Opinion - News Analysis

Who wants to be a superpower?

Dhiraj Nayyar

India needs to be a super-empowerer of the less powerful, both countries and peoples, and not a superpower in the shade of an even bigger one.

WHAT CAN be defined as overbearing, hypocritical, dangerous, a bully, and insensitive to the marginalised, all in one? What else: a superpower. And some in India want us to join the club.

Hypocrisy is a particularly strong trait among superpowers and the wannabes: preach one thing, practise another. If we look at this in terms of economic policy, we need look no further than the advanced economies of today. All of them, particularly the United States, practised high levels of trade protection and extensive use of government intervention during their industrialisation. Even the United Kingdom, often mistaken as the home of free markets (remember the barriers to Indian textile imports in the 19th century?), protected domestic industries from foreign competition. Now, all you hear from their elite clubs, the G-8, the World Bank, and the IMF, are the virtues of free trade, free markets, free everything really except lunch. "Do as we say, not as we did."

In terms of strategic policy, especially in the field of international relations, things are not different. The big powers tend to form clubs often accidentally (like the permanent five at the United Nations Security Council) and then quite arbitrarily close the doors and end the possibility of new membership. None of this is guided by logic, just path dependent exercise of power. The wannabes like India want to sneak into the nuclear club, through the recent deal with the U.S., but want to shut the door on Iran or even Pakistan. Again, if we and the leaders of the free world believe that much in democracy, surely it is the right of every country to develop nuclear energy, just as its everyone's right to demand disarmament from the superpowers before the lesser powers and the no-powers do. There is more hypocrisy: supporting dictatorships while preaching democracy, talking peace while making war, the list is long.

And if the hypocrisy doesn't sound bad enough, there is the constant prospect of being bullied into submitting to all suggestions and ideas emanating from the superpowers. There is always the threat of the now metaphorical imperial battleship roaming the seas nearby. Or more sophisticated methods such as bilateral agreements governing security, strategic and economic issues. Or even more sophisticated methods, the multilateral ones, where `world' organisations like the United Nations, the WTO, et al are arm twisted into becoming instruments of the superpowers.

Dangerous to the world

Not only are superpowers hypocritical bullies, they are also dangerous to the world outside and their own people as well. History is littered with examples of countries and empires that have wreaked havoc across other peoples' lands and lives. Be it the U.S. today, the Soviet Union a little earlier, Britain before that, France, Germany around then, Spain and Portugal before them. Perhaps, India before that. It is a cycle of power, which moves from one place to another but the result does not change much. Superpowers may come in different ideological packages; capitalist, communist, feudal, or monarchist, but the end product is the same, mostly bad.

The other worrying feature of superpowers is the way they often deal with their own. Just leaving the outside world out for a change, let us consider this fact. The U.S. today has huge levels of inequality, high levels of illiteracy, often based on race, and rising poverty. Does that befit a superpower? Especially when there seems little desire to change it.

The Soviet Union was no different. Most of the common people suffered while the elite played their power games from their huge dachas. Imperial Britain had plenty of poverty, as did colonial Spain or Mughal India. The elite once they achieve a certain level of prosperity and global power cease to be concerned about the marginalised within their own countries.

Are we in India going down this road? We often forget, in our public discourse, that we still have 250 million people living in absolute poverty and a lot more in relative poverty. And we fancy ourselves as a superpower just because of a few nuclear weapons? Laughable, if it weren't so tragic.

Most sensible people should, therefore, not be in favour of India as a superpower. But is there an alternative for those who would like to see India exercise influence, in a positive manner, on a global scale?

I would argue in the affirmative and the role should be that of a super-empowerer of the less powerful, both countries and peoples. And not in the form and shape of the Non-Aligned Movement, which somehow always leant towards alignment and diffused focus at the same time. We need new groups, such as the G4 in the WTO. We need new groups like the G4 campaigning for permanent seats at the U.N. Security Council. We need much larger and broader based interest groups than these to fight for the cause of the marginalised countries and people in global fora.

It is time to build new institutions, truly democratic ones. How about a development bank funded by the leading developing countries as an alternative to the World Bank? Or a monetary fund specifically for developing countries to compete with the IMF? Or indeed emulate institutions like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe for regions in the developing world? I am sure the ideas are many. India is a natural leader of an alternative. And it needs to take the initiative on this front.

That should be our place, of the super-empowerer, under the proverbial sun, and not a `superpower' in the shade of an even bigger one. History is there for the making. And the future pleads for a better world.

(The writer is a research scholar in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and can be reached at dn234@cam.ac.uk)

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