How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century by Shyam Saran

Author:Shyam Saran
Language: eng
Format: epub

Part Three: The Wider World

Tackling Energy Security and Climate Change

In managing its external relations, a country must constantly balance the different dimensions of its foreign policy. Traditionally, bilateral relations have been accorded primacy in the conduct of a state’s foreign policy, since costs and benefits are relatively easier to calculate in a two-state context. But we are now living in an international landscape where a state’s bilateral, regional and multilateral relations are intertwined in a complex dynamic with trade-offs being more difficult to determine.

The previous two decades were a time of growth and consolidation for the global economy. There was impressive economic growth, both in absolute and relative terms, in a number of major developing economies, most notably in China and India. This trend coincided with their rapid integration into the global economy. The consistently high growth paths charted by these two continental-size economies has been largely responsible for the shift in the centre of gravity of global economic power from the trans-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. The latter’s share of global output was 16 per cent in 1950 and 34 per cent in 1998, and it is expected to rise to 44 per cent by 2030.

It is not only India and China that are dragging economic power away from the West. There are other significant emerging economies too, including Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and, more lately, Indonesia. They join countries like South Korea, which have during this period consolidated the impressive economic gains they had already made in the earlier decades. Economic capability has led to increased military capability and greater technological sophistication.

The world of today is populated by a cluster of major powers with growing economic and security assets, though there are considerable asymmetries still in the distribution of power among them. What is increasingly apparent is that it is no longer possible for a small cluster of advanced economies to impose global frameworks and rules on the rest of the world as they could in the past. Even if emerging economies are not able to have their say in the shaping of global arrangements in any particular field, they nevertheless enjoy the negative power to prevent these arrangements from being imposed on them. This has been apparent in the continuing deadlock at the Doha Round of trade talks under the WTO. The impression at the talks is that emerging economies have been obstructive in international negotiations, a charge hurled frequently at them. On the contrary, they have become more effective in safeguarding their perceived national interests.

The situation is complicated by the notable dichotomy shown by the economic structures of the newly emerging economies. For example, both India and China would qualify as major economies in overall GDP terms, according to their weightage in the global economy and trade, and in their overall technological and military capabilities. However, they would continue to be classified as developing countries in terms of per capita income levels and the incidence – now declining – of poverty, disease and illiteracy.

This has led to

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