Asia at a crossroad: Where is it going?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The 'post-colonial era' in Asia is over. What's not clear yet is where Asia goes from here: into a bloody rerun of 20th-century European history, or straight into a peaceful and democratic 21st century.

Soeharto's fall guarantees the democratization of Indonesia, which means that soon every one of the former Asian 'tigers' will be a democracy. India's nuclear weapons tests have not yet been echoed by Pakistan, but the nuclearization of the wider alliance structure on the Asian mainland is now almost complete. Two bold signposts for Asia's future -- but pointing in opposite directions.

The nightmare scenario is easier to sketch, because we have analogies from Europe's past. When a fascist party comes to power in India on a minority of votes, the parallel with Germany in 1933 is hard to ignore. When that new Indian government promptly starts blowing off nuclear weapons, justifying it by the alleged threat from its neighbors, the sense of deja vu is overwhelming.

Speaking to India Today magazine, India's exultant Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee could not stop boasting: "India now has a big bomb and is a nuclear weapons state. We will not hesitate to use the bomb in self-defense...There is no question of India signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty....The bomb is not intended for peaceful purposes. Celebrations are being organized up and down the country."

Does he not know that the rest of the world can hear him too, or does he just not care? Couldn't he at least have said that India will only use nuclear weapons if others use them first?

"We will not hesitate to use the bomb in self-defense" is a much broader formulation. In fact, since every country always sees all of its own wars as acts of 'self-defense' (have you ever heard anybody declare that they are waging a war of naked aggression?), Vajpayee's statement is tantamount to saying that India will use nuclear weapons whenever it fights. And it has fought both Pakistan and China in the past (though never yet both at the same time).

India was alarmed recently by Pakistan's testing of a new 1,500-km. (1,000-mi.) nuclear-capable missile -- but India itself has already tested a comparable missile. New Delhi has also been annoyed by the persistent infiltration of Pakistani-trained insurgents into Indian-controlled Kashmir, but that's not why India went nuclear either.

Vajpayee's government freely admits that it would have carried out the tests during its brief stint in power two years ago, if it had only had enough time. He leads a movement that sees enemies everywhere, that thrives politically on confrontation with foreign devils -- and that might drag mainland Asia into a nuclear war.

China has long had a loose alliance with Pakistan, since both countries have territorial disputes with India. Russia, with its own border dispute with China, had a loose alliance with India on the principle that 'the enemy of my friend is my friend'. These four countries are home to almost half of the human race -- and if they all end up with nuclear weapons, it's much more dangerous than when only China and Russia had them.

The other great power in the Asian alliance system, Russia, democratized seven years ago, and as a result it's trying very hard to extract itself from the system. All but one of Russia's border disputes with China are settled, and its relationship with Beijing has improved enormously.

China is showing no interest in being immolated as a by- product of an Indo-Pakistani war either. "We realize that nuclear proliferation is a great danger," says Shen Jiru, author of a book called China Won't Become Mr. No that is the new standard text on international affairs for the reform wing of China's ruling Communist Party. "This (Indian nuclear test) is an opportunity for us to show the world that we are a responsible power."

These same reformers could, in a few years, lead the process of democratization in China. If the old Soviet Union could do it, if South Korea and Taiwan and now Indonesia can do it in Asia, if Chinese students have already tried it once on Tienanmen Square, then democracy is certainly not something unimaginable in China. And it could even come from inside the Party: most of the leaders of the drive to democratize Russia were former Communists.

But so what? India has been democratic for fifty years, and yet it elects a fascist government that immediately goes nuclear. This is a strategic lunacy that endangers the country's future, by nuclearizing a confrontation in which India previously enjoyed a crushing superiority over Pakistan in conventional weapons. Democracy didn't prevent that sort of irrationality in India.

No, but it does make it less likely elsewhere. History offers few examples of democratic countries going to war with each other.

Democracy in Russia, and the prospect of democratization in China, mean that any nuclear war in Asia is likely to be confined to the Indian subcontinent. And democracy in India leaves open the possibility (at least for a while) that Indians can democratically remove the people who are leading them straight towards hell.