The ‘National Security Strategy of the USA’ and Brazilian military thought: Imagining the near future

This paper examines the US National Security Strategies, 2002 and 2006, with a view to understanding the impact that some of their elements, including the doctrine of pre-emptive war, may have on Brazilian military thought. By focusing on revealing articles by Brazilian military intellectuals, and re-examining the international legal implications of the Strategies, the author determines that the implicit threats to the national sovereignty of middle-range powers will intensify the growing suspicion and sense of threat posed by the US to the Armed Forces of Brazil

Defining a US defence diplomacy for Brazil at the beginning of the century

At the beginning of the 1990s, the US military was apparently considered to be a significant threat by the Brazilian Armed Forces. Other military establishments in the Hemisphere likewise expressed a lack of confidence, and even a sense of fear, regarding the North Americans. After an ‘opening’ in military relations between Brazil and the United States, directed by General Barry McAfree, commander-in-chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in the mid 1990s, Brazilian military sentiment regarding the US marginally improved. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this Century, the Brazilian Armed Forces again felt threatened by the unilateralism of the US military. This work examines the the concept of ‘defense diplomacy’ and the process by which the Clinton Administration initiated an experiment in conjunction with the National Defense University (Fort Leslie McNair, Washington, DC), at the request of the Deputy Assitant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, that established between 1999 and 2001 a broader understanding of possible US defense diplomacy for the subsequent seven years. I was an invited participant in this experiment, along with more than two dozen North American and Latin American academics, including Brazilians, the aim of which was to complete a proposal under contract with the Defense Department. Although it was ended soon after the Bush Administration began, this experiment, and the broader concept of ‘defense diplomacy,’ may well have represented an important option for future hemispheric military relations

Clean and green with deepening shadows? a non-complacent view of corruption in New Zealand

New Zealand has long been regarded as a country with little or no governmental corruption. In recent times it has been ranked consistently as one of the five least corrupt countries in the world, on Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In 2009 and 2011 it was ranked as the single most corruption-free country on the CPI, and in 2012 it shared first place with Denmark and Finland. This paper examines the reasons why historically New Zealand has been largely free of governmental corruption, using widely accepted definitions of what constitutes corrupt behaviour. It goes on to argue that, at least by its own normal standards, the country might now be more susceptible to corruption, for a variety of reasons, in both the public and private sectors, and that more political and administrative attention may need to be paid to this issue. The paper discusses New Zealand’s surprising tardiness in ratifying the United Nations Convention against Corruption, an apparent reluctance that leaves the country sitting alongside other non-ratifying countries which have endemic levels of corruption in all its forms. In this context, the paper also notes some international dissatisfaction with New Zealand’s anti-money laundering legislation, enacted in 2009

Introduction

The "Third Wave of Democracy" has had a decidedly mixed impact on the world's military establishments. An increasing appearance of "tribal behavior" and social isolation of military institutions in a post-conscription era, wars of attrition fought conservatively by volunteer forces against ethnic armies, religious tradition versus various versions of modernity, these patterns are rapidly becoming the hallmarks of our age. The end of the Cold War, and of ideology as a driving force of conflict has had profound impacts upon our understanding of socio-political development in virtually all parts of the world. In an important sense, identities-ethnic, religious, linguistic and even historic-have replaced the dichotomous ideological divide that characterized the Cold War. Social science axioms of that now almost-forgotten period have collapsed, along with the major "East Bloc" political systems, while pre-WWI obsessions with conceptualizations of culture, identity, religion and ethnicity have increasingly come to dominate political behavior

Conclusion

Two critical points are highlighted in this examination of what we have chosen to call "quasi-ethnic identities" in military establishments: First, that although the emergence of this phenomenon has been, at best, gradual and incomplete, it has been increasingly aided by a global learning curve; and second, that its goal or strategy, the strengthening of military autonomy and bargaining power, includes the further isolation and alienation of the military from mainstream society, and hence from democratic practices. As to the first point, information exchange is now so rapid and so pervasive that even a relatively remote military establishment such as that of Guinea or Suriname can be fully aware within hours of developments in "military organizational engineering" across the globe. Of the cases in this volume, only Guinea, Tanzania and Algeria have fully established independently "invented" military cultures, the "quasi-ethnicities" that are the subject of this book. Of those, only Guinea has thus far been able to use its development to establish a largely separate, autonomous and independent military organization for purposes of bargaining, and maintaining a unified military position, and been able to maintain a relatively healthy budget and avoid the civil wars, albeit through a protracted military dictatorship, that have beset all of its West African neighbors

Tanzania and Uganda: Contrasting similarities

Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya provide striking institutional comparisons and contrasts in both ethno-political dynamics and civil-military relations, although both Tanzania and Uganda, in what were arguably their most formative periods at least, displayed what Ali Mazrui described as "the most acute manifestation[s] of the crisis of identity," while employing ethno-politics to resist the remnants of their colonial dependency. ¹ Both manifested forms of invented military ethnic identities, or quasi-ethnicities, at one or another junctures, although under very different circumstances, and for very different purposes. After the infamous 1971 Idi Amin coup, Uganda reverted to government by an ethnic, or quasi-ethnic, "Muslim club,"² the Nubian "martial race," or "warrior class," that had originally assisted in the establishment of the British colony of Uganda, prompting Mazrui to comment in 1975 that "tribalism in Africa is unlikely to disappear within a single lifetime. " ³ And yet tribalism seems largely to have done precisely this in neighboring Tanzania except, perhaps, for the emergence of religious differences in the 1990s as potentially divisive and even catastrophic factors

Brasil e Nova Zelândia na Segunda Guerra Mundial

Brazil and New Zealand sent troops in significant number to Italy at the end of WWII. To soldiers from disadvantaged classes, that war represented a chance to gain citizenshiprights. While in New Zealand troops the Maori people predominated, in Brazilian troops, the poor recruits were mostly from North Eastern. This work examines the common factors between these armies in a campaign in which both showed great courage and suffered many losses. Brasil e Nova Zelândia enviaram tropas numerosas para lutar na Itália ao final da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para os soldados menos aquinhoados, essa guerra representou uma chance de obter o direito de cidadania. No caso da Nova Zelândia, predominaram os maoris,; no brasileiro, os recrutas eram, em sua maioria, nordestinos. O artigo examina fatores comuns aos dois exércitos em uma campanha na qual ambos se distinguiram com grande coragem e muitas perdas

Hugo Abreu e Afonso de Albuquerque Lima: a mudança quixotesca da linha dura para o centro

Meu ensaio examina a trajetória de dois oficiais militares nacionalistas autoritários (Linha dura) ao longo da ditadura, Afonso de Albuquerque Lima e General Hugo de Andrade Abreu, que rapidamente e quixotescamente passaram de políticos raivosamente autoritários à ardorosos defensores da proteção dos direitos humanos. Meu argumento central é que o nacionalismo da época (1964-1985) implicava na resistência implícita à dominação econômica e ideológica dos EUA, e que esta dominação incluía o encorajamento por parte dos EUA da adoção de uma economia aberta à exploração estrangeira, bem como incentivava implicitamente a violação dos direitos humanos em apoio ao anti-comunismo. Defendo que o nacionalismo desses oficiais nacionalistas autoritários superou suas tendências autoritárias, tanto assim que, em última instância, eles rejeitaram práticas autoritárias por entenderem que estas não representavam os interesses da nação brasileira, o que lança luzes sobre a natureza do nacionalismo no Brasil nos anos 1960, 1970 e 1980.My essay examines two authoritarian nationalist (linha dura) officers during the dictatorship, Afonso de Albuquerque Lima and General Hugo de Andrade Abreu, who rapidly and quixotically moved from highly authoritarian political positions to become advocates of the protection of human rights. My central argument is that the nationalism of that era (1964-1985) implied resistance to economic and ideological domination by the United States, and that this domination included tacit US encouragement of an economy open to foreign exploitation, and tacit encouragement of the violation of human rights in support of anti-communism (and rejection of nationalism, which was not in the interests of the US). I argue that the nationalism of these authoritarian nationalist officers overcame their authoritarian tendencies, so much so that they ultimately rejected authoritarian practices as not in the interests of the nation of Brazil. This appears to shed light on the nature of nationalism in Brazil in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s