accepted as paramount, the scholars...built themselves into a powerful and effective check on the ruler. To see the Islamic constitution as containing the balance of powers so necessary for a functioning, sustainable legal state is to emphasize not why it failed, as all forms of government eventually must, but why it succeeded so spectacularly for as long as it did.

Under pressure from their European rivals to modernize their empire, the Ottoman sultans, beginning in the nineteenth century, began enacting a series of administrative reforms that brought legal administration under direct state control:

The single most durable feature of the reforms turned out to be the removal of effective lawmaking authority from the scholars through the substitution of written legal codes for the common law of the shari'a.

In effect, the sultans "tamed" the Sharia by encoding it in a book. The scholars were rendered impotent, their freedom to interpret the law emasculated. Their incorporation into the Ottoman bureaucracy deprived them of the real authority they had previously enjoyed as upholders and interpreters of God's law. Originally this concentration of legal power in the hands of the sultans was balanced by a European-style constitution, including an elected assembly, which the Ottoman modernizers saw as useful engines of reform. But within a year of its first sitting in 1876 Sultan Abdul Hamid dismissed the legislature and suspended the constitution, ruling as an absolute monarch for the next thirty years.

As Feldman sees it, the absolutist state became the dominant model in most of the Sunni world in the twentieth century. The "distinctive distortions of many Muslim states in this era were products of unchecked executive authority." However, the idea of Sharia law—of rule "in accordance with God's law"—retained its utility; hence contemporary demands for an Islamic state that includes its "restoration."

Unfortunately, Feldman does not flesh out his thesis with much historical detail. It would have helped his argument if he had provided specific examples of interventions by scholars in cases of disputed successions. An important example he does cite, however, is the establishment of the waqf, or Islamic trust, which, beginning in medieval times, was one of the most important institutions of the precolonial era. These foundations, which were immune from government interference, allowed the transmission of wealth down the generations while sustaining public welfare by providing hospitals, schools, mosques, inns, public drinking fountains, and other services independently of the state.

Waqfs were the primary civil soci-ety institutions in the Islamic world. As such they represented a threat to the modernizing schemes of govern-ments facing the challenge of grow-ing European power. The Ottoman sultans and other would-be reform-ers gradually took them over, incorporating them into the apparatus of state—a movement that facilitated the emergence of the autocratic regimes that prevail in much of the Islamic world to this day because the increase in the power of the state was not balanced by advances in democratic accountability.

In his book Islam and the Secular State Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na'im—from Sudan, now a professor at Emory Law School—covers some of the same ground as Feldman, and reaches similar conclusions. As a practicing Muslim, however, he takes the discussion much further, making a powerful theological case for abandoning the very notion of an Islamic state. He argues that the claims of these so-called states to enforce the Sharia repudiate the fundamental right of religious choice implicit in a Koranic verse that says there can be "no compulsion in religion." The Sharia cannot be codified as state law without violating this provision. It is not a code but a process of legal reasoning. An-Na'im writes:

Whenever the state has been used to enforce Shari'a, the outcome has been a highly selective set of principles in total isolation from their legitimate methodological sources.

Under modern conditions, he argues, recognition of this fact requires separation of religious and secular institutions—in effect, a model similar to the system of church–state separation prevailing in the United States. A secular state provides the most friendly environment in which people can practice their religion out of "honest conviction."

Such an institutional separation, however, need not entail a separation between Islam and politics. Under a formal system of separation the connection between the two can be maintained, allowing for "the implementation of Islamic principles in official policy and legislation," subject to certain safeguards. The Islamist ideology an-Na'im appears to have in mind—although this is not spelled out—would be comparable to the outlook of Christian democratic parties in Europe and Latin America: parties that subscribe to a political philosophy informed by religious values without being dogmatically religious.

In postulating his model, however, an-Na'im reveals the size of the theological mountain that must be climbed before such ideas can take root. To start with, his approach demands a comprehensive reappraisal of Islamic origins. In returning to Islam's earliest sources, he follows the path cleared by the Sudanese humanist scholar Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, founder of the Sudanese Republican Brotherhood, who was hanged in 1985 after being convicted of apostasy. Taha had argued that a distinction must be made between the universal message of Islam proclaimed by Muhammad in Mecca, and the time-specific and hence changeable messages proclaimed in Medina, where he founded the first Islamic state. The changeable texts would include principles such as the "guardianship" of women, punishment for apostasy, and discrimination against religious minorities—issues that pit traditional interpretations of Islam against the constitutional provisions of most modern states, including most that have Muslim majorities.

An-Na'im argues that the dhimma system (entailing legal discrimination against "protected minorities" such as Jews and Christians) is "neither practiced nor advocated anywhere in the Muslim world today." The realities speak louder. Of some seventy terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia that Bilveer Singh attributes to the al-Jamat al-Islamiyah group since 1994, forty-five were against churches. When state institutions are weak, sectarian hatred, fueled by Islamist rhetoric that demonizes Christians and Jews, becomes the default position on the ground. It is difficult to see how such progressive views as an-Na'im's can entrench themselves in the face of fourteen centuries of cultural programming.

A further reality check is provided by Roy Gutman's important study How We Missed the Story. A searing critique of US policy in Afghanistan after the departure of Soviet troops in 1989, it traces the policy shifts in Washington and especially the loss of focus that assisted the rise of the Taliban. Gutman's central claim, that the inability of the US to prevent the September 11 attacks was not so much an intelligence or military failure as a strategic foreign policy failure, will not make comfortable reading for Hillary Clinton's advisers.

Foremost among the errors that he documents in detail was the failure of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright to give adequate support to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most able of Afghanistan's mujahideen commanders, in the face of pro-Taliban pressure from the Pakistan military. Massoud, the Tajik leader, headed a multiethnic coalition and practiced a moderate version of Islamism that contrasted starkly with Taliban extremism. His troops were much more disposed to observe the rules of war than their opponents.

Because of the Lewinsky scandal and complications arising from Pakistan's nuclear policies, Clinton was distracted, with ultimately devastating consequences. Gutman is equally scathing about the role of the international press—or rather, its absence. The atrocities committed by the Taliban during their attempted conquest of central and northern Afghani-stan received little coverage. They included "every war crime on the United Nations' list of summary executions and massacres." Few of these actions were spontaneous: in the case of the worst atrocity of the war, the massacre of at least two thousand mainly Shia civilians in the town of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, "there is overwhelming evidence of advance planning, central direction, and clarity of purpose, namely, revenge."

Gutman provides many details of bin Laden's growing ascendancy over the Taliban and their leader Mullah Omar, and of various ways in which the "Arab-Afghans" humiliated their Taliban hosts and subjected them to a Wahhabite religious agenda. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, giant sandstone statues that had stood for more than 1,500 years, was the most egregious of the iconoclastic acts carried out under pressure from the Arabs and Pakistani mullahs.

The Islamist movement is a mixture of forces comprising many strands of tradition, culture, allegiance, and belief. Its most noxious ingredient is a style of religious imperialism fueled by Arabian petrodollars. As Feldman points out, Saudi Arabia is unique in not having inherited the Ottoman state system. Its scholars influence state policies while also having the freedom to propagate versions of Islam that diverge from the interests of the ruling family. By helping to supply the religious arguments that support jihadist trends, the Wahhabi scholars have a political impact well beyond their intellectual and theological weight, even when specific outcomes, such as attacks on Western targets, run counter to the Saudi state's policies.

The dangers of jihadism, however, have been needlessly exacerbated by the "war on terror" and the folly of the US invasion of Iraq, which, as Sageman suggests, galvanized a whole new generation of "third-wave" jihadists. Yet the "leaderless jihad" he discusses is inherently self-limiting. As a trans-national social movement—rather than an ideology with a coherent political agenda—it generally lacks the organizational capacity to gain and hold power. The exceptions lie in the atypical situations of Iran, where the Shia clergy constitute an "estate" comparable to their equivalents in early modern Europe, and of Gaza, occasioned by the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Contrary to the alarmist views of Henry Kissinger, who insists that "radical Islam rejects claims to national sovereignty based on secular state models," Islamist attitudes toward the national state are ambivalent. There are no insuperable obstacles, historical or theological, to the de jure acceptance of the postcolonial state that most of the Islamist movements already acknowledge, de facto, as being the arena of politics. The challenge for policymakers in Islamic and Western worlds must be to harness these movements' positive energies (including their democratic aspirations and social concerns), while criminalizing terrorism and relentlessly exposing the bigotry that drives it.

—April 30, 2008

Notes
[1] Sageman's book doubtless went to press before several Muslim doctors and trainees (from Iraq and India) working for the National Health Service were arrested in Britain in connection with a failed attempt last July to destroy a London discotheque using car bombs primed with propane gas. A member of the team, three of whom were related, died of his injuries after the failure of a subsequent attempt on Glasgow airport.
[2] Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, edited and introduced by Bruce Lawrence and translated by James Howarth (Verso, 2005); reviewed in these pages by Max Rodenbeck, March 9, 2006.

187) Sistemas Fiscais na América Latina

Los impuestos y la Integración Latinoamericana

Taxation and Latin American Integration
Vito Tanzi, Alberto Barreix, Luiz Villela (eds.)
Washington-Cambridge: IADB, Harvard University Press, 2008

“Los sistemas tributarios modernos fueron mayormente desarrollados entre 1930 y 1960, un período en el cual se levantaron barreras comerciales (eran los tiempos de la Gran Depresión y de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sus postrimerías). Aparte de esto, los movimientos de capital estaban limitados; había poca inversión extranjera y por tanto era restringido el papel de las empresas multinacionales; había una escasa movilidad de las personas, excepto en la condición de migrantes; y prácticamente los individuos no hacían compras fuera de las fronteras de sus países”. Con este párrafo inicial Vito Tanzi, uno de los editores de Taxation and Latin American Integration junto con Alberto Barreix y Luiz Villela, da comienzo al capítulo 13 con el que concluye la obra citada. [1]

A partir de la observación anterior, el autor destaca que los sistemas tributarios lograron introducir dos “innovaciones” fundamentales. Por un lado, la adopción del impuesto integral y progresivo a la renta y, por otro lado, el impuesto generalizado al consumo, bajo la metodología del Valor Agregado. Desde el punto de vista de su génesis, ambas tienen origen distinto. La imposición al ingreso, impulsada originalmente en el siglo XIX por los autores italianos ocupados en las finanzas públicas, principalmente Antonio de Viti de Marco, tuvo su transformación más importante de la mano de la Escuela de Chicago en la década del 40, con el liderazgo de Henry Simons. De otro lado, el IVA, es en el concepto de Tanzi, un invento genuinamente europeo, francés, con mayor propiedad, y es un intento de dar una respuesta ordenada al proceso embrionario de integración europea, en aquellos años bajo el marco de la Comunidad del Hierro y el Acero. La tributación al ingreso y al consumo permitió el establecimiento de una base sólida de recaudación que, a su vez, hizo posible la ampliación de las funciones del estado, tanto en la multiplicación de sus tareas relativas al bienestar social como las concernientes a la regulación macroeconómica.

Sin embargo, y este es el punto principal del argumento del capítulo y por extensión del libro, los sistemas tributarios modernos –su diseño, su arquitectural legal y los principios de la administración de impuestos en los que se apoyan- se desarrollaron y ampliaron en el marco de economías mayormente cerradas al comercio, las inversiones y a los flujos de personas. No es casual entonces que este edificio tributario haya tenido dificultades de convivencia con la expansión a escala multilateral del comercio de bienes y servicios, la globalización, y la integración creciente de actividades y sectores económicos en el marco de regionalismos abiertos.

Los editores de esta obra han reunido trabajos de diversos autores que, de manera sintética, pueden reunirse bajo dos grandes títulos y donde todos ellos prestan atención explícita a la realidad de América Latina. En primer lugar, están aquellos temas donde se discute el impacto que tienen las reformas de la política comercial sobre la solvencia fiscal y la estructura tributaria. Así, por ejemplo, se aborda cómo la liberalización comercial impacta sobre la recaudación tributaria poniendo de relieve algunos de los canales más convencionales, especialmente por la caída de los ingresos aduaneros (Capítulo 2). Pero también se analizan otros menos obvios, al considerar cómo la mayor apertura comercial puede influir sobre el balance fiscal en su conjunto (Capítulo 3). Como parte integrante de esta familia de tópicos, se incluyen los aspectos concernientes a la armonización tributaria en el contexto de los procesos de integración que, para la realidad latinoamericana en la cual discurre el análisis, se trata de uniones aduaneras imperfectas. Así se analizan (Capítulos 4 y 5) los casos de varios procesos de integración sub-regionales –Mercosur, Comunidad Andina, Caribe y SIECA, y los esfuerzos respectivos de armonización tributaria. Un aspecto singular de estos procesos, el funcionamiento de las pensiones en economías que buscan facilitar la extensión y reconocimiento de los beneficios frente a la mayor movilidad del trabajo, es considerado en el capítulo 11. También se examina, (Capítulo 12), la imposición al capital en el contexto europeo y en qué medida las soluciones puestas en práctica allí podrían de servir de guía a integraciones de menor profundidad y alcance, tal el caso de la situación en América Latina y el Caribe. Todas estas cuestiones tienen un común denominador: de una u otra forma procuran soluciones y adaptaciones del diseño tributario a decisiones tomadas en el frente comercial y a la elección de la estrategia de integración. Emergen así reformas y adaptaciones de la política tributaria que están “calibradas” y obedecen a motivaciones externas a la misma, pero sobre las que existe algún grado de control e injerencia de política pública.

Sin embargo, como se señaló en el párrafo inicial de esta reseña, los sistemas tributarios han recibido los impactos de la globalización y, consecuentemente, han sido alcanzados por fenómenos que están más allá del diseño propio de la política comercial. Es éste el segundo conjunto de temas en los que incursiona el libro. Allí se intenta enfocar desde distintos ángulos cómo la política y la administración tributaria ha intentado capear las dificultades del nuevo contexto internacional. Los trabajos tratan así tópicos tales como la competencia y los incentivos tributarios en busca de la inversión extranjera (Capítulos 6 y 7), o la captura de los “precios de transferencia” internos a las firmas y las transacciones financieras trans-fronterizas, sea a través de tratados y convenios tributarios o el intercambio de información (Capítulos 8, 9 y 10). El capítulo final ya citado es una discusión que procura encapsular estos aspectos específicos bajo un prisma más general. El autor observa que, de la mano de la globalización, las autoridades tributarias han optado por competir en la oferta tributaria. Por un lado, tal como se señala, si bien esto representa un incentivo de eficiencia para la política de impuestos y también, por extensión, a la política de gasto público, deja abierto un interrogante que hasta ahora no tiene respuesta. La mayor movilidad de capital, bienes, personas y las propias innovaciones en la tecnología de la información, que abarca también al sistema de pagos y transferencias financieras internacionales, degradan de manera creciente la eficacia del sistema tributario. Vito Tanzi habla figuradamente de “termitas fiscales” que horadan las bases de recaudación y la administración de los impuestos. De esta manera, la competencia y las respuestas individuales de las políticas tributarias se convierten, al descargar externalidades sobre otros territorios pero a su vez recibiendo las respuestas de terceros estados, en soluciones que están lejos del óptimo. La ausencia de cooperación lleva a una situación inferior de la que se podría alcanzar con un esquema de mayor coordinación y entendimiento.[2]

El libro así concluye con una propuesta: la necesidad de avanzar hacia una autoridad tributaria mundial. Como mínimo, según Tanzi, este esquema debería alentar la comunicación y el intercambio de información tributaria de las autoridades nacionales y evitar soluciones independientes o acuerdos bilaterales de alcance restringido. Un escalón más ambicioso de la propuesta sería establecer un impuesto -la mención al “Tobin tax” es obligada aunque el autor sugiere alternativamente otras bases tributarias- con la finalidad de producir bienes públicos globales. A la postre, esta parece ser una manera de escapar a las limitaciones de origen: si bien los sistemas tributarios respondieron a las necesidades de la economía cerrada, parecería que éstos han dado lo mejor de sí, y que ha llegado el momento de reflexionar cómo se diseñan sistemas tributarios que respondan con eficiencia y equidad frente a la realidad de la globalización.

En síntesis, Taxation and Latin American Integration es un valioso compendio que resulta de interés no sólo para el especialista tributario, sino también para quienes están dedicados a examinar los desafíos que exige avanzar en la integración y en la adaptación a la economía global.

[1] El libro está disponible en su versión en inglés únicamente y ha sido publicado con el título de Taxation and Latin American Integration Vito Tanzi, Alberto Barreix y Luiz Villela editores. BID y David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University. 2008. (enlace)

[2] La cuestión tiene una gran actualidad y viene siendo señalada como un tema primordial de política económica, aún para el caso de países que, como Estados Unidos de América, serían los mayores beneficiarios del proceso de globalización. En tal sentido, en una columna reciente del Financial Times (en su edición del 4 de Mayo), Larry Summers, ex Secretario del Tesoro de ese país, de señala que EEUU debe promover mayor cooperación en materia de imposición de la renta de las corporaciones porque ha habido “una verdadera carrera hasta el fondo”. Consideraciones similares hace respecto de los “paraísos fiscales” que ponen al abrigo de las potestades tributarias nacionales a las grandes fortunas; esto debilita, argumenta Summers, la posibilidad de aplicar la imposición progresiva a la renta. (enlace)

186) Mil livros para se ler antes de (you know...)

Books
Volumes to Go Before You Die
By WILLIAM GRIMES
The New York Times Review of Books, May 23, 2008

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
General Editor: Peter Boxall
New York, Universe, 2006, 960 p.

An odd book fell into my hands recently, a doorstopper with the irresistible title “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” That sounds like a challenge, with a subtle insult embedded in the premise. It suggests that you, the supposedly educated reader, might have read half the list at best. Like one of those carnival strength-testers, it dares you to find out whether your reading powers rate as He-Man or Limp Wrist.

The book is British. Of course. The British love literary lists and the fights they provoke, so much so that they divide candidates for the Man Booker Prize into shortlist books and longlist books. In this instance Peter Boxall, who teaches English at Sussex University, asked 105 critics, editors and academics — mostly obscure — to submit lists of great novels, from which he assembled his supposedly mandatory reading list of one thousand and one. Quintessence, the British publishers, later decided that “books” worked better than “novels” in the title.

Even without Milton or Shakespeare, Professor Boxall has come up with a lot of books. Assume, for the sake of argument, that a reasonably well-educated person will have read a third of them. (My own score, tallied after I made this estimate, was 303.) That leaves 668 titles. An ambitious reader might finish off one a month without disrupting a personal reading program already in place. That means he or she would cross the finish line in the year 2063. At that point, upon reaching the last page of title No. 1,001, “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, death might come as a relief.

Two potent factors make “1001 Books” (published in the United States in 2006 by Universe; $34.95) compelling: guilt and time. It plays on every serious reader’s lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread, and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life. Then there’s that bullying title, with its ominous allusion to the final day when, for all of us, the last page is turned.

I appreciate the sense of urgency because I feel it myself. But when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the bar very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

If the “1001 Books” program seems quirky, even perverse, it’s no accident. “I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc.,” Professor Boxall informed me in an e-mail message. And how.

The tastes of others are always inexplicable, but “1001 Books” embodies some structural irregularities. Arranged chronologically, it begins with the novel’s primordial period — everything up to 1800 — and then marches century by century into the present.

More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my hackles rising. Does not the age of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy dwarf its earnest, fitfully brilliant but ultimately punier successor? And if the 20th century can put up a fight, the real firepower is concentrated in the period of 1900 to 1930. Like many others, I admire Ian McEwan, but does he really merit eight novels on the list, to Balzac’s three?

Something is wrong here. Paul Auster gets six novels. Don DeLillo seven. Thackeray gets one: “Vanity Fair.”

Because nearly all the contributors hail from Britain and its former colonial possessions, there is a marked English-language bias and a tendency to favor obscure British novelists over obscure Spanish or Italian ones. Fair enough. A French or Russian version of “1001 Books” would impose its own prejudices. In fact, prejudice is what you want in a book like this, which works best as an annotated tip sheet for hungry readers on the prowl for overlooked writers and neglected works.

The United States gets a fair shake, and there may even be some overcompensation. Philip Roth shows up with no fewer than seven novels, including “The Breast,” and Edith Wharton is honored for four novels in addition to the two big ones, “The House of Mirth” and “The Age of Innocence.”

A little more Anglophilia might have been in order. Anthony Powell shows up with “A Dance to the Music of Time” — which is actually 12 novels, so Professor Boxall cheats — but I would have made a play for a few of the pre-“Dance” novels, like “Venusberg” or “Afternoon Men.”

On the other hand, the 20th-century bias eliminates Americans like Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells entirely, and a certain weakness for postmodernism squeezes out novels like “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser and “The Octopus” by Frank Norris. Drop a couple of Austers, and there would have been room.

As an experiment, I picked three novels, more or less at random, to see how they might change my quality of life: “Castle Rackrent” by Maria Edgeworth; “Tarka the Otter” by Henry Williamson; and “The Invention of Curried Sausage” by Uwe Timm.

Two of the three definitely provided a lift. “Castle Rackrent” (1800), a rollicking satire about trashy English aristocrats who bring ruin to an Irish estate, is worth reading just for the name Carrick O’Fungus, although literary historians prize it for being the first regional novel. That’s fine. Bonus points for getting there first, but the real reason to pick it up is Edgeworth’s slyly vicious picture of slovenly aristos on the loose.

Uwe Timm, a contemporary German writer unknown to me, now flies very high on my mental Amazon rankings. “The Invention of Curried Sausage” (1993) is an offbeat quest novel. The narrator, seeking the origins of currywurst, a German fast-food specialty, quizzes an elderly vendor and winds up with a big, fat history lesson. The issues are big, the prose brilliant, the execution deft. Eternal gratitude to Andrew Blades, theater reviewer for Stage magazine, who convinced Professor Boxall that this novel belonged on the list.

Tarka turned out to be too much otter for me, even though the back story is compelling. Williamson, returning from the trenches after World War I, took up a hermit’s life in north Devon, where he lived among the plants and the animals, observing closely and shunning humankind. “Tarka,” published in 1927, tells the story of a young male otter and its day-to-day struggles for food, a mate and security in a world populated by baying dogs and evil men. T. E. Lawrence loved it. I didn’t.

Since Professor Boxall is keen to start an argument, let me oblige. Drop the bloated, self-indulgent “Ada” from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (“Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Pnin”) and insert “Laughter in the Dark” or “The Gift.” J. M. Coetzee, with 10 novels, can afford to lose 1 or 2. That would open up space for “The Cossacks” by Tolstoy and “A Hero of Our Time” by Mikhail Lermontov. There should be another five Balzacs. I could go on and on.

One problem with drawing up recommended-reading lists is the urge to show off. No one gets points for proposing “The Brothers Karamazov.” Credibility comes with books like “The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein” by Marguerite Duras, or the reverse-chic audacity of insisting that “The Godfather” belongs on the same list as “The Trial.”

A little humility is in order. Easy for me to bring up “Envy” by Yuri Olyesha because I happen to have read it, or Jakob Arjouni, a German writer of Turkish descent who counts as one of my latest discoveries, largely because I was seduced by the title of a recent story collection, “Idiots.”

As a reality check, I opened “1001 Books” at random and beheld “A Kestrel for a Knave,” by Barry Hines, which I have not read, followed by “In Watermelon Sugar” by Richard Brautigan (ditto) and “The German Lesson” by Siegfried Lenz (started it, put it down, meant to get back to it, never did). No matter how well read you are, you’re not that well read. If you don’t believe it, pick up “1001” and start counting.

In his novel “Changing Places,” David Lodge — not on the list — introduces a game called Humiliation. Players earn points by admitting to a famous work that they have not read. The greater the work, the higher the point score. An obnoxious American academic, competing with a group of colleagues, finally gets the hang of the game and plays his trump card: “Hamlet.” He wins the game but is then denied tenure.

That’s the thing with reading lists like “1001 Books.” There’s always that host of the unread.

Come to think of it, I have a personal white whale: “Moby-Dick.” I really must read it before I die.

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"1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die"

2000s
1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan
3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
6. The Sea – John Banville
7. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
8. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
9. The Master – Colm Tóibín
10. Vanishing Point – David Markson
11. The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
12. Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
13. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
14. Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
15. The Colour – Rose Tremain
16. Thursbitch – Alan Garner
17. The Light of Day – Graham Swift
18. What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
20. Islands – Dan Sleigh
21. Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
22. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
23. Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
24. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
25. The Double – José Saramago
26. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
27. Unless – Carol Shields
28. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
29. The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
30. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
31. In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
32. Shroud – John Banville
33. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
34. Youth – J.M. Coetzee
35. Dead Air – Iain Banks
36. Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
37. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
38. Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
39. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
40. Platform – Michael Houellebecq
41. Schooling – Heather McGowan
42. Atonement – Ian McEwan
43. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
44. Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
45. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
46. Fury – Salman Rushdie
47. At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
48. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
50. The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
51. An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
52. The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
53. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
55. The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
56. Under the Skin – Michel Faber
57. Ignorance – Milan Kundera
58. Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
59. Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
60. City of God – E.L. Doctorow
61. How the Dead Live – Will Self
62. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
63. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
64. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
65. Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
66. Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
67. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
69. Pastoralia – George Saunders

1900s
70. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
71. The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
72. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
73. As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
74. Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
75. Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
77. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
79. Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
80. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
81. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
82. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
83. All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
84. The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
85. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
86. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
88. Another World – Pat Barker
89. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
90. Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
91. Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
92. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
93. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
94. Great Apes – Will Self
95. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
96. Underworld – Don DeLillo
97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
98. The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
100. The Untouchable – John Banville
101. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
102. Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
103. Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
104. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
105. The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
106. Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
107. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
108. The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
109. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
110. The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
111. Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
112. The Information – Martin Amis
113. The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
114. Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
115. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
116. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
117. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
118. Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
119. The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
120. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
121. The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
122. Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
123. Land – Park Kyong-ni
124. The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
125. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
126. Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
127. City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
128. How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
129. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
130. Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
131. Disappearance – David Dabydeen
132. The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
133. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
134. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
135. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
136. Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
137. Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
138. Complicity – Iain Banks
139. On Love – Alain de Botton
140. What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
141. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
142. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
143. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
144. The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
145. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
146. The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
147. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
148. Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
149. The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
150. A Heart So White – Javier Marias
151. Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
152. Indigo – Marina Warner
153. The Crow Road – Iain Banks
154. Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
155. Jazz – Toni Morrison
156. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
157. Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
158. The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
159. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
160. The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
161. Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
162. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
163. Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
164. Arcadia – Jim Crace
165. Wild Swans – Jung Chang
166. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
167. Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
168. Mao II – Don DeLillo
169. Typical – Padgett Powell
170. Regeneration – Pat Barker
171. Downriver – Iain Sinclair
172. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
173. Wise Children – Angela Carter
174. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
175. Amongst Women – John McGahern
176. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
177. Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
178. Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
179. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
180. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
181. A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
182. Like Life – Lorrie Moore
183. Possession – A.S. Byatt
184. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
185. The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
186. A Disaffection – James Kelman
187. Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
188. Moon Palace – Paul Auster
189. Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
190. Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
191. The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
192. The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
193. The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
194. The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
195. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
197. London Fields – Martin Amis
198. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
199. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
200. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
202. Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
203. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
204. The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
205. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
206. Libra – Don DeLillo
207. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
208. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
210. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
211. The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
212. The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
213. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
214. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
215. The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
216. The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
217. Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
218. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
219. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
220. World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
221. Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
222. The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
223. Beloved – Toni Morrison
224. Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
225. Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
226. Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
228. The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
229. Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
230. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
231. Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
232. Foe – J.M. Coetzee
233. The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
234. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
235. The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
236. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
237. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
239. A Maggot – John Fowles
240. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
241. Contact – Carl Sagan
242. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
243. Perfume – Patrick Süskind
244. Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
245. White Noise – Don DeLillo
246. Queer – William Burroughs
247. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
248. Legend – David Gemmell
249. Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
250. The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
251. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
252. The Lover – Marguerite Duras
253. Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
255. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
257. Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
259. Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
260. Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
261. Shame – Salman Rushdie
262. Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
263. Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
264. La Brava – Elmore Leonard
265. Waterland – Graham Swift
266. The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
267. The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
268. The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
269. The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
270. If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
271. A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
273. Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
274. A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
275. Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
277. The Newton Letter – John Banville
278. On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
279. Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
280. The Names – Don DeLillo
281. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
282. Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
283. The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
284. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
285. Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
286. Broken April – Ismail Kadare
287. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
288. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
289. Rites of Passage – William Golding
290. Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
291. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
292. City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
294. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
295. Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
296. Shikasta – Doris Lessing
297. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
298. Burger’s Daughter - Nadine Gordimer
299. The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
300. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
302. The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
304. Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
305. The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
306. The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
307. Yes – Thomas Bernhard
308. The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
309. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
310. The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
311. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
312. The Shining – Stephen King
313. Dispatches – Michael Herr
314. Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
315. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
316. The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
317. The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
318. Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
319. The Public Burning – Robert Coover
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
321. Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
322. Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
323. Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
324. Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
325. W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
326. A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
327. Grimus – Salman Rushdie
328. The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
329. Fateless – Imre Kertész
330. Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
331. High Rise – J.G. Ballard
332. Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
333. Dead Babies – Martin Amis
334. Correction – Thomas Bernhard
335. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
336. The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
337. Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
338. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
339. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
341. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
342. A Question of Power – Bessie Head
343. The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
344. The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
345. Crash – J.G. Ballard
346. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
347. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
348. The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
349. Sula – Toni Morrison
350. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
351. The Breast – Philip Roth
352. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
353. G – John Berger
354. Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
355. House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
356. In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
357. The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
359. Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
360. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
361. Rabbit Redux – John Updike
362. The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
363. The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
364. The Ogre – Michael Tournier
365. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
366. Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
368. Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
369. Troubles – J.G. Farrell
370. Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
371. The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
372. Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
373. Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
374. Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
376. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
377. The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
378. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
379. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
380. Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
381. Them – Joyce Carol Oates
382. A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
383. Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
384. Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
385. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
386. Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
387. Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
388. The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
389. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
391. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
392. The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
393. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
394. A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
395. The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
396. Chocky – John Wyndham
397. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
398. The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
400. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
401. Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
402. The Joke – Milan Kundera
403. No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
404. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
405. A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
406. The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
407. Trawl – B.S. Johnson
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
409. The Magus – John Fowles
410. The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
411. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
412. Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
414. Things – Georges Perec
415. The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
416. August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
417. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
419. The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
420. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
421. Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
422. Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
423. Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
424. The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
425. Herzog – Saul Bellow
426. V. – Thomas Pynchon
427. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
428. The Graduate – Charles Webb
429. Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
430. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
431. The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
432. Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
434. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
435. The Collector – John Fowles
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
438. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
439. The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
440. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
441. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
442. Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
443. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
444. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
446. A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
447. Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
448. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
449. Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
453. How It Is – Samuel Beckett
454. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
455. The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
457. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
458. Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
459. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
460. Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
461. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
462. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
463. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
464. Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
465. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
466. Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
468. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
470. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
471. The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
472. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
473. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
474. Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
475. Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
476. The End of the Road – John Barth
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
478. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
479. Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
480. Voss – Patrick White
481. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
482. Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
483. Homo Faber – Max Frisch
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
485. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
486. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
487. The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
488. Justine – Lawrence Durrell
489. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
490. The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
491. The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
492. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
493. The Floating Opera – John Barth
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
495. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
496. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
497. A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
498. The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
499. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
500. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
501. The Recognitions – William Gaddis
502. The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
503. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
504. I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
505. Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
506. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
507. A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
509. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
510. The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
511. The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
512. The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
513. Watt – Samuel Beckett
514. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
515. Junkie – William Burroughs
516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
517. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
518. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
519. The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
520. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
523. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
524. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
525. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
526. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
527. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
528. The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
530. The Rebel – Albert Camus
531. Molloy – Samuel Beckett
532. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
533. The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
534. The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
535. The Third Man – Graham Greene
536. The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
537. Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
538. The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
539. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
540. The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
541. The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
542. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
543. The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
544. The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
545. Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
546. The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
548. All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
549. Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
550. Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
551. The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
552. Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
553. Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
554. The Victim – Saul Bellow
555. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
556. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
557. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
558. The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
559. The Plague – Albert Camus
560. Back – Henry Green
561. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
562. The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
565. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
566. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
567. Loving – Henry Green
568. Arcanum 17 – André Breton
569. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
570. The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
571. Transit – Anna Seghers
572. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
573. Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
575. Caught – Henry Green
576. The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
577. Embers – Sandor Marai
578. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
580. In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
581. The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
582. The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
583. Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
584. Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
585. The Hamlet – William Faulkner
586. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
588. Native Son – Richard Wright
589. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
590. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
591. Party Going – Henry Green
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
593. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
594. At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
595. Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
596. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
597. Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
598. Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
600. After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
601. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
602. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
604. Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
605. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
606. U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
607. Murphy – Samuel Beckett
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
611. The Years – Virginia Woolf
612. In Parenthesis – David Jones
613. The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
614. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
615. To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
616. Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
617. Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
618. The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
620. Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
621. Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
622. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
624. Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
625. Independent People – Halldór Laxness
626. Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
627. The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
628. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
630. England Made Me – Graham Greene
631. Burmese Days – George Orwell
632. The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
633. Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
634. Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
635. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
636. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
637. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
638. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
639. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
640. Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
641. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
642. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
643. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
644. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
645. A Day Off – Storm Jameson
646. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
647. A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
648. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
651. To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
652. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
653. The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
654. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
655. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
656. Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
657. The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
658. Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
659. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
661. Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
662. Passing – Nella Larsen
663. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
664. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
665. Living – Henry Green
666. The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
668. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
669. The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
670. Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
672. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
673. Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
674. Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
676. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
677. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
678. The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
679. Quartet – Jean Rhys
680. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
681. Quicksand – Nella Larsen
682. Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
683. Nadja – André Breton
684. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
685. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
687. Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
688. Amerika – Franz Kafka
689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
690. Blindness – Henry Green
691. The Castle – Franz Kafka
692. The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
693. The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
694. One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
695. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
696. The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
697. Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
698. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
700. The Counterfeiters – André Gide
701. The Trial – Franz Kafka
702. The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
703. The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
704. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
705. The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
706. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
707. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
708. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
709. The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
710. Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
711. Cane – Jean Toomer
712. Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
713. Amok – Stefan Zweig
714. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
715. The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
716. Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
717. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
718. The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
719. Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
720. The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
721. Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
722. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
723. Ulysses – James Joyce
724. The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
725. Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
726. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
727. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
728. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
729. Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
730. Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
731. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
732. The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
733. Summer – Edith Wharton
734. Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
735. Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
737. Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
738. Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
739. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
740. The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
741. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
742. The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
744. Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
745. Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
746. Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
747. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
748. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
749. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
750. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
751. The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
753. Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
754. Howards End – E.M. Forster
755. Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
756. Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
757. Martin Eden – Jack London
758. Strait is the Gate – André Gide
759. Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
760. The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
761. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
762. The Iron Heel – Jack London
763. The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
764. The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
765. Mother – Maxim Gorky
766. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
767. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
768. Young Törless – Robert Musil
769. The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
770. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
771. Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
772. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
773. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
774. Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
775. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
776. The Ambassadors – Henry James
777. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
778. The Immoralist – André Gide
779. The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
781. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
782. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
783. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
784. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
785. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

1800s
786. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
787. The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
789. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
791. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
792. What Maisie Knew – Henry James
793. Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
795. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
796. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
798. Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
799. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
800. The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
801. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
802. Born in Exile – George Gissing
803. Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
805. News from Nowhere – William Morris
806. New Grub Street – George Gissing
807. Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
808. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
810. The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
811. La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
812. By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
813. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
814. The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
815. Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
816. Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
817. The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
818. The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
819. She – H. Rider Haggard
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
821. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
822. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
823. King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
824. Germinal – Émile Zola
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
826. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
827. Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
828. Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
829. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
830. A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
832. The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
833. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
834. Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
835. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
836. Nana – Émile Zola
837. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
838. The Red Room – August Strindberg
839. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
841. Drunkard – Émile Zola
842. Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
843. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
844. The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
845. The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
846. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
847. The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
849. In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
850. The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
851. Erewhon – Samuel Butler
852. Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
853. Middlemarch – George Eliot
854. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
855. King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
856. He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
857. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
858. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
859. Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
860. Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
861. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
862. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
864. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
865. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
868. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
869. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
870. Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
871. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
872. The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
873. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
874. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
875. Silas Marner – George Eliot
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
877. On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
878. Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
880. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
881. The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
882. Max Havelaar – Multatuli
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
884. Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
885. Adam Bede – George Eliot
886. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
887. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
888. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
890. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
891. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
892. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
893. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
894. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
895. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
896. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
898. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
899. Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
900. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
901. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
903. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
906. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
907. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
908. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
909. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
910. Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
912. Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
914. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
915. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
917. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
918. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
919. The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
920. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
921. Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
922. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
923. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
924. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
925. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
926. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
927. The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
928. Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
929. The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
930. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen
934. Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
935. Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
939. The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
941. Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
942. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth

1700s
943. Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
944. The Nun – Denis Diderot
945. Camilla – Fanny Burney
946. The Monk – M.G. Lewis
947. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
948. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
949. The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
950. The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
951. Justine – Marquis de Sade
952. Vathek – William Beckford
953. The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
954. Cecilia – Fanny Burney
955. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
956. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
957. Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
958. Evelina – Fanny Burney
959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
960. Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
961. The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
962. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
963. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
964. The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
965. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
966. Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
967. Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
968. Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
969. Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
970. Candide – Voltaire
971. The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
972. Amelia – Henry Fielding
973. Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
974. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
975. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
976. Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
977. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
978. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
979. Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
980. Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
981. Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
982. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
983. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
984. Roxana – Daniel Defoe
985. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
986. Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
988. A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700
989. Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
990. The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
991. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
992. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
993. The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
994. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
995. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
997. The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
998. Aithiopika – Heliodorus
999. Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
1000. Metamorphoses – Ovid
1001. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

185) Para compreender a Bolivia (nem sempre é facil)

POUR COMPRENDRE LA BOLIVIE D'EVO MORALES
(Editions L'Harmattan, 7 rue de l'Ecole Polytechnique 75005 Paris
www.editions-harmattan.fr/)
ouvrage collectif
Denis Rolland & Joëlle Chassin

Introduction
Denis Rolland et Joëlle Chassin

Peut-on réduire la Bolivie à une image d’indigène impassible au vêtement chatoyant sur fond de montagne andine ou de lac Titicaca et de musique folklorique? A un étalage de feuilles de coca ou de patates de formes et de couleurs incroyablement variées, sans imaginer que l’altiplano ne produit pas tout dans ce pays? Ou à l’image, souvent sympathique à nos yeux d’Européens en mal d’exotisme, d’un Président indien?
Certainement pas.
Encore faut-il essayer de donner des éléments de connaissances complémentaires à ces stéréotypes d’un monde andin, voire latino-américain, indistinct et confus, pétris de quelques références omniprésentes; références anciennes -des aventures de Tintin à la mélodie d’El Condor pasa- ou plus récentes, comme l’idée d’un axe antilibéral et indigène autour des Présidents Evo Morales en Bolivie ou Rafael Correa en Equateur… Comme l’écrivait Thierry Saignes:
«Ce haut pays, au-dessus des nuages, s’abrite derrière ses mythes[…]. La Bolivie laisse prospérer les clichés, le plus souvent développés par les Occidentaux, de l’Indien taciturne, du mineur exploité, du guerillero martyr».

Examinons alors quelques-uns des stéréotypes accolés à ce pays.

La Bolivie est-elle «un petit pays andin»?
Sur nos planisphères, c’est effectivement un espace réduit. Néanmoins, à l’échelle de l’Amérique du Sud, la Bolivie, grande tout de même comme deux fois la France (1,1 million de km2), est un Etat «moyen».
C’est un pays profondément andin où moins de 4000 kilomètres de routes goudronnées donnent une idée des contraintes imposées par le relief (et de la faiblesse des équipements), où seuls 2% du territoire national peuvent être considérés comme de bonnes terres cultivables. Tout n’est cependant pas à l’image de ce «bout du monde» combinant «le sel, le froid, le vent, l’altitude» merveilleusement étudié par Nathan Wachtel! Vus d’Europe, montagne et altiplano ne doivent pas faire oublier les terres chaudes de l’ouverture sur l’Amazonie (accessible parfois par des routes où le paysage exceptionnel compense généreusement la dangerosité) et un piémont au sud-est qui fournit aujourd’hui l’essentiel de la richesse agricole exportable licite. Qui pense en Europe que les plaines tropicales couvrent les deux tiers d’un pays volontiers résumé dans notre imaginaire à l’altiplano? Ou que cet espace est marqué profondément par cette dualité «haut-bas», andin-tropical, à laquelle il faut ajouter un important espace diversifié de transition (vallées, versants…)?

L’enclavement continental est-il à la source de tous les maux du pays?
En 1893, Elisée Reclus, géographe exceptionnel, constatait en ces termes la pesanteur de ce découpage territorial.
«L’ancien territoire du ‘Haut Pérou’ ou de Charcas, qui appartint à la vice-royauté de Buenos Ayres jusqu’à la guerre de l’Indépendance, et qui se constitua en république sous le nom de Bolivie, en l’honneur de Bolívar, est, de tous les Etats sud-américains, celui dont les limites politiques ont été le plus bizarrement tracées. A l’issue de la lutte victorieusement entreprise contre la métropole, la Bolivie avait été déjà sacrifiée au Pérou, ses communications naturelles avec la mer ayant été attribuées à ce dernier Etat; elle a perdu beaucoup plus encore, depuis que le Chili lui a enlevé jusqu’à la voie détournée par laquelle on pouvait des plateaux boliviens dévaler à la mer».
La Bolivie est certes confrontée à une géographie qui ne facilite en rien les communications, au fait montagneux et à cette absence d’accès à la mer qui ont parfois conduit à la qualifier de «Suisse d’Amérique du Sud». Pourtant, comme le rappelle le géographe contemporain Jean-Paul Deler, «elle en serait plutôt le Tibet, le toit des Andes». Suisse ou Tibet, peu importe: l’originalité bolivienne s’enracine dans cette omniprésence d’un imaginaire national d’amputations, littoral en particulier. L’histoire nationale et plus encore les catéchismes nationalistes donnés à l’opinion publique sont très profondément marqués par la contraction des frontières. Comme le Mexique à l’extrémité nord du sous-continent latino-américain en 1848, la Bolivie a perdu la moitié de son territoire initial: 1,2 million de km2 ont été acquis par ses voisins au XIXe siècle en plusieurs étapes: Pérou et Chili à l’ouest (Guerre du Pacifique, 1879-1880); Brésil à l’est (1903-1904); Paraguay ensuite au Sud (Guerre du Chaco, 1932-1935). Si l’on peut toutefois considérer que cette amputation mexicaine au profit du géant du Nord est à peu près «gérée» (mais pas oubliée), il n’en est pas de même pour la Bolivie. En outre, le traumatisme n’est pas proportionnel aux superficies cédées. Si c’est à l’est des Andes que la Bolivie a perdu l’essentiel de son territoire initial, le pays vit dans la mémoire très cultivée et quasi unanimement partagée d’un Occident perdu, de cet accès impossible en toute souveraineté à la mer, en contrebas de la forteresse andine. Aujourd’hui, si l’enclavement ne facilite pas l’intégration à une économie régionale ou mondialisée, la mémoire des amputations la complique assurément.

La Bolivie est-elle un pays peu peuplé, indigène et pauvre?
Avec une des fécondités mais aussi un taux de mortalité les plus élevés d’Amérique latine, la Bolivie demeure un pays faiblement peuplé, le moins peuplé des pays andins. Cela a déjà été souligné, forêts denses, marécages et déserts occupent plus des deux tiers de l’espace et les 10 millions d’habitants se répartissent très inégalement sur son territoire. La densité moyenne est de 8 habitants au km2; hors agglomération, elle oscille cependant entre moins d’une personne au kilomètre carré dans les plaines tropicales de l’est du pays et dix dans l’altiplano à l’ouest; et, rapportée au kilomètre cultivé, cette densité change radicalement, passant à plus de 500 habitants au km2!
La majorité de la superficie du pays étant très faiblement peuplée, cela contribue à l’insularité des grandes villes. Trois grands centres se distinguent (La Paz, Santacruz et Cochabamba) même si l’altiplano et les vallées concentrent les trois quarts de la population.
- La Paz, «capitale» la plus haute du monde, rassemble 820000 habitants; El Alto est la deuxième grande ville du pays avec 870000 habitants; ces deux agglomérations réunies constituent incontestablement le premier centre urbain du pays: presque deux millions d’habitants, 20% de la population nationale.
- Santa Cruz rassemble 15% de la population totale du pays: avec des rêves anciens d’autonomie ou d’hégémonie et aujourd’hui une agglomération de 1,4 million d’habitants, la ville conserve néanmoins une physionomie hétérogène de gros bourg rural, en raison du caractère relativement peu dense et peu élevé des constructions.
- Cochabamba, ville de transition ou d’interface, «périphérie centrale» concentre 7% de la population, avec plus de 900000 habitants.
Il n’y a que quatre autres villes de plus de 100000 habitants, loin derrière ces trois grands centres.
La Bolivie est l’un des pays les plus «indigènes» du continent, avec le Guatemala et le Pérou: comme au Guatemala, cette «indianité maintenue» s’impose au voyageur étranger. Mais, même en omettant le métissage et les populations d’origine européenne, l’unité ethnique n’est qu’apparente: en dépit de près de quatre siècles de colonisation puis de nombreuses décennies de mépris des cultures et langues autochtones, le pays demeure officiellement multilingue. Certes l’espagnol, la langue du colonisateur ibérique et des élites de l’indépendance, est demeuré du XVIe au XXe siècle la langue exclusive et excluante du pouvoir. Mais deux autres langues sont déclarées «officielles» dans la Bolivie du XXIe siècle où le multilinguisme est une réalité qui s’impose: l’aymara est la langue du groupe ethnique le plus important du pays (35% de la population totale, et un premier Président élu en 2005) et le quechua, langue administrative de l’Empire inca, celle de groupes rassemblant environ 30% de la population.
La Bolivie demeure, sans aucun doute, l’un des pays les plus pauvres du continent latino-américain et de la planète. Et ce n’est pas une réalité nouvelle, même si la dégradation économique et sociale des années 1980 a aggravé la situation. Depuis les années 1990 et jusqu’à l’arrivée au pouvoir d’Evo Morales, période de la politique libérale du président Sánchez de Lozada et de ses successeurs, la croissance économique moyenne en Bolivie est d’environ 4% par an. Mais les bénéfices de cette politique, largement liés au cours des hydrocarbures, ne semblent pas avoir changé la situation de la grande majorité des habitants d’un pays très inégalitaire. Plus de la moitié de la population vit toujours au-dessous du seuil de pauvreté et la sous-alimentation est particulièrement forte dans les zones rurales d’altitude.
En Bolivie, la part du territoire utilisé pour l’agriculture est faible (3%). Certes, le pays a connu une des rares réformes agraires abouties du continent (1952-1953), chronologiquement la deuxième, après celle, complexe, liée à la Révolution mexicaine et avant celle de la révolution castriste à Cuba: l’Etat a exproprié les grands domaines d’alors et confirmé aux communautés indigènes la propriété de leurs terr