JLF : New World Order
(check against delivery) Saturday, 6 February 2021
Namita Gokhale, Author and JLF Founding Director
Sanjoy Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts
Firstly, let me thank Namita, William Dalrymple and Sanjoy for maintaining JLF activities despite the pandemic. Authors, books, reading—the heart of your work—has nurtured, entertained and inspired so many of us over the past year.
Thank for the opportunity to speak to your topic The New World Order.
This is my first active role at a JLF event, but I have vivid memories of attending JLF in Jaipur in 2017.
‘I come from the land down under’ is both a truthful statement and a line from a well-loved 1980’s Australian rock song.
However, but for an event some 180 million years ago, I could have been a local.
The breakup of the super continent, Gondwana, saw the Australian land mass shift to the southern extremity of what we now call the Indian Ocean.
This event was a massive reshaping of a world order—at least geomorphic terms.
Today we’re witnessing a similar phenomenon—albeit one concerned with a shift in influence and wealth and not the land upon which it is it exercised or generated.
Indo-Pacific
In recent years we have seen a steady migration of power and influence from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific.
This region is becoming the world’s strategic centre of gravity, where many of the world’s economic opportunities exist.
It is home to the world’s fastest growing economies and is projected to account for two thirds of the world’s future economic growth.
By 2030 it will be home to a middle class of almost 3.5 billion people – or nearly half of the world’s population.
Six of the world’s largest military spending nations call this region home.
By any measure we live in a region on the rise—and on the move.
COVID-19
On the move at a time when for most of the last year the world’s population has stayed put due to the COVID pandemic.
It’s ironic a disease which has been fought universally by promoting practices of lock down and social distancing has also brought countries and people together.
The most obvious example are the vaccines being rolled out worldwide—the result of an astonishing sprint by our researchers and scientists, collaborating across borders to address a common challenge.
But it’s also evident in the outreach undertaken by countries, including Australia and India, to assist neighbouring countries deal with the challenges of COVID.
Having arrived in Delhi a month before lockdown I have marvelled at the Indian Government’s regional response:
- quickly deploying medical teams, medicines, and equipment across the region and pharmaceuticals to the world; and
- its current vaccine diplomacy which has delivered more than 16 million doses—and even more hope—to citizens in countries across the region and beyond.
All at the same time as dealing with the pandemic here at home.
Australia, more lightly touched by COVID, has equally sought to assist nations in near neighbourhoods across the Pacific and South East Asia.
Regional tensions
But COVID’s downside extended beyond the death, dislocation and despair which accompanied its passage across nations.
It accelerated many of the challenges we already faced in the Indo-Pacific and indeed globally.
Great power tensions have been on the rise, and the use of grey zone strategies, coercive tactics and disinformation has been growing.
Tensions over sovereignty are rising, whether on the Line of Actual Control, in the South China Sea or the East China Sea.
The US-China relationship – one of the world’s and this region’s most important – has been under strain.
Nationalism, disruption and new geo-political realities have seen global supply chains fragment and shift.
COVID-19 has cost lives, exacerbated instability and threatens to undermine hard won growth and development in the region.
The region has become more complicated, the future more difficult to predict. The pressures on rules, norms and institutions are also becoming more acute.
COVID has accelerated the very trends we seek to reverse.
As Prime Minister Morrison recently remarked: the post COVID world will potentially be poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly.
All this means we face significant hurdles at a time when our resources and our attention are spread across multiple domains.
That makes coordination toward common goals more important than ever.
Australia-India relationship
These tensions, and the collaboration and coordination demanded by the COVID challenge, also led to a tectonic acceleration in the Australia/India relationship.
Australia calls the Indo-Pacific home and shares a responsibility with India to safeguard the Indian Ocean.
Our defence relationship has strengthened significantly in recent years and last year we again joined with India, Japan and the US in Exercise MALABAR.
During the pandemic our Foreign Secretaries, along with counterparts across the region, were in almost weekly contact as they shared insights and information on tackling COVID and other challenges.
And in June our two Prime Ministers met via a virtual summit where our bilateral relationship was elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
Agreements covering a range of areas from education and research collaboration to water and critical minerals were also signed.
At the summit both Prime Ministers committed to work together in shaping a post COVID Indo Pacific.
A responsibility Prime Minister Modi has called a ‘sacred duty’.
Australia couldn’t agree more.
Australia wants to work with India as the natural leader in the region to ensure that our shared neighbourhood is peaceful.
That it operates by rules and norms which give all us opportunities to prosper in whatever endeavours we seek to pursue.
That allows access to open markets which spurs the economic growth which underpins our living standards.
And which provides resilience against the economic and security challenges to allow citizens and nations alike to set and secure their high ambitions.
India on the rise
Like the rest of the world, Australia has witnessed an India on the move.
In my view India has stood out to the world due to the strength of its economy and its democracy.
Since 2005, more than 270 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty by India’s economic growth.
India has the second-largest digital consumer markets, with over 560 million internet subscribers. Half the next billion internet users will be citizens of this country.
Not only is India on the rise economically, but also politically.
Indians have enthusiastically embraced democracy since Independence.
Churchill famously said democracy was the worst form of government except all the others—and it’s a sober lesson in a week where another elected government has been swept aside.
As a former political practitioner, who spent most of my career in Opposition, I know democracies aren’t perfect.
But, whether you agree with an election result or not, the fact is democracies empower citizens and provide them with a peaceful (and often used) means of punishing those who, when elected, fail to deliver, exceed mandates or exhibit hubris.
The world has welcomed India actively engaging in leadership of multilateral institutions, including the UNSC, ISA, IORA and the WHO.
India’s leadership and humanitarianism, especially through its work with WHO and with the UN on vaccines, has delivered hope to millions across the globe.
A shared vision for a new world order
I spoke earlier of the pressures on rules, norms and institutions in the Indo-Pacific have become more acute in recent years.
These pressures are likely to continue in a post-COVID world—and to form a defining feature of a new order, both regionally and globally.
In such an order, neither Australia nor India can afford to be bystanders. No nation can.
All of us have agency to shape developments in the Indo-Pacific – not only the US and China.
Australia seeks an Indo Pacific that operates by rules and norms which give all the opportunity to prosper in whatever endeavours they pursue.
That allows access to open markets to spur economic growth which underpin the living standards we want.
And that provides resilience against economic and security challenges to allow citizens and nations alike to set, and secure, high ambitions.
And Australia intends to work with India—the natural leaders in the region—to achieve these goals.
Orders change—even World Orders.
COVID has changed the world.
PM Morrison recently noted: “we cannot pretend that things are as they were—the world has changed.”
The historian and diplomat E. H. Carr reminds us: change is certain, progress is not.
If we are to live in a New World Order, we must seek to construct one reflective of our shared values and vision for our future.
Australia, India and other likeminded nations must collaborate to achieve progress.
I’m confident that together, Gondwana-like again, India and Australia can shape an open, inclusive and resilient Indo Pacific which will provide stability to our region—and the world.