The Asian renaissance
CHITRAPU UDAY BHASKAR
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Examines the ascent of Asia by focussing on its three main powers — China, India and Japan
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ASIAN JUGGERNAUT: The Rise of China, India and Japan: Brahma Chellaney; HarperCollins India; 1A, Hamilton House, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 395.
The early 21st century has seen the Asian juggernaut on the move and the three principal powers — Japan, China and India — have been the focus of critical attention and informed comment over the last few years. However, most of this scrutiny has been focussed on individual nations or on one set of bilateral relations and the book under review breaks fresh ground in examining all the three Asian entities together.
Chellaney, a well-known media commentator and strategic affairs expert has produced a very readable and well-researched book that offers an informative and analytical backdrop to the prevailing international strategic environment and the manner in which the three principal Asian powers are responding to the challenges and opportunities that this century represents.
As the author points out at the outset, "Never before in history have there been a strong China, a strong India and a strong Japan at the same time... ensuring that the Japan-China and China-India competition does not slide into strategic conflict remains a key challenge."
Asia it merits recall accounted for up to 60 per cent of global prosperity and wealth in 1820 but the centre of gravity inexorably shifted to Europe and North America over the last two centuries through a tenacious combination of technological perspicacity and the distinctive strategic culture of the Occident (West).
Asia different
The central premise of the book is that Asia is very different from Europe and does not have the necessary institutional arrangements to address the baggage of historical infirmities and experiences, as also the new challenges that are emerging as part of the process of globalisation. The prescriptive part of the book seeks to examine "how Asia can build cooperative approaches to tackle security, energy, territorial, environmental, developmental and history issues." In five fairly comprehensive chapters of about 50 pages each, the book disaggregates the Asian juggernaut into the Asian renaissance, why Asia and Europe are dissimilar, the geopolitics of Asian energy, equations in the strategic triangle and how to avert strategic conflict in Asia. A very useful set of 11 appendices complements the main body and includes major documents and agreements from 1954 to 2005 relevant to the triangle that the juggernaut represents.
Complexities
The burden of history apart, the Asian strategic landscape is leavened with multiple complexities and myriad contradictions and in all fairness to the author, he is able to distil this tangled domain into easily discernible strands. Asia's contestation wherein the principal powers seek to assuage their anxieties even while realising their abiding aspirations and ambitions is further compounded by certain specificities - and these include, inter alia, the North Korean imbroglio, the unresolved Taiwan issue and the intractable Kashmir cum terrorism determinant. Japan, China and India are differently inhibited by these specific challenges and in each case, the footprint, presence and strategic interests of the U.S. loom large. Furthermore, Russia with its Eurasian flavour has its own relevance in this strategic medley and in the post- 9/11 global situation, the anxiety about religious radicalism as manifest in jihadi terrorism and the linkages with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation networks (a la A.Q. Khan) and deviant regimes exacerbates the entire strategic spectrum.
Critique
The book touches upon almost all these issues and while the range covered is commendable, the format tends to be more essayistic and on occasion tautological. Extensive narrative and descriptive sections with the author's own assertions could have been more rigorously anchored through more detailed analysis. Here I believe the editor has a special responsibility to bear in the flow of the text. For instance, is it enough to assert that "Asia has too many men who cannot find wives and who thus could fan jingoistic nationalism... " without exploring inequity in gender ratios with subterranean nationalism? Or for that matter, while a whole page is devoted to China's water problems, India is summarily reduced to one line. On occasion citations are not provided and important quantitative comparisons are glossed over with a broad brush. These are the kind of wrinkles and gaps that more rigorous editing could have redressed. I must confess that I was intrigued with the use of the word `homogeny' (in relation to hegemony) as opposed to homogeneity. The former is more in the domain of medicine and biology and this is an interesting graft to international relations and the social sciences domain but I daresay the editors had good reason to retain this choice of the author.
Some issues that may have merited greater analytical treatment are the role of strategic culture in the 21st century, the linkages between territoriality and perceptions of sovereignty with specific reference to Europe and Asia, and the emergence of the post-modern state in the larger trajectory of the evolution of the nation-state as an entity. The Asian juggernaut is a rich mine to explore these issues. Hopefully Chellaney will revisit his chosen theme in the years ahead even as Japan, China and India move to more robust levels of bilateral and hopefully trilateral interaction in the years ahead. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation that holds the copyright is to be commended for encouraging such volumes.
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