Tag Archives: global Summitry

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: “Symbolically significant”, for now

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) leader-led summit was held in Samarkand in this September. It brought global attention to the group first established by Beijing at the start of the 21st century. Not only was it Xi Jinping’s first trip outside the country since January 2020, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, but the meeting was also an opportunity for a sit down between Xi and Putin on the margins of the summit. That meeting was the immediate point of interest for the global media. In Samarkand, India’s PM Modi was openly critical of Russia as he tried to carve out a leadership position for the South Asian republic. While commentators noted that PM Modi did not hold a bilateral with President Xi indicating that the warmth of 2018’s Wuhan Summit between the two has not yet been rekindled.  Iran participated for the first time with the group now representing 40 percent of the world’s population and nearly a third of global GDP and all of which, barring India, are decidedly illiberal regimes.

While the SCO has more than two decades of existence, the summit is of interest not just because of the high-level leader diplomacy but on the peculiar qualities of a multilateral institution that is often neglected by Western scholars and analysts.

The SCO was established in 2001 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the intention of providing stability to the former Soviet Central Asian spaces with a particular focus on cooperation to combat what the members called the ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. This initial motivation reflected China’s broader concerns about counterterrorism and Islamic extremism in the early 2000s as well as long term anxieties Beijing has had about the threat to the Communist Party of China (CPC) rule at the peripheries of the China.

The initial work of the SCO focused on coordinating the members’ security policies and sharing information, as well as conducting regular military exercises. The group added narcotic trafficking to its counterterrorism agenda and began to talk about economic collaboration and had periodic rhetorical flourishes about global governance and international order. From its initial membership of: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, the SCO has expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017and now Iran.

While the SCOs public diplomacy has been wide ranging, the group was, and remains at its heart, interested primarily on matters of international and transnational security. Yet as many analysts point out, Beijing and the members often appear disinterested in many quite obvious regional security matters, the most immediate example of which is the deadly clash between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan taking place barely 200 km from the current Summit which elicited neither comment nor action from individual leaders or the group as a whole.

Multilateral institutions often serve both symbolic and substantive functions. With the former, symbolic functions provide the opportunity to signal intent, represent collaboration and more broadly to perform statecraft. But substantive functions can provide the means to advance actual policy coordination and, in their more advanced forms, bind members into strict policy commitments, most famously exemplified by the EU and WTO. Most initiatives provide a blend of performance and policy as well as offering a platform at which ad hoc diplomacy can take place, such as the China-Russia meeting this year.

The SCO today is, however, a grouping that is long on symbolism and short on substance. At first glance it appears to be a good example of institutional balancing, that is when states use international institutions to balance against the influence of major powers. In this case the intention is to use the SCO to ensure that the US and its allies’ influence on the geopolitical dynamics in the Eurasian heartland is blunted. From this perspective bringing India into the fold was intended to hedge against Delhi’s growing alignment with Washington.

More broadly, it also represents a desire for a more multipolar and multimodal international order in which the North Atlantic powers have less influence; and liberal values are diluted as well.

While the symbolism is strong, and in the current moment it has particular salience given the Ukraine war illustrating starkly the clash between authoritarianism and democratic systems, there is little sign of the SCO making any meaningful progress on the substantive side of the ledger. One might be tempted to view the SCO as a nascent Central Asian NATO, yet the preferences of the key SCO powers remain low on concrete commitments as well as exhibiting not inconsiderable tensions between various members. At least for now, it is unlikely that the SCO will take any steps to move beyond the symbolic.

It is tempting, therefore, to write off the SCO as another example of shallow diplomacy in which grand statements of intent and photo opportunities are confused for actual statecraft. That is certainly true right now, but in the building of the foundations for collaboration among  influential and illiberal states in a geopolitically crucial zone of world politics, the members in general, and China in particular, have established a solid platform from which members may ultimately make good on their very real ambitions to transform the principles and practice of the regional order and possibly the international order.

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Constructing an Inclusive Order: Avoiding Fragmentation and Worse – Disorder

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Two summits completed and another off in the distance, but impacted by these just completed summits. A crowded summit schedule has begun.

The statements were voiced and the Leaders’ Communique issued by the G7 at Schloss Elmau to be followed by more speeches and statements and the issuing of the “Strategic Concept”  a once ever ten year statement by NATO at Madrid.

What have we learned from this G7 and the NATO gatherings? Let me first focus on the G7 Summit. Well, first it is relevant that we take into account the position expressed by one of the longstanding observers of the summit process, Sheffield’s Hugo Dobson. As he concluded, along with his colleague Greg Stiles in Global Policy , reflecting their review of the German G7 and in particular the Leaders’ Communique:

In summary, and despite what we have tried to do here, beware reading too much either positively or negatively into a single summit document. Rather, this communiqué should be placed in the context of a network of summits – most immediately the NATO Summit in Madrid later this week and looking further ahead to the Indonesian-hosted G20 Summit later this year.

And it is a summary and caution well worth heeding. Nevertheless, the tone is worth further comment. The G7 took the time and the Communique to underscore their self characterization as a democratic forum. In their Communique opening the G7 declared:

 As open democracies adhering to the rule of law, we are driven by shared values and bound by our commitment to the rules-based multilateral order and to universal human rights. As outlined in our Statement on support for Ukraine, standing in unity to support the government and people of Ukraine in their fight for a peaceful, prosperous and democratic future, we will continue to impose severe and immediate economic costs on President Putin’s regime for its unjustifiable war of aggression against Ukraine, while stepping up our efforts to counter its adverse and harmful regional and global impacts, including with a view to helping secure global energy and food security as well as stabilising the economic recovery. 

 

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Without Trust and Without Paranoia: US-China Relations

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It was a time for informal face-to-face contact – just ended – the California summit between Presidents Xi and Obama. There is a strand of global summitry that emphasizes contact between leaders. Such contact can be disastrous of course. Kennedy’s encounter with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, left leaders with misconceptions about the other that ultimately led each to take steps that raised threats and crisis. Let’s hope that nothing like this occurs as a result of this summit. And the reality is that the ‘world of summits’ has changed mightily. The two presidents will see each other again shortly in St. Petersburg Russia at the G20 Leaders Summit. And they will meet again shortly thereafter in Asia at the EAS.

What can we draw as the consequences of this informal meeting of the leaders of these two great powers? Ostensibly the two leaders are searching for a “new type of great power relationship” (xinxing daguo guanxi) – The announcement of this informal summit and the search for a different kind of relationship – read all that as an effort by IR types to avoid what international relations theory tells is the likely outcome of rivalry, friction and conflict between an established superpower and a rising one. Thus many of the foreign policy experts have indeed waded in to describe what might result from such a meeting – and give some expression to the ongoing Sino-American relationship.

Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy, the consummate realist suggested a modest result:

Neither Obama nor Xi can alter the core interests of the two countries, or wish away the various issues where those interests already conflict or are likely to do so in the future. The best they can achieve is a better understanding of each other’s red lines and resolve and some agreements on those issues where national interests overlap. In this way, each can hope to keep things from getting worse and at the margin make relations a bit warmer. … But even if Obama is successful this weekend, this effort is unlikely to prevent Sino-American rivalry from intensifying in the future. The basic problem is that the two state’s core grand strategies are at odds and good rapport between these two particular leaders won’t prevent those tensions from reemerging down the road.

Walt acknowledges the description just referred to is a pessimistic one (he does describe a far more optimistic alternative) based on “… Sino-American rivalry in the future no matter how well Obama and Xi (or their successors) get on this weekend. And so for Walt “intense competition is likely”.

Then there is Walt’s FP compatriot – Dan Drezner. Now Drezner is no realist – and in fact in some ways leans more to a neo-liberal framing of international relations (I suspect Dan may not buy this). But Drezner reflected on this upcoming summit at his blog (I anticipate that this blog post is not his final word on this) by referencing Harvard’s Iain Johnston in a piece Jognston wrote recently for International Security examining the growing Chinese assertiveness – which Johnston largely rejects. The lesson for Drezner is China is no revisionist power. As he argues, “Since 2008, China has had multiple opportunities to disrupt the US-Created international order, and Beijing has passed on almost all these opportunities.” So for Drezner the landscape is filled with collaborative opportunities between the US and China:

Now let’s be clear – China is doing almost all of this to advance its own narrow self-interest. None of the above means that China is suddenly going to embrace the US perspective on human rights or the South China Sea. Still, there are a healthy number of issue areas where China’s interests are pretty congruent with the United States, and where China has taken constructive policy steps. … My main point here is that China is a great power that is inevitably going to disagree with the United Sattes on a host of issues. China is not, however, a revisionist actor hell-bent on subverting the post-1945/post 1989 global governance. To use John Ikenberry’s language, recent Sino-American disputes are taking place within the context of the current international order. They are not about radical changes to that international order. Indeed, contrary to the arguments of some, the current system has displayed surprising resilience.

In a curious way this perspective resonates if only a little with a far more pessimistic view – that expressed most pointedly by Yan Xuetong the Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. A strong nationalist, and realist, Yan Xuetong is not well known outside China-expert circles. FP did themselves and their publics a great favor in printing a post by the Dean entitled, “Let’s Not be Friends“. For some time now Yan Xuetong has been arguing that leaders and their officials should not promote a vision of a trust-based collaborative relationship – those arguing for it will only be disappointed. The US and China are competitors. But that need not prevent incidents of collaboration:

States cooperate not because of mutual trust, but because of shared interests that make cooperation safe and productive. China and the United States should look hard to identify what these incentives and shared interests are – and focus on developing positive cooperation when their interests overlap or complement one another, such as on denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula, and preventive cooperation when their interests conflict, such as on preventing collisions in [the] South China Sea. … Preventive cooperation differs from positive cooperation because it is based on conflicting — rather than shared — interests. … Areas of friction are likely to become more common in the coming years, but the two countries can skillfully manage their competition if they work to minimize these emerging conflicts — not only in the military sector but also in nontraditional security sectors such as energy, finance counterterrorism in the Middle East, anti-piracy in Somali Sea, and even climate change. … Encouraging China and the United States to prioritize preventive cooperation does not mean they should abandon efforts to build mutual trust. However, it does mean the two countries can stabilize their strategic relations without it. The worst-case scenario is not that China and the United States is not that China and the United States will face more strategic conflicts in the coming years, but that they never learn how to develop cooperation based on the lack of mutual trust, thus allowing a small conflict to escalate into a major one.

I suppose it is a framing a little like: “don’t trust but verify”. The dilemma I fear however is that all this realist formulation will lead – at least in US circles if not Chinese ones – to analogize the relationship to something like the cold war contestants, even as they draw distinctions between the two sets of rivals. Simplistic competitive framing is too easy and too familiar. The Washington-types that always lean on “hedging” and insist on greater military preparedness will target the competitive and forget the collaborative. Inexorably the US and China will be characterized as the new cold war rivals.

I have argued for the necessity of wedging cooperation into the relationship and rejecting any logic to US-Soviet competition. In the past I have argued that “both friend and foe” (yi di yi you) is the better framing for the great power relationship than “neither friend nor foe” (fei di fei you) – a framing often used by Chinese experts. Starting at the post, “Not Required to Choose – A Strategy for US-China Relations” I have argued that defining the relationship as including a collaborative dimension is necessary to avoid sliding into a more difficult unpleasant great power relationship. Yes, it will be difficult especially for US decision-makers to retain the partnership aspect – that is both collaborative and competitive. -Without that collaborative element to the relationship, however, Washington leadership will be all too willing to accept just a rivalrous competitive relationship with China. It is after all politically so much easier.

Let’s not make it easy for the claque.

Image Credit: channelnewsasia.com