• FACE-TO-FACE
Marc Saxer, director, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Office for Regional Cooperation in Asia is currently in Nepal. Saxer, a German political analyst and strategist based in Bangkok, has spent more than a decade in Asia supporting democracy and social justice. His work focuses on studying how geopolitical tensions and geoeconomic disruptions shift the opportunity structures for development models, and lay the foundations for a new world order. His book 'Transformative Realism: How to overcome the systemic crisis' was published in 2022. Ram Kumar Kamat of The Himalayan Times caught up with Saxer and discussed geopolitical issues and its impact on the Asia pacific region. Excerpts:
How has the war in Ukraine impacted Germany and Europe? What are the implications of Germany's Zeitenwende?
Zeitenvende means turning point in history. From a German perspective, it truly is a turning point in history. It is the end of 30 years period of peace and prosperity achieved after the end of the Cold War. Germany was reunified in 1990 as one of the main outcomes of the end of the Cold War and this was also a period starting with the charter of Paris where we constructed the European security order which was based on the promise that territorial integrity and sovereignty or borders could not be changed unilaterally and definitely not by military force.
This security order has ended with the Russian invasion. This war would go on for some time. This war has caused sufferings and destruction within Ukraine and has also sent economic and technical shock waves around the world. We have seen energy shock, rising inflation, food shortages, and grain shortages around the world.
In the medium and long term, we are going to see the rebuilding of European territorial defence capabilities, especially in Germany, because we have to deal with the possibility of a land war.
What are the global implications of war in Ukraine, particularly across Asia, and how should the world deal with them?
There is a prospect of intensifying competition between the US and China so the geopolitical logic here is that for many in the US stopping Russia is about sending a signal to China that there is a high cost of invasion and at the same time it does push Russia into China's arms so the war has immediate political implications on the global level. I would say the US and China look at Ukraine but think about Taiwan.
How will Asian countries deal with the two big rivals - US and China - in the coming decades?
I think the strategic competition over hegemony between the US and China is going to stay with us for at least one generation. The real question is: will this go into a hot war scenario or cold war scenario or can it be managed? And this is what everyone in Asia is really concerned about. The hot war scenario most likely will play out around the straits of Taiwan. Why? If we look at situation from the perspective of Beijing, China does feel encircled by the US and its allies especially because of the capability of the US and its allies to blockade and cut off China supply lines and export routes. For the last 15 years, China has been trying to break out of this encirclement. Westward is the belt and road initiative with very important lanes in Pakistan and Myanmar which allow China to bypass the Strait of Malacca. But also, in your neighbourhood there are risks of clashes with India both in the Himalayas as well as Sikkim. Eastward, China tries to push out rival powers out of the South China Sea by militarising the area. Therefore, China is in conflict with the Asian maritime states and trying to push into the strategic depth of the west pacific. This is where Japan's Senkaku island, the Philippines and Taiwan figure. If you look from the perspective of Washington, this is the first aggressive military peer power that is actually pushing towards Guam, Hawaii and the American West coast so there is a pearl harbour trauma. I think for the US, Taiwan is the line in the sand. This is very dangerous as it could escalate into a hot war between the two nuclear armed super powers and it could draw other powers into the conflict.
But let's assume cooler minds prevail and we can somehow either turn this into a cold war competition or somehow manage this conflict. I therefore think the theatre in which this cold war competition is going to be played out will be the economy and technology.
This will have long-lasting implications for all the other Asian states. If you think about the development model of many East Asian countries for the last 30 to 40 years, it was basically a triangle between cheap labour, catch-up industrialisation and export-led growth. The problem now with this geoeconomic competition is that all of these three parts of the triangle are under pressure.
The replacement of humans with machine allows industrialised countries to insource some of the products closer to home out of the danger zone. Export-led business is a problem because there is a lot of protectionist pressure which means that if you are my friend you can go into my market but if you are not, I will block you out. Catch-up industrialisation can only work if there is technology transfer and if counties are integrated in the global supply chain. I think if I were, Nepal, or Myanmar or Mongolia or Indonesia, I would worry how this geoeconomic reorganisation of Asian economies would impact my development model.
How can smaller countries like Nepal that want to remain neutral best protect their interests?
There is enormous pressure to take sides. This pressure is very difficult to resist because of interdependence.
If you look at for instance the chip war, countries are under pressure to decouple when it comes to high-tech semiconductors. When we look at countries that need a bailout in a sovereign debt crisis, we confront the question who is going to deliver this bailout.
Whether it will be the western dominated IMF or a Chinese dominated institution?
There are a lot of pressure points that are making it difficult for countries to remain neutral. At the same time, I can tell you with the very few exceptions, most Asian countries do not want to choose sides because they see that technological bifurcation, binaries in terms of ideologies, democracy versus autocracy and bipolar block building when it comes to trade and economics will, in the long run, impact their development opportunities negatively so they would like to stay out of it when it comes to hot war scenario as well as cold war scenario. Is this possible? Most countries are balancing and most countries are hedging and trying to somehow remain there. Different countries have different pressure points and this is what needs to be watched.
What role can Western democracies play in upholding the rules-based international order? And what lessons can we learn from the current crisis?
There is by and large, consensus on keeping the rule-based international order working that would benefit everyone. The questions I am being asked in the global south is whose rules because many rising powers of the global south are saying that they no longer accept the rulesbased order in the set-up of 1945.
They say the rules-based order has to be adapted to the global balance of power in the 21st century. We can build on a very broad consensus to keep the rules of the road because they are beneficial, but there needs to be a move to adapt the international rule-based order to balance power in the 21st century.
How does FES look into the new geopolitics in the region and its implications for the broader democratisation process?
Well, FES is a bridge builder. This is how we understand and want to play our roles accordingly. After 50 years of being in a strong and deep partnership with countries in the region, we are trying to bring to the table a better understanding of what the countries in the region want and how we can translate that into political conversations in Berlin and Brussels. We identify gaps and build bridges. You will see that within the geopolitical competition, the ability of western democracies to pressurise anti-democratic regimes will be not as strong as it was and countries have the ability to evade pressure by going to the other side.
It would be better to talk about the rules-based order instead of this binary rivalry between democracy and autocracies.
Since you have been writing and speaking on Transformative Realism – how relevant will that approach be when societies are trying to write their own script?
Well, I think this is very important when we talk about the connection between the external opportunity structure and the inner ability to adapt. Every country needs to think about how it manoeuvres, how it adapts its development model. Every country in the world is always shifting development path. If too many powerful actors come to the conclusion that this kind of shift is not in their benefit, they will resist and uphold the status quo. Transformative change making and transformative realism is looking inside the country and asking how do you actually organise politically such a momentous shift? My answer is that we have to look not only at the majority in the parliament - that is superficial - but the entire society. How do we organise alliances for change? If you do not look into the implications for society at large, you will end up in transactional games or zero-sum games and it will be more or less stagnant but that is a great danger if we have been looking at what we call the geoeconomic tsunami that is rolling and going to hit the countries in the region.
What are the chances of autocratic regimes coming together against USA and western democracies?
As far as the US and China are concerned, they would benefit from the bipolar world because that would automatically make them the leaders and the rule setters and benefactors of their part of the world. But for everyone else, we would be worse off. There is high opportunity cost to be paid if one becomes only part of one block. You will lose market and opportunity and you will have security threats etc. on the border and no one wants that.
The real question is can the rest of us resist the structural change towards bipolarity? And that goes also for the countries that you have mentioned. It is very obvious that there is a lot of friction within BRICS. Would India ever accept Chinese dominance in BRICS? The answer is no and the same question can be asked of Russia. For a great power like Russia, in the short run, it may not have any other option but accept to be a junior partner of China, but in the long run, it cannot be in Russia's interest.
Ukraine invasion is a case in point. Right now, Russia is on the back foot and it basically has to swallow the pill. But we just establish that history never ends. There will be a different situation in 10 or 20 years.
The idea that there will be a homogeneous anti-western group that will love each other and will act as natural partners, will not happen.
The same rule also applies to the West. In the West, there is a lot of illusion that India being a democratic country will join the west. India will do no such thing. It is much more complicated than that.
Countries would like multi-alignment so that they can maximise benefits. But the real questions are can that be sustainable? My view is that the real thing that forces us to choose side is technology. There is strong tendency to decouple the technology world. In the next 5 or 10 or 15 years, we can see technology compatible only in the China-led world or America-led world and that would increase the cost for the rest of the world. So, remaining neutral will come with a price.
A version of this article appears in the print on September 28, 2023, of The Himalayan Times
