Beyond Liberal Order

States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean

Harry Verhoeven, Anatol Lieven, Harry Verhoeven, Anatol Lieven, Harry Verhoeven

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781787385436
• eBook ISBN: 9781787387669
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does liberal order actually amount to outside the West, where it has been most institutionalised? Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific, liberal hegemony is thin in the Indian Ocean World; there are no equivalents of NATO, the EU or the US-Japan defence relationship.

Yet what this book calls the ‘Global Indian Ocean’ was the beating heart of earlier epochs of globalisation, where experiments in international order, market integration and cosmopolitanisms were pioneered. Moreover, it is in this macro-region that today’s challenges will face their defining hour: climate change, pandemics, and the geopolitical contest pitting China and Pakistan against the USA and India. The Global Indian Ocean states represent the greatest range of political systems and ideologies in any region, from Hindu-nationalist India and nascent democracy in Indonesia and South Africa, to the Gulf’s mixture of tribal monarchy and high modernism.

These essays by leading scholars examine key aspects of political order, and their roots in the colonial and pre-colonial past, through the lenses of state-building, nationalism, international security, religious identity and economic development. The emergent lessons are of great importance for the world, as the ‘global’ liberal order fades and new alternatives struggle to be born.

1

ORDERING THE GLOBAL INDIAN OCEAN

THE ENDURING CONDITION OF THIN HEGEMONY

Harry Verhoeven

Of all the macro-regions of the earth, the Indian Ocean world contains the greatest range of cultures and religions, political systems and commercial networks. Almost three billion humans live in the countries along the shores of the Indian Ocean and another half a billion reside in states adjacent to the oceanic rim. The populations here are, more than anywhere else, young, multilingual and likely to move in their lives from the countryside to the cities. It is in this region that many of the key challenges facing humanity in the next decades—adapting to climate change, responding to deadly pandemics and reducing poverty while creating meaningful employment—will demand a defining response.

Throughout the ages, land-based empires and the cosmopolitan port cities that supplied them dominated the shores of the globe’s third biggest body of water and connected them with each other—forming, together with China, the beating heart of the world economy before the advent of capitalism. This mercantile tradition gave it a crucial role in the British Empire too, with India, positioned at the centre of most of its overseas possessions, as the jewel in the imperial crown. The region experienced lengthy economic decline in the 20th century, giving rise to nostalgia for a lost age: the quintessential image of the ocean-faring dhow sailing into the setting sun. Today, however, the Indian Ocean world is once again surging in global importance. Whatever metric one uses, its dynamic character is undeniable: the Indian Ocean has the densest flows of migration in the world; its trade routes, from the Straits of Malacca to the Cape and the Suez Canal, are crucial to global commerce; littoral states have been experiencing some of the fastest economic growth anywhere on the planet in the last thirty years; old and new superpowers alike are rapidly increasing their military presence onshore and offshore; and climate change is already disturbing weather patterns and altering coastlines in this macro-region, which is vulnerable like no other.

The Indian Ocean is also the fastest-changing and most unpredictable region on the planet in terms of its politics—local, regional and international. The countries of the region range from the bustling global cities of Singapore and Dubai and the enduring imperial states of Thailand and Iran to the violent fragmentation of authority in Somalia, with a great mixture of different experiences in between. The country that gives the Ocean its name, India, will soon be the world’s populous polity. Rising global powers like China and regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia shape littoral societies, trans-continental trade networks and geopolitical calculations in a way that is leading security systems that hitherto were relatively contained (like the Gulf and the Horn of Africa) to enmesh. In this geographical space, the redrawing of borders and the violent emergence of new states are not a hypothetical scenario but a bitter reality—from the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 amidst genocidal killing to the hard-fought liberations of Eritrea and East Timor in the 1990s to the contemporary crumbling of Yemen’s government. While the Indian Ocean is sometimes melancholically mourned as yesterday’s world, it is, as the contributors to this volume will argue, also very much that of tomorrow.

Studying the Ocean is not just a fascinating endeavour in its own right, but sheds light on the nature of international order in the 21st century. After World War II, the United States assumed the responsibility of reforming the international system in ways that it thought would prevent cataclysmic conflict, spread economic prosperity and guarantee American security. The resultant order was clearly hierarchical in its underpinnings of unprecedented military strength but US hegemony prioritized liberal objectives and instruments to give it longevity. Procedurally, Washington invested in creating multilateral institutions and a web of rule-based arrangements that bound the hegemon and its allies together, ensuring authority would be legitimate, predictable and constrained. Substantively, the liberal order sought to protect the Western model of representative democracy and capitalism and to spread it all over the world in the face of the alternative promoted by the Soviet-led communist bloc. As the Cold War ended, the US-led system of alliances, institutions and norms did not disintegrate, but instead penetrated where previously its reach had been tenuous. The three pillars of the post-1945 global political economy that define this liberal order in our understanding—the Pax Americana, free markets and liberal democracy—appeared unchallengeable. The progress of states in the international system would be measured by their degree of convergence (“transition”) towards these. For liberal theorists, the domestic foundations and international architecture of liberal order are mutually reinforcing and universally desirable (and desired). While few still explicitly use the “end of history” aphorism,¹ the notion of a global, teleological march towards a very specific modernity remains widespread and (until recently) taken for granted.

Yet what does liberal order amount to outside the core areas of the North Atlantic where it was most formally institutionalized? What do empirical realities in Africa, the Gulf and Asia reveal about the relationship between international order and its constituent parts? What happens when, following Chakrabarty,² we “provincialize” the US-led “global” liberal order and examine the ways in which liberal democracy, free markets and the US security umbrella have been understood, mediated, reappropriated, resisted and contributed to by actors in the Indian Ocean world?

There are several reasons why the Ocean is a particularly apt site for asking questions about the past and future of liberal order. As the home of more than a third of humanity, the Indian Ocean world is essential to any global aspirations of liberal order; it makes no sense to speak of “global” order if three billion people are analytically (and practically) ignored. Moreover, there are significant theoretical motivations for rethinking international order from an Indian Ocean standpoint. Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific worlds, where regional order has for decades been dominated by a clear hegemon which spearheaded the development of an elaborate security architecture, encouraged parliamentary democracy and spurred the institutionalization of deep trade and investment ties, the post-1945 geopolitical landscape in the Indian Ocean has been relatively inchoate. There are no equivalents of NATO, the European Union or even the US–Japan defence relationship in the Indian Ocean world—and liberalism remains a deeply unpopular term associated with Western exceptionalism, whether in East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia.³ The weak multilateral institutionalization of the Pax Americana, the dreadful reputation of laissez-faire economics, and the patchy record of elections and human rights in most regional states underline why it is unsurprising that Australia is the only Indian Ocean society that unambiguously identifies as liberal.

The structural condition of what we might call “thin hegemony”—a hierarchical international system with heterogeneous and relatively autonomous constituent parts that interact intensely and often consensually but whose normative preferences need not converge, nor do they mirror those of the dominant power which loosely structures (some of) the system and provides some public goods—offers an intriguing counterpoint to the international relations context shaping the Atlantic and Pacific. Thin hegemony allows us to explore the implications for international cooperation, ideological pluralism and market dynamism of an only irregularly present order-building superpower amidst remarkable political diversity. Moreover, historicizing such a tradition of order and the values and technologies of rule central to it also contributes to rethinking the political geographies of liberalism. Despite the Indian Ocean being on the margins of the priority list of the victorious American superpower post-World War II, historically the fabric of liberal thought and liberal order has been moulded by legacies of empire, with the Ocean serving as the canvas on which civilization, progress and the very meaning of “international” were defined. The “long 19th century” produced “a great transformation to global modernity” and shifted not only the distribution of power, but also the sources of power; an emergent two-tier international order would for the first time span the entire globe and result in the formation of International Relations as a discipline preoccupied with explaining and legitimizing that order.⁴ The Indian Ocean world was in a material sense tremendously important to globalizing capitalism, technological revolutions and the forging of overseas empires. Moreover, it served in ideational terms as oppositional Other to an emerging, liberal “West” in the 18th and 19th century. It was here that, through genocidal violence, settler colonialism established Southern Hemisphere “White Dominions” under liberal-constitutional government such as Australia and South Africa. It was also in this region that piracy, sati (widow immolation) and slavery were fought, campaigns that proved foundational to liberal ideas of civilisation and international law. The very notion of a (liberal) Pax Britannica was meaningless without its ambivalent relationship with the Indian Ocean, which was simultaneously the core of empire and its Other.

That ambiguity, so closely related to thin hegemony, still defines the oceanic landscape today, as this book documents. On the one hand, the Indian Ocean is an important part of the international state system and global capitalism, which have been powerfully shaped and lorded over by successive European and American hegemonies; the societies that constitute the Ocean cannot be studied without considering extra-regional forces and actors. But it is also striking that no other part of the globe has witnessed such potent challenges to all three pillars of the US-led liberal order, even before self-doubt in the liberal West (re) surfaced with a vengeance. Liberal democracy, deregulated markets and the Pax Americana all coexist alongside, and indeed are all being confronted by, explicit alternatives in the Indian Ocean World. American politico-military dominance is challenged by China’s deployment of geo-commercial power through the Belt and Road Initiative and the People’s Liberation Army Navy, by the attempted jihadist caliphates of al-Qaeda and Daesh, and by the revisionist Islamic Republic of Iran, which undermines the American- and Saudi-dominated order in the Middle East. Domestically, most Indian Ocean societies are not converging on a liberal-democratic, laissez-faire horizon either. In view of the pluriformity in political economies that straddle the oceanic rim and its hinterland, an impending transition to an “end of history” settlement appears illusory. Neither the statist developmentalism of African (neo-) liberation regimes nor the patronage systems and economic sovereignty-focused policies dominant both in resource-rich states (Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman) and resource-poor ones (Bangladesh, Yemen) conform to the prescriptions of the “Washington Consensus”. Across the Indian Ocean World, the state appears either too unable to protect Locke’s “life, liberty and property”—in the case of governments struggling to uphold more than nominal control over swathes of their territory, including megacities like Karachi—or too strong, to the point of systemically circumscribing individual freedoms and property rights: the Indian Ocean and its edges host several experiments in state-building in which new Leviathans concentrate and project enormous political and economic power. From Singapore to the United Arab Emirates to Ethiopia, an important gamut of state-builders pursue illiberal recipes that differ resoundingly from the advice of the European Commission or Western-dominated international financial institutions.⁵ The boldest such experiment has been pushed by Narendra Modi in Delhi since 2014. His BJP government implements tempered free-market reform, while trying to recast India as a Hindu-nationalist republic in ways that are significantly qualifying its democracy.

Exploring the idea of thin hegemony may enable us to more fruitfully analyse transoceanic processes that are hard to conceptualize, including the complex relationship between liberal globalization and the resurgent interest in how soaring flows of capital, goods and people between Malacca and Bab al-Mandab are producing a reworked “Afrasian Imagination”.⁶ Even without a strong push by a hegemon to tie regional states, markets and societies together, the Indian Ocean World is, increasingly albeit unevenly, again functioning as an integrated ideational, economic and military space. While this process cannot be seen separately from the impulses provided by the liberal international order, it cannot be reduced to it either. Travel—for education, health, leisure or work—between the different corners of the Indian Ocean has expanded exponentially, as has the consumption of one another’s cultural products—from Bollywood’s popularity in East Africa and the Gulf to the proliferation of Batik textiles in Arabian and African markets to the embrace of Saudi-promoted Salafism among worshippers in Aceh, Dhaka and Mombasa. Millions of accountants, doctors, drivers, construction workers, imams, IT specialists, nurses, teachers and hospitality providers, drawn from across the Ocean world, live and work in the Gulf and in South-East Asia and trade and investment volumes between different sub-regions have skyrocketed. Military exercises by land, sea and air between Ocean states are also being held with increasing frequency as are meetings to coordinate regional responses to piracy. Several forces drive this integrationist thrust: technological advances, most importantly transportation and communication revolutions; unprecedented capitalist accumulation, propelled by the hydrocarbon bonanza in the Gulf, the liberalization of India’s economy and an ocean-wide commodity boom sparked by the economic miracle in post-1978 China; and successive waves of labour migration that have revitalized ancient and deep socio-cultural and economic links. These integrating vectors also include a growing militarization of seas and coastlines, initially spurred by the Global War on Terror. Such projection of military and geo-economic force is also catalysed by growing competition between China, India and the US, and by states caught in regional polarization dynamics such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates (in the Gulf and Horn of Africa). The Ocean is being reconceptualized as an integrated security space, though crucially without the governance architecture of the North Atlantic and North East Asia.⁷

The task of investigating the relationship between the macro-region and global hegemony is urgent considering the neglect of the politics of Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia in mainstream accounts of international order.⁸ How material realities and guiding ideas of liberal order evolve across time and space and how actors in these regions welcome, resist or refract liberal norms, conditionalities and power structures form the subject of this book. Eight chapters and a conclusion draw on a range of approaches—some macro-comparative, others focused on inter-regional connections, still others dissecting continuity and change in specific communities. What unites the contributing anthropologists, historians, political scientists and sociologists is the prism of a Global Indian Ocean: such a “global” perspective does not entail studying the entire world, but rather analysing the structural conditions and structured transformations that affect disparate places and assessing what they, in turn, reveal about the global level.⁹ This volume rejects a teleological account of the integration of states, markets and societies within the Ocean and of the Ocean world into the global system. Instead, it dissects how liberal order has been constructed, perceived, engaged with and/or subverted from the perspective of Indian Ocean states, societies and markets and what outcomes have resulted from processes of both integration and disconnection. This global outlook means at once recognizing the region’s specificity as well as its embeddedness in global structures and processes.¹⁰ On the one hand, the Indian Ocean is ecologically distinct from other parts of the planet and has a unique history of integration and disintegration, both as a region and vis-à-vis the global political economy.¹¹ Moreover, it has experienced—and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Ordering the Global Indian Ocean: The Enduring Condition of Thin Hegemony: Harry Verhoeven, Columbia University
• 2. A History of Distributed Sovereignty: Trade, Migration and Rule in the Global Indian Ocean: Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University
• 3. Liberal Order’s Illiberal Prodigy: Singapore as a Non-liberal Electoral Democratic State: Chua Beng Huat, National University of Singapore
• 4. Hybrid Clientelism as Democracy in the Global Indian Ocean: Shandana Khan Mohmand, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex
• 5. The Arabian Oil State: Infrastructural Power and Social Segmentation: Steffen Hertog, London School of Economics and Political Science
• 6. Women as Objects of Development: Neoliberalism in Bangladesh: Lamia Karim, University of Oregon
• 7. Divide and Rule: Partition and Illiberal State-Building in the Horn of Africa: Mike Woldemariam, Boston University
• 8. Intervention and Order in Failed States: Will Reno, Northwestern University
• 9. China in the Indian Ocean: The Search for a New Hegemon?: Rana Mitter, University of Oxford
• 10. Conclusion: The Indian Ocean and Global Patterns of Order and Disorder: Anatol Lieven, Quincy Institute
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover