It is common to hear of the world order as evolving from the relatively stable equilibrium of the Cold War, through a brief ‘unipolar’ moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to one moving towards a new bipolar world with the US and China as the two poles, or a ‘multi-polar’ world characterized by the US, China, European Union and a set of emerging powers, singly or in concert.
But are either of the two characterizations correct? And if not, what is, and where is it heading? What are the attributes of power in the world today?
Whatever the current state of the world order, one thing is certain: that geo-politics is only one of its determinants. At least four other factors and forces will play a major role in its evolution.
The first is the climate crisis. Failure to meet global targets on emissions and greening, as seems likely, runs the risk of climate change overtaking geo-politics in shaping the world order in ways that we simply cannot predict. India has made impressive commitments in moving away from fossil fuels to green energy but its record in protecting its forests, rivers and environment in general is regressive.
The second is new technologies. Countries investing in new technologies will certainly have a head start in the evolving world order, but some technologies like artificial intelligence (think of ChatGPT as the Bell telephone of the AI age) have the potential of getting ahead of humankind’s ability to govern it with potentially swift and apocalyptic consequences.
The third is demography. There is a secular trend towards aging in advanced industrial societies. Going by these trends, nations with younger populations have an advantage in shaping the evolving world order over others, including in the long run, China.
India overtook China earlier this year as the world’s most populous country. Photo: Shashank Hudkar/Unsplash.
But a younger population comes with many other challenges of education, jobs, skills, productivity, technology, management and capital required for an age of information, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and microchips, cloud computing, big data analytics and cyber and space technologies.
Demographically and in terms of an S&T base, India has a good prospect of emerging as a new pole in world affairs provided it can handle these challenges, but again, Indian investments in R&D and the state of many of its higher educational institutions are disheartening.
But perhaps it is the fourth that is the most consequential: the ability of societies, whether democratic, ‘civilisational’, autocratic or theocratic, to evolve a harmonious and inclusive polity at peace with itself and the world.
It goes without saying that a society that is fractured, divided and at odds or war with itself will face handicaps in dealing with its enemies, rivals and neighbours (although some would argue that power accrues by its very exercise against others).
India has the historic and democratic credentials of being a model for the rest of the world in peaceful coexistence, but trends in India over the last two decades or so, particularly the rise of religious extremism and majoritarianism at the cost of liberal democracy, have called that into question.
Turning to geo-politics, putting the above aside for a moment, the biggest challenge facing India and much of the rest of the world, certainly the world’s leading power, the United States and the West as a whole, is the rise of an assertive China that is ready to challenge both its values, and what it and many perceive as an unfair world order framed by the victors of World War II.
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There are two if not more ways in which the West’s handling of China has been wanting. Even a cursory look at the nature of ICT, new technologies and globalisation in general show that the world today is a single ‘space’ that needs to be looked at holistically.
Yet, the West’s response to the rise of China has been fragmented, looking at China and the world in terms of ‘theatres’ and sectors, whether it is the ‘Indo-Pacific’, or the maritime-continental dichotomy, or technology trade, markets, political systems or military competition, as if they can be compartmentalised, and then investing much effort to ‘re-stitch’ and fuse it together.
Thus, while the US has ‘pivoted’ from the Euro-Atlantic to the Pacific and outsourced its interests in West Asia to the West Asian ‘Quad’, China has done the opposite.
Its Belt and Road initiatives can effectively ‘bypass’ the Indo-Pacific, through continental-maritime alternatives such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), continental initiatives such as its overland Eurasian route from the Pacific to the Atlantic and maritime initiatives such as its forays into the west Indian Ocean, while keeping an eye on the Arctic Route (with Russia) and the Kra Canal. They contain built-in redundancies in case one or the other does not work.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at the Belt and Road International Forum in 2017. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/The Russian Presidential Press and Information Office. CC BY-SA 4.0.
At the same time, it has struck a 25-year, US$ 400 billion geo-economic ‘deal’ with strategic undertones with Iran, brokered a diplomatic breakthrough between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and positioned itself across the Central Asian mountain ranges from the Pamirs to the Hindu Kush into Central Asia and Afghanistan taking full advantage of the US pullout from Afghanistan at its weakest underbelly below Xinjiang, to push its strategic, security and economic interests through Afghanistan as well. (It is possible to see China’s aggressive posture in Ladakh too through such a prism).
China does not look at the world in terms of regional ‘theatres’ or ‘sectors’. Indeed, it is hard to find the word ‘theatre’ in its strategic vocabulary. Rather, it looks at the world as a single space holistically, to probe weak points in the West’s strategic armor.
The second way that the West (and India) have faltered in dealing with China in Asia has been by misreading China’s rise and how to deal with it.
We often forget that the rise of China is first and foremost an economic rise that has now metamorphosed into what they call ‘comprehensive national power’. Yet the West’s responses to it have been primarily ‘politico-military (pol-mil) through such evolving initiatives like the Quad and AUKUS.
Although the Quad has its origins in the 2004 tsunami disaster response, and briefly flirted in the direction of a more military grouping through bilateral and trilateral military, mainly naval, exercises of growing sophistication, it has now settled into a largely political grouping around techno-economic-humanitarian initiatives like the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative, COVID response etc, at least partly because of India’s reluctance to openly be part of a military alliance lest it provoke China. Nevertheless, its pol-mil springs are visible for anyone to see.
Such a posture also tends to give the Quad an inherently confrontationist edge, forcing many middle and smaller countries to be wary of its initiatives (as most of the global south has done in the context of Ukraine).
But there are more subtle economic approaches that could bind many of these countries into a more inclusive approach and yet spur competition with and containment of China, based on the intrinsically agrarian nature of these societies. These have not yet been explored.
To do that, China’s rivals should focus not only on the more industrialised coastal areas of Southeast Asia that are part of corporate global ‘value chains’ as most of Quad initiatives have done, but also invest in the interiors of Southeast Asia like Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia that are virtually colonized by China as suppliers of raw materials and primary produce and markets for cheap Chinese goods, to develop local and regional value chains based on the agri-produce off the land, water, forests and hills that could knit the interiors with the coasts and global value chains.
Such an approach would need less capital intensive, small and medium-scale investments in the agro-rural sectors of these economies from which most of its people derive their livelihoods to add value to their produce for larger markets.
To these could be added digital advancements in people-centric areas of the economy such as education, health, financial inclusion, travel etc. in which countries like India have excelled. Indeed, India, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore (as a financial partner) could form the bedrock of such an initiative stretching from the Pacific to South Asia and serve our Act East policy better.
It would also engage these countries to seek Asian-centric political solutions to the crisis facing countries like Myanmar at present which are being left to fester.
Finally, where does that leave the world order? The global strategic community may have erred in defining the post-Cold War world as unipolar, bipolar or multipolar. The unipolar moment passed with the rise of China.
But the world cannot be called bipolar if it completely overlooks Russia as an independent power; and it is not really multi-polar in the sense that none of the contenders for a multi-polar world really have the capacity to act on their own regardless of the three major powers. They all need one or the other of the three to a substantial degree.
India is trying to do that by leveraging the Quad, G-7, the US and the West on the one hand, and Russia, the BRICS and SCO on the other (and the G-20 in between) with some success for its specific concerns (and others are doing likewise), but there are limits to narrow self-interest and opportunism as guiding principles in international relations as India seems to be pursuing.
G20 posters are often seen in Delhi as the city is set to host the summit in September this year. Photo: Twitter/@sidhant. February 28, 2023.
Russia’s unilateral aggression against Ukraine has revealed that Russia has always been a third pole in international affairs, albeit in a narrow sense and with a comforting wink from China.
This is not the place to discuss why the West overlooked this at its own peril. Russia was never afforded that dignity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That strategic blindness could be attributed to hubris, or to a misreading of Russia as weak because its economy was highly commodity-based and isolated internationally, completely forgetting that it was still strong militarily and in Putin had a leader who was willing to exercise it.
In the long run, Russia will bleed, but it has the capacity to bear pain and is too big to disappear from big power equations.
The hard if unpleasant reality of Russia as an independent pole in world affairs also reveals two features of power in the current international context.
First, that unlike the Cold War when both protagonists spoke in the name of a greater common good, whether it was in the name of democracy, human rights, open markets and societies as it was with the West, or workers’ rights and internationalism on the part of the Soviet bloc, now major powers speak only in terms of their selfish interests, ‘my country first’, with these interests being defined first and foremost in terms of ‘national security’.
This can only lead to a Hobbesian world order that cannot serve the world well in the long run. It also reveals the world as an essentially ‘tri-centric’ world of three selfish powers pursuing their own interests at the expense of others, shorn thin of notions of enlightened self-interest or the greater common good.
Second, it demonstrates the centrality of hard power in definitions of power. It is owing to a lack of hard power that the Non-Aligned Movement remained at best a moral force that fanned its own self-image as a ‘pole’ in world affairs, and perhaps the reason why current and attempted groupings like the European Union, IBSA, ASEAN and the ‘global south’ or countries like Germany and Japan will remain unable to become effective powers.
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Economic, industrial, cultural, moral and even scientific strength are not enough to make any country or grouping an independent pole in itself. But as the case of Russia shows, military strength without the other attributes of ‘soft’ power too is not enough.
This also holds lessons for other evolving groupings like the Quad, BRICS, and the SCO, (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Although BRICS has attracted attention with new countries seeking membership, its composition is too contrary to combine the divergent economic, political, security and strategic interests of even its current membership. India is a test case in this.
Francis Fukuyama (top) and Samuel Huntington (bottom). Photos: Twitter
Francis Fukuyama’s expectation that the end of the Cold War would result in the ‘End of History’ where humanity would march to the dominant tune of an open democratic society and market economy, that would stand the Marxian view of history on its head, has not come true.
Over the last two years alone, the international community led by the West, have virtually betrayed or played lip service to democracy in Myanmar and Afghanistan but faced off with Russia over Ukraine militarily by proxy, and with China over Taiwan, so far, diplomatically.
If anything, the confrontation between Europe and West on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other would suggest that it is Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ that might have the upper hand.
India has an awkward position between the two, trying to walk a slippery path between a majoritarian ‘civilisational’ democracy at odds with liberal democracy and closer to ‘Asian values’, but uncomfortable with talk of a civilizational clash with a West that it needs.
Looking into the future towards a potentially multi-polar world taking into account the non-geo-political factors and forces that will shape the future world order, only India has the intrinsic properties of size, population, political system, educational infrastructure, economy, industry, scientific and technological base, market, military power, nuclear, space and cyber capabilities to emerge as an independent pole in international affairs.
But its capacity to fulfill that role will to a great extent depend on which route it takes to greatness, an inclusive approach that combines its internal soft power and diversity or an exclusive approach that suppresses its countless minorities in a ruthless pursuit of majoritarian power.
We see such a dynamic playing out not merely in the political heartland of India, but even in a corner of India such as Manipur. It is doubtful if a divided, supremacist India can play such a role in world affairs. United we can achieve our potential, divided we will fail.
Gautam Mukhopadhaya is a former Indian ambassador to Myanmar.
