This idea has gained strong ground through the 1990s and through the first part of this century. There is an obvious list of such problems: terrorism itself, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of climate change (quite obviously because we cannot put up a fence in the sky to sequester our own climate), of persistent poverty and haunting hunger, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. There are financial and economic crises (because the financial contagion becomes a virus that spreads from one country to others), the risk of trade protectionism, refugee movements, drug trafficking. And we must not overlook epidemic disease. Take the SARS epidemic in China: initially there was an attempt to keep it quiet, but it was very easy for the virus to hop on a plane and show up in Toronto, and suddenly it became a global phenomenon, no longer something that could be contained in any one country. The same is true of AIDS, which travelled from the Congo to California and on to the world’s consciousness, just as it is true of swine flu (H1N1) today.
The growing list of global ‘problems without passports’ also calls for solutions that cross frontiers. Individual countries may prefer not to deal with such problems directly or alone, but they are impossible to ignore. So handling them together internationally is the obvious way of ensuring they are tackled; it is also the only way. Some scholars of international affairs have begun to speak of an idea they call ‘responsible sovereignty’, the notion that nations must cooperate across borders to safeguard resources and to tackle common threats.
This kind of thinking is also reflective of the change in the way the world thinks about security. After 1945 and throughout the Cold War, the concept of security was taken as relating to nation states seeking to protect their territorial sovereignty and national interests from the threat or use of force by foreign powers. The security debate was framed in terms of defence, arms build-ups and military alliances. With the end of the Cold War and the receding prospect of superpower conflict, security theorists began to focus on threats to security based upon internal conflicts and internecine wars—civil wars, ethnic conflict, secessionist struggles and terrorist attacks—as well as the continuing dangers of the nuclearization of ‘rogue states’, those assumed to be more predisposed to using nuclear weapons than those who had developed them decades earlier.
These threats, however, are still seen in terms of the security of sovereign states. In the context of global governance, however, a new concept has emerged: the concept of ‘human security’, a notion that focuses more on the protection of the individual than on the sovereignty of the state. In the words of the 2003 report of the Commission on Human Security, security involves the need ‘to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfillment’. The commission argues that ‘the security of one person, one community, one nation rests on the decisions of many others—sometimes fortuitously, sometimes precariously’, and that ‘policies and institutions must find new ways to protect individuals and communities’.
How can such security be ensured? Clearly, there is an ineluctable link to the emerging concept of global governance. Human security cannot be the pursuit of any one nation, however rich or powerful it might be. It manifestly requires international cooperation within global bodies, as well as action by international and interstate organizations such as the United Nations itself (including through the operations of specialized agencies working on health, children, labour standards, etc., and the negotiation, conclusion and application of international treaties and conventions). What about the old-fashioned idea of security in the military sense? That is no exception: the UN conducts peacekeeping missions, and so do regional organizations like ECOWAS in West Africa and NATO in Europe, almost always acting under a mandate from the world body. These are all examples of collective military action in a global governance context, and they involve nation states ceding some degree of control over the deployment of their national defence and security forces to supranational institutions. Even a non-UN-authorized mission like that of ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, in Afghanistan involves contributions from several countries, all in the name of a higher global good.
So the world has evolved significantly towards greater global governance since the end of the Second World War. And yet the global governance structures of today still reflect the realities of 1945 and not of 2012. As we look around the world of 2012, we cannot fail to note the increase in the number of major powers across the world since the structures of the international system were put in place in 1945. It is an undeniable fact that the emerging powers have moved very much from the periphery to the centre of global discourse and global responsibility, and they have now a legitimate and an increasingly voluble desire to share power and responsibility in the global system. So, too, do the so-called social forces—NGOs, civil society movements—which have become impossible to ignore in any discussion of global governance, but which lie outside the scope of the present analysis.
India feels very strongly that there is a clear need for an expansion of the Security Council in both categories—permanent and non-permanent. But it also sees the Security Council as part of a broader process of renewing the United Nations. Like many developing countries, India would like to see the General Assembly strengthened as the primary intergovernmental legislative body, which it is not yet; it has become too often a rhetorical forum, prone to declaratory effulgences without effect, rather than one which acts as a legislative body driving the action of the UN organization. The UN’s Economic and Social Council too should become a more meaningful development-oriented body, and a serious instrument of development governance. A greater sharpening is also required in the focus and the operational efficiency of the UN funds, agencies and programmes, whose effectiveness is so important for so many of the world’s vulnerable and developing people.
India is conscious, too, that the international financial institutions set up at Bretton Woods in 1944 are also in need of reform, since they too reflect the realities of a vanished era: Belgium, for instance, disposes of the same weighted vote as China in these institutions. The G20 summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009 set in motion a process for global redesign of the international financial and economic architecture, and is thus emerging as the premier forum for international economic cooperation. The G20 has become a meaningful platform for North– South dialogue precisely because the South is not completely outweighed by the North in the composition of the G20. India will use its position in this grouping to pursue a long-term objective of broad parity between the developed countries and the developing and transition economies in the international financial institutions.
This is reflected in the Pittsburgh summit decision to reform the Bretton Woods institutions, the creation of a mechanism for G20 experts to address regulatory reform, and plans to shift decision-making power (5 per cent of the IMF quota share and 3 per cent of the World Bank’s voting power) from the developed world to the developing and transition economies. Nations like India, Brazil, Russia and China have called for higher figures—7 per cent of the IMF quota share and 6 per cent of the World Bank’s voting powers—to be transferred. India has already established itself as a key player in the G20, where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a notably influential voice, and this institution—or a variant of it, such as a smaller ‘G13’ being touted in some circles as an alternative to both the G8 and the G20—could well prove a more valuable mechanism for international impact in the long term than the United Nations.
It certainly seems incontestable that the recent global financial crisis showed that the surveillance of risk by international institutions and early warning mechanisms are needed for all countries. In other words, it is important that, in the context of global governance, the developing countries should have a voice in overseeing the global financial performance of all nations, rather than it simply being a case of the rich supervising the economic delinque
ncy of the poor.
India also has an evident interest in continued economic liberalization worldwide, which it needs to support overtly and actively, given its stake in freer global trade across the board in goods and services. This means that India would need to start taking more explicit positions in bilateral and multilateral forums in favour of keeping the world economic order open, and play an active role in ensuring such an outcome. New Delhi should, out of self-interest as well as principle, play to its own strengths by advocating liberalization in transnational labour flows, not just capital flows. It has been suggested that India should also take a lead in proposing innovative totalization agreements and tax treaties that would permit the movement of labour and human capital. Under the UPA government, India has energetically pursued global cooperation on issues of bank transparency, money laundering and the oversight of tax havens. This has obvious domestic benefits as well as international ones. Another area of domestic importance with international implications is that of FDI into India, which is currently lower than outward investments by Indian companies abroad. It is essential for India to undertake the domestic reforms necessary to attract and retain FDI; this implies vigorously pursuing the domestic economic reform agenda that many observers currently see as stagnating. All of these initiatives will make New Delhi a more credible and effective player in the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO. India’s interest in the idea of a ‘BRICS Bank’, floated at that grouping’s New Delhi summit in 2012, is an indication of its willingness to challenge global economic assumptions, all of which are currently West-centric.
A reform package that incorporates both Security Council and Bretton Woods reforms could transform global governance, whereas failure to reform could doom it. The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2030 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a transformed global economy, a real transfer of relative wealth and economic power from the West, or the North, to other countries in the global South, and the growing influence of non-state actors, including terrorists, multinational corporations and criminal networks. In the next two decades, this new international system will be coping with the issues of ageing populations in the developed world; increasing energy, food and water constraints; and worries about climate change and migration. Global changes, including India’s own transformation, will mean that resource issues—including energy, food and water, on all of which demand is projected to outstrip easily available supplies over the next decade or so—will gain prominence on the international agenda.
The need for increased, more democratic and more equitable global governance will therefore be even greater. Let us look even further than the next two decades. Growth projections for Brazil, Russia, India and China indicate they will collectively match the original G7’s share of global GDP by 2040–50. All four, probably, will continue to enjoy relatively rapid economic growth and will strive for a multipolar world in which their capitals are among the poles.
The experts tell us that, historically, emerging multipolar systems have been more unstable than bipolar or unipolar ones. The recent, indeed ongoing, global financial crisis underlines that the next twenty years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks. Global policy-makers will have to cope with a growing demand for multilateral cooperation when the international system will be stressed by the incomplete transition from the old to the new order. And the new players will not want to cooperate under the old rules.
The multiplicity of actors on the international scene could, if properly accommodated, add strength to our ageing post–Second World War institutions, or they could fragment the international system and reduce international cooperation. Countries like India have no desire to challenge the international system, as did other rising powers like Germany and Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But they certainly wish to be given a place at the global high table. Without that, they would be unlikely to volunteer to share the primary burden for dealing with such issues as terrorism, climate change, proliferation and energy security, which concern the entire globe.
The dominance of a handful of small industrialized Western countries, especially in the international financial institutions (the so-called Bretton Woods organizations), looks increasingly anomalous in a world where economic dynamism has shifted irresistibly from the West to the East. With all of this, and the emergence of new powers and forces which, unlike China, were omitted from the high table in 1945, we have clearly reached a point where there is need for a system redesign of global governance to ensure that all countries can participate in a manner commensurate with their capacity.
Clearly, what we in India are looking for is a more inclusive multilateralism, and not, as some American and Chinese observers have suggested, a G2 condominium. There is a consensus in our country that India should seek to continue to contribute to international security and prosperity, to a well-ordered and equitable world, and to democratic, sustainable development for all. This we will continue to do, and we will do so in an environment in which our standing has clearly grown. ‘India’s voice carries more weight today in multilateral forums,’ writes an astute observer, David Malone, ‘largely due to its enhanced economic performance, political stability and nuclear capability … [O]n the international stage India now exerts real if still tentative geostrategic and economic influence.’ This it does both in broader multilateral forums like those associated with the UN, and in smaller groups of selected countries with specific influence on an issue. It nominated an Indian, the able Kamalesh Sharma, to head the (formerly British) Commonwealth in 2008, but despite his convincing election to the position of its Secretary-General, there is little indication of that institution moving to markedly higher priority in Indian policy-making circles.
The need for increased, more democratic and more equitable global governance cannot be denied. Jobs anywhere in the world today depend not only on local firms and factories, but on faraway markets for the goods they buy and produce, on licences and access from foreign governments, on international financial trade rules that ensure the free movement of goods and persons, and on international financial institutions that ensure stability—in short, on the international system constructed in 1945. We just have to bring this system into the world of 2012.
Our globalizing world clearly needs institutions and standards. Not ‘global government’, for which there is little political support anywhere. But ‘global governance’, built on laws and norms that countries negotiate together, and agree to uphold as the common ‘rules of the road’. Human security requires a world in which sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems and seize common opportunities. If we are determined to live in a world governed by global rules and shared values, we must strengthen and reform the multilateral institutions that the enlightened leaders of the last century have bequeathed to us. Only then can we fulfil the continuing adventure of making this century better than the last.
From the foregoing emerges the idea that India can and must play an increasing—and increasingly prominent—role in the stewardship of what is called ‘the global commons’, the collection of national resources and institutions that are part of the often intangible patrimony of humankind. These include (but are not limited to) our environment; outer space and cyberspace; the waters of the oceans; and unexplored continents like Antarctica and the Arctic which may well, with global warming, become both exploitable and habitable. Because the global commons is, by definition, beyond the national jurisdiction of any specific country, the United Nations remains the most logical instrument for safeguarding the global commons and promoting the collective interest of humanity in protecting and developing it.
Yes, the United Nations is an often flawed institution. But at its best and its worst, it is a mirror of the world: it reflects not just our divisions and disagreements but also our hopes and aspirations. As the UN’s great second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld,
put it, the United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.
And that it has. We must not forget that the UN has achieved an enormous amount in its sixty-seven years. Most important of all, it prevented the Cold War from turning hot—first, by providing a roof under which the two superpower adversaries could meet and engage, and, second, by mounting peacekeeping operations that ensured that local and regional conflicts were contained and did not ignite a superpower clash that could have sparked off a global conflagration. Over the years, nearly 200 UN-assisted peace settlements have ended regional conflicts. And in the past two decades, more civil wars have ended through mediation than in the previous two centuries combined, in large part because the UN provided leadership, opportunities for negotiation, strategic coordination and the resources to implement peace agreements. More than 350 international treaties have been negotiated at the UN, setting an international framework that reduces the prospect for conflict among sovereign states. The UN has built global norms that are universally accepted in areas as diverse as decolonization and disarmament, development and democratization. And the UN remains second to none in its unquestioned experience, leadership and authority in coordinating humanitarian action, from tsunamis to human waves of refugees. When the blue flag flies over a disaster zone, all know that humanity is taking responsibility—not any one government—and that when the UN succeeds, the whole world wins.
This is what gives India, as a responsible global power, a stake in the success of the United Nations. In all of this, the Security Council remains the key instrument to determine policy, to bring about a convergence of world opinion on burning questions of peace and security, and to guide and supervise the organization’s action. It is only natural that India, which has come a long way since it first joined the UN’s founding members as a British colony in 1945, should expect a place at the high table while these questions are being discussed. But a key role in the other major multilateral institutions at (or emerging from) the UN is also indispensable in this effort.
Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century Page 48
