Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (61 page)

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.

It is said that the divisions at the UN over such issues as the Iraq and Libyan wars and the crises over Syria and Iran have led to a worldwide crisis of confidence in the international system. But as my Chinese friends at the UN used to tell me, in their language, the Chinese character for ‘crisis’ is made up of two other characters—the character for ‘danger’ and the character for ‘opportunity’. There is a real danger that the organization will again be seen as increasingly irrelevant to the real world over which it presides. And yet there is an opportunity to reform it so that it is not only relevant, but an essential reflection of what our world has become in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I believe strongly that the UN needs reform, not because it has failed, but because it has succeeded enough to be worth investing in. And that India should help lead the effort for reform as well as play a visible and leading role in the revived UN emerging from its efforts.

Why does all this matter at all? Today, whether you are a resident of
Delhi or Dar-es-Salaam, whether you are from Thiruvananthapuram or Toronto, it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of your own country. What happens in South America or Southern Africa—from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS—can affect our lives wherever we live, even where my voters are in southern India. And your choices here—what you buy, how you vote—can resound far away. We all graze on the global commons.

Of course, we cannot meaningfully speak of security today in purely military terms. Indeed, informed knowledge about external threats to a nation, the fight against terrorism, a country’s strategic outreach, its geopolitically derived sense of its national interest and the way in which it articulates and projects its presence on the international stage are all intertwined, and are also conjoined with a country’s internal dynamics. There can no longer be a foolproof separation of intelligence from policy-making, of external intelligence and internal reality, of foreign policy and domestic society. Indeed even the very image of our intelligence apparatus contributes to the perception of a country, especially in its own neighbourhood.

But can there be national security without a sense of ‘global security’? National security is easily understood—keeping a country and its people safe behind defensible borders. What is global security?

As a former United Nations official, it is clear to me that, in an era of rapid technological advances, increasing economic interdependence, globalization and dramatic geopolitical change, there is no choice but to see security in all-encompassing terms across our globe. The assault on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 has already created global consciousness of one kind of danger that spans the globe, but there is more to it than terrorism. Some 2600 people died in the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. But some 26,000 people also died on that same day around the world—from starvation, unclean water and preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our idea of global security.

While poverty and human insecurity may not be said to ‘cause’ civil war, terrorism or organized crime, they all greatly increase the risk of instability and violence. Catastrophic terrorism against the rich countries can affect the development prospects of millions in poor countries by
causing a major economic downturn or forcing developed nations to focus on their own concerns. So global security can be said to rest in the creation of a kind of global order that responds to both hard and soft threats, and that does so through a network of states sharing common values and compatible approaches to governance. In this sense I would argue that India has a stake in such a world order, and that it also seeks to be the kind of society that ensures the safety and well-being of its citizens with full respect for their human rights, their basic needs and their physical security.

Across the globe, the threats to peace and security in the twenty-first century include not just international war and conflict but also civil war and internal violence, the insidious depredations of organized crime, the virulent menace of terrorism and the risks posed by weapons of mass destruction. And the threats facing the globe also include the scourges of poverty, of famine, of illiteracy, of deadly disease, of the lack of clean drinking water, of environmental degradation, of injustice, and of human insecurity. All of these threats make human beings less secure; they also undermine states and make them less secure.

Both within countries and across our globalized world, the threats we face are interconnected. The rich are vulnerable to the threats that attack the poor and, paradoxical as it may sound, the strong are vulnerable to the sufferings of the weak. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan famously called for a new global security consensus based on the interconnectedness of such threats. ‘A nuclear terrorist attack on the United States or Europe would have devastating effects on the whole world,’ he wrote. ‘But so would the appearance of a new virulent pandemic disease in a poor country with no effective health-care system. We must respond to HIV/AIDS as robustly as we do to terrorism,’ he added, ‘and to poverty as effectively as we do to proliferation.’ In India as well, we need to tackle the same range of threats if we are to keep our people secure.

The world has clearly evolved since the era when the Cold War seemed frozen in place, borders seemed immutable, and the Soviet Union looked as if it would last forever. In the same vein, the new threats we have to deal with require new responses from the international system, for which new ways of cooperation may need to be devised.

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. In this interconnected world, we need an effective and representative United Nations, in all our interests. And as one who was once the Indian candidate for the secretary-generalship, I trust I will be forgiven for quoting Mahatma Gandhi, who famously said, ‘You must
be
the change you wish to see in the world.’ The UN is no exception. To change the world, the UN must change too.

I am convinced there is much that can be accomplished with the UN as the lynchpin of our system of global governance. I am not advocating world government; we all know that such an idea would be deeply unwelcome in many places, and is neither practical nor desirable in today’s world. India is not alone in being proud of its sovereignty and unwilling to dilute it. But India has every interest in helping devise laws and norms in collaboration with other countries, and agreeing to uphold them as the ‘rules of the road’ for the global commons. And it is in India’s interests to help maintain a forum where sovereign states can come together to do this.

So much for the architecture. But, as the old saying goes, a house is not a home. Something more—something extremely important, although not quite so tangible—is needed: the new UN must encapsulate the twenty-first century’s equivalent of the spirit that informed its founding. It must amplify the voices of those who would otherwise not be heard, and serve as a canopy beneath which all can feel secure. The UN is, and must continue to be, a forum where the rich and powerful can commit their strength and their wealth to the cause of a better world. And it must continue to provide the stage where great and proud nations, big and small, rich and poor, can meet as equals to iron out their differences and find common cause in their shared humanity. The India of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru can certainly strive to ensure that the UN of the twenty-first century never forgets that it is both a child and a source of hopes for a better world—hopes that all human beings share. This is the only UN we have to help surmount the challenges posed by
our shared space in the twenty-first century, and we need to do our best in India to ensure our rightful place in it—to ensure that it does the right thing and that it does the thing right.