Nobel Peace Prize laureate delivers inaugural Baptista Lecture at York

By Andrew McRae

York University is becoming a Canadian leader in presenting the views and visions of internationally known advocates of peace and social justice. On the heels of President of Guyana Janet Jagan's inaugural Jagan Lecture concerning social activist Dr. Cheddi Jagan's vision of a "New Human Order" on March 27, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of Costa Rica, Dr. Oscar Arias, was welcomed to Moot Court in Osgoode Hall Law School on April 8. Arias was visiting York to deliver the inaugural Baptista Lecture, "The Moral Challenge of Globalization: Principles for Human Development.

The Baptista lecture series is designed to publicize the work and ideologies of Michael Baptista, a Royal Bank executive and York University Schulich School of Business MBA graduate who died in 1995.

Arias advanced Baptista's argument of democracy, social justice, human development, demilitarization and global peace in his hour-long lecture. "A renewed focus on human security should be the fundamental basis for creating a new human society," he said.

Furthermore, he stressed the importance of job-security and social welfare in an age of commercial globalization.

"Traditional understanding of economics are changing," Arias told the gathering. "For some, the new economic system means being able to make investments with a worldly perspective [for the purpose of] maximizing profits; for many others it means facing the end of job security and, at the same time, witnessing the reappearance of sweat-shops." Pitching profit-making against job security is an evil the former president is publicly speaking out against.

Arias also lashed out at military-hungry governments, accusing them of adding to the disproportions of wealth and poverty found within their own states, for it is the massive budgets allocated to militarization that are taking away from more pressing and human issues such as poverty and debt relief. While in office, Arias systematically and completely eliminated any need for a Costa Rican military, and today, the country stands as the successful flagship of his theory of demilitarization.

Adopting such measures globally will likely not be witnessed in this generation while there exist belligerents in both East and West. However, it serves as a beacon for any future hope of a peaceful world, where social justice and human development take precedence over arms sales, militarization and aggressive commercial globalization.

The former president today serves as an outspoken advocate
of the Year 2000 Campaign to redirect world military spending to human development, an international effort which lobbies the United Nations to allocate special envoys to sites of potential military conflict. For Arias, redirecting the ludicrous amounts of miliary budgets is not an option in a world where "a billion and a half people have no access to clean water, and a billion live in miserably substandard housing."

Arias' theory of a new economy based on human development is not arrived at without knowledge and experience. His academic credentials include a law and economics degree from the University of Costa Rica, and a PhD in political science from the University of Essex, Great Britain. He served as a political science professor at the University of Costa Rica, was appointed Costa Rican Minister of Planning and Economic Policy, and was elected secretary-general of the National Liberation Party in 1981.

Arias became president of Costa Rica in 1986, a time of chaotic upheaval in Central America with ongoing wars in neighbouring Nicaragua and Guatemala. In 1987, Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Esquipulas II Accords - the regional peace agreement that ended the hostilities.

Arias made use of the monetary award from the Peace Prize to found the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress: a foundation that works to promote conflict resolution in the developing world and equal opportunities for women, while strengthening the participation and peaceful solidarity of the peoples of Central America. While this is a positive campaign, it has little tangible effect globally, he complained, as there is little budget to establish branches of the foundation in countries other than Costa Rica.

Through initiatives such as the Baptista and Jagan lectures York University is cementing its academic relationships in the Caribbean and Latin America. With the invitation of President of Guyana, Janet Jagan, and former President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, and with the efforts of York International and the University's Centre for Research on Latin American and the Caribbean (CERLAC), an awareness of global human development issues is growing within the University community.

Andrew McRae is an honours student in history at York University.