The decline of internationalism

We are confronted by a curious paradox of our time. The world is more densely interconnected, our destinies as countries and peoples are more intertwined and the challenges we confront cut across regional and national boundaries on a scale unprecedented in human history. The nation-state endures and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. However, the concept of national sovereignty, which is integral to the concept of a nation-state, is increasingly conditioned, indeed constrained, by the reality that the line between domestic and external is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Our destinies are impacted by developments far from our shores as was painfully evident during the global financial and economic crisis of 2007-08. A pandemic may break out in a remote corner of Africa but may spread to ravage distant parts of the globe. Climate Change is a global phenomenon but impacts on each country locally. Disasters, whether natural or man-made, frequently range across national borders. National governance structures are no longer sufficient to deal with their consequences.

The interconnectedness of the globe through the wonders of digital technology, the instantaneousness of communication and the expanding reach and influence of social media beyond the control of states, have vastly expanded the scale of unregulated domains. By their very nature they are not amenable to national control and regulation or only partially so. The efficacy of national governance has been shrinking thanks to the impact of accelerated technological change and the irreversible globalisation of our economies. And yet, international institutions and processes to enable the governance of the newer and expanding cross-national domains not only lag behind but their very rationale is under attack. There is something of a worldwide backlash against globalisation and a pervasive yearning for a past with familiar political, social and cultural anchors. 

This reassertion is quixotic because the drivers of cross-border challenges are technological and economic, and are now so deeply embedded in our lives as individuals and communities that they cannot be unravelled. It is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The ecological, economic and strategic challenges of the new millennium can only be tackled through governance at the international scale. And that demands a spirit of internationalism which can temper and transcend the nationalist urges, which, if unchecked, may threaten human survival itself.

Internationalism is not a new concept. It has been around for a long time but in different incarnations. 

Illustration: Binay Sinha

Liberal internationalism of the 19th century was confined to a handful of imperial states but excluded colonised and weak countries to which a different standard was applied. This could hardly survive in the post World War II world of independent, sovereign and politically equal states. The radical and revolutionary internationalism associated with socialist states lost steam with the demise of the Soviet Union and China’s turn to state capitalism and market economics. The Non-Aligned Movement mostly evaporated after the end of the Cold War and developing country solidarity began to be seen as an idealistic and unrealistic construct. And post World War II, internationalism underpinned by the US power is now in decline as the relative predominance of the US itself diminishes and multiple centres of power emerge to challenge the existing geopolitical order. We are confronted with an elemental dilemma: Precisely at a time in the history of mankind when we need much stronger, inclusive and effective international institutions and processes to deal with a completely new set of challenges, the balance between nationalism and internationalism has tilted heavily in the nationalist direction. 

What kind of internationalism will be relevant to our times?

We must begin by acknowledging that the backlash that we are witnessing to globalisation stems from the undeniable fact that the pace of technological advancement has accelerated beyond the capacity of the human psyche and social mores to adapt. The search for familiar anchors is understandable. However, “globalisation is a bell that cannot be unrung”.  We are no longer in a world where countries can cocoon themselves and survive; nor can the pursuit of perceived domestic interests prevail over external engagement. In fact, external engagement is indispensable to achieving domestic ends since the salience of issues cutting across national and regional borders and with an intrinsically global dimension has increased phenomenally. The yearning for national control, the harking back to an imagined historical, social and cultural identity such as we have seen in the Brexit vote in the UK and the elections in the US will inevitably end in frustrated expectations. For the West globalisation was embraced as long as it reinforced Western ascendancy but it became threatening when it spawned other centres of political and economic power. Making America great again in the same mould as in the post World War II era is no longer possible. Nor is the China Dream as articulated by Xi Jinping, possible because that is not the logical destination of the globalisation of the Chinese economy. It is a regression to a past glory which lingers in the Chinese psyche but is unattainable in a vastly different geopolitical terrain. It is only a new internationalism which enables the benefits of globalisation to be shared equitably, mitigates its negative fallout and adjusts existing governance regimes as well as emerging ones, to accommodate all stakeholders, which could bring relative peace and prosperity. Multilateral institutions and processes must no longer be the platform for a contest of competing nationalisms but should reflect the spirit of internationalism without which multilateralism is condemned to deliver least common denominator results. 

Is there a role for India in nudging the world towards this new internationalism and help shape a new world order aligned with the challenges we confront as humanity? Through the ages, India has developed a civilisation whose attributes are what that new order requires: The innate syncretism of its accommodative and self-confident culture, its easy embrace of vast diversity and plurality with an underlying spiritual and cultural unity and a  deep conviction that to achieve greatness a nation must stand for something more than itself.

Nationalism without internationalism is the road to a dead end.

The writer is a former Foreign Secretary and is currently Senior Fellow at CPR