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Towards a New Asian
Order
Toward achieving these ends, the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), annually organises an Asian Security Conference. The volume under review is a collection of papers from the 13th conference held in February, 2011. Towards A New Asian Order attempts to understand the challenges that result from the emergence of China and India to the international system and conceptualises efforts towards a peaceful and stable future, even if a competitive one. The increasing interconnectedness of Asia has fused, what were different sub-regions of South Asia, West Asia, South-East Asia and Central Asia, into one region/super region centred on the growth of the China and the increase in its national strength. The relative decline of the West and the buoyancy exhibited by India has resulted in a geo-political flux in this larger Asian region, where states jostle for space and forge power equations making for a deadly recipe that could lead to disaster. The volume covers both traditional and non-traditional issues under five sections: Theoretically examining the geo-politics of Asia; dealing with the challenge of a powerful China; the sub-regions of Asia; and dealing with the challenges. The volume addresses a wide assortment of themes. The geo-politics of Asia is dealt within the questions of whether Asia is a region; and if there is a similarity between Asia’s present and Europe’s past? William Thompson sees Asia as a region and contends that learning from the European experience has its utility for Asian regionalism. However, he warns that ‘the European experience may prove to be quite unique due to the processes’ (page 22) and that such a comparison does not always take these processes into consideration. The success of the European Union and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in South-East Asia and their trajectory towards a security community and security regime, respectively, have received wide attention as palliatives for constructing a regional order underwritten by the interdependence theories of regional trade and cooperation. The growth of ‘regions’ and ‘regionalism’ is a dominating theme in International Relations and on the downside there also appears to be a linear developmental vision, which foresees that regions of the world would come to represent the structure of the current European Union (EU) in some form or the other. Others have though challenged the linear development of all regions and regional structures argument. In the second chapter, Zhang Zhenjiang examines the lessons of Western Integration for East Asian regionalism and concludes that European cooperation was driven by formal institutions and legal norms, driven by policy as a result of its specific history and geography while Asian regionalism is driven by informal interaction and the market and that "their different historical contexts cannot be compared, learned or copied" (page 51). Niklas Swanstrom in assessing regional cooperation in Asia asserts that despite increase in intra-Asian trade, there is little regional engagement and that a growing number of economic initiatives have created a virtual noodle bowl, where each initiative is unconnected and the complexity is more of a hindrance than an asset and that cooperation among the three economic giants — China, India and Japan — is shallow. There have been an abundance of studies that compare Indian and Chinese growth, argued by some as the ‘Chindia’ phenomenon. There, however, remains a gap when extrapolating the systemic affects of ‘Chindia’ to a more nuanced Asian or global scale. The section on rising China in the volume does this very well with four chapters on contending perspectives on India-China Relations, a triangular look at US-China-India relations, a neo-imperialist/pragmatic/realist reading of China’s ‘peaceful rise’ discourse. Vincent Wei-cheng Wang reduces India-China interactions to the contending paradigms of geopolitics, geo-economics and geo-civilisations. The volume crowds in a large number of papers. Two more volumes along sectional themes would make the book better focussed and definitely easier to review. The forward in the book mentions concepts like ‘regions’, ‘regional security complex’ that require clarifications as they are contested and lacked the necessary citations. The volume is a must for the academic-research community. It enumerates the challenges of Indian foreign policy. It also brings together top-notch scholars of various nationalities on important themes.
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SINCE the end of the
Cold War and over the past decade, we have been a witness to a durable
transformation in the global order. The emergence of China and India,
the resultant change in the structure of global politics necessitates
an understanding of the surfacing contours of the coming age to chart
the possible manoeuvres for India. This would enable India not only to
merely benefit from them but also promote a benign external
environment to focus on the task of socio-economic development.