Shashi Tharoor - THE NEW WORLD DISORDER AND THE INDIAN IMPERATIVE

ALSO BY SHASHI THAROOR

NON-FICTION

The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism

The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India Why I Am a Hindu

An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in Our Time

India: the Future is Now (ed.)

Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century

Shadows Across the Playing Field: 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket (with Shahryar Khan) India (with Ferrante Ferranti)

The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century Bookless in Baghdad

Nehru: The Invention of India

Kerala: Gods Own Country (with M. F. Husain)

India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond Reasons of State

FICTION

Riot

The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories

Show Business

The Great Indian Novel

ALSO BY SAMIR SARAN

NON-FICTION

Pax Sinica: Implications for the Indian Dawn (with Akhil Deo) Financing Green Transitions (ed.)

The Future of Work in India: Inclusion, Growth and Transformation (with Terri Chapman, Rakesh Sinha, Suchi Kedia, and Sriram Gutta)

The Road to Universal Health Coverage (with Anjali Nayyar, Dhruv Pahwa, and Oommen C. Kurian)

The New India-US Partnership in the Indo-Pacific: Peace, Prosperity and Security (with Abhijit Singh, Aparna Pande, Sunjoy Joshi, and Walter Lohman)

Our Common Digital Future: The Global Conference on Cyberspace Journal, 2017 (ed.)

Prospects for EUIndia Security Cooperation (with Eva Pejsova, Gareth Price, Kanchi Gupta, and John-Joseph Wilkins)

Indias Climate Change Identity: Between Reality and Perception (with Aled Jones)

Re-imagining the Indus: Mapping Media Reportage in India and Pakistan (with Hans Rasmussen Theting)

BRIC in the World Order: Perspectives from Brazil, China, India and Russia (with Nandan Unnikrishnan)

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

An independent publishing firm

promoted by Rupa Publications India

First published in India in 2020

by Aleph Book Company

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New Delhi 110 002

Copyright Shashi Tharoor and Samir Saran 2020

All rights reserved.

The authors have asserted their moral rights.

Cover image Jacek Fulawka/Shutterstock

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ISBN: 978-81-942337-3-2

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

To my grandson, Eliseo Kailash
May he grow up in a better world.

Shashi Tharoor

To two individuals who inspire memy dear mother, Sunita, who ensured that her children grew up among books, and her passion to learn became theirs; and to Katharina, my dear wife, with whom I look forward to many years of love, travel, and discovery.

Samir Saran

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

3 May 2016: Donald Trump is nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Campaigns to Make America Great Again. Promises withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); opposition to the Paris Climate Change Agreement; to build a wall on the border with Mexico; and withdrawal of American troops in the Middle East. Donald Trump is elected president on 8 November 2016.

23 June 2016: The United Kingdom holds a referendum on withdrawal from the European Union (EU). 51.9 per cent of those voting support the decision to leave the EU.

14 May 2017: China hosts the Belt and Road Forum (BRF). President Xi Jinping presides over a gathering of thirty heads of state as they sign onto the most ambitious global connectivity initiative in history. Two months earlier, Chinas parliament approved the removal of the two-term limit on the presidency, in effect allowing Xi Jinping to remain in power for life.

17 November 2018: The yellow vest movement erupts in Francewith widespread agitation against austerity, inequality and business as usual politics. Just two months earlier, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a landmark speech calling for a more global French diplomacy.

10 May 2018: Mahathir Mohamad assumes office as Malaysian prime ministerafter campaigning on a strident anti-China platform. Renegotiates a Belt And Road Initiative (BRI) project deal with China in April 2019.

26 May 2019: Populist, far-right and Eurosceptic parties in Europe win a quarter of all seats in the European Parliamentary electionstheir best ever performance.

INTRODUCTION

As we approach the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that the international liberal order is facing a moment of crisis. The political, economic and security fundamentals that underpinned it are invalid, with no consensus on others. Globalization is now being confronted by economic nationalism. Attempts are being made to close open borders. Strongmen politicians are leveraging multiple grievancesreal and perceivedto legitimize populist rule. And international norms and institutions appear less relevant to managing the global commons. There is a sense that the global order is once again becoming more Westphalianthat the gains of interdependence are being undone. There is a visible reassertion of sovereigntyfrom democracies and otherwise. And, above all, there is an uncertainty about what this century has in store for our societies.

Within the punditry that seeks to understand why the world is as it is today, the overwhelming sentiment is that popular and populist leaders have undermined what was a well-meaning and well-functioning international order. Our book seeks to engage with and perhaps correct this narrative. From our perspective, the world has fundamentally been defined by the spirit of Darwinism: the survival of the fittest. The processes of global governance merely legitimized what was otherwise coercive state diplomacy. It provided a means to amass and maintain power and wealth without the use of military force. As our book will show, the crisis of global governance is, in many ways, a comeuppance for the custodians of the post-1945 world order. The story of decline does not begin with populist leaders trampling on an existing world orderalthough they certainly are. These leaders are the product of the contradictions that have always defined the liberal order.