CESPE/UnB – 2010 – DIPLOMATA – CACD – WRITING EXAMINATION – LÍNGUA INGLESA – CONCURSO DE ADMISSÃO À CARREIRA DE DIPLOMATA.

Welcome back to another post!

➧ PROVA DE LÍNGUA INGLESA: CESPE/UnB-2010-DIPLOMATA-CACD-WRITING EXAMINATION.

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

➧ ESTRUTURA-WRITING EXAMINATION-2010:

➭ TRANSLATION (English/Portuguese) – 20 points.

- Text (4 parágrafos) – Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech.

➭ VERSION (Portuguese/English) – 15 points.

- Text (3 parágrafos) – A lecture delivered by Ambassador Celso Amorim.

➭ SUMMARY – 15 points.

-Text (11 parágrafos) – Gwynne Dyer’s Future Tense: the coming world order? || Toronto: Random House, 2004).

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

- Assunto (geral) –  Security Council decisions in perspective.

- Tema (específico) – In what other ways have the Security Council’s actions changed since the end of the Cold War? Why?

➧ PROVA:

Translate into Portuguese the following excerpt adapted from Eleanor Roosevelt's speech which opened a series of United Nations seminars at Brandeis University on December 17th, 1954:

You hear people say, "Why hasn't the United Nations done this or that?" The United Nations functions just as well as the member nations make it function, no better or worse. So the first thing to look at is the kind of machinery that was set up, and what it was meant to do.
             
Now we have to cast our minds back to the time when the Charter was first planned. The war was not over, and this was a dream — an idea to set up an organization, the object of which was to keep peace.
            
Great tracts of the world had first-hand knowledge of war on their doorsteps. We did not know what it was like, either to be occupied or to be bombed. We need to use our imaginations, because we really must grasp what the nations felt then and still feel.
            
What happened, of course, was that peace has never been found, so this organization has had to face questions that were not on its mind at the outset. But talk itself can have great value. You have to envisage it as a bridge, to think of the General Assembly as a place where bridges are built between peoples.

👉  Resposta (Inglês→português)     Parte A :           

Ouvem-se pessoas dizendo: "Por que as Nações Unidas não têm feito isso ou aquilo?". A Organização das Nações Unidas funciona tão bem quanto seus membros a fazem funcionar, nem melhor nem pior. Então, a primeira coisa a observar é o tipo de engrenagem que foi concebida e o que ela foi incumbida de fazer.
            
Agora, nós devemos nos concentrar na época em que a Carta foi planejada. A guerra não havia acabado, e o sonho era este: a idéia de estabelecer uma organização, cujo objetivo era manter a paz.
 Muitas partes do mundo tinham um conhecimento em primeira-mão a respeito da guerra, cujo flagelo chegava à sua soleira. Nós não sabíamos o que era isso, ser invadido ou ser bombardeado. Nós precisamos usar nossa imaginação, porque realmente devemos captar o que as nações sentiam naquele momento e o que ainda sentem.
            
O que aconteceu, evidentemente, foi que jamais se alcancou a paz, e assim a ONU tem-se obrigado a enfrentar questões que não estavam no seu ideário no momento de sua fundação. Mas o diálogo, por si mesmo, pode ser de grande valor. Deve-se conceber a ONU como uma ponte; a Assembléia Geral, como um lugar onde se constroem pontes entre os povos. 

Translate into English the following excerpt adapted from a lecture delivered by Ambassador Celso Amorim as guest speaker at the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Seminar on 5th January, 2009:

    A reforma das Nações Unidas é peça-chave da agenda de mudanças. O multilateralismo é a expressão normativa da multipolaridade. O mundo multipolar que emerge neste século deve encontrar seu paralelismo lógico no reforço das instituições multilaterais.
            
    A reforma da ONU, em particular de seu Conselho de Segurança, decorre da necessidade de aumentar a legitimidade, transparência e representatividade nas suas decisões. Mesmo sem resolver todos os problemas (como o do veto, por exemplo), um Conselho ampliado enviaria aos Estados-membros uma mensagem de confiança na capacidade da ONU de se adaptar aos novos tempos.
             
    O Brasil fez uma clara opção pelo multilateralismo. A contribuição brasileira à Minustah no Haiti constitui uma demonstração concreta desse compromisso. Reflete a nossa "não-indiferença" diante de uma situação difícil vivida por uma nação com a qual temos muitas afinidades. Coaduna-se, ademais, com os princípios de ação coletiva para prevenir ameaças à paz e à segurança internacionais.

👉  Resposta (Português→Inglês)     Parte B :           

Reform of the United Nations is the key piece of the agenda of change. Multilateralism is the normative expression of multipolarity. The multipolar world which has been emerging in this century must find its logical parallel in the strengthening of multilateral institutions. UN reform, and particularly Security Council reform, stems from the need of enhancing legitimacy, transparency and representativity in its decisions. Even if it would not solve every problem (take, for example, that of the veto), an enlarged Council would send member States a message of trust in the ability of the UN to adapt to the new times. Brazil has made a clear option for multilateralism. The Brazilian contribution to Minustah in Haiti means a concrete demonstration of this commitment. It reflects our "nonindifference" towards a difficult situation faced by a nation with which we have plenty of affinity. It is coherent with the principles of collective action in order to prevent threats to international peace and security, as well. 

Write a summary in your own words not over 200 words in length of the following excerpt adapted from Gwynne Dyer’s Future Tense: the coming world order? (Toronto: Random House, 2004).

    The United Nations as constituted in 1945 was a profoundly cynical organization; more explicitly so even than the League of Nations. It accepted without demur that its member states enjoyed absolute sovereignty and would never be forced to submit to intervention in their internal affairs (with the sole and uncertain exception that acts of genocide might trigger international intervention). The UN Charter made no moral or practical distinction between the most law-abiding democracies and the most repressive dictatorships. How could it, when more than half its members were dictatorships themselves? The UN was not about love, or justice, or freedom, although words of that sort are sprinkled freely through the preamble to the UN Charter; it was about avoiding another world war.
            
    The problem that the surviving governments faced in 1945 was this: the existing international system is bankrupt in an era of weapons of mass destruction. The world cannot afford to allow countries armed with nuclear weapons to go to war with each other. It can certainly never again go through one of those generalized great-power melees that in the past were the main way of adjusting the international system to accommodate the changing balance between the great powers. If we fight that kind of war just once more, the whole northern hemisphere will fry. We therefore have to change the system. In fact, we have to outlaw war.
            
    Because ‘outlaw war’ sounds like a naive slogan on a protester’s banner, people fail to grasp how radical a change it was for the great powers of the world to sign up to such a rule in 1945. Since the first city-states of Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, war had been a legitimate tool of statecraft, with no long-lasting opprobrium attached to waging ‘aggressive war’ so long as you were successful. Empires rose and fell, the militarily competent prospered. Now, all of a sudden, it’s over.
            
    Since 1945, according to the UN Charter, it has been illegal to wage war against another country except in two tightly defined circumstances. One is that you have just been attacked, and are fighting back pending the arrival of international help. The other exception arises when the Security Council authorizes various member states to use military force on its behalf to roll back an aggression, or to enforce its decisions on a strictly limited number of other questions.
            
    And that’s it. Apart from these exceptions, international war — that is, war waged by a sovereign government across an international border — is illegal. It is illegal to attack a country because it is sitting on territory that previously belonged to your country. It is even illegal to attack a country because it is ruled by a wicked dictator who oppresses his own people. The rules had to be written like that because to allow exceptions on these counts would have left loopholes big enough to drive a tank through.
             
    Making war illegal does not mean that all wars have stopped, any more than making murder illegal has stopped all killings, but it has transformed the context in which wars take place. The United Nations does not always act to roll back a successful aggression, because that requires getting past the vetoes wielded by all five permanent members of the Security Council and then finding member states willing to put their troops at risk on the ground, but it almost never recognizes border changes accomplished by war.
            
    There is also, however, much that the United Nations cannot do. First and foremost, it cannot act against a perceived interest of any of the great powers, for in order to get them all to sign up it had to offer them a special deal: vetoes that allow the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China to block any UN action they don't like. It’s neither fair nor pretty, but how else were the founders of the UN going to get the great powers to sign up — and what use would the organization be if some of them were outside it? Likewise, the United Nations cannot intervene in a sovereign state — or at least it could not until recently — even to stop the most horrendous violations of human rights.
            
    Despite such limitations, the UN is a central and indispensable part of the modern world. It is the institution through which a politically conscious global society first came into existence, and its specialized organs are still the arena in which most of the world’s large-scale deals are made on matters ranging from telecommunications frequencies and trade to public health and the environment. It is the organizer and command centre for many of the peacekeeping missions that hold old enemies apart and try to minimize the level of violence in failed states, and the source of legal authority for many peacekeeping missions it does not directly control. Most important by far, it is the repository of the new international law which bans the use of aggressive military force, even by the great powers.
           
    It is not generally realised how important this law is because it has so often been broken, especially by the really big powers. Nonetheless, most of the wars that have not involved veto-wielding superpowers have tended not to last very long before international diplomatic intervention puts a halt to them. The Security Council busies itself with appeals for a cease-fire and offers of peace-keeping troops. This has made it hard for those involved to go on fighting. So wars have rarely ended in decisive victories, and territory has almost never changed hands in a legal and permanent way. These very significant constraints may also explain why nuclear weapons have not been used in war for the past 59 years.
            
    Of course, these same constraints can feel very burdensome if you happen to be the greatest power in the world, with overwhelming superiority in both nuclear and conventional weapons. You might even wind up filled with frustration and fury because all these Lilliput nations are trying to use the rules of the United Nations to tie you down like Gulliver.
            
    The best measure of any institution's real importance is how much its enemies hate it. US neo-cons, for instance, hate the UN a lot. They portray it one moment as an irrelevant excrescence and the next as an arrogant, uncaring organization of great power. The United Nations, though, was not created to fight evil wherever it appears. It was designed primarily to stop the kind of straightforward cross-border aggression that had triggered both the First and the Second World Wars, but must not be allowed to cause a Third. So, since the veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council stand to lose everything themselves in another world war, they have generally been able to act in a surprisingly coordinated and decisive manner at the UN when events elsewhere threatened to drag them into such a conflict.

Available at: www.gwynnedyer.com.

Retrieved on 24/3/2010.

👉  Resumo em Inglês     Exemplo de resposta :       

The United Nations were instituted not as a means to end all conflicts, but as a way to prevent a global war in a nuclear age. Thenceforth, no longer could problems be solved by the hitherto legitimate means of warfare as it would mean the extinction of humankind. Therefore, a pragmatic system was created in order to limit widespread war.

           
War was forbidden expect by two tightly defined circumstances: self-defense and Security Council authorization. Not contemplating other possibilities, laudable as they might be, was necessary to ensure its respect.

            
The system is far from perfect, particularly since the five permanent members of the Council have veto power and, thus, hardly will the UN act against these countries’ interests. Notwithstanding, the organization has greatly contributed to the international community with its peacekeeping operations and legal framework banning the use of force.

            
Yet, the UN’s main contribution was to prevent the use of nuclear weapons among

great powers. Its flexibility and pragmatic nature have permitted a coordinated effort from the permanent members of the Security Council, as they are the ones most concerned with a possible Third World War. 

   

It will be no surprise to those who follow UN affairs that the end of the Cold War has been the single most formative experience in the existence of the Security Council. There are many ways to demonstrate this. The simplest is to count the absolute number of Council resolutions. For the period 1946-1989 the annual average number of resolutions passed was fifteen; since then the average has been more than sixty. The Council has moved from roughly one decision a month to one per week. This is indeed a dramatic change.

Peter Wallensteen e Patrick Johansson's. Security Council decisions in perspective.

In: Malone, D.M. ed. The United Nations Security Council: from the Cold War to the 21st Century. London: International Peace Academy, 2004 (Adapted).

In what other ways have the Security Council’s actions changed since the end of the Cold War? Why?
[Length: 350-450 words]

👉  Redação em Inglês     Exemplo de resposta :

Modelo 01(com 05 parágrafos- Média de 80 palavras/parágrafo):            

The demise of the Soviet Union marks a watershed in the history of the UN Security Council. Not only has the amount of resolutions increased in the aftermath of the Cold War, but the substance of its decision has also changed. Peacekeeping operations have been enhanced, new topics have been introduced at the top of the agenda of the council and stiffer verification mechanisms have been concocted in light of the changing global scenario.
           
“An agenda for peace”, a UN report published at the beginning of the 1990s, stressed the new features of armed conflicts and urged states to improve the peacekeeping operations’ capacity to tackle the daunting challenges posed by the new scenario. Thenceforth, the Security Council, aware of the complexity of the burgeoning number of intrastate conflicts, has aimed at diversifying the roles played by peace operations. Peacemaking and peacebuilding activities are now as important as monitoring prior peace deals. The changing nature of armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War has demanded brand new responses from the Security Council.
            
Another major change is the discussion of topics which are not related to the traditional concept of security. This concept has evolved from a strict military bias to a more diverse understanding. The new concept of “securitization”, which was consolidated by Barry Buzan, entails not only the military domain but also the societal, environmental and economic realms. Any threat may be securitized by states and put at the top of their political agenda. Accordingly, the Security Council has held meeting on climate change and human rights.
            
Finally, the Security Council has improved its verification tools through recent decisions such as resolutions 1373 and 1540. The latter refers to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the former is related to terrorism. Both established specific committees to oversee their implementation by UN member-states. Countries have to submit national reports to the committees’ scrutiny. This change was spurred by the 2001 terrorist assaults in the United States and the political will of some permanent members.
           
The international scenario engendered by the end of the Cold War has rendered the UN Security Council more pro-active inasmuch as new challenges have demanded a streamlined approach. A broader agenda, multifaceted peace operations and new
verification mechanisms are important changes in its actions.