IISS: Asian powers and the world order

Sunday morning, we had two very interesting plenary sessions at the
annual conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
(IISS).  In the first, M.K.Narayanan,
the National Security Advisor to the prime minister of India and Harry Harding, a longtime
China-affairs specialist who until recently was Dean of the
International Affairs School at George Washington University in
Washington, DC, talked about China
and India: The Asian rising powers debate.  In the second, Kishore Mahbubani, the Dean
of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and Marc Perrin de Brichambaut,
the Secretary-General of OSCE, talked about Competing world views and the
bases of international order in the 21st century.

Though the presentations were all of a high standard, what I want to
write about here are primarily those made by Mahbubani,
Narayanan, and Harding
because they had more thematic linkages with each other than the
presentation
given by Perrin. [Note: I think those links above should work if you’re
already in the archived version of this post.]

Mahbubani:

Mahbubani, a well-groomed, energetic man in probably his late fifties,
was until recently a high-ranking Singaporean diplomat. 
(At the beginning of his presentation, he made a little joke about not wanting to be called
“Ambassador Mahbubani” any more, and said he was “still practicing
acting undiplomatically.”)

He started by quoting Marc Antony when he said, “I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him,” saying he was coming to praise the way the US had
exercized its hegemony over the world order since 1945 and not to bury
it– though he said he feared the effect of his words might seem to be
to bury it.

There are, he said, five factors that have been leading to the decline
of the UN-based world order:

1. US negligence of, or hostility to, it;
2. the failure of its secondary guardians (primarily, the European
   powers) to protect it;
3. the rise of new non-western powers and the question of whether
   the western powers want to preserve their own position in the world or
   the rules that they themselves had promulgated for it;
4. the demands of economic globalization; and
5. the demands of the globalization of culture.

“Right now, we have more well-educated people around the world than
ever before,” he said.  “They demand a voice in the way the world
is run, whereas previously, discussions of world order issues could be
held among a few elites in Europe and America.  Nowadays,
political legitimacy comes from the 6.3 billion people around the
world.”

(Oh that it were so simple, eh?)

Mahbubani said that the present era is marked by a competition among
what he described as four different views of what the world order
should be:

1. the world order put in place by Harry Truman in 1945;
2. the Jiang Zemin world order;
3. the world order favored by the US neoconservatives, and
4. the world order favored by Osama Bin Laden.

Regarding the first of those, he said the assumption of those who
drafted the U.N. Charter, etc., was that the US “would naturally lead
the world through the rules that it promulgated and the institutions it
created.

Regarding the second, he noted that since 1978, China has had an annual
growth of its GDP averaging 9.4%, while the volume of its international
trade rose from $20 billion to $851 billion.  “It was not a given
that China would seek to emerge as a rising power on the basis of the
1945 rules,” he said.  “China’s achievement has been remarkable,
and we can’t see why people in the west should see China as a ‘not so
good’ player.  From the perspective of Southeast Asia, China’s
present rise has been a great exporter of wellbeing to our whole region.

(In the subsequent discussion period, Harry Harding asked whether, by
these lights, what Mahbubani described as the “Jiang Zemin world
order” should actually classify as distinct from the “Truman world
order”.  He suggested that the while both visions prescribed a
rules-based international order, the Truman version had prescribed that
this should –or would–be under American leadersip.  “So the
Truman version is that you have a rules-based order with American
leadership.  The Chinese version is that you have the rules-based
order and do away with American leadership, while the neocons argue
that you keep the American leadership and do away with the rules-based
order.”)

Regarding the third (neo-con) vision, Mahbubani said, “The neocons
believe that American power is intrinsically good and should be
exported; and that as the world’s greatest democracy, America’s actions
are naturally legitimate.”

On Osama Bin Laden’s vision, he said this holds that the US is the
inheritor of European colonialism; and
attacks Muslims; but America is spiritually weak, while the Muslim
world is spiritually strong and unafraid to confront the west. “It would
be a mistake to dismiss OBL as a single deranged individual since
he’s stirred up such a lot of things,” he said.

He warned:

He advocated some urgent “repair work” and laid out principles on which
this should be conducted:

1. A principle of equality: that there should be one set of laws for
   all nations.  If
   we call on Iran to abide by views of UNSC, so too should the US, Britain,
   and everyone else.
2. A principle of inequality: that the UN power structure should
   reflect the power balance of 2045, not 1945
3. A principle of equity: the need to create and maintain an
   international safety
   net for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people..
4. A principle of evenhandedness: that all peoples in conflicts
   should feel that
   the UN treats them with fairness and equality; and
5. The principles of free-market economics.

In the discussion period, Mahbubani noted that, “There’s an
American-European dialogue going on in the world, and we see it here in
this room. ”  I forget whether it was he or MK Narayanan who
remarked on the dominance of European and American representatives in
the leadership of institutions like the Security Council (4 out of 5
permanent members), the G-8 (7 out of 8 members),  the headships
of the World Bank, and the IMF, etc.  It’s a point
I’ve made several times over the years.  I can’t imagine why
Americans and Europeans seem simply to assume that they have some
God-given right to run the world…  That is, of course, one of
the consequences of the (American version of) the 1945 rules.

Anyway, Mahbubani went on to say,

He warned that he did see a possibility of the 1945 order collapsing
completely, and suggested that the consquences could be dire. 
“The non-interference rule in the 1945 rules was very important,” he
stressed.

Narayanan:

Narayanan is a soft-spoken, careful speaker  verging on
elder-statesmanhood. He stressed the significance of the fact that both
China and
India– which between them account for more than one-third of the
world’s 6.3 billion people– both “rising” as global powers at the same
time, and in the same part of
world.  He noted the massive numbers of people in the two
countries whose lives and life prospects have been significantly
improved within just the past two generations.

The rise of India and China is different from the rise of previous
world powers because it has not been driven my military power or
military conquests, he said.  “It represents the rise of ‘soft’
power in the world order.”

He continued,

He stressed India’s non-competitive attitude toward China a number of
times.  At one point he made reference to one version of the
“complementarity” he saw between the two– that “China would be the
world’s factory and we would be its office”– but he back-tracked
fairly fast from that view.  (There were not, sadly, any Chinese
speakers on the rostrum.  Perhaps there were one or two in the
audience?  I don’t know.  If there were, they certainly
stayed very silent.)

Narayanan described India’s particular strengths in the following terms:

1. We’ve always been a market economy
2. We have good managers and
   a good administrative framework that support that; we have a good
   education system with a network of good-quality educational
   institutions;
   we have a high level of creativity and rising numbers of
   knowledge
   workers: India can lead the world information-technology industry.
3. Our demographics will keep India strong: India produces more
   engineers than EU…
4. Our philosophy is that “the world is one community”  India
   has
   assimilated many other peoples and cultures.  We have great
   multiculturalism
5. Our consistency in econ policy thru changes in govt and our
   management capability w/in democratic structure.  Our respect for
   rule of law.
6. Our record of managing natural disasters [interesting if this has
   become a key marker of national competence or strength, I thought ~HC]
   and health problems… 
   Also, in responding to terrorism…

He said India had  entered into cooperative strategic relations
with allits main neighbors:
China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and even Myanmar.  Regarding
Bangladesh and Nepal,  he said, “We’ve had problems, but we’re
working to resolve them.”

Narayanan added:

At the end of his presentation, Narayanan graciously allowed as to how,
“We in India are prepared to take on greater responsibilities within
the UN and
elsewhere.”

In the discussion period, Narayanan stressed yet again that India
intended never to be drawn into any global coalition against China.
“India will never be drawen into that– and neither has any outside
power including the US and the UK during recent high-level visits–
ever raised this issue with us.”

He noted that India was going to have joint military exercises in the
near future in Rajasthan with
China and some other militaries. “I think such exercizes– that we
also have with the US Navy and other powers– do more to de-escalate
tensions
than to raise them,” he claimed.  [H’mmm.  I wonder what
Mahatma Gandhi would be feeling about that?]

He talked a little about the global reach of Bollywood as representing
a distinctive component of India’s “soft power”, and he spoke of
India’s rich experience of dealing with Islamic
extremists.  “We have a dialogue of civilizations in India, not a
clash of
civilizns.  We wish US wd come to India and learn from what we’ve
done, not tell us
what to do!”

He spoke of India’s many links with Iran, and stated firmly, “”I don’t
think the world can afford to marginalize or ostracize Iran in
any manner.”

Harding

Harry Harding is an old friend.  He’s also extremely
well-informed, thoughtful, smart, and articulate.  I guess he must
be in his late fifties, but he looks much more youthful than
that.  He launched his presentation by talking about post-Mao
China’s development of the distinctive concept “Comprehensive
National Power”– a very multi-dimensional concept that includes
military, economic, and many other soft-power components.  “It has
been a very
intentional effort on their behalf to build up all these components of
national power– with some known results.  The US has not had to
deal beforehand with such a multi-dimensional challenge to its power–
neither from either Russia, or Japan.”

He noted that one of Deng Xiaoping’s cardinal rules, articulated
clearly during his time in power in Beijing, had been to “hide our
capabilities”.  But, Harding said, China has more recently been
shifting from a policy of
self-effacement to one of reassurance, as summed up in their rhetoric
about China’s “peaceful rise” onto the world scene.

“Peaceful rise” he said, is based on three assurances:

1. that China’s rise will indeed be peaceful because it’s
   preoccupied with
   its internal issues; and because it recognizes the power of the
   US.  So it will
   seek to rise as a partner and a friend, rather than through conquest or
   hegemony.
2. that China is deeply invested in economic globalizn… Also,
   that it will be ‘a society of thrift’, especially in its use of energy
   and
   scarce resources. [H’mmm. Someone should tell this to the builders and
   the millions of users of the highway systems n the country’s east-coast
   cities??]
3. its commitment to multilateralism and the promotion of democratic
   international
   institutions.

Chinese reassurance, he concluded, is based on its presenting itself
“as a liberal power”, and taking a number of lessons from the rise of
US power after World War 2.

But, he said, China remains insecure and reveals this in a number of
ways:

1. The country has many internal problems and
contradictions as we know–
including ethnic problems, corruption, and so on. So this makes a
contradiction
betw its promotion of democracy abroad [I think by that he meant within the international system,
rather than within individual countries abroad. ~HC] and its practice
at home. 
2. China has no stable ideology right now– not Maoism, and not
democracy… the
result is often a fairly strongly expressed form of Chinese nationalism.
3.  The lack of resolution of the Taiwan issue.  This has led
tointensive military preparations, and clouds the view of China’s rise
as ‘peaceful.’
4.  The way that China tries to assure its access to international
energy markets by buying equity stakes in ‘rogue’ states breeds doubt
5.  Because the US is not seen as accepting China’s rise, China
then adopts a
hedge strategy that is seen in US as a threat to US interests…

Harding, it has to be noted, did not make much (or any) mention of
India “rising” alongside China into the world system, at all.  He
is probably like most other China specialists in this regard.  Is
there indeed a sort of hanging-on-China’s coat-tails factor at work
when someone like MK Narayanan talkes about both Asian powers “rising”
simultaneously?, Well, imho, both yes and no…

Harding turned to the issue of where the “balance” in China-US
relations now stands.  “The optimists point to the inevitable
meshing of economic and other
interests between the two countries, while  the pessimists argue
that there’s an inevitable competition
betweern them that may well take on mil.itary dimensions,” he said.

[If this olatter is truly one of Washiongton’s “conditions” for
accepting China taking a greater role in the international system, then
I would say it would be ironic– not to mention hypocritical?– in the
extreme?]

In the discussion period, there was a question– from the
session’s chairperson, French citizen Francois Heisbourg– as to
whether Harding actually thought the Bush administration’s role in the
international system was that of a “status-quo power”.  “Though the US may be a status-quo
power inside East Asia, still, at
a global level, if you take george W. Bush’s speeches seriously it
seeks significant
changes in  international system,” heisbourg pointed out..

Harding replied that
he had mis-spoken, “The US isn’t actually a status-quo power, but it is
an established power.”  He also said that though Bush’s policy
toward China is not too bad right now, he is what Americans call “a
lame
duck”– i.e. coming nearer and nearer to the end of his own domestic
political powers– “and there’s already a huge battle brewing 
inside the
Republican Party over China, with many conseravtives being very
vitriolic
against China indeed.”

Actually, I should also note that in addition to the very low or
non-existent presence of Chinese participants in the conference, there
was also a notable absence of any people of any rank a all from the
Bush administration.  This in strong contrast to past years, when
a keynote speech by Donald Rumsfeld or Condi Rice would routinely form
part of the program.

In the lead-up to this year’s conference, there was some talk that our
Charlottesville neighbor Phil Zelikow, the Under-Secretary for Policy in
Condi’s State Department– had been “invited” to give the keynote
speech.  But he never showed, and no keynote speech ended being
provided at all.  All fairly mysterious.

There were many non-administration US participants.  But the
absence of any meaningful, officially connected participation from
Washington was notable.  Does the Bush administration no longer
care about sustaining  high-level dialogue about strategic issues
with interlocutors and analysts from around the world, or are they
simply too comsumed with dealing with the two very different challenges
in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico to be able to devote much
attention to such a staid old forum as the IISS conference?

The absence of the Bushies, in addition, had a clear effect on other
high-level strategic-affairs peoiple from around the world, who also
stayed away in droves.  M.K. Naryanan was probably the
highest-ranking individual there, and should probably have been invited
to give a keynote address– Why not?

Anyway, my intention in writing this fairly lengthy JWN post has been
mainly to pull together my own notes from yesterday’s two very
interesting plenary sessions.  I think next year, I’ll get in
touch with the conference organizers before the session, to see about
getting access to the speakers’ own written versions of their
remarks.  There did not seem to be any special provisions made for
press people this year.