Eisenhower asked, "Is there no other way the world may live?" Demilitarised Costa Rica answers him - a sign of hope, in war times
Trailer for A Bold Peace - full film (pay-per-view) here
As our weekly editorials demonstrate, we are as haunted and appalled by the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s forces as anyone. But true to our name, and our ambition, we want to bring you stories of hope and creativity - even with something as apparently zero-sum, and incontrovertible, as a national army.
2016’s A Bold Peace - full film (pay-per-view) here - is the extraordinary story of how Costa Rica has survived the 20th century, and thrived in the 21st, as a result of abandoning its land army. See the blurb below:
70 years ago Costa Rica abolished its army and committed itself to fostering a peaceful society. It has been reaping the benefits ever since.
In his famous "Cross of Iron" speech in 1953, President Eisenhower critiqued the military-industrial complex while asking, "Is there no other way the world may live?" In Costa Rica today, we glimpse another way to live.
In 1948, Costa Rica dismantled their military establishment and intentionally cultivated security relationships with other nations through treaties, international laws, and international organizations.
Free of the burden of military spending, they used the financial savings to invest in their people, creating strong public institutions including public higher education and universal health care.
In short, Costa Ricans created a society committed to peace, solidarity, and international law. They have survived with safety and relative prosperity for nearly 70 years without a standing army.
Featuring interviews with former presidents and Costa Rican government officials (Óscar Arias, Christiana Figueres) as well as scholars, journalists and citizens of Costa Rica, A BOLD PEACE details the events which shook the country to its foundations, culminating in the 1948 civil war and the decision to abolish the military.
Over the decades, the Costa Rican model has survived several serious crises, but the current threats may be the most formidable of all.
More here. There’s a press kit with some interesting interviews with the film makers. Here's Co-Director/Producer Michael Dreiling:
What does the abolition of the army have to do with the quality of life in Costa Rica?
This is a great question and gets to the core of how we approached the film narrative. As a sociologist, it is clear that when a national government commits to the common good of the people, a number of positive outcomes are assured.
First, when the government is responsive to the needs of the people, rather than powerful private or military interests, the sense of ownership in democracy and trust in government improves – along with it is higher participation in elections, more political parties, and less control by the rich and powerful. The inverse, of course is true as well.
In the U.S., as the Vietnam War rolled on and then the Watergate scandal occurred, public trust in government dropped. That slide in trust has continued as conservative politicians came to define government as a problem – usually as cover for some monied interests to avoid responsibility for the public good – and faith in democracy reached historic lows.
Second, freed from the burden of military spending, Costa Rica invested the financial savings in strong public institutions including public higher education and universal health care. The contrast with the U.S. is again telling. As the U.S. military budget and national debt skyrocket under President Reagan, and ever since, the schools, universities, infrastructure, and health and well-being of Americans have been shortchanged.
While other nations invested in poverty alleviation, high quality public schools, and the health of their people (which the U.S.A. did do a better job of in the 1950s and 1960s), the U.S. continued to feed the military- industrial complex. A government in service to that master loses site of the well-being of the community.
And next from Writer/Director Matthew Eddy:
What would you say to people who argue that Costa Rica may be an interesting country, but it’s so small, how can it be a significant model for the world?
I believe its small size might magnify its significance. If a small nation can use diplomacy, international law and international organizations so effectively, how much more might large nations use the same tools, with the potential to leverage more resources.
in terms of the significance of the Costa Rican case, you also have to remember that Costa Rica exists in one of the most violent regions of the world. Just as important is to consider how often Costa Rica and the entire region have been destabilized by U.S. policies – whether it be supporting the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s or the U.S.-led Drug War today, just to cite two examples among many others.
People often assume the U.S. has had Costa Rica’s back all these years, but the historical record shows Costa Rican security has relied a great deal on European diplomatic support, the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and world courts.
And, unlike a great many Latin American nations, there is no U.S. military base on Costa Rican soil. I don’t think Costa Ricans would ever allow that, although a very small and noisy sector of Costa Rican elites have sometimes supported scenarios like that.
What light does Costa Rica cast on the Ukrainian invasion? A retrospective and regretful one, as this piece from Saltwire (written by Cape Breton University’s Sean Howard) shows:
As the United States’ last ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, complained in a recent interview, the end of the Cold War came not with “the breakup of the Soviet Union” – iconically dramatized in the fall of the Berlin Wall – but in December 1988.
That’s when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev declared as “evident” that “force or the threat of force neither can nor should be instruments of foreign policy,” and identified “disarmament” as “the most important thing of all, without which no other issue of the forthcoming age can be solved.”
'To hell with that'
By the mid-1990s, however, hopes of a radically demilitarized, completely denuclearized, post-bloc European security order were dashed by the strategically-senseless expansion of NATO, a move described in a high-level, bipartisan 1997 open letter to U.S. President Bill Clinton as a “policy error of historic proportions,” certain to “undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West.”
As President George H.W. Bush said of Gorbachev’s desire to build a ‘Common European Home’: “To hell with that! We prevailed. They didn’t.”
But there is one place where, against steep odds, peace has spectacularly prevailed, and war been routed: Costa Rica.
Armed forces abolished
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell to the sledgehammers of non-violently indignant civilians. In 1948, Costa Rica’s new social democratic President, José Figueres, took a sledgehammer to the wall of the country’s massive military headquarters, handed the keys to the minister of education – and abolished the armed forces entirely.
Since then, as the U.S. spent trillions on its global military empire, Costa Rica invested relentlessly in education, health care and environmental protection, generating immense social ‘strength through peace.’
In a war-torn neighbourhood – with Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south, both victims of U.S. invasion – Costa Rica, as psychologist David Barash wrote in 2013, “has no army, navy or air force, no heavy weapons of any kind,” and if you “see lines of pelicans flying in perfect formation, consider” it the “air force, out on manoeuvres.”
Regional peacemaker
The state does maintain a lightly armed civil guard, able only to perform minimal defensive duties. And this non-threatening posture has enabled it to play a key role as regional peacemaker, most famously in the 1980s when President Oscar Arias (awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize) refused to back Washington’s bid to topple the new left-wing regime in Nicaragua, while criticizing the authoritarianism already blighting the Sandinista revolution.
Barash laments that “most American tourists have no idea” the ‘tropical paradise’ they’re enjoying “is demilitarized, even as they enthusiastically partake of the many benefits this decision has helped generate: democratic institutions, the remarkably healthy and happy population, and, not least, the fact that Costa Rica has been able to invest not only in its people but also in preserving about 25 per cent of its land area in either national parks or biological reserves.”
'A country of teachers'
Proving his point, in August 2021 professor of public health Atul Gawande wrote a long article in The New Yorker, asking how Costa Rica had weathered the COVID-19 storm far more effectively than the U.S., without mentioning the fact, as one reader pointed out, that “the end of the armed services allowed for a greater financial and cultural focus on health and education, resulting in a well-educated and long-lived population.”
In his Nobel Lecture, President Oscar Arias described Costa Ricans not only as “an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship,” but “a country of teachers” where “children go with books under their arms, not rifles on their shoulders.”
Had Gorbachev’s vision been fostered, not throttled, in the 1990s, Ukraine today could be such a country, a proud and prosperous part of a neutral, demilitarized Europe: a continent truly whole and free.