The long history of geopolitics and international relations is in many ways about big turning points. A seemingly settled world order or status quo gets disrupted and then unravels. The underlying cause of a power shift is the uneven rate of growth in comprehensive national power in the international system. This changing balance of power depends on many factors, the main ones being structural changes in the demographic, economic and technological bases of the rising powers, accompanied by a period of sustained political stability which enables them to acquire a greater share of global production and wealth. Power shifts could also result from wasteful military interventions, imperial overstretch, political implosion, or a failure to innovate and adapt that precipitates a relative decline among the dominant powers. Today, we are witnessing a combination of both these processes playing out in the dominant and rising powers.
For instance, the high noon of Asian prosperity when China and India were at the apex of the world economic system for over a millennium up to the 18th century seemed stable and enduring. Yet, the Atlantic, or what we refer to as the maritime West, gradually surpassed and then overran these formidable Asian empires and polities with their gunboats, technologies and hard-nosed statecraft. This was a dramatic shock with lasting consequences for world politics.
Another turning point would be the emergence of a multipolar system in 19th-century Europe with a global periphery around it. The balance of power, as a legitimate concept to regulate this crowded geopolitical order of multiple rising powers, was established as a concept in the foreign offices across Europe. But this did not stop the hegemonic aspirations of some powers, who made the fatal error of violently rewriting the status quo. The devastating world wars in the 20th century tell us just how gruelling the concept of the balance of power became in practice when it was challenged and then restored at enormous cost by a concert of powers.
And so the historical cycle repeats – power shifts occur through a process of complex changes at multiple levels of the international system that unsettle an established order, which is then restored by the most capable great powers who reform or create the norms, institutions and security architectures for the new status quo.
We are again at one of those big moments in world history.
The power transition is not occurring through unrestrained violence like in the pre-nuclear age, when a great power war to the finish was the primary means of changing the international order. It is true that the ongoing war in Ukraine is in many ways a modern version of a great power war that remains limited largely because of the contemporary features of the military-technological environment. But, broadly, it can be said that international life has grown more sophisticated with the advent of nuclear weaponry, along with reduced incentives and enormous costs to directly conquering territories and peoples.
Yet, the essence remains the same. An order that is not supported by the material and normative pillars to nourish, preserve and legitimise it becomes unsustainable, and the challengers – that is, those powers who were excluded or were on the margins of the previous fraying status quo – will seek a greater share of benefits and status for their states. How this process of competition and jostling for influence unfolds is typically shaped by the strategic cultures of the key actors in this drama, and how each formulates their national interests, world order visions, and the effectiveness with which they supply international public goods. This is important to emphasise: the precise outcomes of power shifts are rarely predictable because they are contingent on many factors, with every major participant possessing a vote in this dynamic and determining how they pursue change in the international order.
What would be India’s vote in this dynamic?
Indian statecraft before multipolarity
Since we are likely to see a measure of continuity but also profound change in India’s foreign policy and geostrategy, it might be useful to look at previous international environments and world orders to understand how India navigated previous settings. The future is likely to draw from these phases in terms of lessons, concepts and even established practices in statecraft. Before the recent outbreak of multipolarity, there have been three eras that have shaped India’s strategic culture.
It is important to begin with British India. While this phase is mostly remembered for its colonial plunder and cultural destruction — from which India is still recovering its previous material and civilisational position in the world system — the ideational impact on India’s worldviews relating to the regional geopolitical chessboard has left a deep imprint on its strategic culture.
Specifically, much of the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century was defined by the so-called ‘Great Game’ – the rivalry and confrontation between Britain and Russia for influence in various parts of Eurasia. This rivalry, and the fact that India had no sovereignty, meant that the subcontinent became the spearhead and great power base to sustain this continental competition. It led to the creation of buffer states and the ring system of defence around India, ostensibly to keep Russia out and the British permanently in a position of primacy over this region, along with an ability to project power further east in the Western Pacific.
Even on British China policy, India provided enormous leverage in Asian geopolitics not only to advance the forced opening of China during the 19th century but also to enable a robust system of forward control on China’s southwestern periphery, again with the aim of accessing continental Eurasia. India, in other words, was a western sentinel and an indispensable instrument in the great power competition of that epoch.
The ‘loss’ of India after 1947 was only partially compensated by the creation of Pakistan, which was envisioned from the outset in Anglo-American geostrategy to resume some of the roles played previously by British India. But it was always envisioned by some western strategists — and in India too — that India would eventually resume the role of a western sentinel in Asia.
In the mid-1940s, the Indian peninsula was again perceived in western grand strategy as US scholar Nicholas Spykman’s quintessential Rimland state, located on the periphery of the Eurasian continent and one of the keys to penetrate the Eurasian heartland and prosecute the strategy of containment after 1945, which in essence was a resumption and expansion of the 19th-century Great Game.
The outbreak of the Cold War was the first opportunity for India’s leaders to articulate a worldview for the new phase. India rejected the idea that it was going to be a regional lynchpin for the West, since it now had its own sovereign destiny and confronted the formidable task of recovering from the unprecedented material losses of the colonial era. This led to the posture and policy of non-alignment in the 1950s, which was fundamentally rooted in the belief that India was detaching itself from the escalating great power rivalry between the collective West and the Eurasian great powers, a rivalry that took on an even more aggressive form with the Cold War conflicts in Asia.
Indian leaders also quickly discovered that independent states had little space – indeed, Indian sovereignty needed to be substantially rolled back for the Eurasian containment strategy to find its full expression in Asia. India therefore refused to define world politics in a stark zero-sum fashion that would erase every other national identity and interest and subordinate them to the priorities of one of the superpower-led blocs. Although viewed as common sense and pragmatic today, the non-aligned policy was novel at the time and invited intense pressure from both sides, more so from the maritime West, for whom independent powers were an obstacle to gaining access to the gates of Greater Eurasia.
A key feature of non-alignment included military neutrality — that is, one great power’s geopolitical conflicts do not automatically become India’s responsibility to solve or participate in. During British India, it was presumed that British rivalries were to be applied to India, which was meant to step up as a security provider in any allied cause. An independent India rejected this concept both as a principle and a practice. When viewed from today’s vantage point, it might appear that non-alignment was in essence advocating the cause of a plural multipolar world where various ideologies, civilisations and socio-economic systems could coexist.
Non-alignment refused to endorse the moral superiority of any particular model and instead trod an organic path of letting a hundred flowers bloom, with the most durable ideas prevailing over time. This approach also paid rich dividends in drawing economic and military assistance from otherwise competing powers, thereby contributing to Indian security and economic development during its most vulnerable decades. Non-alignment was flexible and pragmatic enough to even leverage one superpower in times of a grave regional crisis during 1971 and in the two decades after that, until the end of the Cold War. But this was not an accident: it was India mentally remapping its own place in Eurasia’s strategic geography and pursuing a balance-of-power policy to confront the twin challenge at the time from a continental great power (China) and a maritime superpower (the US) — the ultimate G-2 challenge.
The balance of power again transformed in the 1990s. The unipolar moment challenged the idea that India could stand apart from great power rivalries while striving for a space to establish its own geopolitical and developmental model. Indeed, during the 1990s and a few years thereafter, there was just one great power in the system with no countervailing options to cushion the power imbalance. India responded with a mixture of engagement — the rapprochement and normalisation with the US and G-7 countries was the big foreign policy development of that decade — and sovereign resistance in select but crucial areas for its future.
India also reconceived its national interest with economic growth as the core objective of foreign policy. This was similar to China’s reform and opening-up policy, whereby rapidly integrating into the global economy became the priority for Indian policymakers. We often refer to this phase as the neoliberal era, where geopolitics was kept in the background to allow economic interdependence to flourish. This phase peaked in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis marking the beginning of the end of the unipolar moment.
In many ways, India’s foreign and security policies over the past century are a series of reorientations and modifications within a geopolitical discourse and framework conceived by the maritime West, looking at the strategic value of this area from the outside and for their own purposes. A multipolar world setting, with its centre of gravity shifting to Eurasia, will require India to develop an alternative geopolitical framework — looking at the broader region from within, rather than via an offshore great power’s prism whose security imperatives are inevitably going to be different and unpredictable.
Multipolarity and its implications for India
There are three novel features about today’s multipolar world, each with significant implications for Indian statecraft in the years ahead.
First, we are seeing a geo-cultural change from the western civilisation-led order to a multi-civilisational order. What makes the present power shifts truly unique is that they are occurring outside the confined spaces of the geo-cultural and geopolitical West. For the past half-millennium, the rise and fall of great powers was exclusively a western affair, with each power being displaced by an even larger and more formidable one from within a common geopolitical and geo-civilisational space. From the Italian city-states, Holland, Portugal and Spain, France, and later England and then Germany and finally the US, each of these players assumed the mantle of leadership over the international order. But for the past 500 years, the fundamental civilisational values and strategic cultures between these different western powers were more alike than distinct, allowing for a cohesive hegemony after every major transition. This cycle of the baton being passed from one western power to another has been permanently broken.
The rise — or the return — of major powers in Greater Eurasia (China, Russia, India, Iran, Indonesia, to mention a few) is a departure from this long pattern. This leaves open the possibility that world order will be built around non-western ideas that are still evolving. What we can say is that world order is not going to be built on a homogeneous idea, given the diversity of strategic experiences and ideologies among the Eurasian players. The emerging multipolar order is in its essence plural and cannot have a universal ideology as its normative edifice.
For India, to be part of a world order where non-western civilisations are seen as equal members of the international community — and not as identities and cultures to be modified, reformed or erased — is something that obviously bodes well for the evolution of Indian nationhood too. Indeed, one of the key virtues of today’s power shift relates to the domestic realms of rising powers, who now have an international context to develop their social systems and cultures without the existential threat of a hostile universal ideology.
The second feature of today’s multipolar world is in the geoeconomic and technological realm. Historically, the pace of change in a power shift has been directly linked to the rapidity with which the dominant power or bloc’s technological advantages are diffused to its competitors and rising powers.
One of the novel features of the contemporary power transition is the relatively rapid development of comprehensive national power, including economic power, outside the US-led bloc in recent decades. There is little historical precedent for this, and it explains much of the erratic policy rhetoric and behaviour from the collective West — because it has occurred under their watch and partly as a consequence of their own specific policies towards globalisation in the past three decades. But the horse of this diffusion of power has already bolted!
As a contrast, during the peak of British hegemony in the mid-to-late 19th century, there was a high degree of concentration of economic and military technologies, while the pace of diffusion of power to the periphery was slow, despite the intensive globalisation and trade during that era. The collapse of political authority in Asia was of course the main reason. It is almost impossible to freeze the spread of knowledge and innovation today because several capable rising powers now possess the domestic conditions and scientific infrastructure to absorb, adapt, create and field new technologies in civilian and military spheres.
The present picture of the top eight leading economies (in terms of GDP, PPP) would have been unimaginable a generation ago: it includes China, India, Russia, Brazil and Indonesia. Only the US, Germany and Japan represent the US-bloc. The changing structure of global industrial capabilities is equally stark: in the year 2000, the G-7 accounted for over 70 percent of global production; by 2030, it is the non-West that is projected to account for nearly 70 percent of global production.
In terms of strategic commodities, energy resources, industrial technologies and scalable human capital, Greater Eurasia is already the centre of the world economy, albeit in an uneven distribution among the various great and regional powers. At an aggregate level, the preponderance of the G-7 has been permanently broken, and this implies very different production and supply chains from those that existed in the pre-multipolar era. The prospect of the non-West being equal partners with the West in economic interdependence — if not leading certain supply chains — is now all too real.
India’s challenge is resetting its geoeconomic compass from a West-centric economy to a Eurasian-oriented economy with a global footprint. In some sectors, the adjustment will be easier, and in some areas restructuring production chains, financial networks and even entire sectors of the domestic economy will require major policy reform. From a connectivity standpoint too, India is putting in place various projects and initiatives that aim to develop lines of communication in terms of transport networks and corridors with Greater Eurasia from multiple directions.
Finally, we come to the geopolitical. The geographic areas of structural competition on the global chessboard are shifting away from the Euro-Atlantic to Greater Eurasia and the Western Pacific.
In the epic struggle between western maritime powers and Eurasian continental powers, India’s geographic position on the Rimland of Greater Eurasia, with a direct frontier with one of the great powers, China, provides the contemporary context for Indian statecraft. Previously, during the Cold War, the subcontinent was generally seen to be at the periphery of the superpower rivalry, with its core being in Europe. This had provided India with limited manoeuvring room to advance its own geopolitical influence in the area as well as carve out a domestic development model.
Has this changed today?
Undoubtedly, the rise of China has transformed the geopolitical setting across Asia and around the subcontinent, both in terms of military security and geoeconomics. A contiguous great power as India’s largest neighbour, with a complicated history of territorial disputes and different visions of regional order, means Indian statecraft cannot reapply past balance-of-power concepts in the same way.
The power realities have changed, making the idea of India as a western sentinel and security lynchpin in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific area appear outdated and posing high risk in the emerging multipolar setting — especially when seen from the unique configuration of the subcontinent’s security system. Regional crises in recent years attest to this point, where India’s external balancing options have revealed their limits.
That being said, if the impending contest is between a Greater Eurasian alignment and a maritime Pacific bloc led by the US, that geoeconomic and security competition will be waged primarily in the core zone of the Western Pacific and in lesser intensity in other sub-regions of Eurasia. NATO’s strategic defeat in Ukraine suggests the axis of struggle will shift to the east. If this is the ‘Great Game’ of the future, then India can regain strategic room and extend its window of opportunity to pursue its domestic transformation by choosing to focus on stabilising its primary region of the subcontinent through a mixture of détente and renewed engagement with China, while simultaneously cultivating several other strategic partnerships.
More broadly, there are two levels of change in this transition to multipolarity. One is the global contest between continental Eurasia and the maritime West to establish the future contours and ground rules of the new world order. The other is an intra-Eurasian order-building process to promote geopolitical stability and deeper economic interdependence, while also maintaining a power equilibrium that blocks any easy pathways to hegemony by any single power — with the obvious reference being China.
India has deep stakes in both these geopolitical processes that are unfolding simultaneously. We are likely to see this manifest in its statecraft through sustained engagement and investment in several areas, but also military neutrality on certain conflict zones and potential flashpoints. India’s grand strategic goal is promoting global multipolarity and co-creating more inclusive and responsive governance norms through institutions such as BRICS, while also promoting Eurasian multipolarity, interdependence and co-developing regional institutions to manage complex security problems.
Ultimately, multipolarity means India reimagining the broader region’s geopolitics and making intelligent policy adjustments with all the great powers. While many strategists still insist that China is the only existential challenge for India, this is inevitable only to the extent that India is an active participant in the new Great Game. India’s China problem, ironically, is more manageable when India pursues an independent foreign policy than when it takes on the burden-sharing role of managing distant security flashpoints and hotspots in concert with the maritime West. This realistic approach to statecraft might sound remarkably similar to the Cold War era, except that the stakes for India are far more real because of the transformation in the military-technological setting in the subcontinent and beyond.
The big ideational shift in Indian grand strategy will occur when India begins seeing itself less as a piece of real estate in Spykman’s framework to hem in a Greater Eurasia and more as a vital pillar in the Eurasian-Pacific multipolar order. Thus, India’s future role should be less of a spoiler and more of a stakeholder and beneficiary in the multipolar setting. When viewed from such a vision, the often-heard claim that India must make a strategic choice to swing towards one side makes little geopolitical sense, because India has vital material and civilisational interests in shaping the entirety of the ongoing historical power shifts underway.
(Zorawar Daulet Singh is an award winning author and strategic affairs expert based in New Delhi. His recent books include ‘Powershift: India China relations in a multipolar world’ and ‘Power and Diplomacy: India’s foreign policies during the Cold War’)
(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK) |
