CESPE/UnB – 2014 – DIPLOMATA – CACD – WRITING EXAMINATION – LÍNGUA INGLESA – CONCURSO DE ADMISSÃO À CARREIRA DE DIPLOMATA.

Welcome back to another post!

➧ PROVA DE LÍNGUA INGLESA: CESPE/UnB-2014-DIPLOMATA-CACD-WRITING EXAMINATION.

➧ BANCA/ORGANIZADOR:http://www.cespe.unb.br/

➧ ESTRUTURA-WRITING EXAMINATION-2014:

➭ TRANSLATION (English/Portuguese) – 20 points.

- Text (1 parágrafo) – Homage to Catalonia. || Jorge Orwell.

➭ VERSION (Portuguese/English) – 15 points.

- Text (1 parágrafo) – Resenha de Política Exterior do Brasil. || Celso Lafer.

➭ SUMMARY – 15 points.

-Text (10 parágrafos) – Underrating Preventive Diplomacy || Foreign Affairs.

➭ COMPOSITION – [Length: 400 to 450 words] – 50 points.

- Assunto (geral) – The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

- Tema (específico) – Comentar os possíveis efeitos positivos, se houver, de diferentes conflitos ao longo do século XX.

➧ PROVA:

Translate into Portuguese the following excerpt adapted from George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia".

[value: 20 marks]

In winter on the Zaragoza front, except at night, when a surprise attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were merely remote black insects whom one occasionally glimpsed hopping to and fro. The prime concern of both sides was essaying to keep warm. The things one normally associates with the horrors of war seldom raised their ugly heads. Up in the hills it was simply the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare. A life as uneventful as a city clerk's, and almost as regular. Atop each hill, knots of ragged, grimy men shivering round their flag. And all day and night, the senseless bullets and shells wandering across the empty valleys and only by some fluke getting home on a human body. I would gaze round the wintry landscape marveling at the futility, the inconclusiveness of such a kind of war. Could you forget that every mountain-top was occupied by troops and thus littered with tin cans and crusted with dung, the scenery was stupendous.

George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia.

Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975, pp. 25-26.

Translate into English the following excerpt adapted from Foreign Minister Celso Lafer's lecture at Instituto Rio Branco in April 2001.

            

    O novo ambiente internacional e seus cenários de conflito tornaram inadequadas as doutrinas de dissuasão nuclear e do "equilíbrio do terror", e, assim, passaram a ser ainda mais difíceis de justificar a retenção e o desenvolvimento de arsenais nucleares. Se aparentemente amainaram os riscos de uma conflagração atômica na escala contemplada à época da guerra fria, seguramente aumentaram os perigos difusos da violência de natureza descontrolada. Tais perigos aumentaram em função de uma faceta da globalização, que faz funcionar o mundo através de diversos tipos de redes. Entre estas estão as das finanças, que possibilitam, além dos movimentos rápidos dos fluxos de capital, a "lavagem" do dinheiro; as do crime organizado; as do tráfico de armas e de drogas; as do terrorismo; as das migrações clandestinas de pessoas, causadas por guerras e perseguições. No caso do Brasil, em função da porosidade das fronteiras, esses riscos provêm, em parte, do impacto interno, no território nacional, de fatores externos.

Celso Lafer. Resenha de Política Exterior do Brasil.

Número 88, 1.° semestre de 2001, MRE, p. 106.

Write a summary, in no more than 200 words, of the following excerpt adapted from Michael S. Lunds's 1995 Foreign Affairs article "Underrating Preventive Diplomacy".

             

    The malaise of U.S. foreign policy is such that academic gadflies now debunk any proposal sounding suspiciously positive. The charge is that proponents of preventive diplomacy oversell its potential, and naive policymakers are taking the bait. It is argued that problems of prescience, policy prescription, and political support mean the "intractable" conflicts "endemic" to the post-Cold War period cannot be averted unless major resources are invested in situations in which risks are high and success doubtful. Preventive diplomacy, the contention runs, merely means that one founders early in a crisis instead of later.
            

    Scaremongers conjure up a nightmare in which zealous purveyors of preventive diplomacy mesmerize unwitting policymakers into buying a discount antidote for local quagmires, one with little potency and hidden side effects. Yet responsible proponents of preventive diplomacy obviously do not presume easy solutions to such disasters can be found, nor do they advise key players to do something, just anything, in dealing with incipient conflicts, tout preventive diplomacy as a cure-all with no cost or risk, or assume no value judgments need be made. Not only do the scaremongers distort the views being expressed but they insult policymakers by implying they would fall for such policy nostrums.
           

    Advocacy of a policy slogan is confounded with adoption of the substance behind it. The fact that preventive diplomacy is a buzzword of foreign policy does not imply that early warning and conflict prevention have become official doctrine or standard operating procedure. The term "preventive diplomacy" refers to actions or institutions that are used to keep political disputes arising between or within nations from escalating into armed force. These efforts are needed when and where existing international relations or national politics fail to manage tensions without violence erupting. They come into play before a point of confrontation,
sustained violence, or military action is reached.
            

    The claim is that while we know the societal conditions that stoke the chances of war or state collapse (e.g., poverty, environmental degradation, ethnic and economic divisions, and repressive, corrupt regimes, and so forth), murky individual and group decisions make it impossible to predict exactly when and where violence will surface. But just because political forecasting is not rocket science does not disqualify it. Unheralded acts, such as a military coup or a terrorist bombing, are very difficult to forecast. Early-warning specialists are, though, making progress in pinning down the probable precipitants of more gradual, phenomena such as ethnic conflict, genocide, and the breakdown of states. Demonstrations, repressive measures, hate rhetoric, arms build-ups, separatist communities forming parallel institutions: these signs one ignores at one's peril.
            

    In Estonia, for example, restrictive citizenship and language laws adopted in 1993 by the newly-independent government were perceived by resident Russian speakers — then a third of Estonia's population — as discriminatory and threatening. Mindful of this group's powerful patron next door, the High Commissioner on National Minorities of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and other governmental and private actors took preventive steps to allay tensions.
            

    The rub, so the argument runs, lies in knowing what actions to take. But preventive strategy is not the stab in the dark some observers insinuate. The blanket view that ethnic tensions uniformly lead to intractable conflicts is based on a few recent instances where, despite efforts to avoid it, violence has ensued: Croatia, Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda. One should look, instead, at the numerous ethnic and national disputes deemed potentially destabilizing and menacing that were actually managed in relative peace: Russia and Ukraine over Crimea, the break-up of the Czech and Slovak Republics, Congo's transition from autocracy, Zambia's non-violent shift toward democracy, and Hungary's moderated relations with its neighbors, among others. Such success stories are virtually ignored. Only two policy options ("little more than talking" or armed force) are mooted, whereas governments and NGOs have resorted to a gamut of measures to influence parties in disputes.
            

    One may well be skeptical that preventive action would save more lives, cost less, and obviate the need for humanitarian intervention. No need, still, to go to the opposite extreme, wherein the financial and political cost of preventing such crises is prohibitive. The logic of conflict escalation is prima facie support for the view that less violent and short-lived disputes offer much greater opportunities for peaceful management by mediators. Issues in those types of disputes tend to be simple and singular, disputants are less rigidly polarized and politically mobilized, fatalities (and thus passions) are low, and communications and common institutions may have survived. Other states or external groups are less likely to have taken sides and may even share an interest in keeping local disputes from burgeoning.
            

    The calculus of deciding whether preventive diplomacy is worth the price must comprehend the costs of alternatives such as mid-conflict intervention and non-involvement. That covers not only lives lost and injuries but also the price of humanitarian relief, refugee aid, and peacekeeping. It should also include the cost of losses in health, education, infrastructure, trade and investment opportunities, and natural resources.
            

    The feeling is that the public will not endorse preventive diplomacy's risks and costs, but the considerations described above cast the issue of "political will" in a different light. Preventive efforts are often much less challenging and more prosaic than cases in which a government must endeavor to rouse the country to expose troops to possible danger abroad. For example, the dispatch of 500 American soldiers to join the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Macedonia was hardly noticed. Were preventive diplomacy to prosper, incipient conflicts would not even reach the desks of the National Security Council, the State Department's upper echelons, and the Pentagon.
            

    Rather than ignore potential crises and threats out of some unexamined theory of their imagined intractability, policymakers might prudently track emerging political disputes around the world and develop policy options for addressing them promptly as opposed to belatedly. That would enable decision-makers to better assess whether they should act, when, with what means, and with whom. As successes mount, the burden of proof will shift to those who would still defend the notion that current wait-and-see policies and practices are best. The stakes in these potential crises are simply too high for such options to be dismissed with cavalier analyses carping on about a few frustrating experiences.

Michael S. Lund, Underrating Preventive Diplomacy, Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995 issue. Available at:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51214/michael-s-lund/un derrating-preventive-diplomacy.

Retrieved on 27.03.2014.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

Carl Gustav Jung.

The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.

The Collected Works. V. 8. Routledge: London, 1960. p. 26.

(Length: 400 to 450 words)

[value: 50 marks]

In light of the quote above, comment on the possible positive effects, if any, of different conflicts throughout the twentieth century.