“What India Lacks and China has is National Determination”, Dr T V Paul

KOCHI:
“What India lacks is national determination at every level. Unlike India, Chinese Community Party ensures that the whole nation is woven together with a sense of working towards making China great.”, said Dr T V PAUL, author and James McGill Professor at McGill University, Montreal, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Erudite Distinguished Senior Fellow, CPPR, Kochi. He was speaking to Dr. Lawrence Prabhakar Williams, Author, Researcher & Professor, International Relations & Strategic Studies at the live Webinar hosted by Centre for Public Policy Research, Kochi on the topic “Changing Global Order” at 6:00 pm on August 13 (Thursday), 2020.

The webinar focused on changing the balance of power; the rise of China and the struggle of dominance in the geopolitical sphere, the possibility for conflict, and the potential for balancing coalitions to counter the rising Chinese influence, especially in the Indo-Pacific.

Focusing on the situation in India’s neighbourhood, he said that India has to offer more to its neighbours in the form of respect, diplomacy and development opportunities and become an economic and technological counterweight to China, if its status in the neighbourhood is to improve.

Talking about the liberal international order, he noted its decline as seen in the weakening of its three pillars- democracy & peace, stress on institutions and economic interdependence. However, he was optimistic that the liberal order that survived 200 year by assuring the twin goals of freedom and prosperity is here to stay, with variations to suit the contemporary context. He said that liberal attraction is that despite all its problems it offers you opportunities irrespective of your origins and this is where countries like US differs from India and China. He noted that China has been able to use elements of Liberal international order like markets and economic interdependence to its benefit.

Even as globalisation has heralded a progressive era, with leaps in technology and infrastructure, it has deepened inequality. Proletarians, however are not organised as in the Communist era and hence in this vacuum, identity markers like religion and populist politics are showing up as indicators of people’s discontent.

He highlighted that even as today”s international order is focussed on the Indo- Pacific like the Colonial era, the times and priorities of nations are different. Countries like Singapore have shown that land is not a precondition for prosperity. Conquests does not necessarily make you rich. The nuclear factor ensures that short war illusions are problematics. Intelligence capacity has improved thanks to technologies like remote sensing.

Despite these advancements, he warned that what is missing today is prudence and statesmanship. The lack of leadership by the hegemonic power, US has been a cause of concern in the recent years. But despite Trump’s populist policies, US resilience can be attributed to its institutional strength. Ending on a positive note, he said that he was cautiously optimistic that we have instruments in place today to prevent escalation to a full-blown war and that situation is dissimilar to the 1920s and 1930s.