The unfounded optimism of peace

Peace-building and peace-making are interchangeably used when it comes to the political discourse of international diplomacy. However, in practice, both terms connote varying meanings in that the former is about a long-term process towards achieving objective peace while the latter is more about building alliances to do away with immediate threats perceived by the peace-making parties.

If peace is, at all, attainable in an uneven international political milieu, it must be founded on compromises, surrendering some degree of sovereignty and accommodating the acrimony and a quid pro quo from the other party.

The much-avowed conception of international diplomacy as an instrument of the peace process is quite subjective in nature. It is subjective because it takes place in a global system of political fragmentation and economic regimentation, which is intrinsically designed to promote wars and conflicts. International diplomacy is an art that attempts to piece together key national policy priorities and weave them in a fabric of internationalism to create interdependence among nations. This interdependence, at times, helps reduce the intensity of conflicts between nation-states who perceive that collaboration will accrue more benefits than antagonism.

For instance, when Donald Trump was elected as the president of the US, some leading political commentators were quick to pronounce the beginning of a new Sino-American cold war. Several think-tanks from across the globe were of the view that the US will block Chinese access in South China Sea, forcing China to rely on Western routes for its international trade. However, this did not happen as China and the US are in a relationship of interdependence defined by their economic interests – wider than the popular belief of an ideological divide.

State capitalism in China thrives because it has the world’s largest labour force and also benefits from the central economic planning and willingness of transnational corporations to invest in the country. Transnational companies consider China to be the most lucrative place for high profitability. China also provides billions of US dollars for Americans as credit facility to invest in imperial wars across the world. The brokers of international diplomacy and the economy, including the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, have been able to promote this economic interdependence more than the ideological difference between China and the West.

However, this economic logic did not work in the case of a fraying EU where the economic interdependence led to fragmentation. In a weaning EU, the weaker states were considered a burden and were hence left to their own devices in a period of crisis. Countries like Spain and Greece were on the verge of bankruptcy when the EU’s economic gurus were busy bailing out financial institutions at the cost of the miseries of people. In this sense, the optimism of China’s rise as the second largest economy is untenable because it is driven by the global economic giants who can move away and leave China in despair when they see diminishing returns on their investments. The US and China are making peace to avoid mutually-assured economic destruction. But this peace is ephemeral and can turn into chaos with overproduction that has started to hurt the global economy.

With Brexit being at the pinnacle of a new trend of regional fragmentation, an EU type South East Asian bloc in a neoliberal global economic order seems to be a shaky prognosis. For the Chinese, this is not an easy proposition given the political role of the Indian and the Japanese to curtail Chinese supremacy through non-regional alliances. The shifting of power from the North to the South is also a myth founded on the Chinese and Indian economic growth theory, which is driven more by the external capital rather than the indigenous capacity to sustain such growth.

Economic protectionism was vital for growth. But when China started to open up, the pace of real growth gradually went down with an inflated volume of production and shrinking markets to realise the proceeds. The visible contradiction between the political ideology of central planning in a state capitalist China and its adoption of neoliberal economic ideology is going to develop an irreconcilable crisis in China.

With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, the optimism of a new global order emerged with the enactment of doctrine of the new world order or the Washington Consensus that claimed to redefine the fundamental principles of political and economic engagement. The triumphant overtures of this doctrine to establish a global neoliberal order were dislodged soon with the rise of balkanisation and the emergence of introvert ideologies in Europe.

Amid the euphoria of capitalistic triumphalism over socialism, the decade of the 1990s was one of the most challenging times for the proponents of the free market economy. The unmet promises of triumphant capitalism to bring about prosperity, equality and an improved quality of life in East Europe and the new states of Central Asia gave birth to violent political agitations. The peace-building process in East Europe failed because the global capitalism turned a deaf ear towards these conflicts, which were considered to be the birth pangs of a new economic order. The pangs were prolonged without giving birth to a new economic system and a series of crises hit Eastern European nations that resulted in political turmoil, including ethnic cleansing.

Some of these states of the former Stalinist bloc strived to make peace with the capitalist West, but they never felt welcomed. Without making peace with these Eastern European nations, the Western powers imposed a peace-building process which culminated in the ethnic cleansing in the Balkan region. A heavy price of this never-ending transition was paid by the ordinary citizens whose dreams of promised freedom and democracy were shattered.

This uneven relationship between Eastern and Western Europe continues till today in that the blame of recent crisis in the EU was squarely put on the weaker economies of Eastern Europe. The weaker economies had no choice but to surrender their political and economic order of social security and public welfare to make peace with neoliberalism.

During the era of the cold war, weaker nations had a choice to make between two equally powerful economic and political blocs with some level of freedom to bargain a political rapprochement. Decades of rivalry between super powers were restrained by the fear of nuclear war of mutually assured destruction and, hence, an era of detente and entente was started.

When the big powers were ready to make political compromises to avoid the perceived larger threat of mutual destruction, smaller and weaker states could assert their role to strengthen one or the other bloc. It was a sine qua non for the smaller states to represent themselves as the members of a larger bloc as a survival strategy as well as a political tactic to gain economic and political concessions.

Our political era is characterised by an unfounded optimism of a rising Asia. But it is not backed by any sound economic logic. The mantra of CPEC as a game-changer has been overstated by the political and economic beneficiaries. But it is more of a Chinese choice than the dream of a common Pakistani. The weaker section will have no choice other than to make peace with the powerful one.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com