MADRID–The American columnist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann once remarked that, in politics, there can be no concluding chapter because there is always more future out in front than recorded history behind. At no point is there a pause when all problems, upheavals and conflicts are solved and every good idea finds its proper place.
In Asia, with the overthrow of Suharto and the detonation of the Indian H-bomb we have just had another jolting reminder of the truth of this observation. At the same time, barely noticed, in Latin America there is another event afoot that reaffirms the other side of political life, the often successful quest for a more ordered, self-disciplined and farsighted world, that certainly India and Pakistan could benefit from in their own fraught relationship over Kashmir and Indonesia likewise with its continued occupation of East Timor.
Very soon one of the world’s last remaining inter-state conflicts, between Peru and Ecuador, will be laid to rest with the signing of an historic peace agreement.
For too many decades Latin America has received more than its fair share of disapprobation because of its declining relative economic standing after the high hopes of the early years of the century when its growth was spectacular, its penchant for dictatorship over democracy and its leanings towards the worst income distribution of the world’s five continents.
Much of the critique was accurate – and part remains opposite even now, despite widespread economic reforms, when one observes the medieval attitude towards the poorer classes and much of the continent seemingly intent on iluting the benefits of its return to democracy that marked the nineteen seventies and eighties and the onset of a Latin renaissance. Today there seems to be a vogue for an era of “democratic Caesars” – elected politicians who ask their legislatures to re-write the constitution so they can stand for a second or even a third term, or for voting for president, as in Bolivia last year, a former harsh military dictator or, as looks increasingly likely in Venezuela, a colonel who all but carried out a coup in 1992.
But there was always another side of Latin America that put it in the forefront of civilization – its belief in international law, the avoidance of war and the supremacy of diplomacy and negociation. It has always been a contradiction, too rarely perceived by outsiders, that while Latin America may seem to have a life-long fascination with the caudillo/general, its paucity of international conflict makes it this century’s most peaceful continent, a state of being that is reflected not least in the relatively low percentage of national income that Latin America spends on military hardware. (Which makes it all the more contemptible that the Clinton Administration, as a favour to the U.S. arms industry, tried to stoke up Latin American arms spending by reversing President Jimmy Carter’s ban on the sale of advanced warplanes to the continent.)
The Latin American “gift” to the world community of this notion of law before war was fashioned by a distinctive group of scholars active in the years leading up to World War 2, including Ricardo Alfaro of Panama, Antonio de Bustamente of Cuba, Epitacio Pessoa of Brazil, Francisco Urrutia of Colombia and most important, the Chilean, Alejandro Alvarez. It was Alvarez who led the effort to show how the basis of international law as it developed after World War 1 was fundamentally wrong, with its stress on the independence of states. His emphasis was on the “interdependence of states”. “This is”, he wrote, “the foundation of their reciprocal relations, and mutual assistance is the condition for their peaceful co-existence and their mutual and moral development”.
Although World War 2 appeared to suffocate this thinking it did in fact survive to play an important part in the post war order, not just in the proclamations of international law societies but in the way that states went about formulating their ideas of their own relations and the rules that ought to govern them.
This week’s historic peace agreement points up the relevance of these political ideas. Ecuador and Peru have been arguing about a piece of (oil-rich) Amazon forest since Spanish colonial times – which puts India’s and Pakistan’s quarrel or Indonesia’s and East Timor’s or, come to that, Israel’s and the Palestinians’into some perspective. In 1995 the two countries briefly went to war which animated Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the U.S., working together, to broker a series of peace negociations.
Ecuador has now given up its claim, but Peru, embracing Alvarez’s principles, will give Ecuador permanent access to the Amazon – a permeable border in effect.
Latin America now wants to make money, not war. If Asia and Africa, not to speak of Greece, Turkey and ex-Yugoslavia in Europe, could learn from Latin America about the superiority of law over war not only would there be more peace, there’d be more prosperity – and the world will have taken a great step away from Lippman’s sophisticated pessimism towards Alvarez’s more considered optimism..
