Globalization of political economy has made regional cooperation an inescapable option
By Dev Raj Dahal
International System
Dev Raj Dahal
The international system of today can best be characterized by hierarchical, complex, competing and interconnected state and non-state power centers where the superpower alone is neither willing nor capable of bearing the entire burden of regional and global challenges. The existing hierarchy between the rich and the poor nations will not change very much in the near future but regionalism might be able to resolve some of their problems and serve as a protection against the pressure of the international economic and political systems. The peculiarity of the international system dynamics is that great powers are more interested in engaging the U.S. in multiple regimes than challenging its dominant leadership. Great powers are interested in respecting each other’s vital interests while bargaining over other matters. The multi-polarity of power has added value to the rise of multilateralism, mutual responsibilities and the necessity of evolving multi-level governance for regulating actors’ behavior. In this sense, multilateralism occupies the moral high ground where national worldviews and interests are tempered for common good of a larger number of peoples and states.
The dramatic spread of international norms, rules, principles, processes and institutions has helped to regulate the pluralistic, essentially anarchic structure of the sovereign state system and moderate the security dilemma. In a situation of power disparity, states seek to increase their power and security and threaten the security of others, thus contributing to vicious distrust and insecurity. The basic components of a regime help to foster social capital, allow states to take advantage of economies of scale, lower transaction costs and attain objectives, which would otherwise be unattainable by singular efforts. The diffusion of regimes has also transformed the very concept of leadership based exclusively on the realist conception of hard power of discipline and coercion and increased the utility of soft power such as shared ideas, values, communication, civilization and peace.
The post-September 9/11, 2001 demonstrated that some of the sources of security threats are global in nature, such as inter-state conflict, terrorism, outbreak of contagious diseases, ecocide, human rights violations, organized crime, drug and weapon proliferation, etc. Other sources of conflicts are defined more by the fault-lines within societies but they are also enmeshed in historical and geopolitical contests for physical domination. For example, growing incongruity between the national state and global society, between national sovereignty and human rights and between economic internationalization and indigenization of social and political system has weakened the coherence of governance in rule making, monitoring of compliance, rule-enforcement, management of public goods and conflict resolution.
The escalation of competitive violence in the international politics is the outgrowth of the erosion of the monopoly of power of the state. Now the states no longer maintain control over the commanding height of political economy. This means many sources of insecurity will persist so long as the collapse of state hierarchies is steered by information revolution. As a result, fault-line conflicts will continue to prevent the attainment of system stability as aspiring powers, such as Japan, Germany, India and Brazil– will continue their claim for a legitimate space in the international system while weak powers of the South will continue to seek a refuge in global justice through an access in technology, market, finance, resource and communication that drive world politics and set the dynamics of global transformation.
Approaches to Security and Peace
The questions of national security, development and peace defined by the spirit of industrial age now attends the dawn of post-industrial, post-state and post-modern aspirations. This age has obviously combined the dualism of the system and the life-world, power and justice, politics and policy and organizations and aspirations. Actors cannot achieve their collective interests unless they can overcome the barriers to collective action and pool their sovereignties for the creation of a regime. There are four dominant approaches to peace and security.
State-Centric Order : State sovereignty defined by the peace treaty of Westphalia is the central organizing element of the international legal and political system. Since the essence of international politics largely remains untransformed, security essentially means liberation of citizens from the Hobbesian state of nature through the sovereignty of state in internal and external relations and the maintenance of a regional and global balance of power. When the part (state) becomes sovereign the whole, that is, architecture of international system lacks a unified sovereign authority for global governance. Anarchy, however, does not mean that there is deficiency of shared interest in cooperation for the welfare of peoples. Calculation of expected benefits shapes the cooperative behavior of actors, mutual policy adjustment and coordination in various issue areas. But now, the powers of state are challenged on all fronts by the global market forces through tax cuts, privatization, devolution and fragmentation of authority posing problems for the state to maintain legitimate public order within the territorial, political, economic and social boundaries and effect socially legitimate collective action.
Due to complex interdependence even the state system is oriented towards Grotian vision of shared interests, growth of international law and institutions, norm-governed cooperation and peace. States can bargain better if they can coordinate their strategies through a coalition or regime. There are proposals for the integration of WTO, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and even the formation of Economic Security Council in the UN.
Inter-National to Global Relations: Negotiated interdependence between the state and society has become important at a time when international relation is marking a shift towards global relations and widening global communication, networks and movements. The space beyond the state has become the domain of regional and global institutions. Due to complex interdependence even the state system is oriented towards Grotian vision of shared interests, growth of international law and institutions, norm-governed cooperation and peace. States can bargain better if they can coordinate their strategies through a coalition or regime. There are proposals for the integration of WTO, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and even the formation of Economic Security Council in the UN.
The UN and international community have now rightly undertaken a number of vital tasks—preventing diplomacy and peace-building in the areas of security; nation-building, supporting multi-track initiatives of the government, business and civil society groups to harness the synergy for horizontal cooperation and seeking a balance between societal, intergovernmental and supra-national efforts in the areas of development cooperation; nuclear safeguarding by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); the Kyoto Protocol in the management of global environment; and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the areas of human development. These steps are important for the survival of international system as a whole and functional efficiency of its constituent units. To be sure, a negotiated peace rests on collective security of all the constituent units of a regime and proportional sharing of burdens and benefits among its members.
The Centrality of Civil Society in Global Space : In consistent with the hopes of federalists and integrationists, functional activities of humanitarian, social and ecological organizations, such as International Red Cross, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (CPPAC), etc are pulling sovereign states, global markets and civil society groups into a solidaristic vision of post-state constellation and enlarging the notion of citizenship in all matters and all levels affecting their life, liberty, property and identity. Civil society groups are seeking to make peaceful approaches to conflict resolution more attractive than other means and moving towards building international community from various societies. They have begun to subsume the very concept of collective action at various levels of security analysis—individual, sub-national, state, regional and global and orienting them towards achieving a modicum of world order. Macro and micro levels of security impact each other and modify each other’s behavior so closely that conditions of peace and security can be treated in an integrative manner.
Global Social Contract and Perpetual Peace : Immanual Kant has articulated the enlightened vision of perpetual peace. In this peace, systemic anarchy and animosities between and among states and peoples are democratically resolved and the great human evils, such as anarchy, fear, terror, war, denial and oppression could be conquered by seeking to make rule-based global governance and global social contract achievable by conditioning a common pattern of policy and behavior of states and non-state actors. To him, perpetual peace can be achieved when cooperation is based on contract than status and governed by the rise of democratic constitutions, cosmopolitan laws and interdependence. Neither de-linking nor autarky not even mercantilism is a viable option in the context of interdependence among states and peoples. In this context, the ultimate resolution of conflict does not come from the fear but in quest for common good for human beings.
Globalization of political economy has made regional cooperation an inescapable option. Individual countries of the region are, therefore, struggling to integrate themselves in a unified, single global market and reap competitive benefits. This has induced the South Asian states and non-state actors to become competitive and extrovert in orientation. In order to reshape globalization and make it more democratic there is a need to moderate its pace to give peoples more time to cope and enlarge the size of winners. But, bringing social justice to global markets requires stable international regimes and regional model of development that respects freedom, human life, dignity and ameliorates the conditions of the marginalized. This means the structure of economic cooperation in SAARC has a number of responsibilities: overcome democratic deficit which is occurring owing to the erosion of the state’s public policy making authority, foster human security for its peoples, promote freedom of action for states in multi-lateral fora and contribute to a rule-based, equitable regional order.
But, the critical questions are: Does the inclusion of new member in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) make the region cohesive, stable and effective or further polarize it from within? How can cooperation become meaningful when outward orientation is not matched by internal economic integration, policy harmony on a number of meta-issues and expansion in the activities of institutional routines of the SAARC secretariat? How long do the core powers of South Asia, India and Pakistan, require in establishing confidence and move forward on substantive collaboration on complex challenges that plague SAARC?
(To be concluded)
Dahal is Head, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in Kathmandu and can be reached at [email protected]
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