Desde hace ya más de tres años, México vive una guerra. Este país de 107.8 millones de habitantes, octava potencia económica mundial, sufre un conflicto armado interno que no parece tener fin y del cual su presidente, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, parece no encontrar salida. La guerra interna entre las autoridades policiales y militares y los poderosos carteles de la droga ha resultado en la aterradora cifra de 13,120 muertes desde el año 2006. 13,120 muertes. En el correr del 2009, las muertes ligadas al narcotráfico en México sobrepasan las muertes en Iraq, con 3,397 contra 2,739 (Reforma). Un clima de inseguridad y de violencia reina en México. Varios medios de comunicación presentan sus "ejecutómetros", contabilizando las muertes ligadas a la lucha contra el narcotráfico día a día. Como si fuera poco, a estos asesinatos se suma su carácter brutal y macabro: torturas, decapitaciones, secuestros y amenazas. En septiembre 2008, una granada lanzada voluntariamente en una plaza dejó el saldo de 8 civiles muertos y cientos de heridos en Morelia, Michoacán. ¿Cómo se llegó a esta situación?El narcotráfico en México: un negocio cada vez más lucrativo.El narcotráfico en México, el comercio de drogas en grandes cantidades, es una mina de oro. El país siempre ha sido productor y corredor de importantes cantidades droga hacia Estados Unidos. Durante la Segunda Guerra mundial, el cierre de las rutas asiáticas del opio causó una gran penuria de morfina en los Estados Unidos. Las autoridades estadounidenses descubrieron que la región colindante de los tres estados mexicanos de Sinaloa, Chihuahua y Durango era particularmente propicia para el cultivo de la planta adormidera. Años después, resultó que ese "Triangulo Dorado", era igualmente fértil para el cultivo de marihuana, cuya demanda en los EEUU explotó a partir de los años 1960'. El consumo de cocaína producida en los Andes y transportada por México y el Caribe, también conoció un aumento exponencial, durante los años 1950' y 1960' entre las elites norteamericanas y siguió su expansión con el aumento del consumo de 'crack' durante los 1980'. Finalmente, a principios de los 1990', nació un gran mercado de meta-anfetaminas en Estados Unidos, que los carteles de la droga mexicanos no tardaron en controlar.La actividad del narcotraficante mexicano consiste en responder a la demanda del principal país consumidor de drogas a nivel mundial. En México, un país donde los bajos salarios y nivel de vida tocan a la mayoría de la población, arriesgarse en un negocio ilegal y peligroso, pero muy fructífero, resulta ser una alternativa atractiva. El salario de un policía oscila entre 2000 y 4000 pesos mexicanos mensuales (U$150-U$300). Se estima que trabajar con un cartel garantiza un ingreso por lo menos dos veces superior (http://www.el-universal.com.mx/nacion/152039.html). A la sólida demanda estadounidense y la precaria situación económica de la población mexicana, se puede agregar un elemento más reciente que ha contribuido al aumento del narcotráfico: el exitoso cierre de la entrada de estupefacientes a EEUU a través de la histórica ruta del Caribe, como parte de la lucha contra el narcotráfico llevada acabo por los gobiernos de Colombia y EEUU durante los años 1990' en el marco del Plan Colombia. México pasó a ser la única ruta de entrada de cocaína andina a EEUU y se contribuyó, así, a valorizar aún más el ya multimillonario negocio.De la tolerancia silenciosa al ataque frontalDurante muchos años las autoridades mexicanas optaron por una política de equilibrio, acordando tácitamente en tolerar las actividades ilícitas en cambio de paz civil y, naturalmente, de una parte de las ganancias. Sin embargo, a partir de 1985, EEUU presionó un cambio de actitud después del descubrimiento del cadáver de Enrique Camarena, un agente estadounidense de la DEA (Drug Enforcement Authority) en las inmediaciones de Guadalajara, Jalisco. El caso conmocionó a la opinión pública norteamericana y sus autoridades presionaron a sus pares mexicanas, cuya parsimonia en las investigaciones aumentaron las sospechas de nexos entre altos dirigentes y el narcotráfico. Durante las negociaciones del Tratado de Libre Comercio en 1994, EEUU insistió en la necesidad de atacar a los carteles. Con la llegada de Vicente Fox y del Partido de Acción Nacional al poder en el año 2000, empezó el verdadero cambio. El PAN había siempre optado por una política de acción frontal al narcotráfico en sus gobiernos estatales. Felipe Calderón, al declararle la guerra abiertamente al narcotráfico después de su victoria a la presidencia de diciembre 2006, comenzó oficialmente una nueva página.Varias son las teorías en cuanto a las motivaciones de Calderón para hacer de la lucha contra el narcotráfico un pilar fundamental de su sexenio. Los más escépticos consideran la iniciativa como una manera eficaz de distraer a la opinión pública de la campaña de deslegitimación contra Calderón, llevada acabo por su rival derrotado en diciembre 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. De igual manera, enfrentar al narcotráfico significó presentarse como el hombre fuerte del momento. Otros ven la iniciativa como una continuación lógica a una situación ya insostenible que revela la inherente debilidad de un Estado mexicano, incapaz de controlar la integralidad de su territorio. Al llamar al ejército y movilizar 45.000 de sus soldados y 5.000 policías federales en toda la República, Calderón contaba con atacar rápida y mortalmente a los cárteles. Sin embargo, la iniciativa se atascó frente a dos obstáculos. Por un lado, el poder de los carteles. Se estima que los carteles movilizan alrededor de 150.000 personas, cifra similar al número de soldados del ejercito mexicano, y que el ingreso de la venta de drogas en EEUU se eleva a entre U$15 a U$25 billones de dólares anuales. Este dinero financia la compra de armas y la corrupción a las autoridades. Por otra parte, la administración se enfrenta a los viejos problemas estructurales del estado mexicano.Corrupción endémica y ejército abusivo.La corrupción es quizás el mayor obstáculo de la administración de Calderón, verdadero cáncer que abarca todos los niveles de gobierno. A fines de mayo de este año, 10 presidentes municipales y 18 oficiales de policía y de gobierno fueron arrestados por presuntos nexos con el narcotráfico. En noviembre 2008, dos ex-dirigentes de Interpol-México fueron arrestados por la misma razón. En diciembre del mismo año, Calderón declaró que, desde el inicio de su campaña, 11.500 empleados públicos habían sido sancionados por corrupción ligada al narcotráfico.Como si ésto fuera poco, Calderón debe enfrentarse a fuertes críticas de organizaciones de defensa de derechos humanos que reciben a diario denuncias de abusos por parte del ejército. Un informe de Human Rights Watch, publicado en abril, presenta casos de "crímenes atroces", como desapariciones, asesinatos, torturas y violaciones. La Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH) reportó 1.200 denuncias contra el ejército durante el año 2008.EEUU: Una estrategia erradaA pesar de estos obstáculos, Calderón cuenta con el apoyo de una aliado no menor: EEUU. Este apoyo se cristalizó en octubre 1997 a través de la Iniciativa Mérida, acuerdo firmado entre George W. Bush Jr. y Felipe Calderón que prevé una ayuda de U$1.4 billones durante tres años, a través de entrenamiento y tecnología. ¿Pero es ésta la solución adecuada al problema? El Servicio de Investigación del Congreso de EEUU publicó recientemente su último informe sobre la violencia ligada al narcotráfico en México. En éste se precisa cual es el rol de los EEUU en esta lucha:- "Brindar asistencia a México para vencer a los carteles y terminar con la violencia- Tomar medidas del lado estadounidense de la frontera para impedir empresas de contrabando- Evitar y prepararse para un eventual desborde de violencia del lado estadounidense"Retomemos la famosa metáfora de Franklin D. Roosevelt, en alusión a la ayuda a Inglaterra en su lucha contra la Alemania nazi: si la casa de mi vecino se incendia, es natural que yo le preste mi manguera. Hoy, la violencia del narcotráfico en México es el incendio. Y naturalmente, hay riesgos de contagio a EEUU. Los carteles tienen capacidad de distribución en 230 ciudades de EEUU y asesinatos y secuestros ya han tenido lugar en Phoenix, McAllen, Dallas, Las Vegas y San Diego. ¡Sin embargo, el vecino de la manguera parece ignorar que desde su garaje, una importante fuga de gasolina está nutriendo el fuego de la casa de su vecino en llamas!La actitud y las medidas de EEUU reflejan una visión centrada únicamente en la garantía de la seguridad física de sus ciudadanos. Son medidas coyunturales y superficiales. Omiten la raíz del problema: la demanda de drogas desde EEUU es la principal causa del narcotráfico. Asistir a México militarmente y reforzar la seguridad fronteriza no es más que atacarse a la punta del iceberg. A esta demanda sólida y eterna, se agrega el hecho siguiente: el flujo de armamento de EEUU a México se estima en 2.000 armas por día. Se pueden comprar en las 7.000 tiendas que se encuentran en los estados del lado norte de la frontera. Por estas razones, hasta que EEUU no tome medidas radicales apuntando a bajar drásticamente el consumo de drogas y regular la venta de armas, su ayuda será de corto alcance.Un combate crucial para el Estado mexicanoEl actual esfuerzo de Calderón por erradicar el narcotráfico del país esconde una vieja realidad: México es, sin duda alguna, un estado, pero es un estado débil y cuyas instituciones sufren una grave falta de credibilidad entre su población. Sorprende entonces que Calderón pensara que la tarea podría ser corta. Basta con visitar varios estados mexicanos para descubrir lugares recónditos donde la presencia estatal no existe o es fuertemente contestada. Por ejemplo, en el estado de Chiapas, se ven aún los conocidos paneles informando al pasante la entrada en territorio zapatista : "Zona Zapatista: Aquí el pueblo manda y el gobierno obedece". En dichos territorios, los zapatistas controlan la producción y administran escuelas y regulan el consumo de alcohol. Por otra parte, las instituciones estatales sufren de muy poca credibilidad y son más bien asociadas con corrupción e ineficacia. 90% de los secuestros no son denunciados a las autoridades por miedo a que éstas negocien con los secuestradores.México vive actualmente un momento sangriento de su historia. Sin embargo, es un momento crucial. Después de haber puesto fin a 71 años de poder del PRI, una eventual victoria contra los carteles de la droga significaría otro logro histórico y un estímulo de credibilidad y legitimidad que permitiría a los mexicanos creer en sus instituciones. El desafío es inmenso. Últimamente, autoridades mexicanas y estadounidenses han convenido en la necesidad de cooperar contra un problema que les concierne a ambos. Las declaraciones de Obama, durante su última visita en abril, parecen vislumbrar una visión más amplia del problema de parte de la administración estadounidense: "…más de 90% de las armas incautadas a los narcotraficantes en México vienen de los EEUU." Admitiendo así que EEUU es parte del problema, dicho país debe, en lugar de ofrecer paliativos puntuales, atacarse a la raíz del fenómeno, con medidas de envergadura y profundidad, si es que desea evitar la inestabilidad de su vecino al Sur y el riesgo de contagio de la ola de violencia en su territorio.*Licenciado en Historia y Ciencia PolíticaCandidato a Maestría en Ciencia Política Universidad de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne
1 IntroducciónEn el año 1971 apareció en Estados Unidos un libro titulado A Theory of Justice, cuyo autor era un profesor de Harvard que hasta el momento había publicado unos pocos artículos en revistas especializadas y su nombre era ciertamente desconocido en la primera plana del pensamiento filosófico de la época. A pesar de ello, nada impidió que esta obra se convirtiera en un best seller, vendiendo cuatrocientas mil copias tan sólo en inglés y siendo traducida a una treintena de idiomas (Pogge, 2007). Más aún, la obra de Rawls se ha convertido en una parada ineludible para cualquiera que desee trabajar en el ámbito de la filosofía política, manteniéndose vigente hasta nuestros días.A diferencia de muchos de sus colegas, Rawls dedicó su carrera al desarrollo y perfeccionamiento de un proyecto de investigación que, junto a la publicación de varios artículos, tuvo dos instancias decisivas entre 1971 y 1999. En 1993, el autor publicó Polítical Liberalism, texto en el que pretende "bajar a tierra" su teoría de la justicia y aplicarla en una democracia liberal, mientras que seis años después, en 1999, vio la luz su más polémica obra: The Law of Peoples. En ella, Rawls plantea su concepción de un sistema internacional justo, regido por principios universales que ofrecerían un marco de paz a las relaciones entre Estados e introduce una controvertida doctrina de los derechos humanos.Sin embargo, y como cabría esperar, la obra de Rawls no ha estado libre de críticas y polémicas. Por el contrario, su relevancia para la filosofía política le ha valido un sin fin de comentarios, suscitando encendidos debates y acaloradas discusiones. En el presente trabajo, se pretende realizar un aporte a la comprensión del pensamiento rawlsiano, identificando lo que podría calificarse como una ruptura de la concepción liberal a lo largo de su obra.Más concretamente, argumentaremos que así como A Theory of Justice y Political Liberaism representaron una redefinición del liberalismo desde el foco del igualitarismo, The Law of Peoples – donde se desarrolla una teoría normativa de las relaciones internacionales – no se corresponde con el universalismo moral kantiano que domina su teoría de la justicia. Por el contrario, Rawls muestra una faceta que, sin ser muy exigentes, deja mucho que desear si es vista desde una óptica liberal igualitaria. En este sentido, pondremos mayor foco en el concepto de "decencia" que Rawls deja entrever en su derecho de gentes y veremos cómo los individuos tomados como un fin en sí mismos dejan de ser el núcleo central, como lo eran en la Teoría de la Justicia, para ceder el lugar a los "pueblos" en el Derecho de Gentes.2 Rawls y su teoría de la justicia"De ahora en más los filósofos políticos deberán trabajar dentro de la teoría de Rawls, o bien explicar por qué no lo hacen"Robert Nozick (1974, 183)."No one concerned for social justice can afford not to study it closely"Thomas Pogge (2007, vii).Es ineludible, para la cabal comprensión de la obra que aquí pretendemos comentar y criticar, el desarrollo previo que tuvo la obra de Rawls. En este sentido, es importante destacar que la publicación de A Theory of Justice significó un antes y un después en la filosofía política contemporánea. Bajo un título aparentemente anodino, Rawls desarrolla una ambiciosa teoría de la justicia social mediante la cual pretende aportar una justificación sistemática a los que Michael Lessnoff ha denominado la síntesis sociopolítica contemporánea: una mezcla entre la democracia liberal, la economía de mercado y el Estadio distributivo del Bienestar (1999, 329). El aporte de la obra de Rawls a esta área del conocimiento ha sido muy importante desde varios puntos de vista, aunque es posible, sin ser exhaustivo, resaltar algunos de los más importantes como forma de comprender la relevancia de su pensamiento.En este sentido, la obra de Rawls se caracteriza por dos aspectos fundamentales. El primero de ellos es que retoma el contractualismo como estrategia para la fundamentación de su teoría de la justicia; y el segundo, que su argumentación se erige en respuesta al utilitarismo que hasta el momento había dominado la filosofía política anglosajona.2.1 El neocontractualismo rawlsianoQuizá el rasgo más distintivo de la obra de Rawls es el retorno a la teoría del contrato social, un dispositivo teórico largamente en desuso, con el cual echará las bases para la construcción de su teoría. Es posible afirmar que con A Theory of Justice, Rawls inaugura lo que se ha denominado como el neocontractualismo contemporáneo (Mejía, 1996), retomando así una tradición iniciada por Thomas Hobbes en el siglo XVII y continuada por John Locke, Jean-Jaques Rousseau e Immanuel Kant, aunque destinada al ostracismo durante el siglo XIX y parte del XX.Como bien lo establece Oscar Mejía (1996, 15-22), el contractualismo hobbesiano tiene su génesis en la interpretación que Santo Tomás de Aquino hizo de la obra de Aristóteles1. El giro tomista a la filosofía política aristotélica, dice el autor, radica en abandonar la idea de que la "la política [forma] parte de la filosofía práctica y [el Estado es] una comunidad que habilita a los ciudadanos para acciones virtuosas". Hobbes, que retoma esta concepción, logra diseñar una justificación tan innovadora como revolucionaria para la legitimidad del poder político y las instituciones que se crean para ejercerlo en una sociedad determinada (Da Silveira, 2000). Para este primer planteo del contrato social, la sociedad política es el producto de un acuerdo entre los hombres, que deciden depositar su derecho natural de gobernarse a sí mismos en una entidad superior, con el fin de abandonar el estado de naturaleza, en el cual la total libertad de cada individuo resulta un flagelo, dado que nadie está a salvo de la arbitrariedad en su utilización.Vale destacar que si bien Locke, Rousseau y Kant utilizan también esta herramienta conceptual para dar una justificación a la construcción del poder político, sus planteos no tienen mayores puntos en común. Sin embargo, lo que sí es cierto, es que todos exponen el acuerdo entre las partes como una ficción y no como un hecho histórico que haya sucedido en el pasado. El estado de naturaleza, del que los contratantes pretenden apartarse, no es entonces una realidad histórica, sino una construcción abstracta que nos permite "evaluar la legitimidad de las normas y los arreglos institucionales que nos hemos dado" (Da Silveira, 2000, 155). Es así que Locke, por ejemplo, plantea la situación anterior al contrato como un "estado de paz, buena voluntad, asistencia mutua y conservación", que luego deriva en un estado de guerra causado por la falta de un juez que dirima las controversias entre los individuos. Rousseau, por su parte, plantea una instancia pre-contractual definida como estado mutuo de inocencia, regido por la solidaridad y la mutua comprensión (Mejía, 1996), el cual se verá desvirtuado por el surgimiento de la propiedad privada, madre de todas las desigualdades.Este breve repaso nos sirve como guía cronológica para llegar a Kant, último eslabón clásico en la teoría del contrato social, cuya influencia en la Teoría de la Justicia de Rawls es explícita2. Advirtiendo las falencias de los teorías contractualistas que lo precedieron, el filósofo prusiano buscó una solución a una diversidad de problemas que tuvieron como resultado la fijación de la legitimidad del poder estatal en la autonomía moral de los individuos, que asumen autónomamente como propios los mandatos de la mayoría, siempre y cuando estos satisfagan las exigencias de racionalidad y universalidad necesarias para conciliar la voluntad general con la individual. Este no es un tema menor, dado que Rawls le otorga un papel central a la sentencia kantiana "obra de tal modo que uses la humanidad, tanto en tu persona como en la persona de cualquier otro, siempre como un fin al mismo tiempo y nunca solamente como un medio".Pero si bien Rawls recoge los frutos de toda la tradición contractualista, el filósofo se propone rediseñar este dispositivo teórico. Para ello, deberá subsanar varios inconvenientes presentes en los planteos antes mencionados y adaptar la teoría del contrato social para construir sobre ella su Teoría de la Justicia.Uno de los principales aspectos que Rawls busca superar es el iusnaturalismo subyacente al planteo de Hobbes, dado que liga moral y política a un nivel indeseable que el autor busca evitar. Si bien la sustitución del derecho divino como justificación del poder político fue un avance revolucionario en el siglo XVIII, la fijación de dicha justificación en el derecho natural, o sea, en un conjunto de normas y valores externos e independientes al individuo – y por ende pre-contractuales – no se ajusta a la solución que Rawls ofrecerá para el establecimiento de sus principios de justicia.Algo similar sucede con los planteos de Locke y Rousseau, que justifican el poder político en el consenso mayoritario, pues si bien este avance teórico es un hito central en la construcción histórica del liberalismo y la democracia liberal tal cual la conocemos hoy día, adolece de un problema de gran importancia, y es que no da lugar al disenso, dado que "la decisión de la mayoría se legitima por encima de los intereses del individuo" (Mejía, 1996, 27).Nuestro autor se inclinará, finalmente, por un planteo "altamente kantiano", como él mismo lo califica (1999, xviii). En este sentido, "Rawls retoma explícitamente la idea kantiana de autonomía, percibe a los individuos como fines en sí mismos y no como medios para la realización de fines ajenos, describe los principios de justicia como imperativos categóricos y la posición original como una situación ideal en la que agentes autónomos actúan siguiendo exclusivamente este tipo de imperativo" (Da Silveira, 1997, 71). Como bien lo define Da Silveira, el objetivo final del planteo contractualista de Rawls no es otro que establecer principios de justicia universalmente aplicables.Para tales objetivos, A Theory of Justice presenta un planteo sumamente innovador. Rawls no propone un estado de naturaleza del cual las partes busquen salir mediante la realización de un contrato, sino que ve en este último la mejor forma de solucionar lo que llamará el "problema de la justicia". Si la sociedad es una "empresa cooperativa para la ventaja mutua", dice Rawls, los integrantes de dicha sociedad tendrán intereses en común, pero también conflictos de intereses, y como ninguno es indiferente a cómo se distribuye la riqueza creada con su colaboración, cada uno – persiguiendo fines personales –buscará una mayor participación en la distribución de dichos beneficios. Entonces nos enfrentamos a un problema central: cómo llegar a principios de justicia universales, con los que cada integrante de la sociedad (cualquiera que esta sea) esté de acuerdo, y que al mismo tiempo eviten proyectar las desigualdades ya existentes. Si la solución fuese la negociación, el resultado estaría condenado al fracaso, pues las partes harían uso de un desigual poder de negociación, lo que terminaría por imponer los intereses de los grupos con mayor poder en la estructura social.La principal preocupación de nuestro autor pasará a encontrarse entonces en la estructura básica de la sociedad, que es definida como la forma en que las principales instituciones sociales distribuyen los derechos y obligaciones fundamentales, al tiempo que determinan la división de las ventajas resultantes de la cooperación social3. Rawls reconoce que en dicha estructura básica las desigualdades son inevitables pero, como bien lo resume Lessnoff, "la cuestión es definir sí y en qué medida las desigualdades pueden ser justas" (1999, 335). La posición original será, junto al velo de ignorancia, el primer paso de la teoría rawlsiana para echar luz sobre esta interrogante.Imaginemos, nos dice Rawls, una asamblea en la que todos los miembros de una sociedad se reúnen para elegir las instituciones básicas que organizarán su vida económica y política. Estas personas tienen conciencia de que las decisiones que tomen condicionarán no sólo su vida, sino además las de sus hijos y nietos, por lo que las decisiones que tomen no serán coyunturales, sino que deberán representar reglas de juego profundamente estables. Más aun, deberán comprender los intereses y preocupaciones de cada uno en base a un acuerdo generalizado.A esta "asamblea" es a lo que Rawls denominará la posición original, una construcción metodológica que le permitirá asegurarse que los principios de justicia sean elegidos por las partes de forma contractual y con todas las garantías necesarias para que dicho contrato sea realizado "por hombres racionales y morales que no contaminen con sus juicios egoístas la imparcialidad" de dichos principios (Mejía, 1996, 43).Puestas las partes en una situación inicial, en la que se caracterizan por ser mutuamente desinteresadas – persiguen su propio interés desconociendo el de los demás – al tiempo que razonables y racionales, aún hace falta eliminar cualquier factor de desigualdad entre ellas. Para esto, Rawls impondrá a las partes situadas en la posición original un velo de ignorancia que tendrá como consecuencia importantes restricciones de información4. A la hora de elegir los principios de justicia que determinarán la estructura básica de la sociedad, las partes carecerán de información sobre cuál será su posición en la sociedad e incluso sobre sus propias cualidades personales. La intención de Rawls es clara. Nadie debe tener ventajas o desventajas derivadas de las circunstancias sociales o incluso de la suerte a la hora de elegir los principios de justicia, lo que asegurará, en última instancia, que nadie intente conseguir beneficios para una determinada posición en detrimento de otra (Rawls, 1999, 16). Los individuos, por tanto, ignorarán cuáles son – o serían – sus intereses particulares y por lo tanto deben llegar a un acuerdo sin saber qué es los que los beneficia o los perjudica. En última instancia, lo que Rawls consigue mediante la imposición del velo de ignorancia es obligar a las partes a "negociar bajo la perspectiva del universalismo moral" (Da Silveira, 2003, 26)5.Teniendo en cuenta las condiciones de igualdad y restricción de la información planteadas anteriormente para la negociación de los principios de justicia, Rawls cree que los individuos en la posición original optarían por los siguientes:"First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all."Es aquí donde se consagran los pilares de su teoría liberal igualitaria. Rawls complementa dichos principios con lo que denomina reglas de prioridad, estableciendo que la libertad siempre primará por sobre la igualdad y la justicia – el primer principio sobre el segundo –, y que la justicia primará en todo momento por sobre el bienestar –, anteponiendo la segunda parte del segundo principio sobre la primera. En otras palabras, la distribución sólo será posible mientras se produzca en total respeto de las libertades individuales, mientras que las desigualdades – bajo el entendido de que estas beneficien a los más desfavorecidos –, sólo serán aceptadas si antes se produjeron en un marco de igualdad de oportunidades para acceder a los cargos de responsabilidad de la sociedad en cuestión (Da Silveira, 2003, 38).Los principios de justicia a los que las partes en la posición original llegarían, pueden ser comprendidos si vemos la estrategia que seguirían teniendo en cuenta su racionalidad. El autor considera que ante las restricciones de información impuestas por el velo de ignorancia, maximizar los posibles beneficios sería un error, por lo que las partes se preocuparían por "maximizar el mínimo" (hacer que la peor situación sea lo mejor posible), un estrategia que ha sido denominada como maximin, y que consiste en reducir al máximo el riesgo que correríamos en caso de encontrarnos en la parte menos favorecida de la sociedad. De esta manera, argumenta Rawls,lo racional no sería tampoco eliminar toda forma de desigualdad en la estructura básica – dado que muchas de estas podrían ser beneficiosas – sino aceptar solamente aquellas que mejoren la situación de los menos aventajados.A los efectos del presente trabajo, es importante rescatar las pretensiones universalistas que se encuentran en A Theory of Justice, teniendo en cuenta que los principios de justicia podrían ser aplicados en cualquier momento en y en cualquier sociedad sin que su validez se vea erosionada. La posición original, como afirma el propio Rawls, nos obliga a contemplar la situación humana desde todos los puntos sociales y temporales posibles. A pesar de lo anterior, este "kantismo ortodoxo" se irá diluyendo con los años (Da Silveira, 2003, 87) dando lugar luego a un segundo y hasta un tercer Rawls, que perderá sus aspiraciones universalistas y sucumbirá en un relativismo que desconcertó hasta sus más fervorosos defensores. Diremos, en este sentido, que el Rawls universalista realizará un lento pero sostenido peregrinaje hacia las huestes del realismo político en el plano de las relaciones internacionales.2.2 Rechazo al utilitarismoEl segundo aspecto fundamental que debemos resaltar en A Theory of Justicie, es su respuesta al utilitarismo, una teoría de la justicia que, desde el liberalismo, había dominado en los últimos dos siglos la discusión en el ámbito de la filosofía política anglosajona. Rawls resume su propósito de la siguiente manera: "My aim is to work out a theory of justice that represents an alternative to utilitarian. (…) The main idea is that society is rightly ordered, and therefore just, when its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it." (1999, 20). Como bien nos dice el autor, es imposible negar el atractivo inicial que nos genera esta concepción de la justicia, por lo que, para combatirla, es necesario no sólo aportar sólidos argumentos en su contra, sino que al mismo tiempo presentar una alternativa viable.Una de las principales razones por las cuales el utilitarismo gozaba de tan amplia aceptación es su claridad frente a otras teorías que, aunque no menos interesantes, carecen de una ventaja fundamental: el utilitarismo ofrece un criterio general de decisión y al mismo tiempo permite una tecnificación de las decisiones morales y políticas. Si todos aceptáramos el criterio de maximizar el bienestar, sería relativamente fácil implementar mecanismos matemáticos para la toma de decisiones (Da Silveira, 2003). Kymlicka, por su parte, agrega otras dos ventajas importantes del utilitarismo frente a otras teorías. Por un lado, el autor reafirma su secularidad. Las metas que el utilitarismo persigue no dependen de la existencia de un Dios, un alma o cualquier otra entidad metafísica y, por lo tanto, no importa que tan seculares seamos, todos sufrimos y somos felices. De esta manera, no podemos negar que la felicidad (o el bienestar) es un valor que todos perseguimos en nuestras vidas. Además, y sumado a lo argüido por Da Silveira, el autor resalta lo que denomina como "consecuencialismo", y que puede ser resumido como la capacidad de contrastar el resultado de las políticas públicas aplicadas a una sociedad determinada con respecto al bienestar que generan. Si todos utilizáramos este mecanismo, entonces no nos enfrascaríamos en discusiones acerca de los aspectos morales de temas como la homosexualidad o el aborto, y se evitaría una infinidad de prohibiciones morales arbitrarias (Kymlicka, 1990, 10-11).Pero a pesar de sus bondades, muchas de ellas muy persuasivas como el mismo Rawls admite, el autor elabora una crítica demoledora de la teoría en cuestión, sobre la que erige una alternativa indiscutiblemente sólida. Rawls ataca al utilitarismo en sus puntos más débiles, valiéndose de una artillería que en su mayoría proviene desde el universalismo moral kantiano y pude ser resumida en una frase que ha pasado ya a la historia: "Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons" (1999, 24). Esta crítica, en apariencia inofensiva, socava al utilitarismo desde su base más liberal. Como sentenciará Rawls, esta teoría no toma a las personas como fines en sí mismos, sino como meros medios para la consecución de ciertos fines, lo que da pie al viejo ejemplo de la esclavitud: si por alguna razón la esclavitud de una parte de la población maximizara el bienestar total de la sociedad, entonces no habría razones para no hacerlo6.Pero esta no es la única crítica que Rawls realiza al utilitarismo. Por el contrario, el autor arremete contra el mecanismo de "justicia social" que la teoría propone, afirmando que el hecho de buscar la maximización total del bienestar sólo permitirá que la sociedad reproduzca las más extremas formas de desigualdad, dado que, ver la justicia social como un promedio de bienestar, evita el hecho de preocuparse por la forma en que dicho bienestar es distribuido. En respuesta a estas dos críticas será que Rawls creará una alternativa que no sólo se preocupe por la distribución de los beneficios obtenidos de la cooperación social, sino que además respete a ultranza las libertades individuales de todos y cada uno de los integrantes de la sociedad. Veremos que, a pesar de todo lo anterior, en el Derecho de Gentes se priorizará la estabilidad por sobre la libertad y la igualdad, algo difícil de imaginar para los lectores que en 1971 revolucionaron su pensamiento con una Teoría de la Justicia. 1 - Según Mejía, "Hobbes rompe la concepción aristotélica en tres sentidos: primero, la política deja de ser derivación de la ética y se desliga de la moralidad y la legalidad; segundo, la política deja de referirse a la práctica y comienza a ser referida como técnica; y tercero, la política deja de ser sabia comprensión, phronesis, y se convierte en ciencia, episteme" (Mejía, 1996, 16).2 - "What I have attempted to do is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. […] The theory that results is highly Kantian in nature. Indeed, I must disclaim any originality for the views I put forward. The leading ideas are classical and well known." (Rawls, 1999, xviii).3 - "For us the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation" (Rawls, 1999, 6).4 - "It is assumed, then, that the parties do not know certain kinds of particular facts. First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of his psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong. These broader restrictions on knowledge are appropriate in part because questions of social justice arise between generations as well as within them (…)" (Rawls, 1999, 118).5 - Es importante recodar en este punto la relevancia que Rawls otorga a lo que él llama el "merecimiento moral". De forma resumida, el autor argumenta que en última instancia, nadie puede aducir que su situación en la sociedad pueda ser justificada desde un punto de vista moral. Nadie merece moralmente las ventajas o desventajas que le hayan tocado en suerte, ya sea desde una inteligencia prodigiosa o una deformidad física hasta una habilidad deportiva o artística. De esta manera, el velo de ignorancia eliminará este tipo de diferencias, por lo que nadie es capaz de saber cuáles serán sus ventajas o desventajas (1999, 273-277).6 - "Si lo que cuenta es la utilidad total o promedio, la satisfacción o el sufrimiento de cada individuo no tiene otro valor del que agrega o quita al conjunto. Y esto supone de instrumentalizar una parte de la sociedad" (DA SILVEIRA, 2003, 53) *Este artículo fue presentado en la 4° sesión el Seminario Interno de Discusión Teórica 2014, organizado por el Departamento de Estudios Internacionales de la Universidad ORT Uruguay.Andrés Riva Casas es estudiante de la Licenciatura en Estudios Internacionales.
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The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: "We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront."Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are "some of the most dangerous weapons in the world" because they "could trigger an accidental nuclear war." As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, "If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad's ground-based leg — not modernize it." This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a "nuclear winter" and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock" — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it's been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it's hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase. Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating "use them or lose them" weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.The Pentagon's misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup. Who decides? The role of the ICBM lobbyA prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of "modernizing" the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he's been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear "modernization" by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman's Women's conference. And we're sure you won't be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the "far-left disarmament community," and the undue influence of "anti-nuclear zealots" on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he's received so far from ICBM producers. You won't be surprised, we're sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon's plan to continue the Sentinel program.Lobbying dollars and the revolving doorThe flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the "revolving door" from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that Cramer's former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.Playing the jobs cardThe argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a minuscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in "a competitive defense industry" and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.Unwarranted influence in the nuclear ageAdvocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:"Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop."The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:"You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We've talked about unwarranted influence. We've had that for more than half a century."Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn't be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.Isn't it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.This article was originally published at Tom Dispatch and was republished with permission.
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Foreign policy mandarins have spent years fighting over what to make of former President Donald Trump. At heart, is he a hawk or a dove? Does he hope to be a new Nixon, capable of seeking detente with enemies despite (or even because of) his mean streak? Or perhaps a new Reagan, focused on achieving "peace through strength"?I might ask it a different way: Who cares? New political science research suggests that Trump's personal views are not the most important part of the puzzle. In short, it's the advisers, stupid. This may sound like received wisdom, but its implications are profound. Researchers created an unprecedented dataset of minutes from presidential meetings related to foreign policy during the Cold War. Using complex statistical methods, they found that the relative hawkishness of a president's advisers is a remarkably good predictor of whether a leader will make "conflictual decisions" regarding an adversary.The differences can be stark. If you assemble the most hawkish group of presidential advisers from the Cold War, the model predicts they would make six times as many aggressive choices as the least hawkish group. Over the course of a presidency, that could mean hundreds of extra moves liable to spark new conflicts or escalate simmering disputes."Who dominates the room [...] does seem to have a systematic effect" on whether presidents choose hawkish or dovish paths, said Tyler Jost, a professor at Brown University who co-led the project.Now, Trump has a unique opportunity. The new research finds that hawkishness is surprisingly consistent from administration to administration; in fact, it varies more within administrations than between them — a statistical testament to the power of the so-called foreign policy "blob." Perhaps more than any president in recent memory, Trump has the chance to ditch advocates of global primacy and hire proponents of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy.Indeed, the former president is spoiled for choice. Most candidates for posts in a new Trump administration now agree that Washington should shift its focus to Asia by pursuing real retrenchment in Europe and the Middle East. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — a close Trump ally and top vice presidential candidate — has slammed U.S. military adventurism, called for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and even voted in favor of removing U.S. troops from Syria in December.New think tanks have popped up to support this viewpoint, and some old conservative stalwarts have refashioned themselves as America Firsters who want to help shape a different, more populist vision of U.S. foreign policy. These groups are creating staffing pipelines for a new brand of conservative foreign policy, and the consequences of their investment could go far beyond 2024.The transition battleThe Heritage Foundation wants you to know that it's changed. Once a premier home for neocons and uber hawks, the eminence grise of conservative politics now loudly calls for the U.S. to pull back from the Middle East and Europe, all while railing against inefficient military spending.Heritage's shift reflects broader changes in the conservative movement dating back to Trump's first election in 2016. "The real America First foreign policy position recognizes that the last few decades were characterized by a series of blunders," argued Micah Meadowcroft, the research director at the conservative Center for Renewing America (CRA) and a former staffer in the Trump White House. "Our leadership class messed up badly" during the so-called unipolar moment by launching a global crusade against terrorism and ignoring China's rise, Meadowcroft told RS.Conservative realists hope that recognizing this shift will allow the U.S. to focus all of its attention on preparing for — and hopefully deterring — a war with China over Taiwan. "China remains the single greatest threat to American interests in the world today, and we just haven't been acting like it," said Alex Velez-Green, a former adviser to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) now based at Heritage. "My view is that a new administration will really need to prioritize it."The key question is how to strike a balance between deterrence and provocation. Velez-Green draws on a "peace through strength" tradition exemplified by Elbridge Colby, a prominent China hawk who appears poised to get a major role in a new Trump administration. While all hope to avoid war, other realists have argued for a more conservative approach to Beijing's rise.Regardless of the reasons behind this broader shift, conservatives have made big investments in order to shape its path. The most influential effort is Heritage's Project 2025, an initiative that has raised millions of dollars to identify potential staffers for a second Trump administration and plan policies to help vault it back into the White House.For supporters of a more restrained foreign policy, Project 2025 has a lot to offer. While any Heritage program is bound to make up a big tent of conservative views, "the leadership of Project 2025 is a lot more aligned to a more Trumpian strain of America First, which is a more narrow, national-interest oriented idea," said Sumantra Maitra of the CRA, who has advised on the effort. Will Ruger, who Trump nominated as his ambassador to Afghanistan, welcomed Heritage's shift toward a "much more prudential approach to American foreign policy."But there are still some reasons to doubt Heritage's restraint bona fides. Project 2025's transition manifesto makes clear that the conservative tone setter is not quite ready to drop its commitment to fighting global terrorism and keeping down America's parochial enemies, however weak they may now be.Of course, Heritage is far from the only game in town. Its foreign policy team has often found common cause with the CRA, a right-wing think tank with restraint-oriented views on international affairs that Maitra said will be a "key player" in the planning for a second Trump term. Trump himself reportedly read and at least partially endorsed Maitra's CRA paper calling for a major down-sizing of the U.S. role in NATO.On the other side, traditional hawks at organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute continue to hold sway in both mainstream and conservative media, as Meadowcroft pointed out. But many prominent hard-line hawks — like one-time Trump adviser John Bolton — have had a sufficiently large break with the MAGA movement to make them persona non grata in any future Trump White House.The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) appears determined to split the difference. Like Heritage, AFPI has questioned the wisdom of continued U.S. aid to Ukraine and pushed hard for Europe to shoulder more of the burden of its own defense. But the startup policy outfit — created as something of a White House in waiting — has a bit of a neocon streak when it comes to the Middle East, with a particular focus on countering Iranian influence and supporting Israel.There is no love lost between Heritage and AFPI, as journalist Sam Adler-Bell recently noted in the New York Times. "A.F.P.I. partisans see Heritage as a latecomer to the Trump train, establishment wolves in 'America First' clothing," Adler-Bell wrote. "Some at Heritage see A.F.P.I. as a redoubt of precisely those unreliable Trump appointees — grifters and RINOs — who trade on their relationships with the president to ensure they can continue to run the show." This antipathy helps to explain why AFPI has a separate Trump staffing effort, known as the America First Transition Project.One should note, however, that the two don't always disagree. They share some staff and have both kept strong ties to more traditional foreign policy shops. Part of this stems from the fact that even the more dovish members of the GOP national security world are more hawkish on, say, the Middle East and Venezuela than hard-line realists. But, on balance, restrainers are more skeptical of AFPI than their old foes at Heritage.It remains unclear which side has Trump's ear. AFPI associates — including Fred Fleitz, Keith Kellogg, and John Ratcliffe — often show up on lists of current and potential future Trump advisers. He also reportedly consults with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who rank among the most hawkish figures in American politics. (Pompeo's habit of calling himself a "realist" is a particular point of frustration for many America Firsters.)But, as efforts like Project 2025 demonstrate, Trump will no longer be stuck with old-school options on every front. There are no hardcore restrainers known to be in the running for major roles, but the former president is reportedly considering Richard Grenell and Kash Patel — both of whom have a somewhat less interventionist streak — for top jobs in his administration. And, as just about everyone I spoke with noted, there's still plenty of time for other potential nominees to gain ground before the election."The bench is deeper, and therefore there are more folks to turn to if a president wants to go in a restraint direction," said Ruger.Trump 2.0Much of the planning for a second Trump administration revolves around staffing. This laser focus is a response to his first term, in which advisers and officials often took steps to block the implementation of the president's preferred policies.Take Syria. When Trump ordered that U.S. troops be withdrawn from the country in 2019, the move sparked an uproar among policy experts who argued that it would leave our Kurdish allies in the lurch. Jim Jeffrey — then the special envoy to Syria — persuaded Trump to leave a token force in the country but later revealed that "we were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there."Trump world is looking to make sure that never happens again. Heritage wants a new administration to make sweeping personnel changes that would allow Trump to replace thousands of federal bureaucrats with more sympathetic cadres.This is both an opportunity and a challenge for restrainers. On the "challenge" side, Trump has increasingly signaled that he wants to use military force against Mexican cartels, a proposal that most realists reject as dangerous and counterproductive. And, as Jost of Brown University notes, presidents don't just select their advisers based on hawkishness. They have to make decisions about which advisers will appease which constituencies in their base, among other considerations. In Trump's case, loyalty to the president appears to be another key criterion.But loyalty to Trump doesn't get your nomination through Congress. For many top jobs, nominees will have to persuade the old-school hawks in the Senate that they won't change too much about the status quo. Restraint-oriented nominees will, however, get help from the growing group of young America Firsters on Capitol Hill, not to mention the changing of the guard symbolized by Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) decision to step down from leadership.It will be up to Trump to decide whether he picks less controversial candidates for these positions or simply relies on "acting" appointees, as he did at the end of his first term. The former president will have much more room to maneuver when it comes to the National Security Council, whose leaders don't require confirmation.These challenges aside, the decisions that Trump makes in a potential second term could have a massive, lasting impact on the direction of conservative foreign policy. To better understand how, a quick history lesson is in order.In 2007, Democratic foreign policy big wigs founded the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a hawkish center-left think tank first conceived as a government in waiting for Hillary Clinton. When Barack Obama beat Clinton in the primaries, he made the fateful decision to soften his stance on the Iraq War and staff up his team with CNAS acolytes.The CNAS crew — in addition to Clinton herself — earned powerful roles in Obama's administration that allowed them to steer the president away from his anti-war rhetoric on the campaign trail. The result was a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on where you stand. The more hawkish CNAS staffers got coveted government experience (and connections) that put weight behind their arguments. Once they left government, they took their place as the sages of liberal foreign policy, with many returning in 2020 to staff the Biden administration.Obama's decision may have been practical. The progressive foreign policy landscape was, and in many ways still is, short on funding and candidates for high-level jobs. But Trump has the virtue of a genuine choice. The former president probably won't reject staffers based on their hawkishness — but perhaps he should. Research suggests it just might prevent the next war before it happens.
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This is a key time to protect global forests. While pressure is still strong on many key global ecosystems, such as the Amazon and Borneo, the significant results of governments such as Lula's in Brazil, as well as the ambitious vision of policies such as the recently enacted EU's Deforestation-Free Regulation (EUDR),[1] show that the devastating trend of deforestation of the past decades can indeed be reversed. Yet, a set of tools needs to be delivered to support this new wave of action to protect global forests, which has been triggered by raising awareness of the climate and biodiversity crises – a mix of social, economic and political, but also technological instruments. New technologies can indeed be a game changer in protecting global forests, if adequately understood and implemented: while some can significantly reduce the costs of once expensive activities, such as monitoring large territories, others can achieve what was otherwise impossible in the past, such as easily checking the origin of legal or illegal timber. It will be however necessary to address a series of obstacles – from a policy, legal, but also cultural perspectives – as well as to understand the interaction of such technologies with social and political aspects, for them to be fully effective.Technologies to fight deforestation While deforestation is almost entirely caused by the expansion of global agriculture (up to 90 per cent of total clearings),[2] failure to prevent it has been due to a number of issues: the cost of monitoring vast or inaccessible territories, such as the core of the Amazon or Indonesia's islands, the lack of effectiveness of enforcement by authorities at all levels, corruption and the relative easiness in evading national and international regulations (also due to their complexity, as in the case of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species – CITES). Technology helps in a number of ways: it reduces the need for specialisation, as many activities can be automatised (such as checking documents through QR codes). It also provides incontrovertible proof of deforestation, raising global awareness on the issue: this has been the case of the sharp increase in the Amazon deforestation under the Bolsonaro administration, which was accurately documented through satellite imagery analysis.[3] It can significantly reduce the cost of monitoring activities and the need for personnel in often understaffed entities, such as NGOs or environmental agencies; drones can cover in a few hours areas that would take entire days to teams on foot. New, experimental technologies also allow for results that were once considered impossible: scanners being now developed by the Spanish police SEPRONA will allow customs officers to trace the origin of wood and eventually declare its legal or illegal origin only by using mobile phones.[4] While the technologies being applied in the sector are many indeed, a few are particularly promising. Satellite imagery analysis is by far the most relevant and most extensively used. While natural photos are now being coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor deforestation patterns on a weekly or even daily basis (as in the case of the Forest Watcher app),[5] multispectral images offer new insights that were once impossible even to think of. Drones have helped with patrolling, but they also have other applications, especially if they use advanced instruments (as in the case of the thermal and multispectral cameras now available also on commercial agricultural drones). Among experimental technologies, scanners for the recognition of the origin of timber are instead using DNA and isotope technologies – two methods that can trace the timber sample to the specific region where the tree grew and was harvested. While DNA and isotope technologies are relatively consolidated and, if used in conjunction, have an extremely low margin of error,[6] they also require a significant mapping of forest areas to create the database that will be used to determine the actual origin of timber. This in turn requires a solid collaboration between different authorities – particularly between those in the countries producing the timber and those in the countries buying it – which has historically proved complicated. While all these methods proved effective over the years, many are indeed the obstacles still ahead. Authorities sometimes do not accept them as valid proof in investigations – this has been the case of several environmental investigations in France, for instance – while their implementation is sometimes impeded by bureaucracy or outdated legislation. This is the case for commercial drones: their technology has made giant leaps in the past ten years, but laws and environmental applications by national authorities are generally based on the low-autonomy drones of the 2010s. Sometimes obstacles are also cultural: technologies are perceived as expensive or inaccessible, even if quick advancements have remarkably changed the landscape in recent years (as again in the case of drones, but also concerning the availability and definition of satellite images). Politics also plays a role: data supplied from sensors, satellite images or drones have in many cases been denied or disregarded by public authorities. Bolsonaro's administration even tried to accuse its own National Institute for Spatial Research, the INPE, of manipulation.[7]The case of Indonesia Indonesia is alternatively the first or second country for deforestation rates (depending on the year) globally, and has long faced issues in addressing the problem; agriculture (palm oil production in particular) has been the main cause for the clear cutting of its forests, but also the main driver for the country's economic growth since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998. The management of forests and the landscape has been thus entangled with significant political and economic interests, some even dating back to the dictatorship time.[8] Technology is thus key for Indonesia to fight an issue that is still plaguing its ample and often inaccessible forest. The tools being applied in the country are mostly three: satellite imagery analysis, drones and apps. Satellite images have been extensively used in the past decade and are an established tool throughout all levels of analysis – institutions, international NGOs such as the World Conservation Society (WCS), but also local NGOs. Professors such as Bambang Hero Saharjo from the IPB University have been using satellite data also to conduct investigations and produce evidence for criminal trials against companies illegally clearing forests to plant palm oil (and other crops). Local NGOs such as Jikalahari (based in the Riau province of Sumatra) or Titian (in West Kalimantan, part of the Indonesian Borneo) use a mix of the NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and the ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2 data to detect "hotspots" – that is, large fires on agricultural or forest land – in real time. The staff from these NGOs then selects the most relevant locations and tries to understand the entity of the fire first through a network of local informers, and then perform a final check on the field using drones. Photos and videos are then used as evidence in investigations run by national agencies. Technologies are also supporting the sustainable production of commodities. Apps such as KoltiTrace by the agri service provider Koltiva[9] allow for the geolocalisation of the production of coffee, so that buyers can trace the origin of the commodity to legal plantations outside protected forests (this being also one of the key legal requirements of the EUDR). Farms on mountainous terrain, such as those in South Sumatra, are testing drones to map large areas in a short time. While all these tools are promising and are already bringing results, it is worth noting that they do not exist in a vacuum: politicians and agencies can ignore the data provided by satellites and drones, for instance. This is an ongoing issue in Indonesia, where the government often overestimated the impact of its regulations against deforestation and underestimated the rate of cutting, in contrast with data supplied from satellite imagery. Concerns about government-supplied data have for example been raised in relation to the debate over the 2020 payments under the REDD+ platform (a UN system to compensate countries that limit deforestation)[10] or the estimations for the devastating 2019 forest fires[11] – the research associate David Gaveau, of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), had even to depart from Indonesia over disagreement with authorities on the data.[12] Similarly, farmers can also find ways to trick the geolocalisation systems – by, for instance, stating that the apps don't work in their area because of lack of signal, or using farms on unprotected land as their own. Corruption can also represent a significant obstacle, the issue being still highly relevant across the country; corrupted officers can avoid reporting what drones or sensors helped them spot, and automatic monitoring systems can be put offline by simulating a malfunction.Looking ahead In order for the anti-deforestation technologies to be fully effective, it will be necessary to implement a series of complementary measures: economic incentives should be provided for sustainable farming, while the cost of using these technologies should not fall entirely on farmers, but be equally distributed throughout the supply chain. In theory this is already the case with most certification schemes and policies such as the EUDR – the final buyer of the commodity has the duty to perform training and tracing, and to bear the cost for this, while also giving farmers a premium price for their sustainability efforts. However, in many cases this extra budget is absorbed by intermediaries in the supply chain and little actually comes to producers, particularly when they are smallholders. At a more general level, international regulations and treaties, such as the EUDR and the CITES, should push for the integration of satellite data into national policies to define a common understanding of the magnitude and causes of deforestation – so far, they only give general recommendations. Integration of regulations is also essential: countries such as Indonesia have worked on providing guidelines for the sustainable production of key commodities in previous years, but these efforts have rarely been integrated into European policies. Particularly from a technology perspective, such integration could instead solve many of the issues being currently debated around EUDR compliance (particularly tracing and geolocalisation). In this sense, technologies can become a key component of a new, holistic approach to the protection of global forests that the world now needs more than ever.Lorenzo Colantoni is researcher of the Energy, Climate and Resources programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). This Commentary has been produced under the PRODIGEES project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 873119. The research reported from Indonesia has been witnessed directly by the author, who participated in a number of missions with local experts and NGOs and conducted interviews with them with informed consent.[1] European Parliament and Council of the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 of 31 May 2023 on the Making Available on the Union Market and the Export from the Union of Certain Commodities and Products Associated with Deforestation and Forest Degradation, http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1115/oj.[2] FAO, "FRA 2020 Remote Sensing Survey", in FAO Forestry Papers, No. 186 (2022), p. 47, https://doi.org/10.4060/cb9970en.[3] M. Cecilia Oliveira and Leandro Siqueira, "Digitalization between Environmental Activism and Counter-Activism: The Case of Satellite Data on Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon", in Earth System Governance, Vol. 12 (April 2022), Article 100135, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2022.100135.[4] Lorenzo Colantoni, Giulia Sofia Sarno and Margherita Bianchi, Fighting Illegal Logging in Europe. An Overview of Trends, Players and Action, Rome, IAI and Ambitus, September 2022, p. 35, https://www.iai.it/en/node/15859.[5] ITU News, How AI Can Help Protect Forest Ecosystems, 9 November 2022, https://www.itu.int/hub/?p=23702.[6] David Abrahamson, "It's Time Forensic Timber Tracing Became Mainstream", in DAI Developments Blog, May 2022, https://dai-global-developments.com/articles/its-time-forensic-timber-tracing-became-mainstream.[7] Karla Mendes, "Experts Deny Alleged Manipulation of Amazon Satellite Deforestation Data", in Mongabay, 16 July 2019, https://news.mongabay.com/?p=220464.[8] Tom Johnson, "It's Time to Confront the Collusion Between the Palm Oil Industry and Politicians that Is Driving Indonesia's Deforestation Crisis (Commentary)", in Mongabay, 18 April 2018, https://news.mongabay.com/?p=205867.[9] Koltiva website: KoltiTrace, https://www.koltiva.com/koltitrace.[10] Hans Nicholas Jong, "Experts Question Integrity of Indonesia's Claim of Avoided Deforestation", in Mongabay, 8 September 2020, https://news.mongabay.com/?p=234649.[11] Hans Nicholas Jong, "2019 Fires in Indonesia Were Twice as Bad as the Government Claimed, Study Shows", in Mongabay, 16 December 2021, https://news.mongabay.com/?p=250761.[12] Dyna Rochmyaningsih, "Wildfire Researcher Deported amid Growing Rift between Indonesian Government and Scientists", in Science, 12 February 2020, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb2763.
El aspecto central y objeto de esta investigación es el análisis, a través de un estudio de caso, de los procesos por los cuales se genera un tipo de acción colectiva denominada "movimiento social", a partir de una realidad social dada en la que no existía, así como los mecanismos por medio de los cuales las personas pasan a movilizarse e implicarse en él. A este conjunto de procesos, McAdam, McCarthy y Zald (1999: 24) lo denominaban "estructuras de movilización", aproximación teórica que derivó en la construcción de lo que acabó conociéndose como "Teoría de Movilización de Recursos" (McCarthy y Zald, 1973, 1977, Kriesi, 1988, McAdam, 1986, replicado por Nepstad y Smith, 1999). McAdam (1999: 447) realiza una aportación en torno a las condiciones que debe cumplir un movimiento social para que impacte en la sociedad. La primera estriba en conseguir nuevos miembros; la segunda, en evitar la fuga de los ya presentes, a través del compromiso y la moral; la tercera, en conseguir una apoyo mediático, que en la actualidad debería incluir todo lo relacionado con las redes sociales; la cuarta, en conseguir el apoyo de grupos externos a él, como otros movimientos sociales o estructuras y organizaciones preexistentes; la quinta, en evitar todos estos elementos anteriores en sus adversarios; y, finalmente, la sexta, en influir sobre las estructuras políticas y conseguir que las administraciones tomen decisiones y medidas en la dirección que propone el movimiento. El primero y el cuarto de los aspectos comentados por McAdam constituyen el objeto central de este estudio. Para desarrollar esta idea principal ha sido necesario aplicar una aproximación al estudio de la génesis de los movimientos sociales desde una perspectiva muy particular: aquella que hace referencia a la formación inicial y al momento en el que da los primeros pasos y va ampliando su base social a través de las interacciones y redes sociales en las que participan otros movimientos y/u organizaciones e individuos a título particular. En esta fase, la presencia de las redes sociales se convierte en una herramienta de interpretación imprescindible, que hace posible comprender cómo determinados movimientos y organizaciones sociales preexistentes permiten la generación de un nuevo movimiento social y cómo, a la vez, casi al mismo tiempo, se va ampliando su base social, especialmente, en función de su capacidad para atraer e incorporar a personas que hasta el momento de la aparición del movimiento social en cuestión, nunca antes habían participado en ninguno otro. Ubicando el estudio en el marco de la teoría de los movimientos sociales, se trataría de dar respuestas a la pregunta ¿cuándo se activa un movimiento social?, centrándose el estudio no tanto en los condicionantes contextuales (en cuanto a estructura de oportunidades políticas) o ideológicos, sino en el papel que juegan las redes sociales (preexistentes y generadas) en la configuración de un nuevo movimiento social. Para abordar estas cuestiones se ha focalizado el estudio en un caso concreto: la génesis de Ganemos Zaragoza (que luego derivó en Zaragoza en Común, en adelante: GZ/ZeC), proceso que se inició en el verano de 2014 y que finalizó con la celebración de las elecciones municipales de mayo de 2015. La importancia de esta investigación estriba en que se adentra en una cuestión clave en el estudio de los movimientos sociales desde una perspectiva sociológica: se trata de proponer estrategias científicas (teóricas y metodológicas) orientadas a dar una respuesta adecuada a la comprensión de cómo emergen ese tipo de acciones colectivas que, algunas contadas veces, tienen como resultado impactos en las estructuras sociales, hasta el punto de llegar a cambiarlas (Giugni, 1998, 2004; Funes y Adell, 2003). El análisis de los impactos de los movimientos sociales en lo instituido, visto tanto desde el punto de vista de los aspectos estructurales de lo social como de las instituciones que le dan forma, se ha convertido en el objeto de muchas investigaciones (desde la ya lejana aproximación de Schumaker, 1975: 494-495 a, entre otros, Andrews, 1997; Casquette, 1998: 205 y ss.; McAdam, McCarthy y Zald, 1999: 477; Burstein y Linton, 2002; Ibarra, Martí y Gomà, 2002; Doménech et al., 2002; Glenn, 2003; della Porta, 2004; Jiménez, 2005; Keefe, Lane y Swarts, 2006; Calle, 2007: 141 y ss.; della Porta y Diani, 2011, 285 y ss.; Campos y Ávila-García, 2013). Sin embargo, en algunos casos se ha desnaturalizado el análisis de los impactos al enfocar su objetivo en un eufemismo ("éxito" o "fracaso" de los movimientos), lo que percibimos especialmente en los desarrollos de la teoría sobre las estructuras de oportunidades políticas utilizadas por autores como Tilly (1991), McAdam (1999), Tarrow (1997) o Kriesi (1988), que se han centrado más en comprender cómo inciden las estructuras en los movimientos que en el fenómeno contrario. Tampoco han ayudado mucho las aproximaciones dirigidas a analizar la capacidad que poseen los movimientos sociales de generar discursos e interpretaciones de la realidad social diferentes a la dominante en un sistema social dado (Touraine, 1978; Melucci, 1989; Snow et al., 1986), o bien centradas en observar el cambio de las relaciones en el interior de los movimientos (della Porta y Diani, 2011: 130 y ss.), puesto que han olvidado la dimensión más estructural y macro de los impactos. Como forma de dar respuesta a estas carencias, en la presente investigación queremos retrotraernos al momento inicial del nacimiento de los movimientos sociales, lo que nos permitirá, de una parte, ofrecer una respuesta integral, que sintetice las aproximaciones macro y micro, y, de otra parte, demostrar que los movimientos no nacen "ex-novo" de una realidad dada, sino que se edifican sobre las estructuras sociales preexistentes, dándoles, a través de las relaciones y redes sociales que se generan, una nueva materialidad. Podría decirse que uno de los axiomas subyacentes de la investigación es que los movimientos sociales (entendidos como una nueva red social) nacen en situaciones sociales "enredadas". Esta idea es sintetizada por Mees, cuando afirma que "todos los movimientos sociales en su tiempo son nuevos y viejos a la vez" (1998: 317). En este sentido, puede concluirse que este estudio pretende, en cierta medida, conocer qué hay de viejo en lo nuevo, en el caso de Ganemos Zaragoza. Del objetivo general citado en el primer párrafo se derivan una serie de objetivos específicos, que se describen a continuación: - Identificar las redes preexistentes que permitieron la articulación de GZ/ZeC - Conocer el proceso de articulación de esas redes para dar vida a GZ/ZeC - Comprender el papel que jugó el 15M en el nacimiento de GZ/ZeC - Desvelar el papel que jugaron las redes de diferente tipo en las distintas fases del proceso, especialmente en el momento en el que se produce el desborde La aproximación metodológica es muy concreta: el estudio de caso. El estudio de caso se incluye dentro de las tradiciones de investigación cualitativa, pero se diferencia del resto de perspectivas que también forman parte de ella (biográfica, fenomenológica, teoría fundamentada y etnografía) en varios aspectos y, en concreto, en que en lo referido al estudio de caso, los procedimientos para alcanzar la validez son dos (según Stake 2005). Por un lado, la triangulación, consistente en la aplicación de múltiples técnicas de investigación en un mismo caso (Ayoub, Wallace and Zepeda-Millán 2014). Y por otro, la confirmación de los participantes, es decir, que los participantes en el caso estudiado se vean reflejados en las conclusiones extraídas de la investigación. Ambos procedimientos han sido criticados pero, con todo, siguen siendo los criterios más pertinentes para validar los estudios de caso. En consecuencia, para estudiar la génesis de GZ, se ha procedido a aplicar diferentes técnicas de investigación en función de los niveles objeto de análisis: análisis de documentación, páginas web, actas, etc.: siete entrevistas semidirigidas a informantes clave y una encuesta estadística representativa. Las entrevistas se focalizaron en aquellos agentes que tuvieron un protagonismo en las primeras fases del movimiento y que permitieron abrir el campo de investigación, así como el conocimiento de las redes preexistentes que habían formado parte de este movimiento y la obtención de información de las relaciones con otros movimientos similares que se estaban produciendo en otras ciudades españolas (fundamentalmente, Barcelona y Madrid). Respecto a la encuesta es preciso hacer algunas aclaraciones para encuadrar adecuadamente el análisis posterior. GZ posee varias listas de personas dadas de alta, en función de su nivel de vinculación a la organización. Para la realización del estudio se escogió la lista "Municipalismo", que se creó en los primeros momentos de vida de GZ y a la que se iban sumando todas las personas que se vinculaban al movimiento, procedentes de diferentes vías de captación. Fue especialmente importante en la gestación, consolidación y desborde de GZ, y es considerada como la lista principal y básica que incluye a las "fuerzas vivas de GZ". En ella se encontraban inscritas 554 personas (a 1 de junio de 2015). La muestra que finalmente contestó fue de 253, con lo que se obtuvo un margen de error del +/- 4,5% y un nivel de confianza del 95%. A este conjunto de personas se les pasó un cuestionario cuya administración fue on-line. Por lo tanto, la encuesta fue "autoadministrada" y su diseño tuvo en consideración los requisitos de esta modalidad de administración de cuestionarios (Díaz de Rada 2012: 195). Respecto a la validación de los resultados, se celebró un grupo de trabajo con ocho personas que reunían las siguientes condiciones: que hubiesen estado inscritas en la Lista de Municipalismo antes del 31 de octubre de 2014; que representasen una variedad de perfiles respecto a su pertenencia previa a organizaciones presentes en la génesis de GZ/ZeC. En la sesión de trabajo se procedió a la presentación de las principales conclusiones de la investigación, se abrió un debate en el que contrastaron sus impresiones y, posteriormente, respondieron de forma anónima a un breve cuestionario compuesto por ocho preguntas, cada una de las cuales centrada en una conclusión de la investigación. La valoración de los participantes (podían puntuar cada pregunta entre 1 y 5) arroja unos valores medios que se sitúan, en todas ellas, entre el "4" y el "5", con lo que la media global alcanza un valor de "4,45". En la primera parte del informe se aborda el reto de explicitar los prerrequisitos que permiten entender los movimientos sociales como una de las expresiones posibles de lo instituyente. Y se comprueba que son las relaciones sociales, y las redes sociales que forman, las que permiten identificar el motor de lo social que hace posible el engranaje de lo macro y lo micro y, paralelamente, posee el potencial causal que explica la génesis de lo social. La segunda parte está dedicada a presentar los aspectos metodológicos de la investigación, haciendo una reflexión especial en torno al análisis de caso en el ámbito concreto de los movimientos sociales. La parte tercera está destinada a realizar un análisis de Ganemos Zaragoza y su evolución, así como de los actores y redes que participaron en su nacimiento. En este sentido, hay un apartado especial centrado en el análisis de la incidencia del movimiento 15M en todo el entramado relacional y organizativo de la ciudad de Zaragoza y su influencia en el movimiento que estamos estudiando. La parte cuarta se dedica al estudio de los resultados de una encuesta que se realizó al grupo promotor de Ganemos Zaragoza, así como a ofrecer un análisis de las redes que intervinieron en su nacimiento y las formas en las que se articularon. En este caso, se realiza un análisis estadístico de redes, partiendo de la pertenencia de los individuos de la muestra a cada una de las redes que estuvieron presentes en el nacimiento de Ganemos Zaragoza, lo que permite confeccionar una tipología que identifica cuatro clústeres que se corresponde con la agrupación de individuos que han tenido una "carrera organizativa" similar. Esos cuatro clústeres identificados con los han sido los siguientes: - Clúster "Movimientos reivindicativos": que gira en torno a la Marea Verde (V) y las Asociaciones de Vecinos (AV). Otras redes significativas son la Marea Negra (N) y la Blanca (Bl). - Clúster "Nueva izquierda": Movimientos Ecologistas (E) y Podemos (POD). - Clúster "Izquierda tradicional": Izquierda Unida (IU) y Comisiones Obreras (C). - Clúster de "No asociados", previamente definido por aquellos individuos que no participaban de redes antes de su incorporación a Ganemos Zaragoza (o que pertenecían a redes minoritarias sin interconexión con otras). Finalmente, la última parte se centra en ofrecer las conclusiones de la tesis.
U prošlome smo se dvobroju Šumarskoga lista, obilježavajući 250. obljetnicu hrvatskoga šumarstva, osvrnuli na tekstove iz prvih godina njegovog tiskanja, povlačeći paralelu s današnjicom. Zbog uvida u povijesni slijed šumarske struke i interesantnost, pa i aktualnost tekstova, u ovome se dvobroju osvrćemo na tri teksta iz 1880. i 1881. god. vezana uz naslov. Prvi tekst odnosi se na "Naredbu c. k. ministarstva za poljodjelstvo od 13. veljače 1875, B 129/A. M., R.-G.-Bl. Br. 9, koja se odnosi na ispit za tehničko službovanje u državnoj šumskoj upravi" (po toj su Naredbi državni ispit polagali državni službenici u resornim ministarstvima u Pešti i Beču, da bi bili osposobljeni za rad u državnoj službi). Drugi tekst odnosi se na "Dopis od 3. studena 1880. Br. 24509, kojim poziva Visoka kralj. Zemaljska vlada ravnateljstvo Kralj. šumarskoga i gospodarskog učilišta u Križevcih, da sastavi posebno povjerenstvo koje bi imalo čim prije izraditi osnovu za preustrojstvo vladine naredbe od 10. siečnja god. 1850. tičuće se šumarskih državnih ispita u obće". Tako je Osnovu nove naredbe o polaganju državnog ispita za samostalnu šumarsku upravu u Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji, sačinilo povjerenstvo u sastavu: F. Ž. Kesterčanek, Dragutin Hlava i Vladimir Kiseljak, a ona se kao i naredba iz 1875. ponajprije temelji na spomenutoj Naredbi od 16. siječnja iz 1850. god. I iskustvima susjednih zemalja. Ispit se održava svake godine u svibnju. Kandidat mora imati završen odgovarajući studij šumarstva, s dobrim ocjenama iz glavnih predmeta i najmanje trogodišnju praksu. Ispit je pismeni i usmeni, a provjerava se znanje iz predmeta: a) Šumogojstvo, b) Zaštita šuma i šumsko redarstvo, c) Šumska tehnologija i uporaba, d) Geodezija, e) Ustanovljivanje šumskih obhodnja, gospodarskih osnova . . . , f) Šumarska taksacija……s osobitim obzirom na proračunanje vriednosti šuma, šumarsko-financijsko gospodarenje…, g) Šumarsko graditeljstvo (šumski putovi i prometila kao i po šumarstvo važne gradjevine……h) Državno šumarsko upravoslovlje (šumski zakon, naredbe), i sl.), i) Odnošaj privatnog prava prema šumarstvu i lovstvu, j) Temeljna načela neposrednog oporezovanja, k) Obća načela lovstva, l) Obći pregled ratarstva". Nakon 8-satnog pismenog, drugi dan je dvosatni javni usmeni ispit za svakog kandidata, a potom nakon nekoliko dana slijedi konačni "u obližnjoj kojoj šumariji ili šumi". Kandidat se nakon ispita "može proglasiti "odlično" ili pako samo "jednostavno osposobljenim", a nesposobnim pronadjeni kandidat može ispit ponoviti u roku , što mu ga ispitno povjerenstvo (od tri člana) ustanovi". U Naredbi iz 1875. posebno smo uočili dio paragrafa u kojemu se kaže: "Ispitni povjerenik, koji je s kojim kandidatom u rodu ili u tastbinstvu, ne smije kod izpita istoga kandidata prisutan biti", a interesantno je napomenuti da se za prijavu ispita, uz diplomu i potvrdu o radnom stažu u struci, traže i stručne primjedbe i zabilješke koje je kandidat vodio tijekom radnoga staža. U ova dva teksta cilj nam je bio prikazati već tadašnju potrebu, propis, način polaganja i obujam materije za polaganje državnog ispita, a u trećemu (vežući ga usputno za današnje političko kadroviranje), nalazimo odgovor na pitanje naslovljeno u članku:"Usposobljuje li položeni drž. šumarski ispit za samostalno vodjenje službe i za najviše šumarske službe?" Ako ga sami sebi postavimo, odgovor bi bio "da", no ako stavimo ruku na srce i budemo iskreni "pa ćemo morati priznati, da je ipak velika razlika biti šumarskim upraviteljem ili ravnajućim visokim činovnikom. Tko vidi, što se dan na dan zbiva, naći će, da ima vrlo mnogo šumara, koji su pod nadzorom vrstnoga i svjesnoga nadčinovnika ne samo najbolji upravni činovnici, već kadkad upravo odlično postupaju u poslovanju; nu ako se oni odmaknu od svoje svere ili im se obzirom na dosadanje poslovanje predaje vrhovna uprava, pokazuju ovi inače toli vješti činovnici toliku nespretnost i počimaju obično tako naopako gospodariti, te se mora i proti volji pomisliti, da su potpuno nevješti. Ne ima svatko sposobnosti, da ono bude, što hoće, i uz najbolju volju može se dogoditi, da komu njegove vlastite naravne sposobnosti reknu: dovde i ne dalje. Ne treba tumačenja, da uslied ovakovih pogriešaka trpi ponajprije šuma". U daljnjem tekstu sugerira se umjerenost, spoznaja vlastitih sposobnosti i napredovanje pojedinca kroz praksu, korak po korak "do one časti, kojoj može po svojih sposobnostih najbolje zadovoljavati". Glede stanja nakon položenog državnog ispita i cijeloživotnog obrazovanja, kritički se osvrće na "izpitane šumare. Većina njih, osvjedočena, da je "svoju svrhu postigla", ne radi ništa, knjige bacila na stranu, na slavohlepnost je zaboravila, svi su postali prosti i dobroćudni građani, koji u miru sade svoj kupus, i samo nuzgredno obavljaju svoju službu kao šumari, što već davno i nisu. Drugi su opet nemirne glave, puni ideja, od kojih se pako ni jedna ne obistinjuje, jer kakove imadu hire, tako im se mijenjaju i osnove; . progutaju sve knjige, ali malo od toga čestita zapamte, .njihov je rad kadkad izvrstan, nu nikad trajan. i rietko kad komu koristi. Baš od ovih polaze naši, toli slabo "cienjeni veleumi!" Treći dio napokon, i to najmanji, jest cviet šumogojaca. Ugled njihova zvanja, koje su odabrali, im je prvo. Oni ne ostaju na stepenu časti, koju su postigli položivši državni ispit, već znajući, da sad tek počima pravi študij njihove struke, i da se u životu ništa ne uči, da se vremenom opet zaboravi, pomnožuju svoje znanje i izobrazuju se kao muževi, svjestni si svoje svrhe. No, i među tom elitom šumarske struke nisu svi jednaki, i oni imaju svaki svoj limit, pa "gdjekoji obnašaju časti, koje im ne pripadaju, niti bi ih postigli da se je gledalo njihovo znanje." Želeći dobro šumarskoj struci, "kad napokon neće biti kod naše struke prepoznanih veleuma, već gdje će svaki pripadnik šumarske struke sam si stvoriti službu, dokle već sižu njegove sposobnosti. To vrieme bit će zora sjajnoj budućnosti šumoznanstva!" Uredništvo ; In the last double issue of Forestry Journal, which was dedicated to the 250th anniversary of Croatian forestry, we reviewed the texts from the first years of its printing and drew a parallel with the present. In order to gain an insight into the historical sequence of the forestry profession and the interesting and contemporary nature of the texts, this double issue will focus on three texts from 1880 and 1881 dealing with the subject title. The first text refers to the "Instruction of the Ministry of Agriculture of February 13, 1875, B 129/A. M., R.-G.-Bl.No.9, dealing with the exam for technical service in the state forestry administration (according to this Instruction, state exams were taken by civil servants in the competent ministries in Budapest and Vienna, which qualified them for work in the public service). The second text refers to the "Letter of November 3, 1880, No. 24509, in which the High Royal Government invites the Administration of the Royal Forestry and Agriculture College in Križevci to form a special commission for the purpose of drawing up a basis for the reformation of the governmental instruction of January 10, 1850, relating to forestry state exams in general". The Basis of the new instruction for state exams for independent forestry administration in Croatia and Slavonia was drawn up by a commission consisting of F. Ž. Kesterčanek, Dragutin Hlava and Vladimir Kiseljak. Like the instruction of 1875, the new instruction was also primarily based on the already mentioned Instruction of January 16, 1850, as well as on the experience from neighbouring countries. The exam was held in May every year. A candidate had to have completed a study of forestry and received good grades in the main subjects, and had to have at least three years of working experience. The exam was in written and oral form, and the subjects included: a) Silviculture, B) Forest protection and forest service, c) Forest technology and use, d) Geodesy, e) Establishment of forest control, Management plans, ., f) Forest inventory . with particular reference to the calculation of forest value, forest-financial management ., g) Forest civil engineering (forest roads and vehicles, as well as forest structures ., h) State forest legislation (forest laws, instructions), and similar), i) Relationship between private rights on forestry and hunting, j) Basic principles of direct taxation, k) General principles of hunting management, and l) General review of farming". The 8-hour written part of the exam was followed by a two-hour public oral exam for each candidate. Several days later the final exam was taken in a "nearby forest office or a forest". After the exam, the candidate might receive the following grades: "excellent" or "just competent", while those found incompetent could retake the exam on a date set by a three- member examining board". The Instruction of 1875 contains a part of the paragraph stating the following: "An examiner who is a candidate´s blood relative or a relative-in-law must not be present at the exam of the said candidate". It is interesting to note that in order to take the exam, the candidates had to submit not only their diploma and a document confirming their work in the profession, but also professional comments and notes they kept in the course of work.These two texts show that the method of taking state exams and the amount of the matter examined were regulated very early. The third text (related to the present politically-based appointments) gives an answer to the question raised in the article:"Does passing the state forestry exam qualify a candidate for an independent running of the highest forestry service?" If we answer the question ourselves, the answer is "yes", but if we are honest, "we must admit that there is a great difference between being a forest manager and a managing high servant. Those who are aware of what is happening day by day will find that there are very many foresters who, supervised by a competent and conscientious superior servant, become not only the best managing servants but also the best workers; however, if removed from their sphere or if appointed to run the highest administration, those otherwise competent servants display such ineptitude and begin to manage in such an inappropriate manner that one cannot help but conclude that they are utterly incompetent. Not everybody is capable of being what he wants to be; try as hard as one might, one´s own natural abilities tell you: you can get no further than this. Needless to say, it is the forest that suffers most in the aftermath of such errors". The text goes on to recommend moderation, an awareness of one´s own abilities and individual advancement through practical work, step by step, "up to that honourable position which can be best fulfilled by one´s abilities". As for the status after passing the state exam and lifelong learning, the text critically reviews "foresters that have passed the state exam. The majority of them, satisfied with the fact that "they have achieved their purpose", do nothing, throw away the books, forget ambition and turn into simple and well-meaning citizens who plant their cabbage in peace and only carry out their service as foresters in passing. Others, on the other hand, are restless and full of ideas, of which none are realized; their whims are followed by their changing priorities; . they avidly read all the books but remember hardly anything, . their work is sometimes excellent but never of long lasting . and is rarely useful for anybody. This is where the majority of our, so badly "appreciated geniuses" originate. The third part, the smallest one, is the crown of forest managers. The reputation of the profession which they have chosen is their utmost priority. They do not bask in the glory of passing the state exam, but, knowing that this is where the true study begins and that the things learned at one time are usually forgotten later on, broaden their knowledge and educate themselves as men with a purpose firmly in mind". Yet, there are differences even among this elite of the forestry profession. Each of them has their own limit, so "some are in honourable positions that do not rightfully belong to them, nor would they achieve them if their knowledge was the foremost criterion." Our profession will advance and benefit "when we finally do away with the geniuses of the profession, and when every member of the forestry profession creates the service himself according to their abilities. This moment will mark the dawn of a splendid future of the forestry science!" Editorial Board
At less than three weeks away from the national election, an Obama victory, even if not inevitable, seems today quite likely. Political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, in his on-line publication Crystal Ball, has now put Obama over the magic number of 270 electoral votes (50% plus 1 of all electoral votes), with potentially many more votes to be added from close races in several states. Barack Obama leads John McCain in the polls by ten points, and the McCain campaign is in disarray. It has stopped campaigning in some states (i.e. Michigan) and is trying to hold on to other states that traditionally vote Republican but are about to be lost for the first time in decades (Virginia, North Carolina). Barring a huge end-of-October surprise, this trend will firm up and determine the result in favor of Obama. Democrats are also poised to win a majority of seats in the Senate and House of Representatives. The so-called "coattails effect" of the presidential race on the congressional election is starting to worry Republicans, who are becoming very critical of John McCain's campaign. Considering that the electoral race was at a continuous dead heat in the last two months, it is worth discussing what has determined the steady rise of Obama in the polls. First and foremost, of course, was the financial crisis. The astounding institutional banking crisis that originated from the meltdown of the real estate market, the resulting credit crunch, have created an anxiety not seen since the Great Depression of 1930. Historically, the Democratic Party has a better reputation for salvaging the economy in times of crisis. In addition to the historical record, several political scientists, Alan Abramowitz from Emory and Larry Bartels from Princeton among others, have developed models based on the correlation between economic growth and presidential election results, and have found that when the economy is not growing in the second quarter of the election year, the party in power almost without exception loses the election. But just as important as the economic disarray has been the reaction of each candidate to that crisis, and the style of leadership that emerged from it. One week before the Wall Street debacle, McCain had said that" the fundamentals of the economy were strong". That unfortunate statement immediately gave an unequivocal ring of truth to Obama's claim that his opponent was "out of touch" with the realities of the country, and it will probably be remembered in history books as the critical turning point of this election. In the first debate, both candidates were cautious about the rescue plan (which had not yet been fully developed by the Treasury) and answered the questions on the economy as if little had changed. However, two days earlier, McCain had suspended his campaign and announced he was needed in Washington to "help solve the crisis". He had also demanded that the debate be cancelled because "times were too serious for that type of exchange". This was a gamble taken by his campaign and it backfired badly, as Obama (who also flew to Washington and attended the same meeting at the invitation of Bush) insisted that because times were difficult, the debate had become even more important and should take place: Americans were now paying attention to who should be the one to lead them out of this mess. Ultimately, McCain backed down and attended the debate, after no agreement on the Rescue Plan came out of that White House meeting. Although he did very well, was energetic and on message, his erratic pre-debate behavior worked against him by providing ammunition to the opposition, who were thereby able to portray him as unpredictable and over excitable, not the steady hand you would want at the helm of a nation in turmoil. Still, most experts and observers considered the first debate a draw, with both candidates passing their respective tests: Obama proving he was presidential enough to hold the office, and McCain reminding the public of his experience and dedication to the country. However, the polls showed most voters had chosen Obama as the winner. The second debate was in a town-hall meeting format, but with strict control of time and of the questioning. Veteran journalist Tom Brockaw moderated it with a strong hand, but the questions were lame and it was a lackluster performance on the part of everybody involved. However, the body language proved an asset to Obama, who listened respectfully, did not take any notes, and when needed, moved comfortably around the set to approach the public. On the other hand, McCain had a nervous restlessness about him that put him at a disadvantage; he kept going back to his corner to make notes on his opponent's comments and at a certain point referred to Obama as "that one" in what was perceived by many to be an expression of slight contempt. This was compounded by his aimless wondering around the set, at times having to be called on by Brockaw for blocking the moderator's teleprompter. In comparison, Obama looked very relaxed and cool, exuding that kind of calm and self-confidence that most people seem to be yearning for during these difficult times. It paid off, and his numbers started mounting dramatically on the next day. Even before that debate, the McCain campaign had thrown all self-restraint overboard and was using every trick in the book of negative campaigning. Thus, the name of William Ayres has become very widely known across the country, as a "domestic terrorist" who organized a bombing campaign of the Pentagon in the 60s, and as a "close associate to Barack Obama". Ayres was the founder of the Weather Underground movement, which protested against the Vietnam War four decades ago. Today he is a university professor and an educational reformer who has worked with many politicians (both Republican and Democrat) to change the educational system in Chicago. The more McCain slips in the poll numbers, the more we hear allusions to Obama's radical "associate", even if their contacts have been sporadic, that they met only a few years ago, and that Obama was eight years old when Ayres was a radical anti-war activist. McCain, however, did not bring this up in the face-to-face debate, perhaps for fear of opening the door to his own connection to Charles Keating, the convicted Savings and Loan scandal figure of the 1980s, whose investigation by regulators McCain had tried to suppress. McCain's vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has at every opportunity mentioned Ayres' name at her rallies, working her base up to frenzy to the point of violent threats, with some yelling "off with his (Obama's) head". For good measure, she added underhanded allusions to his "foreignness" (read: race) by saying for example: "He is not a man who sees America the way you and I see it." This decision to play the "guilt by association" game and to associate Obama with terrorism (of any kind) has led to a violent escalation in the rhetoric and has roused the base, but does not seem to be working with the independent voters, as poll after poll continues to show. On the contrary, it seems to have hurt McCain: at last weekend rallies he had to "correct" several of his own supporters who in their questions to him claimed Obama was an "Arab", a terrorist, a criminal. After one of such claims, McCain very determinedly took the microphone away from a woman and told her: "No, Ma'm, that is not true. He is a decent family man with whom I just happen to have disagreements on policy." Surely this disappointed the base, which has been led to believe differently. In all fairness to Senator McCain, he is not a racist; in fact, he is a very moderate, middle of the road Republican who has taken on his own party on matters of campaign finance reform and immigration. Why, then, is he playing this self-destructive game? The only logical answer is: out of desperation, as his numbers slip and several senior Republicans have turned against him. The constant chasing of the headlines, the constant spewing of "rapid responses and frantic emails" has resulted in an incoherent message to the detriment of his own personal appeal. Yesterday Bill Kristol, political analyst and commentator of impeccable conservative credentials, and editor of the Weekly Standard, in an op-ed column in the New York Times, called for McCain to fire his campaign staff, "set himself free" and run as the "cheerful, open and accessible candidate" he was in the past. He said it is the "strategic incoherence and operational incompetence of his staff that has made his campaign dysfunctional…and toxic." To this, McCain retorted that "even Bill Kristol had bought into the Obama line" and that he himself was "exactly where he wanted to be, with the whole media establishment against him." However, Republicans are starting to distance themselves from McCain, who they think is dragging the whole party down and will be responsible for loss of Senate and House Republican races, too. To compound his plight even more, yesterday a bipartisan ethics report by the state legislature of Alaska found Sarah Palin abused her power when she fired the Police Commissioner over a family vendetta against a state trooper (an affair already nicknamed "Troopergate" by the media). Voters seem to have tuned McCain out; it is no longer a question of message. It is a question of leadership, of calm amid the turmoil, of whom Americans want to answer the proverbial three-in-the-morning phone call that rings in the White House. Confronted with the angst and fury of John McCain, his impulsive change of course and mixed messages at a time of enormous economic uncertainty, voters are turning in larger numbers to Obama, who has remained unflustered in the face of nasty accusations. Composed, focused on the economy, he dismisses the violent rhetoric of his opponents, and prefers to focus on the difficulty of the times and on the specifics of his policy solutions. He has sharpened his message, spoken directly to the issues and remained a sea of calm amidst the turmoil, a source of optimism amidst the gloom and doom of the headlines. In the meantime, his campaign has registered hundreds of thousands of voters in many states that have traditionally voted Republican, and that today are surprisingly in play for the Democrats (namely Virginia, North Carolina). The McCain campaign is financially weaker and had to pull out of Michigan, where he was down eight points, in order to concentrate more resources in Florida, where the race is still tight, but where the economy has been severely hit by the real estate bust and by the reduction in tourism due to the credit crunch, all of which may favor Obama. In spite of the 270 electoral votes that put him over the top, with potentially many more votes to be added from close races in several states, an Obama win is still not assured. McCain is defending states that went for Bush in the last two elections and which he absolutely must win in order to have a slim chance at the whole, and therefore he can't be on the offense as much in other states. If Obama wins Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina, he will be the first non-Southerner Democrat to carry these states since John F. Kennedy. That explains the frustration of Republican Party stalwarts with McCain, his irresponsible choice of running mate and the unraveling of his campaign. Ironically, in the first debate McCain accused Obama of not knowing the difference between a tactic and a strategy. It actually seems it is McCain who has confused the two. Populism as a political tactic is common, but as the main strategy it is ineffective and harmful for the country. At times like this, when people are worried about their jobs, their pensions and their health care, the populist message of anger and division is not what the average voter is looking for. They are looking instead for some measure of optimism and reassurance. That is why they have turned to Obama. To win, the McCain campaign should stop playing the race–and-terrorism card, and instead bring up a concept which surprisingly has been all but ignored in this election: that of Washington being swept up by a "one-party rule", with Democrats controlling not only the White House but also Congress. No checks and balances, no limits on government in this country of Lockean traditions? That is a scenario that few Americans would look forward too, even in difficult times. It may win McCain more votes than destructive insinuations about his opponent. Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
As sociedades europeias encontram-se num momento especialmente delicado de renegociação daquele contrato que forja sociedade e vida em comum, e que pensadores como Rousseau, Locke e Hobbes colocaram no centro da sua visão da política. A política na Europa é cada vez mais governação colectiva e convergência normativa – europeização, para utilizar um termo que se tornou de uso corrente –, mas a Europa está longe de controlar todos os elementos do sistema global em que lhe aconteceu dar estes passos decisivos para a integração política. As tendências demográficas e o movimento global de pessoas, por exemplo, são desafios para os quais a Europa tem clara dificuldade em encontrar respostas adequadas aos seus próprios interesses, além de moralmente justificáveis e consentâneas com a influência que ambiciona exercer no mundo. E no entanto, a queda do muro de Berlim, em 1989, foi celebrada como o grande reencontro dos europeus, e destes com o mundo, com a promessa de inaugurar uma nova era de relacionamentos globais mais equitativos e solidários e, sobretudo, portadores e produtores de segurança humana. O espírito de abertura e unificação de 1989 já vai longe, e as sociedades europeias têm demonstrado fortes resistências a assumir o legado desse momento fundador e a retirar dele as consequências que se imporiam. Sejamos claros, a celebração é um momento catártico, de aceitação do outro, passageiro, e os muros que se derrubam dificilmente deixarão de ser substituídos por outros muros e as pontes que entretanto vão sendo lançadas dificilmente resistem ao regresso cíclico e oportunista da política identitária. Como a simbólica stari most de Mostar, na Bósnia. Condicionadas e afligidas pelo regresso em força da doutrina da segurança nacional, após 11 de Setembro de 2001, e pela clara estagnação económica dos últimos anos, as sociedades europeias vão cedendo à tentação de encontrar no outro as razões para o seu relativo declínio e insegurança, sentimento de que se aproveitam políticos mais ou menos populistas. Os recorrentes problemas com cidadãos extra-comunitários nos aeroportos um pouco por toda a Europa é bem o sinal desse sindroma de assédio que se vai estendendo e começa a ter expressão legislativa. E no entanto, o estigma da emigração começa a atingir também cidadãos e grupos de países de dentro da própria União Europeia, numa atitude que muitos consideram tributária do racismo e da xenofobia. Meados do mês de Maio: a eurodeputada Viktoria Mohacsi desloca-se a Roma e a Nápoles para visitar os acampamentos de ciganos, muitos de origem romena, atacados e obrigados a fugir. Mohacsi informou com carácter de urgência o Comité de Direitos Humanos do Parlamento Europeu. Na sua opinião, os factos que apurou são de extrema gravidade, decorrentes da criminalização colectiva dos ciganos. Os políticos são acusados de incitar ao ódio e a polícia de não cumprir a lei e de violar direitos humanos básicos quando procede a detenções e ao controlo indiscriminado dos acampamentos. O governo Berlusconi alega que o país vive uma emergência de medo e insegurança – motivada por alguns crimes muito mediatizados e perpetrados por cidadãos romenos nos subúrbios das grandes cidades. A resposta de Mohacsi é exemplar: num estado de direito, a segurança não se consegue perseguindo e criminalizando uma comunidade inteira. Numa entrevista ao diário espanhol El País, Mohacsi considera que o governo alimenta o ódio e que é inadmissível que muitos ciganos não tenham ainda conseguido a nacionalidade italiana, mesmo tendo nascido em Itália ou vivendo aí há quarenta anos. Na mesma entrevista, a eurodeputada considera-se assustada e horrorizada. O governo Berlusconi responde com um projecto de lei que criminaliza a imigração ilegal e promete colocar em centros de detenção milhões de estrangeiros com ordem de expulsão. As dificuldades óbvias de pôr a lei em prática e a multiplicação das vozes críticas, dentro e fora de Itália, faz titubear o governo. Berlusconi parece demarcar-se pessoalmente do projecto mas os aliados da Lega Nord mostram-se inflexíveis. Roberto Maroni, o ministro do interior, nega qualquer recuo e considera que a criminalização da imigração ilegal é o instrumento mais eficaz para proceder à expulsão rápida de indivíduos indesejáveis, com ou sem detenção. Entretanto, sem publicidade e sem notas de imprensa, utilizando antes a via doDiário Oficial do Estado, Sílvio Berlusconi acaba de conceder poderes extraordinários aos delegados do governo em Roma, Milão e Nápoles no sentido de "utilizarem todas as medidas úteis e necessárias para a superação da emergência colocada pelos ciganos". Os graves ataques e as repetidas declarações discriminatórias de membros do governo Berlusconi contra a comunidade cigana mereceram o repúdio do Vaticano e do próprio presidente da República italiana. Giorgio Napolitano denunciou os casos de intolerância verificados recentemente e pediu a todos os cidadãos e instituições que sejam firmes na luta contra "qualquer risco de retrocesso civil" no país. As palavras utilizadas por Napolitano dificilmente poderiam ser mais eloquentes. A influente Louise Arbour, Comissária da ONU para os Direitos Humanos criticou duramente as políticas repressivas do governo italiano e a vice-presidente do governo espanhol, María Teresa Fernández de la Veja, provocou mesmo uma mini crise diplomática ao considerar o governo Berlusconi como xenófobo e racista. O tom da polémica baixou consideravelmente mas o mal-estar e o desconforto permanecem. Contudo, as reticências existem no seio do próprio governo Berlusconi. Mara Carfagna, a ministra da igualdade de oportunidades, pôs o dedo na ferida ao lembrar que a política repressiva da imigração pode conduzir a um "drama socioassistencial" em Itália, onde centenas de milhares de famílias dependem dos imigrantes para tarefas cruciais do dia-a-dia. As associações de imigrantes e consumidores estimam que o número de empregados domésticos estrangeiros chegue a 1,7 milhões, dos quais apenas 745 mil estão registados no ministério das finanças, sobretudo peruanas, equatorianas e filipinas, mas também romenas. Os restantes nem sequer dispõem de autorização de residência. Da esquerda, o partido Italia dei Valori usou o sarcasmo para lembrar a Maroni que entre imigrantes ilegais e empregadores que se aproveitam do facto e o alimentam, um destes dias poderia ver-se a braços com 3 milhões de pessoas na prisão. Para evitar a simplista dicotomia entre direita e esquerda, vale a pena referir aqui o relatório da Amnistia Internacional que assinala o próprio Walter Veltroni, o chefe da esquerda, como um dos primeiros políticos italianos a utilizar os sentimentos xenófobos contra aos romenos que vivem em Itália. Por outro lado, da direita começam a surgir declarações anti-racistas, como as do edil de Roma Gianni Alemanno quem, num primeiro momento, chegou a invectivar contra os média estrangeiros que denunciaram os ataques à comunidade cigana. Mas o ambiente restritivo e hostil face à imigração não é exclusivo de Itália. A França, a Bélgica, a Dinamarca, a Holanda, a Suíça, a República Checa, o Reino Unido, todos estes países assistiram nos últimos anos à emergência de um discurso conservador e securitário que encontra na imigração o bode expiatório ideal. De acordo com Robert Marquand do The Christian Science Monitor, as vozes extremistas e nacionalistas antes monopolizadas por Jean-Marie Le Pen em França fazem hoje parte do discurso utilizado pelo centro político e a imigração é vista como uma crise, tanto pela direita como pela esquerda. Mesmo em Espanha, o discurso parece ter mudado sensivelmente desde a campanha para as eleições legislativas de Março último, em que o conflito que opôs Zapatero a Rajoy foi muitas vezes descrito como o conflito entre a tolerância e a intolerância. Não foi preciso o novo ministro do trabalho e imigração tomar posse para se perceber que o discurso oficial tinha endurecido. Reconhecendo as inquietações sobre o tema que fizeram deslocar parte do eleitorado para o Partido Popular, Celestino Corbacho passou a falar insistentemente da necessidade de governar com firmeza o fenómeno da imigração, reforçando a sua vinculação com as necessidades do mercado laboral. Em França, Nicolas Sarkozy chegou à presidência com um discurso duro e intransigente neste tema. Além do mais, são especialmente polémicos o recurso a testes de ADN para imigrantes que requerem a reunião da família em solo francês e o novíssimo pacto de imigração que muitos, em Espanha por exemplo, vêem como assimilação forçada e com alternativas nas leis já existentes. Tomando o relevo da presidência da União Europeia a partir de 1 de Julho próximo, o governo francês já elegeu como objectivo principal a adopção de um pacto europeu para a imigração, o chamado plano Sarkozy que há meses anda a ser negociado com alguns dos parceiros europeus, designadamente com Rodríguez Zapatero. O plano centra-se num endurecimento da política de imigração a nível europeu para limitar a entrada de imigrantes e assenta em cinco pilares: o controlo das fronteiras externas por parte de uma polícia europeia especial, a selecção dos imigrantes, a agilização das expulsões, a adopção de uma política comum de asilo e o fortalecimento da ajuda ao desenvolvimento dos países de origem dos imigrantes. Para além disto, o plano exorta os estados da UE a renunciar às regularizações maciças porque produzem efeito de chamada e interferem nas opções tomadas pelos estados vizinhos. Sendo um espaço de livre circulação de pessoas, bens, serviços e capitais onde desapareceram as fronteiras internas, a União Europeia carece todavia de uma política de imigração, pelo que neste tema vigoram direitos nacionais muito diferentes uns dos outros. A necessidade de harmonização é destacada por muitos, tendo até agora sido aprovadas apenas quatro directivas: sobre o reagrupamento familiar, em Setembro de 2003; sobre o estatuto de residentes de longa duração, em Novembro de 2003; sobre as condições de admissão de estudantes, em Dezembro de 2004 e sobre a admissão de investigadores, em Outubro de 2005. Nos últimos meses têm-se sucedido as negociações para a aprovação de uma directiva relativa à expulsão de imigrantes ilegais, isto é sem-papéis, que aproxime os procedimentos díspares em vigor nos 27 países-membros. Finalmente, no passado dia 5 de Junho os 27 ministros do interior da UE aprovaram a directiva que estabelece garantias judiciais aos imigrantes no tratamento do seu processo e prazos máximos de internamento em centro de detenção. Caso seja aprovada pelo Parlamento Europeu, a norma virá a aplicar-se a cidadãos não pertencentes à UE e sem autorização de residência, ficando de fora os processos de petição de asilo. A directiva de retorno – a que alguns já baptizaram de directiva da vergonha – prevê o estabelecimento de um prazo máximo de detenção de imigrantes ilegais de 6 meses – que pode ir até aos 18 meses em casos específicos – onde até agora os procedimentos eram muito desencontrados. Em Portugal e Espanha, o prazo máximo é de 60 dias, após o qual o imigrante tem de ser libertado; na Alemanha é de 18 meses, enquanto na Lituânia é de 20 meses. No Reino Unido, Dinamarca, Estónia, Finlândia, Grécia, Irlanda, Malta, Holanda e Suécia a detenção de imigrantes ilegais é ilimitada, pelo que o prazo estabelecido resultou necessariamente de um compromisso e representa um máximo – onde antes não o havia –, não um prazo obrigatório. Para além deste ponto, a directiva estabelece um período de 7 a 30 dias para que os imigrantes abandonem o país de forma voluntária, a proibição de regresso por um período máximo de 5 anos – de que estão excluídas as vítimas de tráfico de pessoas, a garantia de assistência jurídica nas mesmas condições que se oferecem aos requerentes de asilo, e a garantia dos interesses dos menores sem família que devam ser repatriados. O texto agora aprovado pelo Conselho de Ministros da UE representa um endurecimento face ao projecto apresentado pela Comissão Europeia em Setembro de 2005, e gera fortes críticas de alguns grupos políticos com representação no Parlamento Europeu. A favor do compromisso estão os eurocépticos e os populares europeus, mas também os socialistas que se encontram no poder actualmente – na Espanha, Portugal, Reino Unido e Alemanha. As principais reservas políticas foram expressas pelos socialistas que não são poder nos seus países – italianos, belgas e franceses –, pela restante esquerda e pelos verdes que consideram a medida demasiado repressiva, mas também no seio dos liberais democratas. Fortemente críticas são as igrejas cristãs europeias. Os bispos católicos reunidos na comissão das conferências episcopais dos países da UE (Comece) disseram-se muito preocupados e pediram ao Parlamento Europeu que se limite o uso da detenção administrativa. Para os bispos europeus, o compromisso emergente em matéria de imigração não toma suficientemente em consideração a condição humana do imigrante. *Doctor en Relaciones Internacionales. Profesor del Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Políticas, Universidad Técnica de Lisboa. Profesor Invitado del Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Universidad Católica Portuguesa.
DER NATURARZT 1896 Der Naturarzt (-) Der Naturarzt 1896 (1896) ( - ) Einband ( - ) [Exlibris]: Aus dem Legat des † Schuldirektors Matthäus Schmiedbauer in Schwanenstadt ( - ) Titelblatt ([I]) Inhalt. (Inhalt.) (II) I. Sachverzeichnis. (II) II. Personen- und Ortsverzeichnis. (VI) II. Personen- und Ortsverzeichnis. (VI) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 1. Januar / 1896) (1. Januar 1896.) ([1]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Zur Jahreswende [Gruss des Bundesvorstandes] Voranzeige. Die nächste Bundesversammlung wird am 5. und 6. April 1896 in Cassel stattfinden. ([1]) Approbierte und nicht approbierte Naturärzte. (2) Ein Wort zur Tropenhygiene. (6) Erste Hilfeleistung bei Zahnschmerzen. (6) Aus der Anatomie und Physiologie. Die Haut. Aufgabe und Thätigkeit der Haut. Erkältung. Abhärtung. Hautpflege. (8) Zur Sozialhygiene. 1. Aus Baden. (12) [Tabelle]: Aus Baden. Grosse Sterblichkeit der Cigarrenarbeiter, Zahlen aus dem Sterberegister 1887 bis einschliesslich 1893. Zahl der gestorbenen Cigarrenarbeiter gegenübergestellt der Zahl der an Lungentuberkulose Gestorbenen. (12) Rettung eines Fusses. (14) Zwei Erfolge von "Heilmitteln". (17) Patent-Medizin in Amerika. (18) Niedriger hängen! (19) Sprechsaal. (21) Bundesnachrichten. Bundesvorstand. Verzeichnis. Steuern. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Aus den Vereinen. (23) Aus der Zeit. Aus dem Reichstag. Aus dem sächsischen Landtage. Vom Reichsversicherungs-Amt. Vom Apotheken-Handel. Dr. Dressel's Nervenfluid. "Malzaxtrakt-Gesundheitsbiere". Auch ein "Naturheilkundiger". "Schwarzer" Medizin-Aberglauben. Aus dem Kampfe gegen den Alkohol. Zur Schulhygiene. Eau de Cologne - als Branntwein. Vom Laufen. (26) Bücherschau. (30) Feuilleton. Wert der Gesundheit. Citate aus dem Werk von Dr. Paul Gizycki: Vom Baume der Erkenntnis, Fragmente zur Ethik und Psychologie aus der Weltliteratur (31) [Gedicht]: O Gesundheit, herrlichst selige, . Ariphron, übersetzt von Thudichum (31) Es ist ein köstlich Ding um die Gesundheit . Michael Montaigne, Gedanken und Meinungen, übersetzt von Bode (31) Zehn Gebote der Frau. (31) Briefkasten. (32) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 2. Februar / 1896) (Nr. 2. Februar 1896.) ([33]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Wie ich Naturarzt wurde. ([33]) Vom Wert der Mineralwässer. (35) Aus der Anatomie und Physiologie. Wirkung kalter Abwaschungen und Bäder. Seife, Schminken. Temperatur des Wassers. Baderegeln. Brausebäder. (36) Zur Sozialhygiene. 2. Aus Sachsen. 3 Aus Preussen. (42) Noch zwei Erfolge von "Heilmitteln". (45) Zur Tuberkulose-Frage. (46) Kniegelenkentzüdung nebst 279 Geschwüren. (47) Heilung von Rhachitis. (48) Ein interessanter Prozess. [Dresden. Interessanter Wettkampf zwischen Medizin- und Natur-Heilkunde. Der Naturheilkundige Karl Schüller musste sich wegen fahrlässiger Tötung verantworten.] (50) Sprechsaal. (52) Bundesnachrichten. Bundesvorstand. Verzeichnis. Steuern. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (53) Aus der Zeit. Im Sächsischen Landtag [Verhältnis der Lehrer zu den Naturheilvereinen]. Ist die Furcht so gross? unwissend oder unwahr? Zur Impffrage. Vivisektion. Geheimmittel. Zur Schulhygiene. [Pflichtstunden der Lehrer sollen nicht erhöht werden, 42,7 % sämtlicher Lehrer sind krank.] In Innsbruck [internationale Ausstellung für körperliche Erziehung, Gesundheitspflege und Sport. Protektorat Erzherzog Ferdinand Karl von Oesterreich]. Ein Elternabend [Schädlichkeit des Rauchens und des Genusses von Bier und Branntwein bei Kindern]. Hängeböden als Schlafräume. Auch ein Prozess. (59) Bücherschau. (61) Feuilleton. [Erzählung]: Zerbrochenes Glück. von Emmy von Borgstede. (61) Briefkasten. (66) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 3. März / 1896) (Nr. 3. März 1896.) ([67]) Mitteilungen über die Bundesversammlung siehe Seite 85. ([67]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Heilung von Brandwunden. ([67]) Aus der Anatomie und Physiologie. Von den Haaren, Nägeln etc. Nicht unwichtig ist die Pflege des Haares. Die Nägel. Hühneraugen. Warzen. Bei spröder Haut, aufgesprungenen Händen. Wunde Hautstellen. (70) Akute Fälle. Drei Heilberichte aus der Berliner Naturheilanstalt. (73) Lehrer und Naturheilvereine in Sachsen. (74) Sprechsaal. (77) Bundesnachrichten. Bundesvorstand. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Die Bundesversammlung wird zu Ostern 1896 in Cassel im "Vereinshaus", Cölnische Strassse 17, abgehalten. [Tagesordnung]. (82) [4 Tabellen]: (1) Kassen-Bericht 1895. (2) Gewinn- und Verlust-Conto 1895. (3) Bilanz am 31. Dezember 1895. (4) Priessnitzfonds 1895. (100) [Naturheilverein Cassel] Programm für die zu Ostern 1896 in Cassel stattfindende Bundesversammlung des Deutschen Bundes der Vereine für Gesundheitspflege und für arzneilose Heilweise. (102) Aus der Zeit. Der Geschäftsausschuss des deutschen Aerztevereinsbundes. Der Geschäftsausschuss der Berliner ärztlichen Standesvereine. Zum kapitel "Unlauterer Wettbewerb". Professor Röntgens Entdeckung. [Professor von Bergmann: Fremdkörper, die keine Beschwerden hervorrufen, im Körper belassen. Dubois-Reymond nannte Karl von Reichenbachs Behauptungen Verirrungen - Und nun?] Also doch? Ein Aufruf an die Naturheilvereine des Königreichs Sachsen. Die Gesundheitslehre in der Fortbildungsschule. Aerzte-Streik [weil Krankenkassen den Naturheilkundigen Wenzel zulassen]. Der Regierungspräsident zu Potsdam [Nebenbeschäftigung von schulpflichtigen Kindern zu Erwerbszwecken] (103) Bücherschau. (106) Feuilleton. Sommertage im heiligen Lande. Allerlei Hygienisches aus meinem Reise-Tagebuch. Von Adolf Damschke. I. (106) Briefkasten. (108) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 4. April / 1896) (Nr. 4. April 1896.) ([109]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Naturheilkunde und Medizin. Zugleich eine Antwort an Dr. R. (Leipziger Zeitung vom 24. Dez. 1895) von Dr. med. Hermann Hufschmidt, dirigierender Arzt der Natureilanstalt Ottenstein-Schwarzenberg i. sächs. Erzgebirge. ([109]) Aus der Anatomie und Physiologie. Die Harnorgane. Nieren. Blase. Erkrankungen der Harnorgane. Verhütung derselben. (113) [2 Abb.]: (1) Fig. 1. Die Nieren (schematisch.) (2) Fig. 2. Lauf des Blutes durch die Gefässknäuel. (114) [Abb.]: Fig. 3. Verlauf der Harnkanälchen. (115) [Abb.]: Fig. 4. Schnitt durch eine Niere. (schematisch.) (116) Ein Jahr unter der Herrschaft der physikalisch-diätetischen (Naturheil-)Methode. Fortsetzung der Statistik in No. 11 (1895) von Dr. Kantorowicz (Hannover) (119) Heilung von Schuppenflechte. (120) Einige Vergiftungen durch Gebrauchsgegenstände und Speisen. (121) Zum Krankenkassengesetz. (123) Sprechsaal. (124) Bundesnachrichten. Bundesvorstand. Verzeichnis. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Steuern. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (126) Aufruf an alle Naturärztinnen und Naturärzte Deutschlands. (133) Aus der Zeit. Im Reichstage [Antrag zur Aufhebung des Impfzwangs]. Von der sächsischen Landtagskammer [Gesetz betr. ärztliche Bezirksvereine und nicht approbierte "Heilkünstler"]. [Erlaubnis zur Errichtung einer] Privat-Krankenanstalt. Ein Gutachten über die Lage der Kellner. Zur Schulhygiene. Nichtapprobierter Dr. med. Helft! [Verkäuferinnen können ihre Arbeit nicht anders als stehend verrichten. Oft zwölf- bis fünzehnstündiges Stehen ist gesundheitsschädigend. Aufruf des Berliner Frauenvereins: Frauen werden aufgefordert. sich durch Unterschrift zu verpflichten, jene Geschäfte zu bevorzugen, wo den Angestellten die Möglichkeit gegeben ist, sich zu setzen.] Arzneiliche Vergiftungen. Hydropath. Magnetopath. Hochgradige Schwindsucht! Wer hat Lust? (134) Bücherschau. (137) Feuilleton. Sommertage im heiligen Lande. Allerlei Hygienisches aus meinem Reise-Tagebuch. Von Adolf Damschke. II. (137) Briefkasten. (140) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 5. Mai / 1896) (Nr. 5. Mai 1896.) ([141]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Der Fall Langerhans. Zur Frage des Behringschen Heilserums. [Diphtherie-Heilserum, Nutzen und Risiken] ([141]) Die Gefahren und Folgen der modernen Frauenheilkunde. (144) In Wörishofen. Die glänzenden Erfolge Pfarrer Kneipp's, die zahlreichen Auflagen seiner Bücher, haben dem einfachen schwäbischen Pfarrer einen Ruf verliehen der alle fünf Erdteile durch hallt. Aus dem kleinen Landstädtchen Wörishofen ist einer der besuchtesten Kurorte geworden. (147) Heilung eines von Pfarrer Kneipp und der Medizin aufgegebenen Falles von Gicht und Neurasthenie (151) Zur Sozialhygiene. (154) Aus der sächsischen zweiten Kammer. (156) Bundesnachrichten. Protokollarischer Bericht über die Bundesversammlung am 5. und 6. April 1896 in Cassel. Bundesvorstand. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Verzeichnis. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (157) Aus der Zeit. Generalmajor von Lippe. In der balneologischen Gesellschaft. Auf dem XIV. Kongress für innere Medizin. Zur Viehimpfung. Her M. von Egidy. In Württemberg. Zur Schulhygiene. In der Schule zu Szameitkehmen im Kreise Pillkallen hat jeder Schüler in der Klasse ein Paar Filzkorken für den Winter stehen. [von der Gemeinde angeschafft, Kinder brauchen nicht in nassen Schuhen in der Schule zu sitzen.] Lungenschwindsucht als Invaliditätsursache. Dr. W. Häusler. "Praktischer Vertreter der arzneilosen Therapie". Von der Krankenbehandlung auf der Insel Tonoag (Neuhebrifen) erzählt der Missionar G. Kurze. Auch ein Jubiliäum! Am 14. Mai sind es 100 Jahre, dass Dr. Jenner die erste Impfung vornahm. (168) Bücherschau. (171) Feuilleton. [Gedicht]: Festgruss. Gesprochen auf dem Casseler Bundestag. (171) Briefkasten. (172) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 6. Juni / 1896) (Nr. 6. Juni 1896.) ([173]) [3 Gedichte]: (1) Das Mass [Pythagoras] (2) Unsere Mässigkeit [Engel] (3) Gäben wir die Hälfte dessen, was wir, krank uns machend, essen, . [Rückert] (-) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Welche Faktoren sind einer rascheren Ausbreitung des Naturheilverfahrens hinderlich? Festrede von Philo vom Walde, gehalten auf der Bundesversammlung in Cassel. ([173]) Der Gesetzentwurf über die ärztlichen Ehrengerichte. (179) Ueber Haar-, Nägel- und Hautpflege. [Entgegnung von Herrn Spohr, Oberst a. D., auf den Artikel von W. Siegert in "Der Naturarzt" Nr. 3. März 1896. Entgegnung auf den Artikel von A. Scholta in "Der Naturarzt" Nr. 4. April 1896. Schuppenflechte "Psoriasis" ist eine Folge von Metall- namentlich Quecksilbervergiftung.] (182) Gefahren der modernen Frauenbehandlung. (Nachtrag. Siehe Seite 144.) (188) Die Impffrage im Reichstage. (189) Die Naturheilkunde im österreichischen Herrenhause. [Auszug aus der Rede von Graf Curt Zedtwitz] (191) Bundesnachrichten. Verzeichnis. Steuern. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (195) Aus der Zeit. Vom Prinzregenten von Lippe-Detmold. Zum Fall Langerhans. [Urteil von Prof. Paul Ehrlich, Direktor der staatlichen Kotrolstation]. Tod durch Heilserum. Behandlung des Scharlachs mit "Antistreptococcen-Serum". Vorgehen einer Krankenkasse gegen gesundheitsschädigende Betriebseinrichtungen. Für Aerzte und Redaktionen. Von der Freiheit der Ueberzeugung. [Aerzte, welche der Homäopathie und der Naturheilkunde anhängen, sind auszuschliessen von der Aufnahme in den Verein der Aerzte in Merseburg und Anhalt.] Ja, die Laienkritik! (203) Bücherschau. (205) Briefkasten. (206) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 7. Juli / 1896) (Nr. 7. Juli 1896.) ([207]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Ein Sieg der Naturheilmethode. ([207]) Zur Behandlung der Migräne. (211) Welche Faktoren sind einer rascheren Ausbreitung des Naturheilverfahrens hinderlich? Festrede von Philo vom Walde, gehalten auf der Bundesversammlung in Cassel. (Schluss.) (212) [Gedicht]: Allen Gewalten zum Trutz [J. W. v. Goethe] (216) Die Behandlung der Gicht. (216) Aerztliche Gutachten über Handesartikel. (218) Noch einmal: "Heilung der Schuppenflechte". [Entgegnung von Herrn A. Scholta auf die Kritik von Oberst Spohr in "Der Naturarzt" Nr. 6. Juni 1896.] (219) Berichtigung: Im Spohrschen Artikel in voriger Nummer sind einige Druckfehler zu berichtigen: (219) Sprechsaal. (219) Bundesnachrichten. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Steuern. Verzeichnis. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (223) Aus der Zeit. Dr. med. Schulze [begeht seine goldene Hochzeit]. Naturheilanhänger, welche Mitglieder von Tierschutzvereinen sind [Hinweis auf den internationalen Kongress der Tierschutzvereine]. Herr Franz W. Kubiczek [österreichischer Schriftsteller, ist am 3. Juni 1896 in Wien gestorben.] Eine Naturheilanstalt auf gemeinnütziger Grundlage. "Von einem Naturarzt behandelt" Zur Haftbarkeit der Aerzte. Von der ärztlichen Verantwortung. Vom ärztlichen Berufsgeheimnis. Von der Würde des ärztlichen Standes. "Lungen- und Kehlkopfleiden". Zur Schulhygiene. Zur Sozialhygiene. Der II. Deutsche Kongress für Volks- und Jugendspiele findet vom 10. bis 13. Juli 1896 in Münschen statt. Noch eine Impfung! Zum Begriff "Naturheilanstalt". Einfluss der Gewohnheit auf den Schlaf. Alkoholgenuss in den Tropen. (231) Bücherschau. (236) Feuilleton. Molière und die Aerzte. Eine litterar-historische Studie von Alfred Moulet (professeur d'Ècole Normale), Versailles. I. (237) Briefkasten. (240) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 8. August / 1896) (Nr. 8. August 1896.) ([241]) Feuilleton. Molière und die Aerzte. Eine litterar-historische Studie von Alfred Moulet (professeur d'Ècole Normale), Versailles, II. (237) Briefkasten. (240) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Aus meiner Studienzeit. Von Dr. med. Anna Fischer-Dückelmann, ([241]) Das medizinische Frauenstudium in Amerika. (246) Ueber Bartflechte. (250) Eine heilgymnastische Methode bei Herzschwäche. (252) Pestalozzi und der Kampf gegen den Alkohol. [Adolf Damaschke zitiert aus der Zeitschrift "Das Schweizer Blatt" und zwar aus der Nummer vom Donnerstag, den 14. Hornung 1782. Er meint, es scheine aufzufallen, dass der Vorschritt der sittlichen und politischen Erleuchtung, den man sich anmasst, nicht so gross sei.] (254) Ein seltener Fall aus der Frauenheilpraxis. (257) Eine Richtigstellung. [Entgegnung von Herrn Spohr, Oberst a. D., auf die Kritik von W. Siegert in "Der Naturarzt" Nr. 7. Juli 1896.] (258) Bekanntmachung. Ausbildung und Prüfung von Naturheilkundigen (259) Bundesnachrichten. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Steuern. Verzeichnis. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (260) Aus der Zeit. Vom Ober-Verwaltungsgericht. Wieder ein Sieg der Wasserheilanwendung! Noech einmal der Fall Langerhans. Der 24. deutsche Aerztetag zu Nürnberg. Paul Krüger, der viel genannte Präsident der Republik Transvaal, trinkt weder Bier noch Wein noch stärkere Sachen, und zwar von Kindheit an. Alkohol auf Bergtouren. Ueber Alkoholmissbrauch bei Kindern. Weibliche Fabrikinspektion. Zur Sozialhygiene. Verlegung des Lohntages. Weibliche Aerzte in Australien. Zum Kapitel Frauenärzte. Apothekengeschäfte. Geheimschwindel und Apotheken. Bienen- und Insektenstiche. Zur Tropenhygiene. Kurpfuscherei. Armut und Sterblichkeit. Lesefrucht aus Pestalozzi. Früher oder später, aber immer gewiss wird sich die Natur an allem Thun der Menschen rächen, das wider sie selbst ist. Aus einer verwesenden Kultur. [Tagestoilette der Römerin]. Licht aus Afrika. Für Radfahrer [Fahrrad ist nicht mehr als Gegenstand des Sports, sondern als Verkehrsmittel anzusehen.] Morphium-Opfer. (265) [Tabelle]: Armut und Sterblichkeit (269) Bücherschau. (270) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 9. September / 1896) (Nr. 9. September 1896.) ([275]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Die Baubudenfrage, ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialhygiene und den Alkoholismus. Von einem Steinsetzer. [Über Arbeit und Leben der Steinsetzer]. ([275]) Ein Sieg der Naturheilkunde in Bautzen. (280) Etwas über Kopf- und Bartflechten, ihre Entstehung und naturgemässe Heilung. (282) Der Schnaps in Afrika. (289) Eine Existenzfrage der Naturheilmethode. [Sind Naturheilbäder als gewöhnliche Badeanstalten oder als konzessionspflichtige Privat-Krankenanstalten zu betrachten?] (290) Bundesnachrichten. Zum Preisausschreiben. Inbezug auf das Bundes-Preisausschreiben: "Die Gefahren in der Zeit der geschlechtlichen Entwicklung", ein Wort für Eltern und Lehrer (s. "Naturarzt" 1894, S. 313) ist die Entscheidung [.] getroffen worden [W. Siegert und Dr. med. Kühner]. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Steuern. Verzeichnis. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (297) Aus der Zeit. Frau Erwine Ronge [25 Jahre Thätigkeit auf dem Gebiete der Naturheilkunde]. Heinrich Spörl-Gamma [gestorben]. Verein abstinenter Lehrer. Zur Impffrage. Zur Nachahmung. [Aarau in der Schweiz, Mitglieder des schweizerischen Lehrerinnenverbandes verpflichteten sich, kein Korsett mehr zu tragen keine Handschuhe mehr anzulegen, Kleiderröcke nur "fussfrei" anfertigen zu lassen.] Heilserum! Von der ärztlichen Ueberzeugungsfeiheit. [Es wurde Dr. med. Baur als "Kneipparzt" aus dem ärztlichen Verein ausgeschlossen.] M. von Egidy. Aus dem Kampf gegen den Branntwein. Geheimmittel gegen Trunksucht [.]Vor dem Ankauf des Mittels wird gewarnt. Zur Schulhygiene. "Das ist gut". [Überschrift des satyrischen Artikels in der Zeitschrift "Jugend", über eine Naturheilanstalt]. Aus dem Reichs-Versicherungs-Amt. Ist eine Krankenkasse für die Kurkosten eines geretteten Selbstmörders haftbar? (302) Bücherschau. (305) Feuilleton. [Gedicht]: Und schreib' ich jemals ein Gedicht! (306) Briefkasten. (306) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 10. Oktober / 1896) (Nr. 10. Oktober 1896.) ([307]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Aus schwerem Kampf. [Der Standpunkt der Aerzte, die das Naturheilverfahren anwenden, ist kein leichter.] ([307]) Die Alkoholfrage und die Naturheilvereine. (308) Ein Kapitel für die Hausfrauen. [Besonders wichtige Entdeckung: Bereitung von alkoholfreien, ungegorenen Weinen oder Fruchtsäften; bekömmliches und vollwertiges Getränk; Kleine wertvolle Schrift über dieses Thema von Prof. Dr. Müller-Thurgau. Anleitung zum Sterilisierungsverfahren: Flaschen im Waschkessel. Naturheilvereine könnten mitwirken, thörichten Bierkonsum umwandeln in Verbrauch von ungegorenen Weinen.] (311) Nochmals die Baubudenfrage. Praktische Vorschläge zur Lösung derselben. Von einem Steinsetzer. [Gesetzliche Maßnahmen, um Leben und Gesundheit der Bauarbeiter zu schützen]. (313) Etwas über Kopf- und Bartflechten, ihre Entstehung und naturgemässe Heilung. (Fortsetzung.) (315) Naturheilverfahren und Philosophie. (322) Heilung von Gehirnhaut-Entzündung. (325) "Praktischer Naturheilkundiger", eine Gerichtsentscheidung. Im Namen des Königs! [Der Strafsenat des Königl. Sächs. Oberlandesgerichts hat in der Strafsache gegen den Naturheilkundigen Friedrich Hermann Klöden für Recht erkannt:] (326) Zur Krankenkassenfrage. (327) Sprechsaal. (328) Bundesnachrichten. Verzeichnis. Steuern. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (329) Aus der Zeit. Der frühere Vorsitzende des Vereins Dresden, Her Hydropath Gotthardt, der noch Schüler von Priessnitz war, ist hochbetagt am 6. August verstorben. Etwa 40 Naturärzte Sachsens [traten zu Beratung zusammen]. Gerling - angeklagt [Verfasser der Broschüre "Blattern und Schutzpockenimpfung]. Zur Impffrage in England. Schnapsreklame. Die in der deutschen Kolonialausstellung schwarzen Reichsangehörigen wollte der Physikus des Kreises Teltow einer ärztlichen Kontrole unterwerfen. [.] Auch bei den Mahareros stiess der Herr Kreisphysikus auf energischen Wiederstand! Fritjof Nansen, der berühmte Nordpolfahrer [nahm keinen Alkohol mit sich an Bord seines Schiffes "Fram"] William S. Bryan, der bekannte Präsidentschaftskandidat der Vereinigten Staaten [.] meidet Alkohol und Taback. Gipfel der "organischen Heilmittel". Eine neue Schutz-Impfung und zwar gegen Schlangengift. Lücke im Unfallversicherungsgesetz. Rückenmarksschwindsucht. Vom Beispiel der Erzieher. [Bericht des "Vereins gegen den Missbrauch geistiger Getränke, Meister sollen Vorbild für Lehrlinge sein.] Die Berliner trinken doppelt so viel Bier als Milch. Zur Sozialhygiene. (333) Bücherschau. (337) Feuilleton. [Gedicht]: Gebet Hygieia's im Namen ihrer Schützlinge. [.] Aus dem "Corpus inscriptionum hygieinicarum", Tom. III, pag. 567 f., nach einer am Lacus Vermensis gefundenen Inschrift übersetzt von Dr. Schmidkunz. (337) Briefkasten. (338) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 11. November / 1896) (Nr. 11. November 1896.) ([339]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. Gesundheitsschutz im Buchdruckgewerbe. ([339]) Kurpfuscherei. (345) Etwas über Kopf- und Bartflechten, ihre Entstehung und naturgemässe Heilung. (Fortsetzung.) (347) Bildet ein Vortrag über Gesundheitspflege eine öffentliche Angelegenheit? (352) "Praktischer Naturheilkundiger" und "Heilkünstler". Ein Briefwechsel [zwischen dem Polizei-Präsident von Berlin und Herrn Gerling]. (353) Durch die Naturheilkunde gerettet! (353) Eine verhütete Operation. (355) Bericht über die ordentliche Generalversammlung der deutschen Naturärzte und Praktiker in Berlin. (355) Sprechsaal. (359) Bundesnachrichten. Verzeichnis. Vereine, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Steuern. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (360) Aus der Zeit. Ein Sieg in Oesterreich. [Beschluss der österreichischen Regierung, an sämtlichen Universitäten des Landes Lehrstühle für Wasserheilverfahren. Oesterreich geht hier allen anderen Kulturstaaten voran und erwirbt sich dadurch ein hervorragendes Verdienst. Wirken von Vincenz Priessnitz, schlesischer Bauer, und Pfarrer Kneipp]. Heinrich Mertens † [Am 6. d. M. verstarb in Rendsburg der Zeichenlehrer und Photograph Ludwig Christian Heinrich Mertens im hohen Alter von 76 Jahren. Gründer von Naturheilvereinen]. Kurpfuscherei. Frau Prediger Ronge [Anlässlich ihres 25 jährigen Jubiläums als ausübende Naturheilkundige erhielt Frau Ronge vom Bundesvorstande und drei Ortsvereinen gestiftetes Ehrengeschenk: zwei fünfarmige prächtige Leuchter.] Der parakt. Arzt Dr. Franz van Vagedes [vom Landesgericht freigesprochen]. Wie Friedrich der Grosse über den Genuss von Kaffee und Bier dachte. Bitte! Den Freunden des Küssens empfiehlt der Gesundheitsrath von Chicago, die Lippen vor dem Küssen mit carbolisiertem Rosenwasser abzureiben. (363) Bücherschau. (366) Feuilleton. Das ist auch gut. Eine Bazillengeschichte in zehn Postkarten. Geschrieben aus Anlass des in der "Jugend" erschienenen Artikels "Das ist gut". [Helene, Frau von Kurt, einem Forscher, schreibt an Melanie, deren Vater Kurts Ansichten nicht teilt.] (367) Briefkasten. (370) 24. Jahrgang. (Nr. 12. Dezember / 1896) (Nr. 12. Dezember 1896.) ([371]) Aus Wissenschaft und Leben. [Brief]: An die Leser! [Adolf Damaschke beschliesst seine Thätigkeit als Schriftleiter des "Naturarzt", und ebenso sein Amt als Bundesschrfitführer. Er wird Chefredakteur der "Kieler Neuesten Nachrichten".] ([371]) Gesinnungsgenossen! [Bitte um finanzielle Unterstützung für Reinhold Gerling.] Reinhold Gerling ist unter Anklage gestellt worden. In seiner Widerlegung der Denkschrift des Reichsgesundheitsamtes "Blattern und Schutzpockenimpfung" soll er die Behörden und Verfasser beleidigt haben. [.] Gerling vertritt in dieser Frage [Reichsimpfgesetz] die Ansicht von Hunderttausenden. (372) Meine Stellung zum Vegetarismus. (372) Etwas über Kopf- und Bartflechten, ihre Entstehung und naturgemässe Heilung. (Schluss.) (377) Nachschrift. [zu "Etwas über Kopf- und Bartflechten, ihre Entstehung und naturgemässe Heilung."] (381) Krankheitsursachen und Krankheitssymptome. (382) Scharlach. (386) Bundesnachrichten. Bekanntmachung, Ausbildungskursus für Naturheilkundige betreffend. Bekanntmachung, Prüfung der Naturärzte betreffend. Verzeichnis. Steuern. Vereine, bezw. Orte, für welche Aerzte gesucht werden. Aus den Vortragsgruppen. Aus den Vereinen. (389) Soll der entscheidende Schlag doch geführt werden? [Sitzung im Kultusministerium, einziger Gegenstand der Tagesordung: Aerzte aus der Gewerbeordung ausscheiden? Es handelt sich hier um Sein oder Nichtsein aller Laien-Aerzte!] Der Verein abstinenter Aerzte. Gegen die Naturheil-Institute. Wegen fahrlässiger Tötung. Morphium. Eine Unsitte [Kinder an einem Arm fassen und über ein Hindernis hinwegheben. Man fasse die Kinder beim Heben unter beiden Armen.] Wasseranwendung vor 350 Jahren. (394) Bücherschau. (397) Unhygienische Redensarten. (398) Briefkasten. (402)
Das International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) ist ein länderübergreifendes, fortlaufendes Umfrageprogramm, das jährlich Erhebungen zu Themen durchführt, die für die Sozialwissenschaften wichtig sind. Das Programm begann 1984 mit vier Gründungsmitgliedern - Australien, Deutschland, Großbritannien und den Vereinigten Staaten - und ist inzwischen auf fast 50 Mitgliedsländer aus aller Welt angewachsen. Da die Umfragen auf Replikationen ausgelegt sind, können die Daten sowohl für länder- als auch für zeitübergreifende Vergleiche genutzt werden. Jedes ISSP-Modul konzentriert sich auf ein bestimmtes Thema, das in regelmäßigen Zeitabständen wiederholt wird. Details zur Durchführung der nationalen ISSP-Umfragen entnehmen Sie bitte der Dokumentation. Die vorliegende Studie konzentriert sich auf Fragen zu Religion und religiöser Identität.
BACKGROUND: The number of individuals living with dementia is increasing, negatively affecting families, communities, and health-care systems around the world. A successful response to these challenges requires an accurate understanding of the dementia disease burden. We aimed to present the first detailed analysis of the global prevalence, mortality, and overall burden of dementia as captured by the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) Study 2016, and highlight the most important messages for clinicians and neurologists. METHODS: GBD 2016 obtained data on dementia from vital registration systems, published scientific literature and surveys, and data from health-service encounters on deaths, excess mortality, prevalence, and incidence from 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016, through systematic review and additional data-seeking efforts. To correct for differences in cause of death coding across time and locations, we modelled mortality due to dementia using prevalence data and estimates of excess mortality derived from countries that were most likely to code deaths to dementia relative to prevalence. Data were analysed by standardised methods to estimate deaths, prevalence, years of life lost (YLLs), years of life lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs; computed as the sum of YLLs and YLDs), and the fractions of these metrics that were attributable to four risk factors that met GBD criteria for assessment (high body-mass index [BMI], high fasting plasma glucose, smoking, and a diet high in sugar-sweetened beverages). FINDINGS: In 2016, the global number of individuals who lived with dementia was 43·8 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 37·8-51·0), increased from 20.2 million (17·4-23·5) in 1990. This increase of 117% (95% UI 114-121) contrasted with a minor increase in age-standardised prevalence of 1·7% (1·0-2·4), from 701 cases (95% UI 602-815) per 100 000 population in 1990 to 712 cases (614-828) per 100 000 population in 2016. More women than men had dementia in 2016 (27·0 million, 95% UI 23·3-31·4, vs 16.8 million, 14.4-19.6), and dementia was the fifth leading cause of death globally, accounting for 2·4 million (95% UI 2·1-2·8) deaths. Overall, 28·8 million (95% UI 24·5-34·0) DALYs were attributed to dementia; 6·4 million (95% UI 3·4-10·5) of these could be attributed to the modifiable GBD risk factors of high BMI, high fasting plasma glucose, smoking, and a high intake of sugar-sweetened beverages. INTERPRETATION: The global number of people living with dementia more than doubled from 1990 to 2016, mainly due to increases in population ageing and growth. Although differences in coding for causes of death and the heterogeneity in case-ascertainment methods constitute major challenges to the estimation of the burden of dementia, future analyses should improve on the methods for the correction of these biases. Until breakthroughs are made in prevention or curative treatment, dementia will constitute an increasing challenge to health-care systems worldwide. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. ; AA received financial support from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, (New Delhi, India) through the INSPIRE Faculty program. MSBS received Australian Government Research and Training Program funding for post-graduates to study at the Australian National University (Canberra, ACT, Australia). FC acknowledges support from the European Union (FEDER funds POCI/01/0145/FEDER/007728 and POCI/01/0145/FEDER/007265) and National Funds (FCT/MEC, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and Ministério da Educação e Ciência) under the Partnership Agreements PT2020 UID/MULTI/04378/2013 and PT2020 UID/QUI/50006/2013. EC is supported by an Australian Research Council Future fellowship (FT3 140100085). AK was supported by the Miguel Servet contract financed by the CP13/00150 and PI15/00862 projects, integrated into the National R + D + I and funded by the ISCIII (General Branch Evaluation and Promotion of Health Research) and the European Regional Development fund (ISCIII-FEDER). MOO is supported by grant U54HG007479 from the National Institutes of Health. TCR is a member of the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK) and is supported by Alzheimer Scotland. RT-S was partly supported by grant number PROMETEOII/2015/021 from Generalitat Valenciana and the national grant PI17/00719 from ISCIII-FEDER. TW acknowledges academic support from University of Rajarata (Mihintale, Sri Lanka). ; Sí
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Venture capital and military startup firms in Silicon Valley have begun aggressively selling a version of automated warfare that will deeply incorporate artificial intelligence (AI). Those companies and their CEOs are now pressing full speed ahead with that emerging technology, largely dismissing the risk of malfunctions that could lead to the future slaughter of civilians, not to speak of the possibility of dangerous scenarios of escalation between major military powers. The reasons for this headlong rush include a misplaced faith in "miracle weapons," but above all else, this surge of support for emerging military technologies is driven by the ultimate rationale of the military-industrial complex: vast sums of money to be made.The New Techno-EnthusiastsWhile some in the military and the Pentagon are indeed concerned about the future risk of AI weaponry, the leadership of the Defense Department is on board fully. Its energetic commitment to emerging technology was first broadcast to the world in an August 2023 speech delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to the National Defense Industrial Association, the largest arms industry trade group in the country. She used the occasion to announce what she termed "the Replicator Initiative," an umbrella effort to help create "a new state of the art — just as America has before — leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains — which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times."Hicks was anything but shy about pointing to the primary rationale for such a rush toward robotic warfare: outpacing and intimidating China. "We must," she said, "ensure the PRC [People's Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes, 'today is not the day' — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond."Hick's supreme confidence in the ability of the Pentagon and American arms makers to wage future techno-wars has been reinforced by a group of new-age militarists in Silicon Valley and beyond, spearheaded by corporate leaders like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.Patriots or Profiteers?These corporate promoters of a new way of war also view themselves as a new breed of patriots, ready and able to successfully confront the military challenges of the future.A case in point is "Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy," a lengthy manifesto on Anduril's blog. It touts the superiority of Silicon Valley startups over old-school military-industrial behemoths like Lockheed Martin in supplying the technology needed to win the wars of the future:"The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who, nevertheless, do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need… These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of defense."In contrast to the industrial-age approach it critiques, Luckey and his compatriots at Anduril seek an entirely new way of developing and selling weapons:"Software will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificially intelligent, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds."At first glance, Luckey seems a distinctly unlikely candidate to have risen so far in the ranks of arms industry executives. He made his initial fortune by creating the Oculus virtual reality device, a novelty item that users can strap to their heads to experience a variety of 3-D scenes (with the sensation that they're embedded in them). His sartorial tastes run toward sandals and Hawaiian shirts, but he has now fully shifted into military work. In 2017, he founded Anduril, in part with support from Peter Thiel and his investment firm, Founders Fund. Anduril currently makes autonomous drones, automated command and control systems, and other devices meant to accelerate the speed at which military personnel can identify and destroy targets.Thiel, a mentor to Palmer Luckey, offers an example of how the leaders of the new weapons startup firms differ from the titans of the Cold War era. As a start, he's all in for Donald Trump. Once upon a time, the heads of major weapons makers like Lockheed Martin tried to keep good ties with both Democrats and Republicans, making substantial campaign contributions to both parties and their candidates and hiring lobbyists with connections on both sides of the aisle. The logic for doing so couldn't have seemed clearer then. They wanted to cement a bipartisan consensus for spending ever more on the Pentagon, one of the few things most key members of both parties agreed upon. And they also wanted to have particularly good relations with whichever party controlled the White House and/or the Congress at any moment.The Silicon Valley upstarts and their representatives are also much more vocal in their criticisms of China. They are the coldest (or do I mean hottest?) of the new cold warriors in Washington, employing harsher rhetoric than either the Pentagon or the big contractors. By contrast, the big contractors generally launder their critiques of China and support for wars around the world that have helped pad their bottom lines through think tanks, which they've funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.Thiel's main company, Palantir, has also been criticized for providing systems that have enabled harsh border crackdowns by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as "predictive policing." That (you won't be surprised to learn) involves the collection of vast amounts of personal data without a warrant, relying on algorithms with built-in racial biases that lead to the systematic unfair targeting and treatment of people of color.To fully grasp how the Silicon Valley militarists view next-generation warfare, you need to check out the work of Christian Brose, Palantir's chief strategy officer. He was a long-time military reformer and former aide to the late Senator John McCain. His book Kill Chain serves as a bible of sorts for advocates of automated warfare. Its key observation: that the winner in combat is the side that can most effectively shorten the "kill chain" (the time between when a target is identified and destroyed). His book assumes that the most likely adversary in the next tech war will indeed be China and he proceeds to exaggerate Beijing's military capabilities, while overstating its military ambitions and insisting that outpacing that country in developing emerging military technologies is the only path to future victory.And mind you, Brose's vision of shortening that kill chain poses immense risks. As the time to decide what actions to take diminishes, the temptation to take humans "out of the loop" will only grow, leaving life-and-death decisions to machines with no moral compass and vulnerable to catastrophic malfunctions of a sort inherent in any complex software system.Much of Brose's critique of the current military-industrial complex rings true. A few big firms are getting rich making ever more vulnerable huge weapons platforms like aircraft carriers and tanks, while the Pentagon spends billions on a vast, costly global basing network that could be replaced with a far smaller, more dispersed military footprint. Sadly, though, his alternative vision poses more problems than it solves.First, there's no guarantee that the software-driven systems promoted by Silicon Valley will work as advertised. After all, there's a long history of "miracle weapons" that failed, from the electronic battlefield in Vietnam to President Ronald Reagan's disastrous Star Wars missile shield. Even when the ability to find and destroy targets more quickly did indeed improve, wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, fought using those very technologies, were dismal failures.A recent Wall Street Journal investigation suggests that the new generation of military tech is being oversold as well. The Journal found that small top-of-the-line new U.S. drones supplied to Ukraine for its defensive war against Russia have proved far too "glitchy and expensive," so much so that, irony of ironies, the Ukrainians have opted to buy cheaper, more reliable Chinese drones instead.Finally, the approach advocated by Brose and his acolytes is going to make war more likely as technological hubris instills a belief that the United States can indeed "beat" a rival nuclear-armed power like China in a conflict, if only we invest in a nimble new high-tech force.The result, as my colleague Michael Brenes and I pointed out recently, is the untold billions of dollars of private money now pouring into firms seeking to expand the frontiers of techno-war. Estimates range from $6 billion to $33 billion annually and, according to the New York Times, $125 billion over the past four years. Whatever the numbers, the tech sector and its financial backers sense that there are massive amounts of money to be made in next-generation weaponry and aren't about to let anyone stand in their way.Meanwhile, an investigation by Eric Lipton of the New York Times found that venture capitalists and startup firms already pushing the pace on AI-driven warfare are also busily hiring ex-military and Pentagon officials to do their bidding. High on that list is former Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Such connections may be driven by patriotic fervor, but a more likely motivation is simply the desire to get rich. As Ellen Lord, former head of acquisition at the Pentagon, noted, "There's panache now with the ties between the defense community and private equity. But they are also hoping they can cash in big-time and make a ton of money."The Philosopher KingAnother central figure in the move toward building a high-tech war machine is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. His interests go far beyond the military sphere. He's become a virtual philosopher king when it comes to how new technology will reshape society and, indeed, what it means to be human. He's been thinking about such issues for some time and laid out his views in a 2021 book modestly entitled The Age of AI and Our Human Future, coauthored with none other than the late Henry Kissinger. Schmidt is aware of the potential perils of AI, but he's also at the center of efforts to promote its military applications. Though he forgoes the messianic approach of some up-and-coming Silicon Valley figures, whether his seemingly more thoughtful approach will contribute to the development of a safer, more sensible world of AI weaponry is open to debate.Let's start with the most basic thing of all: the degree to which Schmidt thinks that AI will change life as we know it is extraordinary. In that book of his and Kissinger's, they asserted that it would spark "the alteration of human identity and the human experience at levels not seen since the dawn of the modern age," arguing that AI's "functioning portends progress toward the essence of things, progress that philosophers, theologians and scientists have sought, with partial success, for millennia."On the other hand, the government panel on artificial intelligence on which Schmidt served fully acknowledged the risks posed by the military uses of AI. The question remains: Will he, at least, support strong safeguards against its misuse? During his tenure as head of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board from 2017 to 2020, he did help set the stage for Pentagon guidelines on the use of AI that promised humans would always "be in the loop" in launching next-gen weapons. But as a tech industry critic noted, once the rhetoric is stripped away, the guidelines "don't really prevent you from doing anything."In fact, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other good government advocates questioned whether Schmidt's role as head of the Defense Innovation Unit didn't represent a potential conflict of interest. After all, while he was helping shape its guidelines on the military applications of AI, he was also investing in firms that stood to profit from its development and use. His investment entity, America's Frontier Fund, regularly puts money in military tech startups, and a nonprofit he founded, the Special Competitive Studies Project, describes its mission as to "strengthen America's long-term competitiveness as artificial intelligence (AI) [reshapes] our national security, economy, and society." The group is connected to a who's who of leaders in the military and the tech industry and is pushing, among other things, for less regulation over military-tech development. In 2023, Schmidt even founded a military drone company, White Stork, which, according to Forbes, has been secretly testing its systems in the Silicon Valley suburb of Menlo Park.The question now is whether Schmidt can be persuaded to use his considerable influence to rein in the most dangerous uses of AI. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for using it to enhance warfighting capabilities suggests otherwise:"Every once in a while, a new weapon, a new technology comes along that changes things. Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology — nuclear weapons — that could change war, which it clearly did. I would argue that [AI-powered] autonomy and decentralized, distributed systems are that powerful."Given the risks already cited, comparing militarized AI to the development of nuclear weapons shouldn't exactly be reassuring. The combination of the two — nuclear weapons controlled by automatic systems with no human intervention — has so far been ruled out, but don't count on that lasting. It's still a possibility, absent strong, enforceable safeguards on when and how AI can be used.AI is coming, and its impact on our lives, whether in war or peace, is likely to stagger the imagination. In that context, one thing is clear: we can't afford to let the people and companies that will profit most from its unbridled application have the upper hand in making the rules for how it should be used.Isn't it time to take on the new-age warriors?This article has been republished with permission from Tom Dispatch
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Yes, it's already time to be worried — very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown, the earliest drone equivalents of "killer robots" have made it onto the battlefield and proved to be devastating weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control. Imagine, for a moment, a world of war in which those aerial drones (or their ground and sea equivalents) controlled us, rather than vice-versa. Then we would be on a destructively different planet in a fashion that might seem almost unimaginable today. Sadly, though, it's anything but unimaginable, given the work on artificial intelligence (AI) and robot weaponry that the major powers have already begun. Now, let me take you into that arcane world and try to envision what the future of warfare might mean for the rest of us.By combining AI with advanced robotics, the U.S. military and those of other advanced powers are already hard at work creating an array of self-guided "autonomous" weapons systems — combat drones that can employ lethal force independently of any human officers meant to command them. Called "killer robots" by critics, such devices include a variety of uncrewed or "unmanned" planes, tanks, ships, and submarines capable of autonomous operation. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is developing its "collaborative combat aircraft," an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intended to join piloted aircraft on high-risk missions. The Army is similarly testing a variety of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), while the Navy is experimenting with both unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and unmanned undersea vessels (UUVs, or drone submarines). China, Russia, Australia, and Israel are also working on such weaponry for the battlefields of the future.The imminent appearance of those killing machines has generated concern and controversy globally, with some countries already seeking a total ban on them and others, including the U.S., planning to authorize their use only under human-supervised conditions. In Geneva, a group of states has even sought to prohibit the deployment and use of fully autonomous weapons, citing a 1980 U.N. treaty, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, that aims to curb or outlaw non-nuclear munitions believed to be especially harmful to civilians. Meanwhile, in New York, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion of autonomous weapons last October and is planning a full-scale review of the topic this coming fall.For the most part, debate over the battlefield use of such devices hinges on whether they will be empowered to take human lives without human oversight. Many religious and civil society organizations argue that such systems will be unable to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and so should be banned in order to protect noncombatants from death or injury, as is required by international humanitarian law. American officials, on the other hand, contend that such weaponry can be designed to operate perfectly well within legal constraints.However, neither side in this debate has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: the likelihood that, sooner or later, they'll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention and, being "intelligent," will be able to come up with their own unscripted tactics for defeating an enemy — or something else entirely. Such computer-driven groupthink, labeled "emergent behavior" by computer scientists, opens up a host of dangers not yet being considered by officials in Geneva, Washington, or at the U.N.For the time being, most of the autonomous weaponry being developed by the American military will be unmanned (or, as they sometimes say, "uninhabited") versions of existing combat platforms and will be designed to operate in conjunction with their crewed counterparts. While they might also have some capacity to communicate with each other, they'll be part of a "networked" combat team whose mission will be dictated and overseen by human commanders. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft, for instance, is expected to serve as a "loyal wingman" for the manned F-35 stealth fighter, while conducting high-risk missions in contested airspace. The Army and Navy have largely followed a similar trajectory in their approach to the development of autonomous weaponry.The Appeal of Robot "Swarms"However, some American strategists have championed an alternative approach to the use of autonomous weapons on future battlefields in which they would serve not as junior colleagues in human-led teams but as coequal members of self-directed robot swarms. Such formations would consist of scores or even hundreds of AI-enabled UAVs, USVs, or UGVs — all able to communicate with one another, share data on changing battlefield conditions, and collectively alter their combat tactics as the group-mind deems necessary."Emerging robotic technologies will allow tomorrow's forces to fight as a swarm, with greater mass, coordination, intelligence and speed than today's networked forces," predicted Paul Scharre, an early enthusiast of the concept, in a 2014 report for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). "Networked, cooperative autonomous systems," he wrote then, "will be capable of true swarming — cooperative behavior among distributed elements that gives rise to a coherent, intelligent whole."As Scharre made clear in his prophetic report, any full realization of the swarm concept would require the development of advanced algorithms that would enable autonomous combat systems to communicate with each other and "vote" on preferred modes of attack. This, he noted, would involve creating software capable of mimicking ants, bees, wolves, and other creatures that exhibit "swarm" behavior in nature. As Scharre put it, "Just like wolves in a pack present their enemy with an ever-shifting blur of threats from all directions, uninhabited vehicles that can coordinate maneuver and attack could be significantly more effective than uncoordinated systems operating en masse."In 2014, however, the technology needed to make such machine behavior possible was still in its infancy. To address that critical deficiency, the Department of Defense proceeded to fund research in the AI and robotics field, even as it also acquired such technology from private firms like Google and Microsoft. A key figure in that drive was Robert Work, a former colleague of Paul Scharre's at CNAS and an early enthusiast of swarm warfare. Work served from 2014 to 2017 as deputy secretary of defense, a position that enabled him to steer ever-increasing sums of money to the development of high-tech weaponry, especially unmanned and autonomous systems.From Mosaic to ReplicatorMuch of this effort was delegated to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's in-house high-tech research organization. As part of a drive to develop AI for such collaborative swarm operations, DARPA initiated its "Mosaic" program, a series of projects intended to perfect the algorithms and other technologies needed to coordinate the activities of manned and unmanned combat systems in future high-intensity combat with Russia and/or China."Applying the great flexibility of the mosaic concept to warfare," explained Dan Patt, deputy director of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, "lower-cost, less complex systems may be linked together in a vast number of ways to create desired, interwoven effects tailored to any scenario. The individual parts of a mosaic are attritable [dispensable], but together are invaluable for how they contribute to the whole."This concept of warfare apparently undergirds the new "Replicator" strategy announced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks just last summer. "Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China's] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people," she told arms industry officials last August. By deploying thousands of autonomous UAVs, USVs, UUVs, and UGVs, she suggested, the U.S. military would be able to outwit, outmaneuver, and overpower China's military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA). "To stay ahead, we're going to create a new state of the art… We'll counter the PLA's mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat."To obtain both the hardware and software needed to implement such an ambitious program, the Department of Defense is now seeking proposals from traditional defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon as well as AI startups like Anduril and Shield AI. While large-scale devices like the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy's Orca Extra-Large UUV may be included in this drive, the emphasis is on the rapid production of smaller, less complex systems like AeroVironment's Switchblade attack drone, now used by Ukrainian troops to take out Russian tanks and armored vehicles behind enemy lines.At the same time, the Pentagon is already calling on tech startups to develop the necessary software to facilitate communication and coordination among such disparate robotic units and their associated manned platforms. To facilitate this, the Air Force asked Congress for $50 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget to underwrite what it ominously enough calls Project VENOM, or "Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model." Under VENOM, the Air Force will convert existing fighter aircraft into AI-governed UAVs and use them to test advanced autonomous software in multi-drone operations. The Army and Navy are testing similar systems.When Swarms Choose Their Own PathIn other words, it's only a matter of time before the U.S. military (and presumably China's, Russia's, and perhaps those of a few other powers) will be able to deploy swarms of autonomous weapons systems equipped with algorithms that allow them to communicate with each other and jointly choose novel, unpredictable combat maneuvers while in motion. Any participating robotic member of such swarms would be given a mission objective ("seek out and destroy all enemy radars and anti-aircraft missile batteries located within these [specified] geographical coordinates") but not be given precise instructions on how to do so. That would allow them to select their own battle tactics in consultation with one another. If the limited test data we have is anything to go by, this could mean employing highly unconventional tactics never conceived for (and impossible to replicate by) human pilots and commanders.The propensity for such interconnected AI systems to engage in novel, unplanned outcomes is what computer experts call "emergent behavior." As ScienceDirect, a digest of scientific journals, explains it, "An emergent behavior can be described as a process whereby larger patterns arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties." In military terms, this means that a swarm of autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform — possibly achieving astounding results on the battlefield, but also conceivably engaging in escalatory acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders, including the destruction of critical civilian infrastructure or communications facilities used for nuclear as well as conventional operations.At this point, of course, it's almost impossible to predict what an alien group-mind might choose to do if armed with multiple weapons and cut off from human oversight. Supposedly, such systems would be outfitted with failsafe mechanisms requiring that they return to base if communications with their human supervisors were lost, whether due to enemy jamming or for any other reason. Who knows, however, how such thinking machines would function in demanding real-world conditions or if, in fact, the group-mind would prove capable of overriding such directives and striking out on its own.What then? Might they choose to keep fighting beyond their preprogrammed limits, provoking unintended escalation — even, conceivably, of a nuclear kind? Or would they choose to stop their attacks on enemy forces and instead interfere with the operations of friendly ones, perhaps firing on and devastating them (as Skynet does in the classic science fiction Terminator movie series)? Or might they engage in behaviors that, for better or infinitely worse, are entirely beyond our imagination?Top U.S. military and diplomatic officials insist that AI can indeed be used without incurring such future risks and that this country will only employ devices that incorporate thoroughly adequate safeguards against any future dangerous misbehavior. That is, in fact, the essential point made in the "Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy" issued by the State Department in February 2023. Many prominent security and technology officials are, however, all too aware of the potential risks of emergent behavior in future robotic weaponry and continue to issue warnings against the rapid utilization of AI in warfare.Of particular note is the final report that the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence issued in February 2021. Co-chaired by Robert Work (back at CNAS after his stint at the Pentagon) and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, the commission recommended the rapid utilization of AI by the U.S. military to ensure victory in any future conflict with China and/or Russia. However, it also voiced concern about the potential dangers of robot-saturated battlefields."The unchecked global use of such systems potentially risks unintended conflict escalation and crisis instability," the report noted. This could occur for a number of reasons, including "because of challenging and untested complexities of interaction between AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems [that is, emergent behaviors] on the battlefield." Given that danger, it concluded, "countries must take actions which focus on reducing risks associated with AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems."When the leading advocates of autonomous weaponry tell us to be concerned about the unintended dangers posed by their use in battle, the rest of us should be worried indeed. Even if we lack the mathematical skills to understand emergent behavior in AI, it should be obvious that humanity could face a significant risk to its existence, should killing machines acquire the ability to think on their own. Perhaps they would surprise everyone and decide to take on the role of international peacekeepers, but given that they're being designed to fight and kill, it's far more probable that they might simply choose to carry out those instructions in an independent and extreme fashion.If so, there could be no one around to put an R.I.P. on humanity's gravestone.This article was republished with permission from Tom Dispatch
