India can lead the world in shaping the New World Order, says Shyam Saran

New Delhi. In a robust analysis of internationalism, Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) Chairman and former Foreign Secretary, GoI Shyam Saran November said that the world needs to ‘nurture a political discourse which refrains from rejecting or disparaging nationalism and patriotism, even while upholding internationalism’.

Mr Saran was delivering the 7th YB Chavan lecture on ‘Decline of Internationalism’ at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) on November 28.

Insisting that India with its ‘accommodative and self-confident culture’ has the attributes of what the new order requires, Mr Saran said, “India could, if it is so resolves, lead the way in shaping a new world order, which is aligned with the challenges we confront as humanity.”

Reflecting on the current global scenario, he pointed out that countries can no longer cocoon themselves and survive, nor can pursuit of perceived domestic interests prevail over external engagement.

He said that external engagement may well be indispensable to achieving domestic ends, since the salience of issues cutting across national and regional borders and with an intrinsically global dimension has increased phenomenally. “The yearning for national control, the harking back to an imagined historical, social and cultural identity, such as we have seen in the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the more recent elections in the United States, will inevitably end in frustrated expectations,” noted Mr Saran.

Observing that the concept of national sovereignty, which is integral to the concept of a nation-state, is constrained by the blurring of lines between domestic and external factors, the former Foreign Secretary said: “The world is more densely inter-connected, our destinies as countries and peoples are more intertwined and the challenges we confront cut across regional and national boundaries than at any other time in human history.”

He warned that Nationalism without internationalism is the road to a dead-end and said that issues like climate change and contemporary challenges such as international terrorism, drug trafficking or international crime can only be addressed through global and collaborative measures. National governance structures are no longer adequate to deal with their consequences, he added.

Speaking on the impact of accelerated technological change and the irreversible globalisation of economies, the RIS Chairman observed that the inter-connectedness of the globe through digital technology, the instantaneousness of communication and its increasingly visual character, and the expanding reach and influence of social media beyond the control of states, have vastly expanded the scale of unregulated domains.

He argued that the ecological, economic and strategic challenges of the new millennium can only be tackled through governance at the international scale, and concluded that the drivers of cross-border challenges are technological and economic, and are now so deeply embedded in our lives as individuals and communities that they cannot be unravelled.

Also present on the occasion was Mr RD Pradhan, Representative of Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan, Mumbai.
The YB Chavan Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture organised by IDSA in collaboration with the Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan, Mumbai, since 2010.