World Order (28 page)

Like the nineteenth-century British who were driven to deepen their global involvement to protect strategic routes to India, over the course of the twenty-first century India has felt obliged to play a growing strategic role in Asia and the Muslim world to prevent these regions’ domination by countries or ideologies it considers hostile. In pursuing this course, India has had natural ties to the countries of the
English-speaking “Anglosphere.” Yet it will likely continue to honor the legacy of Nehru by preserving freedom of maneuver in its Asian and Middle Eastern relations and in its policies toward key autocratic countries, access to whose resources India will require to maintain its expansive economic plans. These priorities will create their own imperatives transcending historical attitudes. With the reconfiguration of the American position in the Middle East, the various regional countries will seek new partners to buttress their positions and to develop some kind of regional order. And India’s own strategic analysis will not permit a vacuum in Afghanistan or the hegemony in Asia of another power.

Under a Hindu nationalist-led government elected by decisive margins in May 2014 on a platform of reform and economic growth, India can be expected to pursue its traditional foreign policy goals with added vigor. With a firm mandate and charismatic leadership, the administration of Narendra Modi may consider itself in a position to chart new directions on historic issues like the conflict with Pakistan or the relationship with China. With India, Japan, and China all led by strong and strategically oriented administrations, the scope both for intensified rivalries and for potential bold resolutions will expand.

In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.

The historical European order had been self-contained. England was, until the early twentieth century, able to preserve the balance through its insular position and naval supremacy. Occasionally, European powers enlisted outside countries to strengthen their positions
temporarily—for example, France courting the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century or Britain’s early-twentieth-century alliance with Japan—but non-Western powers, other than occasional surges from the Middle East or North Africa, had few interests in Europe and were not called on to intervene in European conflicts.

By contrast, the contemporary Asian order includes outside powers as an integral feature: the United States, whose role as an Asia-Pacific power was explicitly affirmed in joint statements by U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao in January 2011, and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June 2013; and Russia,
geographically an Asian power
and participant in Asian groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even if over three-quarters of its population lives in the European portion of Russian territory.

The United States in modern times has occasionally been invited to act as a balancer of power. In the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, it mediated the war between Russia and Japan; in World War II, it defeated Japan’s quest for Asian hegemony. The United States played a comparable Asian role during the Cold War when it sought to balance the Soviet Union through a network of alliances stretching from Pakistan to the Philippines.

The evolving Asian structure will have to take into account a plethora of states not dealt with in the preceding pages. Indonesia, anchoring Southeast Asia while affirming an Islamic orientation, plays an increasingly influential role and has thus far managed a delicate balancing act between China, the United States, and the Muslim world. With Japan, Russia, and China as neighbors, the Republic of Korea has achieved a vibrant democracy bolstered by a globally competitive economy, including leadership in strategic industries such as telecommunications and shipbuilding. Many Asian countries—including China—view North Korea’s policies as destabilizing but regard a collapse of North Korea as a greater danger. South Korea on its part will have to deal with increasing domestic pressures for unification.

In the face of Asia’s vast scale and the scope of its diversity, its nations have fashioned a dazzling array of multilateral groupings and bilateral mechanisms. In contrast to the European Union, NATO, and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, these institutions deal with security and economic issues on a case-by-case basis, not as an expression of formal rules of regional order. Some of the key groupings include the United States, and some, including economic ones, are Asian only, of which the most elaborated and significant is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The core principle is to welcome those nations most directly involved with the issues at hand.

But does all this amount to an Asian system of order? In Europe’s equilibrium, the interests of the main parties were comparable, if not congruent. A balance of power could be developed not only in practice—as is inevitable in the absence of hegemony—but as a system of legitimacy that facilitated decisions and moderated policies. Such a congruence does not exist in Asia, as is shown by the priorities the major countries have assigned to themselves. While India appears mostly concerned with China as a peer competitor, in large measure a legacy of the 1962 border war, China sees its peer rivals in Japan and the United States. India has devoted fewer military resources to China than to Pakistan, which, if not a peer competitor, has been a strategic preoccupation for New Delhi.

The amorphous nature of Asian groupings is partly because geography has dictated a sharp dividing line between East Asia and South Asia throughout history. Cultural, philosophical, and religious influences have transcended the geographic dividing lines, and Hindu and Confucian concepts of governance have coexisted in Southeast Asia. But the mountain and jungle barriers were too impenetrable to permit military interaction between the great empires of East Asia and South Asia until the twentieth century. The Mongols and their successors entered the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia, not through the
Himalayan high passes, and they failed to reach the southern parts of India. The various regions of Asia have geopolitically and historically pursued distinct courses.

The regional orders constructed during these periods included none based on Westphalian premises. Where the European order embraced an equilibrium of territorially defined “sovereign states” recognizing each other’s legal equality, traditional Asian political powers operated by more ambiguous criteria. Until well into the modern era, an “inner Asian” world influenced by the Mongol Empire, Russia, and Islam coexisted with a Chinese imperial tribute system; the latter reached outward to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, which entertained China’s claims of universality even as they practiced a form of statecraft deeply influenced by Hindu principles received from India that posited a form of divinity for monarchs.

Now these legacies are meeting, and there is far from a consensus among the various countries about the meaning of the journey they have taken or its lessons for twenty-first-century world order. Under contemporary conditions, essentially two balances of power are emerging: one in South Asia, the other in East Asia. Neither possesses the characteristic integral to the European balance of power: a balancer, a country capable of establishing an equilibrium by shifting its weight to the weaker side. The United States (after its withdrawal from Afghanistan) has refrained from treating the contemporary internal South Asian balance primarily as a military problem. But it will have to be active in the diplomacy over reestablishing a regional order lest a vacuum is created, which would inevitably draw all surrounding countries into a regional confrontation.

T
HE MOST COMMON FEATURE
of Asian states is their sense of representing “emerging” or “postcolonial” countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial rule by asserting a strong national identity. They share a conviction that world order is now rebalancing after an unnatural Western irruption over the past several centuries, but they have drawn vastly different lessons from their historical journeys. When top officials seek to evoke core interests, many of them look to a different cultural tradition and idealize a different golden age.

In Europe’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century systems, the preservation of the equilibrium—and by implication the status quo—was seen as a positive virtue. In Asia, almost every state is impelled by its own dynamism. Convinced that it is “rising,” it operates with the conviction that the world has yet to affirm its full deserved role. Even while no state questions the others’ sovereignty and dignity and all affirm a dedication to “non-zero-sum” diplomacy, the simultaneous pursuit of so many programs of national prestige building introduces a measure of volatility to the regional order. With the evolution of modern technology, the major powers of Asia have armed themselves
with far more destructive military arsenals than even the strongest nineteenth-century European state possessed, compounding the risks of miscalculation.

The organization of Asia is thus an inherent challenge for world order. Major countries’ perception and pursuit of their national interests, rather than the balance of power as a system, have shaped the mechanisms of order that have developed. Their test will be whether a transpacific partnership, providing a peaceful framework for the interplay of many established interests, will be possible.

Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.

From its unification as a single political entity in 221
B.C.
through the early twentieth century, China’s position at the center of world order was so ingrained in its elite thinking that in the Chinese language there was no word for it. Only retrospectively did scholars define the “
Sinocentric
” tribute system. In this traditional concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the world. Its Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin between the human and the divine. His purview was not a sovereign state of “China”—that is, the territories immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,” of which China formed the central, civilized part: “the Middle Kingdom,” inspiring and uplifting the rest of humanity.

In this view, world order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of competing sovereign states. Every known society was
conceived of as being in some kind of tributary relationship with China, based in part on its approximation of Chinese culture; none could reach equality with it. Other monarchs were not fellow sovereigns but earnest pupils in the art of governance, striving toward civilization. Diplomacy was not a bargaining process between multiple sovereign interests but a series of carefully contrived ceremonies in which foreign societies were given the opportunity to affirm their assigned place in the global hierarchy. In keeping with this perspective, in classical China what would now be called “foreign policy” was the province of the Ministry of Rituals, which determined the shades of the tributary relationship, and the Office of Border Affairs, charged with managing relations with nomadic tribes.
A Chinese foreign ministry
was not established until the mid-nineteenth century, and then perforce to deal with intruders from the West. Even then, officials considered their task the traditional practice of barbarian management, not anything that might be regarded as Westphalian diplomacy. The new ministry carried the telling title of the “Office for the Management of the Affairs of All Nations,” implying that China was not engaging in interstate diplomacy at all.

The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily. China’s most imposing architectural achievement, the Great Wall eventually extending over roughly five thousand miles, was begun by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who had just defeated all rivals militarily, ending the period of Warring States and unifying China. It was a grandiose testimony to military victory but also to its inherent limits, denoting vast power coupled with a consciousness of vulnerability. For millennia, China sought to beguile and entice its adversaries more often than it attempted to defeat them by force of arms. Thus a minister in the Han Dynasty (206
B.C.
–
A.D.
220) described the “five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to
China’s northwestern frontier, though by conventional analysis China was the superior military power: