Poverty and peace

Abstract

Only yesterday, it seems, the Berlin Wall was taken to pieces, and academic journals began to bubble with exciting chatter about the end of history. Some decommissioning of nuclear weapons followed, by agreement, but large arsenals remained to rust and rot, leeching poisons into the environment. In previous years, there had been extensive discussions about how we could use the peace dividend. But for all too many people, the peace dividend was drawn in the unemployment benefit offices, if indeed they were fortunate enough to live in countries that actually compensated people for the loss of their jobs. The end of the Cold War has not put the armorers out of business, even if it has changed some of the flows within the world arms trade. That trade remains swollen, and no previous age has ever been so militarized. The Cold War's end has neither brought about a great renovation of the United Nations Organization nor promoted any wide‐ranging new forms of international cooperation. Instead, within the global economy we have seen a continuation, and on occasion, an acceleration of harmful trends which were already perfectly clear when the arms race was in full flood and when the conflict between East and West seemed a fixture, permanent to the point of ritual. Internally, the U.N. remains torn, indebted, and crisis prone. Externally, the world it serves is no better off.