Shaping the Emerging World

Order and India’s Role

In his celebrated poem, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, the poet Alfred Tennyson
writes the following lines when the dying King Arthur is set on the royal
barge to take him to the nether world:

The old order changeth yielding place to new/

And God fulfils himself in many ways/

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

There is little doubt that the world today is at an inflection point, when the
old and familiar order is crumbling but it is not clear what it is yielding
place to. If history is any guide, a new order will emerge. The question is
whether this will be born from the ashes of a debilitating war or through a
gradual process of adjustment. And if the frenetic pace of change will even
allow a more leisurely construction of a new architecture of global
governance with stable and effective institutions and processes. We may be
able to identify the key drivers of change but not the manner in which they
could lead to an outcome that will be stable and conducive to peace among
nations. Tennyson’s words do convey an important insight: the multiplicity
of societies and the extraordinary variety of human thought and endeavour
cannot be encompassed in a singular blueprint.

The modern state system on which an international order is built originated

in the Peace of Westphalia which brought a debilitating thirty-year war in
Europe to a close in 1648. It inaugurated a European order based on the
inherent equality of states and the recognition of a state’s monopoly over
coercive power within its territorial limits. Thus were born the concepts of
political sovereignty and territorial integrity of independent states and, as a
consequence, a multipolar order held together by a set of agreed rules of the
game and a balance of power among its participants. As Kissinger has
observed in World Order :

…the structure established in the Peace of Westphalia represented the first

attempt to institutionalize an international order on the basis of agreed
rules and limits and to base it on a multiplicity of powers rather than the
dominance of a single country.

An attempt by any country to upset the balance and seek dominance would
trigger responses from other players to restore the equilibrium of power.
And this is how the system operated in subsequent decades.

After Westphalia the concept of European order received a further

elaboration at the Congress of Vienna convened in 1815. The objective of
the Congress was to restore peace in Europe by constructing a new balance
among the major powers after another bout of nearly continuous warfare for
almost twenty-five years due to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars. The main players were Austria, Britain, Russia and Prussia which had
allied against Napoleonic France. However, at the Congress, France also
became part of the order and played a role in maintaining European
balance. The Congress of Vienna may be regarded as a maturation of the
concept of multipolar order, with the development of a more elaborate set of
rules of engagement among sovereign states. The Congress was followed
by a series of regular meetings amongst its main participants, which became
known as the Concert of Europe, inaugurating the age of multilateral
diplomacy. The Concert of Europe created the template which led to the
setting up of the League of Nations after the First World War which may be
considered the early precursor of the UN established in 1945 after the
Second World War.

In the century of relative peace which followed the Congress of Vienna,

several international organizations were created by common consent to
enable and promote cooperation among countries in a number of domains.
These include the Universal Telegraph Union set up in 1865, the Universal
Postal Union set up in 1874 and the Permanent Court of Arbitration set up
in 1899. These institutions were testimony to the fact that technological
change was forcing nations to collaborate to manage a more interconnected
world. It is the Concert of Europe which created the basis for a new
architecture of global governance based on shared interests, which is now
taken for granted as part of the UN system.

The emergence of independent and sovereign states after the Peace of

Westphalia gave rise to the requirement of constant engagement and
communication. Diplomacy as an organized and structured activity with its
own protocols and norms of behaviour among representatives of states also
dates from this period. These norms were further elaborated and codified at
the Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe. This also marks the
beginning of the adoption of official titles for different classes of state
representatives and the alphabetical order to establish an order of
precedence among equal states.

One must not lose sight of the fact that the international order which
germinated and grew into maturity between the seventeenth and twentieth
centuries was a European construction and its principles and norms did not
apply to relations between the European countries and their colonial
possessions across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

There was no question of equality or observance of any norms in the

treatment of colonized peoples. But in the aftermath of the Second World
War, when wave after wave of colonized countries emerged as independent
states, the Westphalian principles of political sovereignty and territorial
integrity were universally affirmed as the basis on which they would enter
the international order. The Westphalian imprint is apparent in the
Panchshila or the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence which were
codified as the basis for interstate relations within the community of the
decolonized states of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The principles of
international law and the codes of conduct to be observed in interstate
relations, which were elaborated over the past four centuries since
Westphalia, were also accepted by the new entrants into the international
system. The UN Charter codified these into universal principles.

The legacy of Westphalia, in a very real sense, is that international

legitimacy demands adherence, in appearance if not in substance, to the
rules of the game codified over the centuries of Western dominance, first in
Europe and then in its Atlantic extension in the US. These rules establishing
a multipolar order among roughly equal states found universal application
in the post–Second World War era and international legitimacy, in theory,
required multilateral sanction.

However, such appeal to legitimacy remained in constant tension with a

very asymmetrical and skewed distribution of economic and military power.
The US emerged from the ravages of the war as the most powerful
economic and military power. It helped create multilateral institutions like
the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs but ensured that these were dominated by
the West. The UN label was useful in its interventions in countries far and
near but unilateralism would often be resorted to if the label was not
forthcoming. But even as the most powerful military and economic power
after the Second World War, the US had to contend with the parallel
hegemony of the Soviet Union and the resistance of a large number of
emerging states to participation in its security system.

It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the end of the
Cold War that the US and the West in general would enjoy a brief unipolar
interlude. During this interlude which lasted up until the global financial
and economic crisis of 2007–08, the US was a true hegemonic power which
could set aside the established multilateral structures and processes and
ignore the Westphalian norms in the pursuit of an interventionist strategy
dictated by its own intent. Other powers had to acquiesce either by choice
or compulsion. It is this interlude which is coming to an end.

The US remains a pre-eminent power against any metric of economic and

military might. Its status as the chief source of technological innovation and
creativity remains undiminished. But it is no longer a hegemonic power. Its
relative power has declined as other powers, chiefly China, have steadily
accumulated significant economic and military capabilities. More
importantly, even if its power remains formidable there is a decline in
popular support in the US for an expansive engagement with the rest of the
world. Trump’s slogan of ‘America First’ is a symptom of that change.

The narrowing of America’s vision is paralleled by the fragmentation of

Europe, a key pillar of Western ascendancy. The EU is strained by the
emergence of a unified Germany at the heart of Europe as its strongest
power. That Germany has emerged unscathed from the economic and
financial crises which have severely weakened other states of Europe has
only sharpened these strains.

Brexit may well lead to Britain once again seeking to play the role of an
offshore presence to uphold a balance of power in continental Europe as it
did through most of its recent history. This may set off countervailing
developments in Europe with Germany expanding its room for manoeuvre
in partnership with Russia and, or, with China. The weakening of US
engagement with Europe, which Trump has already embarked upon, may
only reinforce these trends. In any event it appears unlikely that the promise
of a cohesive Europe playing the role of an influential international actor,
either in its own right or as part of a powerful trans-Atlantic partnership,
will be realized in the foreseeable future, if ever.

In World Order , Kissinger posed different scenarios which may unfold in

Europe. Would Europe, he asked, ‘relate itself to its recent past of Atlantic
cohesion or its long term history of manoeuvring for maximum advantage
on the basis of national interests?’ On present indications the latter prospect
is the most likely.

Russia retains its position as one of the great powers of the world. It has
rich natural resources, a long history of mastery over science and
technology and a sense of its own civilizational uniqueness. It has also been
nursing a grievous sense of loss and resentment over the loss of its Soviet
empire in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The erstwhile Soviet republics
remain its ‘near neighbourhood’ and a target of renewed influence, if not
control. This brings it into confrontation with the US and Western Europe
and may eventually do so with China as well. At the same time there has
been its long-standing urge to be accepted as part of the West and accorded
respect as a fellow European power. When this is not forthcoming the sense
of grievance is only heightened.

In its current state, however, it is unlikely that Russia will emerge as one of
the key architects of the emerging world order. Its relative economic and
military power has diminished, its demographics are against it and in its
isolation from the West it has to acquiesce to an alignment with China,
despite its anxieties over long-term Chinese penetration into its ‘near
neighbourhood’. However, if its relations with the US and Western Europe
normalize, there could be a major shift in geopolitical alignments,
constraining Chinese calculations. It is interesting to note that Russia is
today one of the vocal champions of a multipolar order.

It is in Asia that the new world order is likely to be shaped. There are good
reasons for this. Over the past three decades and more, the Asia-Pacific
region has replaced the trans-Atlantic as the centre of gravity of the global
economy. Asia is home to the second and third largest economies in the
world, namely, China and Japan. In purchasing power parity terms India is
already the fourth largest economy in the world although it still lags behind
at seventh place in nominal terms. In addition there are other substantial
economies in South Korea, Australia, Taiwan and the ASEAN countries as a
whole. This cluster of major Asian powers also deploys a formidable array
of security capabilities, in particular maritime capabilities, though still
modest in comparison to US military presence in the region.

At a time when the economies of the US and Western Europe continue to be

sluggish, Asia has in India and China two of the fastest growing large
economies in the world. They are likely to remain the key growth drivers of
the global economy. The major powers in Asia have managed to sustain
relative political stability and social cohesion and this, too, enables them to
exert expanding influence on both regional and global affairs.

What kind of regional order is likely to emerge in Asia given these trends?
The answer to this question is important because the shape of the regional
order in Asia will greatly influence the new global order precisely because
Asia has now emerged as a key fulcrum of power in the world. There can be
no multipolar world order without a multipolar Asia. An Asian hegemon
will inevitably aspire to global hegemony.

There are a number of scenarios which could emerge and each will be
defined by the distribution of economic and military power among
countries in the region and the perceptions among them concerning the
implications of such power distribution. There may often arise a disconnect
between the reality of power and how it is perceived. The US continues to
be the most formidable military power in Asia. On the eastern flank,
constituting the Asia-Pacific, the US Pacific Command deploys by far the
most powerful land, air and naval forces and is allied to countries which
themselves have significant capabilities of their own, such as Japan, South
Korea and Australia. In addition, the US has strong security arrangements
with India and several ASEAN countries, which augment its capabilities
and geographic reach.

However, its economic profile in the region has diminished even as China’s
has grown. And the perception, if not the reality, of capabilities and more
importantly the willingness to use them has diminished among the countries
of the region even as Chinese economic and military capabilities have
steadily advanced. Despite the continuing gap in security capabilities vis-à-
vis the US, China has shown a willingness to assert its power against the
countries of the region, through unilateral occupation of the offshore islands
it claims in the South China Sea or through the creation of artificial islands
and the deployment of military assets on them. The unwillingness of the US
to confront these actions has led to a pervasive sentiment in the region that
China’s ascendancy is becoming an inevitability. This is reinforced by
Chinese diplomacy using a mixture of threats and blandishments, which
echo the Kautilyan instruments of sama, dana, danda and bheda.

On the western flank of Asia, which includes West Asia and the Gulf and
Central Asia, it is again the US which, through its Central Command and
network of bases, deploys the strongest military presence in the region. No
other power comes close. However, the availability of overwhelming power
is inhibited in its use for a variety of reasons, including war fatigue, the
reduced dependence on the Gulf for energy supplies and a growing
domestic sentiment against expansive external engagement.

This has coincided with visible Chinese activism in Central Asia, the
appearance of its naval forces in the Indian Ocean and its establishment of
naval bases in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa and the Pakistani port of
Gwadar. The perception of US decline has been further reinforced by the
tactical assertiveness of Russia, which is backing Bashar al-Assad in Syria
and Iran. Any objective assessment would reveal that China is still a modest
player in the region even though its presence is expanding.

The Chinese presence in Central Asia has been expanding most rapidly with
an emphasis on infrastructure development, investment in energy resources
and trade. The security element remains less visible but as Chinese assets
gather in scale, security capabilities will follow. The Central Asian
component of China’s ambitious One Belt One Road initiative should be
seen in this perspective. Here it is not the US that is the likely
countervailing power but Russia, which has important stakes, as has been
described earlier, in its ‘near neighbour’. At the moment, Russia’s concern
over China’s inroads into this ‘near neighbourhood’ may be muted for
tactical reasons but when looking at the prospects of China emerging as a
new global hegemon, this essential incompatibility of Chinese and Russian
interests in the region must be kept in mind.

In terms of this analysis it is clear that on neither flank of Asia does China
have military capabilities anywhere near the scale deployed by the US. In
the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to the US, there is a cluster of major
powers with substantial military capabilities and these are being
significantly expanded in response to a perceived Chinese security threat.
India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia fall in this
category. Even without a substantial US military presence in the region,
these capabilities together would easily surpass what China can deploy.

In terms of economic calibre, China is admittedly the most important trade

and investment partner for a number of South East Asian and Central Asian
countries, but there are other important players such as the US, Japan, South
Korea and India itself. On the economic and commercial side, Chinese
prosperity is very much a creature of strong interdependence in the shape of
extended value chains. Disrupting them for political reasons would also
impose a cost on China.

China has also tried, with some success, to characterize its emergence as a
front-ranking power in Asia as a return to its ascendant status through much
of history until it became a victim of Western imperial depredations and
later Japanese aggression. This interlude of about 150 years is described as
a period of national shame and humiliation from which China has now re-
emerged to take its place, once again, at the top of the hierarchy of nations,
first in Asia and then in the world. This is, in the Chinese telling, a return to
the natural order in Asia that needs to be universally acknowledged. The
One Belt One Road initiative tries to project that it is a revival of ancient
maritime and caravan routes with China at the centre, but in a modern
context.

The historical narrative of China as the pre-eminent Asian and global power
is mostly contrived and imagined as is the projection of China being at the
centre of global trade through history. But the narrative is useful in
mobilizing national pride and energy, and in creating a sense of awe among
the countries of Asia and beyond. The Belt and Road Forum convened by
Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing in March 2017 was designed to
demonstrate that Chinese centrality in the contemporary world was being
accepted by friend and adversary alike. The Indian refusal to be present was
seen as an impertinence.

It is true that sections of Asian and international opinion have already begun
to concede this central role to China with the corollary that it is best for the
rest to acquiesce to this inevitability. What careful analysis points to is that
we are, in reality, neither in a China-centric Asia nor in a world destined to
become China-centric. China may continue to expand its economic and
military capabilities and may even become the most powerful country in the
world but the world which is emerging will still be populated by a number
of substantial powers both old and new. This includes Asia.

Furthermore, the Chinese economy is slowing down, as has been the case
with every major economy in history. A simple linear projection of China’s
current growth rate into the future may not be realistic. China also remains
a brittle polity and the rising insecurity within its political leadership sits
uneasily with overweening arrogance of power. Its historical insularity is at
odds with the cosmopolitanism that the densely interconnected
contemporary world demands of any aspiring global power.

The US was, for most of the post-war period, a pre-eminent power, but its
power was contested militarily and ideologically by the Soviet Union. Even
among the constituency of newly independent but mostly poor countries,
the hegemony of the two superpowers was contested by the NAM. It is only
in the quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War in 1990 that the US
may be regarded as a true hegemonic power, capable of imposing its will in
virtually any part of the world. But we must acknowledge that the US
presided over a world order which had been in the making over several
centuries under extended Western dominance. We have seen how the
modern state system and rules of the game and its norms of state behaviour
have evolved since the Westphalian Peace of 1648, traversing successively
through the Congress of Vienna, the Concert of Europe, the League of
Nations and finally the UN. In that sense the US was a legatee of Western
dominance, not its progenitor, though it did expand and extend that
dominance in several aspects. For any non-Western aspiring hegemon there
is no such legacy to build upon and, as has been argued, Chinese claim to
even pre-eminence in Asia is mostly myth.

What lessons does the history of the world since the birth of the
Westphalian state system hold for us? A stable world order needs a careful
balance between power and legitimacy; and legitimacy is upheld when
states, no matter how powerful, observe the various established norms of
behaviour and codes of conduct and act through institutions which have
been accumulated and put in place over the past four centuries, layer by
layer.

The Westphalian system by its very nature is multipolar in character and is

based on the assumption that any attempt by a state or a group of states to
gain hegemony will always invite countervailing action by other states in
the system and in, extreme cases, war. The is what happened when
Napoleon tried to bring the whole of Europe under French domination. The
Napoleonic Wars ended with the restoration of balance at the Congress of
Vienna. The balance was again sought to be upset by an ascendant Germany
and this led to two debilitating world wars. In our own time, the period of
US hegemony from 1990 to 2007–08, when the global financial and
economic crisis broke out, reducing the West to prolonged and debilitating
stagnation and psychological pessimism, lasted only for a generation. This
may have been a period when there were no wars among major powers but
there were conflicts in several parts of the world in which interventions by
the West eventually proved to be damaging to itself.

Hegemony often leads to hubris which in turn leads to overextension and

then to exhaustion and sometimes war through miscalculation. We are
facing chaos and uncertainty precisely because the period of Western
hegemony and the reliance on power with scant attention to legitimacy
weakened both international institutions and processes which could allow a
degree of flexibility in adjusting to changes in the balance of power. The
long period of European peace between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 up
until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 shows that as long as all
key actors generally observe mutually agreed rules of interstate relations
and norms of state behaviour, a stable order can be maintained. The current
shifting international landscape where states continue to be cast in the
Westphalian mode lends itself more appropriately to a twenty-first-century
version of that multipolar world order and not the hegemonic interludes
which have mostly ended in tragedy.

There are even more compelling reasons why the contemporary world
needs a multipolar order. Most of the challenges we confront as an
interconnected and interdependent world are cross-cutting in character and
global in dimension. These include global warming, health pandemics,
cybercrime, drug trafficking, proliferation of WMDs and international
terrorism among others. They are often cross-domain in nature with strong
feedback loops. We explored some of these issues in the chapter relating to
climate change and we shall encounter them again in the Epilogue.

These challenges cannot be dealt with through exclusively national

responses; and even national responses have to contend with the fact that
there are external dimensions which must be taken into account while
devising national solutions. The most effective way to deal with them are
collaborative responses and this was already apparent in the century of
building international institutions to deal with new domains spawned by the
advance of technology such as the Universal Postal Union, the International
Telegraph Union and the International Association of Railway Congresses.
The emergence of new technologies with an even greater global reach and
penetration makes such international collaboration a compulsion today
rather than a choice. A hegemonic order can constrain other states; it will
rarely be able to promote collaborative action which can be effective only if
based on consent and consultation, not coercion.

Despite this compelling logic of multipolarity, it is possible that

hegemonism will hold an attraction for some aspiring power or powers.
China certainly appears headed in that direction and at some future date the
mood in the US may change leading it to believe that its unipolar interlude,
in fact, was the natural order of things. Neither the Chinese version of
national rejuvenation nor American hopes of revivalism are realistic,
precisely because the diffusion of economic and military power and the
horizontal and accelerated spread of scientific knowledge and technology
point to what author Thomas Friedman has called the Flat World.

It is also possible that an ascendant power may temporarily be ready to

accept a dyarchy with what it sees as a declining though still powerful
country. A China–US condominium is possible especially if there is some
understanding, even if temporary, over their respective spheres of influence.
China may be ready to accept a US-dominated Western hemisphere if it is
conceded power over Asia-Pacific and Central Asia. This is what several
US and even Chinese analysts suggest for avoiding the so-called
Thucydides trap. (Thucydides was a Greek thinker who in his celebrated
history of the Peloponnesian War between ancient Athens and Sparta in the
fifth century bc had drawn attention to how a contest between an
established power and an aspiring one usually led to a war for dominance.)
This is also the essence of what China calls the ‘new type of great power
relations’ between China and the US in order to avoid the Thucydides trap.
But by its very nature it will be unstable as there will remain zones of
contestation between China and the US, and each will seek uncontested
dominance.

There could also be cases of the ‘tail wagging the dog’ as we see in the
rising tensions on the Korean peninsula. The US may feel compelled to
launch a strike against the nuclear and missile installations in North Korea
because of the direct threat these may pose to the US itself. China may
respond not because it supports North Korea’s nuclear adventurism but
because the loss of North Korea or its incorporation in a more powerful
united Korea may be seen as a major threat to China’s security.

Even during the Cold War, neither superpower was able to fully control its
respective allies and this can happen with more tragic results in the
unsettled world today. And it is unlikely that even if the US concedes a
Chinese sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific that the other Asian powers
will acquiesce. The withdrawal of US security guarantee over Japan will
almost inevitably lead to its acquisition of nuclear weapons. The same may
happen in South Korea. As a substantial and growing power itself, it is
unlikely that India will accept junior league status in a Chinese-centric
world. Therefore China faces the same dilemma as other emerging powers
in history: what Bismarck referred to as le cauchemar des coalitions or the
nightmare of coalitions. There will always be a countervailing coalition to
constrain a rising power.

It is the third scenario of a multipolar order with a template which came

into being in Europe in 1815 which is likely to be more stable and enduring
and capable of adjustment as the distribution of power changes as it always
does. This is valid even if there exists a degree of asymmetry of power. But
this order will require its own rules of the game and norms of interstate
relations appropriate to the contemporary international landscape. It also
needs a spirit of internationalism with some shared sense of humanity and
human values. What we do not need is the relapse into assertive and
competitive nationalism and the narrowing of political vision which is
sweeping the world.

There is something of a backlash against globalization but the economic

and technological drivers which lie behind it are now so deeply embedded
in our lives as individuals, communities and nations that they cannot be
unravelled. We cannot do without the Internet. We cannot think of a world
without smartphones. Rather than trying in vain to put the genie back into
the bottle and reassert national control over forces which by their very
nature are cross-national, there is a need to embrace governance at the
international scale. This implies multilateral institutions and multilateral
processes which must be informed by a spirit of internationalism. Otherwise
they will degenerate into platforms for competing nationalisms.

Assertive nationalism also shrinks the space for diplomacy. Diplomacy can
operate effectively in areas of grey; its role gets marginalized when there is
a tendency to frame issues in black and white. In World Order , Kissinger
has described how in the run-up to the First World War, diplomacy lost
touch with emerging technology and its corollary warfare, and the military
in European countries ‘ran away with diplomacy’. There is a danger of this
happening again as political leaders fail to understand the implications of
modern technology.

Diplomacy is also constrained by advances in digital technology and the

growth of social media including Twitter and Facebook. There is a premium
on instant communication and political leaders themselves post reactions on
social media, unmediated by professional and carefully deliberated
processes that lie at the heart of successful diplomacy. This is as true of
Trump’s America as it is of Modi’s India. There is little or no room for the
‘mantra-shakti’ or sage counsel which Indian exponents of statecraft placed
ahead of military and economic strength as sources of a country’s power
and influence. The potential for conflict among states due to
misunderstanding and misperception as a result of unmediated messaging
has greatly enlarged. We truly live in a world where a single tweet may
launch a thousand riots. This is yet another reason why we need a
multipolar order which can create a new template and a new common
platform for a densely interdependent and instantly connected world. No
hegemonic order could possibly hope to control these unregulated and in
some ways unregulatable domains.

It is evident that for India it is a multipolar order which will be most aligned
with its interests. It is an emerging power which seeks to expand its own
room for manouevre unconstrained by either a latter-day hegemon or a
return to a bipolar system dominated by two major powers. Its
developmental challenges need a supportive, peaceful and stable
international environment. Therefore India’s best interests are served by its
assistance in shaping a multipolar order with the support of other major
powers. It should not hesitate in promoting and participating in a
countervailing coalition to constrain any aspiring hegemon even while it
expands its own economic and military capabilities.

But this cannot be the whole of India’s story. India possesses the
civilizational attributes which could contribute to the success of a new
international order attuned to contemporary realities. Its culture is innately
cosmopolitan; it embraces vast diversity and plurality and yet has an
underlying sense of being part of a common humanity. There is a deep
conviction that to achieve greatness a nation must stand for something more
than itself. These are assets which it should leverage in helping shape a new
world order. The mindless eruptions of narrow nationalism, communalism
and sectarianism detract from the credibility of its role. We should certainly
seek to advance India’s interests but not without a constant awareness of
our place in a larger, interlinked and interdependent world.