Federico Mayor Zaragoza - Activities and Research

Activities and Research

Activities

The activity of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace is mainly based on the entailment and mobilization of networks of institutions, organizations and individuals that stand out by their commitment with the values for the culture of peace.The concrete actions of the Foundation are mainly centered in the divulging and educative areas.

Research

Federico Mayor Zaragoza published his opus magnum book The World Ahead in 2000 (Zed Books, UNESCO, 2000). The specific aim of the book, which he has drawn up in collaboration with Jerome Binde and with the assistance of Jean-Yves Le Saux, Ragnar Gudmundsson, and the team of UNESCO's Analysis and Forecasting Office, is to prepare us more thoroughly for the coming decades so that we may respond in good time to the challenges of the future. This book began with a complaint and a vision. The complaint charged that the governments of the wealthiest countries are almost exclusively preoccupied with economic affairs. They systematically reduce official development aid and their contributions to the United Nations organizations. Barring the old exception, they are failing on honor their commitment to devote 0.7% of their GNP to public aid for development. We had the opportunity of building peace on the basis of greater sharing and of implementing international global cooperation programmes. This drive, which was undertaken within the framework of the major United Nations conferences that punctuated the last decade, is slowing down. The biggest powers call the tune. For all that, do we see world peace and order? The 1990s saw genocide recurring as though this century's end allowed horror to be rendered banal. Yet, in the age of globalization, such tragedies have taken on a new form. Societies that have lost their bearings seem to be searching for enemies, but the enemy is now diffuse and unattainable, ever-changing, everywhere and nowhere. Federico Mayor argued that Freud detected a ‘discontent’ in civilization and questioned if is it possible to diagnose today, as some experts do, a ‘discontent’ in globalization? He observed that some speak of divorce between a sense of direction and power and others have referred to the loss of references, the erosion of principles, the vertigo they claimed would grip societies in transition around the third millennium. He added that we cannot fail to observe the increase in ‘soul-sickness’ at the very heart of the most prosperous societies and social categories which seem best protected from misfortune. The heart itself seems prey to a curious void, indifference and passivity grow, there is an ethical desert, passions and emotions are blunted, people's eyes are empty and solidarity evaporates. Grey areas expand, mafias work their way into the heart of states and of financial markets, and the law of the jungle prevails. Amnesia wins out- the future seems unreadable. We witness the divorce between forecast and plan; long term vision is discredited; obsession with the short term, with precariousness, and with the tyranny of emergency situations has us in its grip and the twentieth century seems to be ending in a state of stress as we zap perpetually from one crisis to another one. The Vision is inspired by the work of Nobel prizewinner, physicist, chemist, philosopher and one of the great thinkers of our time, late Ilya Prigogine, who argued that: ‘’We cannot predict the future, but we can prepare it’’. He added: ‘’As Paul Valéry has written, ‘’the future is construction’’. Our human action depends on our memory of the past, our analysis of the present and our anticipation of the future’’ (see Prigogine, ‘’Foreword’’ in F. Mayor, The New Page, Dartmouth Publishing/UNESCO, 1995). Federico Mayor argued that, as observed Ilya Prigogine, we cannot predict the future because the future will never be as before. We can prepare for it because, far from being inscribed in a book of destiny, the future is uncertainty, bifurcation, unpredictable creation. It is in our hands, because the future is freedom- for the most part, it will be exactly what we make of it. We can prepare for the future, but are we prepared for the twenty-first century.

More recently, Federico Mayor Zaragoza was working with Edward J. Nell (Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York) and Karim Errouaki on a book called Reinventing Globalization after the Crash (forthcoming in 2012). The book is prefaced by Boutros Boutros Ghali, and will constitute a new blueprint of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace. The book is based on material provided by Federico Mayor Zaragoza's book The World Ahead (Zed Books, UNESCO, 2000), revisited and animated by the theoretical framework put forward by Edward J. Nell in his opus magnum book General Theory of Transformational Growth (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and extended by Karim Errouaki (UM, HEC-Montreal, 2003) who argued that Transformational Growth provides a new vision and a new framework, for thinking about economic development, bringing it into the framework of economic history.

The purpose of the book, which is embodied in their title, is to re-invent globalization in a way that it will ensure that globalization is only profitable and sustainable -the subject of many studies- but it will result in human development. They want to suggest ways to recreate global economy as to humanize it. The main thesis is that globalization brings about creative destruction; we want to ensure not only that the creation outweighs the destruction, but also as far as possible, that those who suffer will be compensated. They will argue that no automatic or market forces will ensure these results; indeed, a good deal of market-driven globalization is predatory, taking advantage of the economically weak, and it often leads to widespread increases in inequality and poverty. They suggest that Government policies will be needed to counter this. They define nine key variables that will make it possible to analyze the interaction between economic advances and the resulting impacts of society, the environment, and the demographics of the system. They go on to suggest that they are currently interacting in negative ways today, that is, in ways that undermine, rather than advance, human development. They present the model of "Transformational Growth", setting out the ways the variables interact in a simple matrix which we called the transformational growth Matrix. This need not be filled in with actual numbers. A great deal of insight can be gained just from knowing whether the relationships are positive or negative, even more, of course, if we can say whether they are strong or weak. Then they show in detail how the interacting vectors – given the current state of the world - lead to largely negative results, so that an improvement in the level of economic activity will tend to be undermined and reversed by the interacting social and environmental consequences. The analysis focuses chiefly on the interaction between advanced economies and developing ones. In short, as things stand now, the pressures of globalization to increase economic activity will tend to be undermined or misdirected, so that in the end the effect may be to make many people worse off. (At a later stage they will consider the transformational relationships between advanced economies.)