CLASS 12

Contemporary Polity

CONTENTS

1. The Cold War Era

2. The End of Bipolarity
3. US Hegemony in World Politics
4. Alternative Centre of Powers
5. Contemporary South Asia
6. International Organisations
7. Security in Contemporary World
8. Environmental and Natural Resources
9. Globalisation

CHAPTER 1

The Cold War Era

INTRODUCTION
• The chapter

• shows how the dominance of two superpowers, the United States of America and the Soviet
Union, was central to the Cold War.

• tracks the various arenas of the Cold War in different parts of the world.

• views the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) as a challenge to the dominance of the two superpowers
and

• describes the attempts by the non-aligned countries to establish a New International Economic
Order (NIEO) as a means of attaining economic development and political independence.

• finally concludes with an assessment of India’s role in NAM and asks how successful the policy of
nonalignment has been in protecting India’s interests.
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
• In April 1961, the leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were worried that the
United States of America (USA) would invade communist-ruled Cuba (North America) and
overthrow Fidel Castro.

• Cuba was an ally of the Soviet Union and received both diplomatic and financial aid from it.

• Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, decided to convert Cuba into a Russian base.
In 1962, he placed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

• The US President, John F. Kennedy, and his advisers were reluctant to do anything that might
lead to full-scale nuclear war between the two countries, but they were determined to get
Khrushchev to remove the missiles and nuclear weapons from Cuba.

• Eventually, to the world’s great relief, both sides decided to avoid war. The Soviet ships slowed
down and turned back.

Background
• In 1945, the Allied Forces, led by the US, Soviet Union, Britain and France defeated the Axis
Powers led by Germany, Italy and Japan, ending the Second World War (1939- 1945).

• The world war ended when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, causing Japan to surrender.

• Critics of the US decision to drop the bombs have argued that the US knew that Japan was about
to surrender and that it was unnecessary to drop the bombs.

• They suggest that the US action was intended to stop the Soviet Union from making military and
political gains in Asia and elsewhere and to show Moscow that the United States was supreme.

• US supporters have argued that the dropping of the atomic bombs was necessary to end the
war quickly and to stop further loss of American and Allied lives.

• Whatever the motives, the consequence of the end of the Second World War was the rise of
two new powers on the global stage.

• The end of the Second World War is a landmark in contemporary world politics. Because it
represented the beginning of the Cold War.
Cold War
• The Cold War referred to the competition, the tensions and a series of confrontations between
the United States and Soviet Union, backed by their respective allies.

• Fortunately, however, it never escalated into a ‘hot war’, that is, a full-scale war between these
two powers.

• The Cold War was not simply a matter of power rivalries, of military alliances, and of the balance
of power. (It was also an ideological tussle)

• These were accompanied by a real ideological conflict as well, a difference over the best and the
most appropriate way of organising political, economic, and social life all over the world.

• The western alliance, headed by the US, represented the ideology of liberal democracy and
capitalism while the eastern alliance, headed by the Soviet Union, was committed to the
ideology of socialism and communism.

Logic of nuclear war

• While the Cold War was an outcome of the emergence of the US and the USSR as two
superpowers rival to each other, it was also rooted in the understanding that the destruction
caused by the use of atom bombs is too costly for any country to bear.

• The logic is simple yet powerful. When two rival powers are in possession of nuclear weapons
capable of inflicting death and destruction unacceptable to each other, a full-fledged war is
unlikely.

• In spite of provocations, neither side would want to risk war since no political gains would justify
the destruction of their societies.

• Even if one of them tries to attack and disable the nuclear weapons of its rival, the other would
still be left with enough nuclear weapons to inflict unacceptable destruction. This is called the
logic of ‘deterrence’. In other words, both sides have the capacity to retaliate against an attack
and to cause so much destruction that neither can afford to initiate war.

• Thus, the Cold War — in spite of being an intense form of rivalry between great powers —
remained a ‘cold’ and not hot or shooting war.

• The deterrence relationship prevents war but not the rivalry between powers.
THE EMERGENCE OF TWO POWER BLOCS
• The two superpowers were keen on expanding their spheres of influence in different parts of
the world. In a world sharply divided between the two alliance systems, a state was supposed to
remain tied to its protective superpower to limit the influence of the other superpower and its
allies.

• The smaller states in the alliances used the link to the superpowers for their own purposes. They
got the promise of protection, weapons, and economic aid against their local rivals, mostly
regional neighbours with whom they had rivalries.

• The alliance systems led by the two superpowers, therefore, threatened to divide the entire
world into two camps.

• This division happened first in Europe. Most countries of western Europe sided with the US and
those of eastern Europe joined the Soviet camp. That is why these were also called the ‘western’
and the ‘eastern’ alliances.

• The western alliance was formalised into an organisation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO), which came into existence in April 1949. It was an association of twelve states which
declared that armed attack on any one of them in Europe or North America would be regarded
as an attack on all of them. Each of these states would be obliged to help the other.

• The eastern alliance, known as the Warsaw Pact, was led by the Soviet Union. It was created in
1955 and its principal function was to counter NATO’s forces in Europe. (It was signed to counter
attack NATO.)
• First World: It was the capitalist world where liberal democracy existed. (US and it’s allies)

• Second World: It was led by USSR or the socialistic pattern of society.

• Third World: It was newly emerged country who were poor and under developed.

• International alliances during the Cold War era were determined by the requirements of the
superpowers and the calculations of the smaller states.

• In some cases, the superpowers used their military power to bring countries into their
respective alliances.

• The Soviet Union used its influence in eastern Europe, backed by the very large presence of its
armies in the countries of the region, to ensure that the eastern half of Europe remained within
its sphere of influence.

• In East and Southeast Asia and in West Asia (Middle East), the United States built an alliance
system called — the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and the Central Treaty
Organisation (CENTO). The Soviet Union and communist China responded by having close
relations with regional countries such as North Vietnam, North Korea and Iraq.

• Under these circumstances, many of the newly independent countries, after gaining their
independence from the colonial powers such as Britain and France, were worried that they
would lose their freedom as soon as they gained formal independence.

• Communist China quarrelled with the USSR towards the late 1950s, and, in 1969, they fought a
brief war over a territorial dispute.
 • The other important development was the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which gave the
newly independent countries a way of staying out of the alliances.

• Yet, the smaller states were helpful for the superpowers in gaining access to

(i) vital resources, such as oil and minerals,

(ii) territory, from where the superpowers could launch their weapons and troops,

(iii) locations from where they could spy on each other, and

(iv) economic support, in that many small allies together could help pay for military
expenses.

ARENAS OF THE COLD WAR

• The two superpowers were poised for direct confrontations in Korea (1950 - 53), Berlin (1958 -
62), the Congo (the early 1960s), and in several other places.

• Crises deepened, as neither of the parties involved was willing to back down.

• When we talk about arenas of the Cold War, we refer, therefore, to areas where crisis and war
occurred or threatened to occur between the alliance systems but did not cross certain limits.

• Sometimes, countries outside the two blocs, for example, the non-aligned countries, played a
role in reducing Cold War conflicts and averting some grave crises.

• Jawaharlal Nehru — one of the key leaders of the NAM — played a crucial role in mediating
between the two Koreas. In the Congo crisis, the UN Secretary-General played a key mediatory
role.

• As the Cold War rolled from one arena to another, the logic of restraint was increasingly
evident.

• In time, therefore, the US and USSR decided to collaborate in limiting or eliminating certain
kinds of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. A stable balance of weapons, they decided, could be
maintained through ‘arms control’. Starting in the 1960s, the two sides signed three significant
agreements within a decade. These were the Limited Test Ban Treaty, Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

• Thereafter, the superpowers held several rounds of arms limitation talks and signed several
more treaties to limit their arms.
CHALLENGE TO BIPOLARITY
• Cold War tended to divide the world into two rival alliances. It was in this context that
nonalignment offered the newly decolonised countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America a third
option—not to join either alliance.

• The roots of NAM went back to the friendship between three leaders — Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz
Tito, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser — who held a meeting in
1956.

• Indonesia’s Sukarno and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah strongly supported them.

• These five leaders came to be known as the five founders of NAM. The first non-aligned summit
was held in Belgrade in 1961. This was the culmination of at least three factors:

(i) cooperation among these five countries,

(ii) growing Cold War tensions and its widening arenas, and

(iii) the dramatic entry of many newly decolonised African countries into the international
arena. By 1960, there were 16 new African members in the UN.
 • The first summit was attended by 25 member states. Over the years, the membership of NAM
has expanded.

• The policy of staying away from alliances should not be considered isolationism or neutrality.

• Non-alignment is not isolationism since isolationism means remaining aloof from world affairs.
Isolationism sums up the foreign policy of the US from the American War of Independence in
1787 up to the beginning of the First World War.

• In comparison, the non-aligned countries, including India, played an active role in mediating
between the two rival alliances in the cause of peace and stability. Their strength was based on
their unity and their resolve to remain non-aligned despite the attempt by the two superpowers
to bring them into their alliances.

• Non-alignment is also not neutrality. Neutrality refers principally to a policy of staying out of
war. States practising neutrality are not required to help end a war. They do not get involved in
wars and do not take any position on the appropriateness or morality of a war.

• Non-aligned states, including India, were actually involved in wars for various reasons. They also
worked to prevent war between others and tried to end wars that had broken out. (In this way,
neither non-aligned states practiced isolationism nor they practiced neutrality)

NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER

• The non-aligned countries were more than merely mediators during the Cold War.

• The challenge for most of the non-aligned countries — a majority of them were categorised as
the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) — was to be more developed economically and to lift
their people out of poverty.

• Economic development was also vital for the independence of the new countries.

• Without sustained development, a country could not be truly free. It would remain dependent
on the richer countries including the colonial powers from which political freedom had been
achieved.

• The idea of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) originated with this realisation.

• The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) brought out a report in
1972 entitled Towards a New Trade Policy for Development.

• The report proposed a reform of the global trading system so as to:

(i) give the LDCs control over their natural resources exploited by the developed Western
countries,
 (ii) obtain access to Western markets so that the LDCs (Least Developed Countries ) could
sell their products and, therefore, make trade more beneficial for the poorer countries,

(iii) reduce the cost of technology from the Western countries, and

(iv) provide the LDCs with a greater role in international economic institutions

• Gradually, the nature of nonalignment changed to give greater importance to economic issues.
In 1961, at the first summit in Belgrade, economic issues had not been very important. By the
mid-1970s, they had become the most important issues.

• As a result, NAM became an economic pressure group.

• By the late 1980s, however, the NIEO initiative had faded, mainly because of the stiff opposition
from the developed countries who acted as a united group while the non-aligned countries
struggled to maintain their unity in the face of this opposition.

INDIA AND THE COLD WAR

• As a leader of NAM, India’s response to the ongoing Cold War was two-fold:

• At one level, it took particular care in staying away from the two alliances.

• Second, it raised its voice against the newly decolonised countries becoming part of these
alliances.

• India’s policy was neither negative nor passive.

• As Nehru reminded the world, nonalignment was not a policy of ‘fleeing away’.

• On the contrary, India was in favour of actively intervening in world affairs to soften Cold War
rivalries.

• India tried to reduce the differences between the alliances and thereby prevent differences
from escalating into a full-scale war.

• Non-alignment was not, as some suggest, a noble international cause which had little to do with
India’s real interests. A non-aligned posture also served India’s interests very directly, in at least
two ways:

• First, non-alignment allowed India to take international decisions and stances that served its
interests rather than the interests of the superpowers and their allies.
• Second, India was often able to balance one superpower against the other. If India felt ignored
or unduly pressurised by one superpower, it could tilt towards the other. Neither alliance
system could take India for granted or bully it.

• India’s policy of non-alignment was criticised on a number of counts. Here we may refer to only
two criticisms:

• First, India’s non-alignment was said to be ‘unprincipled’. In the name of pursuing its national
interest, India, it was said, often refused to take a firm stand on crucial international issues.

• Second, it is suggested that India was inconsistent and took contradictory postures. Having
criticised others for joining alliances, India signed the Treaty of Friendship in August 1971 with
the USSR for 20 years. This was regarded, particularly by outside observers, as virtually joining
the Soviet alliance system.

• The Indian government’s view was that India needed diplomatic and possibly military support
during the Bangladesh crisis and that in any case the treaty did not stop India from having good
relations with other countries including the US.

• Non-alignment as a strategy evolved in the Cold War context. with the disintegration of the
USSR and the end of the Cold War in 1991, non-alignment, both as an international movement
and as the core of India’s foreign policy, lost some of its earlier relevance and effectiveness.

• However, nonalignment contained some core values and enduring ideas. It was based on a
recognition that decolonised states share a historical affiliation and can become a powerful
force if they come together.

• It meant that the poor and often very small countries of the world need not become followers of
any of the big powers, that they could pursue an independent foreign policy.

• It was also based on a resolve to democratise the international system by thinking about an
alternative world order to redress existing inequities. These core ideas remain relevant even
after the Cold War has ended.
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 CHAPTER 2

The end of bipolarity

INTRODUCTION
• The Berlin Wall, which had been built at the height of the Cold War and was its greatest symbol,
was toppled by the people in 1989. (After second World War, Germany was divided into two
halves one was east Germany & another was west Germany. Western Germany was dominated
by the US and other European countries and eastern Germany was under the influence of USSR.
There was a Berlin wall between the two parts of Germany)

• This dramatic event was followed by an equally dramatic and historic chain of events that led to
the collapse of the ‘second world’ and the end of the Cold War.

• Germany, divided after the Second World War, was unified.

• One after another, the eight East European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc replaced
their communist governments in response to mass demonstrations. Eventually the Soviet Union
itself disintegrated.

• In this chapter, we will discuss

• the meaning, the causes and the consequences of the disintegration of the ‘second world’.

• what happened to that part of the world after the collapse of communist regimes and

• how India relates to these countries now.

WHAT WAS THE SOVIET SYSTEM?

• The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) came into being after the socialist revolution in
Russia in 1917. The revolution was inspired by the ideals of socialism, as opposed to capitalism,
and the need for an egalitarian society.

• The Soviet political system centred around the communist party, and no other political party or
opposition was allowed. The economy was planned and controlled by the state.

• After the Second World War, the east European countries that the Soviet army had liberated
from the fascist forces came under the control of the USSR. The political and the economic
systems of all these countries were modelled after the USSR.

• This group of countries was called the Second World or the ‘socialist bloc’.
 • The Warsaw Pact, a military alliance, held them together. The USSR was the leader of the bloc.

• The Soviet economy was then more developed than the rest of the world except for the US. It
had a complex communications network, vast energy resources including oil, iron and steel,
machinery production, and a transport sector that connected its remotest areas with efficiency.
It had a domestic consumer industry that produced everything from pins to cars, though their
quality did not match that of the Western capitalist countries.

• The Soviet state ensured a minimum standard of living for all citizens, and the government
subsidised basic necessities including health, education, childcare and other welfare schemes.

• There was no unemployment.

• State ownership was the dominant form of ownership: land and productive assets were owned
and controlled by the Soviet state.

• The Soviet system, however, became very bureaucratic and authoritarian, making life very
difficult for its citizens.

• Lack of democracy and the absence of freedom of speech stifled people who often expressed
their dissent in jokes and cartoons.

• Most of the institutions of the Soviet state needed reform: the one-party system represented by
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had tight control over all institutions and was
unaccountable to the people.

• In the arms race, the Soviet Union managed to match the US from time to time, but at great
cost.

• The Soviet Union lagged behind the West in technology, infrastructure (e.g. transport, power),
and most importantly, in fulfilling the political or economic aspirations of citizens.

• The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 weakened the system even further.

• Though wages continued to grow, productivity and technology fell considerably behind that of
the West. This led to shortages in all consumer goods. Food imports increased every year.

• The Soviet economy was faltering in the late 1970s and became stagnant.

GORBACHEV AND THE DISINTEGRATION

• Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in 1985, sought to reform this system.
• However, Gorbachev’s decision to normalise relations with the West and democratise and
reform the Soviet Union had some other effects that neither he nor anyone else intended or
anticipated.

• He initiated the policies of economic and political reform and democratisation within the
country.

• The reforms were opposed by leaders within the Communist Party.

• A coup took place in 1991 that was encouraged by Communist Party hardliners.

• The Russian Republic, where Yeltsin won a popular election, began to shake off centralised
control. Power began to shift from the Soviet centre to the republics, especially in the more
Europeanised part of the Soviet Union, which saw themselves as sovereign states.

• The Central Asian republics did not ask for independence and wanted to remain with the Soviet
Federation.

• In December 1991, under the leadership of Yeltsin, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, three major
republics of the USSR, declared that the Soviet Union was disbanded.

• The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned.

• Capitalism and democracy were adopted as the bases for the post-Soviet republics.

• The declaration on the disintegration of the USSR and the formation of the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) came as a surprise to the other republics, especially to the Central
Asian ones.

• The exclusion of these republics was an issue that was quickly solved by making them founding
members of the CIS.

• Russia was now accepted as the successor state of the Soviet Union. It inherited the Soviet seat
in the UN Security Council.

• Russia accepted all the international treaties and commitments of the Soviet Union. It took over
as the only nuclear state of the post-Soviet space and carried out some nuclear disarmament
measures with the US.

• The old Soviet Union was thus dead and buried.

WHY DID THE SOVIET UNION DISINTEGRATE?
• There is no doubt that the internal weaknesses of Soviet political and economic institutions,
which failed to meet the aspirations of the people, were responsible for the collapse of the
system.

• Economic stagnation for many years led to severe consumer shortages and a large section of
Soviet society began to doubt and question the system and to do so openly.

• Why did the system become so weak and why did the economy stagnate?

• The Soviet economy used much of its resources in maintaining a nuclear and military arsenal
and the development of its satellite states in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet system (the
five Central Asian Republics in particular). This led to a huge economic burden that the system
could not cope with.

• At the same time, ordinary citizens became more knowledgeable about the economic advance
of the West. They could see the disparities between their system and the systems of the West.

• After years of being told that the Soviet system was better than Western capitalism, the reality
of its backwardness came as a political and psychological shock.

• The Soviet Union had become stagnant in an administrative and political sense as well. The
Communist Party that had ruled the Soviet Union for over 70 years was not accountable to the
people.

• Ordinary people were alienated by slow and stifling administration, rampant corruption, the
inability of the system to correct mistakes it had made, the unwillingness to allow more
openness in government, and the centralisation of authority in a vast land.

• Gorbachev promised to reform the economy, catch up with the West, and loosen the
administrative system. But still, Soviet Union collapsed in spite of Gorbachev’s accurate
diagnosis of the problem and his attempt to implement reforms.

• There were two sections of soviet society:

• One, who felt that Gorbachev should have moved much faster and were impatient with
his methods.

• Others, especially members of the Communist Party and those who were served by the
system, took exactly the opposite view. They felt that their power and privileges were
eroding and Gorbachev was moving too quickly.

• In this ‘tug of war’, Gorbachev lost support on all sides and divided public opinion.
 • All this might not have led to the collapse of the Soviet Union but there was another reason
also:

• The rise of nationalism and the desire for sovereignty within various republics including Russia
and the Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Ukraine, Georgia, and others proved to
be the final and most immediate cause for the disintegration of the USSR.

• Some of them think that Gorbachev’s reforms speeded up and increased nationalist
dissatisfaction to the point that the government and rulers could not control it.

CONSEQUENCES OF DISINTEGRATION
• Three broad kinds of changes that were resulted from this were:

• First of all, it meant the end of Cold War confrontations. The ideological dispute over whether
the socialist system would beat the capitalist system was not an issue any more.

• Second, power relations in world politics changed and, therefore, the relative influence of ideas
and institutions also changed.

• The end of the Cold War left open only two possibilities: either the remaining
superpower would dominate and create a unipolar system, or different countries could
become important players, thereby bringing in a multipolar system where no one power
could dominate.

• As it turned out, the US became the sole superpower. Politically, the notion of liberal
democracy emerged as the best way to organise political life.

• Third, the end of the Soviet bloc meant the emergence of many new countries. All these
countries had their own independent aspirations and choices.

• Some of them, especially the Baltic and east European states, wanted to join the
European Union and become part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

• The Central Asian countries wanted to take advantage of their geographical location and
continue their close ties with Russia and also to establish ties with the West, the US,
China and others.

SHOCK THERAPY IN POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES

• The collapse of communism was followed in most of these countries by a painful process of
transition from an authoritarian socialist system to a democratic capitalist system.
 • The model of transition in Russia, Central Asia and east Europe that was influenced by the World
Bank and the IMF came to be known as ‘shock therapy’.

• Each of these countries was required to make a total shift to a capitalist economy, which meant
rooting out completely any structures evolved during the Soviet period.

• Privatisation of state assets and corporate ownership patterns were to be immediately brought
in.

• Collective farms were to be replaced by private farming and capitalism in agriculture.

• This transition ruled out any alternate or ‘third way’, other than state-controlled socialism or
capitalism.

• Shock therapy also involved a drastic change in the external orientation of these economies. The
free trade regime and foreign direct investment (FDI) were to be the main engines of change.

• Finally, the transition also involved a break up of the existing trade alliances among the
countries of the Soviet bloc. Each state from this bloc was now linked directly to the West and
not to each other in the region. These states were thus to be gradually absorbed into the
Western economic system.

• The Western capitalist states now became the leaders and thus guided and controlled the
development of the region through various agencies and organisations.

CONSEQUENCES OF SHOCK THERAPY

• In Russia, the large state-controlled industrial complex almost collapsed, as about 90 per cent of
its industries were put up for sale to private individuals and companies.

• This was called ‘the largest garage sale in history’, as valuable industries were undervalued and
sold at throwaway prices.

• The value of the ruble, the Russian currency, declined dramatically. The rate of inflation was so
high that people lost all their savings.

• The old system of social welfare was systematically destroyed. The withdrawal of government
subsidies pushed large sections of the people into poverty.

• Privatisation led to new disparities. Post-Soviet states, especially Russia, were divided between
rich and poor regions. Unlike the earlier system, there was now great economic inequality
between people.

• The construction of democratic institutions was not given the same attention and priority as the
demands of economic transformation.
 • Most of these economies, especially Russia, started reviving in 2000, ten years after their
independence.

• The reason for the revival for most of their economies was the export of natural resources like
oil, natural gas and minerals. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are
major oil and gas producers.

• Other countries have gained because of the oil pipelines that cross their territories for which
they get rent.

TENSIONS AND CONFLICTS

• In Russia, two republics, Chechnya and Dagestan, have had violent secessionist movements.
Moscow’s method of dealing with the Chechen rebels and indiscriminate military bombings
have led to many human rights violations but failed to deter the aspirations for independence.

• In Central Asia, Tajikistan witnessed a civil war that went on for ten years till 2001.

• In Azerbaijan’s province of Nagorno-Karabakh, some local Armenians want to secede and join
Armenia.

• The Central Asian Republics are areas with vast hydrocarbon resources, which have brought
them economic benefit. Central Asia has also become a zone of competition between outside
powers and oil companies.

• After 11 September 2001, the US wanted military bases in the region and paid all Central Asian
states to hire bases and to allow airplanes to fly over their territory during the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.

• However, Russia perceives these states as its ‘Near Abroad’ and believes that they should be
under Russian influence.

INDIA AND POST-COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

• India has maintained good relations with all the post-communist countries. But the strongest
relations are still those between Russia and India. India’s relations with Russia are an important
aspect of India’s foreign policy.

• Indo-Russian relations are embedded in a history of trust and common interests and are
matched by popular perceptions.

• Russia and India share a vision of a multipolar world order.

• What they mean by a multipolar world order is the

 • co-existence of several powers in the international system,

• collective security (in which an attack on any country is regarded as a threat to all
countries and requires a collective response),

• greater regionalism,

• negotiated settlements of international conflicts,

• an independent foreign policy for all countries, and

• decision making through bodies like the UN that should be strengthened, democratised,
and empowered.

• More than 80 bilateral agreements have been signed between India and Russia as part of the
Indo-Russian Strategic Agreement of 2001.

• India stands to benefit from its relationship with Russia on issues like Kashmir, energy supplies,
sharing information on international terrorism access to Central Asia, and balancing its relations
with China.

• Russia stands to benefit from this relationship because India is the second largest arms market
for Russia. The Indian military gets most of its hardware from Russia. Since India is an oil
importing nation, Russia is important to India and has repeatedly come to the assistance of India
during its oil crises.

• Russia is important for India’s nuclear energy plans and assisted India’s space industry by giving,
for example, the cryogenic rocket when India needed it.

• Russia and India have collaborated on various scientific projects.

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 CHAPTER 3

US Hegemony in World Politics

INTRODUCTION
• The end of Cold War left the US without any serious rival in the world.

• The era since then has been described as a period of US dominance or a unipolar world.

• We will follow the popular usage of the word ‘America’ to refer to the United States of America.

• But it may be useful to remind ourselves that the expression America covers the two continents
of North and South America and that the US is only one of the countries of the American
continent.

• Thus, the use of the word America solely for the US is already a sign of the US hegemony that
we seek to understand in this chapter.

In this chapter
• We try to understand the nature, extent and limits of this dominance.

• We begin by narrating the story of the rise of the new world order from the First Gulf War to the
US-led invasion of Iraq.

• We then pause to understand the nature of US domination with the help of the concept of
‘hegemony’.

• After exploring the political, economic and cultural aspects of US hegemony, we assess India’s
policy options in dealing with the US.

• Finally, we turn to see if there are challenges to this hegemony and whether it can be overcome.

BEGINNING OF THE ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’

• The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union took everyone by surprise. While one of the two
superpowers ceased to exist, the other remained with all its powers intact, even enhanced.
Thus, it would appear that the US hegemony began in 1991 after Soviet power disappeared
from the international scene.

• This is largely correct, but we need to keep in mind two riders to this.
 • First, some aspects of US hegemony did not emerge in 1991 but in fact go back to the
end of the Second World War in 1945.

• Second, the US did not start behaving like a hegemonic power right from 1991; it
became clear much later that the world was in fact living in a period of hegemony.

• Process by which US hegemony got established more closely:

• In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, rapidly occupying and subsequently annexing it. After a
series of diplomatic attempts failed at convincing Iraq to quit its aggression, the United Nations
mandated the liberation of Kuwait by force.

• For the UN, this was a dramatic decision after years of deadlock during the Cold War.

• The US President George H.W. Bush hailed the emergence of a ‘new world order’.

• A massive coalition force of 660,000 troops from 34 countries fought against Iraq and defeated
it in what came to be known as the First Gulf War.

• However, the UN operation, which was called ‘Operation Desert Storm’, was overwhelmingly
American.

• Although the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, had promised “the mother of all battles”, the
Iraqi forces were quickly defeated and forced to withdraw from Kuwait.

• The First Gulf War revealed the vast technological gap that had opened up between the US
military capability and that of other states.

• According to many reports, the US received more money from countries like Germany, Japan
and Saudi Arabia than it had spent on the war.

THE CLINTON YEARS

• Despite winning the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush lost the US presidential elections of 1992
to William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton of the Democratic Party, who had campaigned on domestic
rather than foreign policy issues.

• During the Clinton years, it often seemed that the US had withdrawn into its internal affairs and
was not fully engaged in world politics. In foreign policy, the Clinton government tended to
focus on ‘soft issues’ like democracy promotion, climate change and world trade rather than on
the ‘hard politics’ of military power and security.

• Nevertheless, the US on occasion did show its readiness to use military power even during the
Clinton years. The most important episode occurred in 1999, in response to Yugoslavian actions
against the predominantly Albanian population in the province of Kosovo.
 • Another significant US military action during the Clinton years was in response to the bombing
of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in 1998. These bombings
were attributed to Al-Qaeda, a terrorist organisation strongly influenced by extremist Islamist
ideas.

• Within a few days of this bombing, President Clinton ordered Operation Infinite Reach, a series
of cruise missile strikes on Al-Qaeda terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan.

• The US did not bother about the UN sanction or provisions of international law in this regard.

9/11 AND THE ‘GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR’

• On 11 September 2001, nineteen hijackers hailing from a number of Arab countries took control
of four American commercial aircraft shortly after take-off and flew them into important
buildings in the US.

• One airliner each crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Centre in New
York.

• A third aircraft crashed into the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, where the US Defence
Department is headquartered.

• The fourth aircraft, presumably bound for the Capital building of the US Congress, came down in
a field in Pennsylvania.

• The attacks have come to be known as “9/11”.

• In terms of loss of life, 9/11 was the most severe attack on US soil since the founding of the
country in 1776.

• The US response to 9/11 was swift and ferocious.

• As a part of its ‘Global War on Terror’, the US launched ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ against all
those suspected to be behind this attack, mainly Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan.

• The Taliban regime was easily overthrown, but remnants of the Taliban and AlQaeda have
remained potent.

• The US forces made arrests all over the world, often without the knowledge of the government
of the persons being arrested, transported these persons across countries and detained them in
secret prisons.
THE IRAQ INVASION
• On 19 March 2003, the US launched its invasion of Iraq under the codename ‘Operation Iraqi
Freedom’. More than forty other countries joined in the US-led ‘coalition of the willing’ after the
UN refused to give its mandate to the invasion.

• The ostensible purpose of the invasion was to prevent Iraq from developing weapons of mass
destruction (WMD).

• Since no evidence of WMD has been unearthed in Iraq, it is speculated that the invasion was
motivated by other objectives, such as controlling Iraqi oilfields and installing a regime friendly
to the US.

• It is now widely recognised that the US invasion of Iraq was, in some crucial respects, both a
military and political failure.

WHAT DOES HEGEMONY MEAN?

• Politics is about power. Just as individuals want to gain and retain power, groups too want to
gain and retain power.

• In the case of world politics too, countries and groups of countries are engaged in constantly
trying to gain and retain power. This power is in the form of military domination, economic
power, political clout and cultural superiority.

• Therefore, if we wanted to understand world politics, it is necessary that we understand the

distribution of power among the countries of the world.

• For instance, during the years of the Cold War (1945-91) power was divided between the two
groups of countries, and the US and the Soviet Union represented the two ‘camps’ or centres of
power in international politics during that period.

• The collapse of the Soviet Union left the world with only a single power, the United States of
America.

• Sometimes, the international system dominated by a sole superpower, or hyper-power, is called

a ‘unipolar’ system. It may be more appropriate to describe an international system with only
one centre of power by the term ‘hegemony’.
HEGEMONY AS HARD POWER
• The first meaning of hegemony relates to the relations, patterns and balances of military
capability between states.

• It is this notion of hegemony as military preponderance that is especially germane to the current
position and role of the US in world politics.

• The bedrock of contemporary US power lies in the overwhelming superiority of its military
power.

HEGEMONY AS STRUCTURAL POWER

• It emerges from a particular understanding of the world economy. The basic idea is that an open
world economy requires a hegemon or dominant power to support its creation and existence.
The hegemon must possess both the ability and the desire to establish certain norms for order
and must sustain the global structure.

• Hegemony in this second sense is reflected in the role played by the US in providing global
public goods.

• By public goods we mean those goods that can be consumed by one person without reducing
the amount of the good available for someone else. For example, fresh air and roads, sea-lanes
of communication (SLOCs), internet etc.

• It is the naval power of the hegemon that underwrites the law of the sea and ensures freedom
of navigation in international waters.
 • After all, the Bretton Woods system, set up by the US after the Second World War, still
constitutes the basic structure of the world economy.

• Thus, we can regard the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade
Organisation (WTO) as the products of American hegemony.

HEGEMONY AS SOFT POWER

• It would however be a mistake to see US hegemony in purely military and economic terms
without considering the ideological or the cultural dimension of US hegemony.

• This third sense of hegemony is about the capacity to ‘manufacture consent’. Here, hegemony
implies class ascendancy in the social, political and particularly ideological spheres.

• Whether we choose to recognise the fact or not, all ideas of the good life and personal success,
most of the dreams of individuals and societies across the globe, are dreams churned out by
practices prevailing in twentieth-century America.

• America is the most seductive, and in this sense the most powerful, culture on earth. This
attribute is called ‘soft power’: the ability to persuade rather than coerce. (Hard power as
coercive power wielded through inducements or threats)

• During the Cold War, the US found it difficult to score victories against the Soviet Union in the
realm of hard power. It was in the area of structural power and soft power that the US scored
notable victories.

CONSTRAINTS ON AMERICAN POWER

• History tells us that empires decline because they decay from within.

• Similarly, the biggest constraints to American hegemony lie within the heart of hegemony itself.
We can identify three constraints on American power.

• None of these constraints seemed to operate in the years following 9/11. However, it now
appears that all three of these constraints are slowly beginning to operate again.

• The first constraint is the institutional architecture of the American state itself.

• A system of division of powers between the three branches of government places significant
brakes upon the unrestrained and immoderate exercise of America’s military power by the
executive branch.

• The second constraint on American power is also domestic in nature, and stems from the open
nature of American society.
 • Although the American mass media may from time to time impose or promote a particular
perspective on domestic public opinion in the US, there is nevertheless a deep scepticism
regarding the purposes and methods of government in American political culture.

• This factor, in the long run, is a huge constraint on US military action overseas.

• However, it is the third constraint on the US that is perhaps the most important. There is only
one organisation in the international system that could possibly moderate the exercise of
American power today, and that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

• The US obviously has an enormous interest in keeping the alliance of democracies that follow
the market economies alive and therefore it is possible that its allies in the NATO will be able to
moderate the exercise of US hegemony.

INDIA’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE US

• During the Cold War years, India found itself on the opposite side of the divide from the US.
India’s closest friendship during those years was with the Soviet Union.

• After the collapse of the Soviet Union, India suddenly found itself friendless in an increasingly
hostile international environment. However, these were also the years when India decided to
liberalise its economy and integrate it with the global economy.

• This policy and India’s impressive economic growth rates in recent years have made the country
an attractive economic partner for a number of countries including the US.

• It is important that we do not lose sight of the fact that two new factors have emerged in Indo-
US relations in recent years.

• These factors relate to the technological dimension and the role of the Indian-American
diaspora. Indeed, these two factors are interrelated.

• Like all other countries, India too has to decide exactly what type of relationship it wants with
the US in this phase of global hegemony. The choices are not exactly easy. Within India, the
debate seems to be around three possible strategies.

• Those Indian analysts who see international politics largely in terms of military power are fearful
of the growing closeness between India and the US. They would prefer that India maintains its
aloofness from Washington and focuses upon increasing its own comprehensive national power.

• Other analysts see the growing convergence of interests between the US and India as a historic
opportunity for India. They advocate a strategy that would allow India to take advantage of US
hegemony and the mutual convergences to establish the best possible options for itself.
Opposing the US, they argue, is a futile strategy that will only hurt India in the long run.
 • A third group of analysts would advocate that India should take the lead in establishing a
coalition of countries from the developing world. Over time, this coalition would become more
powerful and may succeed in weaning the hegemon away from its dominating ways.

• India-US relations are perhaps too complex to be managed by a single strategy. India needs to
develop an appropriate mix of foreign policy strategies to deal with the US.

HOW CAN HEGEMONY BE OVERCOME?

• How long will hegemony last? How do we get beyond hegemony?

• In international politics, very few factors formally curtail the exercise of military power by any
country. There is no world government like the government of a country.

• As we shall see in Chapter 6, international organisation is not world government. Thus,

international politics is ‘politics without government’. There are some rules and norms called
the laws of war that restrict, but do not prohibit, war.

• But few states will entrust their security to international law alone. Does this mean that there is
no escape from war and hegemony?

• In the short term, we must recognise that no single power is anywhere near balancing the US
militarily. A military coalition against the US is even less likely given the differences that exist
among big countries like China, India, and Russia that have the potential to challenge US
hegemony.

• Some people argue that it is strategically more prudent to take advantage of the opportunities
that hegemony creates. For instance, raising economic growth rates requires increased trade,
technology transfers, and investment, which are best acquired by working with rather than
against the hegemon.

• Thus, it is suggested that instead of engaging in activities opposed to the hegemonic power, it
may be advisable to extract benefits by operating within the hegemonic system. This is called
the ‘bandwagon’ strategy. (It means making good use of the bandwidth given by the hegemonic
system.)

• Another strategy open to states is to ‘hide’. This implies staying as far removed from the
dominant power as possible. There are many examples of this behaviour. China, Russia, the
European Union—all of them, in different ways, are seeking to stay below the radar, as it were,
and not overly and unduly antagonise the US.

• However, this would not seem to be viable for the big, second-rank powers for very long. While
it may be an attractive, viable policy for small states, it is hard to imagine mega-states like China,
India, and Russia or huge agglomerations such as the EU being able to hide for any substantial
length of time.
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 CHAPTER 4

Alternate Centres of Power

INTRODUCTION
• After the end of the bipolar structure of world politics in the early 1990s, it became clear that
alternative centres of political and economic power could limit America’s dominance. (In 1991,
with the disintegration of USSR the bipolar structure of world politics ended and it resulted into
a unipolar world with US as a hegemony.)

• Thus, in Europe, the European Union (EU) and, in Asia, the Association of South East Asian
Nations (ASEAN), have emerged as forces to reckon with.

• While evolving regional solutions to their historical enmities and weaknesses, both the EU and
the ASEAN have developed alternative institutions and conventions that build a more peaceful
and cooperative regional order and have transformed the countries in the region into
prosperous economies.

• The economic rise of China has made a dramatic impact on world politics.

• In this chapter, we take a look at some of these emerging alternative centres of power and
assess their possible role in the future.

EUROPEAN UNION
• As the Second World War came to an end, many of Europe’s
leaders grappled with the ‘Question of Europe’. (After the second
World War, Europe was shattered both economically and as well
as with the loss of lives and properties.)

• Should Europe be allowed to revert to its old rivalries? OR

• Be reconstructed on principles and institutions that would

contribute to a positive conception of international relations?

• The Second World War shattered many of the assumptions and structures on which the
European states had based their relations.

• In 1945, the European states confronted the ruin of their economies and the destruction of the
assumptions and structures on which Europe had been founded.

• European integration after 1945 was aided by the Cold War. America extended massive financial
help for reviving Europe’s economy under what was called the ‘Marshall Plan’.
• Under the Marshall Plan, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was
established in 1948 to channel aid to the west European states. It became a forum where the
western European states began to cooperate on trade and economic issues.

• The US also created a new collective security structure under NATO.

• The Council of Europe, established in 1949, was another step forward in political cooperation.

• The process of economic integration of European capitalist countries proceeded step by step
leading to the formation of the European Economic Community in 1957. This process acquired a
political dimension with the creation of the European Parliament.

• The collapse of the Soviet bloc put Europe on a fast track and resulted in the establishment of
the European Union in 1992.

• The foundation was thus laid for a common foreign and security policy, cooperation on justice
and home affairs, and the creation of a single currency.

• The EU has economic, political and diplomatic, and military influence. Its currency, the euro, can
pose a threat to the dominance of the US dollar.

• Its share of world trade is three times larger than that of the United States allowing it to be
more assertive in trade disputes with the US and China.

• Its economic power gives it influence over its closest neighbours as well as in Asia and Africa. It
also functions as an important bloc in international economic organisations such as the World
Trade Organisation (WTO).

• Militarily, the EU’s combined armed forces are the second largest in the world. Its total spending
on defence is second after the US.
 • Two EU member states, Britain and France, also have nuclear arsenals of approximately 550
nuclear warheads.

Some reservations:
• As a supranational organisation, the EU is able to intervene in economic, political and social
areas. But in many areas its member states have their own foreign relations and defence
policies that are often at odds with each other.

• Thus, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair was America’s partner in the Iraq invasion, and many of
the EU’s newer members made up the US led ‘coalition of the willing’ whereas Germany and
France opposed American policy.

• There is also a deep-seated ‘Euroscepticism’ in some parts of Europe about the EU’s
integrationist agenda. Thus, for example, Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher,
kept the UK out of the European Market.

• Denmark and Sweden have resisted the Maastricht Treaty and the adoption of the euro, the
common European currency. This limits the ability of the EU to act in matters of foreign
relations and defence.

ASSOCIATION OF SOUTH EAST ASIAN NATIONS (ASEAN)

• Which countries would you say fall in the south-eastern region of Asia? Imagine what would
happen if they have a European Union football team!
ASEAN
• Before and during the Second World War, this region of Asia suffered the economic and political
consequences of repeated colonialisms, both European and Japanese.

• At the end of the war, it confronted problems of nation-building, the ravages of poverty and
economic backwardness and the pressure to align with one great power or another during the
Cold War.

• Efforts at Asian and Third World unity, such as the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned
Movement, were ineffective in establishing the conventions for informal cooperation and
interaction.

• Hence, the Southeast Asian nations sought an alternative by establishing the Association for
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

• ASEAN was established in 1967 by five countries of this region — Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore and Thailand — by signing the Bangkok
Declaration.

• The objectives of ASEAN were primarily to accelerate economic

growth and through that ‘social progress and cultural
development’.

• A secondary objective was to promote regional peace and

stability based on the rule of law and the principles of the United
Nations Charter.

• Over the years, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Lao PDR, Myanmar

(Burma) and Cambodia joined ASEAN taking its strength to ten.
• Unlike the EU there is little desire in ASEAN for supranational structures and institutions. ASEAN
countries have celebrated the ‘ASEAN Way’, a form of interaction that is informal, non-
confrontationist and cooperative.

• The respect for national sovereignty is critical to the functioning of ASEAN.

• In 2003, ASEAN moved along the path of the EU by agreeing to establish an ASEAN Community
comprising three pillars, namely, the ASEAN Security Community, the ASEAN Economic
Community and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community.

• The ASEAN security community was based on the conviction that outstanding territorial
disputes should not escalate into armed confrontation.

• The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which was established in 1994, is the organisation that carries
out coordination of security and foreign policy.

• ASEAN was and still remains principally an economic association. The objectives of the ASEAN
Economic Community are to create a common market and production base within ASEAN states
and to aid social and economic development in the region.

• The Economic Community would also like to improve the existing ASEAN Dispute Settlement
Mechanism to resolve economic disputes.

• ASEAN has focused on creating a Free Trade Area (FTA) for investment, labour, and services. The
US and China have already moved fast to negotiate FTAs with ASEAN.
 • ASEAN is rapidly growing into a very important regional organisation. Its Vision 2020 has defined
an outward-looking role for ASEAN in the international community. This builds on the existing
ASEAN policy to encourage negotiation over conflicts in the region. Thus, ASEAN has mediated
the end of the Cambodian conflict, the East Timor crisis, and meets annually to discuss East
Asian cooperation.

• During the Cold War years Indian foreign policy did not pay adequate attention to ASEAN. But in
recent years, India has tried to make amends. It signed FTAs with two ASEAN members,
Singapore and Thailand. It is trying to sign an FTA with ASEAN itself.

• ASEAN’s strength, however, lies in its policies of interaction and consultation with member
states, with dialogue partners, and with other non-regional organisations. It is the only regional
association in Asia that provides a political forum where Asian countries and the major powers
can discuss political and security concerns.

THE RISE OF THE CHINESE ECONOMY

• Let us now turn to the third major alternative centre of power and our immediate neighbour,
China.

• China’s economic success since 1978 has been linked to its rise as a great power. China has been
the fastest growing economy since the reforms first began there. It is projected to overtake the
US as the world’s largest economy by 2040. Its economic integration into the region makes it
the driver of East Asian growth, thereby giving it enormous influence in regional affairs.

• After the inception of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, following the communist
revolution under the leadership of Mao, its economy was based on the Soviet model.

• The model was to create a state-owned heavy industries sector from the capital accumulated
from agriculture. As it was short of foreign exchange that it needed in order to buy technology
and goods on the world market, China decided to substitute imports by domestic goods.

• This model allowed China to use its resources to establish the foundations of an industrial
economy on a scale that did not exist before. Employment and social welfare was assured to all
citizens, and China moved ahead of most developing countries in educating its citizens and
ensuring better health for them.

• In Chapter 2, we discussed the crisis of the state-controlled economy in the USSR. A similar crisis
was to face China too: its industrial production was not growing fast enough; international trade
was minimal and per capita income was very low.

• The Chinese leadership took major policy decisions in the 1970s. China ended its political and
economic isolation with the establishment of relations with the United States in 1972. Premier
 Zhou Enlai proposed the ‘four modernisations’ (agriculture, industry, science and technology
and military) in 1973.

• By 1978, the then leader Deng Xiaoping announced the ‘open door’ policy and economic
reforms in China. The policy was to generate higher productivity by investments of capital and
technology from abroad.

• China followed its own path in introducing a market economy. The Chinese did not go for ‘shock
therapy’ but opened their economy step by step. The privatisation of agriculture in 1982 was
followed by the privatisation of industry in 1998. Trade barriers were eliminated only in Special
Economic Zones (SEZs) where foreign investors could set up enterprises.

• In China, the state played and continues to play a central role in setting up a market economy.

• Privatisation of agriculture led to a remarkable rise in agricultural production and rural incomes.
High personal savings in the rural economy lead to an exponential growth in rural industry. The
Chinese economy, including both industry and agriculture, grew at a faster rate. The new trading
laws and the creation of Special Economic Zones led to a phenomenal rise in foreign trade.

• China has become the most important destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) anywhere
in the world.

• While the Chinese economy has improved dramatically, not everyone in China has received the
benefits of the reforms. Unemployment has risen in China with nearly 100 million people
looking for jobs.

• Female employment and conditions of work are as bad as in Europe of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Environmental degradation and corruption have increased besides a rise
in economic inequality between rural and urban residents and coastal and inland provinces.

• However, regionally and globally, China has become an economic power to reckon with. The
integration of China’s economy and the inter-dependencies that this has created has enabled
China to have considerable influence with its trade partners.

• Hence, its outstanding issues with Japan, the US, ASEAN, and Russia have been tempered by
economic considerations.

INDIA – CHINA RELATIONS

• India and China were great powers in Asia before the advent of Western imperialism.

• The regions where India and China exercised influence rarely ever overlapped. Thus, there was
limited political and cultural interaction between the two.
• The result was that neither country was very familiar with the other.

• After India regained its independence from Britain, and China expelled the foreign powers, there
was hope that both would come together to shape the future of the developing world and of
Asia particularly. For a brief while, the slogan of ‘Hindi-Chini bhaibhai’ was popular.

• However, after India regained its independence from Britain, and China expelled the foreign
powers, there was hope that both would come together to shape the future of the developing
world and of Asia particularly.

• For a brief while, the slogan of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’ was popular.

• China and India were involved in a border conflict in 1962 over competing territorial claims
principally in Arunachal Pradesh and in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh.

• The conflict of 1962, in which India suffered military reverses, had long-term implications for
India–China relations. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were downgraded until
1976. Thereafter, relations between the two countries began to improve slowly.

• Since the end of the Cold War, there have been significant changes in India– China relations.
Their relations now have a strategic as well as an economic dimension.

• Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China in December 1988 provided the impetus for an improvement in
India–China relations. Since then both governments have taken measures to contain conflict and
maintain ‘peace and tranquility’ on the border. They have also signed agreements on cultural
exchanges and cooperation in science and technology, and opened four border posts for trade.

• More recently, both countries have agreed to cooperate with each other in areas that could
otherwise create conflict between the two, such as bidding for energy deals abroad.

• At the global level, India and China have adopted similar policies in international economic
institutions like the World Trade Organisation.

• India’s nuclear tests in 1998, sometimes justified on the grounds of a threat from China, did not
stop greater interaction. It is true that China was seen as contributing to the build up of
Pakistan’s nuclear programme. China’s military relations with Bangladesh and Myanmar were
viewed as hostile to Indian interests in South Asia.

• However, none of these issues is likely to lead to conflict between the two.

• One sign of this is that the talks to resolve the boundary question have continued without
interruption and military-to-military cooperation is increasing.
• Increasing transportation and communication links, common economic interests and global
concerns should help establish a more positive and sound relationship between the two most
populous countries of the world.
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 CHAPTER 5

Contemporary South Asia

INTRODUCTION
• Let us shift our gaze from the larger global developments in the post-Cold War era to
developments in our own region, South Asia.

• When India and Pakistan joined the club of nuclear powers, this region suddenly became the
focus of global attention. India and Pakistan both became nuclear power and as a result this
region became important from the point of view of peace and security for the global leaders.

• The focus was, of course, on the various kinds of conflict in this region: there are pending
border and water sharing disputes between the states of the region.

• Besides, there are conflicts arising out of insurgency, ethnic strife and resource sharing. This
makes the region very turbulent.

• At the same time, many people in South Asia recognise the fact that this region can develop and
prosper if the states of the region cooperate with each other.

• In this chapter, we try to understand the nature of conflict and cooperation among different
countries of the region.

WHAT IS SOUTH ASIA?

• The expression ‘South Asia’ usually includes the following countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India,
the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

• The mighty Himalayas in the north and the vast Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of
Bengal in the south, west and east respectively provide a natural insularity to the region, which
is largely responsible for the linguistic, social and cultural distinctiveness of the subcontinent.

• The boundaries of the region are not as clear in the east and the west, as they are in the north
and the south.

• Afghanistan (exist left of Pakistan) and Myanmar (is exist towards the right of Northeast India)
are often included in discussions of the region as a whole. China is an important player but is not
considered to be a part of the region.

• Thus defined, South Asia stands for diversity in every sense and yet constitutes one geo-political
space.
 • The various countries in South Asia do not have the same kind of political systems.

• Despite many problems and limitations, Sri Lanka and India have successfully operated a
democratic system since their independence.

• Pakistan and Bangladesh have experienced both civilian and military rulers, with Bangladesh
remaining a democracy in the post-Cold War period.

• Till 2006, Nepal was a constitutional monarchy with the danger of the king taking over executive
powers. In 2006 a successful popular uprising led to the restoration of democracy and reduced
the king to a nominal position.

• Bhutan is still a monarchy but the king has initiated plans for its transition to multi-party
democracy.

• The Maldives, the other island nation, was a Sultanate till 1968 when it was transformed into a
republic with a presidential form of government.

• In June 2005, the parliament of the Maldives voted unanimously to introduce a multi-party
system.

• It was earlier believed that democracy could flourish and find support only in prosperous
countries of the world. In that sense the South Asian experience of democracy has expanded the
global imagination of democracy.

• Let us look at the experience of democracy in each of the four big countries of the region other
than India.

THE MILITARY AND DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN

• After Pakistan framed its first constitution, General Ayub Khan took over the administration of
the country and soon got himself elected.

• He had to give up office when there was popular dissatisfaction against his rule. This gave way
to a military takeover under General Yahya Khan.

• During Yahya’s military rule, Pakistan faced the Bangladesh crisis, and after a war with India in
1971, East Pakistan broke away to emerge as an independent country called Bangladesh.

• After this, an elected government under the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power in
Pakistan from 1971 to 1977.

• The Bhutto government was removed by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977.

 • General Zia faced a pro-democracy movement from 1982 onwards and and an elected
democratic government was established once again in 1988 under the leadership of Benazir
Bhutto.

• This phase of elective democracy lasted till 1999 when the army stepped in again and General
Pervez Musharraf removed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

• Pakistan continues to be ruled by the army, though the army rulers have held some elections to
give their rule a democratic image.

• Several factors have contributed to Pakistan’s failure in building a stable democracy. The social
dominance of the military, clergy, and landowning aristocracy has led to the frequent overthrow
of elected governments and the establishment of military government. Pakistan’s conflict with
India has made the promilitary groups more powerful.

• Pakistan has a courageous and relatively free press and a strong human rights movement.

• The lack of genuine international support for democratic rule in Pakistan has further encouraged
the military to continue its dominance. The United States and other Western countries have
encouraged the military’s authoritarian rule in the past, for their own reasons.

• Given their fear of the threat of what they call ‘global Islamic terrorism’ and the apprehension
that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal might fall into the hands of these terrorist groups, the military
regime in Pakistan has been seen as the protector of Western interests in West Asia and South
Asia.

DEMOCRACY IN BANGLADESH
• Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan from 1947 to 1971. It consisted of the partitioned areas of
Bengal and Assam from British India. The people of this region resented the domination of
western Pakistan and the imposition of the Urdu language. (In 1947, Britishers divided Indian
territory into two halves one was Pakistan and another was India. But Pakistan was not a single
continuous landmass and comprised of west Pakistan (Punjab region) and east Pakistan (now
Bangladesh).So basically, west Pakistan was Punjabi dominated and east Pakistan was Bengali
dominated. After the partition took place, the west Pakistan tried to dominate and impose its
culture on east Pakistan and thus people of east Pakistan gradually felt like second class citizens
in their own country because its culture was not valued and given due importance.)

• Soon after the partition, they began protests against the unfair treatment meted out to the
Bengali culture and language. They also demanded fair representation in administration and a
fair share in political power. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led the popular struggle against West
Pakistani domination. He demanded autonomy for the eastern region.
 • In the 1970 elections in the then Pakistan, the Awami League led by Sheikh Mujib won all the
seats in East Pakistan and secured a majority in the proposed constituent assembly for the
whole of Pakistan. But the government dominated by the West Pakistani leadership refused to
convene the assembly. Sheikh Mujib was arrested.

• Under the military rule of General Yahya Khan, the Pakistani army tried to suppress the mass
movement of the Bengali people.

• The government of India supported the demand of the people of East Pakistan for their
independence and helped them financially and militarily. This resulted in a war between India
and Pakistan in December 1971 that ended in the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East
Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh as an independent country.

• Bangladesh drafted its constitution declaring faith in secularism, democracy and socialism.
However, in 1975 Sheikh Mujib got the constitution amended to shift from the parliamentary to
presidential form of government. He also abolished all parties except his own, the Awami
League.

• This led to conflicts and tensions. In a dramatic and tragic development, he was assassinated in a
military uprising in August 1975. The new military ruler, Ziaur Rahman, formed his own
Bangladesh National Party and won elections in 1979.

• He was assassinated and another military takeover followed under the leadership of Lt Gen H.
M. Ershad.

• The people of Bangladesh soon rose in support of the demand for democracy. Students were in
the forefront. Ershad was forced to allow political activity on a limited scale. He was later
elected as President for five years.

• Mass public protests made Ershad step down in 1990. Elections were held in 1991. Since then
representative democracy based on multi-party elections has been working in Bangladesh.

MONARCHY AND DEMOCRACY IN NEPAL

• Nepal was a Hindu kingdom in the past and then a constitutional monarchy in the modern
period for many years.

• In 1990, the king accepted the demand for a new democratic constitution, in the wake of a
strong pro-democracy movement. However, democratic governments had a short and troubled
career.

• During the nineties, the Maoists of Nepal believed in armed insurrection against the monarch
and the ruling elite. This led to a violent conflict between the Maoist guerrillas and the armed
forces of the king.
 • In 2002, the king abolished the parliament and dismissed the government, thus ending even the
limited democracy that existed in Nepal.

• In April 2006, there were massive, country wide, prodemocracy protests. The struggling pro-
democracy forces achieved their first major victory when the king was forced to restore the
House of Representatives that had been dissolved in April 2002. The largely non-violent
movement was led by the Seven Party Alliance (SPA), the Maoists and social activists.

• Nepal’s transition to democracy is not complete. At the moment, Nepal is undergoing a unique
moment in its history because it is moving towards the formation of a constituent assembly that
will write the constitution for Nepal.

DEMOCRACY IN SRI LANKA

• Sri Lanka has retained democracy since its independence in 1948. But it faced a serious
challenge, not from the military or monarchy but rather from ethnic conflict leading to the
demand for secession by one of the regions.

• After its independence, politics in Sri Lanka (it was then known as Ceylon) was dominated by
forces that represented the interest of the majority Sinhala community. They were hostile to a
large number of Tamils who had migrated from India to Sri Lanka and settled there.

• The Sinhala nationalists thought that Sri Lanka should not give ‘concessions’ to the Tamils
because Sri Lanka belongs to the Sinhala people only. The neglect of Tamil concerns led to
militant Tamil nationalism.

• From 1983 onwards, the militant organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has
been fighting an armed struggle with the army of Sri Lanka and demanding ‘Tamil Eelam’ or a
separate country for the Tamils of Sri Lanka. The LTTE controls the northeastern parts of Sri
Lanka.

• The government of India has from time to time tried to negotiate with the Sri Lankan
government on the Tamil question. But in 1987, the government of India for the first time got
directly involved in the Sri Lankan Tamil question.

• India signed an accord with Sri Lanka and sent troops to stabilise relations between the Sri
Lankan government and the Tamils. Eventually, the Indian Army got into a fight with the LTTE.
The presence of Indian troops was also not liked much by the Sri Lankans. They saw this as an
attempt by India to interfere in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka. In 1989, the Indian Peace
Keeping Force (IPKF) pulled out of Sri Lanka without attaining its objective. (In 1989, Rajiv
Gandhi was assassinated by the member of LTTE in Tamil Nadu.)
 • In spite of the ongoing conflict, Sri Lanka has registered considerable economic growth and
recorded high levels of human development. Sri Lanka was one of the first developing countries
to successfully control the rate of growth of population, the first country in the region to
liberalise the economy, and it has had the highest per capita gross domestic product (GDP) for
many years right through the civil war.

• Despite the ravages of internal conflict, it has maintained a democratic political system.

INDIA-PAKISTAN CONFLICTS
• Soon after the partition, the two countries got embroiled in a conflict over the fate of Kashmir.
The Pakistani government claimed that Kashmir belonged to it. Wars between India and
Pakistan in 1947-48 and 1965 failed to settle the matter.

• The 1947-48 war resulted in the division of the province into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the
Indian province of Jammu and Kashmir divided by the Line of Control. In 1971, India won a
decisive war against Pakistan but the Kashmir issue remained unsettled.

• India’s conflict with Pakistan is also over strategic issues like the control of the Siachen glacier
and over acquisition of arms.

• In 1998, India conducted nuclear explosion in Pokaran. Pakistan responded within a few days by
carrying out nuclear tests in the Chagai Hills. Since then India and Pakistan seem to have built a
military relationship in which the possibility of a direct and full-scale war has declined.

• The Indian government has blamed the Pakistan government for using a strategy of low-key
violence by helping the Kashmiri militants with arms, training, money and protection to carry
out terrorist strikes against India.

• The Indian government also believes that Pakistan had aided the proKhalistani militants with
arms and ammunitions during the period 1985-1995.

• Its spy agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), is alleged to be involved in various anti-India
campaigns in India’s northeast, operating secretly through Bangladesh and Nepal.

• The government of Pakistan, in turn, blames the Indian government and its security agencies for
fomenting trouble in the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan.

• India and Pakistan also have had problems over the sharing of river waters.

• Eventually, in 1960, with the help of the World Bank, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters
Treaty which has survived to this day in spite of various military conflicts in which the two
countries have been involved.
 • The two countries are not in agreement over the demarcation line in Sir Creek in the Rann of
Kutch. India and Pakistan are holding negotiations on all these issues.

INDIA AND ITS OTHER NEIGHBOURS

• The governments of India and Bangladesh have had differences over several issues including the
sharing of the Ganga and Brahmaputra river waters. The Indian government has been unhappy
with Bangladesh’s denial of illegal immigration to India, its support for anti-Indian Islamic
fundamentalist groups, Bangladesh’s refusal to allow Indian troops to move through its territory
to northeastern India, and its decision not to export natural gas to India or allow Myanmar to do
so through Bangladeshi territory.

• Bangladeshi governments have felt that the Indian government behaves like a regional bully
over the sharing of river waters, encouraging rebellion in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, trying to
extract its natural gas and being unfair in trade.

• The two countries have not succeeded in resolving their boundary dispute.

• Despite their differences, India and Bangladesh do cooperate on many issues. Economic
relations have improved considerably in the last ten years.

• Bangladesh is a part of India’s Look East policy that wants to link up with Southeast Asia via
Myanmar.

• Nepal and India enjoy a very special relationship that has very few parallels in the world. A
treaty between the two countries allows the citizens of the two countries to travel to and work
in the other country without visas and passports. Despite this special relationship, the
governments of the two countries have had trade related disputes in the past. The Indian
government has often expressed displeasure at the warm relationship between Nepal and China
and at the Nepal government’s inaction against anti-Indian elements.

• Many leaders and citizens in Nepal think that the Indian government interferes in its internal
affairs, has designs on its river waters and hydro-electricity, and prevents Nepal, a landlocked
country, from getting easier access to the sea through Indian territory.

• Nevertheless, Indo-Nepal relations are fairly stable and peaceful.

• The difficulties in the relationship between the governments of India and Sri Lanka are mostly
over ethnic conflict in the island nation. After the military intervention in 1987, the Indian
government now prefers a policy of disengagement vis-à-vis Sri Lanka’s internal troubles.

• India signed a free trade agreement with Sri Lanka, which strengthened relations between two
countries. India’s help in post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka has also brought the two
countries closer.
 • India enjoys a very special relationship with Bhutan too and does not have any major conflict
with the Bhutanese government.

• The efforts made by the Bhutanese monarch to weed out the guerrillas and militants from
northeastern India that operate in his country have been helpful to India.

• India is involved in big hydroelectric projects in Bhutan and remains the Himalayan kingdom’s
biggest source of development aid.

• India’s ties with the Maldives remain warm and cordial. In November 1988, when some Tamil
mercenaries from Sri Lanka attacked the Maldives, the Indian air force and navy reacted quickly
to the Maldives’ request to help stop the invasion.

• India has also contributed towards the island’s economic development, tourism and fisheries.

• Not all conflicts in South Asia are between India and its neighbours. Nepal and Bhutan, as well as
Bangladesh and Myanmar, have had disagreements in the past over the migration of ethnic
Nepalese into Bhutan and the Rohingyas into Myanmar, respectively.

• Bangladesh and Nepal have had some differences over the future of the Himalayan river waters.

PEACE AND COOPERATION

• In spite of the many conflicts, the states of South Asia recognise the importance of cooperation
and friendly relationship, among themselves.

• The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is a major regional initiative by
the South Asian states to evolve cooperation through multilateral means. It began in 1985.

• Unfortunately, due to persisting political differences, SAARC has not had much success.

• SAARC members signed the South Asian Free Trade (SAFTA) agreement which promised the
formation of a free trade zone for the whole of South Asia.

• The Agreement was signed in 2004 and came into effect on 1 January 2006. SAFTA aims at
lowering trade tariffs by 20 percent by 2007.

• But some of our neighbours fear that SAFTA is a way for India to ‘invade’ their markets and to
influence their societies and politics through commercial ventures and a commercial presence in
their countries.

• India thinks that there are real economic benefits for all from SAFTA and that a region that
trades more freely will be able to cooperate better on political issues.
• Some in India think that SAFTA is not worth the trouble since India already has bilateral
agreements with Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

• Although India-Pakistan relations seem to be a story of endemic conflict and violence, there
have been a series of efforts to manage tensions and build peace. The two countries have
agreed to undertake confidence building measures to reduce the risk of war.

• No region exists in a vacuum. It is influenced by outside powers and events no matter how much
it may try to insulate itself from non-regional powers. China and the United States remain key
players in South Asian politics.

• Sino-Indian relations have improved significantly in the last ten years, but China’s strategic
partnership with Pakistan remains a major irritant. The demands of development and
globalisation have brought the two Asian giants closer, and their economic ties have multiplied
rapidly since 1991.

• American involvement in South Asia has rapidly increased after the Cold War. The US has had
good relations with both India and Pakistan since the end of the Cold War and increasingly
works as a moderator in India-Pakistan relations.

• The large South Asian diasporas in the US and the huge size of the population and markets of
the region also give America an added stake in the future of regional security and peace.

• However, whether South Asia will continue to be known as a conflict prone zone or will evolve
into a regional bloc with some common cultural features and trade interests will depend more
on the people and the governments of the region than any other outside power (like USA).
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 CHAPTER 6

International Organisations

INTRODUCTION
• In this chapter we shall discuss the role of international organisations after the collapse of the
Soviet Union.

• We shall examine how, in this emerging world, there were calls for the restructuring of
international organisations to cope with various new challenges including the rise of US power.

• The potential reform of the United Nations Security Council is an interesting case of the reform
process and its difficulties.

• We then turn to India’s involvement in the UN and its view of Security Council reforms.

• The chapter closes by asking if the UN can play any role in dealing with a world dominated by
one superpower.

• In this chapter we also look at some other transnational organisations that are playing a crucial
role.

WHY INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS?

• The UN is generally regarded as the most important international organisation in today’s world.
In the eyes of many people all over the world, it is indispensable and represents the great hope
of humanity for peace and progress.

• Why do we then need organisations like the UN?

• International organisations are not the answer to everything, but they are important.
International organisations help with matters of war and peace. They also help countries
cooperate to make better living conditions for us all.

• Countries have conflicts and differences with each other. That does not necessarily mean they
must go to war to deal with their antagonisms. They can, instead, discuss contentious issues and
find peaceful solutions. The role of an international organisation can be important in this
context.

• An international organisation is not a super-state with authority over its members. It is created
by and responds to states. It comes into being when states agree to its creation. Once created, it
can help member states resolve their problems peacefully.
 • There are issues that are so challenging that they can only be dealt with when everyone works
together. (like Global warming)

• Unfortunately, recognising the need for cooperation and actually cooperating are two different
things. Nations can recognise the need to cooperate but cannot always agree on

• how best to do so,

• how to share the costs of cooperating,

• how to make sure that the benefits of cooperating are justly divided, and

• how to ensure that others do not break their end of the bargain and cheat on an
agreement.

• An international organisation can help produce information and ideas about how to cooperate.

• It can provide mechanisms, rules and a bureaucracy, to help members have more confidence
that costs will be shared properly, that the benefits will be fairly divided, and that once a
member joins an agreement it will honour the terms and conditions of the agreement.

EVOLUTION OF THE UN
• The First World War encouraged the world to invest in an international organisation to deal with
conflict. As a result, the League of Nations was born. However, despite its initial success, it could
not prevent the Second World War (1939-45).

• The UN was founded as a successor to the League of Nations. It was established in 1945
immediately after the Second World War. The organisation was set up through the signing of
the United Nations Charter by 51 states. The UN’s objective is to prevent international conflict
and to facilitate cooperation among states.

• By 2006, the UN had 192 member states. These includeed almost all independent states.

• In the UN General Assembly, all members have one vote each.

• In the UN Security Council, there are five permanent members. These are: the United States,
Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China.

• These states were selected as permanent members as they were the most powerful
immediately after the Second World War and because they constituted the victors in the War.

• The UN’s most visible public figure, and the representative head, is the Secretary-General.
 • Social and economic issues are dealt with by many agencies including the World Health
Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations
Human Rights Commision (UNHRC), the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR),
the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), among others.

REFORM OF THE UN AFTER THE COLD WAR

• Reform and improvement are fundamental to any organisation to serve the needs of a changing
environment. The UN is no exception.

• Two basic kinds of reforms face the UN:

• reform of the organisation’s structures and processes; and

• a review of the issues that fall within the jurisdiction of the organisation.

• Almost everyone is agreed that both aspects of reform are necessary. What they cannot agree
on is precisely what is to be done, how it is to be done, and when it is to be done.

• On the reform of structures and processes, the biggest discussion has been on the functioning of
the Security Council.

• Related to this has been the demand for an increase in the UN Security Council’s permament
and non-permanent membership so that the realities of contemporary world politics are better
reflected in the structure of the organisation. In particular, there are proposals to increase
membership from Asia, Africa and South America.

• Beyond this, the US and other Western countries want improvements in the UN’s budgetary
procedures and its administration.

• The UN was established in 1945 immediately after the Second World War. After the Cold War,
those realities are different. Here are some of the changes that have occurred:

• The Soviet Union has collapsed.

• The US is the strongest power. (US acted as a hegemony)

• The relationship between Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, and the US is much more
cooperative.

• China is fast emerging as a great power, and India also is growing rapidly.

• The economies of Asia are growing at an unprecedented rate.

 • Many new countries have joined the UN (as they became independent from the Soviet Union or
former communist states in eastern Europe).

• A whole new set of challenges confronts the world (genocide, civil war, ethnic conflict,
terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, environmental degradation, epidemics).

• In this situation, in 1989, as the Cold War was ending, the question facing the world was:

• Is the UN doing enough?

• Is it equipped to do what is required?

• What should it be doing? And how?

• What reforms are necessary to make it work better?]

REFORM OF STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES

• In 1992, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution. The resolution reflected three main
complaints:

1. The Security Council no longer represents contemporary political realities.

2. Its decisions reflect only Western values and interests and are dominated by a few powers.

3. It lacks equitable representation.

 In view of these growing demands for the restructuring of the UN, on 1 January 1997, the UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan initiated an inquiry into how the UN should be reformed. How, for
instance, should new Security Council members be chosen?
 The following are just some of the criteria that have been proposed for new permanent and
non-permanent members of the Security Council.
 A new member, it has been suggested, should be:
 A major economic power
 A major military power
 A substantial contributor to the UN budget
 A big nation in terms of its population
 A nation that respects democracy and human rights
 A country that would make the Council more representative of the world’s diversity in
terms of geography, economic systems, and culture.
 Clearly, each of these criteria has some validity. Governments saw advantages in some criteria
and disadvantages in others depending on their interests and aspirations.
 Even if they had no desire to be members themselves, countries could see that the criteria were
problematic.
  How big an economic or military power did you have to be to qualify for Security Council
membership?
 What level of budget contribution would enable a state to buy its way into the Council?
 Was a big population an asset or a liability for a country trying to play a bigger role in the world?
 Furthermore, how was the matter of representation to be resolved? Did equitable
representation in geographical terms mean that there should be one seat each from Asia, Africa,
and Latin America and the Caribbean?
 A related issue was to change the nature of membership altogether. Some insisted, for instance,
that the veto power of the five permanent members be abolished. Many perceived the veto to
be in conflict with the concept of democracy and sovereign equality in the UN and thought that
the veto was no longer right or relevant.
 In the Security Council, there are five permanent members and ten non-permanent members.
The Charter gave the permanent members a privileged position to bring about stability in the
world after the Second World War. The main privileges of the five permanent members are
permanency and the veto power.
 The non-permanent members serve for only two years at a time and give way after that period
to newly elected members. A country cannot be re-elected immediately after completing a term
of two years. The non-permanent members are elected in a manner so that they represent all
continents of the world.
 Most importantly, the non-permanent members do not have the veto power. What is the veto
power? In taking decisions, the Security Council proceeds by voting. All members have one vote.
 However, the permanent members can vote in a negative manner so that even if all other
permanent and non-permanent members vote for a particular decision, any permanent
member’s negative vote can stall the decision. This negative vote is the veto.
 Without the veto, there is the danger as in 1945 that the great powers would lose interest in the
world body, that they would do what they pleased outside it, and that without their support and
involvement the body would be ineffective.

JURISDICTION OF THE UN
• The following steps should be taken to make the UN more relevant in the changing context.

• Creation of a Peacebuilding Commission

• Acceptance of the responsibility of the international community in case of failures of

national governments to protect their own citizens from atrocities

• Establishment of a Human Rights Council (operational since 19 June 2006)

• Agreements to achieve the Millennium Development Goals

• Condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations

 • Creation of a Democracy Fund

• An agreement to wind up the Trusteeship Council

INDIA AND THE UN REFORMS

• India has supported the restructuring of the UN on several grounds. It believes that a
strengthened and revitalised UN is desirable in a changing world.

• India also supports an enhanced role for the UN in promoting development and cooperation
among states.

• India believes that development should be central to the UN’s agenda as it is a vital precondition
for the maintenance of international peace and security.

• One of India’s major concerns has been the composition of the Security Council, which has
remained largely static while the UN General Assembly membership has expanded considerably.

• The membership of the UN Security Council was expanded from 11 to 15 in 1965. But, there was
no change in the number of permanent members. Since then, the size of the Council has
remained stationary.

• India supports an increase in the number of both permanent and non-permanent members.

• Not surprisingly, India itself also wishes to be a permanent member in a restructured UN.

• India is the second most populous country in the world comprising almost one-fifth of the world
population. Moreover, India is also the world’s largest democracy. India has participated in
virtually all of the initiatives of the UN. Its role in the UN’s peacekeeping efforts is a long and
substantial one. The country’s economic emergence on the world stage is another factor that
perhaps justifies India’s claim to a permanent seat in the Security Council.

• India has also made regular financial contributions to the UN and never faltered on its
payments.

• India is aware that permanent membership of the Security Council also has symbolic
importance. It signifies a country’s growing importance in world affairs. This greater status is an
advantage to a country in the conduct of its foreign policy: the reputation for being powerful
makes you more influential.

• Despite India’s wish to be a permanent veto-wielding member of the UN, some countries
question its inclusion.

• Neighbouring Pakistan, with which India has troubled relations, is not the only country that is
reluctant to see India become a permanent veto member of the Security Council.
 • Yet others feel that if India is included, then other emerging powers will have to be
accommodated such as Brazil, Germany, Japan, perhaps even South Africa, whom they oppose.

• There are those who feel that Africa and South America must be represented in any expansion
of the permanent membership since those are the only continents not to have representation in
the present structure.

• Given these concerns, it may not be very easy for India or anyone else to become a permanent
member of the UN in the near future.

THE UN IN A UNIPOLAR WORLD

• Can the UN serve as a balance against US dominance?

• Can it help maintain a dialogue between the rest of the world and the US and prevent America
from doing whatever it wants?

• US power cannot be easily checked. First of all, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the
US stands as the only superpower. Its military and economic power allow it to ignore the UN or
any other international organisation.

• Secondly, within the UN, the influence of the US is considerable. As the single largest
contributor to the UN, the US has unmatched financial power. The fact that the UN is physically
located within the US territory gives Washington additional sources of influence. The US also has
many nationals in the UN bureaucracy.

• The US can and does use this power to “split” the rest of the world and to reduce opposition to
its policies.

• The UN is not therefore a great balance to the US.

• Nevertheless, in a unipolar world in which the US is dominant, the UN can and has served to
bring the US and the rest of the world into discussions over various issues.

• US leaders, in spite of their frequent criticism of the UN, do see the organisation as serving a
purpose in bringing together over 190 nations in dealing with conflict and social and economic
development. As for the rest of the world, the UN provides an arena in which it is possible to
modify US attitudes and policies.

• While the rest of the world is rarely united against Washington, and while it is virtually
impossible to “balance” US power, the UN does provide a space within which arguments against
specific US attitudes and policies are heard and compromises and concessions can be shaped.
• The UN is an imperfect body, but without it the world would be worse off. Given the growing
connections and links between societies and issues—what we often call ‘interdependence’—it is
hard to imagine how more than seven billion people would live together without an
organisation such as the UN. Technology promises to increase planetary interdependence, and
therefore the importance of the UN will only increase.

• Peoples and governments will have to find ways of supporting and using the UN and other
international organisations in ways that are consistent with their own interests and the interests
of the international community more broadly.
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 CHAPTER 7

Security in Contemporary World

INTRODUCTION
• In reading about world politics, we frequently encounter the terms ‘security’ or ‘national
security’. Do we know what these terms mean?

• Often, they are used to stop debate and discussion. We hear that an issue is a security issue and
that it is vital for the well-being of the country.

• The implication is that it is too important or secret to be debated and discussed openly.

• As citizens of a democracy, we need to know more about the term security.

• What exactly is it?

• And what are India’s security concerns?

• This chapter debates these questions.

• It introduces two different ways of looking at security and highlights the importance of keeping
in mind different contexts or situations which determine our view of security.

WHAT IS SECURITY?
• At its most basic, security implies freedom from threats.

• Human existence and the life of a country are full of threats.

• Does that mean that every single threat counts as a security threat?

• Every time a person steps out of his or her house, there is some degree of threat to their
existence and way of life.

• Our world would be saturated with security issues if we took such a broad view of what is
threatening.

• Those who study security, therefore, generally say that only those things that threaten ‘core
values’ should be regarded as being of interest in discussions of security.

• Whose core values though? The core values of the country as a whole? The core values of
ordinary women and men in the street? Do governments, on behalf of citizens, always have the
same notion of core values as the ordinary citizen?
 • Furthermore, when we speak of threats to core values, how intense should the threats be?

• Every time another country does something or fails to do something, this may damage the core
values of one’s country. Every time a person is robbed in the streets, the security of ordinary
people as they live their daily lives is harmed.

• We would be paralysed if we took such an extensive view of security: everywhere we looked,

the world would be full of dangers.

• So we are brought to a conclusion:

• Security relates only to extremely dangerous threats— threats that could so endanger core
values that those values would be damaged beyond repair if we did not do something to deal
with the situation.

• Let us begin by putting the various notions of security under two groups:

• traditional and non-traditional conceptions of security.

TRADITIONAL NOTIONS: EXTERNAL

• In the traditional conception of security, the greatest danger to a country is from military
threats. The source of this danger is another country which by threatening military action
endangers the core values of sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. Military action
also endangers the lives of ordinary citizens.

• In responding to the threat of war, a government has three basic choices:

• to surrender; (it means giving up on the war and not ready to retaliate instead the
country surrendered)

• to prevent the other side from attacking by promising to raise the costs of war to an
unacceptable level; and

• to defend itself when war actually breaks out so as to deny the attacking country its
objectives and to turn back or defeat the attacking forces altogether.

• Governments may choose to surrender when actually confronted by war, but they will not
advertise this as the policy of the country.

• Therefore, security policy is concerned with preventing war, which is called deterrence, and
with limiting or ending war, which is called defence.

• Traditional security policy has a third component called balance of power. When countries look
around them, they see that some countries are bigger and stronger. This is a clue to who might
 be a threat in the future. For instance, a neighbouring country may not say it is preparing for
attack. There may be no obvious reason for attack. But the fact that this country is very
powerful is a sign that at some point in the future it may choose to be aggressive.

• Governments are, therefore, very sensitive to the balance of power between their country and
other countries.

• They do work hard to maintain a favourable balance of power with other countries, especially
those close by, those with whom they have differences, or with those they have had conflicts in
the past.

• A good part of maintaining a balance of power is to build up one’s military power, although
economic and technological power are also important since they are the basis for military
power.

• A fourth and related component of traditional security policy is alliance building. An alliance is a
coalition of states that coordinate their actions to deter or defend against military attack. Most
alliances are formalised in written treaties and are based on a fairly clear identification of who
constitutes the threat.

• Countries form alliances to increase their effective power relative to another country or alliance.
Alliances are based on national interests and can change when national interests change.

• For example, the US backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the
1980s, but later attacked them when Al Qaeda—a group of Islamic militants led by Osama bin
Laden—launched terrorist strikes against America on 11 September 2001.

• In the traditional view of security, then, most threats to a country’s security come from outside
its borders. That is because the international system is a rather brutal arena in which there is no
central authority capable of controlling behaviour.

• Within a country, the threat of violence is regulated by an acknowledged central authority —

the government. In world politics, there is no acknowledged central authority that stands above
everyone else.

• It is tempting to think that the United Nations is such an authority or could become such an
institution.

• However, as presently constituted, the UN is a creature of its members and has authority only to
the extent that the membership allows it to have authority and obeys it. So, in world politics,
each country has to be responsible for its own security.
TRADITIONAL NOTIONS: INTERNAL
• Traditional security must also, therefore, concern itself with internal security. The reason it is
not given so much importance is that after the Second World War it seemed that, for the most
powerful countries on earth, internal security was more or less assured.

• After 1945, the US and the Soviet Union appeared to be united and could expect peace within
their borders. Most of the European countries, particularly the powerful Western European
countries, faced no serious threats from groups or communities living within those borders.
Therefore, these countries focused primarily on threat.

• As the colonies became free from the late 1940s onwards, their security concerns were often
similar to that of the European powers. Some of the newly independent countries, like the
European powers, became members of the Cold War alliances.

• They, therefore, had to worry about the Cold War becoming a hot war and dragging them into
hostilities — against neighbours who might have joined the other side in the Cold War, against
the leaders of the alliances (the United States or Soviet Union), or against any of the other
partners of the US and Soviet Union.

• The security challenges facing the newly-independent countries of Asia and Africa were different
from the challenges in Europe in two ways. For one thing, the new countries faced the prospect
of military conflict with neighbouring countries. For another, they had to worry about internal
military conflict. These countries faced threats not only from outside their borders, mostly from
neighbours, but also from within.

• Many newly independent countries came to fear their neighbours even more than they feared
the US or Soviet Union or the former colonial powers. They quarrelled over borders and
territories or control of people and populations or all of these simultaneously.

• Internally, the new states worried about threats from separatist movements which wanted to
form independent countries. Sometimes, the external and internal threats merged. A neighbour
might help or instigate an internal separatist movement leading to tensions between the two
neighbouring countries. Internal wars now make up more than 95 per cent of all armed conflicts
fought anywhere in the world.

• Between 1946 and 1991, there was a twelve-fold rise in the number of civil wars—the greatest
jump in 200 years. So, for the new states, external wars with neighbours and internal wars
posed a serious challenge to their security.
TRADITIONAL SECURITY AND COOPERATION
• In traditional security, there is a recognition that cooperation in limiting violence is possible.
These limits relate both to the ends and the means of war. It is now an almost universally-
accepted view that countries should only go to war for the right reasons, primarily self-defence
or to protect other people from genocide.

• War must also be limited in terms of the means that are used. Armies must avoid killing or
hurting noncombatants as well as unarmed and surrendering combatants. They should not be
excessively violent. Force must in any case be used only after all the alternatives have failed.

• Traditional views of security do not rule out other forms of cooperation as well. The most
important of these are disarmament, arms control, and confidence building. Disarmament
requires all states to give up certain kinds of weapons. For example, the 1972 Biological
Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) banned the
production and possession of these weapons. More than 155 states acceded to the BWC and
181 states acceded to the CWC.

• Both conventions included all the great powers.

• Arms control regulates the acquisition or development of weapons. The Anti-ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty in 1972 tried to stop the United States and Soviet Union from using ballistic
missiles as a defensive shield to launch a nuclear attack.

• While it did allow both countries to deploy a very limited number of defensive systems, it
stopped them from large-scale production of those systems.

• The US and Soviet Union signed a number of other arms control treaties including the Strategic
Arms Limitations Treaty II or SALT II and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

• The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 was an arms control treaty in the sense that
it regulated the acquisition of nuclear weapons: those countries that had tested and
manufactured nuclear weapons before 1967 were allowed to keep their weapons; and those
that had not done so were to give up the right to acquire them. The NPT did not abolish nuclear
weapons; rather, it limited the number of countries that could have them.

• Traditional security also accepts confidence building as a means of avoiding violence.

• Confidence building is a process in which countries share ideas and information with their rivals.
They tell each other about their military intentions and, up to a point, their military plans. This is
a way of demonstrating that they are not planning a surprise attack.

• They also tell each other about the kind of forces they possess, and they may share information
on where those forces are deployed.
 • In short, confidence building is a process designed to ensure that rivals do not go to war through
misunderstanding or misperception.

• Overall, traditional conceptions of security are principally concerned with the use, or threat of
use, of military force. In traditional security, force is both the principal threat to security and the
principal means of achieving security.

NON-TRADITIONAL NOTIONS
• Non-traditional notions of security go beyond military threats to include a wide range of threats
and dangers affecting the conditions of human existence. They begin by questioning the
traditional referent of security.

• In doing so, they also question the other three elements of security —

• What is being secured,

• From what kind of threats and

• The approach to security.

• Human security is about the protection of people more than the protection of states. Human
security and state security should be — and often are — the same thing. But secure states do
not automatically mean secure peoples.

• Protecting citizens from foreign attack may be a necessary condition for the security of
individuals, but it is certainly not a sufficient one.

• Indeed, during the last 100 years, more people have been killed by their own governments than
by foreign armies.

• All proponents of human security agree that its primary goal is the protection of individuals.

• Proponents of the ‘narrow’ concept of human security focus on violent threats to individuals or,
as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan puts it, “the protection of communities and
individuals from internal violence”.

• Proponents of the ‘broad’ concept of human security argue that the threat agenda should
include hunger, disease and natural disasters because these kill far more people than war,
genocide and terrorism combined. Human security policy, they argue, should protect people
from these threats as well as from violence.

• In its broadest formulation, the human security agenda also encompasses economic security
and ‘threats to human dignity’.
 • Put differently, the broadest formulation stresses what has been called ‘freedom from want’
and ‘freedom from fear’, respectively.

• The idea of global security emerged in the 1990s in response to the global nature of threats such
as global warming, international terrorism, and health epidemics like AIDS and bird flu and so
on. No country can resolve these problems alone. And, in some situations, one country may
have to disproportionately bear the brunt of a global problem such as environmental
degradation.

• For example, due to global warming, a sea level rise of 1.5–2.0 meters would flood 20 percent of
Bangladesh, inundate most of the Maldives, and threaten nearly half the population of Thailand.
Since these problems are global in nature, international cooperation is vital, even though it is
difficult to achieve.

NEW SOURCES OF THREATS

• The non-traditional conceptions— both human security and global security—focus on the
changing nature of threats to security.

• Terrorism refers to political violence that targets civilians deliberately and indiscriminately.
International terrorism involves the citizens or territory of more than one country. Terrorist
groups seek to change a political context or condition that they do not like by force or threat of
force. Civilian targets are usually chosen to terrorise the public and to use the unhappiness of
the public as a weapon against national governments or other parties in conflict.

• Human rights have come to be classified into three types. The first type is political rights such as
freedom of speech and assembly. The second type is economic and social rights. The third type
is the rights of colonised people or ethnic and indigenous minorities. While there is broad
agreement on this classification, there is no agreement on which set of rights should be
considered as universal human rights, nor what the international community should do when
rights are being violated.

• Since the 1990s, developments such as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda, and
the Indonesian military’s killing of people in East Timor have led to a debate on whether or not
the UN should intervene to stop human rights abuses.

• Global poverty is another source of insecurity. Currently, half the world’s population growth
occurs in just six countries—India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

• High per capita income and low population growth make rich states or rich social groups get
richer, whereas low incomes and high population growth reinforce each other to make poor
states and poor groups get poorer. Globally, this disparity contributes to the gap between the
Northern and Southern countries of the world.
 • Health epidemics such as HIV-AIDS, bird flu, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have
rapidly spread across countries through migration, business, tourism and military operations.

• By 2003, an estimated 4 crore people were infected with HIVAIDS worldwide, two-thirds of
them in Africa and half of the rest in South Asia.

• In North America and other industrialised countries, new drug therapies dramatically lowered
the death rate from HIVAIDS in the late 1990s.

• Other new and poorly understood diseases such as ebola virus, hantavirus, and hepatitis C have
emerged, while old diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever and cholera have mutated
into drug resistant forms that are difficult to treat.

• Expansion of the concept of security does not mean that we can include any kind of disease or
distress in the ambit of security. If we do that, the concept of security stands to lose its
coherence. Everything could become a security issue.

COOPERATIVE SECURITY
• We can see that dealing with many of these non-traditional threats to security require
cooperation rather than military confrontation.

• Military force may have a role to play in combating terrorism or in enforcing human rights (and
even here there is a limit to what force can achieve), but it is difficult to see what force would do
to help alleviate poverty, manage migration and refugee movements, and control epidemics.

• Far more effective is to devise strategies that involve international cooperation. Cooperation
may be bilateral (i.e. between any two countries), regional, continental, or global. It would all
depend on the nature of the threat and the willingness and ability of countries to respond.

• Cooperative security may also involve a variety of other players, both international and
national—international organisations (the UN, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank,
the IMF etc.), nongovernmental organisations (Amnesty International, the Red Cross),
businesses and corporations, and great personalities (e.g. Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela).

• Cooperative security may involve the use of force as a last resort. The international community
may have to sanction the use of force to deal with governments that kill their own people or
ignore the misery of their populations who are devastated by poverty, disease and catastrophe.
It may have to agree to the use of violence against international terrorists and those who
harbour them.

• Non-traditional security is much better when the use of force is sanctioned and applied
collectively by the international community rather than when an individual country decides to
use force on its own.
INDIA’S SECURITY STRATEGY
• India has faced traditional (military) and non-traditional threats to its security that have
emerged from within as well as outside its borders. Its security strategy has four broad
components, which have been used in a varying combination from time to time.

• The first component was strengthening its military capabilities because India has been involved
in conflicts with its neighbours — Pakistan in 1947–48, 1965, 1971 and 1999; and China in 1962.
Since it is surrounded by nuclear armed countries in the South Asian region, India’s decision to
conduct nuclear tests in 1998 was justified by the Indian government in terms of safeguarding
national security. India first tested a nuclear device in 1974.

• The second component of India’s security strategy has been to strengthen international norms
and international institutions to protect its security interests.

• India also took initiatives to bring about a universal and non-discriminatory non-proliferation
regime in which all countries would have the same rights and obligations with respect to
weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical). It argued for an equitable New
International Economic Order (NIEO).

• Most importantly, it used non-alignment to help carve out an area of peace outside the bloc
politics of the two superpowers. India joined 160 countries that have signed and ratified the
1997 Kyoto Protocol, which provides a roadmap for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases
to check global warming.

• Indian troops have been sent abroad on UN peacekeeping missions in support of cooperative
security initiatives.

• The third component of Indian security strategy is geared towards meeting security challenges
within the country. Several militant groups from areas such as the Nagaland, Mizoram, the
Punjab, and Kashmir among others have, from time to time, sought to break away from India.

• India has tried to preserve national unity by adopting a democratic political system, which
allows different communities and groups of people to freely articulate their grievances and
share political power.

• Finally, there has been an attempt in India to develop its economy in a way that the vast mass of
citizens are lifted out of poverty and misery and huge economic inequalities are not allowed to
exist. The attempt has not quite succeeded; we are still a very poor and unequal country. Yet
democratic politics allows spaces for articulating the voice of the poor and the deprived citizens.

• There is a pressure on the democratically elected governments to combine economic growth

with human development.
• Thus, democracy is not just a political ideal; a democratic government is also a way to provide
greater security.

• You will read more about the successes and failures of Indian democracy in this respect in the
textbook on politics in India since independence.
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 CHAPTER 8

Environment and Natural Resources

INTRODUCTION
• This chapter examines the growing significance of environmental as well as resource issues in
world politics.

• It analyses in a comparative perspective some of the important environmental movements

against the backdrop of the rising profile of environmentalism from the 1960s onwards. Notions
of common property resources and the global commons too are assessed.

• We also discuss, in brief, the stand taken by India in more recent environmental debates.

• Next follows a brief account of the geopolitics of resource competition.

• We conclude by taking note of the indigenous peoples’ voices and concerns from the margins of
contemporary world politics.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS IN GLOBAL POLITICS

• In this book we have discussed ‘world politics’ in a fairly limited sense: wars and treaties, rise
and decline of state power, the relationship between the governments that represent their
countries in the international arena and the role of intergovernmental organisations.

• Now consider some other issues. Do you think they fall within the scope of contemporary world
politics?

• Throughout the world, cultivable area is barely expanding any more, and a substantial portion of
existing agricultural land is losing fertility. Grasslands have been overgrazed and fisheries
overharvested. Water bodies have suffered extensive depletion and pollution, severely
restricting food production.

• According to the Human Development Report 2006 of the United Nations Development
Programme, 1.2 billion people in developing countries have no access to safe water and 2.6
billion have no access to sanitation, resulting in the death of more than three million children
every year.

• Natural forests — which help stabilise the climate, moderate water supplies, and harbour a
majority of the planet’s biodiversity on land—are being cut down and people are being
displaced. The loss of biodiversity continues due to the destruction of habitat in areas which are
rich in species.
• A steady decline in the total amount of ozone in the Earth’s stratosphere (commonly referred to
as the ozone hole) poses a real danger to ecosystems and human health.

• Coastal pollution too is increasing globally. Although the open sea is relatively clean, the coastal
waters are becoming increasingly polluted largely due to land-based activities. If unchecked,
intensive human settlement of coastal zones across the globe will lead to further deterioration
in the quality of marine environment.

• You might ask are we not talking here about ‘natural phenomena’ that should be studied in
geography rather than in political science. But think about it again.

• If the various governments take steps to check environmental degradation of the kind
mentioned above, these issues will have political consequences in that sense. Most of them are
such that no single government can address them fully.

• Therefore, they have to become part of ‘world politics’.

• Issues of environment and natural resources are political in another deeper sense.

• Who causes environmental degradation?

• Who pays the price?

• And who is responsible for taking corrective action?

• Who gets to use how much of the natural resources of the Earth?

• All these raise the issue of who wields how much power. They are, therefore, deeply political
questions.

• The Club of Rome, a global think tank, published a book in 1972 entitled Limits to Growth,
dramatising the potential depletion of the Earth’s resources against the backdrop of rapidly
growing world population.

• International agencies, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), began
holding international conferences and promoting detailed studies to get a more coordinated
and effective response to environmental problems. Since then, the environment has emerged as
a significant issue of global politics.

• The growing focus on environmental issues within the arena of global politics was firmly
consolidated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. This was also called the Earth Summit.

• The summit was attended by 170 states, thousands of NGOs and many multinational
corporations. Five years earlier, the 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, had warned
 that traditional patterns of economic growth were not sustainable in the long term, especially in
view of the demands of the South for further industrial development. (The First world country
were already developed but third world country were under developed therefore they
demanded for industrialisation and as a result of which the emission of polluted gases was
bound to happen.)

• At the Rio Summit, the rich and developed countries of the First World, generally referred to as
the ‘global North’ were pursuing a different environmental agenda than the poor and
developing countries of the Third World, called the ‘global South’.

• Whereas the Northern states were concerned with ozone depletion and global warming, the
Southern states were anxious to address the relationship between economic development and
environmental management.

• The Rio Summit produced conventions dealing with climate change, biodiversity, forestry, and
recommended a list of development practices called ‘Agenda 21’. But it left unresolved
considerable differences and difficulties. There was a consensus on combining economic growth
with ecological responsibility. This approach to development is commonly known as ‘sustainable
development’.

• Some critics have pointed out that Agenda 21 was biased in favour of economic growth rather
than ensuring ecological conservation.

THE PROTECTION OF GLOBAL COMMONS

• ‘Commons’ are those resources which are not owned by anyone but rather shared by a
community. This could be a ‘common room’, a ‘community centre’, a park or a river.

• Similarly, there are some areas or regions of the world which are located outside the sovereign
jurisdiction of any one state, and therefore require common governance by the international
community. These are known as res communis humanitatis or global commons. They include
the earth’s atmosphere, Antarctica, the ocean floor, and outer space.

• Cooperation over the global commons is not easy. There have been many path-breaking
agreements such as the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and the 1991
Antarctic Environmental Protocol.

• A major problem underlying all ecological issues relates to the difficulty of achieving consensus
on common environmental agendas on the basis of vague scientific evidence and time frames.

• In that sense the discovery of the ozone hole over the Antarctic in the mid-1980s revealed the
opportunity as well as dangers inherent in tackling global environmental problems.
 • Similarly, the history of outer space as a global commons shows that the management of these
areas is thoroughly influenced by North-South inequalities.

COMMON BUT DIFFERENTIATED RESPONSIBILITY

• We have noted above a difference in the approach to environment between the countries of the
North and the South.

• The developed countries of the North want to discuss the environmental issue as it stands now
and want everyone to be equally responsible for ecological conservation.

• The developing countries of the South feel that much of the ecological degradation in the world
is the product of industrial development undertaken by the developed countries.

• If they have caused more degradation, they must also take more responsibility for undoing the
damage now. Moreover, the developing countries are in the process of industrialisation and
they must not be subjected to the same restrictions, which apply to the developed countries.

• Thus, the special needs of the developing countries must be taken into account in the
development, application, and interpretation of rules of international environmental law. This
argument was accepted in the Rio Declaration at the Earth Summit in 1992 and is called the
principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.

• The relevant part of the Rio Declaration says that “States shall cooperate in the spirit of global
partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem.

• In view of the different contributions of global environmental degradation, states have common
but differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries acknowledge the responsibility that
they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development in view of the pressures their
societies place on the global environment and of the technological and financial resources they
command.”

• The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) also provides
that the parties should act to protect the climate system “on the basis of equity and in
accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

• The parties to the Convention agreed that the largest share of historical and current global
emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries. It was also acknowledged
that per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low.

• China, India, and other developing countries were, therefore, exempted from the requirements
of the Kyoto Protocol.
 • The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement setting targets for industrialised countries to
cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

• Certain gases like Carbon dioxide, Methane, Hydro-fluoro carbons etc. are considered at least
partly responsible for global warming - the rise in global temperature which may have
catastrophic consequences for life on Earth.

• The protocol was agreed to in 1997 in Kyoto in Japan, based on principles set out in UNFCCC.

COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCES

• Common property represents common property for the group. The underlying norm here is that
members of the group have both rights and duties with respect to the nature, levels of use, and
the maintenance of a given resource.

• Through mutual understanding and centuries of practice, many village communities in India, for
example, have defined members’ rights and responsibilities.

• A combination of factors, including privatisation, agricultural intensification, population growth

and ecosystem degradation have caused common property to dwindle in size, quality, and
availability to the poor in much of the world.

• The institutional arrangement for the actual management of the sacred groves on state-owned
forest land appropriately fits the description of a common property regime. Along the forest belt
of South India, sacred groves have been traditionally managed by village communities.
INDIA’S STAND ON ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
• India signed and ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in August 2002. India, China and other
developing countries were exempt from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol because their
contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases during the industrialisation period (that is
believed to be causing today’s global warming and climate change) was not significant.

• However, the critics of the Kyoto Protocol point out that sooner or later, both India and China,
along with other developing countries, will be among the leading contributors to greenhouse
gas emission.

• At the G-8 meeting in June 2005, India pointed out that the per capita emission rates of the
developing countries are a tiny fraction of those in the developed world.

• Following the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, India is of the view that the
major responsibility of curbing emission rests with the developed countries, which have
accumulated emissions over a long period of time.

• India’s international negotiating position relies heavily on principles of historical responsibility,

as enshrined in UNFCCC. This acknowledges that developed countries are responsible for most
historical and current greenhouse emissions, and emphasizes that ‘economic and social
development are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country parties’.

• So India is wary of recent discussions within UNFCCC about introducing binding commitments on
rapidly industrialising countries (such as Brazil, China and India) to reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions.

• The Indian government is already participating in global efforts through a number of

programmes. For example, India’s National Auto-fuel Policy mandates cleaner fuels for vehicles.

• The Energy Conservation Act, passed in 2001, outlines initiatives to improve energy efficiency.
Similarly, the Electricity Act of 2003 encourages the use of renewable energy.

• A review of the implementation of the agreements at the Earth Summit in Rio was undertaken
by India in 1997.

• One of the key conclusions was that there had been no meaningful progress with respect to
transfer of new and additional financial resources and environmentally-sound technology on
concessional terms to developing nations. India finds it necessary that developed countries take
immediate measures to provide developing countries with financial resources and clean
technologies to enable them to meet their existing commitments under UNFCCC.

• India is also of the view that the SAARC countries should adopt a common position on major
global environment issues, so that the region’s voice carries greater weight.
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS: ONE OR MANY?
• Some of the most significant responses to environmental challenge have come not from the
governments but rather from groups of environmentally conscious volunteers working in
different parts of the world.

• Some of them work at the international level, but most of them work at the local level. These
environmental movements are amongst the most vibrant, diverse, and powerful social
movements across the globe today. These movements raise new ideas and long-term visions of
what we should do and what we should not do in our individual and collective lives.

• Diversity is an important trait of contemporary environmental movements.

• The forest movements of the South, in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, continental
Africa and India are faced with enormous pressures.

• Forest clearing in the Third World continues at an alarming rate, despite three decades of
environmental activism. The destruction of the world’s last remaining grand forests has actually
increased in the last decade.

• Another group of movements are those involved in struggles against mega-dams. In every
country where a mega-dam is being built, one is likely to find an environmental movement
opposing it.

• The early 1980s saw the first anti-dam movement launched in the North, namely, the campaign
to save the Franklin River and its surrounding forests in Australia. This was a wilderness and
forest campaign as well as anti-dam campaign.

• India has had some of the leading anti-dam, pro-river movements. Narmada Bachao Andolan is
one of the best known of these movements.

• It is significant to note that, in anti-dam and other environmental movements in India, the most
important shared idea is non-violence.

RESOURCE GEOPOLITICS
• Resource geopolitics is all about who gets what, when, where and how. Resources have
provided some of the key means and motives of global European power expansion. They have
also been the focus of inter-state rivalry. Western geopolitical thinking about resources has
been dominated by the relationship of trade, war and power, at the core of which were
overseas resources and maritime navigation.

• The critical importance of ensuring uninterrupted supply of strategic resources, in particular oil,
was well established both during the First World War and the Second World War.
• Throughout the Cold War the industrialised countries of the North adopted a number of
methods to ensure a steady flow of resources.

• After the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the security of supply
continues to worry government and business decisions with regard to several minerals, in
particular radioactive materials. However, oil continues to be the most important resource in
global strategy.

• The global economy relied on oil for much of the 20th century as a portable and indispensable
fuel. West Asia, specifically the Gulf region, accounts for about 30 per cent of global oil
production. But it has about 64 percent of the planet’s known reserves, and is therefore the only
region able to satisfy any substantial rise in oil demand.

• Saudi Arabia has a quarter of the world’s total reserves and is the single largest producer. Iraq’s
known reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia’s.

• And, since substantial portions of Iraqi territory are yet to be fully explored, there is a fair
chance that actual reserves might be far larger.

• The United States, Europe, Japan, and increasingly India and China, which consume this
petroleum, are located at a considerable distance from the region.

• Water is another crucial resource that is relevant to global politics. Regional variations and the
increasing scarcity of freshwater in some parts of the world point to the possibility of
disagreements over shared water resources as a leading source of conflicts in the 21st century.

• Some commentators on world politics have referred to ‘water wars’ to describe the possibility
of violent conflict over this life sustaining resource.

• Countries that share rivers can disagree over many things. For instance, a typical disagreement
is a downstream (lower riparian) state’s objection to pollution, excessive irrigation, or the
construction of dams by an upstream (upper riparian) state, which might decrease or degrade
the quality of water available to the downstream state. States have used force to protect or
seize freshwater resources.

• Examples of violence include those between Israel, Syria, and Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s
over attempts by each side to divert water from the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers, and more recent
threats between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq over the construction of dams on the Euphrates River.
THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND THEIR RIGHTS
• The question of indigenous people brings the issues of environment, resources and politics
together.

• The UN defines indigenous populations as comprising the descendants of peoples who inhabited
the present territory of a country at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin
arrived there from other parts of the world and overcame them.

• Indigenous people today live more in conformity with their particular social, economic, and
cultural customs and traditions than the institutions of the country of which they now form a
part.

• The indigenous voices in world politics call for the admission of indigenous people to the world
community as equals. Indigenous people occupy areas in Central and South America, Africa,
India (where they are known as Tribals) and Southeast Asia. Many of the present day island
states in the Oceania region (including Australia and New Zealand), were inhabited by the
Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian people over the course of thousands of years.

• They appeal to governments to come to terms with the continuing existence of indigenous
nations as enduring communities with an identity of their own.

• ‘Since times immemorial’ is the phrase used by indigenous people all over the world to refer to
their continued occupancy of the lands from which they originate. The worldviews of indigenous
societies, irrespective of their geographical location, are strikingly similar with respect to land
and the variety of life systems supported by it.

• The loss of land, which also means the loss of an economic resource base, is the most obvious
threat to the survival of indigenous people.

• In India, the description ‘indigenous people’ is usually applied to the Scheduled Tribes who
constitute nearly eight per cent of the population of the country. With the exception of small
communities of hunters and gatherers, most indigenous populations in India depend for their
subsistence primarily on the cultivation of land.

• For centuries, if not millennia, they had free access to as much land as they could cultivate. It
was only after the establishment of the British colonial rule that areas, which had previously
been inhabited by the Scheduled Tribe communities, were subjected to outside forces.

• Although they enjoy a constitutional protection in political representation, they have not got
much of the benefits of development in the country.

• In fact they have paid a huge cost for development since they are the single largest group
among the people displaced by various developmental projects since independence.
• Issues related to the rights of the indigenous communities have been neglected in domestic and
international politics for very long.

• During the 1970s, growing international contacts among indigenous leaders from around the
world aroused a sense of common concern and shared experiences.

• The World Council of Indigenous Peoples was formed in 1975. The Council became subsequently
the first of 11 indigenous NGOs to receive consultative status in the UN.
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 CHAPTER 9

Globalisation

INTRODUCTION
• We begin by analysing the concept of globalisation and then examine its causes.

• We then discuss at length the political, economic and cultural consequences of globalisation.

• Our interest is also in studying the impact of globalisation on India as well as how India is
affecting globalisation.

• We finally draw attention to resistance to globalisation and how social movements in India also
form part of this resistance.

THE CONCEPT OF GLOBALISATION

• If we look for examples of the use of the term ‘globalisation’ in real life, we will realise that it is
used in various contexts. Let us look at some examples, different from the ones that we have
looked above:

• Some farmers committed suicide because their crops failed. They had bought very expensive
seeds supplied by a multinational company (MNC).

• An Indian company bought a major rival company based in Europe, despite protests by some of
the current owners.

• Many retail shopkeepers fear that they would lose their livelihoods if some major international
companies open retail chains in the country.

• A film producer in Mumbai was accused of lifting the story of his film from another film made in
Hollywood.

• A militant group issued a statement threatening college girls who wear western clothes.

• These examples show us that globalisation need not always be positive; it can have negative
consequences for the people. Indeed, there are many who believe that globalisation has more
negative consequences than positive.

• These examples also show us that globalisation need not be only about the economic issues, nor
is the direction of influence always from the rich to the poor countries.
 • Globalisation as a concept fundamentally deals with flows. These flows could be of various kinds
— ideas moving from one part of the world to another, capital shunted between two or more
places, commodities being traded across borders, and people moving in search of better
livelihoods to different parts of the world.

• The crucial element is the ‘worldwide interconnectedness’ that is created and sustained as a
consequence of these constant flows.

• Globalisation is a multidimensional concept. It has political, economic and cultural

manifestations, and these must be adequately distinguished.

• It is wrong to assume that globalisation has purely economic dimensions, just as it would also be
mistaken to assume that it is a purely cultural phenomenon.

• The impact of globalisation is vastly uneven —

• it affects some societies more than others and some parts of some societies more than others

• and it is important to avoid drawing general conclusions about the impact of globalisation
without paying sufficient attention to specific contexts.

CAUSES OF GLOBALISATION
• What accounts for globalisation?

• If globalisation is about the flows of ideas, capital, commodities, and people, it is perhaps logical
to ask if there is anything novel about this phenomenon.

• Globalisation in terms of these four flows along has taken place through much of human history.

• However, those who argue that there is something distinct about contemporary globalisation
point out that it is the scale and speed of these flows that account for the uniqueness of
globalisation in the contemporary era.

• Globalisation has a strong historical basis, and it is important to view contemporary flows
against this backdrop.

• While globalisation is not caused by any single factor, technology remains a critical element.

• The ability of ideas, capital, commodities and people to move more easily from one part of the
world to another has been made possible largely by technological advances. The pace of these
flows may vary.

• For instance, the movement of capital and commodities will most likely be quicker and wider
than the movement of peoples across different parts of the world.
 • Globalisation, however, does not emerge merely because of the availability of improved
communications. What is important is for people in different parts of the world to recognise
these interconnections with the rest of the world.

• Currently, we are aware of the fact that events taking place in one part of the world could have
an impact on another part of the world. The Bird flu or tsunami is not confined to any particular
nation. It does not respect national boundaries. Similarly, when major economic events take
place, their impact is felt outside their immediate local, national or regional environment at the
global level.

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
• How does globalisation affect traditional conceptions of state sovereignty?

• There are at least three aspects that we need to consider when answering this question.

• At the most simple level, globalisation results in an erosion of state capacity, that is, the ability
of government to do what they do. All over the world, the old ‘welfare state’ is now giving way
to a more minimalist state that performs certain core functions such as the maintenance of law
and order and the security of its citizens.

• In place of the welfare state, it is the market that becomes the prime determinant of economic
and social priorities.

• The entry and the increased role of multinational companies all over the world leads to a
reduction in the capacity of governments to take decisions on their own.

• At the same time, globalisation does not always reduce state capacity. The primacy of the state
continues to be the unchallenged basis of political community.

• The old jealousies and rivalries between countries have not ceased to matter in world politics.
The state continues to discharge its essential functions (law and order, national security) and
consciously withdraws from certain domains from which it wishes to. States continue to be
important.

• Indeed, in some respects state capacity has received a boost as a consequence of globalisation,
with enhanced technologies available at the disposal of the state to collect information about its
citizens. With this information, the state is better able to rule, not less able.

• Thus, states become more powerful than they were earlier as an outcome of the new
technology.
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES
• The mention of economic globalisation draws our attention immediately to the role of
international institutions like the IMF and the WTO and the role they play in determining
economic policies across the world. Yet, globalisation must not be viewed in such narrow terms.
Economic globalisation involves many actors other than these international institutions.

• A much broader way of understanding of economic globalisation requires us to look at the

distribution of economic gains, i.e. who gets the most from globalisation and who gets less,
indeed who loses from it.

• Economic globalisation usually involves greater economic flows among different countries of the
world. Some of this is voluntary and some forced by international institutions and powerful
countries.

• Globalisation has involved greater trade in commodities across the globe; the restrictions
imposed by different countries on allowing the imports of other countries have been reduced.
Similarly, the restrictions on movement of capital across countries have also been reduced. In
operational terms, it means that investors in the rich countries can invest their money in
countries other than their own, including developing countries, where they might get better
returns.

• Globalisation has also led to the flow of ideas across national boundaries. The spread of internet
and computer related services is an example of that.

• But globalisation has not led to the same degree of increase in the movement of people across
the globe.

• Developed countries have carefully guarded their borders with visa policies to ensure that
citizens of other countries cannot take away the jobs of their own citizens.

• In thinking about the consequences of globalisation, it is necessary to keep in mind that the
same set of policies do not lead to the same results everywhere.

• While globalisation has led to similar economic policies adopted by governments in different
parts of the world, this has generated vastly different outcomes in different parts of the world.

• It is again crucial to pay attention to specific context rather than make simple generalisations in
this connection.

• Economic globalisation has created an intense division of opinion all over the world. Those who
are concerned about social justice are worried about the extent of state withdrawal caused by
processes of economic globalisation.
 • They point out that it is likely to benefit only a small section of the population while
impoverishing those who were dependent on the government for jobs and welfare (education,
health, sanitation, etc.).

• They have emphasised the need to ensure institutional safeguards or creating ‘social safety nets’
to minimise the negative effects of globalisation on those who are economically weak.

• Some economists have described economic globalisation as recolonisation of the world.

Advocates of economic globalisation argue that it generates greater economic growth and well-
being for larger sections of the population when there is de-regulation.

• Greater trade among countries allows each economy to do what it does best. This would benefit
the whole world. They also argue that economic globalisation is inevitable and it is not wise to
resist the march of history.

• More moderate supporters of globalisation say that globalisation provides a challenge that can
be responded to intelligently without accepting it uncritically.

• What, however, cannot be denied is the increased momentum towards interdependence and
integration between governments, businesses, and ordinary people in different parts of the
world as a result of globalisation.

CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES
• The consequences of globalisation are not confined only to the sphere of politics and economy.
Globalisation affects us in our home, in what we eat, drink, wear and indeed in what we think. It
shapes what we think are our preferences.

• The cultural effect of globalisation leads to the fear that this process poses a threat to cultures
in the world. It does so, because globalisation leads to the rise of a uniform culture or what is
called cultural homogenisation.

• The rise of a uniform culture is not the emergence of a global culture. What we have in the
name of a global culture is the imposition of Western culture on the rest of the world.

• The popularity of a burger or blue jeans, some argue, has a lot to do with the powerful influence
of the American way of life. Thus, the culture of the politically and economically dominant
society leaves its imprint on a less powerful society, and the world begins to look more like the
dominant power wishes it to be.

• Those who make this argument often draw attention to the ‘Mc Donaldisation’ of the world,
with cultures seeking to buy into the dominant American dream.
 • This is dangerous not only for the poor countries but for the whole of humanity, for it leads to
the shrinking of the rich cultural heritage of the entire globe.

• At the same time, it would be a mistake to assume that cultural consequences of globalisation
are only negative. Cultures are not static things. All cultures accept outside influences all the
time. Some external influences are negative because they reduce our choices. But sometimes
external influences simply enlarge our choices, and sometimes they modify our culture without
overwhelming the traditional.

• The burger is no substitute for a masala dosa and, therefore, does not pose any real challenge. It
is simply added on to our food choices.

• Blue jeans, on the other hand, can go well with a homespun khadi kurta.

• While cultural homogenisation is an aspect of globalisation, the same process also generates
precisely the opposite effect. It leads to each culture becoming more different and distinctive.
This phenomenon is called cultural heterogenisation.

• This is not to deny that there remain differences in power when cultures interact but instead
more fundamentally to suggest that cultural exchange is rarely one way.

INDIA AND GLOBALISATION

• During the colonial period, as a consequence of Britain’s imperial ambitions, India became an
exporter of primary goods and raw materials and a consumer of finished goods.

• After independence, because of this experience with the British, we decided to make things
ourselves rather than relying on others. We also decided not to allow others to export to us so
that our own producers could learn to make things.

• This ‘protectionism’ generated its own problems.

• In 1991, responding to a financial crisis and to the desire for higher rates of economic growth,
India embarked on a programme of economic reforms that has sought increasingly to de-
regulate various sectors including trade and foreign investment.

• While it may be too early to say how good this has been for India, the ultimate test is not high
growth rates as making sure that the benefits of growth are shared so that everyone is better
off.
RESISTANCE TO GLOBALISATION
• We have already noted that globalisation is a very contentious subject and has invited strong
criticism all over the globe.

• Critics of globalisation make a variety of arguments. Those on the left argue that contemporary
globalisation represents a particular phase of global capitalism that makes the rich richer (and
fewer) and the poor poorer.

• Weakening of the state leads to a reduction in the capacity of the state to protect the interest of
its poor.

• Critics of globalisation from the political right express anxiety over the political, economic and
cultural effects. In political terms, they also fear the weakening of the state.

• Economically, they want a return to self-reliance and protectionism, at least in certain areas of
the economy.

• Culturally, they are worried that traditional culture will be harmed and people will lose their
age-old values and ways.

• It is important to note here that anti-globalisation movements too participate in global

networks, allying with those who feel like them in other countries.

• Many anti-globalisation movements are not opposed to the idea of globalisation per se as much
as they are opposed to a specific programme of globalisation, which they see as a form of
imperialism.

• In 1999, at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Meeting there were widespread
protests at Seattle alleging unfair trading practices by the economically powerful states.

• It was argued that the interests of the developing world were not given sufficient importance in
the evolving global economic system.

• The World Social Forum (WSF) is another global platform, which brings together a wide coalition
composed of human rights activists, environmentalists, labour, youth and women activists
opposed to neo-liberal globalisation.

• The first WSF meeting was organised in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. The fourth WSF meeting
was held in Mumbai in 2004.

• The seventh WSF meeting was held in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2007.
INDIA AND RESISTANCE TO GLOBALISATION
• What has been India’s experience in resisting globalisation? Social movements play a role in
helping people make sense of the world around them and finding ways to deal with matters that
trouble them.

• Resistance to globalisation in India has come from different quarters. There have been left wing
protests to economic liberalisation voiced through political parties as well as through forums like
the Indian Social Forum.

• Trade unions of industrial workforce as well as those representing farmer interests have
organised protests against the entry of multinationals.

• The patenting of certain plants like Neem by American and European firms has also generated
considerable opposition.

• Resistance to globalisation has also come from the political right. This has taken the form of
objecting particularly to various cultural influences — ranging from the availability of foreign
T.V. channels provided by cable networks, celebration of Valentine’s Day, and westernisation of
the dress tastes of girl students in schools and colleges.
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