The price of peace

UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1994 by Federico Mayor Zaragoza

THE world has changed. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of Cold War confrontation between the two major power blocs, which is undoubtedly the most important political transformation of the last few years.

What has this meant for world peace? The geopolitical interpretation, perhaps the commonest, maintains that bipolarity based on the existence of two nuclear powers of equal strength was the guarantee of peace over the last forty years. Now that this balance of terror has disappeared, all kinds of wars are once again possible.

I do not share this view of "negative peace". In the first place, it is inaccurate since, while applicable in some degree to Europe, it does not take account of the hundreds of wars that have devastated other parts of the planet since 1945. Secondly and most importantly, it overlooks the perverse effects of the unquestioned paradox that "war is unthinkable but disarmament is impossible", which made superpower confrontation the inescapable fate of several generations and justified the arms race as the only rational solution.

The end of the Cold War has nullified the logic of this reasoning. The widespread propagation of violence, which is a characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century, today appears to us as a self-evident fact and forces us to recognize that the nature of war and its protagonists have changed. War today assumes the form of civil war and its belligerents are not states but the distinctive communities--ethnic and social--which seek political fulfilment to compensate for their personal, cultural and social frustrations.

This exaggerated desire for political compensation explains why the achievement of freedom in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe has mainly taken the form of a radical affirmation of the integrity of their collective identities and has been reflected in intransigent and violent claims for the restoration of ideal frontiers. The Geophysical Institute of the Moscow Academy of Sciences reported in 1991 that of the twenty-three frontiers that separated the different republics only three were fully accepted, which put at seventy-five the number of potential trouble spots, seventeen of which were already the scene of open conflict.

In the face of these intrastate wars, ethnic and cultural in origin, fluctuating and intermittent, highly varied and changing in form, involving an unpredictable and indeterminate number of participants, traditional conflict scenarios have little to tell us. These situations require profound historical and sociological analysis; they call for a new cultural approach--tenacious and imaginative--that sees prevention as the only possible solution. In other words they demand--more than ever--a culture of peace, and thereby assign UNESCO a key role in this context.

Redefining the concept of security

What are difficult are the conceptual changes, the changes in course that future generations will reproach us for not having made if we do not have the clear-sightedness and spiritual strength needed to embark on them. Not only has war changed; so too have the conditions affecting our collective security, and indeed the very concept of security itself. For that reason I think the United Nations Security Council, as it approaches the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, could come up with a fresh definition of the idea of security, which is now so different from what it was in 1945. In my opinion, all the global threats to security--deterioration of the environment and living conditions, population problems, cultural and ethnic incompatibilities, lack of respect for human rights and so on--should be regarded as falling within the competence of the Security Council.

If we really want to put an end to this other kind of threat to our security, part of the vast sums spent on military power must be invested in the struggle against poverty, especially in rural communities, so as to prevent the violence and mass emigration that result from it. Money will have to be invested to abolish the shameful situation of street children and child labour. We are accepting the unacceptable. We are continuing to arm ourselves against enemies who no longer exist, and we stand defenceless before those now threatening us.

We are well equipped to contend with the more conventional dangers of war culture. We have armies, and our national budgets include appropriations for defence and armaments. But the amount of aid provided to help developing countries to mobilize their immense potential remains derisory. The results are poverty, excessive population growth, mass emigration, intolerance and violence. We are paying a preposterous price for our short-sightedness. The first threat facing us today is that posed by the deepening chasm that divides the countries of the North from the countries of the South. Yet there can be no doubt that the world is one and that either we go forward together or we shall be unable to avoid chaos and disaster. A global outlook is now the prime condition of our survival.