Adil Najam is vice chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, professor of international relations at Boston University, USA, and the former director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. 

Moeed Yusuf is the South Asia adviser at the Center for Conflict Management, United States Institute of Peace.

South Asia 2060

Envisioning Regional Futures

By Adil Najam, Moeed Yusuf

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 Adil Najam and Moeed Yusuf
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-074-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix,
List of Abbreviations, xi,
Introduction Imagining South Asian Futures Moeed Yusuf and Adil Najam, 1,
Section I South Asia as a Region,
Chapter 1 Prisoners or Masters of Destiny? Ramesh Thakur, 11,
Chapter 2 South Asian Futures: Three Scenarios Stephen P. Cohen and Jacob Friedman, 22,
Chapter 3 Federalism on the Road: Region and Regionalism Kanak Mani Dixit, 29,
Chapter 4 Diversity in South Asia John Thomson, 38,
Chapter 5 Future’s Past Manan Ahmed Asif, 46,
Section II State Relations,
Chapter 6 The Future of Democracy Jalal Alamgir, 55,
Chapter 7 Conflict and Reconciliation: Three Scenarios Amitabh Mattoo, 61,
Chapter 8 Religion and State Formation Najeeb Jung, 68,
Chapter 9 Will South Asia Still Be Terrorism’s Center of Gravity? William Milam, 75,
Chapter 10 Speculations on Nuclear South Asia Pervez A. Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, 82,
Chapter 11 Nuclear Risk: Overstated or Underrated? Hilary Synnott, 90,
Chapter 12 The Shadow of the India–Pakistan Stalemate Maleeha Lodhi, 96,
Chapter 13 Regional Integration Lhaba Tshering, 102,
Chapter 14 The Future of Integration Nihal Rodrigo, 108,
Chapter 15 The Giant Neighbor: Why is China Important? Manu Bhaskaran, 114,
Section III Development,
Chapter 16 South Asian Economy in 2060 Ishrat Husain, 123,
Chapter 17 Economic Futures: Challenges Ahead A. K. Enamul Haque, 132,
Chapter 18 South Asia in the Asian Economy: Struggling to Overcome History Amitendu Palit, 141,
Chapter 19 Globalization and South Asia Sanjoy Chakravorty, 147,
Chapter 20 Trade Relations: Some Predictions and Lessons Pradeep S. Mehta and Niru Yadav, 153,
Chapter 21 Urban Policy for Environmental Quality and Well-Being Madhav G. Badami and Murtaza Haider, 160,
Chapter 22 Urban Futures, Urban Challenges Syed Abu Hasnath, 169,
Chapter 23 Water Security: Risks and Responses John Briscoe, 177,
Chapter 24 Agriculture and Food Security M. E. Tusneem, 183,
Chapter 25 Meeting Electric Power Demand in South Asia Rajan Gupta and Harihar Shankar, 192,
Chapter 26 E-South Asia: A Social Science Fiction Rohan Samarajiva, 201,
Section IV Human Well-Being,
Chapter 27 Population Dynamics, Economic Prospects and Regional Coherence David E. Bloom and Larry Rosenberg, 211,
Chapter 28 Towards Cooperation for Poverty Reduction? Safiya Aftab, 221,
Chapter 29 Health Challenges Gerald T. Keusch and Pramilla Senanayake, 229,
Chapter 30 Regional Disease Dynamics Chalinda D. Weerasinghe, 238,
Chapter 31 Education: Time Bomb or Silver Bullet? Jamshed Bharucha, 246,
Chapter 32 Scholarship in and on South Asia Ali Riaz, 254,
Chapter 33 Rights and Justice: A Prospective View Balakrishnan Rajagopal, 261,
Chapter 34 Patriarchy, Power and Paradox: Dreaming Gender Equality and Development Shahla Haeri and Brenda Gael McSweeney, 270,
Chapter 35 Women in South Asia Anita M. Weiss, 277,
Chapter 36 Media: New Trends, Old Problems Beena Sarwar, 284,
Chapter 37 Sports: Passion and Industry Saad Shafqat, 293,
About the Authors, 300,
Bibliography, 309,
Index, 318,

CHAPTER 1

PRISONERS OR MASTERS OF DESTINY?

Ramesh Thakur

Global governance for a world without world government faces a fundamental paradox. The policy authority for tackling global problems and mobilizing the necessary resources is principally vested at country level, in states, while the source and scale of the problems and potential solutions to them are transnational, regional and global. One result of this situation is that states have the capacity to disable decision making and policy implementation by global bodies like the United Nations, but generally lack the vision and will to empower and enable their own global problem solving on issues such as human rights abuses, gender discrimination, environmental degradation, human trafficking, terrorism and nuclear weapons.

Could regionalization, by inserting an additional level of governance between the state and the world, provide a satisfactory resolution of this paradox? What are the implications of regionalism and interregionalism for global governance and world order? And what might a regionally integrated South Asia look like in 50 years’ time? In this essay, I will first comment on the rise of regionalism in recent decades and then describe how South Asia has bucked the trend, before concluding with a personal, highly idealized vision of the South Asian region in the year 2060.

The Rise of Regionalism

Regional integration refers to a process in which a group of countries, usually contiguous, move from a condition of disconnected isolation to one of partial or complete unification. The shift involves a progressive lowering of internal boundaries within the integrating zone and a de facto rise of external boundaries vis-à-vis countries outside the region for the flow of goods, services, capital, labor, people and even ideas. Although regional integration does not have to involve the construction of permanent intergovernmental structures of mutual cooperation, usually it does.

Regional organizations have proliferated across the world since 1945. Some have argued that the nation-state has become an unnatural, perhaps even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and economic interactions in a borderless world and that it does not represent any genuine community of economic interests. Instead, the natural economic zones are “region states” whose boundaries are drawn not by politicians but by the invisible hand of the global market for goods and services. And their primary links are not with host countries but with the global economy (Ohmae 1993).

The growth in the number and geographical coverage of regional organizations is accompanied by increased diversity in the “substance” or “content” of integration. For example, some regional integration projects are limited to the achievement of economic integration among the countries concerned. Others extend integration beyond purely economic concerns in a so-called “new regionalism” (Hettne et al. 1999; and Söderbaum and Shaw 2003), which holds that trade and economy cannot be isolated from the rest of society. In this approach, integration can also encompass matters of law, security and culture.

The European Union (EU), the first and most advanced instance of “new regionalism,” incorporates explicit political elements in a deep economic integration. The EU requires that would-be member states meet certain standards of behavior in public and foreign policy before they can be considered to be truly “European.” The new regionalism has also spread to other continents, both through the creation of new organizations (like the Southern Common Market, MERCOSUR, in Latin America) and through the upgrading of previously existing regional and subregional economic bodies (as with the reinvention of the Organization of African Unity as the African Union). Nevertheless, regionalism remains uneven across the world and in Europe itself; there were major setbacks in 2010 as several countries in the eurozone were hit by major economic crises, raising questions of the viability of economic integration without fiscal and even political union.

In parallel with spreading and deepening regional integration, recent decades have also seen the gradual emergence of interregionalism, or relations among different regions, which interact with one another as regions. Initially the EU dominated in this area, building formal relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as early as 1980. Regular Asia–Europe Meetings (ASEM) and the EU–MERCOSUR agreement followed in the 1990s. Now regional organizations from all continents have become more active in pursuing interregional connections.

Thus regionalism has become an integral part of contemporary multilayered and multiactor governance. Neither states by themselves nor the United Nations (UN) as their universal collective forum can substitute for regional governance. Whether in Africa, the Americas, Asia or Europe, countries share certain policy problems and approaches on a regional scale that they do not hold in common with all countries on a global scale. At the same time, however, regional governance cannot substitute for the UN, particularly in promoting security and development in the world. The task is therefore to build effective partnerships among states and regional and global agencies, and also among governmental and nongovernmental actors.

South Asia: A Region Sans the Sense of Regionalism

Among the world’s inhabited continents, Asia has the least sense of pan continental identity. It is an essentially geographical construct developed by the Europeans to differentiate themselves from the “Other.” In the UN system, for example, which functions ubiquitously and pervasively on the basis of geographical groupings, Asians are the least united. Even on the sporting field, Europeans, Africans, Latin Americans and North Americans have a sense of shared bonds that is missing in action in Asia.

Within Asia, South Asia is marked by its own paradox. It is one of the sharpest natural regions of the world, with clearly defined physical characteristics, shared histories and considerable economic and administrative coherence inherited from the British Raj. Yet regionalism was progressively weakened after the departure of the British as the independent countries went their separate ways politically, economically and in their foreign policies. To date, interstate tensions have inhibited the rise of South Asian regional identity, institutions and interactions. Can the direction of causality be reversed: is it possible to envisage better relations among South Asian countries as a consequence of the creation of regional institutions? After all, the primary original motivation behind European economic integration after 1945 was geopolitical, to prevent another war between Europe’s great historic enemies. Today, war between Britain, France and Germany is indeed unthinkable.

The South Asian region comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Although Afghanistan joined the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC 1985) in 2007, for most practical purposes, because of the Western military intervention that has neglected the country’s history being rooted in its geography (Thakur 2012), it has been largely disconnected from regional cross-currents. South Asia’s combined population represents one-fifth of the world’s people. It is also a population characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and low life expectancy. South Asian countries do not fare well on these measures even by developing-country standards, let alone by world or industrial-country standards. In addition, most of them are wracked with problems of internal security and economic scarcities which threaten them with political destabilization and territorial disintegration. The region is home to one of the most concentrated grouping of fragile and failing states. Yet, on the positive side, South Asia too has been infected by the worldwide movement toward greater democratization and market freedoms.

India by itself accounts for around three-quarters of South Asia’s total population, land area and economic product. This has a triple consequence. Most obviously, India is the natural hegemon of South Asia. Second, other countries find it difficult to imagine existential threats to India. And yet thirdly, if India were to suffer from state failure and breakup, the consequences for all other countries in the neighborhood would be horrific as well.

India’s position in the region is distinctive also for the fact that all other states, save the Maldives, share a border with India but not with any other. This has three important consequences for India. First, all other states have every prospect of strained relations with India but little chance to develop friction in sparse relations with each other. Second, having India as a common problematic neighbor encourages the others to team up against the regional giant. Third, India is open to major social and political forces sweeping any of its neighbors. Whether it be civil war in Afghanistan, Maoist insurgency in Nepal, Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh and Pakistan or Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka, the turmoil will spill over into India.

By size, location and power India is and will ever be the principal actor in South Asian international relations. Geopolitics ensures too that India is the hub with spokes running to all the other states in the region, so that South Asian international relations revolve around India. India has not been free of difficulties in bilateral relations with any of its neighbors: demographic overspills from Bangladesh (while the latter itself can be flooded by refugees from Myanmar), the flow of goods across India from landlocked Nepal, the use of water from shared river systems with Pakistan, the spillover effects of ethnic warfare in Sri Lanka, the demarcation of maritime boundaries with the two large neighbors of Bangladesh and Pakistan and the perennial problems in relations with Pakistan.

India has a considerable military capacity to influence the outcomes of varying levels of conflict in South Asia. But it lacks the economic underpinning and diplomatic finesse to bend regional affairs to its political will. Consequently, its self-appointed managerial role in the region remains flawed. Its aspirations to regional leadership are continually thwarted by the stubborn refusal of other South Asian countries to learn the art of “followership” (for a discussion of this evocative concept, see Cooper, Higgott and Nossal 1991). The smaller countries were especially emboldened to challenge India’s preeminence by the humiliation inflicted on it by China in 1962.

The fact that India has sometimes had disputes with all its neighbors simultaneously suggests that India itself might be the center and cause of some regional disputes. Anxious to project itself on the world stage, India has appeared irritated at regional obstacles in its path to the status of a world power. In a remarkable tribute to a fatally flawed foreign policy, India finds itself without a network of useful friendships in its own region. India’s potential lies first and foremost in its neighborhood. Instead of realizing this potential, India has frightened all its neighbors at one time or another. They have tended to view India as overarmed, overweening and “over here.”

The search for a regional security structure remains as elusive today as it was in 1947. The pivot of South Asian regional geopolitics is the India-Pakistan rivalry. On the one hand, Pakistan is everyone’s favorite basket case on the brink of state failure and collapse as well as being suspected of state complicity in cross-border terrorism. Its bloody birth, the history of unremitting hostility with India, the bitter legacy of the loss of its eastern half to India-assisted secession in 1971, the decades of civil war with international entrapments in Afghanistan, the military capture of the commanding heights of the nation’s polity, the rise of Islamism as a global phenomenon, and the stranglehold of corruption on the country’s institutions have left it fractured as a society and broken as a polity. On the other hand, Pakistan has a middle class that is as well educated as India’s, a vigorous and inquisitive print and electronic media, an independent and assertive judiciary, and per capita income comparable to India’s.

The World of 2060

South Asia’s diffidence in moving towards open economic regionalism is in marked contrast to the evident trend toward free trade agreements in several parts of the world. For all South Asian countries, prosperity will require the flattening of regional borders, price-driven competition, free markets, the state limited to its elemental functions and an abandonment of dirigisme.

In November 2011, Pakistan caused a frisson of excitement in India by announcing the grant of most-favored-nation (MFN) status, something that India had granted to Pakistan back in 1996. The excitement faded as Islamabad, facing opposition from sections of the business community and religious organizations, “clarified” that it was merely considering whether to do so. In early 2012, Pakistan did confirm that it was moving to a negative list for trade with India, whereby anything that was not on a proscribed list would be tradable. Although India had wanted a 600item negative list, Pakistan approved a list of 1,209 items. This would still open up an estimated 6,850 commodities for trade against the existing 1,900 and pave the way for MFN status in a year or so (Joshua 2012). Quick calculations showed that this would increase the volume of bilateral trade from the existing $2.7 billion to an estimated $6 billion by 2014 (TOI 2012). In effect Pakistan emulated the strategy adopted by India vis-à-vis China in the 1980s not to hold bilateral trade hostage to the boundary dispute. For such efficiency – and trade – promoting gains to accrue, both countries would need improved infrastructure, additional trading points on the border, better customs facilities and financial services, and further dismantling of nontariff barriers to trade.

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