Science that must be shared

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1995 by Federico Mayor Zaragoza

Contrary to the fears of Alexis de Tocqueville and other nineteenth-century thinkers, democracy has not built a kingdom of mediocrity inimical to the development of higher forms of art and science. Rather, the opposite has occurred. The vitality and creative force of democratic society - in which the state is secular, powers are separated and all ideas are subject to debate - have turned out to be much greater than its early critics imagined. These qualities have not only enabled it to surmount the danger posed by various forms of totalitarianism but also to promote unprecedented cultural and economic development.

An unexpected turn of events

However, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the nature of the challenges and threats with which democracy has to cope is changing. Since 1989, the end of the Cold War has given new emphasis, and in some cases greater virulence, to old disputes of ethnic or religious origin that had survived under wraps in the shadow of the East-West confrontation. It is quite clear that they are not the consequences of freedom but the result of many years of oppression. The triumph of democratic principles in Eastern Europe, the break-up of the Soviet empire and the nuclear weapons reduction agreements have opened up broad vistas of peace while at the same time releasing resentments and twisted perceptions long harboured in the secret places of the heart.

The countries of the free world had prepared for war, but not for peace. They were surprised when the course of events diverged from what the prophets of doom had predicted. The iron curtain was soon a thing of the past; peace was achieved in Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, the Middle East and South Africa. Conflicts were no longer international but international. The threats to security are now poverty, the unbalanced distribution of resources, runaway population growth, massive emigration and social injustices that create reactions of rejection.

This turnaround caught out some countries which had little inclination to take radical decisions, looked no further than the next elections and regarded any reference to future generations as an irritation. Their budgetary and productive priorities, social organization and defence structure are geared to the threats of the past but are unsuitable for tackling the problems of the future. The examples of Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda underscore the inability of the international community to solve new, "low-intensity" post-Cold War conflicts.

An intolerable situation

The individual and collective violence that constitute the seedbed of war can take many different forms. In politics it manifests itself as oppression and tyranny; in economics, as exploitation and destitution; and in society, as exclusion and intolerance.

Every effort to establish a culture of peace must take into account these deep roots of human conflict and give priority to the transmission of values, the forging of attitudes and the drafting of legal provisions to replace those of the declining culture of war. The pillars of this undertaking are education and development, which make it possible to eliminate the most dehumanizing aspects of extreme poverty, and to contribute to the elimination of discrimination and the establishment of governments that respect the will of the people and the agreements they have entered into. Twenty years ago, in 1974, the industrialized countries undertook to promote the development of the less privileged countries by allocating to them 0.7 per cent of their GDP (keeping 99.3 per cent for themselves!). With a few praiseworthy exceptions - the Nordic countries in particular - they have not honoured their undertaking.

Worse still, the meagre "development assistance" on offer sometimes included military equipment. As a result, there has been no endogenous development in most of the countries in question. Foreign debt and the macroeconomic structures put in place have led to an intolerable situation that has nevertheless been tolerated for years: the poor countries are paying the rich! Millions of people drawn by "city lights" are fleeing the poverty of rural areas to go and live in the squalid, crowded solitude of the major urban centres. One day, helpless and desperate, they will head north. How easy and wrong it is to deplore radicalism and extremism where poverty, marginalization, exclusion and ignorance have been allowed to proliferate.

The idea that development is synonymous with economic growth has long been superseded. Nowadays, the ethical and social problems arising from scientific and technological progress brook neither delay nor evasion. When UNESCO speaks of the need for development with a human face - integrated, endogenous, sustainable, supportive and environment-friendly - it is merely complying with one of its basic precepts: the duty to act as the conscience of the United Nations system in a world that hesitates, in the presence of powerful interests and forces of inertia, to take the new directions that, at the dawn of a new millennium, are morally inescapable.