Thinking About the Good Society

Dr. Oscar Arias
The Central America Leadership Initiative
Aspen Institute Executive Seminar
San Jose, Costa Rica
May 23 26, 2004

It is a pleasure to join you for the opening evening of this innovative three-day seminar. I am already intrigued to see what fruits will result form a collaboration between the Aspen Institute and INCAE in the field of values-based leadership. INCAE has been nurturing an institutional conversation on ethics and entrepreneurship for quite some time now, and these themes will be compelling elements to consider as part of a larger definition of what comprises a good society in Central America.

Exploring the theoretical contours of a good society is an intellectual challenge and, at the same time, a call for personal introspection. Deep discussions should force us to confront those misconceptions which we can never seem to completely purge from our minds. At some point, we have all fallen under the sway of the incorrect but popular belief that there are in this world two types of people: those who think, and those who act. But reality is not so simple. The intellect is useless is useless in the absence of dedication to an ideal, just as suffrage is empty without the critical participation of the electorate, and wealth is infertile without the entrepreneurs vision of a social cause. The fusion of dualities ideal and reason, thought and action promises to be a constant goal in this seminar and, hopefully, a hallmark of the Central America Leadership Initiative.

My friends, I believe that we all must cultivate a vision of the world that will motivate us to act in our varied capacities in favor of progress. A hundred years from now, I would like my great-grandchildren to enjoy a world in which each government is democratically elected, is able to fulfill its peoples basic needs, remains at peace with both its neighbors and its internal opposition, and uses the tools of economics and science to the benefit of all its people. This, in brief, is my idea of a well-functioning society, humble yet painfully out of reach in todays world.

Perhaps the good society of mine sounds a bit dry, a bit technical; but the fact that the twentieth century, despite its astonishing achievements, was incapable of producing such a society indicates a deep underlying challenge. I strongly believe that, if we still dare to hope that this century can be less bloody than the last, we must struggle for the collective acceptance of a new value system, a new ethics. Its goal will be to create a world where with each passing day humans display more solidarity and less individualism; more honesty and less hypocrisy; more transparency and less corruption; more faith and less cynicism; more compassion and less selfishness. In short, a world with more love.

Love, of course, is practically a dirty world in contemporary political discourse. The cynics tell us that there is nothing we can do to combat poverty and social inequality or to achieve lasing peace. They tell us that social inequality and poverty are inevitable, and that security can only be achieved through military means, as is happening today in the Middle East. The cynics tell us that wealth is essentially the result of clambering over the backs of your brothers. Such moral pessimism underlies the oft-heard argument that anyone who is willing to fight for the underdog, to work for peace, to commit to ending human suffering, is really just a dreamer.

I was labeled a nave utopian back in the 1980s for believing that the self-declared Marxist-Leninist government in Nicaragua would hold free elections, as they committed to doing when they signed my peace plan. Those who called themselves realists claimed that military victory was the only way to end the conflict in Central America. That time the realists were wrong. There is a first time for everything.

And here we arrive at another popular but erroneous belief: that optimism implies a certain degree of blindness to difficult facts. However, as the statesman Francois Guizot once said, the world belongs to the optimists; pessimists are only spectators. Today, in business as much as in politics, we sorely need leaders who act with the optimists characteristic mixture of hope and analytical thought.

Certainly, these are trying time for those who yearn to believe in the inexorable march of human progress. The last two years have been baffling for those of us who thought that history had definitively proven the necessity of seeking collective answers to our common problems and challenges. Since well before the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, President Bush has been moving the country of Lincoln and Kennedy towards an existential crisis by sanctioning a culture of low regard for the law, of respecting the law only when it is convenient. His administration adheres to the belief that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. Unfortunately for American citizens, indeed for the rest of the world, this patent arrogance carries a great cost. As the British playwright Robert Bolt once wrote, This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast. Mans laws, not Gods. And if you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

When the security and moral stature of a nation is at stake, a leader of President Bushs stature is obliged to tell the people and that includes his friends in the oil business- what they need to know, not what they want to hear. As Martin Luther King Junior once said, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus. Misleading people is not a valid method of molding consensus. I would not be surprised if the devisors of this war announced that Saddams scientists were so advanced that they managed to turn all their nuclear weapons invisible.

In all seriousness, it is one thing to put a complex and sophisticated case in direct, clear and simple language before the electorate. It is quite another to lie, distort and ignore the facts in order to induce support for an unpopular war. In region as tormented and volatile as the Middle East, nothing could be more reckless than deliberate oversimplification of the facts. That is a lesson that we know only too well from the recent history of Central America.

No amount of mortars or bombs can ever achieve true peace; the most they can do is cause devastation and perhaps enforce a ceasefire, but we know that peace based on fear and humiliation may not be peace at all, and it probably will not last. Peace can only be achieved by its own methods, which are dialogue and understanding, tolerance and forgiveness. But this process will not take hold without some serious rethinking about the priorities of our governments, and the ethical focus of the world economy.

Today, the seed of war lies in the paradoxical spread of human misery in an increasingly affluent world. Add to that condition the manipulations of demagogues and fanatics, and you have an explosive situation which is not easily combated by the methods of conventional warfare. I propose that to overcome this condition we must consider not methods of waging war, but strategies for establishing peace.

Since September 11, 2001, it has often been observed that terrorism has taken the place of communism in the pantheon of enemies of the West, and that the Bush strategy of preemptive war is a response to this new threat. But neither terrorism nor communism has ever been, fundamentally, the real threat. Look closely into any of the worlds hot spots, and you will find the hallmarks of a universal human crisis lurking at the very core of our modernity. It is a development crisis when nearly a billion and a half people have no access to clean water, and a billion live in miserably substandard housing. It is a leadership crisis when we allow wealth to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, so that the worlds three richest people have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the poorest forty-three countries. It is a spiritual crisis when, as Gandhi said, many are so poor that they only see God in the form of bread, and when other individuals seem only to have faith in the capricious invisible hand of the free market. It is a moral crisis when 35,000 children die each day from malnutrition and disease. And it is a democratic crisis when 1.3 billion people live on an income less than one dollar per day, and are effectively excluded from public decision-making because of the wrenching poverty in which they live.

Our theorizing on the transition to globalization, on the potential of enterprise and the benefits of free trade, cannot ignore the struggles of those who find themselves included in such bleak statistics. If you oppose an ideology, such as fanatical terrorism, which seeks its platform among the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, then your principle struggle must be with the structural causes of poverty itself. Therefore, economists and entrepreneurs have a vital role to play, for economic development is the tool of a greater goal: ensuring justice, a dignified life, and security for a people. Clearly, targeting the dividends of growth against social and economic inequality is not easy task. However, there is no alternative: our imperative to seek economic development, and to harness that development in favor of the poor, must be clear.

For those countries with small population and territory, such as Central American nations, export-led growth is the principal source of jobs, government revenue, and ultimately social and economic development. For that reason, I believe that the conclusion of negotiation talks for the Central American Free Trade Agreement this past January has moved Central America a step closer to cutting the Gordian knot of underdevelopment. We have not had a better shot at modernizing our institutions, reducing poverty and increasing the pace of growth in the region since the creation of the Central American Common Market. And just as the Common Market played a central role in the regions development over the past four decades, CAFTA must become a landmark achievement in raising the quality of life of the Central American people.

However, the North must understand the urgency of making trade work for the poor of Central America. Although virtually all leaders of industrialized countries profess to believe in free trade, most often what they are looking for is the opening of other countries markets, not their own. Today, industrialized countries provide approximately 325 billion dollars per year that is, nearly one billion dollars per day in different kinds of subsidies to their own farmers, while spending about 68 billion dollars per year on foreign aid, that is, a quarter of one percent their combined GDP. Until this combination of protectionism and stinginess on aid is ended, free trade will not live up to its promise for poor countries. The leaders of wealthy countries with large domestic markets must be made to understand that we, in the developing world, depend on trade for our survival. If we cannot export our goods, we will have no option but to continue exporting our people.

Even if we do achieve a more fair and open international trade system, solidarity and empathy are not the inevitable results of economic growth. I would argue that human misery stems not only from material want, but from indifference and lack of love imposed on global scale. In our world, the most fantastic means of communication exist in the midst of seemingly infinite deserts of silence and solitude.

In solitude, our brothers in Africa the torture of witnessing their children die from hunger and sickness.

In solitude, the worlds most promising youth are dragged into the hell of drug addition.

In solitude, perish the children caught up in the violence of warring cities, and in solitude suffer the prisoners in all the concentration camps still open in the world.

The millions of children who will never know the alphabet also face the sinister solitude of ignorance.

Paved in solitude are the roads treaded by millions of refugees displaced by war and misery.

Walls of solitude surround the sick who do not have access to the marvels of modern medical science, while the fruits of their labor are consumed by governments in the absurd pursuit of military dominance.

What is to be done? How must a good society confront the conditions which cause such despair? As I said before, we each must act according to the prerogatives of our conscience and in light of the vision we hold of a better world. All of you know that the most intense of my political labors is the struggle against war and preparation for war. I reject the idea purported by many of an armed peace. I reject the proverb which says that if we want peace, we must prepare for war. Because I believe in love, I believe that political action must search for peace without adjectives; therefore, I am compelled to reject the ferocious logic of militarism. The global arms trade, and its accompanying glut of military spending, exacerbates and prolongs wars, criminal activity and ethnic violence; destabilizes emerging democracies; inflates military budgets to the detriment of health care, education and basic infrastructure; and increases inequality and underdevelopment on a global scale. This waste of resources and human life represents the single most significant perversion of worldwide priorities known today.

My dedication to the cause of arms control stems from the recent painful history of Central America. We can never know exactly how many Nicaraguan, Guatemalan and Salvadoran children grew up not with toys, books and teachers, but in camps where they learned to wield weapons and to suppress their humanity. We know that many were child soldiers that many died before having learned to play or to read, and that the rest of them saw peace arrive only after they were already condemned to adulthood without a future. Colombian youth face that same peril today; but the children of Latin America are not the only ones to suffer the effects of armed violence. Recently I read the frightening news that, between 1979 and 1998, more than 50,000 children died of bullet wounds in the United States alone. Truly, it is dangerous to be a child on our American continent.

My friends, I have presented you with a few very general ideas on global poverty, security and trade: I want to stress that, in spite of their vast scale, these challenges present us with a collective opportunity to steer the world a little closer to peace. This room is filled with people who are well equipped to be leaders in the drive to build a more just and peaceful world. And leadership in this struggle is desperately needed. I have said before that peace is a process which never ends; it is the result of innumerable decisions made by many people in many lands. Each of us has a job to do and a role to play, and that includes reflecting on our ideals of a more just society and effective government.

A Central American ethic of leadership need not be invented from scratch, as its foundation is implicit in the political, philosophical, and religious ideas of humankinds history. We seek guidance in both those ethical ideas that have already been implemented and those that have merely been advocated. Such principles are carved on the facades of numerous Houses of Parliament, Government Palaces, churches and universities. They are engraved on catacombs, dungeons and prison cells.

Jesus, Plato, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, the anonymous authors of Popol Vuh, Erasmus, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, Adam Smith and Marx. The fathers of the American Revolution, Emerson, Lincoln, Cartier, Latin Americas Bolivar, San Martin, Sarmiento, Benito Juarez, and Jose Marti. In this century, Gandhi, Churchill, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King, Hayek, Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. These are merely some of the names of people whose ideas have been incorporated into our intellectual pantheon.

The ethics that all of the Americas deserves comprises precepts such as Platos The Virtue of the State, Moses commandment not to kill, Jesus advice to Love thy neighbor as thyself, Gandhis warning to never respond with violence, ending with Mandela and Menchus reminder that We are all created equal.

Central America has the possibility to establish its ethics based on these values because in our region, as in no other, different races, languages, religions, virtues, vices and sufferings from all corners of the world have met and mingled. This ethical system, assembled from sacred values expounded by people from all eras and all parts of the world, may in practice lead to greater solidarity, tolerance, and respect for life, human liberty and dignity.

My friends, the course of the twenty-first century has yet to be determined, and as Victor Hugo once wrote, the future has many names: for the weak, it is the unreachable; for the timid, it is the unknowable; for the brave, it is an opportunity. For all of the turmoil we see in todays world, we must remember that there is always the possibility of a better future. It wont come automatically. Instead, it will require conviction, courage and perseverance. But we have an opportunity, and lets make use of it. After all, how much poverty can a democracy survive?

Thank you.