India's Indigenously built OPV INS Sunayna
Indian Navy
Navies, and the competitions between them, are shaped by their strategic context, but have an important role in shaping that context too. Discussing the issue of how best to manage maritime competition in the Indian Ocean therefore requires a look at that strategic context and the way it affects navies, together with analysis of how the challenges it poses might be managed.
The Overall Context
When speaking of the Indian Ocean region (IOR), analysts sometimes use the word ‘copetition’ to denote the fact that maritime engagement in the IOR clearly has both cooperative and competitive connotations, the former conducive to peace, the latter potentially leading to conflict. The peace and prosperity of the region demands that cooperative maritime engagement be encouraged and competitive engagement be managed and discouraged.
One vision of the future implies a recreation of the ancient pre-colonial past. Broadly,[1] the Indian Ocean area was the an ‘uncommanded’ sea, an area that was once largely free of great power naval rivalry and was instead the scene of a sea-based trading system that united the peoples of the whole area, from the Eastern Mediterranean to Southern China, in common commercial and cultural endeavour, and in which India, simply as a function of its geography, was the natural centre. At least at first glance, the general peacefulness of this maritime system seems to confirm the ideas of the Manchester School that free trade was and is a universal good in that the more nations trade, the more they prosper and the less they fight.
This is also the idea behind such visions as SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) as first outlined by Prime Minister Modi in Mauritius in March 2015.[2] In this speech and subsequently, Modi called for regional cooperation in developing the ‘blue economy’, for the harmonisation of maritime interests and for the cooperative defence of maritime security by the IOR countries. The interests of extra-regional powers would be recognised and accommodated through a climate of trust and transparency and adherence to the disciplines of a rules-based order. This achieved, maritime disputes would be resolved and prosperity and peace would follow.
In turn, this would confirm the sea in its role as a strategic enabler, something that joins nations rather than a fence or a barrier that divides them. But, conversely, if that blue economy and sea-based trade is threatened by instabilities of various sorts the sea could well become an arena for increased maritime competition, disorder at sea and international tension. Instability, both ashore and at sea, can threaten trade and, importantly, the conditions for trade, whether it does so directly by threatening the good order at sea on which the safe passage of merchant ships depend, or indirectly by undermining the legal, social and economic conditions ashore that allow trade deals to be struck in the first place and then executed. There seem to be three main sources of instability that could have this effect:
- Challenges to free trade
- Chaos in the littorals
- Inter-state competition
Each source of instability will be discussed in turn, together with a review on how each might best be handled. It will be seen that each has significant consequences for the region’s navies and that naval development and behaviour are part of the problem, but part of the solution too.
Challenges to free trade
Globalisation was supposed by its advocates to usher in an age of peace and prosperity by giving everyone a stake in success and interest in the efficiency and security of the world trading system, whether as consumers looking for reduced costs of living, commodity suppliers, or makers of components used in distributed international manufacturing processes. Further, this meant the world’s navies had to work together to defend the trading system against such threats as piracy and other forms of transnational crimes at sea, instability and natural disasters ashore, and inter-state conflict. Navies, it was argued, were now entering a new era of cooperation at sea.
The South Korean shipping firm Hanjin, however, based its plans on the widespread assumption that international trade would keep on growing and had to file for bankruptcy when it became clear that trade was not in fact expanding. In the second quarter of 2016 it, in fact, fell by 0.8 percent, amidst lower consumption and investment. As a result, many of the world’s 20 million containers and the ships to transport them were not needed.[3] Free trade seems to be in trouble, as the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round talks failed, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership flounders. China, like other major economies, is now making more of what it consumes and consumes more of what it makes. New restrictions are being put into place. The asymmetric effect of these restrictions will increase tension between states.[4] There is likely to be increased competition for resources and even serious talk of trade wars.
Many have lost of faith in the very idea of globalisation. Neo-liberalism has benefitted capital much more than labour and so has led to greater social inequality.[5] In turn, this has sparked a rise in populist anti-globalisation sentiment from Donald Trump in the United States, to Jeremy Corbyn and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. In the 2016 US presidential election even Hillary Clinton, the principal architect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was forced to back away from the project.[6] The addition to this of a xenophobic nationalism empowered by the social media makes for a toxic mixture.
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