Prior to the 2010s, the buzzword was “Asia-Pacific,” understood as the embodiment of Pax Americana in Asia. However, the last decade has been marked by major upheavals that have led to a conceptual redefinition of this space: Asia-Pacific has been quietly replaced by “Indo-Pacific”. Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union all established an Indo-Pacific strategy before Canada recently did the same.
The rise of China largely explains this redefinition. In 2013, it announced the deployment of its Silk Road economic belt, a project which today brings together 147 States, and whose objectives are multiple: economic development, increased trade, but also use of the renminbi (Chinese currency) for compete with the US dollar.
This commercial “benevolence” of China is however tinged with an escalation of tensions on several fronts: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, the China Sea, the Sino-Bhutanese and Sino-Indian borders, all are areas where aggressive Chinese “wolf fighter” diplomacy is generating geopolitical, economic, anti-democratic and, all too often, humanitarian crises.
Added to the belligerent behavior of North Korea, these new parameters indicate that the order that has reigned in the region for decades has been irreversibly upset.
In an entirely liberal conception of the international order presented in its Indo-Pacific strategy, Canada asserts that China’s rise has not only been made possible by its adherence to “the same international rules and norms that this country increasingly despises moreover”, but also because it “seeks to shape the international order to make it a more permissive environment with regard to interests and values that are increasingly diverging from our own”. It is in this spirit that Canada has joined the ball of “Indo-Pacific states”.
We will remember the enthusiasm shared by US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2017, when they praised the merits of closer cooperation between the United States and India in the Indo-Pacific. India was becoming the West’s new colt in the region, a bulwark of more than a billion people against the rise of China.
The erosion of democracy in India
Today, Canada adheres to this vision, abandoning the Asia-Pacific in favor of the Indo-Pacific. However, one detail is striking: Washington’s strategy is realistic and ignores the erosion of democracy in India, the primary objective being to defend American interests, even if it means offending the most liberal minds. On the contrary, the Canadian strategy is, on paper, justified by a liberal conception of the world where exchanges and cooperation between democratic states can only lead to greater international stability.
PHOTO PRAKASH SINGH, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Arrest of opposition party protesters in New Delhi in July 2021
However, under the Modi government, the liberal character of the “largest democracy in the world” is suffering. In 2021, the American NGO Freedom House downgraded India from a free country to a partly free one. The reasons: “discriminatory policies and […] increased violence affecting the Muslim population,” as well as increased harassment of “journalists, NGOs and other government critics.” Not to mention that “Muslims, Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis) remain economically and socially marginalized”. In short, India is promoting “values that are increasingly diverging from our own”, to use the words used by Canada with respect to China.
Ottawa nevertheless justifies a rapprochement with New Delhi on the basis of “common values”, understood as “security and the promotion of democracy, pluralism and human rights”. Values which, after all, are not on Modi’s agenda.
How to understand this contradiction? Over the past decade, global neoliberalism seems to have favored some of its historical adversaries (authoritarian states), who have seized on international cooperation mechanisms to improve their position. For some, the fall of the USSR in 1991 was to lead to the “end of history” and the triumph of democratic values. However, the limits of the liberal enthusiasm of the 1990s seem to have been reached, when we observe a resurgence of authoritarian regimes in the four corners of the world.
Perhaps liberal thinkers struggle to recognize the failure of their ideas on the geopolitical chessboard. Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy, despite a liberal coating, is based on a realistic and pragmatic background: the West must strengthen its presence in the region to slow down the rise of China, even if it means turning a blind eye to anti-democratic excesses. influential states like India. It now remains to be seen whether this contradiction will harm consistency in the implementation of a strategy based on the duality between massive investments in programs for the defense of human rights, and accolades with leaders with authoritarian overtones.