Inglês — CACD 2020

Text 4 1  The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly shaken up old structures and accelerated 180-degree changes and innovation. Diplomacy and multilateral systems are no 4 exception. The impossibility to meet face to face, given the confinement, social-distancing, and other sanitary measures, has demanded an overnight transformation of the diplomatic 7 business as we know it. Technological platforms have made it possible for diplomats from all over the world to continue discussions and advance the multilateral agenda across the 10 United Nations, and more broadly, the international community. Representatives from larger and smaller delegations have gathered in front of their screens, and 13 found themselves negotiating in a whole new environment, one that is evolving at a very rapid pace. Sometimes delegates do not have the possibility of consulting with their 16 capital-based experts as the negotiation period gets shortened. Different time zones and the lack of systems that may provide for simultaneous interpretation have also 19 hindered the participation of technical experts, academics, the civil society, the private sector, and other representatives that are based outside multilateral hubs. Nonetheless, it has 22 become clear that delegations from the developing world are underrepresented in virtual gatherings. Not only are governments focused on tackling the pandemic back home, 25 but non-effective access to technology and the lower numbers of personnel have negatively impacted their 27 engagement in the digital realm.

Text 6 1  For centuries, the fact that diplomats represented venerable principals – from powerful monarchs to established states – guaranteed their protected and 4 privileged status. Whereas long-standing rules of diplomatic immunity and privileges by and large continue to be upheld in interstate relations, popular perceptions of diplomats have 7 changed in recent decades. To the extent that diplomats are perceived as symbols of disliked countries, religions or “-isms”, the quality of standing for others has been 10 transformed from a rationale for diplomatic immunity to a rationale for political violence. No longer being inviolable symbols, diplomatic representatives have increasingly 13 become highly vulnerable symbols.

Text 5

Text 4 1  The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly shaken up old structures and accelerated 180-degree changes and innovation. Diplomacy and multilateral systems are no 4 exception. The impossibility to meet face to face, given the confinement, social-distancing, and other sanitary measures, has demanded an overnight transformation of the diplomatic 7 business as we know it. Technological platforms have made it possible for diplomats from all over the world to continue discussions and advance the multilateral agenda across the 10 United Nations, and more broadly, the international community. Representatives from larger and smaller delegations have gathered in front of their screens, and 13 found themselves negotiating in a whole new environment, one that is evolving at a very rapid pace. Sometimes delegates do not have the possibility of consulting with their 16 capital-based experts as the negotiation period gets shortened. Different time zones and the lack of systems that may provide for simultaneous interpretation have also 19 hindered the participation of technical experts, academics, the civil society, the private sector, and other representatives that are based outside multilateral hubs. Nonetheless, it has 22 become clear that delegations from the developing world are underrepresented in virtual gatherings. Not only are governments focused on tackling the pandemic back home, 25 but non-effective access to technology and the lower numbers of personnel have negatively impacted their 27 engagement in the digital realm.

Text 7  It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all the statues, paintings and architectural forms seem to fall into place as if they obeyed one law. We call such a law, which all creations of a people seem to obey, a “style”. The rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual work the effect of poise and austere harmony.  The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict laws, which every artist had to learn from his earliest youth. Seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men had to be painted with darker skin than women; the appearance of every god was strictly laid down. Every artist also had to learn the art of beautiful script. He had to cut the images and symbols of the hieroglyphs clearly and accurately in stone. But once he had mastered all these rules he had finished his apprenticeship. No one wanted anything different, no one asked him to be “original”. On the contrary, he was probably considered the best artist who could make his statues most like the admired monuments of 19 the past. So it happened that in the course of three thousand years or more art changed very little. Everything that was considered good and beautiful in the age of the pyramids 22 was held to be just as excellent a thousand years later. Granted, new fashions appeared, and new subjects were demanded of the artists, but their mode of representing man and nature remained essentially the same.  Only one man ever shook the iron bars of the Egyptian style. He was a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenophis IV, a heretic. He broke with many of the customs hallowed by age-old tradition. He did not wish to pay homage to the many strangely shaped gods of his people. For him only one 31 god was supreme, Aten, whom he worshipped and whom he had represented in the shape of the sun-disk sending down its rays, each one endowed with a hand. He called himself Akhnaten, after his god, and he moved his court out of reach of the priests of the other gods.  The pictures that he commissioned must have shocked the Egyptians of his day by their novel character. In them none of the solemn and rigid dignity of the earlier Pharaohs was to be found. Instead, he had himself depicted lifting his daughter on to his knee, walking with his wife Nefertiti in the garden, leaning on a stick, beneath the blessing sun. Some of his portraits show him as an ugly man; perhaps he wanted the artists to portray him in all his human frailty. Akhnaten’s successor was Tutankhamun, whose tomb with its treasures was discovered in 1922. Some of these works are still in the modern style of the Aten religion. The back of the king’s throne shows the king and queen in a homely idyll. He is sitting on his chair in an attitude which might have appalled the strict conservative – almost lolling, by 50 Egyptian standards. His wife is no smaller than he is, and gently puts her hand on his shoulder while the Sun-god again is stretching his hands in blessing down to them.

Text 8  “The history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant models. Whenever you look at any particular civilisation, you will find that its most characteristic writings and other cultural products reflect a particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for these writings – or paint these paintings, or produce these particular pieces of music – are dominated by. And in order to identify a civilisation, in order to explain what kind of civilisation it is, in order to understand the world in which men of this sort thought and felt and acted, it is important to try, so far as possible, to isolate the dominant pattern which the culture obeys. Consider, for instance, Greek philosophy or Greek literature of the classical age. If you read, say, the philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his thought operates on lines which are coordinated by the idea that there are certain axiomatic truths, adamantine, 19 unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to deduce certain absolutely infallible conclusions; that it is possible to attain to this kind of wisdom by a special method which he recommends; that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge to be obtained in the world, and if only we can attain to this absolute knowledge, of which geometry, indeed mathematics in general, is the nearest example, the most perfect paradigm, we can organize our lives in terms of this knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in a static manner, needing no further change; and then all suffering, all doubt, all ignorance, all forms of human vice and folly can be expected to disappear from the earth.  […]  “Let us look at another example – a parallel culture, that of the Bible, that of the Jews at a comparable period. You will find a totally different model dominating, a totally different set of ideas, which would have been unintelligible to the Greeks. The notion from which both Judaism and 37 Christianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family life, the relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of members of a tribe to one another. Such fundamental 40 relationships – in terms of which nature and life are explained – as the love of children for their father, the brotherhood of man, forgiveness, commands issued by a 43 superior to an inferior, the sense of duty, transgression, sin and therefore the need to atone for it – this whole complex of qualities, in terms of which the whole of the universe is explained by those who created the Bible, and by those who were to a large extent influenced by it, would have been totally unintelligible to the Greeks.”

Text 7  It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all the statues, paintings and architectural forms seem to fall into place as if they obeyed one law. We call such a law, which all creations of a people seem to obey, a “style”. The rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual work the effect of poise and austere harmony.  The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict laws, which every artist had to learn from his earliest youth. Seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men had to be painted with darker skin than women; the appearance of every god was strictly laid down. Every artist also had to learn the art of beautiful script. He had to cut the images and symbols of the hieroglyphs clearly and accurately in stone. But once he had mastered all these rules he had finished his apprenticeship. No one wanted anything different, no one asked him to be “original”. On the contrary, he was probably considered the best artist who could make his statues most like the admired monuments of 19 the past. So it happened that in the course of three thousand years or more art changed very little. Everything that was considered good and beautiful in the age of the pyramids 22 was held to be just as excellent a thousand years later. Granted, new fashions appeared, and new subjects were demanded of the artists, but their mode of representing man and nature remained essentially the same.  Only one man ever shook the iron bars of the Egyptian style. He was a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenophis IV, a heretic. He broke with many of the customs hallowed by age-old tradition. He did not wish to pay homage to the many strangely shaped gods of his people. For him only one 31 god was supreme, Aten, whom he worshipped and whom he had represented in the shape of the sun-disk sending down its rays, each one endowed with a hand. He called himself Akhnaten, after his god, and he moved his court out of reach of the priests of the other gods.  The pictures that he commissioned must have shocked the Egyptians of his day by their novel character. In them none of the solemn and rigid dignity of the earlier Pharaohs was to be found. Instead, he had himself depicted lifting his daughter on to his knee, walking with his wife Nefertiti in the garden, leaning on a stick, beneath the blessing sun. Some of his portraits show him as an ugly man; perhaps he wanted the artists to portray him in all his human frailty. Akhnaten’s successor was Tutankhamun, whose tomb with its treasures was discovered in 1922. Some of these works are still in the modern style of the Aten religion. The back of the king’s throne shows the king and queen in a homely idyll. He is sitting on his chair in an attitude which might have appalled the strict conservative – almost lolling, by 50 Egyptian standards. His wife is no smaller than he is, and gently puts her hand on his shoulder while the Sun-god again is stretching his hands in blessing down to them.

Text 6 1  For centuries, the fact that diplomats represented venerable principals – from powerful monarchs to established states – guaranteed their protected and 4 privileged status. Whereas long-standing rules of diplomatic immunity and privileges by and large continue to be upheld in interstate relations, popular perceptions of diplomats have 7 changed in recent decades. To the extent that diplomats are perceived as symbols of disliked countries, religions or “-isms”, the quality of standing for others has been 10 transformed from a rationale for diplomatic immunity to a rationale for political violence. No longer being inviolable symbols, diplomatic representatives have increasingly 13 become highly vulnerable symbols.

Text 7  It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all the statues, paintings and architectural forms seem to fall into place as if they obeyed one law. We call such a law, which all creations of a people seem to obey, a “style”. The rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual work the effect of poise and austere harmony.  The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict laws, which every artist had to learn from his earliest youth. Seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men had to be painted with darker skin than women; the appearance of every god was strictly laid down. Every artist also had to learn the art of beautiful script. He had to cut the images and symbols of the hieroglyphs clearly and accurately in stone. But once he had mastered all these rules he had finished his apprenticeship. No one wanted anything different, no one asked him to be “original”. On the contrary, he was probably considered the best artist who could make his statues most like the admired monuments of 19 the past. So it happened that in the course of three thousand years or more art changed very little. Everything that was considered good and beautiful in the age of the pyramids 22 was held to be just as excellent a thousand years later. Granted, new fashions appeared, and new subjects were demanded of the artists, but their mode of representing man and nature remained essentially the same.  Only one man ever shook the iron bars of the Egyptian style. He was a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenophis IV, a heretic. He broke with many of the customs hallowed by age-old tradition. He did not wish to pay homage to the many strangely shaped gods of his people. For him only one 31 god was supreme, Aten, whom he worshipped and whom he had represented in the shape of the sun-disk sending down its rays, each one endowed with a hand. He called himself Akhnaten, after his god, and he moved his court out of reach of the priests of the other gods.  The pictures that he commissioned must have shocked the Egyptians of his day by their novel character. In them none of the solemn and rigid dignity of the earlier Pharaohs was to be found. Instead, he had himself depicted lifting his daughter on to his knee, walking with his wife Nefertiti in the garden, leaning on a stick, beneath the blessing sun. Some of his portraits show him as an ugly man; perhaps he wanted the artists to portray him in all his human frailty. Akhnaten’s successor was Tutankhamun, whose tomb with its treasures was discovered in 1922. Some of these works are still in the modern style of the Aten religion. The back of the king’s throne shows the king and queen in a homely idyll. He is sitting on his chair in an attitude which might have appalled the strict conservative – almost lolling, by 50 Egyptian standards. His wife is no smaller than he is, and gently puts her hand on his shoulder while the Sun-god again is stretching his hands in blessing down to them.