The BRICS-BIMSTEC meeting in Goa this month, that immediately followed the annual India-Russia Summit (also in Goa), capped months of hectic diplomatic activity, during which India pursued a robust, even aggressive, foreign policy. By and large, such activism has served India well — the most evident being the furthering of relations between India and the United States. Given the several changes in direction — and departures from past policies and practices — taking place, there is perhaps scope to debate whether this amounts to a redefining of India’s foreign policy.
International diplomacy is hardly a ‘zero-sum game’. It has become even more complicated with the passage of time. Hence, giving a new direction to the country’s foreign policy demands careful consideration and assessment of all relevant aspects. Systemic, national and decision-making factors must determine foreign policy choices. Maintaining coherence and balance is also a vital aspect. It would seem, however, that this kind of exercise has yet to be undertaken, even as shifts in policy have been effected.
Among the acronyms
One indication of this would seem to be India’s current approach towards different multilateral organisations and plurilateral groupings. Many are better known by their acronyms such as NAM, SAARC, BRICS, BIMSTEC, etc.
Multilateral fora have today become indispensable to the conduct of international diplomacy, and how a nation deals with, or adjusts to, the alphabetic soup of organisations that exist is important. This is so even if a case exists that some of the older ones have lost much of their relevance.
Since Independence, India has played a leading role in multilateral fora. It was a founder member of NAM (Non Aligned Movement), SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and BCIM (Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar).
India has sought membership of the NSG (Nuclear Suppliers Group) and the Wassenaar Arrangement (on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-use Goods and Technologies) and also full membership of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), etc, recognising the potential of being inside rather than outside such bodies.
Even granting that the world is increasingly tilting towards the post-modern phenomenon of transactional politics, and that older institutions such as NAM are increasingly out of sync with this, a proper study of the utility of participation in such fora — prior to treating many of them as of little consequence — would have been useful. To optimise its many advantages, India clearly needs to play on as many geopolitical chessboards as possible.
NAM may be a pale shadow of what it was during an earlier period when towering personalities such as Nehru, Tito, Nasser and Castro dominated its proceedings. With non-alignment giving way to strategic alignment, organisations such as NAM may seem anachronistic, but it should not be lost sight of that it still resonates with many Third World countries.
It also offers an alternative platform for putting forward a different viewpoint. It would, hence, be premature to pronounce the death of NAM.
SAARC is still relevant
India’s stakes in SAARC are, if anything, higher. It is the most important country in South Asia, and India was the progenitor of the idea of a primarily economic grouping of countries of South Asia.
Admittedly, SAARC has been on ‘life-support’ for much of the period, but had begun to display a new vigour and dynamism of late. India had also shown a willingness to adopt an asymmetrical and non-reciprocal approach towards other SAARC members which had gone down well with these countries. To undermine SAARC due to the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan may well be an instance of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.
Propping up bodies such as BIMSTEC and BCIM in place of SAARC is hardly the answer, and could even prove counterproductive. The China factor is all too predominant here, with almost every country (other than India) under China’s thrall, having been assiduously wooed with financial and other inducements. China is hoping to further consolidate its position through its One Belt, One Road initiative which has been warmly welcomed by all these countries, the sole exception again being India.
In the case of BRICS, the weakening of the so-called strategic triangle between Russia, China and India does affect its image. The diminishing economic fortunes of Russia, Brazil and South Africa, of late, have also dented its image as a flag-bearer of newly emerging economies. Still, the idea of BRICS remains valid though it will require hard work and skilful diplomacy to reproduce the previous elan, and avert a pincer move against India by Russia and China as they move closer strategically and economically.
Changing ties
Undoubtedly, India’s foreign policy has to evolve in keeping with the changes and shifts taking place across the globe. Permanence in relations, and consistency in alignments, is not a signal virtue in the world of the 21st century. Not all relationships can or should be regarded as cast in stone, and impervious to change. This applies equally to ideologies. Nevertheless changes, if any, must not take place in an episodic manner, or as a series of isolated steps.
For instance, India-U.S. relations today are at an all-time high. This was hardly the case a decade and a half ago. On the other hand, the ‘all weather’ India-Russia relationship is today nowhere at the same level as it was even a few years back. Notwithstanding the rhetoric from Goa, Russia can hardly be viewed as a strategic ally as of now. Russia may have been restored to the position of ‘the most favoured defence supplier’, but this is a far cry from being a strategic ally. India may be only partly to blame for this, as Russia has been looking at diversifying its options for some time. It had moved closer to China and has achieved a degree of strategic congruence to counter U.S. moves in Asia.
The China, Russia and India triangle thus heralds a situation where two sides, China and Russia, have grown much closer to each other, with India in danger of losing out in this process. The China-Russia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination, as also the recent Russia-Pakistan military exercises, even though on a limited scale and a subtext of this, only demonstrate the growing strategic ambiguity in our neighbourhood and in Asia as a whole.
On the sidelines of the March
It is China that will demand India’s wholehearted attention. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent reference to a ‘new Long March’ is not without significance. China’s ‘not so peaceful rise’, alongside its growing economic and military muscle, its growing strategic congruence with Russia, and a further tightening of its links with Pakistan pose a pre-eminent challenge for India in the competition of influence in the region and beyond. It may have other graver implications as well. The One Belt, One Road initiative and the new Maritime Silk Route/Road also have the potential to bottle up India and Indian initiatives in Asia.
As India aspires to become a leading power, these are real matters for contemplation and action. Most important would be highlighting India’s capabilities to accelerate economic growth during a period which marks the demise of globalisation (not literally though). India could also bring to the attention of the rest of the world its tremendous ‘human assets’ that can power the country as the world transits to an incredible future, viz., the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.