Prof.
Gamini Keerawella from Regional centre for Strategic Studies presented a paper
titled “Unpacking South Asian Regional Security in the 21st Century: A view
from Sri Lanka” at the Plenary session themed ‘Contemporary Security
Perspectives’, at the international conference themed “Threats to Security in
the 21st Century: Finding a Global Way Forward”. The School of Integrated
Social Sciences, University of Lahore, Pakistan organized the conference from 5
– 6 May, 2018 at University of Lahore, Pakistan. The objective of the
conference was to discuss the challenges posed by changing nature of security
threats and contemporary security issues that blur the division between
traditional and non-traditional security in the framework of national, regional
and international security in the 21st century.
The full text of his speech can be accessed
here:
Unpacking South Asian Regional Security in the 21st
Century:
A view from Sri Lanka
By
Prof.
GaminiKeerawella,
Executive
Director, Regional Center for Strategic Studies
South
Asia, home to a fifth of humanity, is one of the least integrated regions in
the world. The intra-regional trade in
South Asia accounts for only 5% of its total trade, manifesting a low degree of
economic bonding in the region. Two main states in South Asia were
born into an environment marred by mutual antagonism and it continued to remain
so as they got locked into a multiple-levels conflict as to the dispute over
territory, balance of power, threat perceptions, mutual accusation of
interference in each other’s domestic affairs and rival foreign policy
approaches. The relationship between India and its other neighbors constantly
fluctuates in an environment of mutual fear and suspicion. Faltering SAARC process
appears to be in limbo since 2016 after the India’s boycott of the Islamabad
Summit, in retaliation to the Uri attack in Kashmir. Against these ground
realities, what is really meant by ‘regional
security’ and ‘regionalism’ in South Asia?
Firstly, to unpack these issues, I intend to raise some fundamental
questions pertaining to the construction of the term, ‘South Asian region’, and
of the concept, ‘regional security of South Asia’. The polysemy of the term ‘South Asia’ and
processes of its multi-layered construction will be traced. What is the
reference point of regional security exactly? It must be made clear that ‘regional
security’ and the ‘regional security complex’ are not the same; the first is a
reference point and the latter is an analytical tool. The regionalism is a process propelled by
multi-faceted regional bonding. Later, the
issues and processes of South Asian regional security and insecurity in the 21st
century will be unpacked with the help of these analytical insights.
The
term South Asia bags different notions, depending on the context of its use and
the underlying stake of its construction. The term has been presented as a
civilizational entity, a geographical description and also as apolitical idea. The
shared cultural heritage in South Asia is a historical fact but culture is a
constantly evolving phenomenon. The existence of different religions and paths
of civilizations in South Asia also contests the idea that South Asia forms a single
cultural region. Many states in South
Asia are post-colonial entities and they possess a similar colonial
experience--unification and division. However, the geographical description of
South Asia does not correspond with any sense of political belonging. Against this backdrop, what is meant by South Asian region? To answer this
question, it is necessary to trace the genealogy of concept of ‘region’ in
international studies and evolution of regional security studies.
The
concept of region entered into the academic realm of international studies as a
unit of analysis only after the Second World War; but its ideological roots can
be traced in the geo-political writings in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. In the early Cold War years, an analytical
category of region, located in between the individual state and the global
system, was recognized in line with global strategic projections of the superpowers.
The
concept of ‘region’ as a heuristic construct to study international relations
gained currency with the proliferation of area studies in US centers of higher
learning and research after the Second World War. At the same time, certain scholars in
international politics conceptualized geographically distinct group of states
as subsystems or subordinate systems.
Leonard Binder, then Director of the Near East Center at the University
of California, Los Angeles, can be considered the pioneer to use subsystem
approach to study regions. He was soon followed by a group of scholars such as
Michael Brecher of McGill University, William Zartman of SAIS and Larry W.
Bowman, of Connecticut University who employ systems theory to bring regions to
international politics. In defining
regional subsystems, William R. Thomson identified four necessary conditions of
a regional subsystem: (1) the actors’ patterns of relations exhibit a
particular degree of regularity and intensity to the extent that a change at
one point in the subsystem affect other points, (2) the actors are generally
proximate, (3) internal and external observers and actors recognize the
subsystem as a distinctive ‘theatre of operation’, and (4) the subsystem
logically consists of at least two or, quite probable, more actors.
In
the Cold War context, regions were identified mainly in terms of the importance
given to the region in global strategic calculations of the Superpowers. South Asia as a region was not considered
vital to their central strategic balance.
However, India and Pakistan as individual states figured to some extent in
the containment and de-containment strategies of superpowers. The commonly used
term in academic parlance at that time was the Indian Sub-continent. The attention was mainly on the Indo-Pakistan
rivalry.
It
should also be noted that in the deliberations of Asian Relations Conference in
1947 or Colombo Powers Meeting in 1954, the term South Asia was not used at
all. It was in the late 1950s, that the US
State Department and the World Bank used the term South Asia. In 1959, US state
department published a briefing document entitled ‘Subcontinent of South Asia’. It was believed that the term South Asian
region is politically neutral, compared to the term Indian Sub-continent.
It
is with the establishment of SAARC in 1985 that the term South Asia received a
new currency. Since then, various
agreements were signed and initiatives were launched with South Asian regional
focus. The achievements of SAARC in
promoting regional cooperation, especially in some functional areas should not
be discounted. However, progress in achieving goals and objectives of regional
cooperation in key political and economic domains is far from satisfactory.
In
this situation, what is meant by South Asian regional security? If security is
defined as pursuit of freedom from threat and fear, i.e., a process then, whose
security are we talking of when it comes to South Asia? In this regard, three references
need to be taken into consideration:
South Asian Region as a whole, the states in the region and more
importantly, people in the region. South Asia’s position in the global system
and region-wide security issues that demands regional approach and action
constitute the first level. The
reduction of adversarial environments linked with fear and suspicion in
relations among South Asian States and promotion of trust and confidence through
economic interaction and political dialogue would be the concerns under the
second level of reference. Security
concerns of individual citizen in the region can be included in regional
security as many of them are more or less common irrespective of state
boundaries. Threats to human security
can be cited as a case in point. The discourse on Peoples’ SAARC represents
this tendency.
In
addition, the term regional security can be used to explain present state of
security conditions, i.e., an analysis. A rich body of literature is available
in South Asian regional security and in particular the contributions of the
Copenhagen School must be noted. Barry
Buzan and Ole Waever, in their highly influential work published in 2003, Regions and Power: Structure of
International security, developed the regional security complex theory
(RSCT). They argue that security is clustered in geographically shaped regions
because threats travel more easily over short distance than over long
ones. Furthermore, threats are most
likely to be in the region and security of each actor in a region interacts
with the security of other actors in the region. They observe “a set of units whose major
processes of securitization, de-securitization, or both are so interlinked that
their security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed or resolved apart from
one another”. In analyzing the Regional
Security of South Asia from the perspective of RSCT, they observed two points.
First, the South Asian regional security complex was slowly moving towards an
internal transformation from bipolarity to unipolarity as India got stronger
and Pakistan weaker. Second, the rise of China was creating a center of gravity
that was slowly drawing South Asia into closer security interaction with the
East Asian regional security complex. In
his article on the South Asian Security Complex published in 2011,Barry Buzan
argued that despite many events in South Asia, but ‘little in the way of
structural change from the analysis in Power and Region’.
Thus,
it is useful to bring to focus the difference between two contexts in which the
term regional security is employed: process and description. According to
Earnest B. Hass, “the phenomenon of regionalism is sometimes equated with the
study of regional integration. Regionalism can be a political slogan; if so, it
is ideological data that the student of integration must use. Regionalism can
also be an analytical devise suggesting what the world’s ‘natural’regions are
(or ought to be)”. Regionalism is a process as well as an outcome of the
process. Regionalism cannot be imposed; it should be evolved. The primary
condition of regionalism would be a common regional identity that is determined
by a number of factors. Having common
socio-cultural traits and values does not necessarily generate
regionalism. The perception of having
common regional attribute must set in motion of a process of regional bonding. Political and economic dynamics in operation
at different levels are critical factors that promote or hinder regional
bonding despite the fact that the region claims common regional attributers.
In
new millennia, there is a growing tendency towards regional economic integration.
As East Asia Forum noted, as of February 2016, 625 notifications of regional trade
agreements had been received by the WTO and 419 were in force. South Asia remains out of this tendency. After the establishment of SAARC, a number of
initiatives were taken in the direction of regional economic integration such
as signing of the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) agreement in 2004. But in real terms SAFTA proceeds very slowly
due to trust deficit, insufficient policy-relevant analytical work on gains of
regional integration to make informed policy decisions, limited logistics and
regulatory impediments and cross-broader conflicts. Economically South Asia is one of the least
integrated regions in the world at present. Intra-regional investment in South
Asia is smaller than one percent. Its intra-regional
trade accounts only for 5 percent of its total trade whereas intraregional
trade in Southeast Asia makes up 25 percent of ASIAN’s total trade. South Asia is
a region where the highest interstate barriers exist to trade and it suffers
from prohibitive tariffs. If these barriers are removed, intra-regional trade
in South Asia could increase from the current $23 billion to $50 billion. According
to some survey, at present it is 20% cheaper for India to trade with Brazil
than with its neighbor, Pakistan.
Economic gains of deeper economic integration in South Asia are not
unknown. But, the region still falters in making a breakthrough. It could be explained in terms of political
logic unique to South Asia.
It
should be pointed out that fundamental to the conflict
between India and Pakistan is the contradictory ideologies upon which the two
states are based. The ideological rationale of the state of Pakistan has been
the homeland for Muslims in the Indian sub-continent while founders of the Indian
state asserted multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-linguistic character of
the state based on a federal constitution to maintain the unity of India’s
diverse social patchwork of collective identities. The idea that Hinduism and
Islam formed two separate civilizations, a view that is shared by Hindu
nationalists in India as well, sets roadblocks to the growth of regionalism
with regional bonding.
The
chronic rivalry between India and Pakistan is just one dimension of the
pervasive trust deficit in South Asia. Incidents reported from time to time in
both sides of the boarder keep the pot boiling at all times. It has now become
a socially constructed phenomenon. Lack
of trust among states in South Asia can’t be attributed wholly to Indo-Pakistan
conflict. The trust-deficit in the
region is also an outcome of some architectural realities of South Asian
states. The unchangeable and undeniable regional reality in South Asia, the
term used by late Mr. Lakshman Kadirgamar, is the central and asymmetrical
presence of India in various domains. India’s preponderance over all others in
South Asia is based on its size, power, resources and development. Further, India’s centrality in South Asia is
geo-political. None of the South Asian countries interact with another without
touching or crossing Indian land, sea or air space. In addition, India has
special ties with each of its neighbors with regards to language, religion,
ethnicity, kinship, economic nerves or common historical experience. The states
around India fear that India could use some of these ties and cross-border
linkages to interfere in the internal affairs of its neighbors. Sir Ivor
Jennings vividly captured this love-hate relationship between India and its
neighbors in 1951when he wrote, “India thus appears as a friendly but
potentially dangerous neighbor to whom one must be polite but a little
distance. It is not because that India and Indians are unpopular, but that the
Ceylonese [Sri Lankans], while admiring much that is Indian, and feeling
themselves racially akin to Indian have a sensation of living under a mountain
which might send down destructive avalanches”. This is more relevant today.
The
paradoxical impact of the rise of India to a status of global power on regional
bonding should also be paid attention. In the last decade India
consistently maintained one of the highest GDP growth rates in the world. India
was able to take impressive strides in the area of knowledge industry and R
& D. India is now ranked fourth in
the Global Fire Power (GFP) ranking. Today, India’s military is the third
largest and its air force the fourth largest with 1,080 combat aircrafts. Its
navy is fifth largest in the world. These developments have compelled India, as an
aspirant global power, to extend its strategic perspective beyond South Asia.
At the same time, it acerbates the fear of Indian ‘bogey’ among its small neighbors
as they feel becoming more and more Lilliput before the Indian Gulliver.
This
is only one aspect of the changing scenarios. It must not be forgotten that
South Asia became the fastest growing region in the
world in 2016 and solidified its lead in 2017due to solid economic performance by India. Still the South Asian region is
home to 40% of world poor. The challenge before India’s neighbors in South Asia
is how to leverage their special links with India to become an integral part of
South Asian growth engine. Nevertheless, stunned and threatened by economic and
scientific advances achieved by the Indian Industrial and commercial
establishment, some sections of weak and backward industrial and commercial
middle class of South Asian neighbors seek state protection to remain within
their own comfortable cocoon. In contrast, general public in these countries
experiences cross border dividends generated by the growth of Indian economy and
by other advances in scientific and medical research. The economies of other
countries also benefit from the renewed Indian economic dynamism. For example, Colombo
port has emerged as a major international transshipment hub for Indian goods.
In 1915, 42% of India’s transshipment was handled by Sri Lanka.
In
order to go forward as a global power, India needs stable and friendly South
Asian environment. It is a fact that insecure
and discontented neighbors around her in South Asia would not augur well for
India, having millstones around her neck. In the changed constellation of power
in South Asia, what needs today is a ‘new Gujral Doctrine’ on the part of India
to allay the perceived fears of its neighbors. In the long run, it will enhance
its soft power in global politics. At the same time, it would give a kick-start
to the stalled SAARC process. The small states of South Asia also need to
recognize evolving geo-political realities in the region.
All
the issues and impediments come to the forefront when regionalism is projected
from the state-centered formula. The
trust deficit exists mainly among states and not among people in South Asia. It
must be noted that there can be two approaches to regionalism. The first is the
top-down approach, which aims to foster collaboration between the states in the
region. The issues of regional power
politics come forward to hamper the process of regionalism when it is pursued through
top-down approach. The second is the
bottom-up approach, focusing on the people-to-people interaction based on
common belonging and shared interests. In bottom up approach, the reference point of regional
security, hence the driving force of regionalism is the people in the region
that counts on their community of interests cutting across state boundaries. Therefore,
the possible way out of the present imbroglio of SAARC is to redefine and
re-chart regionalism from bottom-up approach. In such an endeavor, the human
security in South Asia becomes a priority in regional security. The two
approaches are not alternatives to each other. In an ideal situation, the both could
proceed simultaneously. Hence, the South Asian regionalism must be a
multilayered process and a political discourse. Who sets the agenda of the
discourse is the critical issue here. It is a too serious issue to leave in the
hands of demagogues, a common breed in South Asia.
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