Saturday, 7 November, 2020
08 WORLD VIEW
Don’t overestimate the Us election impact on soUth asia
OutlOOk, india
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MiChael KugelMan
s of this writing, the outcome of America’s 2020 election—one closer than many pollsters had projected—was unclear. Given what’s at stake, Americans—and the world— were nervously awaiting the result. And yet, when it comes to south Asia, there’s little reason for anxiety. And that’s because there’s not much daylight between the positions of Donald Trump and Joe Biden on U.s. policy in the region. In a country as hyper-polarized as America, few public policy issues are nonpartisan. Everything under the sun, from immigration and health care to climate change and the question of U.s. global leadership, amounts to partisanship on steroids—bitterly disputed between America’s two main political parties and their supporters. Even issues that should transcend the poison of partisanship—from wearing a mask during a pandemic to fully supporting U.s. treaty allies—have become political footballs. U.s. policy toward India, however, is an exception. It’s one of the few subjects that Republicans and Democrats, and by extension Trump and Biden, agree on. For this reason, the 2020 election impact on U.s. policy toward India—and south Asia more broadly— shouldn’t be overstated. Geopolitical dynamics, more than the person occupying the White House on Inauguration Day, will influence the trajectory of U.s. relations with India and its neighbors. The U.s.-India relationship has enjoyed forward movement ever since the early 1990s, and especially since the mid-2000s. Two key U.s. interests with strong bipartisan support—combating terrorism and counterbalancing China—have fueled its growth. Today, amid a U.s.-China rivalry that’s here to stay, both Democrats and Republicans view U.s.-India partnership as a strategic imperative. They view India as a like-minded player keen to work with Washington to push back against Beijing in the Indo-Pacific region. The election won’t interrupt the relationship’s latest
surge in momentum, which in recent days saw the signing of a major defense accord that enables Washington to share sensitive intelligence with New Delhi—the last of a series of foundational agreements that America inks with its closest defense partners. In fact, by traveling to India to sign the accord just days before their boss risked becoming a lame duck, the U.s. secretaries of state and defense telegraphed a significant message: U.s.-India partnership transcends partisan issues like elections, and endures regardless of the government of the day. To be sure, Democrats are more willing than Republicans to call out India on human rights and religious freedom concerns. Barack Obama famously criticized India on the latter during a 2015 speech in New Delhi. Additionally, much of the noise on Capitol Hill last year following India’s Article 370 revocation came from Democrats. still, given the bipartisan support for the idea that U.s.-India partnership is essential, any White House—regardless of party affiliation—will limit such criticism to avoid rocking the boat with India. Widen the geographic lens beyond India, and the bipartisan policy consensus remains entrenched. Both Democrats and Republicans view Pakistan as an important country that warrants a workable relationship, but that is also a difficult partner. Both view as paramount Pakistan’s assistance with peace talks in Afghanistan and continued counterterrorism efforts at home. Both remain open to broadening the relationship into the trade and investment realm—but only after sufficient progress is made on Afghanistan and counterterrorism. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, both major U.s. parties support a peace process that ends the war, and the withdrawal of U.s. troops. Democrats favor a more gradual exit, but they want one nonetheless. They wouldn’t want to back out of the agreement with the Taliban, concluded last February, which obliges all U.s. troops to leave by the spring of 2021. However, while Democrats and Republicans largely operate in lockstep on south Asia policy, there are sharp differences in their foreign policy positions more broadly that carry considerable implications for India and its neighbours. Democrats favor a more conciliatory position toward Iran. They want to bring America back into the nuclear deal with Tehran brokered by Obama. An even modestly improved U.s.-Iran relationship would be advantageous for New Delhi, Islamabad, and Kabul. All three want stronger commercial ties with Tehran, and they’d rather not have to confront a tough U.s. sanctions regime on Iran. Then there’s China. A bipartisan consensus exists in Washington that Beijing is America’s top strategic rival, and constitutes a threat to U.s. economic primacy. But Democrats are more open to exploring cooperation in some areas. Potential spaces for collaboration include, as Biden wrote in a Foreign Affairs essay earlier this year, climate change, nonproliferation, and health security. A slightly less fraught U.s.-China relationship
would be welcomed by Islamabad, Beijing’s close ally, as this would give U.s.-Pakistan relations more space to grow. A mild U.s.-China detente may even be welcomed by New Delhi. After all, the more toxicity there is in U.s.-China relations, the more likely Beijing is to hit out at America’s friends, including India, as it did in Ladakh. The next administration will be confronted with three key south Asia policy questions. The first is how to reframe the U.s.-Pakistan relationship amid an impending withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. For four decades, Washington has largely viewed this relationship through the lens of Afghanistan. The second is how to manage a fast-growing U.s.-India security partnership outside of an alliance system that Washington prefers but that New Delhi eschews, insisting that it remains committed to strategic autonomy—and even after the Ladakh crisis, which crystallizes the threat that Beijing poses to both New Delhi and Washington. The trick is to find a happy medium between alliance and alignment. Finally, the next administration must figure out how to fit south Asia into its broader Asia policy. Both major parties agree on allocating more economic and security resources to the region to push back against China, and they have implemented similar policies: the Asia pivot and rebalance for Obama, and the Indo-Pacific strategy for Trump. To this point, such efforts (with the exception of India policy) have been more focused on East Asia, home to U.s. treaty allies. But China’s increasing inroads into south Asia—mainly through the vehicle of BRI—coupled with its capacity to threaten U.s. partners there highlight the strategic logic of formally bringing south Asia into the Indo-Pacific fold. The Trump administration’s messaging (in January, a senior official declared that the Indo-Pacific stretches from “California to Kilimanjaro”), along with Indo-Pacific policy documents supporting more cooperation with smaller south Asian states, suggest a desire for including western Asia in the Indo Pacific policy. Given U.s. bipartisan concern about China’s growing reach in broader Asia, such a position won’t likely attract opposition across the aisle. The 2020 election was one of the most consequential in decades, mainly because it was a referendum on so much—and especially the dramatically different approach that Trump, one of the most unconventional and controversial leaders in modern U.s. history, brought to the presidency. It’s been a turbulent three-plus-year in Trump’s America. And yet, in the tumultuous sea of U.s. politics, policy toward India and the broader region is a relative island of stability. sure, there may be differences around the margins, but it largely enjoys broad bipartisan support. Continuity is assured, regardless of the election outcome. Michael Kugelman is Deputy Director for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
GettinG reaDy For mr BiDen With a constrained mandate, he will face strong domestic and external challenges Hindustan times eDitOrial
The election of the 46th president of the United states is over, bar the final official result. While there remain a handful of states yet to finish their ballot tabulating, Democratic candidate Joe Biden requires only a single victory to win the magic number of electoral college votes. Mr Biden will not be able to claim a decisive mandate. The presidential contest has gone down to the wire. The Democrats failed to recapture the senate and suffered a net loss of seats in the House of Representatives. Donald Trump was able to eat into Democratic margins among the working class and even minorities. If Covid-19 had not struck and Mr Trump had been slightly less abrasive, a second term would have been more than likely. This election was all about him: Even those who voted for Mr Biden did so largely because he wasn’t Donald Trump. Mr Biden will take over a nation deeply divided on a number of fronts, and be overwhelmingly absorbed in trying to heal the gaping wounds evident in American society. His administration wants to spend money at home to overcome the pandemic, lay out a green energy path, expand subsidised health care and revamp ailing infrastructure. Much of this will be designed to overcome the social inequities that led to the Trump phenomenon in the first place. But Mr Biden will shy away from the more radical demands of the Left-wing of his party, primarily breaking up tech monopolies and Wall street’s financial conglomerates. He will be harassed from the Right by Mr Trump even as his party’s progressive wing will push him to move further Left, even as Mr Biden’s policy initiatives will be ideologically moderate. Mr Biden will have his own version of America First. Yes, he will reverse Mr Trump’s stance on immigration, security alliances and, most of all, the multilateral approach on climate. Punitive tariffs will be rolled back, in part because they are ineffective, but trade will be increasingly about reciprocity. The shifting of supply chains and technology coalition-building, both aimed at China, will continue. Middle Kingdom bashing is bipartisan, but there may be marked difference in tactics. Mr Biden’s team version of isolationism lies in the desire to commit less overseas and invest more on the home front. Beijing is unlikely to give him so much leeway. Mr Biden will be tested in the international realm — and having to decide whether home renovation is possible without neighbourhood watch duties.
macron’s task is to show French muslims they have a place in the republic THE PRESIDENT MUST DEMONSTRATE THAT THE SECULAR STATE – WITH A SUBTLE DOSE OF MULTICULTURALISM – WORKS FOR THEM
Guardian
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Catherine FiesChi
s a dual citizen of France and Canada, I never cease to be amazed by the depth of misunderstanding there is about French attitudes to religion. France’s shortcomings in its management of diversity are obvious – as are everyone else’s – but it is important to recognise some basic facts before pronouncing on them. The first is that the principle of laïcité in France – the country’s particular brand of secularism – is more than posturing: it is a lived, sociological fact. The extent of secularism in France, especially over the last half century, is well documented. Jérôme Fourquet, in The French Archipelago, provides 350 pages of evidence on the transformation of France – or, as he puts it, the disappearance of the religious in France. To explain the depth of that transformation, he starts with the obliteration of Catholicism. There hasn’t just been a precipitous decline in Catholic belief and practice, but a near-vanishing of Christian references. In 1945, Catholicism had officially been a minority sport for half a century, but it still played a role in the social space. The years since the war have
seen that role disappear, and Catholic observance reduced to a (very small) minority. As a result, that minority has occasionally become more strident, more “identitarian”, but also quite irrelevant. Its irrelevance is confirmed by Olivier Roy in Is Europe Christian?, in which he examines the political space occupied by French Catholics. As Roy puts it, no political party in France can afford to put Catholicism at the heart of its political programme – or in fact go anywhere near it, because it speaks to only roughly 5% of the electorate. And switches everyone else radically off. And this is the key point: France is a nation of equalopportunity heretics. The allergy to granting faith any kind of public role is displayed across the board: most French people will break out in hives at the sight of a procession of priests in the public space, as much as at any other kind of religious display. Any debate about the rights or wrongs of France’s brand of secularism needs to be conducted within the terms of this generalised anti-clericalism. Of course, there is a difference between poking fun at a majority culture that is largely confident in itself and its own contradictions, and poking fun at a culturally and economically marginalised minority. There is Islamophobia in France, much as in any non-Muslim majority country, but reducing the principle of laïcité to intolerance or racism – or alleging that it is no more than a vast cover-up – is missing how deep and how wide French suspicion of all faiths runs. so while this across-the-board anti-clericalism may exacerbate social tensions, it is politically defensible and institutionally rooted. Anyone holding their breath for an about-turn on this is in for a long wait. Most French people would go to the wall for it, including against any Christian church. And those who are looking for France to compromise here misunderstand the nature of what citizenship means in
France: any compromise with any faith will be seen as a breach of the social contract. That is the second basic fact. However, for the contract to hold, it needs to be renewed with French citizens of all beliefs and of all cultures. And for that to work secularism cannot be deployed simply as an incantation of republican values or used as a test of belonging. Laïcité needs to be explained. For many (especially young) Muslims it simply isn’t clear how or why this particular ideal can be liberating rather than diminishing: that it offers a neutral space in which to exercise one’s fundamental human rights, including the right to walk away from one’s original tradition or belief. Taking the trouble to spell this out (it hasn’t been done since the 1905 law separating church and state) is a necessary step. And it is a remarkably difficult one. The renewed emphasis that the French government is hopefully now going to place on the teaching of laïcité – rather than simply beating people over the head with it – gives me hope. But this takes us to the third basic fact and the recent actions of Emmanuel Macron, which mark a departure from those of his predecessors. Over the past few weeks, Macron has been taken to task for calling for a reformed Islam, and a French Islam. I think his recent actions show two things. The first is a resoluteness in engaging with Muslim media and Muslim organisations abroad. He has made it clear, for example, that he supports the inclusion of Hezbollah in talks on the future of Lebanon. Domestic engagement with French Muslim organisations may alienate some, given that these groups do not represent all French Muslims. But the fact that they are so actively being brought into the tent suggests a pivotal moment. Macron is upping the security ante, too, adapting the counter-terrorism strategy France first put in place in the aftermath of 9/11 and developed after the attacks of
2015. And of course this is part of his attempt to square up to Marine Le Pen and her supporters. But the president may also quietly be setting the stage for a new departure; closer to a strategy of multiculturalism, even if that concept is so fundamentally misunderstood in France that it could never dare speak its name. I have always argued that multiculturalism, as practised in Canada or singapore rather than Germany or the UK, is a stroke of realpolitik genius. Far from the kumbaya philosophy to which it is often reduced, multiculturalism is first and foremost an incredibly effective if slightly cynical political strategy. It is designed to create a framework for the participation of minorities – complete with all the right financial and political incentives – in exchange for an agreement that each of them becomes just one defined cultural strand among many. Faith and religion become culture, as do language and ethnicity. Institutions make room for their representation, but as criss-crossing cultural identities rather than currents of belief or faith. Multiculturalism in effect dilutes public faith into culture. This may not sit well with everyone, but it does recognise and cement people’s status in a polity. In the French context, where faith is a private matter but religion can be a matter of cultural affiliation, moving toward such inclusion is more necessary than ever. More to the point, it is probably the only compromise on the horizon. In advanced democracies with generous welfare states, where the state rather than the market is the gatekeeper to full citizenship rights, a multicultural set of institutions is the only way to balance rights and duties. What Macron is attempting to do – the carrot of engagement and the stick of security – may not immediately quell the sort of violence we have seen in the past few weeks, but it may create the kind of framework in which French Muslims will finally feel an integral part of the republic. Perhaps Macron has understood that a subtle dose of stealth multiculturalism is the best way to achieve thoroughly republican aims. Catherine Fieschi is director of the new Global Policy Institute at Queen Mary University London and author of Populocracy.
