World in Flux: Geopolitics in the Age of Disruption
The timeless aphorism of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci - The old world order is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters - rings profoundly true even for the present geopolitical moment.
To analytically unpeel this critical inflexion point, the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University, had the privilege of hosting distinguished retired diplomat and acclaimed novelist Ambassador Vikas Swarup.
Ambassador Swarup maintained that the tectonic shifts in the global order can be aptly captured through a chessboard analogy. While the yesteryears of this order were characterised by slow and calculated manoeuvres by the key players, the present moment is witnessing brisk and unpredictable moves - a sort of geopolitics on steroids.
The re-election of Donald Trump as the US President has been even more disruptive than before, as he simultaneously courts Russia, competes with China and belittles NATO. However, as Ambassador Swarup submitted, Donald Trump is simply the loudest symptom of a broader pathology afflicting the current world order. Thus, to preclude any potential of missing the wood for the trees, Ambassador Swarup donned his analytical hat and neatly presented what he felt were the ten big takeaways from the present moment.
The first was the unravelling of the international rules-based order. Broadly functional as a liberal international order, helmed by the United States, enshrining cherished principles like territorial sovereignty, liberal democracy and capitalism, and imbued with a considerable degree of legitimacy, this order had so far presented at least an illusion of fairness to the realm of the international. This chimaera had now been de-mystified with the global reticence on war crimes, brazen contravention of the rules by the very rule-creators and the element of false exceptionalism and impunity in the conduct of great powers.
This was closely entangled with a crisis of multilateralism - the cooperative ability to work together for peace and prosperity. As a corollary, the world had increasingly been fragmented into smaller groupings, antagonistic to each other. Ambassador Swarup believed that the development resulted from three factors: the eroding legitimacy of governance structures, the reluctance of great powers to give shared and differential treatment to the emerging powers and economies, and the extra-institutional geopolitical moves by the supposedly responsible great powers. While bilateralism and protectionism were the natural outcomes of such a crisis, it also engendered a spate of mini-lateral issue-specific coalitions - G20, G7, AUKUS, BRICS, and Five Eyes. Ambassador Swarup suggested that any return to multilateralism must go through realistic institutional architecture reforms.
The third facet of the present moment was the retreat of globalisation and a concomitant surge in economic nationalism. The enduring postulate that a rising economic tide of the free market would lift all nations had lost its traditional purchase, with rampant inequality and unemployment worldwide. As a panacea, most governments had resorted to a culture of self-sufficiency and economic isolationism by foisting astronomical tariffs on imports. This remained antithetical to the liberal internationalist axiom of cooperation and interdependence amongst nations through the logic of comparative advantage.
The other potent fallout of the present moment was the ascent of right-wing politics all across the world and the erosion of liberal democracy. As a form of popular politics claiming to embody the general will of the people, right-wing populism and its reactionary effects had systematically undermined democracy in the different societies of Asia, Europe and America.
Ambassador Swarup had three-fold reasoning to explain its causality - the failed liberal promise of economic prosperity leading to significant financial distress, the status anxiety of the native citizens of those countries to the influx of migrants, and finally, the disruptive effects of technology. It was only through greater income equality, reconciliation of the multiple cultural identities and robust accountability measures within Big Tech that this populist zeitgeist could be countered.
The US-China contest for hegemony was to constitute the fifth dimension of this world order. As the world's second-largest economy, with alternative geoeconomic prototypes like the Belt and Road Initiative and boasting critical technology, Beijing was now well placed to convert a trade war with America into a full-blown geopolitical struggle. Washington was also not ready to relent, having already undertaken different legislations to foster greater techno-strategic self-sufficiency and counter Chinese penetration. As Ambassador Swarup cautioned, with the retreat of a strategically altruistic America and the rise of a crudely transactional one, the Sino-American rivalry could escalate significantly, with Taiwan becoming a potential flashpoint.
The climate crisis and the struggle for sustainable development were the other critical fallout of this world order. With rising mercury levels and carbon emissions, the ecosystem was gradually advancing to collapse, with vast swathes of terrestrial and marine life turning inhospitable. The situation remained further exacerbated as the world's leading power completely turned back on all its ecological commitments and arbitrarily withdrew from the climate accords.
The disruptive implications of technology constituted the seventh dimension of this geopolitical moment, with artificial intelligence, quantum computing and robotics not merely advancing but also reshaping our global economy. Having deftly cracked open the operating system of humans, artificial intelligence could now be weaponised to fuel hatred and misinformation and distort and manipulate human attention. The path ahead involved balancing innovation and ethicality to flesh out the truthful signal from the digital noise.
The scramble for resources and the energy wars marked another geostrategic takeaway from the present moment. With the rising geoeconomic stocks of critical minerals and rare earths like lithium and cobalt, the new age wars would now be fought over controlling such energy resources. Ambassador Swarup alluded to the potential geostrategic nodes as the South China Sea and Greenland, evoking the attention of the great powers in the time to come.
The novel nature of security threats in the form of cyber warfare and asymmetric conflicts was the penultimate facet of this world order. The October attacks carried out by terror outfits like Hamas, which had adroitly destabilised the surveillance system and breached the celebrated Israeli intelligence networks, testified to the degree of sophistication presently harboured by terror outfits. This was compounded by cyber criminals hacking communication networks and stealing intellectual property rights. The other theatre of insecurity emanated from the strategic abandonment of the nuclear non-proliferation exercises by the key nuclear powers.
The final facet of this world order, and in all probability the only affirmative development, was the spirited rise of the Global South. The resilient nation-states of Asia, Africa and Latin America were no longer peripheral to the order-making processes but were on course to become the upcoming powerhouses of the world. With their institutional architecture through BRICS and ASEAN and their rising demographic and economic heft in formations like G20, the Global South possessed the capacity to forge a post-Western world order with a transformative potential.
In closing, Ambassador Swarup averred that India has a crucial role in this evolving stage. As a pivotal actor of the Global South, with youthful demography, technological prowess and astronomical vision, New Delhi faces a geopolitical sweet spot, given its multi-aligned posture in global politics. Finally, while her capacity to shoulder transnational responsibilities has already been vindicated through her vaccine diplomacy during the coronavirus pandemic, New Delhi needed to astutely cultivate a friendly neighbourhood dynamic and a densely integrated economic framework for the region to consolidate its role as a leading power. The talk was followed by some insightful interventions made by the audience present. Such reflections pertained to the de-dollarisation of the global economy, the future of populist right-wing movements, and New Delhi's positions in the multi-polar matrix.
Ambassador Swarup flagged some crucial issues in the discussion that followed. While he posited that such populist waves operate in boom and bust cycles, the immediate in its favour would not die down quickly. He underscored how the bipartisan consensus in New Delhi over multi-alignment will see India smoothly weather the storm. Finally, he remained cautiously optimistic about the rise of a new global statesman and visionary leader who could tackle the multiple faultlines of the present juncture and lead the world to a better place.