A
little over three years ago I wrote in The Hindu that at a time when interest in India and
India’s interest in the world are arguably at their highest, Indian scholarship
on global issues is showing few signs of responding to this challenge and that
this could well stunt India’s ability to influence the international system.
As we meet here now, at the first real convention of scholars
(and practitioners) of International Studies from throughout India, we can take
some comfort. A quick, albeit anecdotal, audit of the study of International
Studies would suggest that the last three years have been unusually productive.
So much so, that we are now, I believe, at a veritable “tipping point” in our
emergence as an intellectual power in the discipline.
Stanley Hoffman, Professor of International Relations (IR) at
Harvard, once famously remarked that IR was an American social science. The
blinding nexus between knowledge and power (particularly stark in the case of
IR in the United States) perhaps made him forget that while the first modern IR
departments were created in Aberystwyth and in Geneva, thinking on
international relations went back, in the case of the Indian, Chinese and other
great civilizations, to well before the West even began to think of the world
outside their living space.
Having absorbed the grammar of Western international relations,
and transited to a phase of greater self-confidence, it is now opportune for us
to also use the vocabulary of our past as a guide to the future.
2011 survey
Recovery of these Indian ideas should not be seen as part of a
revivalist project or as an exercise that seeks to reify so-called Indian
exceptionalism. Rather, interrogating our rich past with its deeply
argumentative tradition is, as Amartya Sen put it, “partly a celebration,
partly an invitation to criticality, partly a reason for further exploration,
and partly also an incitement to get more people into the argument.” In the
context of international relations it offers the intellectual promise of going
beyond the Manichean opposition between power and principle; and between the
world of ideas and norms on the one hand, and that of statecraft and even machtpolitik,
on the other.
In doing so we are not being particularly subversive. A 2011
survey of American IR scholars by Foreign Policy found that 22 per cent adopted a
Constructivist approach (with its privileging of ideas and identity in shaping
state preferences and international outcomes), 21 per cent adopted a Liberal
approach, only 16 per cent a Realist approach, and a tiny two per cent a
Marxist approach. When academics were asked to “list their peers who have had
the greatest influence on them and the discipline,” the most influential was
Alexander Wendt, the Constructivist, and neither the Liberal, Robert Koehane,
nor the Realists, Kenneth Waltz or John Mearsheimer.
Mohandas Gandhi once said that “if all the Upanishads and all the other scriptures
happened all of a sudden to be reduced to ashes, and if only the first verse in
the Ishopanishad were left in the memory of the
Hindus, Hinduism would live forever.” Let me make what may seem like another
astounding claim, and which I hope, in the best argumentative tradition, will
be heavily contested. If all the books on war and peace were to suddenly
disappear from the world, and only the Mahabharata remained, it would be good
enough to capture almost all the possible debates on order, justice, force and
the moral dilemmas associated with choices that are made on these issues within
the realm of international politics.
Uncertainty in the region
Beyond theory, we are faced with a period of extraordinary
uncertainty in the international system and in our region. Multilateralism is
in serious crisis. While the U.N. Security Council remains deadlocked on key
issues, there is little progress on most other issues of global concern, be it
trade, sustainable development or climate change. As academics, we cannot
remain unconcerned about these critical failures.
Our continent is being defined and redefined over time. Regions
are, after all, as much shaped by the powerful whose interests they seek to
advance as by any objective reality. Whatever nomenclature we adopt, and
whatever definition we accept, we are faced with, what Evan Feigenbaum and
Robert Manning described as two Asias: the ‘Economic Asia’ whose $19 trillion
regional economy drives global growth; the “Security Asia,” a “dysfunctional
region of mistrustful powers, prone to nationalism and irredentism, escalating
their territorial disputes over tiny rocks and shoals, and arming for
conflict.”
The Asian Development Bank says that by nearly doubling its
share of global GDP to 52 per cent by 2050, Asia could regain the dominant
economic position it held 300 years ago. Yet, as several academics have pointed
out “it is beset by interstate rivalries that resemble 19th century Europe,” as
well the new challenges of the 21st century: environmental catastrophes,
natural disasters, climate change, terrorism, cyber security and maritime
issues. An increasingly assertive China that has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s
24-character strategy of hiding its light and keeping its head low, adds to the
uncertainty of the prevailing strategic environment.
India’s military and economic prowess are greater than ever
before, yet its ability to influence South Asian countries is less than what it
was, say, 30 years ago. An unstable Nepal with widespread anti-India sentiment,
a triumphalist Sri Lanka where Sinhalese chauvinism shows no signs of
accommodating legitimate Tamil aspirations, a chaotic Pakistan unwilling to
even reassure New Delhi on future terrorist strikes, are symptomatic of a
region being pulled in different directions.
Can our thinking from the past help us navigate through this
troubled present? Pankaj Mishra, in his brilliant book, From the
Ruins of Empire: the Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia,
describes how three 19th century thinkers, the Persian Jamal-al Din al-Afghani,
Liang Qichao from China and India’s Rabindranath Tagore, navigated through
Eastern tradition and the Western onslaught to think of creative ways to strike
a balance and find harmony. In many ways, these ideas remain relevant today as
well. For if Asia merely mimics the West in its quest for economic growth and
conspicuous consumption, and the attendant conflict over economic resources and
military prowess, the “revenge of the East” in the Asian century and “all its
victories” will remain “truly Pyrrhic.”
(This is an edited version of Prof. Mattoo's presidential address to the Annual Convention of the Indian Association of
International Studies in New Delhi on December 10, 2012.)
(Source: The Hindu)
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