CHAPTER 5
ASIA AND EUROPE: DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF BALANCE OF POWER
The term “Asia” ascribes a deceptive coherence to a disparate region. Until the arrival of modern Western powers, no Asian language had a word for “Asia”; none of the peoples of what are now Asia’s nearly fifty sovereign states conceived of themselves as inhabiting a single “continent” or region requiring solidarity with all the others. As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia. There is no memory of a common empire comparable to that of Rome. Across Northeast, East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, prevailing major ethnic, linguistic, religious, social, and cultural differences have been deepened, often bitterly, by the wars of modern history.
The political and economic map of Asia illustrates the region’s complex tapestry. It comprises industrially and technologically advanced countries in Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore, with economies and standards of living rivaling those of Europe; three countries of continental scale in China, India, and Russia; two large archipelagoes (in addition to Japan), the Philippines and Indonesia, composed of thousands of islands and standing astride the main sea-lanes; three ancient nations with populations approximating those of France or Italy in Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar; huge Australia and pastoral New Zealand, with largely European-descended populations; and North Korea, a Stalinist family dictatorship bereft of industry and technology except for a nuclear weapons program. A large Muslim-majority population prevails across Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and sizeable Muslim minorities exist in India, China, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines.
The global order during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was predominantly European, designed to maintain a rough balance of power between the major European countries. Outside their own continent, the European states built colonies and justified their actions under various versions of their so-called civilizing mission. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, in which Asian nations are rising in wealth, power, and confidence, it may seem improbable that colonialism gained such force or that its institutions were treated as a normal mechanism of international life. Material factors alone cannot explain it; a sense of mission and intangible psychological momentum also played a role.
The pamphlets and treatises of the colonial powers from the dawn of the twentieth century reveal a remarkable arrogance, to the effect that they were entitled to shape a world order by their maxims. Accounts of China or India condescendingly defined a European mission to educate traditional cultures to higher levels of civilization. European administrators with relatively small staffs redrew the borders of ancient nations, oblivious that this might be an abnormal, unwelcome, or illegitimate development.
At the dawn of what is now called the modern age in the fifteenth century, a confident, fractious, territorially divided West had set sail to reconnoiter the globe and to improve, exploit, and “civilize” the lands it came upon. It impressed upon the peoples it encountered views of religion, science, commerce, governance, and diplomacy shaped by the Western historical experience, which it took to be the capstone of human achievement.
The West expanded with the familiar hallmarks of colonialism—avariciousness, cultural chauvinism, lust for glory. But it is also true that its better elements tried to lead a kind of global tutorial in an intellectual method that encouraged skepticism and a body of political and diplomatic practices ultimately including democracy. It all but ensured that, after long periods of subjugation, the colonized peoples would eventually demand—and achieve—self-determination. Even during their most brutal depredations, the expansionist powers put forth, especially in Britain, a vision that at some point conquered peoples would begin to participate in the fruits of a common global system. Finally recoiling from the sordid practice of slavery, the West produced what no other slaveholding civilization had: a global abolition movement based on a conviction of common humanity and the inherent dignity of the individual. Britain, rejecting its previous embrace of the despicable trade, took the lead in enforcing a new norm of human dignity, abolishing slavery in its empire and interdicting slave-trading ships on the high seas. The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct, technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world.
With the exception of Japan, Asia was a victim of the international order imposed by colonialism, not an actor in it. Thailand sustained its independence but, unlike Japan, was too weak to participate in the balance of power as a system of regional order. China’s size prevented it from full colonization, but it lost control over key aspects of its domestic affairs. Until the end of World War II, most of Asia conducted its policies as an adjunct of European powers or, in the case of the Philippines, of the United States. The conditions for Westphalian-style diplomacy only began to emerge with the decolonization that followed the devastation of the European order by two world wars.
The process of emancipation from the prevalent regional order was violent and bloody: the Chinese civil war (1927–49), the Korean War (1950–53), a Sino-Soviet confrontation (roughly 1955–80), revolutionary guerrilla insurgencies all across Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War (1961–75), four India-Pakistan wars (1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999), a Chinese-Indian war (1962), a Chinese-Vietnamese war (1979), and the depredations of the genocidal Khmer Rouge (1975–79).
After decades of war and revolutionary turmoil, Asia has transformed itself dramatically. The rise of the “Asian Tigers,” evident from 1970, involving Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand, brought prosperity and economic dynamism into view. Japan adopted democratic institutions and built an economy rivaling and in some cases surpassing those of Western nations. In 1979, China changed course and, under Deng Xiaoping, proclaimed a nonideological foreign policy and a policy of economic reforms that, continued and accelerated under his successors, have had a profound transformative effect on China and the world.
As these changes unfolded, national-interest-based foreign policy premised on Westphalian principles seemed to have prevailed in Asia. Unlike in the Middle East, where almost all the states are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy, in Asia the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics. The various nations emerging from the colonial period generally affirmed one another’s sovereignty and committed to noninterference in one another’s domestic affairs; they followed the norms of international organizations and built regional or interregional economic and social organizations. In this vein a top Chinese military official, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Deputy Chief of General Staff Qi Jianguo, wrote in a major January 2013 policy review that one of the primary challenges of the contemporary era is to uphold “the basic principle of modern international relations firmly established in the 1648 ‘Treaty of Westphalia,’ especially the principles of sovereignty and equality.”
Asia has emerged as among the Westphalian system’s most significant legacies: historic, and often historically antagonistic, peoples are organizing themselves as sovereign states and their states as regional groupings. In Asia, far more than in Europe, not to speak of the Middle East, the maxims of the Westphalian model of international order find their contemporary expression—including doctrines since questioned by many in the West as excessively focused on the national interest or insufficiently protective of human rights. Sovereignty, in many cases wrought only recently from colonial rule, is treated as having an absolute character. The goal of state policy is not to transcend the national interest—as in the fashionable concepts in Europe or the United States—but to pursue it energetically and with conviction. Every government dismisses foreign criticism of its internal practices as a symptom of just-surmounted colonial tutelage. Thus even when neighboring states’ domestic actions are perceived as excesses—as they have been, for example, in Myanmar—they are treated as an occasion for quiet diplomatic intercession, not overt pressure, much less forcible intervention.
At the same time, an element of implicit threat is ever present. China affirms explicitly, and all other key players implicitly, the option of military force in the pursuit of core national interests. Military budgets are rising. National rivalries, as in the South China Sea and Northeast Asian waters, have generally been conducted with the methods of nineteenth-century European diplomacy; force has not been excluded, though its application has been restrained, if tenuously, as the years go by.
Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historical international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ, soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere (an art still remembered and practiced today in some quarters).
In Asia’s historical diplomatic systems, whether based on Chinese or Hindu models, monarchy was considered an expression of divinity or, at the very least, a kind of paternal authority; tangible expressions of tribute were thought to be owed to superior countries by their inferiors. This theoretically left no room for ambiguity as to the nature of regional power relationships, leading to a series of rigid alignments. In practice, however, these principles were applied with remarkable creativity and fluidity. In Northeast Asia, the Ryukyu Kingdom for a time paid tribute to both Japan and China. In the northern hills of Burma, tribes secured a form of de facto autonomy by pledging their loyalty simultaneously to the Burmese royal court and the Chinese Emperor (and generally not straining to follow the dictates of either). For centuries, Nepal skillfully balanced its diplomatic posture between the ruling dynasties in China and those in India—offering letters and gifts that were interpreted as tribute in China but recorded as evidence of equal exchanges in Nepal, then holding out a special tie with China as a guarantee of Nepal’s independence vis-à-vis India. Thailand, eyed as a strategic target by expanding Western empires in the nineteenth century, avoided colonization altogether through an even more elaborate strategy of affirming cordial ties with all foreign powers at once—welcoming foreign advisors from multiple competing Western states into its court even while sending tribute missions to China and retaining Hindu priests of Indian descent for the royal household. (The intellectual suppleness and emotional forbearance demanded by this balancing strategy were all the more remarkable given that the Thai King was himself regarded as a divine figure.) Any concept of a regional order was considered too inhibiting of the flexibility demanded from diplomacy.
Against this backdrop of subtle and diverse legacies, the grid of Westphalian sovereign states on a map of Asia presents an oversimplified picture of regional realities. It cannot capture the diversity of aspirations that leaders bring to their tasks or the combination of punctilious attention to hierarchy and protocol with adroit maneuver that characterizes much of Asian diplomacy. It is the fundamental framework of international life in Asia. But statehood there is also infused with a set of cultural legacies of a greater diversity and immediacy than perhaps any other region. This is underscored by the experiences of two of Asia’s major nations, Japan and India.
JAPAN
Of all of Asia’s historical political and cultural entities, Japan reacted the earliest and by far the most decisively to the Western irruption across the world. Situated on an archipelago some one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing, Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in isolation. Possessed of ethnic and linguistic near homogeneity and an official ideology that stressed the Japanese people’s divine ancestry, Japan turned conviction of its unique identity into a kind of near-religious commitment. This sense of distinctness gave it great flexibility in adjusting its policies to its conception of national strategic necessity. Within the space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the West (for the army from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.
Japan for centuries existed at the fringe of the Chinese world, borrowing heavily from Sinic religion and culture. But unlike most societies in the Chinese cultural sphere, it transformed the borrowed forms into Japanese patterns and never conflated them with a hierarchical obligation to China. Japan’s resilient position was at times a source of consternation for the Chinese court. Other Asian peoples accepted the premises and protocol of the tribute system—a symbolic subordination to the Chinese Emperor by which Chinese protocol ordered the universe—labeling their trade as “tribute” to gain access to Chinese markets. They respected (at least in their exchanges with the Chinese court) the Confucian concept of international order as a familial hierarchy with China as the patriarch. Japan was geographically close enough to understand this vocabulary intimately and generally made tacit allowance for the Chinese world order as a regional reality. In quest of trade or cultural exchange, Japanese missions followed etiquette close enough to established forms that Chinese officials could interpret it as evidence of Japan’s aspiration to membership in a common hierarchy. Yet in a region carefully attuned to the gradations of status implied in minute protocol decisions—such as the single word used to refer to a ruler, the mode in which a formal letter was delivered, or the style of calendar date on a formal document—Japan consistently refused to take up a formal role in the Sinocentric tribute system. It hovered at the edge of a hierarchical Chinese world order, periodically insisting on its equality and, at some points, its own superiority.
At the apex of Japan’s society and its own view of world order stood the Japanese Emperor, a figure conceived, like the Chinese Emperor, as the Son of Heaven, an intermediary between the human and the divine. This title—insistently displayed on Japanese diplomatic dispatches to the Chinese court—was a direct challenge to the cosmology of the Chinese world order, which posited China’s Emperor as the single pinnacle of human hierarchy. In addition to this status (which carried a transcendent import above and beyond what would have been claimed by any Holy Roman Emperor in Europe), Japan’s traditional political philosophy posited another distinction, that Japanese emperors were deities descended from the Sun Goddess, who gave birth to the first Emperor and endowed his successors with an eternal right to rule. According to the fourteenth-century “Records of the Legitimate Succession of the Divine Sovereigns,”
Japan is the divine country. The heavenly ancestor it was who first laid its foundations, and the Sun Goddess left her descendants to reign over it forever and ever. This is true only of our country, and nothing similar may be found in foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.
Japan’s insular position allowed it wide latitude about whether to participate in international affairs at all. For many centuries, it remained on the outer boundaries of Asian affairs, cultivating its military traditions through internal contests and admitting foreign trade and culture at its discretion. At the close of the sixteenth century, Japan attempted to recast its role with an abruptness and sweep of ambition that its neighbors at first dismissed as implausible. The result was one of Asia’s major military conflicts—whose regional legacies remain the subject of vivid remembrance and dispute and whose lessons, if heeded, might have changed America’s conduct in the twentieth-century Korean War.
In 1590, the warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi—having bested his rivals, unified Japan, and brought more than a century of civil conflict to a close—announced a grander vision: he would raise the world’s largest army, march it up the Korean Peninsula, conquer China, and subdue the world. He dispatched a letter to the Korean King announcing his intent to “proceed to the country of the Great Ming and compel the people there to adopt our customs and manners” and inviting his assistance. After the King demurred and warned him against the endeavor (citing an “inseparable relationship between the Middle Kingdom and our kingdom” and the Confucian principle that “to invade another state is an act of which men of culture and intellectual attainments should feel ashamed”), Hideyoshi launched an invasion of 160,000 men and roughly seven hundred ships. This massive force overwhelmed initial defenses and at first marched swiftly up the peninsula. Its progress slowed as Korea’s Admiral Yi Sun-sin organized a determined naval resistance, harrying Hideyoshi’s supply lines and deflecting the invading armies to battles along the coast. When Japanese forces reached Pyongyang, near the narrow northern neck of the peninsula (and now North Korea’s capital), China intervened in force, unwilling to allow its tribute state to be overrun. A Chinese expeditionary army estimated between 40,000 and 100,000 strong crossed the Yalu River and pushed Japanese forces back as far as Seoul. After five years of inconclusive negotiations and devastating combat, Hideyoshi died, the invasion force withdrew, and the status quo ante was restored. Those who argue that history never repeats itself should ponder the comparability of China’s resistance to Hideyoshi’s enterprise with that encountered by America in the Korean War nearly four hundred years later.
On the failure of this venture, Japan changed course, turning to ever-increasing seclusion. Under the “locked country” policy lasting over two centuries, Japan all but absented itself from participating in any world order. Comprehensive state-to-state relations on conditions of strict diplomatic equality existed only with Korea. Chinese traders were permitted to operate in select locations, though no official Sino-Japanese relations existed because no protocol could be worked out that satisfied both sides’ amour propre. Foreign trade with European countries was restricted to a few specified coastal cities; by 1673, all but the Dutch had been expelled, and they were confined to a single artificial island off the port of Nagasaki. By 1825, suspicion of the seafaring Western powers had become so great that Japan’s ruling military authorities promulgated an “edict to expel foreigners at all cost”—declaring that any foreign vessel approaching Japanese shores was to be driven away unconditionally, by force if necessary.
All this was, however, prelude to another dramatic shift, under which Japan ultimately vaulted itself into the global order—for two centuries largely Western—and became a modern great power on Westphalian principles. The decisive catalyst came when Japan was confronted, in 1853, by four American naval vessels dispatched from Norfolk, Virginia, on an expedition to flout deliberately the seclusion edicts by entering Tokyo Bay. Their commanding officer, Commodore Matthew Perry, bore a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Emperor of Japan, which he insisted on delivering directly to imperial representatives in the Japanese capital (a breach of two centuries of Japanese law and diplomatic protocol). Japan, which held foreign trade in as little esteem as China, cannot have been particularly reassured by the President’s letter, which informed the Emperor (whom Fillmore addressed as his “Great and Good Friend!”) that the American people “think that if your imperial majesty were so far to change the ancient laws as to allow a free trade between the two countries it would be extremely beneficial to both.” Fillmore clothed the de facto ultimatum into a classically American pragmatic proposal to the effect that the established seclusion laws, heretofore described as immutable, might be loosened on a trial basis:
If your imperial majesty is not satisfied that it would be safe altogether to abrogate the ancient laws which forbid foreign trade, they might be suspended for five or ten years, so as to try the experiment. If it does not prove as beneficial as was hoped, the ancient laws can be restored. The United States often limit their treaties with foreign States to a few years, and then renew them or not, as they please.
The Japanese recipients of the message recognized it as a challenge to their concept of political and international order. Yet they reacted with the reserved composure of a society that had experienced and studied the transitoriness of human endeavors for centuries while retaining its essential nature. Surveying Perry’s far superior firepower (Japanese cannons and firearms had barely advanced in two centuries, while Perry’s vessels were equipped with state-of-the-art naval gunnery capable, as he demonstrated along the Japanese coast, of firing explosive shells), Japan’s leaders concluded that direct resistance to the “black ships” would be futile. They relied on the cohesion of their society to absorb the shock and maintain their independence by that cohesion. They prepared an exquisitely courteous reply explaining that although the changes America sought were “most positively forbidden by the laws of our Imperial ancestors,” nonetheless, “for us to continue attached to ancient laws, seems to misunderstand the spirit of the age.” Allowing that “we are governed now by imperative necessity,” Japanese representatives assured Perry that they were prepared to satisfy nearly all of the American demands, including constructing a new harbor capable of accommodating American ships.
Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to that of China after the appearance of a British envoy in 1793 (discussed in the next chapter). China reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference while cultivating China’s distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail. Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power—albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination. After a new faction came to power in 1868 promising to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” they announced that they would do so by mastering the barbarians’ concepts and technologies and joining the Westphalian world order as an equal member. The new Meiji Emperor’s coronation was marked with the Charter Oath signed by the nobility, promising a sweeping program of reform, which included provisions that all social classes should be encouraged to participate. It provided for deliberative assemblies in all provinces, an affirmation of due process, and a commitment to fulfill the aspirations of the population. It relied on the national consensus, which has been one of the principal strengths—perhaps the most distinctive feature—of Japanese society:
1. By this oath, we set up as our aim the establishment of the national wealth on a broad basis and the framing of a constitution and laws.
2. Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by open discussion.
3. All classes, high and low, shall be united in vigorously carrying out the administration of affairs of state.
4. The common people, no less than the civil and military officials, shall all be allowed to pursue their own calling so that there may be no discontent.
5. Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature.
6. Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.
Japan would henceforth embark on the systematic construction of railways, modern industry, an export-oriented economy, and a modern military. Amidst all these transformations, the uniqueness of Japanese culture and society would preserve Japanese identity.
The results of this dramatic change of course would, within a few decades, vault Japan into the ranks of global powers. In 1886, after a brawl between Chinese sailors and Nagasaki police, a modern German-built Chinese warship sailed toward Japan, compelling a resolution. By the next decade, intensive naval construction and training had given Japan the upper hand. When an 1894 dispute over relative Japanese and Chinese influence in Korea culminated in war, Japan prevailed decisively. The peace terms included an end of Chinese suzerainty over Korea (giving way to new contests between Japan and Russia) and the cession of Taiwan, which Japan governed as a colony.
Japan’s reforms were pursued with such vigor that the Western powers were soon obliged to abandon the model of “extraterritoriality”—their “right” to try their own citizens in Japan by their own, not local, laws—which they had first applied in China. In a landmark trade treaty Britain, the preeminent Western power, committed British subjects in Japan to abide by Japanese jurisdiction. In 1902, the British treaty was transformed into a military alliance, the first formal strategic alignment between an Asian and a Western power. Britain sought the alliance to balance Russian pressures on India. Japan’s goal was to defeat Russian aspirations to dominate Korea and Manchuria and to establish its own freedom of maneuver for later designs there. Three years later, Japan stunned the world by defeating the Russian Empire in a war, the first defeat of a Western country by an Asian country in the modern period. In World War I, Japan joined the Entente powers and seized German bases in China and the South Pacific.
Japan had “arrived” as the first non-Western great power in the contemporary age, accepted as a military, economic, and diplomatic equal by the countries that had heretofore shaped the international order. There was one important difference: on the Japanese side, the alliances with Western countries were not based on common strategic objectives but to expel its European allies from Asia.
After the exhaustion of Europe in World War I, Japan’s leaders concluded that a world beset by conflict, financial crisis, and American isolationism favored imperial expansion aimed at imposing hegemony on Asia. Imperial Japan detached Manchuria from China in 1931 and established it as a Japanese satellite state under the exiled Chinese Emperor. In 1937, Japan declared war on China in order to subjugate additional Chinese territory. In the name of a “New Order in Asia” and then an “East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” Japan strove to organize its own anti-Westphalian sphere of influence—a “bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers,” arranged hierarchically to “thereby enable all nations to find each its proper place in the world.” In this new order, other Asian states’ sovereignty would be elided into a form of Japanese tutelage.
The members of the established international order were too exhausted by World War I and too preoccupied with the mounting European crisis to resist. Only one Western country remained in the way of this design: the United States, the country that had forcibly opened up Japan less than a century earlier. As though history contained a narrative, the first bombs of a war between the two countries fell on American territory in 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American mobilization in the Pacific eventually culminated in the use of two nuclear weapons (the sole military use of these weapons to date), bringing about Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Japan adjusted to the debacle by methods similar to its response to Commodore Perry: resilience sustained by an indomitable national spirit based on a distinctive national culture. To restore the Japanese nation, Japan’s postwar leaders (almost all of whom had been in the public service in the 1930s and 1940s) portrayed surrender as adaptation to American priorities; indeed, Japan used the authority of the American occupation regime to modernize more fully and to recover more rapidly than it could have by purely national efforts. It renounced war as an instrument of national policy, affirmed principles of constitutional democracy, and reentered the international state system as an American ally—though a low-key one more visibly concerned with economic revival than with participation in grand strategy. For nearly seven decades, this new orientation has proved an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity.
Japan’s postwar posture was frequently described as a new pacifism; in fact it was considerably more complex. Above all, it reflected an acquiescence in American predominance and an assessment of the strategic landscape and the imperatives of Japan’s survival and long-term success. Japan’s postwar governing class accepted the constitution drafted by American occupying authorities—with its stringent prohibitions on military action—as a necessity of their immediate circumstances. They avowed its liberal-democratic orientation as their own; they affirmed principles of democracy and international community akin to those embraced in Western capitals.
At the same time, Japan’s leaders adapted their country’s unique demilitarized role to Japanese long-term strategic purposes. They transformed the pacifist aspects of the postwar order from a prohibition against military action to an imperative to focus on other key elements of national strategy, including economic revitalization. American forces were invited to remain deployed in Japan in substantial numbers, and the defense commitment was solidified into a mutual security treaty, deterring potentially antagonistic powers (including a Soviet Union expanding its Pacific presence) from viewing Japan as a target for strategic action. Having established the framework of the relationship, Japan’s Cold War leaders proceeded to reinforce their country’s capacities by developing an independent military capability.
The effect of the first stage of Japan’s postwar evolution was to take its strategic orientation out of Cold War contests, freeing it to focus on a transformative program of economic development. Japan placed itself legally in the camp of the developed democracies but—citing its pacifist orientation and commitment to world community—declined to join the ideological struggles of the age. The result of this subtle strategy was a period of concerted economic growth paralleled only by that following the 1868 Meiji Revolution. Within two decades of its wartime devastation, Japan had rebuilt itself as a major global economic power. The Japanese miracle was soon after invoked as a potential challenge to American economic preeminence, though it began to level off in the last decade of the twentieth century.
The social cohesion and sense of national commitment that enabled this remarkable transformation has been called forth in response to contemporary challenges. It enabled the Japanese people to respond to a devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan’s northeast—by World Bank estimates, the costliest natural disaster in world history—with an astonishing display of mutual assistance and national solidarity. Financial and demographic challenges have been the subject of searching internal assessment and, in some aspects, equally bold measures. In each endeavor, Japan has called forth its resources with its traditional confidence that its national essence and culture could be maintained through almost any adjustments.
Dramatic changes in the balance of power will inevitably be translated by Japan’s establishment into a new adaptation of Japanese foreign policy. The return of strong national leadership under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gives Tokyo new latitude to act on its assessments. A December 2013 Japanese government white paper concluded that “as Japan’s security environment becomes ever more severe … it has become indispensable for Japan to make more proactive efforts in line with the principle of international cooperation,” including strengthening Japan’s capacity to “deter” and, if needed, “defeat” threats. Surveying a changing Asian landscape, Japan increasingly articulates a desire to become a “normal country” with a military not constitutionally barred from war and an active alliance policy. The issue for Asian regional order will be the definition of “normality.”
As at other pivotal moments in its history, Japan is moving toward a redefinition of its broader role in international order, sure to have far-reaching consequences in its region and beyond. Searching for a new role, it will assess once again, carefully, unsentimentally, and unobtrusively, the balance of material and psychological forces in light of the rise of China, Korean developments, and their impact on Japan’s security. It will examine the utility and record of the American alliance and its considerable success in serving wide-ranging mutual interests; it will also consider America’s withdrawal from three military conflicts. Japan will conduct this analysis in terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance; adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy. Which of them will emerge as dominant, or whether the choice is for a mix of them, depends on Japan’s calculations of the global balance of power—not formal American assurances—and how it perceives underlying trends. Should Japan perceive a new configuration of power unfolding in its region or the world, it will base its security on its judgment of reality, not on traditional alignments. The outcome therefore depends on how credible the Japanese establishment judges American policy in Asia to be and how they assess the overall balance of forces. The long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy is as much at issue as Japan’s analysis.
INDIA
In Japan, the impetus of Western intrusion changed the course of a historic nation; in India it reshaped a great civilization into a modern state. India has long developed its qualities at the intersection of world orders, shaping and being shaped by their rhythms. It has been defined less by its political borders than by a shared spectrum of cultural traditions. No mythic founder has been credited with promulgating the Hindu tradition, India’s majority faith and the wellspring of several others. History has traced its evolution, dimly and incompletely, through a synthesis of traditional hymns, legends, and rituals from cultures along the Indus and Ganges rivers and plateaus and uplands north and west. In the Hindu tradition, however, these specific forms were the diverse articulations of underlying principles that predated any written text. In its diversity and resistance to definition—encompassing distinct gods and philosophical traditions, the analogues of which would likely have been defined as separate religions in Europe—Hinduism was said to approximate and prove the ultimate oneness of manifold creation, reflecting “the long and diversified history of man’s quest for reality … at once all-embracing and infinite.”
When united—as during the fourth through second centuries B.C. and the fourth through seventh centuries A.D.—India generated currents of vast cultural influence: Buddhism spread from India to Burma, Ceylon, China, and Indonesia, and Hindu art and statecraft influenced Thailand, Indochina, and beyond. When divided—as it often was—into competing kingdoms, India was a lure for invaders, traders, and spiritual seekers (some fulfilling multiple roles at once, such as the Portuguese, who arrived in 1498 “in search of Christians and spices”), whose depredations it endured and whose cultures it eventually absorbed and mixed with its own.
China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever professing to be especially awed by any of them. Invaders might raise extraordinary monuments to their own importance, as if to reassure themselves of their greatness in the face of so much aloofness, but the Indian peoples endured by a core culture defiantly impervious to alien influence. India’s foundational religions are inspired not by prophetic visions of messianic fulfillment; rather, they bear witness to the fragility of human existence. They offer not personal salvation but the solace of an inextricable destiny.
World order in Hindu cosmology was governed by immutable cycles of an almost inconceivably vast scale—millions of years long. Kingdoms would fall, and the universe would be destroyed, but it would be re-created, and new kingdoms would rise again. When each wave of invaders arrived (Persians in the sixth century B.C.; Alexander and his Bactrian Greeks in the fourth century B.C.; Arabs in the eighth century; Turks and Afghans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Mughals in the sixteenth century; and various European nations following shortly after), they were fitted into this timeless matrix. Their efforts might disrupt, but measured against the perspective of the infinite, they were irrelevant. The true nature of human experience was known only to those who endured and transcended these temporal upheavals.
The Hindu classic the Bhagavad Gita framed these spirited tests in terms of the relationship between morality and power. The work, an episode within the Mahabharata (the ancient Sanskrit epic poem sometimes likened in its influence to the Bible or the Homeric epics), takes the form of a dialogue between the warrior-prince Arjuna and his charioteer, a manifestation of the god Lord Krishna. Arjuna, “overwhelmed by sorrow” on the eve of battle at the horrors he is about to unleash, wonders what can justify the terrible consequences of war. This is the wrong question, Krishna rejoins. Because life is eternal and cyclical and the essence of the universe is indestructible, “the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.” Redemption will come through the fulfillment of a preassigned duty, paired with a recognition that its outward manifestations are illusory because “the impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal.” Arjuna, a warrior, has been presented with a war he did not seek. He should accept the circumstances with equanimity and fulfill his role with honor, and must strive to kill and prevail and “should not grieve.”
While Lord Krishna’s appeal to duty prevails and Arjuna professes himself freed from doubt, the cataclysms of the war—described in detail in the rest of the epic—add resonance to his earlier qualms. This central work of Hindu thought embodied both an exhortation to war and the importance not so much of avoiding but of transcending it. Morality was not rejected, but in any given situation the immediate considerations were dominant, while eternity provided a curative perspective. What some readers lauded as a call to fearlessness in battle, Gandhi would praise as his “spiritual dictionary.”
Against the background of the eternal verities of a religion preaching the elusiveness of any single earthly endeavor, the temporal ruler was in fact afforded a wide berth for practical necessities. The pioneering exemplar of this school was the fourth-century B.C.minister Kautilya, credited with engineering the rise of India’s Maurya Dynasty, which expelled Alexander the Great’s successors from northern India and unified the subcontinent for the first time under a single rule.
Kautilya wrote about an India comparable in structure to Europe before the Peace of Westphalia. He describes a collection of states potentially in permanent conflict with each other. Like Machiavelli’s, his is an analysis of the world as he found it; it offers a practical, not a normative, guide to action. And its moral basis is identical with that of Richelieu, who lived nearly two thousand years later: the state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
Tradition holds that at some point during or after completing his endeavors, Kautilya recorded the strategic and foreign policy practices he had observed in a comprehensive manual of statecraft, the Arthashastra. This work sets out, with dispassionate clarity, a vision of how to establish and guard a state while neutralizing, subverting, and (when opportune conditions have been established) conquering its neighbors. The Arthashastra encompasses a world of practical statecraft, not philosophical disputation. For Kautilya, power was the dominant reality. It was multidimensional, and its factors were interdependent. All elements in a given situation were relevant, calculable, and amenable to manipulation toward a leader’s strategic aims. Geography, finance, military strength, diplomacy, espionage, law, agriculture, cultural traditions, morale and popular opinion, rumors and legends, and men’s vices and weaknesses needed to be shaped as a unit by a wise king to strengthen and expand his realm—much as a modern orchestra conductor shapes the instruments in his charge into a coherent tune. It was a combination of Machiavelli and Clausewitz.
Millennia before European thinkers translated their facts on the ground into a theory of balance of power, the Arthashastra set out an analogous, if more elaborate, system termed the “circle of states.” Contiguous polities, in Kautilya’s analysis, existed in a state of latent hostility. Whatever professions of amity he might make, any ruler whose power grew significantly would eventually find that it was in his interest to subvert his neighbor’s realm. This was an inherent dynamic of self-preservation to which morality was irrelevant. Much like Frederick the Great two thousand years later, Kautilya concluded that the ruthless logic of competition allowed no deviation: “The conqueror shall [always] endeavor to add to his own power and increase his own happiness.” The imperative was clear: “If … the conqueror is superior, the campaign shall be undertaken; otherwise not.”
European theorists proclaimed the balance of power as a goal of foreign policy and envisaged a world order based on the equilibrium of states. In the Arthashastra, the purpose of strategy was to conquer all other states and to overcome such equilibrium as existed on the road to victory. In that respect, Kautilya was more comparable to Napoleon and Qin Shi Huang (the Emperor who unified China) than to Machiavelli.
In Kautilya’s view, states had an obligation to pursue self-interest even more than glory. The wise ruler would seek his allies from among his neighbors’ neighbors. The goal would be an alliance system with the conqueror at the center: “The Conqueror shall think of the circle of states as a wheel—himself at the hub and his allies, drawn to him by the spokes though separated by intervening territory, as its rim. The enemy, however strong he may be, becomes vulnerable when he is squeezed between the conqueror and his allies.” No alliance is conceived as permanent, however. Even within his own alliance system, the King should “undertake such works as would increase his own power” and maneuver to strengthen his state’s position and prevent neighboring states from aligning against it.
Like the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, Kautilya held that the least direct course was often the wisest: to foment dissension between neighbors or potential allies, to “make one neighboring king fight another neighbor and having thus prevented the neighbors from getting together, proceed to overrun the territory of his own enemy.” The strategic effort is unending. When the strategy prevails, the King’s territory expands, and the borders are redrawn, the circle of states would need to be recalibrated. New calculations of power would have to be undertaken; some allies would now become enemies and vice versa.
What our time has labeled covert intelligence operations were described in the Arthashastra as an important tool. Operating in “all states of the circle” (that is, friends and adversaries alike) and drawn from the ranks of “holy ascetics, wandering monks, cart-drivers, wandering minstrels, jugglers, tramps, [and] fortune-tellers,” these agents would spread rumors to foment discord within and between other states, subvert enemy armies, and “destroy” the King’s opponents at opportune moments.
To be sure, Kautilya insisted that the purpose of the ruthlessness was to build a harmonious universal empire and uphold the dharma—the timeless moral order whose principles were handed down by the gods. But the appeal to morality and religion was more in the name of practical operational purposes than of principle in its own right—as elements of a conqueror’s strategy and tactics, not imperatives of a unifying concept of order. The Arthashastra advised that restrained and humanitarian conduct was under most circumstances strategically useful: a king who abused his subjects would forfeit their support and would be vulnerable to rebellion or invasion; a conqueror who needlessly violated a subdued people’s customs or moral sensibilities risked catalyzing resistance.
The Arthashastra’s exhaustive and matter-of-fact catalogue of the imperatives of success led the distinguished twentieth-century political theorist Max Weber to conclude that the Arthashastra exemplified “truly radical ‘Machiavellianism’ … compared to it, Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.” Unlike Machiavelli, Kautilya exhibits no nostalgia for the virtues of a better age. The only criterion of virtue he would accept was whether his analysis of the road to victory was accurate or not. Did he describe the way policy was, in fact, being conducted? In Kautilya’s counsel, equilibrium, if it ever came about, was the temporary result of an interaction of self-serving motives; it was not, as in European concepts after Westphalia, the strategic aim of foreign policy. The Arthashastra was a guide to conquest, not to the construction of an international order.
Whether following the Arthashastra’s prescriptions or not, India reached its high-water mark of territorial extent in the third century B.C., when its revered Emperor Asoka governed a territory comprising all of today’s India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and part of Afghanistan and Iran. Then, about the time when China was being unified by its founding Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 221 B.C., India split into competing kingdoms. Reunified several centuries later, India fractured again in the seventh century, as Islam was beginning to mount its challenge to the empires of Europe and Asia.
For nearly a millennium, India—with its fertile soil, wealthy cities, and resplendent intellectual and technological achievements—became a target for conquest and conversion. Waves of conquerors and adventurers—Turks, Afghans, Parthians, Mongols—descended each century from Central and Southwest Asia into the Indian plains, establishing a patchwork of smaller principalities. The subcontinent was thus “grafted to the Greater Middle East,” with ties of religion and ethnicity and strategic sensitivities that endure to this day. For most of this period, the conquerors were too hostile toward each other to permit any one to control the entire region or to extinguish the power of Hindu dynasties in the south. Then, in the sixteenth century, the most skillful of these invaders from the northwest, the Mughals, succeeded in uniting most of the subcontinent under a single rule. The Mughal Empire embodied India’s diverse influences: Muslim in faith, Turkic and Mongol in ethnicity, Persian in elite culture, the Mughals ruled over a Hindu majority fragmented by regional identities.
In this vortex of languages, cultures, and creeds, the appearance of yet another wave of foreign adventurers in the sixteenth century did not at first seem to be an epochal event. Setting out to profit from an expanding trade with the wealthy Mughal Empire, private British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese companies vied with one another to establish footholds on land in friendly princely states. Britain’s Indian realm grew the most, if initially without a fixed design (prompting the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge to say, “We seem, as it were, to have conqueredand peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind”). Once a base of British power and commerce was established in the eastern region of Bengal, it found itself surrounded by competitors, European and Asian. With each war in Europe and the Americas, the British in India clashed with rivals’ colonies and allies; with each victory, they acquired the adversary’s Indian assets. As Britain’s possessions—technically the holdings of the East India Company, not the British state itself—expanded, it considered itself threatened by Russia looming to the north, by Burma by turns militant and fragmented, and by ambitious and increasingly autonomous Mughal rulers, thus justifying (in British eyes) further annexations.
Ultimately, Britain found itself conceiving of an Indian entity whose unity was based on the security of a continental swath of territories encompassing the contemporary states of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Something akin to an Indian national interest was defined, ascribed to a geographic unit that was, in fact, run as a state even in the absence (it was assumed) of an Indian nation. That policy based the security of India on British naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean; on friendly, or at least nonthreatening, regimes as far-flung as Singapore and Aden; and on a nonhostile regime at the Khyber Pass and the Himalayas. In the north, Britain fended off czarist Russia’s advances through the complex forays of spies, explorers, and indigenous surrogates backed up by small contingents of British forces, in what came to be known as the “Great Game” of Himalayan geostrategy. It also edged India’s borders with China north toward Tibet—an issue that arose again in China’s war with India in 1962. Contemporary analogues to these policies have been taken over as key elements of the foreign policy of postindependence India. They amount to a regional order for South Asia, whose linchpin would be India, and the opposition of any country’s attempts, regardless of its domestic structure, to achieve a threatening concentration of power in the neighboring territories.
When London responded to the 1857 mutiny of Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the East India Company’s army by declaring direct British rule, it did not conceive of this act as establishing British governance over a foreign nation. Rather, it saw itself as a neutral overseer and civilizing uplifter of multifarious peoples and states. As late as 1888, a leading British administrator could declare,
There is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious … You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.
By deciding after the mutiny to administer India as a single imperial unit, Britain did much to bring such an India into being. The diverse regions were connected by rail lines and a common language, English. The glories of India’s ancient civilization were researched and catalogued and India’s elite trained in British thought and institutions. In the process, Britain reawakened in India the consciousness that it was a single entity under foreign rule and inspired a sentiment that to defeat the foreign influence it had to constitute itself as a nation. Britain’s impact on India was thus similar to Napoleon’s on a Germany whose multiple states had been treated previously only as a geographic, not a national, entity.
The manner in which India achieved its independence and charted its world role reflected these diverse legacies. India had survived through the centuries by combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary psychological skill in dealing with occupiers. Mohandas Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule was made possible in the first instance by the spiritual uplift of the Mahatma, but it also proved to be the most effective way to fight the imperial power because of its appeal to the core values of freedom of liberal British society. Like Americans two centuries earlier, Indians vindicated their independence by invoking against their colonial rulers concepts of liberty they had studied in British schools (including at the London School of Economics, where India’s future leaders absorbed many of their quasi-socialist ideas).
Modern India conceived of its independence as a triumph not only of a nation but of universal moral principles. And like America’s Founding Fathers, India’s early leaders equated the national interest with moral rectitude. But India’s leaders have acted on Westphalian principles with respect to spreading their domestic institutions, with little interest in promoting democracy and human rights practices internationally.
As Prime Minister of a newly independent state, Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the basis of India’s foreign policy would be India’s national interests, not international amity per se or the cultivation of compatible domestic systems. In a speech in 1947, shortly after independence, he explained,
Whatever policy you may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that country.
Kautilya (and Machiavelli) could not have said it better.
Nehru and subsequent prime ministers, including his daughter, the formidable Indira Gandhi, proceeded to buttress India’s position as part of the global equilibrium by elevating their foreign policy into an expression of India’s superior moral authority. India presented the vindication of its own national interest as a uniquely enlightened enterprise—much as America had nearly two centuries earlier. And Nehru and later Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984, succeeded in establishing their fledgling nation as one of the principal elements of the post–World War II international order.
The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a “balancer” in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side—as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.
Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs. In 1947, he stated in a message to the New Republic,
We propose to avoid entanglement in any blocs or groups of Powers realizing that only thus can we serve not only [the] cause of India but of world peace. This policy sometimes leads partisans of one group to imagine that we are supporting the other group. Every nation places its own interests first in developing foreign policy. Fortunately India’s interests coincide with peaceful foreign policy and co-operation with all progressive nations. Inevitably India will be drawn closer to those countries which are friendly and cooperative to her.
In other words, India was neutral and above power politics, partly as a matter of principle in the interest of world peace, but equally on the grounds of national interest. During the Soviet ultimatums on Berlin between 1957 and 1962, two American administrations, especially John F. Kennedy’s, had sought Indian support on behalf of an isolated city seeking to maintain its free status. But India took the position that any attempt to impose on it the norms of a Cold War bloc would deprive it of its freedom of action and therefore of its bargaining position. Short-term moral neutrality would be the means toward long-term moral influence. As Nehru told his aides,
It would have been absurd and impolitic for the Indian delegation to avoid the Soviet bloc for fear of irritating the Americans. A time may come when we may say clearly and definitely to the Americans or others that if their attitude continues to be unfriendly we shall necessarily seek friends elsewhere.
The essence of this strategy was that it allowed India to draw support from both Cold War camps—securing the military aid and diplomatic cooperation of the Soviet bloc, even while courting American development assistance and the moral support of the U.S. intellectual establishment. However irritating to Cold War America, it was a wise course for an emerging nation. With a then-nascent military establishment and underdeveloped economy, India would have been a respected but secondary ally. As a free agent, it could exercise a much-wider-reaching influence.
In pursuit of such a role, India set out to build a bloc of like-minded states—in effect, an alignment of the nonaligned. As Nehru told the delegates of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,
Are we, the countries of Asia and Africa, devoid of any positive position except being pro-communist or anti-communist? Has it come to this, that the leaders of thought who have given religions and all kinds of things to the world have to tag on to this kind of group or that and be hangers-on of this party or the other carrying out their wishes and occasionally giving an idea? It is most degrading and humiliating to any self-respecting people or nation. It is an intolerable thought to me that the great countries of Asia and Africa should come out of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or humiliate themselves in this way.
The ultimate rationale for India’s rejection of what it described as the power politics of the Cold War was that it saw no national interest in the disputes at issue. For the sake of disputes along the dividing lines in Europe, India would not challenge the Soviet Union only a few hundred miles away, which it wished to give no incentive to join up with Pakistan. Nor would it risk Muslim hostility on behalf of Middle East controversies. India refrained from judgment of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and North Vietnam’s subversion of South Vietnam. India’s leaders were determined not to isolate themselves from what they identified as the progressive trends in the developing world or risk the hostility of the Soviet superpower.
Nevertheless, India found itself involved in a war with China in 1962 and four wars with Pakistan (one of which, in 1971, was carried out under the protection of a freshly signed Soviet defense treaty and ended with the division of India’s principal adversary into two separate states, Pakistan and Bangladesh—greatly improving India’s overall strategic position).
In quest of a leading role among the nonaligned, India was adhering to a concept of international order compatible with the inherited one on both the global and regional level. Its formal articulation was classically Westphalian and congruent with historical European analyses of the balance of power. Nehru defined India’s approach in terms of “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Though given the name of an Indian philosophical concept, Pancha Shila (Five Principles of Coexistence), these were in effect a more high-minded recapitulation of the Westphalian model for a multipolar order of sovereign states:
(1) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,
(2) mutual non-aggression,
(3) mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,
(4) equality and mutual benefit, and
(5) peaceful co-existence.
India’s advocacy of abstract principles of world order was accompanied by a doctrine for Indian security on the regional level. Just as the early American leaders developed in the Monroe Doctrine a concept for America’s special role in the Western Hemisphere, so India has established in practice a special position in the Indian Ocean region between the East Indies and the Horn of Africa. Like Britain with respect to Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India strives to prevent the emergence of a dominant power in this vast portion of the globe. Just as early American leaders did not seek the approval of the countries of the Western Hemisphere with respect to the Monroe Doctrine, so India in the region of its special strategic interests conducts its policy on the basis of its own definition of a South Asian order. And while American and Indian views often clashed on the conduct of the Cold War, they have, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, been largely parallel for the Indian Ocean region and its peripheries.
With the end of the Cold War, India was freed from many conflicting pressures and some of its socialist infatuations. It engaged in economic reform, triggered by a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 and assisted by an IMF program. Indian companies now lead some of the world’s major industries. This new direction is reflected in India’s diplomatic posture, with new partnerships globally and in particular throughout Africa and Asia and with a heightened regard around the world for India’s role in multilateral economic and financial institutions. In addition to its growing economic and diplomatic influence, India has considerably enhanced its military power, including its navy and stockpile of nuclear weapons. And in a few decades, it will surpass China as Asia’s most populous country.
India’s role in world order is complicated by structural factors related to its founding. Among the most complex will be its relations with its closest neighbors, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and China. Their ambivalent ties and antagonisms reflect a legacy of a millennium of competing invasions and migrations into the subcontinent, of Britain’s forays on the fringes of its Indian realm, and of the rapid end of British colonial rule in the immediate aftermath of World War II. No successor state has accepted the boundaries of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in full. Treated as provisional by one party or another, the disputed borders have ever since been the cause of sporadic communal violence, military clashes, and terrorist infiltration.
The borders with Pakistan, which roughly traced the concentrations of Islam on the subcontinent, cut across ethnic boundaries. They brought into being a state based on the Muslim religion in two noncontiguous parts of what had been British India divided by thousands of miles of Indian territory, setting the stage for multiple subsequent wars. Borders with Afghanistan and China were proclaimed based on lines drawn by nineteenth-century British colonial administrators, later disclaimed by the opposite parties and to this day disputed. India and Pakistan have each invested heavily in a nuclear weapons arsenal and regional military postures. Pakistan also tolerates, when it does not abet, violent extremism, including terrorism in Afghanistan and in India itself.
A particular complicating factor will be India’s relations with the larger Muslim world, of which it forms an integral part. India is often classified as an East Asian or South Asian country. But it has deeper historical links with the Middle East and a larger Muslim population than Pakistan itself, indeed than any Muslim country except Indonesia. India has thus far been able to wall itself off from the harshest currents of political turmoil and sectarian violence, partly through enlightened treatment of its minorities and a fostering of common Indian domestic principles—including democracy and nationalism—transcending communal differences. Yet this outcome is not foreordained, and maintaining it will require concerted efforts. A further radicalization of the Arab world or heightened civil conflict in Pakistan could expose India to significant internal pressures.
Today India pursues a foreign policy in many ways similar to the quest of the former British Raj as it seeks to base a regional order on a balance of power in an arc stretching halfway across the world, from the Middle East to Singapore, and then north to Afghanistan. Its relations with China, Japan, and Southeast Asia follow a pattern akin to the nineteenth-century European equilibrium. Like China, it does not hesitate to use distant “barbarians” like the United States to help achieve its regional aims—though in describing their policies, both countries would use more elegant terms. In the administration of George W. Bush, a strategic coordination between India and America on a global scale was occasionally discussed. It remained confined to the South Asia region because India’s traditional nonalignment stood in the way of a global arrangement and because neither country was willing to adopt confrontation with China as a permanent principle of national policy.
Like the nineteenth-century British who were driven to deepen their global involvement to protect strategic routes to India, over the course of the twenty-first century India has felt obliged to play a growing strategic role in Asia and the Muslim world to prevent these regions’ domination by countries or ideologies it considers hostile. In pursuing this course, India has had natural ties to the countries of the English-speaking “Anglosphere.” Yet it will likely continue to honor the legacy of Nehru by preserving freedom of maneuver in its Asian and Middle Eastern relations and in its policies toward key autocratic countries, access to whose resources India will require to maintain its expansive economic plans. These priorities will create their own imperatives transcending historical attitudes. With the reconfiguration of the American position in the Middle East, the various regional countries will seek new partners to buttress their positions and to develop some kind of regional order. And India’s own strategic analysis will not permit a vacuum in Afghanistan or the hegemony in Asia of another power.
Under a Hindu nationalist-led government elected by decisive margins in May 2014 on a platform of reform and economic growth, India can be expected to pursue its traditional foreign policy goals with added vigor. With a firm mandate and charismatic leadership, the administration of Narendra Modi may consider itself in a position to chart new directions on historic issues like the conflict with Pakistan or the relationship with China. With India, Japan, and China all led by strong and strategically oriented administrations, the scope both for intensified rivalries and for potential bold resolutions will expand.
In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.
WHAT IS AN ASIAN REGIONAL ORDER?
The historical European order had been self-contained. England was, until the early twentieth century, able to preserve the balance through its insular position and naval supremacy. Occasionally, European powers enlisted outside countries to strengthen their positions temporarily—for example, France courting the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century or Britain’s early-twentieth-century alliance with Japan—but non-Western powers, other than occasional surges from the Middle East or North Africa, had few interests in Europe and were not called on to intervene in European conflicts.
By contrast, the contemporary Asian order includes outside powers as an integral feature: the United States, whose role as an Asia-Pacific power was explicitly affirmed in joint statements by U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao in January 2011, and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June 2013; and Russia, geographically an Asian power and participant in Asian groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even if over three-quarters of its population lives in the European portion of Russian territory.
The United States in modern times has occasionally been invited to act as a balancer of power. In the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, it mediated the war between Russia and Japan; in World War II, it defeated Japan’s quest for Asian hegemony. The United States played a comparable Asian role during the Cold War when it sought to balance the Soviet Union through a network of alliances stretching from Pakistan to the Philippines.
The evolving Asian structure will have to take into account a plethora of states not dealt with in the preceding pages. Indonesia, anchoring Southeast Asia while affirming an Islamic orientation, plays an increasingly influential role and has thus far managed a delicate balancing act between China, the United States, and the Muslim world. With Japan, Russia, and China as neighbors, the Republic of Korea has achieved a vibrant democracy bolstered by a globally competitive economy, including leadership in strategic industries such as telecommunications and shipbuilding. Many Asian countries—including China—view North Korea’s policies as destabilizing but regard a collapse of North Korea as a greater danger. South Korea on its part will have to deal with increasing domestic pressures for unification.
In the face of Asia’s vast scale and the scope of its diversity, its nations have fashioned a dazzling array of multilateral groupings and bilateral mechanisms. In contrast to the European Union, NATO, and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, these institutions deal with security and economic issues on a case-by-case basis, not as an expression of formal rules of regional order. Some of the key groupings include the United States, and some, including economic ones, are Asian only, of which the most elaborated and significant is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The core principle is to welcome those nations most directly involved with the issues at hand.
But does all this amount to an Asian system of order? In Europe’s equilibrium, the interests of the main parties were comparable, if not congruent. A balance of power could be developed not only in practice—as is inevitable in the absence of hegemony—but as a system of legitimacy that facilitated decisions and moderated policies. Such a congruence does not exist in Asia, as is shown by the priorities the major countries have assigned to themselves. While India appears mostly concerned with China as a peer competitor, in large measure a legacy of the 1962 border war, China sees its peer rivals in Japan and the United States. India has devoted fewer military resources to China than to Pakistan, which, if not a peer competitor, has been a strategic preoccupation for New Delhi.
The amorphous nature of Asian groupings is partly because geography has dictated a sharp dividing line between East Asia and South Asia throughout history. Cultural, philosophical, and religious influences have transcended the geographic dividing lines, and Hindu and Confucian concepts of governance have coexisted in Southeast Asia. But the mountain and jungle barriers were too impenetrable to permit military interaction between the great empires of East Asia and South Asia until the twentieth century. The Mongols and their successors entered the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia, not through the Himalayan high passes, and they failed to reach the southern parts of India. The various regions of Asia have geopolitically and historically pursued distinct courses.
The regional orders constructed during these periods included none based on Westphalian premises. Where the European order embraced an equilibrium of territorially defined “sovereign states” recognizing each other’s legal equality, traditional Asian political powers operated by more ambiguous criteria. Until well into the modern era, an “inner Asian” world influenced by the Mongol Empire, Russia, and Islam coexisted with a Chinese imperial tribute system; the latter reached outward to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, which entertained China’s claims of universality even as they practiced a form of statecraft deeply influenced by Hindu principles received from India that posited a form of divinity for monarchs.
Now these legacies are meeting, and there is far from a consensus among the various countries about the meaning of the journey they have taken or its lessons for twenty-first-century world order. Under contemporary conditions, essentially two balances of power are emerging: one in South Asia, the other in East Asia. Neither possesses the characteristic integral to the European balance of power: a balancer, a country capable of establishing an equilibrium by shifting its weight to the weaker side. The United States (after its withdrawal from Afghanistan) has refrained from treating the contemporary internal South Asian balance primarily as a military problem. But it will have to be active in the diplomacy over reestablishing a regional order lest a vacuum is created, which would inevitably draw all surrounding countries into a regional confrontation.