A new map for the world

It was confirmation that the USSR had lost the will to hold its own, indeed lost the will even to survive. The West had triumphed in what Winston Churchill had so perceptively foreseen in 1943 when, in a lecture at Harvard, he had remarked that the battle of the future would be a battle between ‘‘the empires of the mind’’.

The US and its allies did not have to defeat communism on the battle field. Gorbachev put it to sleep in acknowledgement of the inability of his empire to sustain itself a mere seven decades after the Great October Revolution.

Thus Gulf War I marked the confirmation of an emerging world order which buried the agreement at Yalta that had divided the world into spheres of competing influence for the capitalist West and the communist East respectively. The next step, as Bush Senior saw it, was to consolidate the domination of his school of thought by dragging into his train those, like the Non Aligned Movement, who had sat out the previous world order. The instrumentality for this was to be the United Nations, which gave everyone in the General Assembly a forum for democratic, participative debate while concentrating decision-making in respect of international peace and security in the Security Council.

For a while it seemed that a new world order was indeed in the making, based on the universal application of the twin concepts of a democratic polity, as embodied in East Europe’s avid embrace of the parliamentary system, and a liberal economy, as embodied in the Washington consensus of 1992 put together by the World Bank and the IMF, involving, inter alia, the conversion of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organisation. A United Nations in which the permanent members of the Security Council pulled together provided this world order with both legitimacy and authority.

Bush Junior’s Gulf War II has resulted in his father’s world order coming unstuck. The permanent members of the Security Council have held together for no more than a decade after the Soviet Union went into history. Meanwhile, the Washington consensus is no more the unquestioned artha dharma.

There is, therefore, yet another world order emerging Phoenix-like from the ashes of the immediate Berlin Wall aftermath. Where Bush Senior’s world order demanded acquiescence as the alternative to ostracism, in the emerging alternative international system, countries like India have enormous elbow room for recovering their independence of thought and action — if the will to freedom still animates our national ethos.

The post-Cold War world order, which Bush the Elder fabricated, was doomed because it assumed that Europe’s unquestioned acceptance of America’s lead would outlive the extinguishment of the common threat from Moscow which had brought about the alliance which linked the continents on either sea-board of the Atlantic Ocean. Now that there is no common threat, Europe wants to know why it must play second fiddle. Significantly, it is the ‘‘old Europe’’ decried by the Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd, that is the Europe which had known or aspired to imperial domination, which has been the first to break rank with the US quest for dominance; ‘‘new Europe’’ is still too much in need to American assistance, political and economic, to bite the hand that feeds it. But in the internal balance within the European Union, it is the old, which in terms of economic and political clout, far outweighs the new.

Europe is now sufficiently formidable to provide an alternative, if not necessarily always competing, pole to the United States. Moreover, this alternative Europe does not end at the Urals. Russia is on Europe’s side in resisting unilateralism.

We must see our opportunity there. It is the Non Aligned Movement that is dead, not the mainsprings of nonalignment as a philosophy of foreign policy. So, which would serve us better — a subsidiary alliance with the United States or the pursuit of independence in concert with those who want a participatory world order?

The Iraq war has opened up the second option. It is clear that what brought together two-thirds of the international community at the Seventh Nonaligned Summit in New Delhi in 1983 is no longer the natural brotherhood. Also, Cancun has shown that it is not developing vs developed, as in the 1970s, but primarily agricultural as against primarily industrial countries which constitutes the real face-off. Thus, just as New Zealand and Australia have more in common with Brazil and India at trade talks, so also in the realm of international peace and security, India has more in common with old Europe than, for example, the monarchies of West Asia. A realignment of nonalignment to distinguish between those who want to enter into subsidiary alliances and those who want to stand up is what we have to choose between as our long-term external policy trajectory. A realigned nonaligned movement would take within its fold all those who believe in the supremacy of the IMF-WB-WTO order. Is such a realignment possible? Yes, because Iraq has shown that Europeans like the Germans and the French and the Russians (and the post-Blair Brits) are from Venus, even if Bulgaria and Italy pretend to the Americans that they are from Mars.

But, of course, so long as we continue to indulge in the trifling abuse which Musharraf and Vajpayee exchanged at the UN, Pakistan will remain an albatross around our necks, reducing a potential influential world power like India to an alley cat squabbling with the Pakistanis.