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Sunday , April 27, 2008 at 0101 hrs is not a major diplomatic player yet. The other issue is how quickly does India address its internal challenges of poverty, environment, health, corruption, etc to be on a coherent, sustainable path towards greatness and respectiability? India should focus on the latter in order to achieve the former — this is what China has done since the 1970s.
Is central Asia going to be the determinant of how power equations are going to be structured in the new century?
Central Asia is one of the critical “second world” regions I focus on. It has the second largest oil reserves, particularly in the Caspian Sea region, and is the strategic crossroads of East and West. It is where Russia’s influence may gradually decline as China’s grows — China borders more of the post-Soviet “Stans” than Russia does and has advanced rapidly in building road, rail, pipeline, and trade linkages across these countries to reach Iran and the Persian Gulf. It is also the region where the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) westward towards Iran (including Afghanistan and Pakistan) overlaps nervously with the eastward expanding missions of NATO. So Central Asia is very much where we see a new round of the historic “Great Game” being played out.
The Second World. Given that the geopolitical groupings indicated by this name have changed over the past few centuries, how do you use the label? How long do you see the countries you have labeled second world continuing to be so?
The “second world” did indeed refer to the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Today I use it to refer to countries which are socio-economically speaking both first and third world at the same time — modern, developed, globalised, but also backward and underdeveloped. This tension within countries has become a defining trait of the globalisation era and one that is likely to continue for decades, challenging second world countries’ ability to stay unified and whole. There is no one answer as to which will make it through towards the first world and which will fall into the third — that is the challenge of governance. Some countries are doing well like Chile and Kazakhstan and Malaysia, while others such as Egypt and Indonesia I am less optimistic about. ...
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