Dr N Janardhan :
FROM 19th-20th century geo-strategist Alfred Mahan to contemporary analyst Robert Kaplan – both Americans – and many others in between, scholars have emphasised that the Indian Ocean is where the global struggles will unfold in the 21st century.
As a result, while the need for institutionalised cooperation among the countries in the waters spanning three continents has been repeatedly stressed, the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation, however, remained on the margins since its formation in 1997. Much of the blame lies in the lack of political will to believe that the Indian Ocean littoral countries can function as a community.
Amid the recent and evident shift of economic power centre from West to East, and global events pointing to traditional power structures being challenged, a serious multi-layered bid is underway to revitalise the grouping of 20 countries, extending from Mozambique to Iran, Madagascar to Singapore, and Thailand to the United Arab Emirates (and Oman and Yemen too), six dialogue partners (who are major powers) and two observers.
Among the first moves has been simplifying and renaming the grouping as the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) during a ministerial meeting in Australia in late 2013. Second, Track II and Track 1.5 channels are being encouraged to help inter-governmental processes achieve the IORA’s policy goals better.
Third and more importantly, there has been growing debate about evolving new mechanisms to shift the focus of the IORA from cooperation on economic issues to addressing security challenges emerging from four Ts – turbulence, turmoil, tension and transition.
Thus, in the push to bring the geo-economic and geo-political concerns on the same page, the effort is to encourage the growth of the Indian Ocean region countries from merely cooperating at the sub-regional level to graduating to a broader regional level.
The renewed efforts to revitalise the IORA emanates from the strategic foreign policy reorientation of the United States. Under President Barack Obama, Washington is refashioning itself less as a land power and more as an ‘offshore power’ using air and naval power. Apart from budgetary constraints rooted in economic decline, which is partly a fallout of the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures, the United States is now relying less on West Asia’s energy than before. This means that Washington may not feel the need to protect energy-supplying sea-lanes with the same intensity as it did before.
It also means that Washington will not seek to solve all the problems of the world as it did in the past. Instead, while inevitably remaining a major power for a reasonably long period of time, it will more likely play the role of ‘lead facilitator’ by attempting to involve ‘middle powers’ in crisis management and conflict resolution.
While the world is unipolar at present, some speculate that it would become bipolar, with the United States and China being competitors. There is also a third and multipolar alternative involving the middle powers, leaving out the United States and China. All the three models, however, are inherently contradictory.
As the events in West Asia have shown, there is no guarantee of ‘absolute security’ even when a ‘superpower’ is the security guarantor. The need for a different model is more pressing today than ever before – a shift towards nurturing a community of shared destiny, prosperity, peace and stability. Hence the need and call for collective ownership and security of the Indian Ocean region, where the emphasis would be on people-centric cooperation, not power-centric competition and confrontation.
Interestingly, the goings-on in West Asia, especially the Gulf, gel well with the IORA agenda. As a result of the US fatigue about the region and region’s fatigue about the United States, the overwhelming preference is for more internationalisation of West Asia and the Gulf.
Since most of the Indian Ocean cooperation discourse took place in the midst of Western domination of regional and world political-security dynamics, West Asia and the IORA can now feel liberated to constructively consider looking beyond economic cooperation and evolving an alternate collective security mechanism.
In this and in the context of the IORA region becoming the hub of both production and consumption of energy resources, it is imperative that the buyers and sellers add security to their economic portfolio.
Maritime security in a “maritime era” is an important consideration given that the Indian Ocean is home to several chokepoints like the Straits of Hormuz, Straits of Malacca, Lombok and the Sunda Straits, which could disrupt energy flows and trade. This ocean carries half the world’s container ships, one-third of the bulk cargo traffic and two-thirds of the world’s oil shipments.
The fact that the shift in the role of providing security in the region will not be as smooth a transition as one we witnessed between the Anglo-Saxon powers in late 1960s and early 1970s, makes the task of cooperation among Indian Ocean countries both exciting and challenging in the decades ahead.
Only a restructured and revitalised IORA can face the challenge of traditional and non-traditional threats. This mandates overcoming political differences through multilateral confidence-building measures. And, since the prospect of improving economic prosperity amid declining security is a tough proposition, cooperation is also now more plausible than ever before.
(Dr N. Janardhan is a UAE-based political analyst and honorary fellow of the University of Exeter)
