Please note that this programme transcript is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS RADIO ANALYSIS ANCHOR AWEIGH? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Philip Stephens Producer: Simon Coates Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC Room 1210 White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS (020) 8752 7279 Broadcast date: 15.03.07 2030-2100 Repeat date: 18.03.07. 2130-2200 CD number: PLN710/07VT1011 Duration: 27.41 Taking part in order of appearance: Kishore Mahbubani Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore; former Permanent Representative of Singapore to the United Nations & author of Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World & Can Asians Think? Nicole Gnesotto Director, European Union Institute for Security Studies, Paris Dr. Joseph Nye Distinguished Service Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University & author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics Dr. Paul Kennedy, C.B.E., F.B.A., F.R.Hist.S. J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University & author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers & The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations The Rt. Hon. The Lord Hurd of Westwell, C.H., C.B.E. Deputy Chairman, Coutts & Co. & Foreign Secretary, 1989-95 Dr. Minxin Pei Senior Associate & Director, China Program Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C. & author of China’s Trapped Transition Salman Haidar Former Indian Ambassador to China & the United Kingdom; Foreign Secretary, Indian Ministry of External Affairs; & Indian Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dr. Lilia Shevtsova Senior Associate, Moscow Carnegie Center & author of Post-Communist Russia MAHBUBANI: By the year 2050, three of the four largest powers in the world will be Asian—number one, China; number two, United States of America; number three, India; number four, Japan. The current multilateral order rests on the geopolitical map of 1945, and that geopolitical map, I think, has disappeared. GNESOTTO: First, the world will be much more multipolar; and second, the West will be shrinking. In other words, it will be very, very difficult for the US to maintain its leadership in all the areas—economy, politic, legitimacy, values and so on. But the real issue is: what kind of multipolarity it will be. NYE: One of the great shifts of the twenty- first century is going to be what you might call the recovery of Asia. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Asia was three-fifths of world production. That declines to one-fifth of world production by the 1940s. It’s now two-fifths and I would expect by the middle of the century it will be back to three-fifths. So I think the rise of China, the rise of India are major shifts in the relations between states. STEPHENS: Three experts, from three continents, predicting radical upheaval in the geopolitical order. Life was simple when the world was organized around the Cold War stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the Berlin Wall came down, it seemed Washington alone would settle things. America, in the piqued description of the French, was the hyper-puissance or hyper-power. Now Paris can breathe more easily. Washington’s unipolar moment has passed. The pax Americana is challenged both by the failures in Iraq and by the re-emergence of other great powers—most importantly in Asia. In this programme, we’re going to explore the implications of these shifts in global power—the greatest since the nineteenth century; we’ll analyze how the relative decline of the West and the rise of the East will affect how the world works; and we’ll examine how the global system is going to be anchored. First, though, the present. For all its woes, the US remains by a considerable margin the pre-eminent global power. But just how big? Paul Kennedy is the British historian of the rise and fall of great powers and a professor of modern history at Yale University. KENNEDY: It’s in a class by itself. It’s now spending approximately half of all of the world’s defence spending—which is quite amazing. It’s never happened before in history—not the Romans, not the British, not the Ottoman Turks. So, in the military sphere, it is the five hundred pound gorilla in the cage, thinking that it should be everywhere and anywhere. STEPHENS: Why isn’t, though, military power alone enough any more? KENNEDY: Well, it’s partly because military power is only one dimension of life. But it’s also because there are different ways of winning friends and influencing people. STEPHENS: In the old days, military might was what counted. Stealth bombers still matter, but Washington’s intervention in Iraq teaches us that ideas and values matter too. Battles are fought on the internet as well as on the field. Even the most powerful need allies. So what’s the consequence of this shift for the old “hyper-power”? Douglas, now Lord Hurd was Britain’s foreign secretary under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. HURD: The Americans will remain through your lifetime a very substantial, probably pre-eminent power. But they won’t have the power to settle everything. There won’t be the power of the pax Americana. And if they’re sensible—and I think they will be, eventually—the Americans will see that this is the time when they desperately need international institutions which will bind themselves but also the other people coming up. STEPHENS: Who is going to settle things? HURD: I think the Americans, as in 1945, are still the people who’ve got to take the initiative. I don’t quite see who else is going to take the initiative. You’re going to have a sort of balance of power in Asia; Europe is not likely to be quite bold enough and brave enough upon this. So I think you’re going to need an American president or a set of American statesmen—just as you had in ’45—who will take the lead. And, if they’re sensible, they will do that in the knowledge that, whatever the timing of the decline in American power, no power lasts forever, and it’s therefore in their interest to have these institutions. STEPHENS: Already, over North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear weapons programmes, President Bush has gone some way to acknowledge that. If it wants to achieve its aims, the US will have to listen more closely to its friends and be willing to talk to its foes. But the geopolitical revolution we’re witnessing consists of more than a waning America. History’s correcting itself. Kishore Mahbubani was until recently one of Singapore’s top diplomats. He’s now Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. MAHBUBANI: Essentially, for the last two hundred years, you had a very small group of nations, in Europe and North America, who were the only successful nations in the world. And, therefore, you had one dominant civilization in the world—Western civilization. In the twenty-first century, we’re going to return to the old norm where, from the year one to the year 1820, the two largest economies in the world were always China or India—so we are moving from a mono- civilizational world to a multi-civilizational world. And this is something that’s very difficult for Western minds to comprehend because they’re so used to living in the Western civilization—to quote V.S. Naipaul, being the “universal civilization”. STEPHENS: As the sun rises again over the East, how will the West like the shade? Will it be prepared to share global leadership? After all, nineteenth and early twentieth century European history also suggests that when new powers challenge the existing order the result can be conflict. Paul Kennedy at Yale. KENNEDY: India is clearly poised and, indeed, very willing to assume a larger, regional hegemonic role in the Indian Ocean. As for China, well, it’s almost like the German statesmen before 1914, who said to other nations at the time, as Wilhelmine Germany was expanding so fast, “It’s no use telling us to stop growing. That’s like telling an increasingly large schoolboy to stay in the same pair of trousers.” STEPHENS: But ultimately there are two choices—either those neighbours and the United States accommodate China’s rise and give it more space or there’s war? KENNEDY: Yes, and this is not unlike that debate which occurred in Edwardian Britain where the bankers and Lloyd’s of London and the traders and the shipping lines said, “Look, Germany is our number one trading partner, we will never go to war,” at the same time as the Royal Navy and the British chiefs of imperial defence were planning what would happen if they went to war. STEPHENS: Scary—and a salutary warning for those who imagine that globalization will trump nationalism. Just occasionally, though, we can learn from history. Nicole Gnesotto is director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris. It recently peered into the geopolitical future in a report called The Global Puzzle. Governments, she thinks, can look to the European Union as a model for the new, multi-polar world. GNESOTTO: There are three options: either you have an anarchic multipolarity; or you have a multipolar system which is very much aggressive—with power looking only for their national interest—or, third option, you have a multipolar system which is based on common rules, common institution and common will by all the players. STEPHENS: But that means reform of the international institutions, that means making way at the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund for these new powers. Is Europe ready to make way in the Security Council? GNESOTTO: Yes, global governance means global institution, global rules and it means mostly rules which are written and accepted by everybody—which means that the rule will not be perfect and if we aim at perfect rule we will not have a multilateral system. And, second, it means also fair representation of power in the system, you’re right. And it’s true that two years ago there was a failure of the international community in the reform of the UN system because it’s obvious that, in the next twenty years, even the UN Security Council must give a place to the new global power which are going to emerge. STEPHENS: Getting twenty-seven countries to agree can be fraught enough just on our own continent—although it’s facilitated by agreement over core democratic values and ideas. Isn’t it going to be much more difficult to persuade different re-emerging powers, like China, to continue to accept the West’s rules? PEI: China sees itself as a responsible global power and it does not see itself as a power, although rising, ready to challenge the current global order. Of course, that can change. STEPHENS: Minxin Pei is the director of the China programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. PEI: With growing power, China may want to flex its muscle. But for the next ten, fifteen years, the Chinese leadership will continue its current policy of keeping a relatively low international profile and not risking any confrontation with the West, especially the US. STEPHENS: Does it want ultimately to be a super- power, a power that matters everywhere in the world? PEI: It will want to achieve several goals in stages. For the immediate future, China certainly wants to have a veto power in east Asia. That is, nobody can do anything in the region without China’s consent. Beyond that, I do not see China has real global ambitions. It will have global interests, but China will not have the kind of global capabilities the US has today. That means China will have to rely on either the US or the current international regimes to protect its global interests. MAHBUBANI: The newly emerging powers—and look especially at China and India—they want to emerge on the basis of the rules of the current world order. They’re not revisionist powers. They’re status quo powers. STEPHENS: Kishore Mahbubani, who twice served on the Security Council as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations. MAHBUBANI: One of the greatest secrets that has been hidden from the world by the Western media [chuckles] is how much of a status quo power China is! In fact, ironically, China is today a greater supporter of the rules of the 1945 order than any Western country is— primarily because, by the way, China is becoming the single biggest beneficiary of these rules. STEPHENS: China, then, isn’t going to be upending the furniture at the United Nations. For the time being, the global system suits Beijing quite nicely—even if that sometimes means an awkward moment when the West’s values collide with China’s interests. Of course, China has had its permanent seat on the Security Council for a while. India, though, is still in the waiting room. And waiting. Salman Haidar is a former Indian ambassador and head of Delhi’s foreign ministry. HAIDAR: While everyone recognizes that this needs doing, to actually get a consensus on how to do it is proving very difficult. India is a contender as a developing country that, over the last sixty years, has come into its own finally and is pulling its full weight in the international system, and feels that its right to be in the Security Council as a permanent member is now quite clear. HURD: Behind every one of the reasonable candidates for new permanent seats on the Security Council is somebody semaphoring behind their back, “Anyone but him!” And that’s true of Germany, Brazil, India—I mean, just about everybody you can think of. So that way is more or less blocked. . STEPHENS: Lord Hurd with sobering news for India and other aspirants, like Brazil and South Africa—despite the efforts at modernization made by the UN’s last Secretary General. HURD: Kofi Annan made a heroic effort. He did get something. He got the General Assembly to endorse something called “the right to protect” which does entitle the international community—or bits of it—to intervene to save a people from its own ruler. But this is still very, very fuzzy stuff and will still in practice be case-by- case. I think the IMF, the World Bank have actually changed their own composition a bit. But it’s very, very slow work and I’m… well, being polite, I’m not quite sure that I see the new Secretary General of the UN actually gripping this and pushing it forward with the kind of energy which Hammarskjöld, for example, had in the 1950s. STEPHENS: Back then, of course, the Soviet Union used its veto on the Security Council to block many of the ideas coming from the capitalist West. Does Vladimir Putin’s Russia, flush with cash from its oil and gas exports and flexing its muscles on the international stage, take a more enlightened view? Lilia Shevtsova is senior associate of the Moscow Carnegie Center. SHEVTSOVA: Russia, together with China, are the only two great powers that are interested in preserving the status quo, at least until the moment when these two countries would feel stronger and will have capacity to participate in the building of the new world order. So, until that moment, I would believe Russia and China would block any real serious reform of the United Nations or of the Security Council. STEPHENS: So they don’t want to let others in— they don’t want the Indias and the Brazils to join? SHEVTSOVA: Sure. In this case, Russia’s influence will be dissolved and Russia can lose its veto rights that blocks a lot of Western initiatives. So to be part of the old Security Council is one of the very important attributes of the Russia status. STEPHENS: The international order, though, is about more than who sits at the top table. For the past half-century, the idea that governments can do pretty much as they like within their own borders has been in retreat. State sovereignty’s been increasingly circumscribed by international rules on everything from human rights to the law of the sea. The question now, with the emergence of a multipolar system, is whether that process is coming to a halt. China and India are wary of universal rules. We’ve seen that by the way they’ve behaved over the humanitarian crises in Sudan and Burma—and from the scramble for natural resources in Africa and the Middle East. Joseph Nye is the Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and the celebrated author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. NYE: There was a degree of hubris in the Nineties about what we could do with humanitarian intervention, but I don’t think it’s coming completely to an end. I think we’re going to be more cautious, more careful about it. But, if you look at cases like Sudan and Darfur today, it’s interesting to see that, while we haven’t solved it, there is not a feeling that we can turn our backs away from it. Now, it’s one thing to say we’re trying to be protective, and going from that to the idea that you’ll invade them and coerce them into doing things our way. I think that latter version of it is gone. But will you do things in terms of sanctions, resolutions, various organized multilateral pressures? I think that won’t go away. STEPHENS: We’re still a long distance, then, from the grand doctrine of international community enunciated by Britain’s Tony Blair at the time of the Kosovo crisis. China, India and Russia all seem keener on making their own choices from the menu of international rules. They might argue that there are precedents for this. Yale’s Paul Kennedy. KENNEDY: The argument is being redeveloped that we should go back to the wise cherry picking policy of certain earlier American administrations. That is to say, when you can get a Security Council agreement—take it. It doesn’t do you any harm. When something happens that you don’t like, disregard it. STEPHENS: So this is multilateralism à la carte, as it were? KENNEDY: It’s à la carte multilateralism—yes, you’re right! But, of course, many would say that this is precisely what egoistical, large powers do. Mr. Putin’s policies towards international organizations are à la carte multilateralism. The Chinese are now getting perfect at this. They are now devoted upholders of intellectual property rights and the World Trade Organization. Of course, if you mention something like interference in the internal affairs of a member of the United Nations, they will be neuralgic about it. STEPHENS: To à la carte multilateralism we could add à la carte alliances. The other striking feature of this multipolar world is the complexity—or even innate duplicity—of its myriad relationships. A nineteenth century British statesman once remarked that states had only permanent interests. Alliances were purely transient arrangements fixed in pursuit of those interests. That seems to be what’s happening as today’s powers jostle for advantage. Lilia Shevtsova at the Moscow Carnegie Center says we shouldn’t expect consistency. Take Vladimir Putin. SHEVTSOVA: Russia wants to drift on the orbit of the West; and at the same time—and this is the irony—Russian political elite would like to have the West as an enemy. STEPHENS: Well, we’ve seen President Putin, along with China promoting, say, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a counterweight to the West. Does Russia see this new alliance as one pole in a multipolar world? SHEVTSOVA: On the one hand, Russians are constantly talking about the multipolar world, and they’re even playing up the multipolar cooperation with China, with India—and even some Russians are thinking about the cooperation—strategic partnership—with the Islamic world. But, on the other hand, in reality, Russia does not know how to play multipolarity because multipolarity means a lot of trade-offs, consensus making, bridge making—which do not exist in Russia. STEPHENS: But hasn’t Mr. Putin been making friends in Beijing? At first glance, the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement, signed by Russia, China and the former Soviet states of central Asia, looks like a common front against the West. How durable is the Beijing-Moscow axis? SHEVTSOVA: I don’t see a really strong strategic interest that unite Russia and Beijing. And this axis of convenience supported by both Moscow and Beijing is the instrument, a tool in their game to counterbalance, first of all, the West and the United States of America. STEPHENS: Is it an axis of convenience that will last? SHEVTSOVA: Well, it can be broken any time and at least Russians on the level of political elite—they are much more suspicious of Chinese than of the West. STEPHENS: A marriage of convenience then. And not the only one. China and India fought a major war only forty years ago. Relations lately have warmed and Delhi enjoys observer status in the Shanghai group. While the West frets over this new chuminess, do their interests really coincide? Minxin Pei. PEI: I do not see any possibilities for a genuine alliance between China and India because their geopolitical rivalry is permanent. STEPHENS: Why “permanent”? PEI: Well, these are two big countries very nationalistic in their culture. But this said, both countries also understand that their interests for the next twenty years lie not in confrontation but in cooperation and peaceful coexistence. So we’re going to see short-term détente between China and India. Then, beyond that, we really do not know. HAIDAR: Even though there is a calm and a friendly and a mutually supportive relationship in many ways between India and China, there is a history. And the kind of re-arming in which China is engaged, the kind of technical skills that it has displayed in bringing down that satellite will certainly elicit a watchful response from India. STEPHENS: Salman Haidar reminding us that China’s recent successful test of an anti-satellite missile and its rising defence budget have unnerved its Indian neighbour. We shouldn’t forget either that Washington’s also been cosying up to Delhi. The fusion of the military and the political returns us to the fundamental question that Paul Kennedy raised at the beginning of the programme. In this new world order, how far will the key measure be military prowess, and how far will it be values, such as democracy, the rule of law and human rights? The struggle with radical Islamists is certainly, at its core, one of ideas. How will the dividing lines among states fall? Nicole Gnesotto at the European Security Institute in Paris. GNESOTTO: There is one vision—which is basically a US vision of the future—which says that, in twenty years, the international system will be again two camps. The first one will be an alliance of democracies and the other camp will be all the rest—whether it is the Muslim world or it is Chinese power or anything which is supposed to oppose democracy. I don’t think that this is a relevant position any more. There is another vision, which is more a European one, which says that if you want to keep power in the world, you must accept at a time to share it. STEPHENS: The West isn’t at one on this question, although the neo-conservative tide in Washington is now receding. That values matter in today’s interconnected, interdependent world—probably more than territory—should favour the West. The US, after all, still draws succour from its own founding narrative of personal freedom, aspiration and achievement. It was Harvard’s Joseph Nye who first coined the phrase “soft power” to describe the potency of values. NYE: What you will see is interesting questions about whether values of democracy, human rights that are shared by US and Europe will spread to other areas and regions. Contrary to a decade or two ago, when the Asian leaders were talking about Asian values and rejecting the values of the West, you’ll now find Chinese talking about democracy. You’ll find in South Korea a democratic regime. Japan is now talking about democracy and practising it. So it’s not clear that it’s going to be a rejection of Western values, but they’ll look very different when they’re translated into other areas. STEPHENS: The test seems to be how far these values spread. Can they cease to be Western and belong to the world? Paul Kennedy, Yale’s connoisseur of power politics. KENNEDY: An enormous imprint was made by the fact that the West first asserted these values through a long, philosophical, intellectual tradition and then made them, as it were, public in the Prologue and Charter of the United Nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And there is a hope, a belief that these values, being universal, will spread easily to other nations. So the case for optimism is certainly there. On the other hand, other people are going to pay attention to different sorts of values—one of which will be social solidarity less than individualism, and one of which may be, in the Muslim world, a much stronger attachment to your religion above your nation or above your individualism. So we should treat that with care. On the whole, if we can present the values as being something which is both useful and sensible to all cultures, provided we have the decent respect for all cultures, it’s going to work and it’s going to be helpful. STEPHENS: So we should, though, be talking about the rise of China, the rise of India, of other powers and the rise of religion in this new world order or disorder? KENNEDY: Yes, I think the role of ideas is going to be incredibly important. MAHBUBANI: The reason why Asian societies are succeeding today is not because they have rejected the West. It’s because they’ve finally understood the best practices of Western civilization, absorbed them and implemented them in their societies. STEPHENS: Kishore Mahbubani from Singapore. This, though, will be a slow process. We shouldn’t expect China to start embracing democracy next week or even next year. MAHBUBANI: China will have a huge challenge transforming itself into a Western democratic system. The young Chinese intellectuals I speak to are aware that China’s political system has got to evolve and change. They have no doubt that, in due course, China too must become democratic. But they don’t share the Western belief that they’re better off doing it tomorrow rather than ten or twenty years from now. STEPHENS: Big shifts in the distribution of power will inevitably bring bruising clashes. Nationalism hasn’t gone away. And a multilateral architecture designed to keep the peace in the world after 1945 must buckle in places under the strain. Looking ahead, we should also expect old-fashioned confrontations among states about access to vital resources. That may be where the West will find it most uncomfortable to adjust to its more modest role in the new global scheme. It’s not hard, then, to find grounds for pessimism about this multipolar future. And yet the new powers are rising precisely because they’re becoming more like the old. India’s prospering as the globe’s largest democracy. China’s rise is rooted in a willingness to be more open to the world. So if power is about values, the West, we may well discover, could win even as it’s waning. . 1