It's precisely because the IBSA countries are respectable democracies that they can prove so useful to the less respectable. Philippe Bolopion, the U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, says, "For months, they enabled Russia and China to use their veto and block any Security Council action." It was far easier for the veto-bearing countries to claim that they were acting out of principle when they had India and others on their side. Of course, Russia and China wielded their vetoes again last month when India and South Africa shifted their votes, but it's striking that, since that time, both Moscow and Beijing have sought to distance themselves from Damascus. They've lost their cover.
India's behavior served the cynicism of others, but it was not, itself, altogether cynical. Unlike Russia, India has no real political or economic interests in Syria (or Libya). What is has are ideological reflexes left over from the era of the "Non-Aligned Movement," of which it was a founder. C. Raja Mohan, a leading Indian foreign-policy commentator, recently ascribed India's Syria policy to its long-standing preoccupation with "the anti-colonial theme" and to "solidarity" with the Arabs against Israel. Countries like India that long chafed under imperial dominion tend to see the West's moral activism as a new species of colonialism. India is thus a zealous defender of the principle of state sovereignty and reflexively opposes any intrusion into it. Puri says that he feared that the West was looking for an excuse to go to war in Syria, as it had in Libya, but Article 41 only authorizes the use of nonmilitary forms of coercion. He wasn't standing up to "humanitarian intervention" in Syria, which in any case had zero support in Western capitals last fall; he was defending Syria's right to do as it wished to its own citizens.
Why did India change its vote last month? Puri says that the resolution, which endorsed an Arab League plan designed to ease Assad from power, included a specific proviso excluding the possibility of military action. But Russia and China saw the new resolution as little different from the previous one and vetoed it too, implicitly defending their own right to do as they wish to their citizens, whether in Chechnya or Tibet. (India, too, is loath to set a precedent that could later justify Security Council action in Kashmir.) David Malone, a senior Canadian diplomat and the author of Does the Elephant Dance?, a book on Indian foreign policy, suggests a less legalistic explanation for the Feb. 4 vote: Once the violence grew worse and the Arab League more strident, domestic public opinion, in the form of pundits like Mohan, forced New Delhi's hand and persuaded it to look beyond the obsession with sovereignty. In this regard, of course, the IBSA countries do resemble the Western democracies: Policy responds to public opinion. Russia and China can smother or ignore the public in a way that India and Brazil cannot.
This raises the intriguing question of where the IBSA countries, as well as other emerging democracies, are heading. It's hard to predict. As one Western diplomat put it, anti-colonialism is in South Africa's "founding myth," and the reflexes associated with it will not quickly subside. Brazil, on the other hand, seemed far less comfortable defending Syria than India or South Africa, perhaps because Brazilian public opinion is more open to Western norms. All these countries have been wary of the principle that states have a "responsibility to protect" (R2P) their citizens from mass atrocities, as well as an obligation to act on behalf of people threatened with atrocities elsewhere. Puri says that India accepts the first part, but thinks that the second "needs to be addressed." But with Arab states like Qatar citing "R2P" to justify action in Libya and Syria, public opinion in non-Western democracies may begin to move beyond the anti-neocolonial reflex.
All three IBSA countries are candidates for permanent membership in the Security Council. Puri says that he is confident -- it's not clear why -- that India, at least, will gain that status soon. He is not troubled, he says, by the thought that giving aid and comfort to Russia and China will harm India's candidacy with the United States, Britain, and France, which could block it. One of the fundamental questions about the post-Western world we are moving toward is whether countries like India will be "socialized" to Western norms or whether things will work the other way around. The legatees of that system, above all in the United States, will feel a great deal more comfortable about the prospect of sharing power if the newcomers accept the obligations understood to come with that power.
SUBJECTS:
(44)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE