The book is really a collection of 32 short essays on the development of Costa Rica, the second smallest continental Latin American country, in the last 15 years. Andreas Maislinger, the editor, a young political scientist from the University of Innsbruck, deserves major credit for having organized and compiled a rather homogeneous selection of scholarly articles—with a few exceptions to be pointed out later—in a single volume, and for convincing Innsbruck to publish it. Only four essays are in English, all others have been written in or translated into German. Short English summaries at the end of the book can be helpful for those without a full command of the German language.
Although the original intention was to provide a manual about Costa Rica, the book ultimately became a festschrift to the memory of Georg Gaupp-Berghausen, an Austrian well known and beloved in Costa Rica, where he was the driving force behind the creation and operation of I.C.E.R., a private radio education institute, whose daily programs reached the most isolated jungle areas in Central America.
The book covers mainly the presidency of Luis Alberto Monge (1982–86) and particularly two important structural events of that period. The first is the declaration of “perpetual, active, and unarmed neutrality” of Costa Rica as a means to promote peace in Central America. Several authors analyze the political and constitutional structure of the country, its international relations, and detailed aspects of such a policy of “unarmed neutrality,” also called the “Monge doctrine.” Though it is temporarily useful to reduce frictions with Nicaragua in the Contadora process, practically all scholars consider this “doctrine” as utopic and unrealistic, as the country cannot support its neutrality with a strong defense system as can Sweden, Switzerland, or Austria. On the contrary, Costa Rica abolished its army in the Constitution of 1949. The second subject surveyed is the policies adopted by the Monge administration to overcome the deep structural economic crisis of the early 1980s, and to create more solid developmental structures based on the country’s own resources.
As in many other selections of collective thought, not all articles deserve equal praise. Fortunately, there are very few exceptions here: agricultural development and the outstanding ecological policies of Costa Rica deserved more space. The editor could also have spared us the paper of Manfred Ernest, too biased and inaccurate to deserve serious consideration, as he claims to prove that Costa Rica “sold out” to capitalism and was arming to become a “repressive power” (pp. 300-301).