Book Reviews

30 junho, 2006

68) Democratização do sistema de patentes nos EUA

------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- Published by EH.NET (June 2006)

B. Zorina Khan
The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ix + 322 pp. $60 (cloth), ISBN: 0-521-81135-X.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Robert A. Margo, Department of Economics, Boston University.

If one had to list the top five issues in economic history, technical change would surely be among them. Institutions and institutional change, of course, would also be on the list. But the connection between the two -- institutions and technical change -- is certainly understudied by cliometricians. Zorina Khan's new book is meant to help remedy this situation by focusing on the role of intellectual property institutions -- patents and copyrights -- in technical progress in nineteenth-century America. (Khan is an associate professor of economics at Bowdoin College, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.)

_Democratization_ is divided into ten chapters and an index (there is no separate bibliography). After an introduction that sets the stage and makes a case for the use of patent statistics and related data, chapter two surveys the legal history of patent systems in France, England, and the United States. In comparison with France, the American system was less arbitrary; in comparison with England, it was far less costly, opening up the possibility of ordinary Americans obtaining a patent.

Chapter three examines outcomes in the universe of reported cases of patent litigation before the Civil War. Khan's analysis reveals, among other results, that the shift in 1836 to patent examinations (in the application/granting process) was associated with an increase in favorable outcomes for plaintiffs, which Khan (p. 99) attributes to the greater likelihood that the "Patent Office would ... filter out those claims that failed to meet the standards for novelty" thereby altering the set of cases that went to trial. Chapter four studies another novel data set on antebellum patentees. Over time, patenting per capita increased, not because of a greater likelihood of invention among a small, core elite, but rather an increase in the proportion of individuals who patented. Patenting was also correlated
with various features of local economies that suggest a role for market expansion, such as urbanization or access to transportation networks.

Chapters five and six switch gears, focusing on female patentees. Khan argues that women's role in technical change has been slighted in favor of other topics (such as labor force participation). Although women were far less likely to be patentees than men, there was growth over time -- indeed more rapid growth among women later in
the century -- and certain patterns suggest responsiveness to market signals. In Chapter six, Khan uses a data set on married women's property laws to test whether the passage of such laws -- a form of economic emancipation -- raised the probability that women would engage in patenting. Chapter seven returns to the basic theme, showing that "great inventors" of the nineteenth century were also, in many ways, not very distinguishable from ordinary Americans.

To this reviewer, Chapters eight and nine are perhaps the most interesting in the book. Chapter eight, sort of a reprise of chapter two, elucidates the history of copyright in the United States against a European background. By comparison, American copyright emphasized widespread access to intellectual output whereas the European model (that is, the French) imagined that authors had natural rights to
their work. Chapter nine is an entertaining analysis of the American refusal, until late in the nineteenth century, to extend copyright protection to "foreign" authors. Using a variety of data including a sample of book prices, Khan investigates various assertions in the literature -- for example, that the policy permitted book publishers to charge lower prices for foreign authors (apparently not). Chapter
ten summarizes the central findings and also further explores variations in patent systems across countries and economic outcomes.

_Democratization_ has many virtues. The general topic is, without question, of first-order importance. Above all, the book is very well-written. It is obvious from the beginning that Khan has an erudite command of the relevant literature and historical sources, both American and European, a command that is especially evident in the copious and detailed footnotes. She has a flair for telling anecdotes, written and visual, that personalize the hard numbers. The quantitative data examined in the book are fresh and quite varied. By and large, cliometricians have paid relatively little attention to historical data on legal outcomes. In this regard, the analysis of patent litigation in Chapter three may prove useful as a blueprint in other contexts.

Virtues aside, however, I found myself flagging about halfway through largely because the book's mantra -- that America possessed a patent system that was, by world standards, egalitarian -- does not seem particularly surprising and, at the very least, is of debatable economic significance. The two chapters on women, frankly, could easily have fit into one, much briefer chapter that would have better
kept this reader's attention.

For a book that is quite self-consciously "cliometric" -- there are 37 tables and 20 figures -- the cliometrics on display do not go far enough, at least for my tastes. Hypotheses to be tested are not derived from formal models but rather from the prior literature and, consequently, the connection to the empirical work can seem vague
(as, for example, in the claim mentioned at various points that the preponderance of ordinary Americans among patentees sheds useful light on Joel Mokyr's well-known distinction between macro- and micro-inventions). The many regressions are descriptive exercises -- multivariate versions of (the many) two-way tables, if you will. As such, the coefficients are subject to multiple interpretations that
are not always considered in sufficient detail to convince a skeptical reader of Khan's preferred spin. For example, in her econometric analysis of patent specialization (Table 4.3), Khan draws on previous work by Kenneth Sokoloff (_Journal of Economic History_ 1988) to give a plausible explanation of the negative coefficient of the presence of a navigable waterway. The "average patentee," we are
told (p. 121), "became less specialized when water transportation became available, but ... this change was reversed over time as urbanization ... progressed." This may be true, but it imposes a dynamic interpretation on an econometric specification that is not designed for this purpose. In another example, Table 6.4 reports
regressions that claim to show that states that passed married women's property laws experienced increases in female patenting that were statistically and economically (given the low base) significant. This, too, may be true but, as best as I can tell, the econometric analysis is not true difference-in-difference, and potential
endogeneity issues regarding the laws do not seem to be fully explored.

Criticisms aside, _Democratization_ is an important book on a subject -- the economic history of intellectual property -- that heretofore has received insufficient attention from economic historians. The book's style of argument emphasizing a wide array of sources will appeal to a much broader audience than is usually the case with monographs in economic history. And it will be a very good thing if Khan's quantitative work with historical legal documents stimulates
others to follow suit.

Robert A. Margo is Professor of Economics and African-American Studies, Boston University; and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the editor of _Explorations in Economic History_.

Copyright (c) 2006 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 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview

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29 junho, 2006

67) O tao vilipendiado investimento estrangeiro direto

A propósito do lviro:
Crise e Oportunidade: O Brasil e o Cenário Internacional
Antonio Corrêa de Lacerda, organizador
Lazuli, 328 págs., 2006; R$ 40

Incertezas de uma longa jornada mundo adentro
Por Cyro Andrade
jornal Valor Econômico, 29/06/2006

De 1993 a 2003, os dividendos pagos a não-residentes como proporção do estoque de investimento direto estrangeiro (IDE) realizado em empresas no Brasil ficaram na média de 3,3%. Pode-se concluir, então, que o IDE é um capital bastante "barato". A avaliação, baseada em números declarados pelas mesmas empresas que participaram dos censos do capital estrangeiro realizados pelo Banco Central (BC) em 1996 e 2001, é de Gustavo Franco. O ex-presidente do BC também considera "obtusa" a "ótica estritamente cambial", que trata o IDE como ítem indesejável do "passivo externo", por agravar a "vulnerabilidade" do país. Ao erro de incluir os estoques de IDE no passivo externo (o capital integralizado é 'não exigível', por ser conta de natureza patrimonial) soma-se, então, um segundo, na interpretação de Franco, contido na intenção de diminuir a importância do investimento direto ao se chamar de vulnerabilidade o que seria internacionalização.

Em artigo que abre a série publicada no livro "Crise e Oportunidade - O Brasil e o Cenário Internacional", Franco apresenta um longo arrazoado para justificar que o correto é contabilizar o IDE como um "ativo estratégico", por ser "elemento fundamental no processo de construção do setor real da economia, veículo de transferência de tecnologia e capacidade gerencial, de estabelecimento de vínculos com a economia global, diretos e indiretos, comerciais e financeiros, e de criação de capacidade produtiva". Além de "barato".

O investimento estrangeiro, ainda às vezes associado, por hábitos históricos, a aspectos sombrios do capitalismo, é, de fato, protagonista de presença marcante nas relações de produção internacionalizada. E se reforça nessa condição ao fazer, hoje mais do que em qualquer época, a liga globalizante entre as estratégias das empresas multinacionais e as tendências do comércio e da finança. Em "Crise e Oportunidade" os articulistas examinam aspectos macro e microeconômicos da imersão do Brasil nesse amálgama de interinfluências complexas, e inevitáveis. São textos que, na maioria, informam sem entediar e oferecem opiniões instigantes, a começar pelas de Gustavo Franco, que se serve de dados estatísticos levantados nos censos do capital estrangeiro realizados pelo BC em 1996 e 2001.

Entre um censo e outro, o fluxo de IDE no Brasil passou de R$ 40,5 bilhões (6.322 empresas respondentes) para R$ 100 bilhões (11.404 empresas), o que corresponde a mais que o dobro do estoque acumulado até 1995 e reflete um aumento da participação brasileira nos fluxos mundiais de IDE, de 0,37% em 1993 para um máximo, no período, de 3,79% em 1998. O capital integralizado pertencente a não-residentes passou de R$ 40,5 bilhões para R$ 201,4 bilhões. Os ativos totais foram de R$ 272,6 bilhões para R$ 914,0 bilhões.

São efeitos diretos da estabilização econômica, "números expressivos, que servem para demonstrar que uma etapa muito especial teve lugar nesses anos no histórico de relacionamento entre o Brasil e o IDE", afirma Franco. É um processo: os próximos anos deverão mostrar como essa onda de investimento direto externo, "maior que tudo que tivemos antes, vai afetar a economia brasileira no futuro".

Nessa transição, sempre haverá alguma passagem por situações derivadas de dois fatos: as empresas do censo, confirmou-se nos dois levantamentos, têm maior propensão a exportar e a importar do que as nacionais; e cresceu o comércio "intrafirma", aquele em que a contraparte no exterior é controladora ou coligada. Está aí, em retrato de corpo inteiro, a produção internacionalizada, sinônimo perfeito de globalização, algo que, diz Franco, "temos que entender melhor, pois não é muito consistente com 'substituir importações com vistas à auto-suficiência', velho hábito brasileiro que resiste ao desuso" - como também não serviria para endossar propostas de 'política industrial'".

Há políticas e políticas. A Unctad, por exemplo, reconhece que tem sido favorável ao aumento dos fluxos de IDE para o Brasil, desde 2004, o impacto de "uma nova política industrial e de inovação" adotada no país, "que concede incentivos para investimentos em certos setores". Naquele ano, de recuperação econômica em toda a América Latina, depois de um longo período de estagnação, o aumento do investimento estrangeiro no Brasil foi de 79%, bem acima dos 44% para o conjunto da região, que recebeu um total de US$ 68 bilhões, dos quais 27% vieram para o Brasil, destinatário líder da área, quase empatado com o México, com 25%. Em 2004, também, o Brasil foi o primeiríssimo, na América Latina, como exportador de IDE, respondendo por US$ 9,5 bilhões de um total de US$ 11 bilhões.

Na vastidão dos US$ 897 bilhões de influxos de IDE que andaram pelo mundo em 2005, segundo a Unctad, os números brasileiros são um fiapo: para cá vieram US$ 16 bilhões (menos que em 2004, portanto), de US$ 72 bilhões recebidos pela região (mais 5%). O aumento de 11% na Ásia e Oceania deu US$ 173 bilhões para a região, dos quais a China levou US$ 60 bilhões, o mesmo valor de 2004.

Suponha-se que se faça no Brasil tudo que manda o melhor figurino reformista pró-atração de IDE em larga escala (no livro, a economista Maria Helena Zockun dá bons exemplos dos muitos fatores de desestímulo que persistem, e sugere modos de superá-los). É programa para no mínimo dez mandatos de governos iluminados. Que se faça o possível, então. O páreo continuará duro. Por que não deverá desfazer-se tão cedo a preferência pelo investimento intramuros no centro do mundo. Em 2005, os fluxos de IDE para os países desenvolvidos cresceram 38%, depois de uma retração de quatro anos. Com o interessante detalhe de que a virada se deu principalmente por causa dos investimentos feitos no Reino Unido, destinatário líder de IDE pela primeira vez desde 1977.

Outro sinal dessa tendência centralizante: na movimentação dos US$ 2,9 trilhões em fusões e aquisições, que são a outra face do IDE realizado em 2005, o maior aumento de negócios transnacionais ocorreu na Europa. E os investimentos novos caíram um pouco, mas na América Latina a queda foi pronunciada, chegando a 30%.

Como em outros aspectos da globalização, porém, também na questão do IDE cada país escolhe seu caminho na longa jornada mundo a dentro. E só saberá se é possível chegar lá fazendo a viagem. "Crise e Oportunidade" é um bom guia para se compreender o tamanho do desafio.

28 junho, 2006

66) A riqueza das ideias, e como...

------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (June 2006)

Alessandro Roncaglia,
The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 582 pp. $110 (cloth), ISBN: 0-521-84337-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Ingrid H. Rima, Department of Economics, Temple University.

Allesandro Roncaglia's very readable history of economic thought book, entitled _The Wealth of Ideas_, begins by noting that even before the close of the prehistoric era of political economy, two distinctly different (and incompatible) views about the functioning of economies had become articulated. On the one hand, there was the perspective traceable to Greek ethics and philosophy that reemerged in the writings of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Church scholars whose teachings about moral behaviors included buyer and seller transactions intended to serve the common good. This prescriptive outcome was effectively "Church directed," and is interpreted by Roncaglia as equating exchange values with the "need satisfying" (i.e., utility yielding) capabilities of scarce commodities.
With the gradual decline of feudalism beginning in the thirteenth century, and the subsequent rise of the nation-state, the focus of intellectual inquiry shifted, which Roncaglia interprets as a "transfer of the economic problem from the field of ethics to that of scientific thinking" (p. 40). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers became preoccupied with the stock of metallic money (treasure) as an index of national wealth, holding that management of the gold stock is, or should be, the primary responsibility of the state. While historians of economics are well acquainted with the writings of Thomas Mun and other English and French mercantilists, Roncaglia also sketches out the contributions of some early Italian thinkers, in particular Antonio Serra, who is credited with a more sophisticated understanding than others of the interdependence between financial and real variables in enhancing the productive capabilities of the kingdom of Naples vis a vis other Italian cities. Thus economic thought shifted from the subjective concept of utility and scarcity to the objective perspective of physical costs and the economy's ability to generate a surplus.
To put the conflict between these competing perspective into context, _The Wealth of Ideas_ traces the history of economic thought with chapter titles that are identified with the names of the leading contributors, beginning with William Petty (chapter 3), and concluding with a trilogy (chapters 14-16) devoted to J. M. Keynes, Joseph A. Schumpeter, and Piero Sraffa, whom he regards as the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, along with their leading associates. Inclusion of in-depth chapters on Schumpeter and Sraffa reflects the influence of a negative assessment of the methodology of neoclassical theory and anti-equilibrium analysis on Roncaglia's thinking.
The history in Chapter 2 of the nexus between precious metals, trade and a nation's ability to generate a surplus is thus an important point of departure for Roncaglia's inquiry into the foundation of the surplus approach of modern day Sraffians. While the Physiocrats identified Nature and land-based activities as the source of the surplus, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ attributed the origin of surplus to "the annual labor" of every nation as the source of its wealth, which grows with increasing division of labor and the expansion of markets. Labor effort (enhanced in its effectiveness by its division) and Nature are the twin sources of a nation's surplus, and through it the source of accretions to its wealth, and its division among the three great social classes of society: workers, landlords, and capitalists, whose utilization of profit to support productive labor underlies the "virtuous spiral" that is the essence of _The Wealth of Nations_.
Smith's distinction between a commodity's value-in-use versus its value-in-exchange is central to his rejection of the possibility of explaining the exchange value of a pair of commodities in terms of use value. His labor-value theory encompassed both the notion of embodied labor and the labor a commodity can command in exchange. The "embedded labor" explanation of exchange value is valid only in "the early and rude state of society," which precedes the acquisition of private property and capital accumulation from which Smith infers a theory of "natural price," which determines the distributive shares.
However, Roncaglia maintains it is only with Ricardo that the theory of value "in its modern meaning of a theory of relative prices comes into centre stage" (p. 139). Nevertheless the Ricardian edifice underwent a progressive decay, which opened the way for Alfred Marshall's demand and supply synthesis, even though his predecessor J. S. Mill rejected the elements of "scarcity and utility upon which the subjective approach relied" (p. 243). The emergence and mounting influence of subjectivism is detailed in Chapters 10 (The Marginalist Revolution), 11 (The Austrian School and Its Neighborhood), and Chapter 12 (General Economic Equilibrium). Chapter 13 (Alfred Marshall) credits Marshall with distancing himself from "the extreme methodological individualism" of the first marginalist theoreticians. Marshall is also briefly credited for his appreciation of the evolutionary process of economic development, and his effort to construct supply curves for individual firms and industries that are characterized both by increasing return to scale and decreasing returns. The latter construct is weak, as elaborated in Chapter 16 on Piero Sraffa.
Joseph Schumpeter is especially credited for his dynamic theory of entrepreneurial bank-financed innovation, which initiates expansions that shift resources from traditional uses to introduce new methods of production and new goods or to open new markets. Entrepreneurs initiate changes that others swarm in to imitate with other loans that contribute to inflationary price increases that ultimately provoke credit restrictions -- i.e., "forced savings" -- that generate endogenous contractions. The culmination is business failures, unemployment, and unused capacity. But it is during this phase of the trade cycle that the developmental innovations of the expansion phase are "digested." Thus, the destruction of the depression phase is economically "creative." Yet it is also politically destabilizing, and in Schumpeter's view capitalist breakdown is inevitable. This is the central message of Schumpeter's _Business Cycles_ and _Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy_, which followed _The Theory of Economic Development_.
Chapter 16, simply entitled Piero Sraffa, begins by articulating Sraffa's ambitious goal of "shunting the car of economic science" in a direction opposite to the marginalist approach introduced by Jevons, and refined by the Austrians, Walras, Marshall, and Pigou to ultimately emerge as the present day paradigm of the economics profession. Sraffa began his academic career at the University of Perugia in 1923, and by 1925 (one year after the death of Alfred Marshall and the publication in 1924 of the eighth edition of his _Principles_), he published a lengthy article in Italian criticizing Marshall's attempt to reconcile the phenomenon of increasing returns at the level of the firm with the existence of purely competitive markets. Joining a debate initiated by John H. Clapham (1922) in the _Economic Journal_, Sraffa criticized Marshall's attribution of long-run increasing returns to "external economies" equally available to all firms. Marshall's error, Sraffa argued, was that the external economies concept violates the assumptions that underlie his partial equilibrium analysis. Firms experiencing increasing returns will expand in order to increase returns still further, which is incompatible with the competitive assumption of large numbers of small firms. Recognizing the predisposition of decreasing long-run cost to monopoly, Marshall conceived of economies of production that are external to individual firms, while being internal to the industry. But, Sraffa argued, it is precisely the incompatibility of economies that are external to the firm while being internal to the industry, which render Marshall's theory of the firm's supply curve untenable. Economies external to the firm but internal to an industry are incompatible with Marshall's partial equilibrium approach. Sraffa's 1925 critique of Marshall's increasing returns analysis of the firm is thus tantamount to an anticipation of imperfect competition. Thus, Sraffa's 1925 paper (republished in 1926) "paved the way" for the modern non-neoclassical theory of non-competitive market firms, for which Joan Robinson (1933) and Edward Chamberlin (1933) are typically credited.
Because of Italy's political instability and the congenial intellectual environment offered Sraffa at Cambridge following the publication in the _Economic Journal_ of his 1925 paper, he moved to the U.K. As the Secretary of the Royal Economics Society, J. M. Keynes was in a position to negotiate on Sraffa's behalf the assignment of editing the work of David Ricardo, which ultimately resulted between 1951 and 1955 (with the assistance of Maurice Dobb) in eleven volumes of _The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo_ (the last being an index). The Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Sraffa a gold medal for his achievements in 1961, anticipating the Nobel Prize in economics, which has only been awarded since 1969. The highlight of Sraffa's interpretation of Ricardo's contribution to economic thought was that he reconceptualized the economic system as a circular flow of production enhanced by increasing division of labor, which generates a surplus that promotes consumption and growth. Sraffa maintained that this is an interpretation of the classical tradition that reflects a "striking contrast" (1960, p. 93) to contemporary neoclassical theory, which conceives of the economy as a one-way avenue leading from "factors of production" to "consumption goods," and whose values in exchange are established by the interaction of demand and supply forces. For Sraffa the term "value" does not mean value in exchange, because the price of one commodity cannot be conceived independently of any other. Commodity prices are established simultaneously with wages and profits, which is a theme that is further elaborated in his _Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities_ (1960). Sraffa's concern, therefore, is not to explain the determination of static equilibrium prices on the assumption of constant returns to scale. Rather, it is to study the conditions of reproduction in capitalistic economies on the assumption that industries tend to earn a uniform rate of profit, from which Sraffa inferred that the key to the movement of a relative price is a change in the wage cost.
Roncaglia's chapter on Sraffa provides a logical segue to his final two chapters "The Age of Fragmentation" and "Where Are We Going?" The age of fragmentation is characterized by the presence of substantially autonomous groups of economists located internationally who ignore, or do not take into account, research areas other than their own. "Pluralism" is, in no sense, near at hand. The theory of value constitutes the "heart" of economic science (p. 514). Yet, for Roncaglia, the basic caveat is that the evolutionary approach of Sraffian/Schumpeterian/post-Keynesian/neo-Marxian/ Institutionalism is incompatible with the static view, which reflects the struggle between utility and scarcity that emerges from the demand and supply equilibriums. Thus, in no sense is Roncaglia able to see any evidence "of a clear and continuous ascent of economic science towards an ever fuller understanding of reality" (p. 505). Present day fragmentation of economic thinking therefore strengthens the case for studying the history of both the classical and marginalist approaches, between which there exists a "no man's land," which both Keynes and Schumpeter may have inhabited. Roncaglia himself, while clearly writing to reflect the legacy of Schumpeter and Sraffa, provides a very knowledgeable and readable account of the history of economic thought. His book is a contribution, not only to every historian of economic thought, but also to contemporary heterodox thinkers who now will have a valuable resource for understanding the historical origins of many (perhaps most) heterodox issues.

The seventh edition of Ingrid H. Rima's _Development of Economic Analysis_ is in progress.

Copyright (c) 2006 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).
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26 junho, 2006

65) O Brasil e os conflitos armados: uma imponente obra de direito internacional

Uma importante obra, sem dúvida alguma completíssima, do meu amigo e colega de faculdade, Tarcilo Dal Maso, sobre o Brasil e o direito da guerra. Está tudo aqui: doravante, os professores e mesmos os diplomatas poderão dizer: "Vamos ver no Dal Maso".
Meus sinceros parabéns por esta obra magnífica.


O BRASIL E O DIREITO INTERNACIONAL DOS CONFLITOS ARMADOS
Tarciso Dal Maso Jardim
(Porto Alegre: Antonio Sergio fabris Editor, 2006; 2 tomos; 1.156 p.; ISBN: 9788575253830; R$ 240,00)

O autor é professor de Direito Internacional do CEUB, consultor do Senado Federal, observador da ONU para o estabelecimento do Tribunal Penal Internacional (Roma).

Sumário:

Volume I:
Prefácio
Compatibilidade do Aparato Jurídico Brasileiro com o Direito Internacional dos Conflitos Armados

Capítulo 1 – Vinculação do Estado Brasileiro ao Direito Internacional dos Conflitos Armados
1.1. Panorama dos tratados ratificados
1.2. Últimas gestões internas para vincular-se a tratados relacionados a direito internacional dos conflitos armados
1.2.1. Estatuto de Roma do Tribunal Penal Internacional
1.2.2. Protocolo Facultativo da Convenção sobre os Direitos da Criança, relativo à Participação de Crianças em Conflitos Armados
1.2.3. Segundo Protocolo relativo à Convenção para a proteção dos bens culturais em caso de conflitos armados
1.2.4. Protocolo V e emenda à Convenção sobre Armas Convencionais
1.3. Incorporação do direito internacional humanitário no ordenamento jurídico interno

Capítulo 2 - Normativa e práxis brasileira em matéria de conflito armado
2.1. Situações de emergência
2.2. Proteção do emblema da Cruz Vermelha e de outros símbolos correlatos
2.3. Repressão penal das violações do direito internacional humanitário
2.4. Direito processual penal
2.5. Proteção de pessoas detidas
2.6. Aplicação interna dos tratados internacionais sobre a limitação de armas por questões humanitárias
2.7. Responsabilidade por atos contrários ao direito internacional humanitário
2.8. Sociedade civil e o direito internacional humanitário
2.9. Comissão nacional para difusão e implementação do direito internacional humanitário no Brasil
2.10. Difusão do direito internacional humanitário e institucionalização de seu ensino no Brasil

Volume II - Instrumentos Internacionais de Proteção de Pessoas e Bens em Conflitos Armados
II.1. Convenção de Genebra para a melhoria da sorte dos militares feridos nos exércitos em campanha (22.08.1864)
II.2. Convenção II da Haia relativa às leis e aos usos da guerra terrestre (29.07.1899)
II.3. Convenção III da Haia para a adaptação à guerra marítima dos princípios da Convenção de Genebra de 1864 (29.07.1899)
II.4. Convenção de Genebra sobre a melhoria da sorte dos enfermos e feridos em campanha (6.07.1906)
II.5. Convenção IV da Haia de 1907 relativa às leis e usos da guerra terrestre (18.10.1907)
II.6. Convenção IX da Haia relativa ao bombardeio por forças navais em tempo de guerra (18.10.1907)
II.7. Convenção X da Haia para a adaptação à guerra marítima dos princípios da Convenção de Genebra de 1864 (18.10.1907)
II.8. Convenção XI da Haia relativa a certas restrições ao exercício do direito de captura na guerra marítima (18.10.1907)
II.9. Convenção de Genebra para a melhoria da sorte dos feridos e enfermos nos exércitos em campanha 27.07.1929)
II.10. Convenção relativa ao tratamento dos prisioneiros de guerra (27.07.1929)
II.11. Convenção I de Genebra para melhoria da sorte dos feridos e enfermos dos exércitos em campanha, de 12 de agosto de 1949
II.12. Convenção II de Genebra relativa a melhoria da sorte dos feridos, enfermos e náufragos das forças armadas no mar, de 12 de agosto de 1949
II.13. Convenção III de Genebra relativa ao tratamento dos Prisioneiros de guerra, de 12 de agosto de 1949
II.14. Convenção IV de Genebra relativa à proteção das pessoas civis em tempo de guerra, de 12 de agosto de 1949
II.15. Protocolo adicional às Convenções de Genebra de 12 de agosto de 1949 relativo à proteção das vítimas dos conflitos armados de caráter internacional (Protocolo I - 8.6.1977)
II.16. Protocolo adicional às Convenções de Genebra de 12 de agosto de 1949 relativo à proteção das vítimas dos conflitos armados sem caráter internacional (8.6.1977)
II.17. Protocolo adicional às Convenções de Genebra de 12 de agosto de 1949 relativo à adoção de sinal distintivo adicional (Protocolo III – 08.12.2005)
II.18. Tratado para a proteção das instituições artísticas, científicas e monumentos históricos – Pacto Roerich (Washington, 15.04.1935)
II.19. Convenção para a proteção de bens culturais em caso de conflitos armados e seu Protocolo (Haia 14.05.1954)
II.20. Protocolo à Convenção para a Proteção de Bens Culturais (14.5.1954)
II.21. Segundo Protocolo relativo à Convenção da Haia de 1954 para a proteção dos bens culturais em caso de conflito armado
II.22. Convenção sobre a proibição das piores formas de trabalho infantil e a ação imediata para a sua eliminação (Convenção 182 da OIT)
II.23. Protocolo Facultativo à Convenção sobre os Direitos da Criança relativo ao envolvimento de crianças em conflitos armados.

TOMO II
VOLUME III - Repressão Internacional Penal e Conflitos Armados
III.1. Convenção para a Prevenção e Repressão do Crime do Genocídio (9.12.1948)
III.2. Estatuto de Roma do Tribunal Penal Internacional (17.7.1998)

VOLUME IV - Condução das Hostilidades
IV.1. Regras Diversas sobre a Condução das Hostilidades
IV.1.1. Convenção III da Haia de 1907 Relativa ao Rompimento das Hostilidades (18.10.1907)
IV.1.2. Convenção VI da Haia Relativa ao Regime dos Navios Mercantes Inimigos no Começo das Hostilidades (18.10.1907)
IV.1.3. Convenção VII da Haia Relativa à Transformação dos Navios Mercantes em Navios de Guerra (18.10.1907)
IV.1.4. Convenção sobre Deveres e Direitos dos Estados nos Casos de Lutas Civis (20.2.1928)
IV.1.5. Protocolo à Convenção sobre Direitos e Deveres dos - Estados nos Casos de Lutas Civis (1.5.1957)
IV.1.6. Tratado de Renúncia à Guerra (Pacto de Paris ou Briand-Kellog, de 7.8.1928)
IV.1.7. Atas de Londres de 1936 Relativas ao Uso da Força por Parte de Submarinos contra Navios Mercantes (6.11.1936)
IV.2. Neutralidade
IV.2.1. Declaração de Paris sobre Princípios de Direito Marítimo em Tempo de Guerra (16.4.1856)
IV.2.2. Convenção V da Haia de 1907 Relativa aos Direitos e Deveres das Potências e das Pessoas Neutras em Caso de Guerra Terrestre (18.10.1907)
IV.2.3. Convenção XIII da Haia Relativa aos Direitos e Deveres das Potências Neutras, em Caso de Guerra Marítima (18.10.1907)
IV.2.4. Convenção sobre Neutralidade Marítima (Havana, 20.2.1928)
IV.3. Meios e Métodos Proibidos
IV.3.1. Declaração de São Petersburgo para Proscrever, em Tempo de Guerra, o Emprego de Projéteis Explosivos ou Inflamáveis (11.12.1868)
IV.3.2. Convenção VIII da Haia Relativa à Colocação de Minas Submarinas Automáticas de Contato (18.10.1907)
IV.3.3. Declaração XIV da Haia Relativa à Proibição de Lançar Projéteis e Explosivos dos Balões (18.10.1907)
IV.3.4. Protocolo de Genebra sobre a Proibição do Emprego na Guerra de Gases Asfixiantes, Tóxicos ou Similares e de Meios Bacteriológicos de Guerra (17.6.1925)
IV.3.5. Tratado para a Proscrição das Armas Nucleares na América Latina e no Caribe (Tratado de Tlatelolco) e suas Modificações
IV.3.6. Tratado sobre a Não-Proliferação de Armas Nucleares (Londres, Moscou e Washington, 1.7.1968)
IV.3.7. Convenção sobre a Proibição do Desenvolvimento, Produção e Estocagem de Armas Bacteriológicas (Biológicas) e à Base de Toxinas e sua Destruição (10.4.1972)
IV.3.8. Convenção sobre a Proibição da Utilização de Técnicas de Modificação Ambiental para Fins Militares ou Quaisquer Outros Fins Hostis (1976)
IV.3.9. Convenção sobre Proibições ou Restrições ao Emprego de Certas Armas Convencionais, que Podem Ser Consideradas como Excessivamente Lesivas ou Geradoras de Efeitos Indiscriminados (Nova Iorque, 10.10.1980) e seus Protocolos (I, II, III, IV e V)
IV.3.10. Convenção Interamericana contra a Fabricação e o Tráfico Ilícitos de Armas de Fogo, Munições, Explosivos e Outros Materiais Correlatos (Washington, em 14 de novembro de 1997)
IV.3.11. Convenção sobre a Proibição do Uso, Armazenamento, Produção e Transferência de Minas Antipessoal e sobre sua Destruição (Ottawa, 3.12.1997)
IV.3.12. Convenção Internacional sobre a Proibição do Desenvolvimento, Produção, Estocagem e Uso de Armas Químicas e sobre a Destruição das Armas Químicas Existentes no Mundo (13.1.1993)

64) Estatisticas historicas dos EUA: setores economicos

Estatísticas costumam ser aborrecidas, para não falar das estatísticas históricas, frequentemente longas séries de números que parecem não fazer mais sentido em face das novas realidades do presente.
Não é o caso desta série, sobre uma das mais vibrantes e potentes economias do planeta, ever, isto é, em toda a histórica econômica registrada até o presente (a China ainda é uma promessa de grande transformação, mas por enquanto ela só está recuperando o atraso em relação aos capitalismos avançados).
Mas também tenho uma otura razão para transcrever esta resenha da minha série apreciada de livros de histórica econômica: o autor da resenha é um "brasilianista", ou pelo menos parece ser. Vejam isto:
Lee J. Alston's current research interests include political governance in the historical U.S. and present-day Brazil; and the determinants of tenancy in the historical U.S. and Latin America today. His two most recent publications are: Lee J. Alston and Bernardo Mueller, "Pork for Policy: Executive and Legislative Exchange in Brazil," _Journal of Law Economics and Organization_ 22, Number 1 (Spring 2006) 87-114;

------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- Published by EH.NET (June 2006)

Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L.
Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, editors,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Volume Four: Economic Sectors
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv + 1123 pp. $825 (for the five-volume set), ISBN: 0-521-85389-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Lee J. Alston, Department of Economics, University of Colorado.

This volume brought back memories from my graduate school days. As part of the field exam in economic history at the University of Washington overseen by Robert Higgs, Morris Morris, Douglass North, Robert Thomas and Kozo Yamamura, we had a set of required readings that more than took up a summer. Higgs required us to read several of the NBER volumes in _Studies in Income and Wealth_. He also strongly encouraged us to buy the _Historical Statistics of the United States_. Over the years I have consulted _Historical Statistics_ countless times and this new edition is far more than a simple update of earlier Census editions. To give you a sense of its magnitude, this edition of Volume Four has 1,123 pages devoted to "Economic Sectors" compared to 272 pages in my older edition. This volume is an incredible public good and I congratulate the editors and contributors for the care with which they assembled the data.
Moreover the introductions along with the essays for each chapter could be compiled into a "stand alone" book on the evolution of the American economy. As my mentors did to me, I will do to my students: I will have them read all of the essays in this volume.

As Richard Sutch notes in his introduction to this volume, the Office of Management and Budget in 1945 "standardized the classification of industries and collection and reporting of data with the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system." Each establishment or economic unit is classified into eleven broad divisions and then
subsequently sub-divided, e.g. mining is one of eleven broad codes and then subdivided into metal mining (and others) and, within metal mining, as detailed as "metal cans." Though the SIC system was replaced in 1997 to coordinate with other countries in North America, the data in this volume are organized along the lines of SIC codes still familiar to most of us. The editors have persuaded the experts
in the profession to oversee each section and these experts in turn have brought on board others to write some sub-sections: Alan L. Olmstead -- Agriculture with help from Julian M. Alston, Bruce L. Gardner, Philip G. Pardy, Paul W. Rhode, and Daniel A. Sumner; Gavin Wright -- Natural Resource Industries; Kenneth A. Snowden -- Construction, Housing and Mortgages; Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman -- Manufacturing; Daniel M.G. Raff -- Distribution; Louis P. Cain -- Transportation; Alexander J. Field - Communications; and Thomas Weiss- Services with help from Susan B. Carter on Utilities. Anyone familiar with economic history will recognize the editors as
"naturals" to write essays as well as to oversee the assembly of the data.

The essays for each sector are not boring. As Alan Olmstead notes in Chapter Da. Agriculture: 4-7: "Underlying the data in this chapter is one of the epic stories in world history." The movement out of agriculture in such a short span of time was phenomenal. The data when viewed in this context take on more life. Like Olmstead, Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman set the stage nicely for the subsequent data, on manufacturing (Chapter Dd. Manufacturing: 4-575): "The industrial transformation was swift: the modest manufacturing sector of 1850 had evolved into a complex multiplant, multiproduct producer of manufactured goods by 1900." After production, goods needed to be distributed. In 1930 Americans were scattered over three million square miles. Nearly half of the population was rural. As a result, Daniel Raff argues (Chapter De. Distribution: 4-705): "The scale of the problem of distribution is immediately apparent." The size of the U.S. is impressive and moving goods and services across space is an incredible task. The distribution of good and services goes hand in
glove with transportation as Louis Cain notes (Chapter Df. Transportation: 4-761): "Where people work and where they live, where goods are produced and where they are sold, are all determined in part by the transportation infrastructure." With today's internet mindset we think that modern communications only arrived in the
1990s, but Alexander Field (Chapter Dg. Communications: 4-977) reminds us that "There is a technological and historical context to these developments ... the technological and regulatory issues we continue to deal with in the first decade of the twenty-first century did not arrive full-blown with the breakup of the Bell System or the explosive growth of the Internet." The transition from a dominant agricultural country to a manufacturing powerhouse and now to an economy with a large service sector has raised some fears amongst social critics. Thomas Weiss aptly summarizes the concern of some critics (Chapter Dh. Services 4-1061): "the United States is becoming a nation of 'hamburger flippers,' who do not contribute much to the growth or vitality of the nation's economy." This volume may not make Oprah's reading list, but as essays introducing mountains of useful data they are far more interesting than I expected. The stage-setting of the essays, the clarity of definitions of the data, the sources for the data and the index are superb. This volume will find a welcoming home on the shelves of all U.S. economic historians.

Lee J. Alston's current research interests include political governance in the historical U.S. and present-day Brazil; and the determinants of tenancy in the historical U.S. and Latin America today. His two most recent publications are: Lee J. Alston and Bernardo Mueller, "Pork for Policy: Executive and Legislative Exchange in Brazil," _Journal of Law Economics and Organization_ 22, Number 1 (Spring 2006) 87-114; and Lee J. Alston, Jeffery A. Jenkins and Tomas Nonnenmacher, "Who Should Govern Congress? Access to Power and the Salary Grab of 1873," _Journal of Economic History_ (forthcoming, September 2006).

Copyright (c) 2006 by EH.Net.
All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview

25 junho, 2006

63) Seriam os EUA um Estado Falido?: Noam Chomsky pensa que sim

Homeland Insecurity
Failed States by Noam Chomsky
Review by JONATHAN FREEDLAND
Published: The New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2006

THIS latest philippic from Noam Chomsky sets out to overturn every belief about their country Americans hold dear. The self-image of the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy, lighting the way for the rest of the world, is a lie, Chomsky says, and it always has been. "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy" aims to expose the rot of the shining city on a hill, from its foundations to its steeples.

FAILED STATES
The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.
By Noam Chomsky.
311 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $24.

At the book's center is the avowed American mission to spread democracy throughout the world. Chomsky concedes that, rhetorically at least, this has been the nation's goal since Woodrow Wilson, but he insists the words are utterly at odds with American deeds. In its many foreign interventions, Washington has acted to frustrate the will of the people, often by supporting those engaged in the most chilling violence. The United States has overthrown democratic governments in Iran, Chile, Guatemala "and a long list of others." Elsewhere it has paid lip service to procedural democracy while doing all it could to rig the outcome. There is, Chomsky says, a "rational consistency" to this inconsistency between words and actions. The record shows that the United States does indeed back democracy abroad — "if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests."

These are not, Chomsky insists, the interests of the American people, but of the corporate elite that dominates the country and its policy making. For, he says, the United States is not a democracy, if that word is reserved for a society where the people's will is done.

Take health care. Chomsky has the data to show that the American system is economically inefficient, much costlier than more socialized models abroad and deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans, who are ready to pay for increased government intervention even if that means higher taxes. That democratic majority remains unheard, however, because "the pharmaceutical and financial industries and other private powers are strongly opposed." That is why the mainstream news media, a perennial Chomsky target, say publicly funded health care lacks political support: the majority might back it, but not the people who count.

Chomsky employs the same linguistic deconstruction for media definitions of prosperity. The experts may say the economy is healthy, as it is for the top 1 percent, whose wealth rose by 42 percent from 1983 to 1998. But it is not healthy for the majority, whose wages have stagnated or declined in real terms, nor for those going hungry in America because they cannot afford to buy food.

Much of this will be familiar to veteran Chomsky readers, but in this book he supplies a new twist. What, he asks, is a failed state? It is one that fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions." On that definition, Chomsky argues, the United States is the world's biggest failed state. This sounds like a hyperbolic charge, ludicrously overblown — but he goes far toward substantiating it. He is especially strong on pointing up Washington's woeful efforts to protect Americans from terror attacks, in one instance lavishing more resources on the imaginary threat from Cuba than on the all-too-real menace of Al Qaeda.

And if a rogue state is defined by its defiance of international law, then the United States, Chomsky says, has long been the rogues' rogue. It has ignored the Geneva Conventions by its treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and of Iraqi civilians in Falluja; violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by its development of new weapons when it should be making good-faith efforts to get rid of the old ones; flouted the United Nations Charter, which allows the use of force only when the "necessity of self-defense" is "instant" and "overwhelming," standards hardly met by the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and defied the World Court, which in the 1980's held Washington guilty of "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua, a ruling the United States simply rejected. Scholars like to speak of American exceptionalism, but with Chomsky the phrase takes on new meaning: America exempts itself from the rules it demands for everyone else. This is not a double standard, but flows from what Chomsky, quoting Adam Smith, calls the single standard: the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: . . . All for ourselves, and nothing for other people."

Throughout "Failed States" Chomsky writes in this vein of fierce excoriation. No one is exempt, according to him. The whole system is rotten, including traditional liberal heroes. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy are all faulted for their pursuit of international dominance, from Roosevelt's plans to firebomb Japanese cities more than a year before Pearl Harbor to Kennedy's war in Vietnam. Even the framers of the Constitution are condemned. Chomsky disapprovingly quotes James Madison's insistence that the new Republic should "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." He doesn't much like The New York Times either.

If there is a crumb of comfort for his readers, it is this: Americans are not a uniquely evil people. On the contrary, imperialists throughout history have behaved in the same way, from the Greeks to the British, always telling themselves they were driven by noble purpose — even as their elites wreaked havoc for their own material gain.

There are flaws in this book. It is dense, with almost every paragraph broken up by extensive quotations. And it is unrelenting, the invective interrupted only by the occasional flash of bitter wit. Like any polemicist, Chomsky is selective in his material: for example, he cites rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court that have injured Palestinians rights, but ignores those that have respected them.

Too often Chomsky fails to cast those outside the United States as active moral agents in their own right. He argues, with justification, that the American invasion of Iraq has unleashed a wave of terrorism in that country — but he has little interest in the bombers and beheaders themselves. Their actions are merely the inevitable products of decisions taken in Washington. He is also too airily dismissive of liberal interventionists, those who would like to see American power deployed to thwart genocide; in Chomsky's eyes, they are mere patsies for imperialism.

Similarly, his view of politics can be too mechanistic; sometimes he writes as if whole national debates are mere staged distractions, planned by the powers that be. And while he spends 260-odd pages presenting his critique, he offers only two paragraphs of solutions (an imbalance, it should be said, he is aware of).

Still, maybe it's sufficient for a prophet to tell the people they are in a wilderness; he shouldn't be expected to point the exact way out. Chomsky's ambitions, after all, are high enough. It's hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light.

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London.

24 junho, 2006

62) Os cinco melhores livros sobre o terrorismo (do ponto de vista do The Wall Street Journal)

Todo sábado, o The Wall Street Journal, seguramente um dos melhores jornais do mundo -- tem quem não concorde, em vista das posições assumidamente capitalistas do jornal, o que não deve ser confundido com uma posição conservadora, longe disso, pois o jornal não é necessariamente pela defesa do status quo, apenas pelo respeito à mudança dentro da ordem -- mas, todo sábado, eu dizia antes de ser interrompido por mim mesmo, esse jornal capitalista publica uma pequena lista dos "cinco melhores livros sobre..."
Claro, trata-se de uma lista subjetiva, feita pelo comentarista convidado para fazer a sua seleção, mas sempre se aprende algo nessa listagem dos "Five Best Books on..."
Pode ser culinária, pode ser literatura policial, auto-ajuda, administração para homens de negócios (o que costuma ser quase igual ao anterior), enfim, pode ser qualquer coisa, mas geralmente é um tópico de interesse público.
Pois bem, eu que recebo todos os dias o boletim eletrônico do WSJ (e sempre dou uma olhada muito rapida, pois esse jornal capitalista libera poucas matérias de graça, cobrando -- claro, como bom capitalista -- pelas mais relevantes), no sábado costumo acordar cedo só para ver a lista de livros -- vocês já repararam que eu sou viciado em livros, não é mesmo? -- e neste sábado a lista é sobre livros acerca do terrorismo.
Claro, sempre do ponto de vista americano - daí a obsessão com Osama Bin Laden e a Al Quaeda, mas ainda assim relevante.
Recomendo, particularmente, o último livro: um liberal de esquerda -- o que nos EUA quer dizer algo -- que se posicionou resolutamente pela luta sem tréguas contra o terrorismo e a favor do desmantelamento de estados fundamentalistas no Oriente Médio.
Vejamos a lista (não conheço o autor da seleção, mas deve ser um jornalista do WSJ tendo trabalhado como correspondente estrangeiro na França):

FIVE BEST
Terror Tomes
Top books on unconventional warfare.

BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES
The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, June 24, 2006

1. No End to War
Walter Laqueur (Continuum, 2003).
Rich and poor, strong and weak, Right and Left, people of some religion or of none: All have gone in for terrorism. In "No End to War," his informative survey of terrorism and its implications for the 21st century, Walter Laqueur admirably documents a mass of historical and political material that resists easy generalization. Where once terrorists tried to assassinate kings and presidents in the belief that they could change society, he says, since the 20th century "the propaganda of the deed" has taken over. Laqueur displays the imagination and skill required to enter the terrorist mindset -- especially when discussing the Muslims who aim to destroy the U.S., indeed the whole West, in a war that looks set to endure for decades.

2. The War Against The Terror Masters
Michael A. Ledeen (St. Martin's, 2002).
Michael Ledeen's was the first book to point out that terrorism begins at the top in both Iran and Saudi Arabia, where those responsible for taking decisions to attack us hide behind subcontractors and proxies. Islamic terror, then, has its rationale as a weapon used by hostile states against their enemies, whether open or undeclared. We aren't dealing with crazies or criminals, or even the oppressed, but with cold calculators, some of whom, in Saudi Arabia notably, pass themselves off as our allies. The inability to analyze realistically what we are up against landed us in self-deception and muddle. Those whom the terror masters claim to represent are in fact their victims, and that's what Ledeen, better than anyone else, has gotten across.

3. Inside Al Qaeda
Rohan Gunaratna (Columbia, 2002).
This is an authoritative study of Osama bin Laden and the organization he built. Al Qaeda is being steadily ground down, with the result that successive editions of this book have a hard time keeping up, but nonetheless "Inside Al Qaeda" is a useful map of the group and its ramifications. (It is also an Islamist who's who, where information about the latest terrorist in the news can be found.) In terms of raising finance and recruiting throughout the Muslim world, the al Qaeda feat is impressive. Communism and its system of subversion by means of local parties and cells seems to be the only precedent for conspiracy on this international scale. And as Gunaratna says, those living in an al Qaeda Bloc would be just as miserable as were the victims of Soviet domination.

4. Terror in the Name of God
Jessica Stern (Ecco, 2003).
Jessica Stern's study illuminates the state of mind of those who kill in the belief that they are obeying a religious imperative. She found Christian cultists in the U.S., Jewish zealots in Israel, and Islamists in the Palestinian Authority, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere. Part of the interest here is in the way Stern, a Harvard lecturer, undertakes intrepid journeys to seek out her subjects. These terrorists are by no means simple, she finds; they are often in the grip of complex designs, usually at odds with reality. The secret is to be persuaded that one is doing good by doing evil. Humiliation after some perceived injustice seems a prerequisite. Frustrated nationalism is another frequent motivation. A moral, though: It remains easier to kill people than conscience.

5. Terror and Liberalism
Paul Berman (Norton, 2003).
"Terror and Liberalism" is several fine things: an evaluation of what is wrong in the Muslim world, a defense of humanist values, a message of hope and, not least, a scintillating contribution to political literature. Berman takes the European totalitarian model and shows how it came to be incorporated in the Islamosphere via secular leaders like Saddam Hussein and religious thinkers like Sayyid Qutb. The Baath Party in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt may look like indigenous movements, but they are essentially Western derivatives. If it was right to liberate people from Nazism and Communism, Berman argues, then it follows that it is also right to liberate people from their Islamic off-shoots. Any other view, he says, is not so much selfish as inhuman.

Mr. Pryce-Jones's "Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews" will be published in the fall by Encounter Books.

23 junho, 2006

61) Zen em quadrinhos


Leia aqui: http://winstonsmith.free.fr/__/library/chih_chung/zq-1.html

60) Falando de Lord Skidelsky... (The Road From Serfdom)

The Road from Serfdom: The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism
Skidelsky, Robert
(Allen Lane, New York, New York, U.S.A., 1996; ISBN: 0713991224)

At the onset of the Cold War in 1944, Friedrich A. Hayek wrote his classic book The Road to Serfdom to warn that central planning threatens freedom. Now Robert Skidelsky, author of an acclaimed biography of John Maynard Keynes, looks at the havoc central planning has wrought since then. Despite the seeming chaos of the post-communist world, Skidelsky argues that the global failure and collapse of collectivism as a principle of social organization is one of the most hopeful events of the 20th century.

Excellent overview of the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union. Shows how the failure of the planned economy was predicted by Ludwig von Mises, how Friedrich Hayek showed that planned economy is the basis of a totalitarian state. Examines how the ups and downs of Soviet socialism affected the debate on economic policy in the Western countries. Easy to read, no jargon.

Pode ser encontrado no maior sebo eletrônico de livros do mundo: Abe Books (www.abebooks.com), por preços que vão de US$ 1,11 (sim, isto mesmo um dólare e onze centavos) até US$ 33,17 (desculpem a pergunta, mas porque diabos esse livreiro tinha que colocar 17 centavos nos seus 33 dólares?; esses americanos são malucos, mas vai ver que ele vende livros por quilo, ou melhor, pounds...)

59) Os Estados Unidos como poder imperial...

Review
Hot, Cold & Imperial
By Robert Skidelsky
The New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 12 • July 13, 2006
Neste link.

1945: The War That Never Ended
by Gregor Dallas
Yale University Press, 739 pp., $40.00

Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
by Charles S. Maier
Harvard University Press, 373 pp., $27.95

The question of how the world should be run, and America's part in its running, is the subject of much academic and political discussion in Washington these days. The factual questions are: Is the United States on the road to becoming an empire like the Roman and British Empires before it? What are the prospects for such an enterprise in today's world? More speculatively, does globalization require an imperial underpinning? There are also questions of value: Is imperialism a good or bad thing? Should the United States sacrifice its republican institutions in order to fulfil an imperial vocation?[1] Gregor Dallas's 1945: The War That Never Ended can be read as setting the scene for this discussion. The Second World War cleared away the European empires, actual and aspiring, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the two contending superpowers. The collapse of the Soviet Union concluded the "unfinished business" of the war, by leaving the United States the sole superpower and simultaneously creating a single world economy. The dynamics of postwar US supremacy and the question of whether they are pushing the United States toward formal empire are the subject matter of Charles Maier's Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors.
1.
World War II, according to Gregor Dallas, never ended: it just stopped where the armies of East and West met, and almost immediately morphed into the cold war. This was because although the Soviet Union had achieved its war aim—an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans—America had not achieved its aim, which, it will come as no surprise, was to convert the whole of Europe to democracy and free enterprise. The cold war started when Truman realized that "democracy" did not mean quite the same to Stalin as it did to the Americans.
That, in a nutshell, is the main argument of Dallas's discursive but fascinating book, made up of myriad fragments like a collage. Dallas justifies his method by quoting the Polish poet Czesl/aw Mil/osz: "You can only express things properly by details. When you've observed a detail, you must discover the detail of the detail." Nevertheless, underlying the book is an eminently sound proposition: that the war against Germany (Japan is scarcely mentioned) was simultaneously a struggle to control the post-Nazi future. Behind every military decision lay a political calculation. Indeed, Dallas's book is so much taken up with the jostling for postwar position that it sometimes loses sight of the fact that till 1945 a war was still being fought against Nazi Germany. But even in defeat, Hitler, too, influenced the shape of post-Nazi Europe, by his choice of where to fight, how hard to fight, whom to surrender to—and whom to kill. By the end, he preferred to have Germany conquered by Slavic communism than by the decadent democracies.
Dallas dates the turning point of the war to July 1943, with the German failure to push back the Russian salient at Kursk and with the Allied landings in Sicily. But Hitler may have realized that the war was lost—in the sense that he would not be able to impose his will on events by military force alone —as early as December 1941, following the disastrous German defeat before Moscow, one of the forgotten but decisive battles of the war.[2] Thereafter the most he expected from his armies was to achieve "temporary" victories to put him into a better bargaining position. He thought that the alliance between the West and the USSR would soon be torn asunder by conflicting interests, leaving him with room for a "political" solution. He was right to believe the Grand Alliance would break up, wrong to think it would happen before his own empire had been swept away. His aims, methods, and crimes had put him beyond the pale for the Western Allies.
Dallas suggests that Hitler would have had a better chance with Stalin. The main evidence for this is the Ribbentrop–Molotov, or Nazi–Soviet, Pact of August 23, 1939. By the terms of this pact, Hitler recognized half of Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia as being in the Russian "sphere." Most historians have regarded the pact as a marriage of convenience: Hitler avoided the danger of a two-front war; Stalin bought time. Dallas accepts the argument for Hitler —Hitler's sights were always set on the conquest and settlement of European Russia—but not for Stalin. Stalin looked on the pact as a long-term arrangement because, to put it brutally, Hitler could give him what the Western democracies could not: reconstitution of the tsarist empire and further gains for the future. In November 1940, he and Hitler toyed with the idea of carving up the British Empire between them. But this was not Hitler's dream, and he was probably leading Stalin on in order to keep supplies flowing from Russia till he was ready to strike.[3]
Dallas claims that even after the Germans invaded Russia, Stalin never abandoned the "fantastic perspectives" opened up by the Nazi–Soviet Pact. "In the spring and early summer of 1943, Stalin's representatives in Stockholm attempted to negotiate a revived Pact; it failed because Hitler insisted on holding on to the Ukraine." It was the Soviet victory at Kursk in July 1943, not at Stalingrad in December 1942 (which was followed by a successful German counterattack), that finally convinced him that Hitler had no more to offer. "As the Soviet armies rolled forward, Stalin could nourish the dream of imposing on Europe a novel kind of Nazi–Soviet Pact—one minus the Nazis."
The strength of Dallas's hypothesis is that it helps explain the movement of Stalin's armies, and thus links the Nazi– Soviet Pact to the origins of the cold war. Stalin's postwar annexations, including Poland up to the "Curzon Line," closely followed the contours of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. His designs on the Balkans, and even on the Middle East (where Israel was originally conceived as a Soviet satellite), were foreshadowed in the November 1940 conversations between Molotov and Ribbentrop in Berlin. Stalin's ambitions were bound to break up the Grand Alliance. What Britain and France were not prepared to concede to Russia in 1939 as the price for an anti-Nazi pact, America and Britain were not prepared to concede as the price for continuing the Grand Alliance. The seeds of the cold war, in Dallas's view, were laid when Stalin insisted at Tehran in November 1943 that the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact still applied to Poland.
Dallas's thesis is not without its problems, though. Does one need the pact to explain the "movement" of Stalin's armies? Was Stalin not just helping himself to the spoils of war that fell into his lap? For in fact Stalin got much more than Hitler offered. The cold war may have started with the Soviet takeover of Poland, but it got going seriously only in 1948 with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which had nothing to do with the pact. (It was Czechoslovakia rather than Poland that was regarded as the litmus test of Soviet intentions in 1948, as it had been of German intentions ten years earlier.)
One could argue that the "fantastic perspectives" that opened up to the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1948 had less to do with the pact than with the power vacuum across Western and Central Europe. The claim that Stalin had a preference for Hitler also seems overdone, in view of his earlier efforts to negotiate an anti-German alliance with Britain and France. Then again, if Stalin was so keen to have Hitler as a companion in world conquest, why did he send such a spectacularly sour envoy as Molotov to Berlin in November 1940? Furthermore, Dallas offers no evidence for his contention that Stalin's representatives tried to renegotiate the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in Stockholm in 1943. The truth is we will never know for sure what went on in Stalin's mind. Dallas offers a powerful provocation to thought rather than conclusions from evidence.
Roosevelt was never concerned about who should liberate whom, because he dreamed of a post-territorial condominium with "Uncle Joe," exercised through multilateral institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. This can be counted as the most spectacular misjudgment in American history, aided and abetted by a network of Soviet spies in the Treasury and State Departments. Churchill, who was defending a territorial empire, evinced a much greater interest in frontiers: hence his attempt to limit Soviet expansionism by means of the "percentages" agreement with Stalin in October 1944. For the same reason, Roosevelt showed no interest in getting the British and American armies into Eastern Europe through Germany ahead of the Russians. This would have been quite feasible in the autumn of 1944, when Germany lay defenseless against Western assault. Nor did he back Churchill's plan of seizing Hungary and Austria by forcing the attack on the German lines in northern Italy. "A break through the Ljubljana Gap and a march into Austria," argued Harold Macmillan, Churchill's envoy in the Mediterranean, in his memoirs, "might have altered the whole political destinies of the Balkans and Eastern Europe."[4] But implementing such strategies would have required the Churchillian concept of the "balance of power," which had no place in Roosevelt's brave post-territorial world. And Churchill, the weakest of the Big Three, did not control Western policy.
Of the three victors, Britain's victory was the most equivocal. The Soviet Union gained an empire in Eastern Europe, the United States became the world's leading power, but Britain emerged too weak to hold on to the empire which it had been Churchill's object to preserve. Dallas emphasizes a point with which I am bound to agree since I have made the argument myself[5] —that Roosevelt's persistent war aim was "the ejection of the British Empire as a Great Power." Churchill in his geopolitics and Keynes in his economic policy fought as hard as they could to maintain independence from the Americans, but the shrunken assets Britain controlled by the end of the war were inadequate for the job.
Was there an alternative? Dallas reminds us that De Gaulle proposed an Anglo-French alliance on November 12, 1944. "Should England and France agree to act together..." he told Churchill, "they will wield enough power to prevent anything being done which they themselves have not accepted or decided. Our two countries will follow us. America and Russia, hampered by their rivalry, will be unable to counter it." Others would join the Anglo-French camp because of their "instinctive fear of giants." Churchill refused. "It is better to persuade the stronger than to go against them." Dallas tends to ascribe Churchill's choice of America over Europe to his rootlessness (abetted by his American mother, and his free trade perspective), but who was the fantasist: Churchill with his hopes of encouraging the Americans into the paths of realism or De Gaulle with his dream of a bankrupt Europe as a third force?
2.
Dallas's parallel theme is the struggle that went on within Hitler's fortress— between collaborators and resisters, and between different groups of resisters. The collaborators hoped to find an acceptable place within Hitler's empire; the partisans and resisters fought over the post-Nazi future—as spearheads for the armies and vanguards of postwar governments. Which political tendency won out depended on the "movement of armies." Dallas reminds us of just how open the outcome was. In 1943 the "non-Communist resistance in Poland awaited the Western Allies to liberate them; the Communists in France stood ready for a Soviet liberation." Neither expectation was as absurd as it now seems. The Normandy invasion had not yet happened; and the German armies were still deep in Russia.
In all those parts of German-dominated Europe whose populations were not destined for slavery or liquidation, the Germans had allies and collaborators who, whether from conviction or perceived necessity, sought a privileged place in Hitler's New Order. For a time, at least, the Vichy regime in France enjoyed more legitimacy than the postwar puppet regimes set up by the Russians in Eastern Europe. It seemed to many in 1940 and 1941 that Germany had won the war. On that assumption, what was the alternative to making the best of a bad situation? Pierre Laval and Admiral Jean-François Darlan hoped to join with Germany in carving up Africa at Britain's expense. This was not entirely foolish: as we have seen, it was one of Hitler's options, though not his preferred one. Even on the murderous eastern front there were pro-Nazi forces inspired by ethnic anti-Russianism or anti-communism or anti-Semitism. Had Hitler been less brutal toward local populations he might have been received as a liberator over much of the Soviet Union, and not just in the Ukraine. But his racial theories left no room for Slav allies.
The different Resistance factions contended among themselves for control in order to establish their claim to postwar rule. Often they seemed keener to eliminate their rivals than fight the occupier. In France, the Communists tried to ensure that they, not De Gaulle, inherited liberated France. This might involve betraying Gaullist Resistance leaders, like Jean Moulin, to the Germans. The problem faced by De Gaulle—known as Ramrod, Dallas writes, "because he had all the rigidity of a poker without its occasional warmth"—was that he was the self-appointed leader in exile, whereas most of the internal Resistance, reacting to mass deportations of French workers to Germany, was run by the Communists. De Gaulle's other problem was that Roosevelt detested him. FDR was "at heart an ally of Vichy, thinking always that at any moment Vichy would switch sides and become a convenient client state of the Americans." For two years it was Churchill and Macmillan alone who upheld the claims of the prickly French general against American hostility. De Gaulle won the battle of legitimacy when his supporters gained control of the insurrection in Paris in August 1944 shortly before the Americans arrived, aided by the German military commander Dietrich von Choltitz, who ignored Hitler's order to "raze" the French capital. The price De Gaulle had to play was to share his legitimacy with the Communists. Dallas rightly notes that De Gaulle's ambiguous relationship with the Communists at home and with the Soviets abroad continued for the rest of his life.
Paris was in another world from Warsaw. The cities were "two symbols of the closing months of the Second World War: Paris was liberated, Warsaw was annihilated." In the German-occupied part of Poland there was very little scope for collaboration with the Germans, since the Nazi plan was to make it a slave state. The murder of tens of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere in 1940 on Stalin's orders showed that Stalin had an almost equally grim fate in store for the Polish elite in his part of Poland. With Wl/adysl/aw Sikorski's death in an aircraft accident in 1943, Poland lost its De Gaulle, but even he would have been powerless to save Poland from the Soviets in face of the "movement of armies"—unless the London Polish government had received much stronger support from Britain and America. This would probably have required a showdown with Stalin—perhaps even a threat to cut off crucial supplies to Russia—which Churchill may have been ready for, but which Roosevelt was not.
Without determined Western backing, the Warsaw Uprising started by the non-Communist "Home Army" on August 1, 1944, was destined for catastrophe. Its motive was to seize Warsaw before the arrival of the Red Army, which it would greet as Warsaw's rightful owners. It partly succeeded in its initial aim, but the Red Army remained encamped on the right bank of the Vistula and never came, leaving the Germans time to destroy the Home Army and most of Warsaw in two months of savage fighting. Stalin even denied landing rights to the RAF and USAF to fly in supplies.
Historical debate has centered on the reason for Stalin's decision to halt his armies. Was it because they were exhausted? Did he want to give the Germans time to eliminate the anti-Communist resistance? Or was he concerned about a German counter-attack? Dallas has another explanation: Stalin stalled the advance into Germany, and diverted part of his forces to the Balkans, in order to "reestablish the gains he had made and expected out of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939...." Seized by a single idea, Dallas explains too much by it.[6]
3.
Of the 18 million Nazi victims in Europe, 11 million, including millions of Jews, died in Poland. The final section of Dallas's book reminds us that Hitler and Stalin were not "normal" statesmen pursuing "realpolitik" goals, but mass murderers who aspired to reshape the societies they controlled by transporting or liquidating entire populations. Dallas's special provocation is to argue (as Solzhenitsyn has done) that in the matter of forced labor and extermination Hitler was a pupil of Stalin, who only "caught up" with his master in the war, and then in the special circumstances of "total" war. "Russian and German camps breathed death into one another, like the winds of the plain, in an alternating cycle." In Poland and Russia, the "Nazis moved into former Soviet camps; the Soviets then took over, and used the old Nazi camps. Worse still, some of these camps would have the same inmates and the same administrators. This is the story that has so far not been told."
Slave labor was started by Stalin: there were already millions in huge industrial camps like Kolyma in 1939 when there were only 21,000 in German concentration camps. During the war Hitler copied Stalin by rounding up millions of foreign workers to produce munitions and food in Germany, a disastrous policy that drove young men in the occupied territories into the Resistance. The policy was the logical consequence of refusing to allow the mobilization of German women, Hitler believing that "our long-legged, slender German women" were unsuitable for factory work.[7] As in the Soviet Gulag, many of these workers died from brutality, malnutrition, and disease.
Dallas follows Solzhenitsyn in denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The classic distinction between stigmatizing a race (which could not change its characteristics) and a class (which could be "reeducated") breaks down with Stalin. He too "dumped whole nations down the sewer pipes," wrote Solzhenitsyn. Stalin deported the nations whom he thought had collaborated, or might collaborate, with the Germans—Georgians, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmuks—straining the Russian transport system just as the deportation of Jews to the East strained the Nazi transport system. The reasoning was the same in both cases: their ethnic characteristics made the victims actual or potential enemies of the regime. In 1941, Hitler wavered between deporting and exterminating the Jews. He had been considering evacuating all Jews first to Madagascar and then east of the Urals. It was "the loss of any chance for control of these lands...[which] pushed the Nazis towards...the 'Final Solution.'"
In another twist to the story, Dallas argues that the "event decisive for the fate of the Jews" was initiated not by Hitler but by Stalin when he deported the Volga Germans to Siberia in September 1941. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi minister for the eastern territories, told Hitler that virtually none would survive. "It seems that it was between late September and October 1941 that Hitler, not a forgiving man, decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe in return." Thus the two regimes' policies were linked in a murderous tit for tat. The acceleration of Hitler's extermination program in 1942 was a reaction to a war that was being lost. After the defeat in front of Moscow, Dallas argues, Hitler "was obliged to imagine ways in which his Nazi ideology could survive.... The Jews, all the Jews, would have to be murdered while he still had control, before the war was ended."
According to Dallas, the main difference between the Nazis and the Soviets was that "the Nazis had specific aims whereas the Communists fired in every direction." The Nazis were the more determined killers, but their targets were much more limited. "The Russian Gulag penetrated every aspect of Soviet society," whereas most Germans "had nothing to fear from the Nazis." It was the Soviet Union, not Hitler's Germany, that was "in strictest terms the totalitarian state."
Different interpretations are possible of the origins of the Holocaust, and Dallas's is entirely plausible. Its great strength is its insistence that this appalling tragedy was not predetermined. His account raises large questions about what other nations might have done to prevent the genocide of the Jews. The most uncomfortable question of all is: Would it have happened at all had Britain and France conceded Danzig to Hitler?
The end of the fighting left a huge population of displaced persons: the survivors of the camps, German populations fleeing from the Red Army, non-Germans who had collaborated with the Germans, voluntarily or involuntarily. At Yalta the Big Three decided that the "scum of Europe," as Koestler called them, would be repatriated to their "home countries," even against their will. This was a parody of "national self-determination." Jews suffered most: for months survivors of the Nazi concentration camps stayed in them, many of them dying of typhus and dysentery. The Cossacks, Caucasians, Muslims, Christians, Ukrainians, even Poles who had fought or worked for the Germans were deported to the Gulag. The most infamous episode was the consignment of 25,000 Cossacks and thousands of Yugoslav "Chetniks" from British-occupied Austria to the sanguinary attentions of the Red Army and Tito's partisans. The uprooting and murder of peoples went on after the movement of armies had stopped.
When, then, did World War II eventually end? It was only in the years after 1989 that the Nazi–Soviet Pact was finally liquidated. Post-Communist Russia has lost all the imperial gains it made under the pact: eastern Poland (now Belarus), the Baltic States, Bessarabia (now Moldova), plus their surrounding circle of Eastern European satellites have all become independent states. Even some of Stalin's original dominions, inherited from Imperial Russia, have gone—Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Russia's influence in the Middle East is virtually extinguished. NATO, said Solzhenitsyn in a recent interview with Moskovskiye Novosti, "is methodically developing its military deployment in Eastern Europe and on Russia's southern flank."[8] The United States is embarked on a revised version of FDR's mission to spread democracy and free markets around the world. It would take a rash person to say that frontiers in all these places are finally fixed, though it is far from clear where they will be fixed, or whether fixing them will make that much difference.
4.
The US is the only belligerent discussed by Dallas without territorial ambitions. Germany, Italy, and Japan were trying to acquire empires, Russia to restore the Russian Empire, Britain to retain its empire. (China is barely mentioned.) America aspired to be a post-territorial "empire of liberty," not a territorial dominion imposed by force. The US was only compelled to establish "frontiers" in Europe and Asia in 1947 and 1949, something FDR had disdained, because of the collapse of his delusion of a US–Soviet condominium. In the postwar world, as Professor Charles Maier of Harvard University describes it in Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors, the US had "far-flung, but real, frontiers." Woodrow Wilson and FDR had dreamed of American leadership not based on territory; rivalry with the Soviet Union forced the United States to construct a territorial and post-territorial domain simultaneously.
Maier's book has much to say about how this construction took place after 1945. In this sense it follows from where Dallas left off. The US compromise between traditional empire and a Kantian comity of democratic republics was to establish American "hegemony" over the "free world," backed by military commitments and military bases, and underpinned by nuclear weapons and Ford assembly-line technology. Maier distinguishes between the "empire of production" and the "empire of consumption." In the first phase, the American productive system was transferred to its allies through Marshall Aid and other aid packages; Phase II's "empire of consumption" was based on the dominance of the dollar, and culminated in the "twin deficits" of today—the budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit.
Maier contrasts the ways in which Britain and the United States financed their world domination. He shows how the adventurism of the Kennedy- Khrushchev period, which culminated in the Cuban missile crisis and in the Vietnam debacle, gave way to the Nixon-Kissinger-Brezhnev efforts to stabilize frontiers between the rival systems, and how this failed attempt to "adjourn...the cold war" was followed by a new "forward movement" by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and by the Carter doctrine of human rights. Of the Nixon-Kissinger design for imperial multipolarity—in which the American superpower would share the world with China and the USSR—he writes: "Not since Hitler had offered Molotov the domination of South and Central Asia in November 1940 was such a fundamental world political order presented as a grand bargain to international rivals."
Although there are some interesting ideas here, this is the less satisfactory part of Maier's book, since the history of the cold war is well-trodden ground. It shows signs of being hastily written, and is full of irritating small mistakes. It has not escaped the blight of the academic field called political economy—vague treatment of fundamental concepts, and of the linkages between economic and politics.
More thought-provoking is the first part of Maier's book, in which he inquires about the meaning of the word "empire" and to what extent the US position in the world resembles past empires like the Roman and British Empires. His method is to identify "recurring themes" in imperial history and ask how far the US experience fits them. The inquiry has become especially relevant, because an academic consensus is developing that by its military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, its establishment for the first time of military bases in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and its threat of an attack on Iran, the United States has moved beyond the forms of "primacy," "hegemony," "leadership," or "ascendancy," by which its role has until recently been described, and aspires to reach a new stage in which the term "empire" might apply. The historian Niall Ferguson has called America an "empire in denial"[9] ; Maier suggests it might be an empire in the making.
Maier wants to reserve the term "empire" for a "territorially extensive structure of rule," which subordinates "diverse ethnolinguistic groups" and reserves preponderant power to an executive authority and its elites. On this definition, the United States is not and never has been an empire, because it has not sought formal sovereignty over foreign territory. (Domestic expansion in North America doesn't qualify, in Maier's view, because the Native Americans were semi-nomads; the Philippines was an exception.) However, Maier finds it difficult to use the word consistently, talking about the US as an "empire of consumption." In the end, the best he can do is to say America has some characteristics of an empire and not others.
Take the way the United States exerts power. Subordinate rulers abroad defer to the United States. Washington, too, is an "imperial" capital, attracting academic and other elites who want to be near the center of power. However, unlike in the case of traditional empires, these arrangements are voluntary, resting on shared values, and were created by a common perception of an external threat by the Soviet Union: if this is empire, it is "empire by invitation."
Empires had emperors. The title emperor was connected to military rule. The emperor personifies rule, has an intimate relationship with military resources, possesses (or claims) a moral grandeur, and, unlike a monarch, is not necessarily a heredity dynast. In Maier's view, Rome remains the most convincing model for discussing the United States because foreign conquest changed it from a republic to an empire. It retained eviscerated republican institutions like the Senate, but power shifted to the emperor, and voting became plebiscitary. According to this view, the US is not yet an empire because its domestic politics haven't yet become Bonapartist. But perhaps it is on the way. There has been a slippage of power from the legislature to the executive, from open discussion to expert control, and from the politics of political parties to the politics of religious and other groups. According to the Bush doctrine of the "unitary executive," the president as commander in chief has supreme power and does not have to be accountable to Congress for its exercise.
America does not yet have emperors, though it is possible to think of its presidents as elected emperors, with dynastic elements. Since World War II, considerations of "national security" have increasingly subverted civilian institutions, even though the one genuine US proconsul, General Douglas MacArthur, was put in his place by President Truman. However, the official and popular ideology of the United States is anti-imperial, and for that reason alone America is unlikely to complete the classical transition from republic to empire.
Another recurring theme of empire is the psychological satisfactions it provides: heroism, glory, valor, honor, opportunity of service for elite groups, vicarious identification for the masses. It has been seen as an antidote to decadence.[10] Maier has little to say by way of moral evaluation of empire. He writes, that is, as a political scientist or sociologist, not as a political philosopher. He does not consider the role of ideas as influences on forms of rule. This results in a defective discussion of reasons for empire and of imperial collapse. Empires, as Thucydides realized long ago, arise from a belief in the right to rule, and collapse when that belief wanes. To be sure, there is a strong ideological element in the current US drive for empire, especially among neoconservatives in the academy and Washington think tanks. It is based on the belief that the West is best, and will only be secure if the Western way becomes the universal norm. Those who resist the embrace of the West are thought to be savages and must be persuaded, or forced, to recognize the error of their ways. This is classic European imperial-speak, and it is heard in Washington today. However, the doctrine of Western superiority has not yet crystalized into an overt imperial ideology. It lacks the nineteenth-century, as well as the Nazi, ingredient of racism, without which it is difficult to justify rule without consent, though the Soviets managed it for a time.
Maier discusses whether empires by definition exploit their subjects, concluding sensibly that all theories of exploitation make "unresolvable normative claims." Leaving these aside, Maier raises some factual questions which can in principle be resolved: Do the costs of empire outweigh the bene-fits to the imperial power? Can these costs be reclaimed from imperial subjects through taxation? Which groups gain and lose through the imperial connection? Maier tends to support the liberal view that empires, with all their military and other costs, are a
net drain on the imperial power, but that political and business elites, and special interests, both in the imperial center and at the peripheries, may gain at the expense of those with lower incomes.
This seems to fit recent US experience (for example, in relation to Latin America), but is unlikely to sustain an imperial project in the absence of popular support. Maier perceptively notes the reluctance of liberals to admit the connection between markets and empire. In economics as well as in psychology, they tend to view the satisfactions and rewards of empire as residues of past conditions rather than as part of the workings of markets. Thus, Maier writes, today's market model of globalization hides the role of US multinationals in spreading "imperial employment patterns" through offshore production. To the extent that empires were always a contest for control of resources, the current American adventure in the oil-rich Middle East fits the traditional imperial logic.
The most interesting discussion in Maier's book concerns the role of borders and of violence in the imperial experience. Empires, like states (at least in the Western tradition), are defined by having fixed borders; but the fixing of borders by conquest, and the maintenance of borders thus fixed, is a source of recurring violence "on the frontier," which affects domestic politics. Imperial borders, Maier argues, are inherently contestable, since they do not rest on consent. So empires, unlike nations, are unstable structures. His main point, though, is that the attempt to "fix" borders marks a retreat from claims to universal sovereignty, a recognition that the imperial writ can be made to run only so far. The classic example is Augustus' decision to limit the Roman Empire at the Rhine following the loss of Varus' legions beyond it in 9 AD. "The utopia of the United States," writes Maier, "has been of a system of free worldwide transactions.... When the utopia is punctured, the logic of territory reasserts itself." Just as the consolidation of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe forced the US to limit its claims after World War II, so the emergence of terrorism has forced the US to shift from its post-territorial utopia to territorial defense in the post-Communist world.
Thus the fundamental contradiction at the heart of empires is that they promise peace but beget war. Their claim to be benevolent institutions is subverted by continuous conflict on frontiers and the revolt of subject peoples. Maier recalls England's butchery of the native Irish population in the sixteenth century. With their mania for classification, empires also hardened ethnicities, identifications, and divisions: what are called "ancient hatreds" usually turn out to be products of colonial policies.
Maier is agnostic on the most popular current defense of empire as an agent of globalization, whatever its historical validity. The argument is that globalization requires conditions of peace and security that only empires can bring about. But advocates of empire forget that the last age of globalization, which was also the age of imperialism, ended in World War I. The truth is that no imperial substitute for multilateral institutions and rules will be accepted in a globalizing world that is also becoming more pluralist. There is no alternative but to advance at the pace which the slowest Great Power finds acceptable.
6.
So where is America headed? The idea that the US is an "empire of invitation" rather than conquest will be harder to sustain in the future in the absence of the Soviet threat. Clearly the United States is not in Iraq by invitation. Some line seems to have been crossed and, as in Vietnam, the US either will have to make its new frontier effective—which in Iraq it is manifestly not, with sectarian civil war raging almost unchecked—or get out. In any case, the notion of an "empire of invitation" was always partly a fiction: the United States was not "invited" into Germany and Japan in 1945; it conquered them, and they have been "garrisoned" by American troops ever since. One could say that since World War II both countries have been somewhere between being independent and being client states: and the same is true for the European Union as a whole, whose leaders and populations lack the will and cohesion to break out of their US-protected cage.
The main conclusion which emerges from Maier's study, though it does not seem to me that he spells it out explicitly, is that between the two poles of "empire" and "independence" there are a large number of intermediate positions which exhibit different mixtures of independence and subordination. It is the fiction that there are only two alternatives—a fiction which is the joint product of Wilsonian idealism and anti-colonialism—which causes most of the current confusion. Any exertion of power by the strong is called "imperialist" by its opponents, while the imperialist has to pretend that his actions are fully consistent with national independence.
Yet while this disguise may offend simple souls who crave sharp contrasts, it may also be a sign of progress. There is some evidence that forms of rule have been growing softer, more subtle, and more humane; being less transparent, they are harder to define. Despite the mass killings and other atrocities that still disfigure parts of the world, the systematic "imperial" brutality of Hitler or Stalin which Dallas documents is past history. They tortured and killed millions; now a relatively small number of violent deaths, of "human rights" abuses attributable to imperial efforts, arouses universal condemnation—partly, but not wholly, because of the difficulty of keeping violence off the airwaves.
The European Union is a new political contraption, and we Europeans have the same problem in identifying it as Maier has with the United States. Is it a federal state in the making? Is it a confederation plus? I suggest it is an experiment in a form of governing a group of countries for which we have not yet found a name. And the same, I suspect, is true of the position of the United States in the world. So, illuminating though it is, the attempt to fit the United States into historical patterns of empire is ultimately misguided. The United States is not in transition from hegemony to empire. The world is in transition to new forms of political organization, whose outlines can be dimly perceived, but whose frontiers cannot yet be fixed.

Notes
[1] The latest offering is Harold James's brilliant essay, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire(Princeton University Press, 2006). James, whose translation from Cambridge, England, to Princeton, USA, may be viewed as an example of the imperial job market in action, quotes the bon mot once applied to the British Empire: "Britannia waives the rules in order to rule the waves."
[2] On this see Rodric Braithwaite's excellent Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (Knopf, 2006).
[3] This interpretation has been challenged by John Lukacs, in June 1941: Hitler and Stalin (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 23–24. Lukacs depicts Hitler as wavering in the autumn of 1940 between the attractions of a "peripheral" (German, Italian, French, Spanish) anti-British coalition which would include the Soviet Union and attacking the Soviet Union. It was Molotov's demand for military bases in Finland and Bulgaria when he came to Berlin in November 1940 which convinced Hitler to give the go-ahead to "Barbarossa."
[4] H. Macmillan, The Blast of War 1939– 1945 (Macmillan, 1967), pp. 510–511, quoted in Dallas, Among Empires, p. 442. For a different view, see Theodore Draper, "Eisenhower's War—II," The New York Review, October 9, 1986.
[5] In John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom 1937–1946 (Viking, 2001), pp. xiii–xv.
[6] Norman Davies, in Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (Viking, 2003), p. 272, agrees that "Soviet policy was ruthless, inhumane, and coldly calculating," but suggests that "their hesitations may have been inspired as much by disorientation as by deliberate policy."
[7] Quoted in Joachim Fest, Speer: The Final Verdict (Harcourt, 2002), p. 155.
[8] Quoted in William Pfaff, "Solzhenitsyn's Righteous Outrage," International Herald Tribune, May 4, 2006.
[9] Niall Ferguson, Colossus (Penguin, 2004), p. 6.
[10] This was one of the main themes of Leo Strauss, guru of the "neocons." See Edward Skidelsky, "No More Heroes," Prospect, March 2006, pp. 34–38.