“Human Security: From Concept to Practice”

Amitav Acharya (right), Professor of International Relations at American University and Global Director of TRANSCEND addresses a panel discussion on “Human security –– Its application and added value”, part of the General Assembly’s day-long thematic debate on human security. Beside Mr. Acharya is Joseph Deiss, President of the sixty-fifth session of the Assembly. 14 April 2011, United Nations, New York
Source: http://www.unmultimedia.org/photo/detail.jsp?query=identifer:470/470150




“Human Security: From Concept to Practice”

Text of Speech by Professor Amitav Acharya, UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance, America University and Global Director of Transnational Challenges and Emerging Nations Dialogue (TRANSCEND), to the "Informal Thematic Debate of the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Human Security", New York, 14 April 2011.


Madam Chair, Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen,


The evolution of the concept of human security has gone through two phases. Between the 1990s and the early 2000s was a period of debate over its various meanings, whether human security was about freedom from fear, or freedom from want. Since then, the debate has entered a period of general agreement that human security is both, as well as freedom to live a life of dignity. It is not a matter of either this or either that. The important challenge is how to look for linkages between these various meanings.

But a common feature of all these debates and synthesis was that they were almost exclusively conducted by the academic community and policymakers of individual countries. Ironically, common people hardly got their voice through, even though human security is really about people’s security. What people – especially those who are real victims of human insecurity in their real lives- think of the human security concept was hardly factored-in.

This bias was partly because these debates took place in academia and in intergovernmental institutions and forums, but not in the field. It was also because we did not do micro-research, or case studies in actual conflict areas. Instead, we focused on the broad picture.

Now we have some data to correct this bias. Recently, the Asian Dialogue Society a regional network of academics, policy leaders and concerned citizens and friends of Asia, in partnership with the School of International Studies at American University, and the Madhyam Foundation, a non-profit group in India, and funded by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan, carried out a study of human security in two regions of India – Northeast India and Orissa. Both these areas have lots of human insecurity – poverty, insurgency and conflict. Our findings, which has just been published as a book entitled, Human Security: From Concept to Practice (Singapore and London: World Scientific, 2011), edited by Amitav Acharya, Subrat K. Singhdeo, and M. Rajaretnam, are important not only for the practical aspects of human security, but also for rethinking the concept itself. Let me list four of these findings:

1. Poor people fear most. In Northeast India, we found that 76.1 per cent of the people who have an annual income of 1000 rupees or less felt they were “compelled to live in anxiety?”, compared to 60.4 per cent of the people who had an income level of 10,000 rupees or more. The clear implication is that poverty and human insecurity are inextricably linked.

2. States and state policies are also a source on human insecurity. One cause of fear is operations by the military or security forces. For example, when asked whether they feared the militants or the military (security forces) more, 38.5 per cent of respondents in the North East India cases said they were equally afraid of both, a higher percentage than those who said they were more afraid of the militants and those who said they feared the security forces more. Another factor that came out clearly is bad governance, including government corruption. These findings go to the heart of a very important question about human security, which is security for the people, rather than security for states.

3. Political and socio-economic factors behind conflict are closely linked. Conflict is caused by a variety of sources. The three most important sources of popular dissatisfaction contributing to conflict (hence sources of threats to human security) that came out in both North East India and Orissa are: corruption in government, unemployment, and poverty and lack of basic amenities.

4. People want dialogue. More than two-thirds of the people – including people who sympathize with the insurgents- interviewed said they prefer dialogue to extreme solutions such as outright suppression or outright secession. They prefer governments to talk to insurgents, rather than strengthen military operations, or grant independence to them. Moreover, we people want the dialogue to be inclusive, involving the representatives of the larger civil society. This finding is significant for the UN’s efforts to find effective solutions to the problem of internal conflicts leading to state break-ups. The key demand of groups fighting governments may not be to break away, but to have their human security respected and fulfilled. Responding to internal conflicts with this understanding mind will go a long way in addressing the challenge of state failure today.


This also leads me to talk briefly about responses to challenges to human security: how to devise effective policy tools to improve the prospects for human security around the world.

Mr Obasanjo has earlier urged the UN to develop a human security index. The foundation for such an index has already been laid in the project and book Human Security: From Concept to Practice, which I have mentioned earlier. In our project, we propose three policy tools: (1) Human Security Governance Index and Ranking; (2) Human Security Mapping in Conflict Zones; and (3) Human Security Impact Assessment. While limitation of time does not allow me to go into details, let me mention a few key points about each of these.

(1) Human Security Governance Index and Ranking: We now have Human Development Reports (under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program) for countries and increasingly states/provinces within countries, our innovation has been is to extend it to regions and districts (within states/provinces) to allow for more micro-studies and of the local context in which human security assessments and policies must be carried out. Moreover, we include governance, not just threats, in our measurement, since bad governance is a fundamental cause of human insecurity and good governance is key to ensuring the realization of human security.

(2) Human Security Mapping in Conflict Zones: People who live in the constant shadow of conflict may have more specific and acute perceptions of human security challenges and needs than people who live in relative peace and order. Hence, a methodology for relating to people in conflict zones and analyzing their concerns and attitudes is vital. Our project presents such a template.

(3) Human Security Impact Assessment (HSIA): We have environmental impact assessments for some time, but it is time to extend it and cover the entire gamut of human security concerns. Some projects intended for promoting development, such as large infrastructure projects undertaken by donor agencies, multilateral institutions like the World Bank, national/provincial governments, and corporations, no matter how well-intentioned, may end up aggravating insecurity and conflict in the area. A HSIA enables governments, foreign donors, multilateral institutions and corporations, to better anticipate the impact of their projects not just on development and environment, but also on security as a whole, from a broader perspective. And by necessity, such assessments have to be localized and micro-analytic. Our project has provided the template and methodology for such a HSIA, which can be easily adapted to all parts of the world.

None of this is to belittle the value of broad brush measurements of human security, such as the Human Security Report, produced under the leadership of Professor Andrew Mack. This is becoming an indispensable source of knowledge about human security. What I urge is for the international community, including the UN, to compliment the broad picture studies with micro-studies, which give you a better chance to incorporate the people’s own perception of the meaning and scope of human security. My call is for allowing the civil society and the common people to get involved in the process of human security research and policy dialogues.

To sum up, the overall conclusion that one might reach from our study is that to an overwhelming extent, people see human security in a holistic way, not in a piecemeal manner. So the lines drawn between “freedom from fear”, “freedom from want”, and “freedom to live a life with dignity”, are easily blurred in people’s perceptions of human security, what it means to them and how it is challenged and how it is to be promoted. This is the finding that we need to bring into our ongoing efforts to reach a common understanding of human security and correct the bias that I mentioned earlier. And while we derive these insights from case studies in India, it is my strong belief that they hold true everywhere.

I conclude by observing that just as the concept of human security itself is people-centric, so should be research and dissemination efforts about it. If the UN, the Human Security trust Fund and individual countries are to effectively promote human security, they might want to invest more on research and dissemination from “bottom-up”, by increasing the engagement of common people and the civil society.

Thank you very much for your attention.

http://www.un.org/en/ga/president/65/initiatives/humansecuritystatements.shtml

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Summary of Question and Answer Session: Responses Offered by Prof Acharya

Responding to a variety of comments and questions posed by various national delegations participating in the debate, Prof Acharya made the following points with reference to questions that touched upon the main points of his speech:

1. While it is important to take note of the people’s perception of human security at the local level, “local” should not lead to cultural particularism and relativism. The local context should not be used to exclude or delegitimize good ideas about, and approaches to, human security that may have a broader relevance. The challenge is how to construct a broader definition and understanding of human security from different local contexts, and how to draw out the broader relevance of local perspectives for other localities/regions and the world at large.

2. To those delegations who have raised concerns about linking human security with responsibility to protect, and who insist that any definition of human security must respect national sovereignty and territorial integrity and should not allow foreign intervention, I should say that these objections are not new but are important and require a sensitive response. My own position is that human security should not be pursued through military intervention. At the same time, sovereignty is itself a changing concept, and most countries, both from the West and the South, are realizing that there are legitimate ways of making sovereignty more flexible, on the basis of UN’s authority to which all nations can agree.

3. It should be possible for the global community to pursue and promote human security without the use or threat of use of military force. Human security is not the same as humanitarian intervention, or the Responsibility to Protect” idea. But this does not mean states do not have a responsibility to secure their own citizens. To quote the words of one delegate from the developing world (Brazil), “Human security should be a primary responsibility of the State”. In other words, all states have some obligations and responsibilities to fulfill the human security needs of all their citizens, and ensure their freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom to live life with dignity. I endorse this principle wholeheartedly.

4. Those countries that feel strongly that the definition of human security should be inclusive and not be dominated by Western nations or intellectuals, should not hesitate to put forward their own definitions of human security and approaches to promote it, just like Thailand has done. Indeed, all states should be invited to offer their own ideas and definitions of human security before we can reach a common understanding.

5. Those who argue that only the governments of a country should have the sole responsibility to decide what constitute a threats to the human security their own citizens, I would say that while this principle is broadly acceptable, they should also, as good citizens of the international community and the world, do their best to make their determination consistent with the principles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and other universally accepted norms and practices.

6. To those who are worried that human security might lead to securitization of socio-economic issues and might even lead to an expanded role of the armed forces and security services in civilian affairs, I would agree that this is a very valid concern. We need to watch out for such potential abuses and ensure that human security policies are carried out within a broad democratic context and with the active involvement of the civil society.

7. To the question, how to differentiate human security from human rights, I would respond that human rights is a legal concept, or has legal standing under domestic and international law, where human security is still a political notion, awaiting legalization and institutionalization. Moreover, where as human rights is often referred to as individual rights, human security is peoples’ security, and has a somewhat more social and communitarian connotation. This means one can apply it to a different cultures and societies, including those societies which claim to have a more communitarian ethic compared to Western individualism. Hence, I would say that human security is a broader notion that subsumes human rights and can be promoted in tandem with human rights.

8. My concluding thoughts are that the realization of human security is a mutual learning process. All learning is social, and the most effective ways of learning are voluntary not imposed. Broad and universal ownership of the concept is vital. Learning takes time and is achieved through dialogue and mutual understanding. Let the dialogue begin.


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Extracts From: “IN WORLD OF UNPREDICTABLE THREATS, EXPANDED CONCEPT OF SECURITY NEEDED TO ENCOMPASS BROAD RANGE OF CONDITIONS ENDANGERING SURVIVAL, DIGNITY, GENERAL ASSEMBLY TOLD”.
Available at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/ga11072.doc.htm
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Today’s thematic debate followed those held in May 2008, May 2010, and July 2010, and aimed to contribute to discussions on a notion of human security, as outlined in resolution 64/291 (2010), which called for continued consideration of the topic. With that in mind, the first of two interactive panels — on “A possible approach for defining human security” — heard a lively debate on the idea that human security represented a point of convergence for the United Nations’ most important goals of peace, security and human development.
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The panel featured presentations by: Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria and Founder of the Centre for Human Security; Frene Ginwala, former Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa, and Member of the Commission on Human Security; Jennifer Leaning, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health; and Amitav Acharya, Professor of International Relations and Chair of the ASEAN Studies Center at American University. Margareta Wahlström, Assistant Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, moderated the discussion.
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Mr. ACHARYA said that from the mid-2000s onwards, there had been a convergence of views regarding the definition of human security and it was now a question of prioritizing its many strands. Ironically, the people who were at the receiving end of threats to human security were left out of a largely academic debate. While micro-studies or targeted case studies had largely been avoided, his two studies of two poor conflict-affected regions of India had broken ground. Among their findings was that people who were poorest lived in the most fear: 76 per cent of those with 1,000 rupees or less felt a great deal of anxiety, while only 60 per cent of those making more than 10,000 rupees felt that much anxiety. He had also found that the policies of the State — including specific initiatives carried out to address human security — had the potential to create human insecurity. For example, people feared the military as much as the militant groups fomenting the local insurgency. Among other things, that meant that States bore some responsibility for human insecurity, he said.
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Mr. ACHARYA said, in response to question about the need for a detailed definition, that such a definition was unnecessary. If the price of a definition was the lowest common denominator, or one that limited imagination and approach, it was preferable not to have one. While progress had been made on human security, it had been uneven. For example, he heard very little about human security in Washington, D.C., even from an administration with a very human face. At the same time, it was not accepted that people were at the heart of national security. He agreed it would be hard to resolve the role of the State, which played an ambiguous role and sometimes compromised human security. Thus, in his view, some criteria must be laid down to identify what activities and polices were acceptable and what were not. He was not arguing, however, for intervention. While a local focus was important, it should not be used to exclude or delegitimize relevant concepts.

He further stressed that, because the creation of a definition was a political process, the world’s Governments must make that effort rights here in the General Assembly. But, if a common working understanding, rather than a concrete definition, was the only possible outcome that would also be acceptable.
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Mr. ACHARYA said that, despite initial skepticism, he now believed, after having participated in the discussion, that the world community was much closer to a definition of human security. Regarding a human security index, he suggested that regional organizations might have a better understanding of the local context that also avoided parochialism. At this point, the idea of human rights was a legal concept, while human security was a political construct. It also operated from a community perspective, rather than an individual one, as human rights did.

Why has the UN been so ineffective in the Middle East?

Amitav Acharya
Remarks at the Conference on Emerging Powers, Global Security and the Middle East, Abu Dhabi, 8-10 February 2010. Emirates Center for Strategic Stdies and Research and Center on International Cooperation, New York University

Why has the UN been so ineffective in the Middle East? There are at least four main answers to the question, aside from the generic reasons that apply to the UN’s role in peace and conflict in any part of the world. These reasons make the Middle East an especially difficult challenge for the UN.

First, the challenge facing the UN’s peace and security role is especially daunting in the Middle East. Depending on how broadly one defines the regions, this region suffers from a wider variety of conflicts than any other region in the world:
• Enduring rivalries or protracted regional conflict: Israeli-Palestinian, Arab-Israeli conflicts
• Rising powers trying to alter the regional balance of power and seeking regional dominance: Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and Iran now
• Danger of nuclear proliferation: Iran
• Terrorism and radicalism: Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan
• Failed and failing states: Sudan, Afghanistan
• Non-traditional threats, competition over resources, such as water and energy


No other region, including Asia, matches the Middle East in terms of the variety and complexity of conflicts and their underlying causes.

Second, the Middle East does not have an effective or a semi-effective regional institution. Arab League and GCC are the weak. This is not to say that other regions have regional groupings that are always effective, but Asia is experimenting with new institutions and has some useful groupings: ASEAN, six party talks, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which have moderating impact if not transforming impact on conflicts, the League and GCC do not compare at least as regional conflict management mechanisms. The OAS and African Union are also stronger examples of regionalism, despite the Taif accord on Lebanon for which Arab League takes credit.

While having an effective regional organization is not necessarily a precondition for UN’s success, it helps. The idea of subsidiarity, whereby regional groupings could act as first points of conflict management, moderate tensions, and help create the ground for the UN to play its role, is important. One example, during the decade long Cambodia conflict, from 1979 ASEAN did lot of ground work before UN-sponsored Paris Peace Conference produced a diplomatic settlement in 1991.

Why does the Middle East lack effective regional institutions? Because the League is beset by weak leadership, intra-Arab differences, while the GCC is not an inclusive organization, since it does not include two major actors in the Gulf (Arabian or Persian). The Middle East is the only region to lack a genuinely inclusive regional organization or process (even compared to OAS-Cuba). Amar Moussa, the SG of Arab League, wrote an op-ed in IHT a few days ago, which I think we should all read. He talks about creating a regional system for the Middle East. But he leaves out the role Israel or Iran will play in such an arrangement.

To compound the problem, the degree of economic integration in Middle East is low. A recent study published in the Journal of the World Economy, “provides empirical evidence that Middle Eastern countries with significant trade ties to other countries in the region do cooperate more and fight less.” According to a report by the Dubai International Financial Center, “Intra-regional trade in the Middle East has grown 28 per cent between 2000 and 2007 and now represents 19.3 per cent of all trade in the region,” http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-198978443.html. By contrast, in East Asia, intra-regional trade accounts for close to 50% of its total trade.

A third reason behind the UN’s limitations in the Middle East has to do with the role of outside powers, especially the US. Barbara Crosette, a well-known journalist, once said: “the U.N. will never be able to fix the Middle East, for the simple reason that the United States would not let it.” It has become a cliché to say that the US is absolutely critical to Middle East peace. No one questions it. At best, it deters and stifles initiatives by other countries. At worst, the role of the UN in peace negotiations remains hostage to domestic politics and changes in the US. The Obama administration pledged to be more active in ME peace process, but it has not achieved much during its first year in office, for a variety of reasons, including domestic difficulties.

But the dominance of outside powers is not in relation to the Israeli-Palestine conflict alone. Under Bush, we saw in Iraq, another dramatic evidence of US’s unilateral attempt to fix a regional security challenge with or without UN sanction and involvement. Although it tried to draw in the UN subsequent to the invasion, this has not been noticeably successful. Critics alleged that “the US intends to use the UN to push Iraqis to accept US-imposed "benchmarks" for reconciliation, including a controversial oil law and debaathification.” “the Security Council succumbed to US and UK pressure and voted on August 10, 2007 to expand the UN's role in Iraq. Only if the US occupation ends can there be a substantial – and politically viable – UN role.” http://www.globalpolicy.org/iraq/political-issues-in-iraq/un-role-in-iraq.html

Aside from individual powers, NATO is also involved in the region, which raises additional issues of legitimacy of outside countries in conflict resolution within the region.

Moreover, there is an important difference between Middle East and Asia when it comes to role of great powers. Rising great powers sometimes have a strong stake in peace and stability and genuinely want to avoid instability, in their own neighbourhood, so as to have favourable conditions for growth and prosperity. Amb Wu: “peace abroad, stability at home”, or “peace near abroad, stability and regime security at home”. China in East Asia is a good example of this. If great powers involved in a regional conflict are from outside the region, their stake in regional stability is not existential, because their vulnerability to regional instability is correspondingly less. Most great powers in the Middle East are from outside the region. Most great powers in East Asia are from inside the region. That makes a difference.

Another complicating factor is the role of emerging powers in the Middle East. The competitive instincts and roles of Russia, China and India in East Asia are constrained by the diplomatic and normative influence of ASEAN and the countervailing postures of each other and the US. But no such checks apply to their roles in the Middle East.

Fourth and finally, the UN’s Middle East role is stymied by history and recent precedent. Aside from its limited role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and since the 1991 Iraq war, where US-led coalition forces authorized by the UN expelled Saddam Hussein’s occupation forces from Kuwait, it has been marginalized in the principal recent conflicts in the Middle East: Iraq (2003), Afghanistan, and in the war on terror more generally. This has led to a serious loss of confidence on the UN’s relevance and its ability address conflicts in the Middle East. Does anyone trust that the UN can bring peace to Middle East? The kind of optimism that accompanied the end of the Cold War with the Iraqi expulsion from Kuwait has disappeared.

How then to make the UN more relevant to the Middle East?

The UN has limited resources. Despite Obama administration’s ostensible support for multilateralism, it has not really transformed the UN or led the infusion of resources into the UN.

Also, each conflict zone in Middle East - Iraq, Israeli-Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, etc. - has its own dynamic and requires its own approach. There is no silver bullet or one size fits all. The UN must tailor its response to these individual circumstances. But some general elements of a more effective approach to the region can be identified.

The UN should encourage and support the creation of inclusive regional arrangements, and cooperate with them. Indeed, a UN-sponsored Confidence-bulding mechanism in the region will be a great idea. The UN should seriously consider it.

The UN should focus on addressing the human security and non-traditional security concerns in the Middle East. According to a recent report by the Oxford Research Group, “Food shortages are a further concern in a number of countries in the region and this situation will deteriorate over the coming decades as a result of climate change significantly reducing agricultural output at the same time as the region experiences dramatic population growth. Much of the region is already heavily dependent on food imports, which leaves it vulnerable to fluctuations in the global commodity markets. Recent years have seen violent riots in Morocco (September 2007), Yemen (March 2008) and Egypt (April 2008), primarily relating to the rising cost of wheat and the knock on effect on bread prices, together with the poor economic situation in general.” The UN and its specialized agencies should and could do more to address these problems.

The UN should seek a greater and more direct role in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace process, and not simply remain passive or play second fiddle to the US, even though it will require adjustments and changes to UN’s policies regarding Israel’s legitimacy as a state.

Finally, the UN should expand its role in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, it has faced pressure from US and others to this. This could include sending a peacekeeping force to the region with the involvement of both India and Pakistan, and possibly even Iran. But while doing so, it should not compromise its image of neutrality or blindly legitimize the past approaches of the US and its coalition partners. The UN’s legitimacy is not just with the states, but also with the people of the region. And a lot of people in the region are unhappy with the recent roles of Western countries in these two countries.

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A New Beginning in International Affairs?

Keynote Address by Professor Amitav Acharya to the Symposium on "Looking Forward: International Affairs in the Next Decade", organized by the Journal of International Service, American University, January 30, 2009.

Thank you for inviting me to deliver the keynote address at the Journal of International Service's 2009 Symposium on "Looking Forward: International Affairs in the Next Decade". I will give you more than what you had asked me to do, by commenting on international affairs not just of the next decade, but the next three decades.

What I am going to do today is to address a simple question: what sort of world are you going to live and work in as you consider and embark on a professional career? As you know, SIS is a professional school, it’s supposed to prepare you for a career in international affairs, such as the foreign service, national security establishments, international organizations, and non-governmental groups, etc. But even as a professional school, we give you sufficient grounding in theories in international relations. This is not only because we want at least some of you to pursue academic careers, but also because theory can act as templates or lenses for analyzing real world policy challenges and conceiving pathways to address them.

But I should start with the important caveat that IR scholars have a notoriously bad record when it comes to making predictions. Sometimes, it’s a failure to anticipate what is coming, at other times, it’s the failure of predictions that were actually made in scholarly writings. In the most striking recent example of the former, i.e., failure to anticipate what’s coming, there is no better example than the end of the Cold War. Nobody, realists, liberals or constructivists, had predicted the end of the Cold War. But neo-realism was particularly implicated. Kenneth Waltz, the leading light of neo-realism, had argued famously that bipolar international systems are more stable than multipolar ones. At first, Waltz meant by stability the degree of conflict and cooperation in a given international system. Later he revised the meaning of stability to imply the durability of the system. He was wrong on both counts. The Cold War was not really that stable in the first sense, especially if you are counting the number of conflicts, and the dead and injured in the developing world. He was also wrong about the durability of bipolarity. The Cold War lasted a lot less longer than the multipolar order of European great powers in the 19th century.

What about predictions about what the future holds? To be sure, most IR scholars generally shy away from making outright predictions about the future events. What they more commonly do is to identify and label new ‘moments’ or turning points in history. Hence we have formulations like the late Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, and assorted claims about the ‘liberal moment’, the ‘unipolar moment’, and now the onset of Richard Haas’ ‘nonpolarity’, Nial Fergusson’s ‘apolarity’. The Economist Magazines ‘neo-polarity’ and Fareed Zakaria’s ‘post-American World’. But even here, IR theory has a poor record. Liberals and constructivists have been less precise in their predictions, but their analysis of the future world order has also gone awry. [by the way, when Obama was running for President, he was seen with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s book, entitled “the Post-American World’, and there was a comment from a conservative source: Obama is reading a book by a Muslim who wants the US to be destroyed.)

Anyway, both realism and liberalism gave rather optimistic accounts of the world order to come after the end of the Cold War. The ‘liberal moment’, exemplified in the democratic peace theory, George Bush senior’s New World Order slogan, and in a more extreme fashion, by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, has given way to liberal pessimism. Constructivism was associated with the Gorbachev’s ideational revolution, with the emergence of security communities in Western Europe and Southeast Asia where war becomes unthinkable, and the transformative impact of socialization and collective identity building. What we see instead is the resumption of the Russian-West rivalry, and the dark side of collective identity-building which fuels ethnic and religious conflicts.

Reviewing some of the popular and influential ideas about the future of world order since the end of the Cold War, I can only make the following conclusions:

1. The end of history versus clash of civilizations was a false debate. We now know, if any proof was really needed, only too well that civilizations cooperate as well clash. In the war on terror, there has been plenty of empathy and cooperation across civilizations, and plenty of divisions within them. Similarly the simplistic view that the end of the Cold War means a decisive and final triumph of market economics and liberal democracy over all other ideologies and approaches has been overtaken and discredited by a host of developments from the rise of China to the ongoing global financial crisis.

2. Neo-conservatism or the ideology of pursuing democracy promotion with a big stick, and disdaining multilateral cooperation in pursuing strategic goals, was overrated in terms of its durability and impact. The neo-cons are gone, hopefully for good, although not before causing much damage to global order and US credibility and leadership, which now needs to be repaired.

3. A more contentious question: is unipolarity ending and if so, will it have dangerous consequences for international stability? A recent article in National Interest Online (January 2009) by Chicago University Professor Robert Pape and entitled ‘Empire Falls’, argues that the United States is in unprecedented decline. Pape calculates that even before the economic downturn, the average rate of US growth has fallen from nearly 4% during the Clinton years to just over 2% during Bush. The US decline is of course relative, especially that to China. China’s share of world product had grown consistently by over 10%. Between 2000 and 2008, the US share of the World product measured in current US dollars fell by 32%, while that of China rose by 144%. A good deal, or nearly a quarter, of the decline is self-inflicted: spending on the Iraq War, tax cuts, current account deficits, etc. Other factors behind the US relative decline include the rise of China and the diffusion of technology around the world. Overall, Pape concludes, the US has experienced one of the most significant declines of any state since mid-19th century. This has the risk of causing dangerous international instability, as powers undergoing such decline tend to become targets of counterbalancing or even opportunistic aggression by rival powers and coalitions or face defeat from preventive wars initiated by themselves.

Can we accept this thesis, not just of the fact of the US decline, but its strategic consequences? First, even Pape concedes the US decline is stoppable and even reversible, with the right grand strategy. Can Obama administration pursue such a strategy? Here is a clue:

In Barrack Obama’s Dreams for my Father, on page 41, he recounts an incident where his young Barry Obama, after being attacked with a stone, by a class-mate, is taught self-defence by his Indonesian step father, Lolo. While the training goes on in the courtyard, with his mother watching from inside the house, Lolo says to little Barry Obama:

‘Better to be strong. If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always be strong yourself.’

I am not sure how much President Barrack Obama’s worldview and foreign policy derives from young Barry Obama’s experience growing up in Indonesia. But what the above tells me is that the US under the Obama administration is not going to sit back and be overtaken by another power or bandwagon with another rising power.
Moreover, as Stephen Walt points out in his blog in the Foreign Policy Magazine, while the US relative power has declined, so have that of most other powers during this period, with the notable and significant exception of China.

And even if one accepts that the US is a declining superpower and that this is a long-term and irreversible phenomenon, what about its strategic consequences? This brings me to the subject of China’s rise, since China is the closest that any nation comes to being the peer-competitor to the United States.

Unlike Germany of the late 19th century, China is a status quo power. China does not seek to alter the existing international order by force. It’s a mistake to use European analogy, as Pape, like many other Western scholars before him have done, to anticipate how the rise of China might affect future international order. Just as Paper and others point to the diffusion of technology as a new factor undermining the relative US dominance, so we can also say that new instruments of regional and international governance, not available during the era of European global dominance, will come into play and some of them may prevent history from repeating itself.

These include the growing density of multilateral institutions. As Iain Johnston points out in his new book, Social States, China is today deeply engaged in the global regional multilateral structures. China is probably the first truly global power to emerge in an era of extensive and cross-cutting multilateral linkages. The entire history of European state-system could claim to have had only one, the European concert system of the early 19th century.

Contrary to the scenario sketched by Pape about the possible strategic consequences of the US decline and the end of unipolarity, let me discuss four key trends about what we might expect in the future:

1. The end of unipolarity will not usher in an era of great power wars, whether caused by opportunistic aggression against decline powers, or through the logic of power transition where a rising power squares off against a declining or status quo power. In fact there is a far greater likelihood of relative peace among the major global powers, including the West, Russia and China.

2. The main security challenges facing the world will be human insecurity challenges, including death and injury from internal conflicts, from hunger and disease, and from social and political consequences of rapid environmental degradation. Many of these dangers will be transnational dangers: they will arrive suddenly and unexpectedly, spread through linkages forged by globalization.

3. There will be no ‘back to the future in Europe’, under conditions of multipolarity, as John Mearsheimer had argued in his 1990 article in International Security in under the same title.

4. In Asia, the rise of China and Japan and India will pose major policy challenges and dilemmas for the US. But Asia will not be ‘Ripe for rivalry’, contrary to the thesis advanced by Aaron Friedberg, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser and professor at Princeton. Nor will Asia be the arena for vindicating Mearsheimer’s ‘Tragedy of Great Power Politics’.

Finally, instead of assessing the prospects for world order mainly in terms of material power, economic and military, we should accept that other factors, such as legitimacy, socialization and identity can also make a big difference. In this respect, something truly extraordinary has happened in this world and it has happened in the United States. The president of the world’s most powerful nation today has a resume and life history that includes a substantial period of his formative years growing up outside the United States. This was in far away Indonesia, where the ‘children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats’ became his ‘best friends,’ and whose Indonesian step father taught him how to eat dog meat (which he found tough) , snake meat (which he thought was tougher), and roasted grass hoppers (which are described as merely crunchy). I must confess that despite having grown up in a very remote rural corner of India, and having been to Indonesia numerous times, I have never eaten dog meat, snake meat or grasshoppers. In Indonesia, young Barry Obama also experienced first-hand the synthesis between religions and civilizations when introduced to a brand of Islam that made ‘room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths’. And in Indonesia, the future president of the United States had to face on a daily basis the burden of having to make a decision how to choose for giving money between various types of beggars that included ‘men, women, children, in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy, or polio or leprosy’. Since there would not be enough rupiah to go around, his mother had learned to be selective and devised a formula to ‘calibrate the levels of misery.’ His step father was less sentimental, he advised young Obama to save the money for himself so that he did not ‘end up on the street’ himself’.

I wonder how many Senators, and Congressmen/women, or even leaders of even developing countries can claim such childhood learning? What greater symbolism is there for the United States and its citizens to banish elitism and exceptionalism that sometimes comes with being the leading nation, or bury the clash of civilization thesis. What better time to embrace, multiculturalism, multiracialism, and multilateralism, human security and global governance?

So I end in an optimistic note, cautiously so, but nonetheless disagreeing with an overtly geopolitical zero-sum view of the world. Thank you for your attention.

Asian Conceptions of International Relations and Global Governance

Delivered at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, on 4th December 2008, as part of the S.T. Lee Project on Global Governance. The ideas presented in this paper draw upon a few previous writings by the author, especially “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?”, International Security (Spring 2004); Asia Rising: Who Is Leading? (World Scientific 2007), “Why is There no Non-Western International Relations Theory? Perspectives on and from Asia,” Special issue of International Relations of the Asia Pacific (2007) co-edited by Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan; and Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Cornell University Press, 2009).

Argument and Caveats

“Has Asia been doing enough in leading the world opinion on how to manage, and in particular not to mismanage, the global challenges we face today, including that of terrorism, violence, and global injustice”, asked Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen at a forum in Bangkok in 2007. Sen was raising a fundamental question about Asia’s role in global governance. Extending his list of challenges to other issues such as climate change and financial volatility, the obvious answer to his question would be that Asia is doing more than before, but this is still far from enough. A key reason for this, I argue in this essay, is that leading Asian powers today are far more concerned with developing and legitimising their national power aspirations (using the traditional notions and means of international relations) than contributing to global or even regional governance. This disjuncture is not entirely surprising, but a debate over how to reconcile national aspirations with collective good is long overdue in Asia, and hopefully, this conference and project will offer some answers and pathways.

At a first glance, Asian conceptions of international relations and global governance are indeed changing in keeping with the region’s ascendancy in the world power structure. The early leaders of modern Asian states were preoccupied with bringing down colonial rule, protesting Western dominance of the international system, asserting their juridical sovereignty, and demanding economic concessions and aid from the West. Hence, their ideas about international relations centred on nationalism and what might be called ‘defensive sovereignty’. But if one takes the shift in world power to Asia as an incontrovertible fact or an irreversible trend, as Kishore Mahbubani has done in his The New Asian Hemisphere, then should not one expect Asian ideas about and approaches to international relations to change as well? One might expect that instead of defensive sovereignty, Asia will harness its economic and political achievements of recent decades to seek out a share of global leadership. This paper is an attempt to understand whether and to what extent such a shift might be taking place and its implications for global governance in the 21st century.

Some initial caveats about this paper are necessary. First, given the diversity of Asia, and differences over where its boundaries lie, it will be highly simplistic to speak of an Asian conception of international relations, world order or global governance. What this essay sets out to investigate instead is a plurality of ideas and approaches that can be found in Asia, both historically and in the contemporary context, and to ascertain both variations and commonalities among them. It is difficult enough to speak of an American conception of world order since the collapse of the American foreign policy consensus in the 1970s, or a European conception, despite the extraordinary recent progress of European integration. The notion of an Asian conception is even more problematic, given sharp contestations that exists over what Asia is and where to draw it regional and subregional boundaries.

Second, while it is more plausible to speak of national conceptions of, and approaches to international relations, they are not always representative of the nation itself. In authoritarian states, any ‘national’ ideas about statecraft and world order promoted by the ruling elite are not necessarily shared by the people. The worldviews of individual leaders, the ruling elite or governments are of course crucial. But perspectives from the society also matter. For example, Western conceptions of international relations theory are dominated by philosophers rather than policymakers. For every Machiavelli, (whose The Prince, one must be reminded, was written after he had been deposed as an official in the Florentine court), Kissinger, or Woodrow Wilson, there are dozens of Thucydides, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Morgenthau and Waltz, who were not members of the policymaking elite.

This leads to a third caveat: the general paucity of conceptual thinking in Asia about modern international relations and world order. To be sure, Asia has a rich classical intellectual heritage from which it can draw ideas about statecraft, and here the ideas from Kautilya, Confucius or religious traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam are especially important. But the conceptualization of international relations in the modern era has been especially thin. This can be explained by several factors, beginning with the superimposition of the essentially European (Westphalian) ideas about sovereignty and statecraft (such as balance of power) on Asian leaders and intellectuals as a result of colonialism and decolonisation. This not only had the effect of suppressing indigenous thinking, based on historical ideas about governance, statecraft and interstate relations within the region, but also shaped Asian conceptions of international relations as little more than reactions to, and localization of, Western concepts.

Compounding this state of affairs is the fact that the study and training of international relations in classrooms around Asia discourages and disparages long-term conceptual thinking and theoretical work in favour of policy-oriented research geared to the immediate needs of governments (Acharya and Buzan 2007). At the same time, Western ideas and theories of international relations have acquired a hegemonic status, and West retains an overwhelming dominance in terms of intellectual resources (academics, especially theorists of international relations, journals, publishing houses and venues of free and inclusive debate) that are essential to the creative formulations and dissemination of ideas and concepts of international relations. With very few exceptions, Asians have made a far less conceptual contribution to the study of international relations than Western scholars and analysts to the state of international relations and future of world order.

Indeed, some of the concepts that we associate with Asia and use to explain Asian political and economic dynamics have been coined and conceptualized by Western scholars. For example, the concept that launched the debate over globalisation and global governance in Asia, the so-called ‘East Asian model’ of economic development focusing on the role of the state in creating market-friendly development policies, was largely coined and elaborated by Western scholars.

Finally, national role conceptions and ideas about world order are not a given or constant, but are shaped and reshaped continually by domestic and external developments, including economic growth, war and economic crises. While this holds true anywhere, in a rapidly transforming region like Asia, where the most dramatic shift in the world economic and military power is taking place, change is more regular and perhaps even more fundamental. For example, Chinese, Indian and even Japanese role conceptions of international relations and world order have changed in significant ways since the early post-Second World War period, in keeping with changes in their domestic politics, economic capacity and policy, and the impact of external developments such as the end of the Cold War. India has abandoned its non-alignment concept, and more arguably, moved significantly away from the entire Nehruvian approach. Some analysts describe Indian foreign and security policy today more in tune with the realist approach to international relations. China has moved past the tenets of Maoist socialist internationalism to embrace a worldview that is best described as neo-Westphalianism. The shift occurring in Japan is from post-War pacifism to becoming a “normal state”.

Asian Conceptions of International Relations: Towards Convergence?

International relations theory accommodates a range of perspectives on world order and global governance. The most important of these are realism and liberalism (which incorporates elements of idealism). For Realists, international relations is a highly competitive game driven by considerations of national interest and relative gain and where war remains a constant possibility with genuine international cooperation highly improbable. Liberals take a more optimistic view, believing that conflict can be mitigated through the pacific effects of economic interdependence, international institutions and shared democratic governance.

But these categories, which draw mostly from Western philosophical thinking, and reflect Western historical experience, do not do justice to the ‘maverick’ or eclectic perspectives of many Asian leaders. For example, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru was foremost among those nationalist leaders whose ideas about world order were eminently compatible with Wilsonian liberal internationalism. Burma’s leader Aung San was a self-professed internationalist (“I am an internationalist, but an internationalist who does not all [allow] himself to be swept off the firm Earth”) who championed economic interdependence and regional integration in Asia (“The one fact from which no nation, big or small, can escape is the increasing universal interdependence of nations. A free and independent Burma is quite ready to enter into any arrangement with other nations for common welfare and security etc.”) – a far cry from the self-imposed autarchy and isolationism of the latter military junta. But Nehru’s critics in Asia, such as Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, who accused him of being a ‘starry-eyed idealist’, were not necessarily people who, as a realist might expect, dismissed regional and international cooperation. Romulo was actually an active champion of regional multilateral institutions. Realism, as some academic analysts argue, may well be the dominant mode of thinking among Asia’s policymaking elite, but this has not prevented Asian states from engaging in multilateral cooperation at the global and increasingly, regional levels, as the case of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, foremost among Asia’s realist statesmen, attests.

Perhaps a better way to look at post-War Asian thinking on international relations is to assess how Asian states related to an international order which was practically an extension of the ‘European international society’ and was overwhelmingly dominated by the West. Here, despite some early rhetoric on Asian unity, there remained significant differences within the region, which I would label as conformist, revisionist, and adaptive.

The classic conformist nation was Japan, the first Asian nation to modernize by imitating the West. Because of its economic accomplishments and military power, Meiji Japan was granted limited entry into the European international society as a ‘civilised’ nation, a status that was denied to the European colonies in Asia, such as India. To be sure, Japan did turn against Western powers when its effort to dominate its own immediate Asian neighbourhood was challenged. But post-war Japan, despite its distinct cultural-political style and a plurality of voices within its academic institutions (Marxism was a strong force there), retained a largely conformist posture in the international system, accepting Western ideas, rules and institutions and becoming a significant financial stakeholder in them. Japan might not have been the ‘yes-man’ of Asia, but it was certainly not, and still not, a ‘Japan that can say no’.

This was especially in contrast to communist China, which occupied the other end of the spectrum as Asia’s leading revisionist power. China under the nationalist regime started out as a conformist nation, but communist China was a different story. “From its birth date,” writes Chinese historian Chen Jian, “Mao's China challenged the Western powers in general and the United States in particular by questioning and, consequently, negating the legitimacy of the ‘norms of international relations’”.

India remained somewhere in between, and its position may be best described as an adaptive one. Jawaharlal Nehru rejected European style power politics and was especially scathing on the realist prescriptions about international order which, as proposed in the 1940s by Nicholas Spykman, Winston Churchill and Walter Lippman, would have divided the world into a series of regional blocs each under a great power’s leadership (including one under India itself). Instead, Nehru would propose what he called a ‘world association’ of states that recognized the essential equality of states. But Nehru never went too far in his critique of Western dominance or in pushing for the creation of an anti-Western bloc in Asia, a fact recognised and appreciated by Britain (but not the US). He kept the tone of the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 (of which he was the chief organizer) or the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 (of which he was a co-sponsor) remarkably moderate. Nehru defended the United Nations, and for all his early championing of Asian unity and shepherding of communist China, disagreed with Chou En-lai at Bandung when the latter proposed a permanent regional association of Asian and African countries to serve China’s need at a time when it was not recognized by the UN. Nehru’s concept of “non-involvement’ (which later fused into the broader doctrine of ‘non-alignment”) was practically an adaptive extension (which I would call ‘localization’ see Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter, 2009) of the Western principle of non-intervention at a time when the two superpowers were violating the doctrine with impunity.

The predicament and position of Southeast Asian nations was closer to India’s than to China’s or Japan’s. They were willing to live within the existing system of international governance which preserved their independence. With the brief revisionist posture of Sukarno in the 1960s when he withdrew Indonesia from the UN and flirted his own ideas about ‘old established forces’ (OLDEFOS) and ‘new emerging forces (NEFOS), and that of communist Vietnam in the 1970s and 80s, Southeast Asian states have generally accepted the rules and norms of the international system, especially non-interference, diplomatic interdependence and sovereignty equality of states. Burma’s Aung San and U Nu exemplified this thinking in the early period, and later, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations spearheaded the emergence of a regional international society based on adaptations of these rules.

The divergent attitudes and responses of Asia’s key nations towards the existing international order meant significant intra-regional differences over how to organize the region and the world at large. Japan’s sense of cultural and political supremacy as Asia’s first modernising nation had underpinned its quest for an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. But while Japan’s initial military victories over Western powers inspired Asian nationalists, its Japanese idea of an exclusionary regional economic and political bloc did not. Thus, Aung San after flirting for a while with the Japan’s East Asian co-prosperity sphere idea would declare: “a new Asian order…will not and must not be one like the Co-prosperity Sphere of militarist Japan, nor should it be another Asiatic Monroe doctrine, nor imperial preference or currency bloc.”

Wide differences emerged over the philosophy of international economic relations, such as between China and Japan (the undisputed leader of East Asia’s market economies). India’s economic approach had more in common with socialist China than with democratic Japan. One offshoot of the divergent positions of Asia’s three major powers was that none would be able to lead an Asian regional organisation. After World War II doomed Japan’s effort to create an East Asian bloc, Nationalist China and Nehruvian India in a competitive way and India and communist China in a more cooperative manner were central actors in a period from 1947 to 1955 when Asia tried to develop a regional multilateral grouping. But neither would succeed, conceding the ground to ASEAN, which emerged and survived precisely because it was not led by any of the three great Asian powers. This rejection of great power leadership could become a norm of Asian regional governance.

Has matters changed? The end of the Cold War, a common adherence to state-supported capitalist economic development, and the emergence of Asia-wide multilateral regional groupings like the ARF and East Asian Summit has effectively put an end to the conformist-revisionist-adaptive divide. The differences between Japan, China, India, ASEAN countries over concepts and approaches to economic development are hardly fundamental. In foreign policy terms, India by abandoning Nehruvian non-alignment and China similarly ditching Maoism have moved closer to Japan’s position. Globally, all Asian powers, China included, are status quo powers. All have embraced ASEAN-led multilateralism in the region. Ironically, it was the US under the Bush administration which seemed the least conformist power in relation to a world order and governance structure that it had played a central role in creating.

This apparent convergence of worldviews and approaches does not, however, mean Asian powers share a common view of global governance and how to reform it. Realists argue that the simultaneous rise of India and China and their respective moves beyond non-aligned and socialist ideologies may actually mean greater competition, rather than cooperation between them. As C. Raja Mohan argues, India and China have become essentially similar players in the international system, both are aspiring great powers who are equally willing to assert their national interest, increase their power and influence in the world at large, and resort to the use of force in international relations. Realists see distinct prospects for an intensified security dilemma in 21st century Asia not unlike what Europe experienced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Moreover, there remain important areas of diversity in contemporary Asian thinking on the relationship between democracy and regional stability and international order. While Asian leaders have generally accepted the liberal view that economic interdependence is a force for peace and that international (including regional) institutions are useful if not powerful instruments for managing regional order, sharp divisions remain over the role of democracy: whether democracy promotes development (the Lee Kuan Yew versus Fidel Ramos debate in the 1980s), whether democracy is at all a suitable political arrangement for Asia (Lee Kuan Yew versus Kim Dae Jung in Foreign Affairs) and whether democracy is a force of national and regional stability or a prescription for violence and disorder (for a review see: Acharya, Asia Rising)

Against this backdrop, what is prospect for Asian approach to reform of global governance?

Global and Regional Governance in an Era of Rising Asia

It is in China, rather than in Japan or India, that a good deal of conceptual thinking in Asia about the future of international order has taken place, both official and semi-official (academic) levels. This is partly in response to the international community’s doubts and misgivings about China’s global role following its spectacular ascent, doubts that are less pronounced in relation to the role of Japan or India. Unsurprisingly therefore, Chinese thinking on international relations today is to a large extent an attempt to legitimise the rise of China as a fundamentally positive force in international relations.

China’s initial conceptualisation of the post-Cold War order was to view it as a multipolar one. Consider the following statement posted at the Chinese Foreign Ministry Website in 2000:

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has moved towards multi-polarity, and the international situation on the whole has become more relaxed. This is an objective tendency independent of people's will, reflecting the trend of the development of the present era. Multi-polarization on the whole helps weaken and curb hegemonism and power politics, serves to bring about a just and equitable new international political and economic order and contributes to world peace and development.

But the concept of multi-polarization was dampened by the US victory over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and the advent of the so-called ‘unipolar moment’. This led some Chinese to modify their position by recognising what they called ‘uni-multipolarity’. At the same time, Chinese policy and academic discourse (the two are often inseparable) developed its thesis about China’s ‘peaceful rise’, thereby rejecting the neorealist ideas of power transition or the ‘tragedy of great power politics’ (the title of John Mearsheimer’s well-known book).

In terms global governance, Chinese attitude towards multilateralism has changed. China has moved a fair distance from being a revisionist power to being Zoellick’s ‘responsible stakeholder’ for which its ASEAN neighbours, especially ASEAN, can take some credit. And in Iain Johnston’s words, China is not only a ‘status quo power’ but also a ‘social state’. Johnston finds China despite its initial suspicion of multilateralism, has now embraced it thanks to a socialization process through international and regional institutions. At the regional level, China, once a sceptic of multilateral security through the ARF, has emerged as an active participant. In Chinese academia, efforts are ongoing to develop a ‘Chinese school of international relations’ based partly on the historical features of the old tributary system, and what Fairbank had called the ‘Chinese world order’ (See Qin Yaqin’s article “Why is there no Chinese IR Theory”, in Acharya and Buzan, 2007).

Leadership is a key element of global governance and China retains an ambiguous attitude towards the question of leadership. (See Acharya, Asia Rising, Chapter on ‘Can China Lead?’) Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that “China should not lead” continues to be echoed in China’s recent reluctance to take the lead in allowing its ample financial resources play a direct role in alleviating the impact of the global financial crisis. Hence the argument from President Hun Jintao:

The Chinese economy is increasingly interconnected with the global economy…China’s sound economic growth is in itself a major contribution to global financial stability and economic growth. This is why we must first and foremost run our own affairs well. (Japan Times 11 November 2008)

China has been less reticent in assuming a regional leadership, as exemplified in its promotion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the East Asian Community. But even here China has been a cautious exponent, backtracking in the face of resistance to any real or imagined effort on its past to drive the membership and agenda of the larger East Asian institutions.

No comparable conceptual discourse underpins Japan’s attitude towards global governance today, at least at the official level. One possible exception is the idea ‘normal statehood’ for Japan promoted by Koizumi and elaborated by Japanese scholars such as Takashi Inoguchi. Koizumi’s purpose was strategic, i.e. to use the concept to counter and dilute some of the constitutional limits on Japanese diplomacy and power projection at a time when Japan was under pressure to do more for the US-Japan alliance, than to use it as the basis of redefining Japanese approach to global governance. But as a Japanese ambassador to Canada, comparing normal state with the notion of ‘middle power’, put it, ‘a "normal state" meant a state that is not only interested in its own security and prosperity, but also contributes proactively to international peace, security and prosperity.’ Inoguchi finds links Japan’s normal state quest with its desire and capacity ability to provide leadership in global governance. As he put it, ‘The globalization of governance entails more integrated markets, the global diffusion of military weapons, and the global permeation of public elite culture…Astute, articulate and agile leaders must always be mindful of domestic audiences and yet must act globally – and decisively.” This requires Japan to move beyond its post-war constitutional constraints. Importantly, Inoguchi cites the Japanese naval deployment to the Indian Ocean to support US operations in West Asia as one example of normal statehood, along side regional trade negotiations.

When he was foreign minister, the current Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso spoke of Japan as a “thought leader” of Asian regionalism, hence of regional governance. Another former foreign minister, Taro Nakayama, actually brokered ideas about turning the ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conferences into the ASEAN Regional Forum, but he was drawing on ideas already circulating in Asia-Pacific second track dialogues than espousing an entirely original formula. Japanese contribution to concepts of regional governance has been more substantive; Japanese intellectuals such as Professor Kojima were pioneers of the Pacific Community concept in the 1970s and 80s. The 1997 Japanese proposal to develop an Asian Monetary Fund (which some saw as a challenge to the authority of the IMF) might seem to have been an exception, but the Japanese initiative faded quickly in the face of strong US opposition. Japan has actively sought a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, and is willing to collaborate with India (whom it has in the past defeated in a bid for a temporary seat), but its is not clear whether this move reflects a any genuine desire to change the basic rules of the global multilateral system or simply to win itself due recognition for its abundant financial and other contributions to the UN system. Takashi Inoguchi (in Acharya and Buzan, 2007) is right in arguing that Japan has “become one of the major rule makers relinquishing the role of a rule taker in global governance in a number of policy areas.” Among the niche areas he identifies in the academic arena are attempts to reconcile different conceptions of human rights, developing “rules and norms of transnational business transactions”, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. But none of these represents a fundamental rethinking of the contemporary global governance structure. In short, Japan continues to be a conformist status quo power. And in the current global financial turmoil, while Japan has offered to strengthen the IMF’s coffers, Premier Aso, like the Chinese leadership, has indicated that ‘Japan’s primary responsibility lies in invigorating its own economy…this would be the most immediately effective contribution that Japan can deliver.” (Japan Times, 11 November 2008)

In India’s case, the demise of non-alignment has not been replaced by any broad organising framework, developed at official or academic levels, to describe and guide its international relations. In his Crossing the Rubicon, C. Raja Mohan argued that India under the BJP government might be reverting to a Curzonian view of geopolitics, replacing Nehruvian idealism. The Curzonian approach assumed Indian centrality in Asia, and envisaged a proactive Indian role in staibilizing Asia as a whole. The end of the BJP government might have slowed if not ended that transition, but Indian power projection in both western and eastern Indian Ocean areas is growing. But while India will not revert to non-alignment, even under a Sino-US bipolar system should it materialise, Nehruvian thinking is not entirely dead or out of date in India. I would argue that Nehruvian thinking, if not his approach to China, partly explains why India, while implicitly embracing the role of a ‘regional balancer” vis-à-vis China, avoids any outright containment of China or offers unconditional support to the US strategic framework vis-à-vis China.

Indian conceptions of global governance are likely to reflect its interest in legitimising its relative power position in the international system that comes through respectable growth rates, info-tech power, nuclear weapons capability and space dreams (now a partial reality). Like Japan, India has sought a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, a dream that seems destined to remain unfulfilled for some time. It has done better through the G-20 forum, but even there, there does not seem to be any obvious Indian ideas or imprint that may inspire the reform and restructuring of the global multilateral order.

Within Asia itself, India has returned to the fold of Asian regionalism, but in stark contrast to the Nehru era, India’s role today is that of a follower, rather than as a leader. And its regional involvement is much stronger in its economic dimension than in its political and security one, even though it remains excluded from APEC.

Although China, Japan and India are among the biggest players in the global economy today and they are also rapidly developing their military power, Asia continues to offer little leadership in world affairs. The present economic crisis may enable China, India and even Indonesia to assume a greater role in global economic governance through their participation in the G-20. But whether the G-20 will develop concrete institutional capacity or even emerge as a viable and permanent global institution sharing decision-making and agenda-setting powers from the G-7 and the Bretton Woods institutions is far from clear.

Nor is there any natural leader of Asia in managing the region’s own economic and security problems. Legitimacy deficit (sometimes for historical reasons, e,g, pre-war Japanese imperialism, communist Chinese subversion, and Indian diplomatic arrogance) and mutual rivalry, if not resource capacity, prevent Japan, China and India from assuming leadership in dealing with common challenges such as terrorism, climate change, pandemics and internal conflicts.

For example, China, largely out of strategic considerations, has not been supportive of the bids by India and Japan to acquire a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. If Europe can have two members of UNSC, (and a third, Germany, whose membership is not objected to by France and Britain), why not Asia? After all, such a development would be supportive of China’s own ‘multi-polarization’ concept.

Finally, Asian thinking on global governance can not be isolated from the development of Asian regional governance. There is a general sense in Asia that regional institutions here are distinctive from those in Europe, in the sense that they are more informal and non-legalistic. There is general agreement among the Asian participants to keep Asian multilateral institutions loose and sovereignty-bound. But differences exist over membership of regional institutions, especially the East Asian Summit and the idea of an East Asian Community. Japan opposed China’s desire to keep the EAS exclusively East Asian, and in response, China is seeking to develop an East Asian Community out of the ASEAN Plus Three, rather than the broader EAS. While Asian regional groups have performed better in engaging China than their European counterparts in engaging Russia (See author’s keynote speech, ‘Regional Worlds in a Post-Hegemonic Era,’ to the 3rd GARNET Annual Conference, Bordeaux, 17-20 September 2008), there remains significant doubts about their ability to cope with global and transnational challenges without a significant shift to the neo-Westphalian mindset of their leadership.

Conclusion

“China, Japan can help by helping themselves’, ran the headline of a Japan Times commentary by journalist Frank Ching on Chinese and Japanese responses to the latest global financial crisis (Japan Times, 11 November 2008). (Admittedly, why should they go out of their way to correct a crisis caused by America’s folly?) These responses are remarkably revealing. What they tell us is that while Asian conceptions of international relations are no longer a defensive or confrontational reaction to Western dominance, there is a perceptible and growing gap between Asia’s rise in terms of the traditional power indices of international relations and its role in global governance. The gap may be explained partly by resentment against Western resistance to the desire of Asian countries to increase their influence over global institutions commensurate with their rise in the global power structure. But it is a fair guess whether a larger say over global institutions will yield a great willingness on the part of Asian powers to go beyond their ‘helping others by helping themselves” mindset. There is also little question that intra-Asian differences and rivalries stifle Asia’s bid to assume a greater share of the leadership in the global governance structure.

Changing national role conceptions, such as China’s ‘multi-polarization’ and ‘peaceful rise’, Japan’s ‘normal state’, and more questionably, India’s shift from Nehru to Curzon, are not authentic concepts of global governance, but are efforts at redefining the status of these Asian powers in the emerging international order. Such conceptual thinking is closely tied to the power aspirations and policy imperatives of the Asian great powers. The desire for increasing its representation in, and share of leadership of, global institutions is growing in Asia. But with few exceptions, there is no coherent Asian thinking on global governance and the equivalent of the European discourse that redefines EU’s global role as that of a ‘normative power’. For such a role conception to develop, Asia needs to overcome its internal divisions and competition, and engage in greater self-reflection and long-term conceptual debate and thinking. There is no unitary Asian view of international relations and there never will be one. But ideas found in the writings of some of the people at this workshop, such as The New Asian Hemisphere or The Quest for World Order (which outlines Tommy Koh’ ‘pragmatic idealism’), and what might emerge from the ST Lee project may be an excellent step in exploring a more proactive and positive conception of Asia’s role in global governance.

(This is a synopsis only. References to be provided later)

ASEAN's Responsibility to Protect?

Amitav Acharya

The French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, who co-founded the humanitarian group Doctors without Borders, has stirred controversy by suggesting that the UN should invoke its responsibility to protect principle to force international humanitarian assistance to the victims of Nargis which struck Myanmar on 2 May 2008. Some have argued that the R2P in its “original” formulation does not apply to Myanmar, because its was meant to respond to the kind of ethnic cleansing of the kind that occurred in Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi, Bosnia and Kosovo. It raised the bar of humanitarian intervention high, excluding political reasons (i.e. to effect regime change), or rescuing the civilian nationals of other countries stranded in another in the event of conflict. It does not make humanitarian assistance obligatory when natural disasters strike.

On the other hand, the main source of the R2P doctrine, the report of the International Commission on Humanitarian Intervention and State Sovereignty, did mention the need for international action in the event of “serious and irreparable harm” to human beings by a crisis or large-scale “large-scale” loss of life. A flexible interpretation, as befits a norm which is not a legal doctrine, would certainly justify international action on Myanmar.

ASEAN does not need to quibble about the finer points of the responsibility to protect principle to take serious and decisive action to respond to the tragedy in Myanmar. No one in ASEAN disputes the scale of this human tragedy. No one also disputes (although some ASEAN members may be shy to say so for the fear of offending Myanmar’s government) the fact that the government of Myanmar might have worsened the crisis by refusing to accept humanitarian assistance offered to it by the international community. No reasonable person can doubt that this might have cost thousands of lives and put more at risk. Hence can ASEAN be a bystander?

There are two things AESAN must do collectively and urgently. The first is to do its best to persuade the Myanmar government to accept aid from the international community, including the US, French and India, which have naval forces on the standby ready to move in a matter of hours.

If this fails, ASEAN should offer to act as a conduit of international aid by mobilizing its own capabilities and assets which are not inconsequential. Not so long ago, Thailand had justified its purchase of a helicopter carrier by saying that it would be used for humanitarian aid. And Singapore’s considerable capacity for humanitarian aid was demonstrated in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

While ASEAN has a “responsibility to assist”, Myanmar has a “responsibility to accept”. The latter has refused to accept Western aid because of perceived political risks to its regime. But it should have less hesitation from accepting aid from ASEAN, which would never conspire against the regime.

ASEAN may not have a Good Samaritan Law of its own, so failure to act would not bring about punishment of the kind that the Seinfeld foursome (in the finale of the famous American sitcom of the 1990s) received for failing to come to the aid of the victim of a carjacking. But the loss of respect and the ridicule of the international community that its failure to act would bring about would be a more severe punishment for a regional group whose standing has already been challenged by a series of setbacks over Myanmar.

Oration for Dr Surin Pitsuwan

Oration by Dr Amitav Acharya, Professor of Global Governance, at the Conferment Ceremony for the Degree of Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa on ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan by the University of Bristol, Dusit Thani Hotel, Bangkok, 31 March 2008. At the right: Surin Pitsuwan and Mr Chris Harries from Bristol University's Registrar's office.














Mr Vice-Chancellor,

Dr Surin Pitsuwan is one of the most well-known and highly respected voices of emerging Asia.

Born in the southern Thai province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, whose very name (Nagara Sri Dharmaraja in Sanskrit) harks back to a golden era of maritime voyages that linked Southeast Asia with the outside world, including Japan, China, India, and the Arab world, young Surin Pitsuwan was educated at Thammasat University, Claremont Men’s College and Harvard University, where he earned a master and a Ph D. His Harvard education was funded by the Winston S. Churchill Association and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships. Churchill, as some of the audience may know, was the longtime chancellor of the University of Bristol, both before, during and after he was Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Surin Pitsuwan was a Political Science lecturer at Thammasat University from 1978 before joining politics. He was first elected to the Thai Parliament from his home town, Nakhon Si Thammarat, in 1986. He was to be returned to the Thai Parliament 8 times. He became the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister of Thailand from 1992-1995 and served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1992-2001. As Foreign Minister, he successfully mobilized international support for rescuing Thailand from the severe economic crisis of 1997. He also served as Chair of the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting and the Chair of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1999-2000. In September 1999, while serving as ASEAN Chair, he led the efforts to get Southeast Asian governments, with the support of the United Nations and the international community, to help restore law and order in East Timor.

As a political leader, Surin Pitsuwan has championed the values of democracy and human rights, and innovative solutions to the region’s complex, transnational problems. In 1998, soon after taking over as the foreign minister of Thailand, he challenged ASEAN to look beyond its traditional notion of non-intervention. He came up with the idea of “flexible engagement,” a term that has since become a permanent entry in the lexicon of Asian diplomacy. The idea of flexible engagement was to motivate ASEAN not to shy away from commenting and acting collectively on problems that may arise from within the boundaries of one nation-state, but which may threaten regional and international stability and prosperity. Although some of his colleagues in ASEAN then expressed reservations about such a radical notion, it is a testimony to the deep respect that Dr Surin enjoys in the regional community that he was enthusiastically endorsed by all ASEAN members as the new secretary-general of ASEAN when it was Thailand’s turn to fill the position.

Between the time he was Thai Foreign Minister and his appointment to be the ASEAN Secretary-General, Dr Surin went around the world speaking for Asia, not in the tone of a defensive exceptionalist, like some of the proponents of the “Asian Values” School, but as a cosmopolitan regionalist, subscribing to the universal values of democracy, sustainable development and human security.

During this time, he served in important international bodies, including as a member of the UN Commission on Human Security, chaired by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, and the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata of Japan. The commission’s report, Human Security Now, was to become the bible of those who believe in security for the people, rather than security for the state alone. He was also a member of the Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, a Member of the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Member of the International Advisory Board of the International Crisis Group (ICG) and a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Asia Foundation. Additionally, he was an adviser to the International Commission on State Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention, which came up with the idea of “Responsibility to Protect”, adopted by the UN in 2005.

Dr Surin was one of the Asian contenders to be the next UN Secretary-General of the UN, the post which finally went to South Korean Ban Ki Moon. But it followed that Dr Surin was appointed to be the Secretary General of ASEAN from 2008 to 2013. ASEAN is Asia’s preeminent regional intergovernmental organization. ASEAN and its extensions, such as ASEAN Regional Forum, ASEAN Plus Three, East Asia Summit and Asia-Europe Meeting, bring together the world’s most powerful nations, including the US, China, India, Japan, the European Union, and Russia. These countries hold annual ministerial or summit level meetings with ASEAN.

Dr Surin takes over as ASEAN Secretary-General at a time of momentous changes in the regional and global arena. The rising economic power of Asia, led by Japan, China, and lately India, is fundamentally transforming not only the way the global economy works, but also the political and strategic architecture of world politics. ASEAN is a club of small nations with a unique leadership role in navigating the region’s political and strategic currents. As Secretary-General, it is Dr Surin’s job to maintain ASEAN’s position as a cohesive regional community, infuse it with new ideas and approaches to help tackle complex challenges, and uphold its image as the driver of a new brand of cosmopolitan regionalism.

A Muslim who is widely praised for his efforts to promote a dialogue of civilizations, Dr Surin is precisely the kind of individual that the international community needs at a time when it is seeking ways of dealing with extremism and associated forms of insecurity. In this respect, Dr Surin leads not just with words, but also with deed. For example, he has nurtured closely a school founded sixty six years ago by his grandfather in his home province which has become a model for providing quality integrated education to Muslim students, thereby helping to bridge the gap between Islam and modernity.

Mr Vice-Chancellor, so far, I have described not one, but three Surin Pitsuwans, all rolled into one. First, there is Surin the academician, blessed with a powerful intellect, who has attained the highest level of education in both the east and the west, and who is a man of ideas that are often ahead of their time.

Then there is Surin the people’s man, and here I am deliberately not using the term politician, a man from the ivory tower of Harvard who has his feet firmly on the ground in the poorest and remotest parts of Thailand, and who, unlike leaders of some Asian countries, has actually contested and won many elections conducted freely and fairly

And last but not the least, there is Surin the statesman, from being foreign minister of a crisis-stricken nation desperately mobilizing international help, to being the secretary-general of the developing world’s most successful regional organization, a member and adviser to several of the world’s brain trusts.

The University of Bristol recognizes the substantial accomplishments of Surin the academician, Surin the people’s man and Surin the statesman. It recognizes his potential as ASEAN Secretary General to make a further significant contribution to the well-being of Southeast Asia and the international community.

Mr Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Dr Surin Pitsuwan as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa.
From left: Mr Chris Harries, Registrar's office, Bristol University, Professor Amitav Acharya, Orator, Dr Surin Pitsuwan, Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor, Bristol University and Professor Suchit Bunbangkorn, presiding officer of the conferement ceremony.






















After the Ceremony





Dr Surin Pistuwan wearing Bristol University ceremnial robe, gave a luncheon talk outlining his vision for ASEAN following the conferment of an honorary doctorate on him by the University of bristol. The speech was co-organized by the Asian Dialogue Society, The Nation Media Group and the Centre for Governance and International Affairs, University of Bristol.

Four Principles for (President) Obama to Restore American Honour

If Barack Obama wins the American Presidency, how would he go about restoring America’s standing and leadership in world affairs? For an answer, read Samantha Power’s new book, Chasing the Flame, a political biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello – the senior UN official in Iraq killed in a suicide terrorist bombing of his Baghdad hotel in 2003. Power was in Bristol (just 3 days before she resigned as a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Obama, for calling Senator Hillary Clinton a "monster") to speak about her new book and about Barack Obama’s foreign policy principles at a talk hosted by the Centre for Governance and International Affairs of Bristol University and Festival of Ideas in Bristol.

Dublin-born and American educated Samantha Power is an award-winning journalist, a Harvard professor and a foreign policy intellectual, all rolled into one. In her own words, she was a “dreamer” before her journalistic life, and she “got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.” Her 2005 book, A Problem from Hell, described by Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffman as “an admirable mix of erudition and passion”, was about genocide, and America’s failure to prevent it. It not only won her a Pultizer Prize, and a chair at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but also an invitation to meet with a freshman Senator from Illinois, named Barack Obama. For Senator Obama the central message of her book was not just to understand why and when genocide occurs, but also the need to fix American foreign policy. This encounter led directly to her third and possibly most important career: as a foreign policy adviser to the man who could become the next president of the United States, and make her realise her dream of “to try to change the world”.

There are interesting parallels between the central character of her new book and that of her current job. Both de Mello and Senator Obama are people who are ‘comfortable crossing boudnaries’. De Mello was a Brazillian who was educated in Europe and distinguished himself while serving the UN in many of the hotspots of the world, including Bangladesh, East Africa, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq. Senator Obama was born in Hawaii to Kenyan and American parents and spent four of his formative years in Indonesia.

Indeed, Power recommends four principles from de Mello’s character which could guide Obama’s foreign policy.

Perhaps the most controversial of them is the “talking to the enemy” principle. De Mello was a firm believer dialogue with adversaries, including known evils like Slobodan Milesevich of Serbia and Pol Pot of Khmer Rogue. He would talk to insurgents, warlords and rebels. Candidate Obama has been much criticized by his democratic and republican opponents alike for his willingness to talk to dictators like the leaders of Iran and Cuba. We now know where this idea came from. Power defends the principle vigorously. America has to speak to unsavory regimes without preconditions, but that does not mean throwing principles vital principles out of the window. Even if there is no significant progress, it creates legitimacy for the US by creating the impression that it is not the US which is the problem.

The second principle is “freedom from fear”. “Fear is a bad advisor.” As she sees it, there is too much fear-mongering around in American politics and foreign policy these days. The Bush administration has often played up the fear of terrorism after 9/11 for domestic political advantage. When America is afraid, Power argues, it tends to lurch between the extremes of doing nothing or little (Rwanda, Bosnia) and being overly aggressive (Iraq). The other end of this principle is acting through the UN and other agencies to create institutions, such as elections, rule of law, police and courts to create a culture where there is freedom from fear in conflict-prone areas.

Next is the principle of “embrace humility, understand complexity”. Under Bush, US foreign policy is marked by extreme arrogance and meddling in other people’s affairs. This could grow into a crisis of confidence about international action, a danger of retreat from international engagement, if not outright isolationism. Neither extreme is warranted. The US should recognize the complexity of fixing conflict-ridden societies, but should not be paralyzed by the immensity of the task of nation-building.

The final principle is the “doctrine of dignity”. In the international arena, this means showing respect for the opinions of other states and leaders no matter how different or small they might be. The doctrine of dignity is more important than democracy promotion. Imposing democracy through force does not work because it shows a lack of awareness of the indignity people feel about foreign occupiers. Just ask the people of Iraq.

(The author is professor of Global Governance and Director of the Centre for Governance and International Affairs at the University of Bristol)