Urbi et Orbi - Território Internacionalista

Documentário: The Death of Yugoslavia

2011-12-24T19:25:00.000-02:00

The Death of Yugoslavia (BBC) (1995)

Episódio 1 - Enter Nationalism

Episódio 2 - The Road to War

Episódio 3 - Wars of Independence

Episódio 4 - The Gates of Hell

Episódio 5 - A Safe Area

Episódio 6 - Pax Americana

Russia: The Man Who Got Russa Right (Foreign Policy)

2011-12-24T18:34:00.000-02:00

The Man Who Got Russia Right

Washington has a long tradition of misreading Moscow. As Putin teeters, it’s worth recalling George Kennan, the best Kremlinologist America ever had.

BY SUSAN B. GLASSER | DECEMBER 23, 2011

When mass protests broke out in Russia a few weeks ago, the breathtaking speed with which the country's generally complacent middle class turned on Vladimir Putin seemed most remarkable of all. For a dozen years, the KGB-trained tough guy in the Kremlin had been boosted by a stage-managed image of macho realism and the backstage machinations of a corrupt and heavyhanded state, fueling his wildly misleading popularity. When his approval ratings cratered after claims of vote-rigging in the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, it was as if a giant soufflé had fallen: Overnight, seemingly, Putin's poll numbers went from nearly 70 percent approval to a bare 51 percent.

It was so serious that even Dmitry Medvedev, the puppet president whose office Putin has said he plans to retake in 2012, was warning this week that the political system has "exhausted itself" and that without real change, Russia's rulers could find their rule "delegitimized." And that, Medvedev said, "would only mean one thing for our country: the collapse of the state."

The timing of Russia's latest political spasms couldn't be more fitting. It was exactly 20 years ago this week that the Soviet Union itself collapsed, a 70-year-old empire that evaporated in the weeks between Dec. 8, 1991 -- when Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared their independence -- and Christmas Day, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from the Soviet presidency, declared the office extinct and signed the government's death warrant. The events were so traumatic for many Russians of the old regime that, years later, Putin was moved to call the Soviet breakup "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

If you're bewildered by the new twists in Russia's famously contorted history, give thanks for George F. Kennan, who has been resurrected in a timely and authoritative biography by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. George F. Kennan: An American Life is out just in time to guide us through a Russia once again in the throes of political transformation.

Kennan almost singlehandedly invented the serious study of Russia by America's diplomats, and through his three stints in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he sent reporting home that was prescient and insightful even for today's audience. Consider this observation he made to his boss, the U.S. ambassador to Latvia, in 1932. At the time, the United States hadn't even recognized the Soviet Union, Kennan was several years short of 30 and he hadn't yet traveled inside Russia. But he was already immersed in its history, language and literature, and he foresaw the Soviet Union's internal decay -- at a time when others perceived a new superpower emerging to become one of the new strong men of Europe.

"From the most morally unified country in the world," Kennan wrote, "Russia can become over-night the worst moral chaos."

Based in Moscow a few years later, Kennan saw the historical contradictions that undermined the foundation of the Soviet regime -- while at the same time giving it a veneer of power. Russians were "used to extreme cold and extreme heat, prolonged sloth and sudden feats of energy, exaggerated cruelty and exaggerated kindness, ostentatious wealth and dismal squalor, violent xenophobia and uncontrollable yearning for contact with the foreign world, vast power and the most abject slavery, simultaneous love and hate for the same objects." Looking for an insight into the forces competing for political supremacy in Russia today, you could do far worse than Kennan's observations.

The quote comes from the draft of a 12,000-word essay Gaddis unearthed and which Kennan wrote for Ambassador Averell Harriman in the summer of 1944. Much of Kennan's genius about Russia is contained in it, from the notion that the Soviet Union, despite its enormous losses in World War II of some 20 million of its people, would rise as "a single force greater than any other that will be left on the European continent when this war is over" to the cultural factors that would eventually prove the communist state's undoing. "The strength of the Kremlin lies largely in the fact that it knows how to wait," Kennan wrote. "But the strength of the Russian people lies in the fact that they know how to wait longer."

Gaddis captures why Kennan's dispatches deserved to be immortalized. "Contrary to what almost everyone else assumed at the time Kennan portrayed the Soviet Union as a transitory phenomenon: It was floating along on the surface of Russian history, and currents deeper than anything Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had imagined would ultimately determine its fate." Or here is Gaddis on Kennan again: "He saw what others saw but in different colors.... He had a historian's consciousness of the past, which gave him a visionary's perspective on the future."

In short, Kennan was a great reporter.

But Kennan's place in American history, and in Gaddis's biography, is assured not for what he saw in Russia but for what he told the United States to do about it. He was, as a million Google hits will tell you, "the architect of containment," the postwar strategy for countering the Soviet Union that was at the heart of the Cold War.

The notion of "containment" as a new form of Western grand strategy -- a third way to block the Soviets that involved neither capitulation nor another devastating world war -- built on Kennan's views about the internal weaknesses of Soviet power. It was a brilliant insight, and Gaddis spends much of his biography on Kennan's decades-long struggle (he died in 2005 at age 101) against the many ways in which his idea was used to justify a long, highly militarized contest with the Soviet Union, a contest whose particulars he often violently disagreed with.

Kennan's containment was rooted in his fight to get Washington to pay attention to Stalin's shift at the end of World War II, from allying with the United States and Britain to competing with them for mastery over postwar Europe. But the term itself has lost that meaning; it has long since become shorthand for all that followed: the costly, reckless nuclear arms race, the war in Vietnam, and the chess match in the Middle East and Latin America, all justified in the name of competing with the Soviet aggressor. Kennan was against many if not all of those and yet his name has been indelibly associated with them -- in part reflecting the much cannier Washington savvy of his rivals within the U.S. government, rivals more skilled at promoting the muscular form of containment backed by American military might that they preferred. Even today, Kennan's name is shorthand for a policy he mostly hated. Here was GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, just the other day, complaining of our current foreign policy. "We're still trapped," he said, "in the Cold War, George Kennan mindset."

Here is where one can at least gently criticize Gaddis's book, the sort of tome that is invariably called "magisterial" and in this case for the most part is. Gaddis subtitles his book -- an authorized biography nearly 30 years in the making -- "An American Life," and goes on at great length about Kennan's critiques of the country of his birth. But Gaddis makes a far less convincing case that Kennan was anywhere near the student of the United States that he was of Russia. Indeed, some of his early writings, as Gaddis acknowledges, show Kennan as a sort of misinformed elitist (and a highly intolerant, vaguely anti-Semitic one at that) who had contempt for the democratic politics of his homeland even as the twin totalitarian behemoths were taking shape in 1930s Europe. For much of Kennan's long life after his star-studded diplomatic career, he was writing and teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and arguing on the wrong side of U.S. political battles in a Washington he had always disdained.

Which is why I'd like to make the case here for more of Kennan the Russia hand and less of Kennan the American strategist.

It is because of Kennan's meticulous observations, incisive prose and deep knowledge of the country and its people that 20th-century Americans were lucky enough to have him as witness to the monstrosities of Stalin's Russia -- one who didn't merely throw up his hands in confusion, or succumb to wishful thinking or fellow-travelerism or any of the other diseases endemic to so much Western writing about the Soviet Union.

This is a relevant legacy of Kennan's, and one that we have yet to fully absorb. Indeed, the tradition of getting Russia wrong has a distinguished Washington lineage, and one that I witnessed while covering the rise of Putin for The Washington Post in the early 2000s. In those years, Putin was reconsolidating power in the Kremlin, taking over independent media, jailing or banishing potential political opponents, shutting down elections for governor and putting into place a new security-state apparatus from such remnants of the Soviet police state as had survived the 1990s. Yet back in Washington, there were those who persisted in believing for years that Putin was not exactly as he seemed. Remember when George W. Bush looked into his "soul" in 2001? He wasn't the only one. We encountered many, both at senior levels in the U.S. government and among the Westerners in Moscow, who were so eager to do business with a resurgent Kremlin that they were willing to rewrite the facts. The White House today faces a similar challenge as President Obama, who made a point of a "reset" in relations after the frosty U.S.-Russia standoff of the late Bush years, now leaves it to his secretary of state to lecture Putin on democracy. Will the administration read the Kremlin right this time?

Kennan knew well the perils of Washington getting Russia wrong, and this understanding makes for the high point of Gaddis's gripping book. It was Feb. 22, 1946, and Kennan, at home in his Moscow sickbed, was getting pinged from Washington about a speech Stalin had given a few weeks earlier. The speech -- given at the Bolshoi Theater and, as Gaddis writes, "meant, superfluously, to win him an election" -- said nothing much new to Kennan, who saw it as so routine he at first just summarized it in a cable home to the State Department.

But like any good reporter, he responded when his bosses demanded front-page treatment for the story. In the 5,000-word masterpiece that followed, Kennan let rip with a document that summed up everything he had seen in six long winters in Russia, from the poisonous fusion of Russian nationalism with international Communism to the weaknesses of a country overextended into an empire it couldn't fully absorb and with a people it could repress but not fully conquer.

This was Kennan's famous "Long Telegram," and it exploded in the American policy debate like a bomb -- not because Kennan had his pulse on the policy battles in D.C., but because he knew Moscow when it mattered. "It hit Washington," Harriman later recalled, "at just the right moment."

Source: Foreign Policy.

More on Russia:

Development: The rebirth of Russian foreign aid (The Guardian)

Analysis: The new Russian military doctrine: more of the same?

Asia: North Korea's Uncertain Succession (CFR)

2011-12-22T12:30:00.000-02:00

North Korea's Uncertain Succession

Interviewee:	Scott A. Snyder, Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy, Council on Foreign Relations
Interviewer:	Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

December 19, 2011

Despite an outward show of unity in the wake of Kim Jong-il's death, there is much unknown about North Korea's succession process, says Scott A. Snyder, CFR's top expert on Korea. Snyder expects the North Korean leadership to focus inward to put its policies in order, but he questions whether the military leadership will remain loyal to Kim Jong-un, Kim's youngest son and handpicked successor, who turns twenty-eight next month. "Korea is a society that is attentive to age and seniority," says Snyder. "And so the idea of a twenty-eight-year-old who also commands the military is hard for outsiders to grasp, and it remains to be seen whether it is in fact sustainable."

With the death of North Korea's President Kim Jong-il, there seems to be a leadership plan in place in which his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, would take over. But Kim Jong-il's sister, Kim Kyong-hui is there in a senior position as well as her husband, Jang Song-taek. What is going to happen?

The initial focus is going to be on getting through this mourning period and the funeral. The funeral is going to be held on December 28. There already is a funeral committee and a kind of rank ordering of top individuals serving on the committee, and it is headed by Kim Jong-un. So that projects a sense of order to this process. Kim Kyong-hui is on the list as well as Jang Song-taek.

Do we learn much from the funeral list?

This list really flows in my view from the September 2010unveiling of Kim Jong-un (MSNBC) as the next leader at the Workers Party conference. And so far it looks like there are a lot of efforts to suggest a sense of continuity and a sense there is a collective process that is effectively functioning. What we don't know is what is happening behind the scenes and whether the process can hold in the absence of Kim-Jong-il, because he really has been the glue that has held the system together over the course of the past fifteen years.

Will North Korea become less militant, more willing to strike deals with the outside world, go back to nuclear disarmament talks or become more belligerent? Do you have any guesses?

I'm actually expecting kind of an inward turn and a focus on getting affairs in Pyongyang in order before things move forward. You know, Kim Jong-il actually observed a three-year mourning period [after his father died] in which he, even though everyone knew he was the successor, did not come out and perform any public functions or take any visible external leadership positions.

I anticipate that it is unlikely that Kim Jong-un is going to take an active role in the near term in managing state affairs.

That was back in what years?

That was between 1994 and 1997. There was the continuation of and resolution of the Agreed Framework [between the United States and North Korea] in 1994 so it didn't mean North Korea's diplomacy ground to a complete halt. But I anticipate that it is unlikely that Kim Jong-un is going to take an active role in the near term in managing state affairs. He will be involved much more in a kind of initial behind-the-scenes role especially as it relates to foreign diplomacy.

Any chance of provocation from the new leadership?

Because we know so little about the leadership, it also means we don't have a good grasp on the motivation in the event of provocations. And this is particularly complicated in a circumstance where a provocation could be evidence of fragmentation or divisions in the North Korean leadership. Or it could be a tactic used to signal to outsiders to stay away or it could be a tactic used by design to gain some kind of tactical advantage.

And I take it this funeral will not be attended by Western leaders?

That's right; it's all just a domestic affair. No foreign leaders invited.

In the last few weeks the United States has had diplomats in China meeting with North Korean officials. What was the purpose of those talks (NYT), and do you think those will continue or come to a halt?

Last week, the Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, Robert King, had discussions in Beijing with his counterpart, Ambassador Ri Gun, on the issue of conditions under which the United States might provide food assistance to North Korea. There was also anticipation following the visit of Special Representative for North Korean Policy Glyn Davies to Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing-- that there might be a third round of U.S.-North Korean bilateral talks. There were press rumors that that set of talks might have even occurred at the end of this week. It is unlikely now that will happen.

The United States does have some interesting decisions to make regarding whether or not, in the context of this transition, it might want to announce provision of food assistance now-- especially since the talks have already occurred and presumably there was some level of understanding reached about the conditions under which the United States would be willing to provide that assistance.

Would such assistance be conditioned on North Korea's returning to the Six Party Talks concerning stopping their nuclear program?

The talks about food have been separated from the nuclear issues.

And, the new presumptive leader, Mr. Kim Jong-un, hasn't really made himself known to the international scene yet; has he spoken publicly?

No. He has met some international leaders but always with his father. And all of his public appearances so far had been with his father. So he was being groomed for leadership, but this is still the early stages. Now he is basically on his own, and we will find out if he can move forward. If he does, he is supported by some sort of collective leadership process that looks like it had been put in place. We saw something very similar to this following Kim Il-sung's death when Kim Jong-il took over.

There is another factor here that I have to mention. He is turning twenty-eight on January 8, and although he carries the title of General, Korea is a society that is attentive to age and seniority. And so the idea of a twenty-eight-year-old who also commands the military is hard for outsiders to grasp and it remains to be seen whether it is in fact sustainable.

Talk a bit about him.

He apparently was at a Swiss boarding school for a couple of years and also has had educational opportunities in North. But my impression is that really he may be the North Korean version of a home school product with the exception of his two years in Switzerland. It doesn't appear to be the case that as he was receiving instruction in North Korea, or that he had a lot of interaction with peers, for instance, at Kim Il-sung University or at some other North Korean university.

Kim Kyong- hui, who is the new leader's aunt and her husband, Jang Song-taek, are high up in the leadership. Some people speculate that Jang in fact might be the true leader of the military for the time being.

Well, it's complicated. Jang is actually lower down on some of the leadership lists, and he also was not highly ranked in the September 2010 party conference. But he has the greatest potential for cross-institutional experience or connections in various parts of North Korea's bureaucratic system. Jang is the one who at first brush appears to have more lateral contact than many others in the system.

Talk about the relationship right now between South Korea and North Korea. How tense is it?

The two Koreas have really not been on speaking terms over the course of the summer and fall. The new unification minister [for South Korea] Yu Woo-ik, appointed back in October, has been attempting to open some new channels. But the North Korean leadership has shifted its focus more toward who is likely to succeed the current South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, than on having dialogue with Lee. So that's a reflection of the poor quality of Korean relations. Lee has continued to insist on a North Korean apology for the 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval ship, Cheonan, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island near the North Korean mainland.

Is there an election scheduled in South Korea?

There are parliamentary elections that will take place in April of next year, and the presidential election takes place in December. Lee cannot run again so there will be a new president. At the moment it looks like it could be a fairly competitive race. There was a recent election for Seoul mayor, which was won by a progressive candidate, Park Won-soon, who beat a candidate from Lee's conservative party. So there is the possibility of a shift in power from conservative to progressive in South Korea.

Are the progressives more interested in closer relations with the north?

Yeah, they've been historically more interested in engagement.

It's arguable that there is nothing that North Korea would like more than for the U.S. to come in as a kind of strategic counterweight to China.

How are North Korea's relations with China and the United States?

North Korea is economically almost completely dependent on China and that has resulted in a closer political relationship, but as far as I can see it is because the Chinese are hugging the North Koreans. Not necessarily because the North Koreans are hugging the Chinese back. And in fact it's arguable that there is nothing that North Korea would like more than for the U.S. to come in as a kind of strategic counterweight to China. But the nuclear issue remains as a major, really inescapable sticking point. There is simply no prospect for the United States to improve diplomatic relations with North Korea without denuclearization.

And is it likely the new leadership will want to maintain this nuclear foothold?

There's no reason yet to expect that there would be a change in policy direction in North Korea.

Source: CFR.

Asia: Kim Jong Il's Death and North Korea's Transition (Stratfor)

2011-12-21T11:53:00.000-02:00

Dispatch: Kim Jong Il's Death and North Korea's Transition

Source: Stratfor

Read more on North Korea:
International security: North Korea: Dear Leader, departed (The Economist)

International security: North Korea: Dear Leader, departed (The Economist)

2011-12-20T15:35:00.001-02:00

North Korea

Dear Leader, departed

Dec 20th 2011, 0:20 by D.T. and G.E. | SEOUL and BEIJING

THE tyrant has perished, leaving a failing, nuclear-armed nation in the uncertain young hands of his “Great Successor”. His father, since 1994 the "Dear Leader" of one of the world’s most secretive and repressive states (iconic, to the right in the photo above), died on a train at 8.30am on Saturday morning, of a heart attack. North Korea's 69-year-old supremo had been in poor health: he had heart disease and diabetes, and suffered a stroke in 2008. Nonetheless his demise places sudden and extraordinary pressure on his third son, his designated but untested successor, Kim Jong Un (to the left, in the photo above).

Kim junior—recently dubbed the “Young General”—is now officially in charge of North Korea. His dynastic succession, which had been in preparation since 2009, was reaffirmed swiftly by the state media (as swiftly as the 51 hours it took to announce the elder Kim’s death). The machinery of party and propaganda are organised to support a smooth succession. That does not mean its success is assured. At just 27 or perhaps 28 years of age, the young Un, educated in Switzerland and a great fan of basketball, wants for both experience and proof of loyalty from the armed forces. He was installed as the country’s leader-in-waiting little more than a year ago. By contrast his father had been groomed for leadership for nearly 20 years, with careful attention paid to establishing for him a cult of personality in the image of his own father, the dynasty’s founding dictator, Kim Il Sung.

That Kim Jong Un has no such background may be cause more for anxiety than for relief. His only qualification to lead the country is to be the son of a man who all but destroyed it, and a grandson of the man who built its disastrous brand of totalitarianism. In the 17 years Kim Jong Il ruled since the death of Kim Il Sung, North Korea teetered on the brink of collapse. A devastating famine in the mid-1990s killed as many as a million of his countrymen, while Kim Jong Il indulged his own appetites to excess and diverted massive resources to his dream, now realised, of building a nuclear weapon.

A third Kim may be a step too far. This succession’s viability may well depend on the work of a “regent”: Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law, Chang Sung Taek. He and his wife, Kim Kyong Hui, appear to have accompanied the Young General’s elevation in lockstep, as those who might stand in his (and their) way have been pushed aside. The ruling elite around the family trinity might appear cohesive from a distance, but they are potentially vulnerable to intrigue. North Korea’s is a government of obscure and competing factions—the army, the Korean Workers’ Party and the cabinet being the greatest—and any uncertainty or crisis in the months ahead could upset the delicate balance behind the dictatorship.

In the very short term though, it seems unlikely that anyone will make a move. Bruce Cumings, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, argues that the cohort of officials who rose during Kim Jong Il’s reign “are now in power and have much privilege to protect”. Even those who privately oppose Kim Jong Un will proclaim loyalty for now. China, fearing instability, will support the succession in so far as it promises to maintain order and prevent a flood of refugees from spilling over its border.

Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, called Kim Jong Il “a great leader of North Korean people and a close and intimate friend of Chinese people”. Zhang Liangui of the Central Party School in Beijing however told Caijing magazine that China’s policy has been developed with regard for “North Korea the country, not Kim Jong Il the man”. For many years Chinese leaders tried in vain to convince Kim Jong Il to embrace Chinese-style economic reforms; they might yet choose to push those reforms with renewed vigour.

The optimists’ argument would be that the time is ripe for such an overture, and that the West should join with its own. The year 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, is supposed to be the year that North Korea becomes a “strong and prosperous nation” (kangsong taeguk). The domestic justification for reform could go like so: Kim Jong Il built the nuclear weapons that made his nation “strong”, regardless of whether North Korea might choose to give them up; now it is the time make the country “prosperous”. “Diplomatically, that’s where you want to engage with them,” says John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul who watches China and North Korea. “Okay, you got strength, you’re secure. Now let’s work on prosperity together.”

Sceptics, a group who were proved right under the late Leader time and again, argue that the regime’s elite circles will be loth to abandon the systems of patronage and rent-seeking that have so enriched them. Moreover, any meaningful effort to open up the economy risks exposing the state’s ruling mythology. It has long been shielded from contamination by such inconveniences as facts.

Given a choice, the people might prefer facts to mythology, and real economic well-being over juche (loosely, self-reliance, or autarky). Local television reports are filled with the requisite footage of wailing on the streets of Pyongyang, where the more privileged and well-fed reside, but these images do not offer much insight into the reaction of the impoverished countryside. One NGO worker with extensive contacts around the country states that though they “lived under undeniable fear with Kim Jong Il as the leader of the nation, they are surely even more fearful with him gone.” Without even the barest infrastructure of civil society, lacking most of the tools of modern technology, the rural population of North Korea cannot be fruitfully compared to the victims of repression in the Middle East who are trying to make good on the Arab Spring.

North Korea's fate may depend in some measure, then, on how the rest of the world chooses to grapple with the new leadership, and vice versa. The death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 was quickly followed by the completion of an “agreed framework”, negotiated with the Clinton administration, that had seemed to sideline North Korea’s nuclear programme. Last week, immediately prior to Kim Jong Il’s death, there were whispers of a possible thaw in relations. North Korea is in desperate need of food aid, and the United States had reportedly offered to ship nearly a quarter of a million tonnes of "nutritional aid" on a month-to-month basis—on the condition that it would be allowed to verify that none of it ended up "on some leader's banquet table". There were even murmurs to the effect that Pyongyang might suspend its uranium-enrichment programme. There is something on which to build. Facing an election year of his own however, Barack Obama may find it difficult to pursue a new, softer line on North Korea, even with a new Kim.

Another approach could come from South Korea, but perhaps not until after its parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012. The sitting president, Lee Myung-bak, has defined his term in office with a hawkish stance towards the North. The South’s public reaction to Kim’s death was relatively muted: The KOSPI index of leading Korean stocks fell at first but then stabilised. Ordinary South Koreans have been debating whether or not condolences should be sent (as Pyongyang did when Kim Dae-jung, a former president of South Korea, died in 2009). Some have taken to criticising the country’s intelligence capabilities. The timing of Mr Lee’s visit to Japan on Saturday, December 17th, makes it seem plain that none of South Korea’s spooks were aware of Kim Jong Il’s fate until the official announcement was broadcast. That happened to fall on the president’s birthday; his party was cancelled at the last minute.

A spokesman for Mr Lee, Cho Hyun-jin, says that he is “cautiously optimistic” about North-South relations, and notes that he is in close contact with leaders in Japan, America, and Russia. Mr Lee’s term in office has been marked by severe tensions with North Korea. In November 2010, the North shelled a South Korean island, killing two civilians. Earlier in the same year it was accused of sinking a South Korean naval vessel with a torpedo, killing 46 sailors. Those may prove to have been the last two attacks to have been carried out at the order of Kim Jong Il. But some observers have attributed them to the “Great Successor” as rites of initiation.

Kim Jong Il’s funeral, which may provide the first opportunity for assessing the regime’s new pecking order, is to take place on December 28th. (Intriguingly, Mr Chang, the Great Successor’s chief regent, is ranked a lowly 19th on the official list of attendants.) The late Kim’s record, according to Mr Cumings, will be one of “failure at almost every level, except the critical one of maintaining maximum power for his family and the regime”. We will soon see whether or not Kim Jong Un—the youngest leader in the world to command a nuclear arsenal—has such staying power, or such unfortunate consequences for his people. The months ahead will be most telling. Mr Zhang, of the Central Party School in Beijing, makes a wry nod to his own country’s experience. Uttering the ritual platitudes of succession and actually carrying it out are two very different things. “Socialist countries are like this,” he says. “There's a certain distance between legal procedure and actual practice.”

(Picture credit: AFP PHOTO / KCNA VIA KNS)

Source: The Economist.

Cuba: Por que Cuba?

2011-09-25T13:19:00.004-03:00

Esta série de textos que hoje se inicia tem a proposta de compartilhar as impressões de minha viagem a Cuba, mas sob o olhar de um analista internacional, alguém que, pela própria formação profissional, deve ser extremamente sensível e observador a todos os detalhes, especialmente àqueles que passam despercebidos aos olhares mais apressados.

Fiquei em Cuba por duas semanas, entre o final de julho e o início de agosto de 2011. Permaneci a maior parte do tempo em Havana, mas fiz passeios de um dia a Pinar del Río e a Varadero. O objetivo maior da viagem foi manter-me o mais sintonizado possível com a realidade do país: lendo os jornais, assistindo aos noticiários, conversando com as pessoas, degustando os cartazes políticos na rua e decifrando as evidências não evidentes. O fato de eu ter ficado em uma “casa particular” em Habana Vieja permitiu um contato muito mais estreito com o povo cubano do que eu teria em um hotel ou um hostel, por exemplo.

Por que Cuba?

Cuba sempre despertou debates apaixonados. Tudo sobre a ilha é politizado ou politizável. Quando contei aos amigos de minha viagem, alguns chegaram a sugerir que eu seria “comunista”; alguns membros de minha conservadora família, por sua vez, alertaram-me de que eu só veria miséria e decadência por lá.

Desde criança, desconfio de tudo que é dito sobre Cuba. Desconfio dos relatos excessivamente laudatórios, que defendem que a ilha é o “paraíso socialista” da América Latina, de que são exemplos livros como “A Ilha” e “Fidel e a Religião”. Igualmente suspeito das críticas raivosas da imprensa nacional, que afirmam que Cuba é o reduto totalitário e miserável de uma utopia anacrônica e que aparecem semanalmente em revistas como “Veja”.

Em suma, não fui a Cuba buscando comprovar uma “tese”. Fui para aprender, para observar em que pé está a experiência cubana. É lógico que isso tudo tinha um senso de urgência, porque não se sabe quando essa experiência pode “acabar”. Então, assim que meu orçamento me permitiu, busquei realizar esse sonho de ver Cuba com meus próprios olhos.

Obviamente, a Cuba de Raúl Castro não é mais a Cuba dos subsídios soviéticos da época da Guerra Fria, nem a Cuba dos duríssimos anos 1990. As mudanças em Cuba são muito complexas, e creio que nem a população – e nem o governo – sabe ao certo o que está sendo criado ali. Pretendo, na medida do possível, relatar o que eu observei por lá.

Leia mais:

Como aquecimento, sugiro o delicioso texto do jornalista norte-americano Patrick Symmes, publicado na Folha de São Paulo. Symmes passou um mês em Cuba (sobre)vivendo com um salário de um cubano médio, e suas histórias são impressionantes. É o relato mais detalhado, realista e profundo do que Cuba é hoje. Leitura recomendadíssima!

Opinião: Quem assumirá os custos de estabilização da Líbia pós-Kadhafi?

2011-08-22T11:45:00.009-03:00

Urbi et Orbi pergunta:

Com a iminente queda de Muammar Kadhafi, como será feita a estabilização da Líbia? Quem assumirá seus custos materiais e humanos?

Lembrando que...

Os EUA já estão concentrados em duas guerras muito caras (Afeganistão e Iraque), e a Europa está à beira do colapso fiscal.

A agenda política dos rebeldes líbios para a Líbia pós-Kadhafi ainda não está totalmente clara.

As fidelidades políticas na Líbia, como em boa parte do mundo árabe, baseiam-se em critérios tribais, além dos religiosos.

Leia mais:

Libyan Rebels Enter Tripoli (Stratfor)

Cobertura completa da guerra civil líbia (Stratfor)

Site oficial do Conselho Nacional de Transição líbio (CNT)

Cobertura completa da Al-Jazeera

Diplomacia cultural: A lusofonia, a CPLP e a difusão do português no mundo (Outras Palavras)

2011-06-20T13:12:00.007-03:00

Língua Portuguesa: expansão e diversidade

ADMIN

– 20/06/2011POSTED IN: CAPA

Para diretor de instituto internacional do idioma, globalização é multilíngue. Português avança, mas não será língua única de país algum

A notícia passou quase despercebida, numa mídia pouco atenta aos grandes temas contemporâneos. Um estudo da Semiocast – uma consultoria francesa, especializada em pesquisa e inteligência de dados – revelou que o português já era, em fevereiro de 2010, a terceira língua mais “falada” no twitter. Usado em 9% das micropostagens, estava atrás apenas inglês e japonês. A investigação destacou, além disso, que a língua de Shakespeare perdia terreno rapidamente. Havia caído para 50% dos tweets globais –ainda muito, mas bem abaixo dos 66% que representara, apenas um ano antes. Idiomas pouco conhecidos no ocidente – entre eles, o malaio (6%), árabe, hebreu, islandês, persa, swahili, nepalês e pashtum – comparaciam, cada um, com mais de 2%.

Ao menos duas conclusões emergem destes resultados. A ideia de que a globalização conduziria a uma homogenização empobrecedora das línguas, e à imposição progressiva do inglês, não parece se confirmar na prática. As novas comunicações em rede vão se desenvolvendo na forma de uma galáxia multilíngue, na qual o português – impulsionado certamente pela forte presença do Brasil nas redes sociais – parece ter importância real.

O linguista brasileiro Gilvan Müller de Oliveira está convencido de que as relações entre os idiomas expressam sempre poder; e que, portanto, a garantia da diversidade linguística, é uma conquista democratizante, pela qual é preciso lutar de modo permanente. Gilvan é, desde outubro de 2010, diretor-executivo da organização encarregada de estimular a difusão global do português, e de gerir seu desenvolvimento. Trata-se do Instituto Internacional da Língua Portuguesa (IILP), criado em 2002, pela Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa (CPLP), sediado em Cabo Verde, é pouco conhecido no Brasil, embora muito atuante.

A partir do impulso de Gilvan, o IILP (vale conhecer também seu blog) tem adotado uma estratégia de expansão global do idioma audaciosa e refinada. Age para fortalecê-lo em regiões como a Galícia (no Estado espanhol), cuja língua, o galego, é muito semelhante à nossa. Busca resgatá-lo mesmo em países onde é empregado por pequenas comunidades – por exemplo, a Guiné Equatorial, onde os idiomas oficiais são espanhol e francês, mas há um idioma crioulo com traços de português. Estabelece laços com comunidades importantes que falam a língua em países onde poucos suspeitariam – a Ucrânia, por exemplo.

Mas, coerente com a defesa da diversidade, o IILP destoa de velhas concepções, favoráveis à suposta “pureza” da língua. Gilvan, que atuou anos defendendo os idiomas dos autóctones brasileiros contra a homogenização imposta pela português, orgulha-se das 3500 escolas bilíngues hoje instaladas no país, frequentadas por 200 mil índios. Posiciona-se a favor do ensino das línguas crioulas nas nações africanas onde o português era, até há pouco, o idioma único nas escolas. Condena as políticas que desestimularam, no passado, o uso do italiano, alemão ou polonês por comunidades de imigrantes no Brasil – para não falar na repressão à “língua geral”, predominante em várias regiões até o século 18 e hoje extinta, depois de longa e tenaz repressão – que chama de “dilapidação do patrimônio linguístico. Lembra que somos ainda, apesar disso, um país de cerca de 210 idiomas [ver seu artigo a respeito], e é preciso valorizá-las.

A entrevista a seguir registra seus pontos de vista e planos de ação no IILP. Ela própria é, aliás, expressão das colaboração linguística e cultural que pode haver no interior da CPLP. Adaptada por Outras Palavras, foi produzida em Cabo Verde, por Kriolidadi, um suplemento do jornal A Semana. A versão original pode ser conferida aqui (A.M.)

Qual é o papel do Instituto Internacional da Língua Portuguesa (IILP)?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: O instituto é uma iniciativa inovadora e supranacional de gestão do português. Sediado em Praia (Cabo Verde), representa de forma paritária e comunitária as oito nações da Comunidade de Países da Língua Portuguesa (CPLP) – Angola, Brasil, Cabo Verde, Guiné Bissau, Moçambique, Portugal, São Tomé e Príncipe e Timor Leste. Todos financiam, participam e têm direito aos benefícios da promoção e difusão da língua portuguesa. Através do Instituto, a língua portuguesa deixa de ser gerida só na sua base tradicional – Brasil e Portugal – e promove um contato mais estreito entre os países lusófonos, cada um gerindo sua pluralidade interna, mas podendo dialogar num quadro mais amplo.

Esta visão plural permitirá promover, em setembro, o Colóquio de Maputo, quando discutiremos a diversidade linguística na CPLP. Vamos debater experiências como as do Instituto de Linguística do Timor-Leste – que é responsável pela norma do tétum; do Instituto Angolano de Línguas Nacionais – que começa a fazer o trabalho de mapeamento das línguas nacionais (kikongo, kimbundu). Acompanhamos a criação da Licenciatura Intercultural Bilingue da Universidade Federal do Amazonas, no Alto Rio Negro. Ou a recente oficialização do mirandês, já aprovado pelo Parlamento Português. E, em Cabo Verde, as discussões para a oficialização e reconhecimento da língua crioula.

Como será esse novo modelo que quer reorganizar a lusofonia no mundo?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Queremos gerar e provocar novos contatos. Colocar em diálogo centros de produção de saberes linguísticos que nunca antes tinham entrado em contacto e que veiculam a língua e cultura dos países da CPLP.

De que forma?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Por exemplo: em breve, vamos organizar a primeira vídeoconferência de rádios comunitárias de língua portuguesa, que podem ser um imenso veículo de promoção do português. Se temos em conta que essas rádios comunitárias quase nunca tiveram oportunidade de se encontrar, estamos abrindo a via para projetos concretos de atuação e gestão da língua.

Por que Cabo Verde foi escolhido para sediar o Instituto?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Por sua situação geográfica e também linguística – no Atlântico, entre a América, a Europa e a África – Cabo Verde é símbolo de que a língua portuguesa não é só do país onde ela nasceu, Portugal, nem dominada pelo país com o maior número de falantes, o Brasil. Situa-se a meio caminho de várias rotas, e com uma perspectiva promissora em termos de gestão da língua, na medida em que as negociações para oficialização do crioulo avançam, e o processo de transformação do português em um idioma de circulação internacional vai-se consagrando pelo aumento constante da escolaridade da população. Poderá ser um modelo para os países da CPLP em África que também são países plurilingues.

Quais são as perspectivas do IILP para os próximos anos?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Em março de 2010, os Estados-membros da CPLP realizaram, pela primeira vez, uma conferência sobre o futuro do português. O encontro delegou ao IILP tarefas concretas, relacionadas a quatro pontos: a língua portuguesa nas organizações internacionais; a diversidade linguística na CPLP; a Língua Portuguesa na Diáspora; e a Língua portuguesa na Internet. Decidimos realizar quatro colóquios, em quatro países diferentes. Cada colóquio vai se debruçar sobre as linhas de ação específicas. O IILP deverá ser, entre 2012 e 2014, um instituto de execução de projetos, de organização do campo linguístico e do estabelecimento das redes nesta grande comunidade.

“A Wikipédia existe em 248 línguas, e a tendência é
que isso continue a crescer. O Google já busca em 128 idiomas –
entre eles, hindi, polaco, quéchua…”

O que acha da proposta do mestre em linguística, João Rosa, que recentemente defendeu o ensino do crioulo nas salas de aulas de Cabo Verde até o terceiro ano escolar?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: É sempre saudável realizarmos políticas que reconheçam a realidade. O crioulo é a língua de Cabo Verde, um país que está buscando uma forma de gestão do seu bilinguismo identitário, instituinte.

O que se sabe já, de outras experiências, é que é sempre melhor para as crianças que aprendam a sua língua materna. Não se trata de um truísmo, é um conhecimento bem estabelecido. Assim como tem acontecido em outros países da CPLP, caso de Timor; de Moçambique com suas escolas bilingues; do Brasil com suas 3.500 escolas bilingues indígenas que têm 200 mil alunos, para não citar outros países.

É importante que Cabo Verde, a médio prazo, possa ter a língua cabo-verdiana como língua de instrução, paralelamente ao português, porque isso vai permitir, em primeiro lugar, que as pessoas separem os dois sistemas linguísticos de uma maneira mais clara. Vai permitir ainda a produção de conhecimento em língua cabo-verdiana – que é importante para a cidadania. Não acredito, como tenho escutado, que esta possibilidade seja uma ameaça para o português em Cabo Verde. O português está num momento de crescimento internacional, e tem-se tornado lentamente uma língua de oportunidades.

A Unesco lançou, há algum tempo, um programa de incentivo ao plurilinguismo chamado “The Language Matters”. Por que pedir atenção para este tipo de assunto?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Estamos entrando numa era chamada por muitos de sociedade do conhecimento, na qual os modos de produção são redes comunicantes que precisam de informação atualíssima. E a língua é o principal instrumento. Há uma necessidade de instrumentos multicanal cada vez mais plurilingues: uma explosão das oportunidades de uso e expansão para muitas línguas. É o contrário do que se previa nos anos de 1990, quando se falava do domínio do inglês pela sua presença maciça no mundo, e do desaparecimento de outras línguas.

Que oportunidades são essas?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: A Wikipédia existe em 248 línguas, e a tendência é que isso continue a crescer. O Google já busca em 128 idiomas – hindi, polaco, quéchua. Para que estes programas e sites estejam disponíveis na internet, é necessária toda uma tarefa de retaguarda de terminólogos, gramáticos, lexicógrafos que poucos sabem que existe. Quando uma língua entra no meio digital, aquilo é só a ponta do iceberg de um trabalho imenso, que foi feito e consolidado por baixo.

Qual a importância disto?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: As oportunidades para que as pessoas possam viver na sua língua estão crescendo. Estamos nos encaminhando para soluções plurilingues, quando antes nós só enxergávamos soluções monolingues. Aquela ideia do século XIX, de Estados autarcas e fortes, de uma soberania encerrada numa única língua, na tentativa de controlar corações e mentes, ficou obsoleta e fadada ao passado. No entanto, ter o direito e oportunidade de viver na sua língua, não implica que você não possa aderir a outras línguas, ao mesmo tempo. Acaba, então, aquela dicotomia “ou eu falo a minha língua materna ou eu falo uma segunda língua”.

Estamos passando por um momento positivo de plurilinguismo. Preconizado pela Unesco desde pelo menos 1958, ele vai se concretizando numa série de instrumentos linguísticos como a Declaração Universal dos Direitos Linguísticos, de Barcelona em 1996, a Declaração Universal da Diversidade Cultural, de 2007.

“Ter direito de liberdade de expressão não é só
dizer o que eu penso – é poder dizer isso na minha língua,
e não apenas na língua hegemônica”

É a descoberta econômica da língua?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Também: a percepção do erro que foi os Estados terem delapidado seu patrimônio linguístico, oprimindo grupos minoritários que falavam línguas que hoje poderiam significar a conexão com comunidades de outras nações, e gerar intercâmbio econômico. No entanto, além da dimensão econômica, há o direito linguístico enquanto locus do direito humano. Ter direito de liberdade de expressão não é só dizer o que eu penso – é ter direito de dizer isso na minha língua, e não apenas na língua hegemônica. Em terceiro lugar, é a revelação da língua como instrumento essencial de manutenção da diversidade de tradições e conhecimentos produzidos pela humanidade. Precisamos evitar que eles se percam, como ocorreu durante o longo período em que a tradição ocidental foi imposta como única forma legítima, expressa nas línguas europeias. Foi o que poderíamos chamar de função linguística do colonialismo.

A manutenção destas línguas e tradições de conhecimento implica reconhecer uma estrutura ecológica de saberes da qual necessitamos para sobreviver. É o oposto de crer que só a tradição ocidental é legítima, estando autorizada a destruir outras tradições, a considerar superstição todo um rol de conhecimentos, taxados com adjetivos negativos em nome da cientificidade declarada universal.

É preciso gerir melhor a política linguística no mundo?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Nosso trabalho envolve explicitar as políticas linguísticas. Exige superar uma visão ingênua, que vê a língua como instrumento da natureza, monumento nacional, ou algo que se deu por si mesmo, que nasceu como nasce um baobá, que cresceu e engordou como se fosse um animal, uma planta. A língua, ao contrário, é a mais evidente criação do ser humano, e como todo o produto cultural ela sofre intervenções políticas todo o tempo – mesmo que o grosso da população nunca saiba que decisões foram estas. Portanto, tornar visível a questão política das línguas e sua gestão é meta de qualquer Estado democrático e qualquer instância internacional.

Que representa a entrada na CPLP da Guiné-Equatorial, único país africano de língua espanhola?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: A Guiné-Equatorial requisitou seu ingresso na CPLP como membro pleno, o que é uma novidade muito grande. É um país que dá passos para redefinir sua identidade linguística nacional, a partir da oficialização do francês e do português, em função dos seus interesses regionais e das suas possibilidades econômicas e diplomáticas. A Guiné-Equatorial está integrada na CEAC (Comunidade Econômica da África Central), que também tem o francês e o português como línguas oficiais, a partir da presença do Gabão e São Tomé e Príncipe.

É um sinal de que a língua não é uma fatalidade, é uma decisão política. A entrada de Guiné-Equatorial implicará uma série de medidas, que definirão qual será a presença do português naquele país: em que instâncias afetará a população, se entrará como língua de trabalho em determinadas áreas. Tal como a Guiné-Equatorial, há muitos outros países que hoje gostariam de entrar na CPLP. É um bom sinal, um bom augúrio para o bloco. Ninguém quer entrar num clube que não funciona, mas quando as coisas começam a melhorar as pessoas passam a querer aderir.

“A ideia do século XIX: Estados autarcas e fortes,
soberania encerrada numa única língua,
na tentativa de controlar corações e mentes, ficou obsoleta”

Quais são as exigências da CLPL para a entrada da Guiné-Equatorial?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: O primeiro passo foi elaborar um mini-plano que dará origem às estratégias de implementação do português no período 2011-2012. Implica definir o que se entende por oficialização do português: a oferta no setor público, na comunicação, no ensino superior. Por si só, a oficialização ainda não quer dizer nada. O português, por exemplo, apesar de ser oficial em Timor Leste, tem usos específicos. Este ano foi a primeira vez que houve uma sessão parlamentar em português lá.

Uma segunda ação é entender como a população sente a língua: Tem uma visão positiva? É vista como uma língua de opressão ou de abertura para o mundo? Existem setores que rechaçam o português? Em terceiro lugar, serão criados dois centros para o ensino do português: um na capital, Malabo, outro em Bata, principal cidade da Guiné-Equatorial continental. Quarto: haverá um programa de português na rede pública de televisão por semana, sem legenda nem dublagem. Quinto: será feito um estudo do crioulo de Annobón(o IILP vai movimentar uma equipe para isso), para caracterizar esta herança portuguesa a partir da existência do crioulo, da família dos crioulos do Golfo da Guiné, junto com osantomé, o lingué e o angolar, todos de São Tomé e Príncipe.

Qual a situação do português nas organizações internacionais?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: É importante que o idioma esteja presente nas organizações diplomáticas, como a ONU. Mas o mais importante, a meu ver, é o crescimento do português nos blocos econômicos regionais. Porque eles – e o Mercosul é um belíssimo exemplo – envolvem toda a sociedade, não só o corpo diplomático. Envolvem mobilidade física, parcerias de produção, conhecimento de títulos de formação, ações conjuntas. Vivificam a convivência entre comunidades linguísticas. E o português é língua oficial em cinco blocos, dos 17 existentes no mundo: União Europeia, Mercosul, Cedeao, CEAC, SADC e futuramente pode ser ainda língua oficial da Asean, quando Timor deixar de ser observador e se tornar membro pleno.

Você falou de “países-observadores” da CPLP. Qual é a situação do Senegal, Ilhas Maurício, Ucrânia que já sinalizaram o interesse em ter o português no seu território?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Friso que também a Galícia, região autônoma da Espanha, faz um movimento em direção à CPLP, porque uma das polêmicas que vive é que o galego é português.

O Senegal tem uma área tradicional falante do crioulo da Guiné-Bissau, que é Ziguinchor, capital da província de Casamance, um antigo território português que foi trocado por Cabinda, em Angola, no final do século XIX.

Recentemente, saiu a biografia do ex-presidente de Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano, e ele diz: “o colonialismo português na África em muitos momentos foi pior que o apartheidpara os africanos”. Isso é interessante porque apesar de tudo o que o português significou para o continente, existe uma sintonia e vontade de aproximação destes países (no âmbito dos blocos linguísticos e políticos), tanto por parte da elite quanto das classes populares. Existe uma vontade de pertença, que na minha opinião é um fator positivo e deveria ser investigado.

Isto traduz o novo modelo de lusofonia, que quer promover a adição de culturas e tradições a partir da língua – ao contrário do cenário antigo, que subtraía valores?

Gilvan Müller de Oliveira: Exatamente. Por que a Ucrânia teria interesse em ser membro da CPLP? Para além dos 400 mil ucranianos que vivem no estado do Paraná, no Brasil? Porque parece que no tempo da União Soviética cada república era especializada numa relação internacional, e a relação da URSS com os países de língua originária do português era prerrogativa da Ucrânia. Então estabeleceu-se lá um vínculo de 1975, um elo que permitiu a muita gente aprender o português. Muitos cidadãos foram para a África, e eles não querem desperdiçar este capital humano, linguístico e cultural que foi acumulado. Como o Brasil desperdiçou o capital da migração alemã, italiana, da língua guarani falada na Bolívia, Paraguai, Argentina. O Brasil, de certo modo, jogou no lixo oportunidades abertas pelo contato com estas outras comunidades. Trata-se de aproveitar o português nesta conjunção. Tornar a língua mais atraente, passível de paridade e negociação. Talvez seja uma novidade do século XXI.

Fonte: Outras Palavras.

Humor Internacionalista: A eleição do FMI e o Nhonho

2011-06-17T08:21:00.006-03:00

Alguém já notou que o candidato mexicano (Agustín Carstens) ao posto de diretor-geral do FMI é uma versão envelhecida do Nhonho, do seriado Chaves?

Confiram abaixo. Não é um jogo dos sete erros?

Crédito das fotos: [1] [2]

International security: South China Sea dispute (The Economist)

2011-06-16T07:30:00.000-03:00

Banyan

Not littorally Shangri-La

The South China Sea becomes a zone of eternal dispute

Jun 9th 2011 | from the print edition

CHINA and America make the weather in Asia-Pacific security. A year ago, when policy wonks and defence officials gathered in Singapore at the Shangri-La hotel for their annual “dialogue” on the subject, a chill was in the air. Robert Gates, America’s defence secretary, complained about petulant rebuffs from China, which at the time put up a cold front. A hawkish Chinese strategist at the conference was unapologetic, growling that America was “taking the Chinese as the enemy”.

This year, when the dialogue reconvened on June 4th, Singapore was deluged by a succession of tropical downpours, but Mr Gates, on the brink of retirement, was in sunnier mood, praising an improvement in China-US relations. China even honoured the event, organised by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London-based think-tank, by sending its defence minister, Liang Guanglie, for the first time. By the standards of speechifying Chinese soldiers, General Liang was remarkably affable, praising a “co-operative partnership” with America.

Yet the shifts in tone from the blunt to the bland and in posture from finger-pointing to backslapping have not been matched by progress toward solving any of the two countries’ underlying disputes in the region. The biggest concern Taiwan, the Korean peninsula and—which is bound to dominate any forum held in South-East Asia—the South China Sea, where the risks of failing to resolve a mesh of overlapping territorial claims are mounting.

America is not directly involved. But it has declared a “national interest” in preserving freedom of navigation in the sea. Of the 74,000 vessels, carrying one-third of global seaborne trade, that passed through the Strait of Malacca last year, most also plied the South China Sea. Commerce is not in fact under immediate threat. But America, Mr Gates insisted in Singapore, wants to remain an Asia-Pacific power. Ever twitchy about China’s intentions, South-East Asian countries hope he means it.

Speaking at another annual regional forum, the Asia-Pacific Round-table, in Kuala Lumpur a few days earlier, Admiral Robert Willard, America’s commander in the Pacific, said its navy aimed to maintain a “continuous presence” in the South China Sea. Despite budget constraints, America seems determined to beef up its deployment in the area. China is unlikely to welcome that. Its spokesmen are complaining more loudly about America’s habit of sending surveillance ships close to its shores. In 2009 a nasty row erupted when China harassed one. In Singapore Mr Gates blamed China’s lack of transparency, saying most of the snooping was into “mysteries” rather than “secrets”. China is hardly willing to accept that distinction.

More likely than conflict between the big powers, however, are clashes between China and the smaller claimants to parts of the sea. Of these, Taiwan, still notionally the Republic of China, mirrors the Beijing government’s claim. This seems based on a 1940s map giving China virtually the whole sea, ignoring the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The most belligerent of the other claimants is Vietnam, which says it has sovereignty over both the Paracel Islands, in the northern part of the sea, from which China evicted it in 1974, and the Spratlys, farther south (where the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei all have partial claims). On June 5th hundreds joined anti-Chinese protests in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City provoked by an incident in late May in which a Vietnamese ship exploring for oil and gas had its surveying cables cut by Chinese patrol boats.

Besides a wealth of marine life, the sea is believed to be rich in oil and gas: the “next Persian Gulf” in the words of one excited observer. The countries laying claim to this bounty have all been building up their navies, notably China which this week officially confirmed long-known plans to deploy its first aircraft-carrier. To counter such advances, Vietnam has ordered six Kilo-class submarines from Russia.

In 2002 China and the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations agreed to a “declaration” on a code of conduct for the sea. This is a promise to formalise a code minimising the risk that disputes between fishermen or other users of the sea might escalate into conflict. The code has not emerged. But optimists point to the restraint parties have shown since 2002 in not occupying uninhabited islands or specks of rock (though they have been energetically fortifying the places where they already had a presence). Similarly, some were cheered when China’s most recent statement of its claim did not include the contentious map, and could even be construed as accepting UNCLOS principles.

Douglas Unfairbank

However, China does not inspire confidence. Around the time when the Vietnamese survey ship had its lines cut, the Philippines reported that Chinese vessels had been spotted unloading building material on an uninhabited reef, known as the Amy Douglas Bank, in waters it claims, apparently to build an oil rig. If so, this would undermine the declaration’s one big achievement. “It could be the final nail in its coffin,” says Ian Storey of the Institute for South-East Asian Studies in Singapore, author of a new book on China’s rise and South-East Asian security.

Even if China does not build on the reef, the perception has taken hold that it is intent on picking off the South-East Asian claimants one by one, starting with the Philippines, one of the weakest. No wonder many in the region will have been cheered by Mr Gates’s response to a question about America’s commitment: laying a $100 bet “that five years from now the United States’ influence in this region [will be] as strong if not stronger than it is today.” An even safer bet is that, during that period, hardly any of the plethora of interlocking international disputes in the South China Sea will have been resolved.

Source: The Economist.

Regional integration: Un nouveau marché commun (BBC Afrique)

2011-06-15T09:43:00.004-03:00

Un nouveau marché commun

Dernière mise à jour: 12 juin, 2011 - 16:46 GMT

D'ici 2014, les produits et services vont circuler librement dans la nouvelle communauté

En Afrique du Sud, plus d’une vingtaine de Chefs d’Etats et de gouvernements d’Afrique ont signé dimanche en grande pompe l’acte fondateur du plus grand marché commun du continent.

A terme, c’est à une fusion de trois communautés économiques allant de l’Egypte à l’Afrique du Sud ; et de l’Angola à Madagascar.

Mais derrière l’enthousiasme affiché, il y a de nombreuses inquiétudes dissimulées par des pays sans réel tissu industriel.

Cela étant, dans trois ans, c'est-à-dire d’ici 2014, les produits et services, mais également la main d’œuvre des 26 pays, vont circuler librement dans la nouvelle communauté qui gardera pour le moment l’appellation d’Alliance tripartite.

Ce n’est pas avec les mêmes arguments que tout le monde s’engage dans ce que l’on s’accorde à présenter comme une grande opportunité.

D’un côté, il y a de petits pays qui n’ont à priori pas un grand intérêt à éliminer les taxes douanières sur les produits en provenance des autres pays signataires de l’accord.

C’est le cas de la RDC dont le ministre de l’industrie et du commerce veut malgré tout rester optimiste.

Anicet Kouzounda mise, par exemple, sur ‘les investissements’ que la nouvelle structure va créer.

Des investisseurs intéressés par le vaste marché seraient, en fait, attirés par des pays comme la République Démocratique du Congo où la main d’œuvre est bon marché, toute chose qui bénéficierait à cet Etat à travers la création d’emplois.

Mais dans l’immédiat c’est l’Egypte et l’Afrique du Sud qui devraient surtout bénéficier du marché commun en gestation.

Pour faciliter la circulation des biens et services, routes en parfait état et chemins de fer vont traverser le continent de l’Egypte à l’Afrique du Sud.

Les mêmes voies de communication vont relier l’Océan Atlantique à l’Océan Indien, de l’Angola à la Tanzanie.

Source: BBC Afrique.

International security: Military spending in 2010 (The Economist)

2011-06-08T16:41:00.005-03:00

Military spending

Defence costs

Jun 8th 2011, 14:00 by The Economist online

The biggest military spenders

ON JUNE 8th China's top military brass confirmed that the country's first aircraft carrier, a refurbishment of an old Russian carrier, will be ready shortly. Only a handful of nations operate carriers, which are costly to build and maintain. Indeed, Britain has recently decommissioned its sole carrier because of budget pressures. China's defence spending has risen by nearly 200% since 2001 to reach an estimated $119 billion in 2010—though it has remained fairly constant in terms of its share of GDP. America's own budget crisis is prompting tough discussions about its defence spending, which, at nearly $700 billion, is bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined.

Source: The Economist.

Bilateral Relations: Brazil & China (Financial Times)

2011-06-03T08:10:00.002-03:00

The New Trade Routes: Brazil & China (Financial Times)

Development: The rebirth of Russian foreign aid (The Guardian)

2011-05-31T16:45:00.005-03:00

The rebirth of Russian foreign aid
Russia spent £470m on foreign aid last year, the lowest of all the G8 nations. But its status as a 're-emerging donor' reveals its desire to maintain influence and rebuild its public image
Claire Provost
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 May 2011 11.39 BST
Article history

Aid arriving in Kyrgyzstan from Russia after ethnic clashes last year. Photograph: Igor Kovalenko/EPA

Russia spent $472.32m on foreign aid in 2010, according to the Russian ministry of finance's report released in advance of this week's G8 summit in Deauville, France.

The country's aid spending, according to the report, dropped from $785m in 2009 to $472.32m in 2010 – a decrease of 40%. However, Russia had only temporarily increased its aid budget in 2009 to soften the blow of the global financial and economic crises, particularly in the neighbouring former Soviet republics, the report says.

Though Russia has the smallest aid budget of the G8 bloc, it is often called a "re-emerging" donor. The Soviet Union provided massive amounts of aid for several decades during the Cold War – some $26bn in 1986 alone – but Russia became a net recipient of assistance in the 1990s after the fall of communism. Until last year, Russia was a recipient of UK aid.

A Russian government strategy paper, from 2007, about foreign aid policy set an annual spending target of $400-500m and talked about setting up a specialised government aid agency. "Present-day realities of global policy and economy and Russia's status of a superpower suggest that Russia could pursue a more active policy in international development assistance, including an increase in government spending for these purposes," it said. Emerging market rival Brazil already has its own aid agency and South Africa launches its development partnership agency this year.

Priorities for Russian overseas aid last year included food security and health programmes, with $98.2m for agricultural training and technology in African countries, and more than $80m on global health programmes in developing nations.

Unlike aid from many of the other large economies, most Russian development assistance is channeled through multilateral organisations, including the World Bank, the UN, and global initiatives to stimulate industry investment for vaccine research and development. More than 60% of Russian aid for global food security initiatives last year was channelled through multilateral organisations.

Russia has been up-front about the role it hopes its aid budget will play in maintaining its regional influence and rebuilding its public image. However, Andrei Bokarev, the head of international financial relations at the Finance Ministry, said in January that the government needs to do more to publicise Russia's aid programme because it doesn't get enough media coverage.

But as other G8 countries, including the US and Britain, struggle to make the case for development aid to a domestic public increasingly affected by budget cuts, Russia is experiencing its own special challenges, with one in eight Russians living below the official poverty line and millions unemployed.

"Russia is becoming a major provider of development assistance for low-income countries in the region," says the World Bank. "Yet development also remains a domestic imperative." In 2008, official poverty rates ranged from 38% in Kalmykia (in the south) to 7.4% in oil-rich Khanty-Mansiysk.

Despite the domestic problems, Russia has said the role of its foreign aid is to "strengthen the credibility of Russia and promote an unbiased attitude to the Russian Federation in the international community". A more consistent policy on international development would help strengthen its international position, said its 2007 strategy paper, and could spur Russia's domestic development by promoting trade and economic cooperation with countries that receive Russian aid. And, it added, a strong development policy could promote a "belt of good neighbourliness" along Russian borders and help address issues from drug trafficking to cross-border crime.

In response to the global financial and economic crises, Russia backed the creation of a multi-billion dollar crisis response fund to help struggling neighbours. Through the fund, Russia gave Tajikistan a $63m grant last year. And between 2006 and 2009, Russia put together a multi-million dollar package to develop health systems in neighbouring republics, in response to the threat of an influenza pandemic. More than 40 laboratory facilities in the region were re-fitted and upgraded, and 200 specialists were trained on influenza surveillance and response.

Last week, leading development charities accused the G8 of "cooking the books" in its annual accountability report, released in advance of the Deauville summit. The charities said the report covered up broken promises to the world's poor by ignoring the impact of inflation. But unlike other members of the G8 – the US, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada – Russia did not make specific commitments for aid to Africa at the 2005 Gleneagles summit and does not submit its aid figures to the OECD, which monitors progress on aid pledges.

In 2007, Russia committed to the UN aid spending target of 0.7% of gross national income (GNI), though set no specific timeframe for meeting the target. If it had met the 0.7% target in 2009, Russia would have been the world's 6th largest aid donor, with a budget of $9.27bn.

Fonte: The Guardian

Evento: Semana de Relações Internacionais (Unicuritiba) (29-31/03/2011)

2011-03-27T00:30:00.003-03:00

Mais informações aqui.

Vídeo: "Histoire de la diplomatie française" (em francês)

2010-12-30T17:20:00.005-02:00

Documentário simplesmente fantástico sobre a história da diplomacia francesa, produzido pela TV5 Monde.

Rico em depoimentos, documentação e imagens de época.

É uma boa pedida para relaxar nesse fim de ano.

Aproveitem porque ele está disponível para visualização gratuita somente até amanhã (31 de dezembro).

Para ver o documentário, clique aqui:

TV5MONDE : Vidéo : Histoire de la diplomatie française

Foto: Quai d'Orsay (sede da diplomacia francesa).

Analysis: The new Russian military doctrine: more of the same?

2010-12-29T00:59:00.003-02:00

The long-awaited publication of the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation [1], signed by President Dmitry Medvedev on 5 February 2010, was the result of years of debate within the Russian military and political establishment. The new Russian strategic perspective was expected with anxiety due to the great changes in the international arena since the last edition of the Military Doctrine of the country, in 2000, including: the resurgence of Russian power; the September 11 attacks and the international terrorism; the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003); NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders (2004); and the August War against Georgia (2008).

The military doctrine of a country is always a very important document, as it outlines and provides a measure of predictability to its security policy. In the case of Russia, where the security issues have historically had great influence in government decisions and in the very formation of Russia’s national identity, the study of the new Military Doctrine allows experts to become familiar with a very relevant aspect of the international insertion of Moscow. Based on the text of the Doctrine, this paper aims to highlight its most representative elements and analyze its possible impacts on Russian foreign policy and Moscow’s relations with its neighbors and major powers.

The Military Doctrine of 2010 [2] starts with general provisions which deal with the purposes of the Doctrine relating to the protection of Russia’s national interests of Russia and with the conceptualization of terms such as risk of war (voennaya opasnost’), military threat (voennaya ugroza), local war (lokal’naya voyna) and large-scale war (krupnomasshtabnaya voyna). The doctrine is divided into three sections: the dangers of war and military threats to the Russian Federation (Articles 7 to 16); military policy of the Russian Federation (Articles 17 to 37), and military and economic security of defense (Articles 38 to 53).

Elements

In the beginning of the section on the dangers of war and military threats to Russia, the Doctrine recognizes that the “[e]xisting architecture of international security, including its international legal mechanisms, does not provide equal security for all states” (Russian Federation 2010). This reveals the perception that, despite being well placed within the international security system, Russia estimates that such system provides even greater protection to other states.

The Doctrine recognizes the waning possibility of a large-scale war being waged against Russia, but notices the persistence of some sources of military threat to the country. The expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) towards Russian borders and the intention to give it global functions appears as the first item of the main external dangers of war to the country mentioned in the document. Another danger cited is the establishment of missile defense systems that “[...] undermine global stability and violate the balance of power [...]” (Russian Federation 2010), in a clear reference to the U.S. project of installing a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Territorial claims against Russia are also evaluated as an external danger of war – here we can remember the Japanese claim on the Kuril Islands. International terrorism is another item quoted in the external dangers of war by the Doctrine.

The Doctrine demonstrates that Moscow will thoroughly monitor the military-strategic scenario in its Near Abroad. Several passages show that will be considered military dangers and threats to Russia the occurrence of the following situations in the territory of its neighbors: the deployment of military contingents belonging to states and organizations which are alien to the region; the use of military force in violation of international law; the escalation in armed conflicts; the activities of international armed radical groups; and the development of military exercises with provocative purposes.

The document recognizes the growing importance of high-precision weapons, information and control systems and robotics for the conduct of contemporary warfare, including through devices remotely controlled by humans. In this subject, it is worth remembering the Russian acquisition of Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) in 2009, which demonstrates both the willingness of Moscow to modernize its armed forces and the inability of the Russian military-industrial complex to produce certain types of weapons required in the 21^st century warfare.

In order to prevent conflicts, the Doctrine attaches great importance to the cooperation and coordination in security issues within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). NATO was not cited in this part, receiving only a brief mention among the organizations with which Russia will seek to develop relationships.

Concerning the use of nuclear weapons, the Doctrine reserves the right of Russia to use them as a response to an attack with weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical or bacteriological) against the country, as well as in the case of aggression with conventional weapons that threatens the very existence of the Russian state. Here, Moscow has adopted the first-use policy of nuclear weapons and adhered to the doctrine of preemptive nuclear strikes – even though the country has already begun pondering about it in the late 1990’s, after NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia, when the military might of the Atlantic Alliance was greater than Russia’s (Kramnik 2009). According to Russian military commanders, the country will continue to develop and modernize its “nuclear triad”, consisting of land-based ballistic missile systems, nuclear submarines equipped with ballistic missiles and strategic bombers armed with nuclear warheads (RIA Novosti 2010).

However, further details on the Russian nuclear deterrence policy will only be known with the presentation of the Principles of State Nuclear Deterrence Policy to 2020, which were approved together with the Military Doctrine, but have not been released to the public yet.

The Doctrine envisages the use of Russian Armed Forces abroad to protect the interests of Russia and its citizens, among other things, in accordance with international law and Russian federal legislation. In addition, the document ascribes the protection of citizens of the Russian Federation living abroad against armed attacks directed at them as one of the tasks of the Armed Forces in peacetime. As Western analysts suspect, these provisions may give room for a stronger interventionism of the Kremlin in the domestic affairs of states in its Near Abroad – such as Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine – on the pretext of protecting Russian minorities living in these countries. Indeed, the protection of Russian populations was one of the reasons for Moscow’s military intervention in the August War against Georgia in 2008.

The text also delegates to the Armed Forces the task of combating piracy and ensuring the safety of navigation. In fact, this provision is not more than an acknowledgement of the participation of the Russian Navy in suppressing the activities of Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden, by sending a task force of three warships from its Pacific fleet to the region in 2009 (RIA Novosti 2009).

Regarding the organization of the military, the Doctrine aims to transform the Armed Forces in a more efficient and mobile force by optimizing the structures of the three armed branches (Air Force, Army and Navy) and independent troops (airborne troops, space and strategic missile forces), with the use of combined arms units performing similar tasks (RIA Novosti 2010).

In the third section of the document, military and economic security of the defense, great attention is paid to economic and social sustainability of the apparatus of national defense and the role of the military-industrial complex in this matter. After all, putting the recent history of Russia in perspective, one can point to the hypertrophy of the military apparatus as one of the decisive causes for the demise of the Soviet experience.

One of the tasks assigned to the military-industrial complex is “[...] to ensure a strategic presence of Russia on the world market of high-technology products and services” (Russian Federation 2010). In fact, the country has managed to maintain a privileged position in the global arms market, accounting for about 25% of all exports in the sector between 2004 and 2008 – in 2007, Russia exported as much as US$ 7.4 billion in defense equipment (SIPRI 2009).

One of the goals of the military-industrial complex is to improve the system of intergovernmental cooperation in the military field. In this subject, it is worth citing the already extensive military cooperation between Russia and India – whose most prominent project is the development of fifth-generation fighter for the Air Forces of the two countries (Sukhoi/HAL FGFA).

Another objective assigned to the military-industrial complex is to ensure Russia’s technological independence in the development of weapons of strategic importance. However, the recent purchases of the French-made Mistral helicopter carrier and of the aforementioned Israeli-made UAV’s show that Russia will have to overcome obstacles of financial and technical nature in order to fully achieve this objective.

The preservation of state control over the organizations of strategic importance within the military-industrial complex is also a goal mentioned in the Doctrine. In fact, this proposal aims to consolidate the measures taken by former President Vladimir Putin related to the defense industry, with the monopoly on exports of Russian arms granted to the state enterprise Rosoboroneksport and the merger of all Russian aerospace industries under a single cluster (United Aircraft Corporation).

The Doctrine cites the progress on negotiations for the establishment of regional security systems as one of the tasks of Russia in the field of political-military cooperation. Here, we can see Moscow’s interest in deepening regional collective security arrangements under the CSTO and the SCO frameworks, as well as an desire to establish the pan-European Treaty of European Security, which has faced a cool reception in Western Europe.

Doctrine’s articles 50 and 51 regarding the tasks and the main priorities of the political-military cooperation clearly show the Russian perception of “concentric circles” of alliances around them (Belarus, CSTO, CIS and CST):

(i) the closest one, with Belarus, involves the coordination in the development of the national armed forces and the use of military infrastructure;

(ii) within the CSTO, aims to the creation of a collective force to ensure common defense;

(iii) within the CIS, seeks to guarantee regional security and to conduct peace operations, and

(iv) within the SCO, recommends the coordination of efforts against possible security threats to the common area and the creation of a legal basis for the organization.

The final clause of the Doctrine states that its content can be corrected due to changes in the character of military threats to Russia and to the conditions of the country’s development. This prediction of adaptability to the Doctrine demonstrates that the Russian authorities responsible for the document are sensitive to the dynamic changes in the nature of contemporary military conflicts, in which the classic conventional war between states coexists with the fourth generation of wars involving non-state actors.

The innovations of the Military Doctrine of 2010 compared to its predecessor were the explicit identification of threats – particularly the placement of NATO as the first in the list of major external dangers of war – and allies, the provision ascribing the right to use troops abroad to protect Russian citizens and the inclusion of the fight against piracy on the list of tasks of the Russian Armed Forces (Saradzhyan 2010).

Conclusion

A document as fundamental as this has two facets: orientation of the Armed Forces in the domestic stage and foreign consumption. It is important to remember that the text of the Doctrine is full of messages carefully targeted to specific audiences (states, organizations etc.). First, the very date of its publication (February 5) is quite symbolic, as it coincided with the beginning of the 46th Munich Security Conference, dedicated to the future of international and European security (Russia Today 2010). Throughout the text, there are frequent references to cooperation with the CSTO, the SCO and the CIS – organizations where Moscow’s influence is considerable – while passages on the rapprochement with NATO are much more scarce. This inspired the reaction of Christopher Bryant (Bryant 2010), the British minister for European Affairs, who said that:

NATO has no intent against Russia. I don’t think any Russian soldier has been involved or will be involved in any action against NATO, whereas, you know, Russians have died from international terrorism. There have been many incidents in the last few years. So, I would challenge Russia and say: no, you are wrong on this.

For Marcel de Haas (de Haas 2010), the explicit reference to NATO’s expansion as a threat and the implicit reference to the missile shield the United States plans to install in Eastern Europe are all running against the core of Obama’s “reset policy” (perezagruska) toward Russia. For de Haas and Richard Weitz (Weitz 2010), the references to NATO show that the new Doctrine reaffirms old Cold War values. This arguments, however, lacks substance since Russia only makes such references to the Atlantic Alliance because it is reacting to a concrete geopolitical situation in which NATO – certainly a product of the Cold War – is approaching its military infrastructure toward Russia’s borders, causing concern in the Kremlin. If NATO’s rhetoric is of partnership and mutual trust with Russia, how to justify its expansion to the East, causing annoyance to its Russian counterparts?

According to the military commentator Ilya Kramnik (Kramnik 2009), the new Doctrine reflects the gradual movement of Russia toward Western standards of military force employment and the abandonment of the ideological aspects that made up the military doctrine of the Soviet Union.

The more assertive content of the Doctrine must be understood as a product of the process of Russia’s resurgence as a power with global reach, characterized by a foreign policy more affirmative of Russian national interests, the recovery of its economy and higher spending on the defense sector – there are plans to increase the current budget of US$ 40 billion by 50% over the next three years (RIA Novosti 2010). The increase in military spending is much more an intention to resume investments in the Russian military infrastructure, which was abandoned in the 1990s, than a movement of militarization for the adoption of interventionist and expansionist policies in the international stage, as argued by some analysts.

Moreover, the content of the Doctrine can also be seen as a post facto legitimization of Russia’s role in the August War against Georgia in 2008 and of other initiatives adopted by Moscow in the field of international security in the period between 2000 and 2010.

Bruno Quadros e Quadros is a student of International Relations at Centro Universitário Curitiba (UniCuritiba), Brazil

—

NOTES

[1] Hereinafter referred to as “Military Doctrine” or “Doctrine”.

[2] The analysis was based on the original document in Russian and English translations were made freely by the author. Since references to the content of the Military Doctrine are very frequent in this paper, we will only write references in parentheses (in the Chicago format) in cases of direct quote from the original text of the Doctrine.

REFERENCES

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de Haas, Marcel. “Cold War Military Doctrine.” The Moscow Times. 11 Feb 2010. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/cold-war-military-doctrine/399496.html (accessed Feb 21, 2010).

Russian Federation. “Voennaya doktrina Rossiyskoy Federatsii” [“Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation”], 2010. Moscow, 2010.

Kramnik, Ilya. “Who should fear Russia’s new military doctrine?”. RIA Novosti. 23 Oct 2009. http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20091023/156567212.html (accessed Feb 20, 2010).

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RIA Novosti. “Russian president approves new military doctrine”. RIA Novosti. 05 Feb 2010. http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20100205/157785368.html (accessed Feb 20, 2010).

Russia Today. “Russia’s new military doctrine approved”. Russia Today. 05 Feb 2010. http://rt.com/Politics/2010-02-05/russia-military-doctrine-approved.html (accessed Feb 21, 2010).

Saradzhyan, Simon. “Nuclear ‘Constraint’ in Russia”. International Relations and Security Network (ISN). 16 Feb 2010. http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?lng=en&id=112745 (accessed Feb 20, 2010).

SIPRI. 2009. SIPRI Yearbook 2009: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Stockholm: SIPRI. http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2009/files/SIPRIYB09summary.pdf.

Weitz, Richard. “Global Insights: Russia’s New Military Doctrine reaffirms Old Values”. World Politics Review. 09 Feb 2010. http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=5094 (accessed Feb 21, 2010).

Source: e-International Relations.