Recent summits only confirm differences

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: Summits and other high level international meetings are the diplomatic equivalent of measuring out one's life in coffee spoons. They reveal little and usually change little. Sometimes, nevertheless, a series of such encounters can raise the curtain and show us the nature of the drama in which our lives are set.

They do so -- it is a recurrent theme in all drama, real and fictional -- by showing us how little we have settled for. So it has been recently with events as apparently disparate as the Olympic committee's decision to give China the games in 2008, the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Jiang Zemin in Moscow, the failure of the Indo-Pakistani summit, and now the G-8 meeting.

The Olympic decision can stand as symbolic of China's full entry into world affairs without its having had to pay a serious price in terms of internal political change. As the last difficulties over membership of the World Trade Organization are negotiated away, the Olympic move puts a final stamp of international approval upon an authoritarian and willful state.

China's rulers have relentlessly pressed for recognition in every sphere, while altering not a single element in a national program of reform without democracy domestically and dominance rather than cooperation regionally.

The Putin-Zemin meeting shows both China and Russia determined to go their own way, and ready to make a certain degree of common cause against the United States in order to do so. This, and Putin's attendance in Genoa, reminds us of how completely western countries have accepted the deeply flawed Russia of today.

Lost and gone is the vision of a truly democratic Russia of only a decade ago, a vision toward which schemes like including Russia in the G-8 gatherings were supposed to contribute. Instead the west has accepted Putin's half-way house, without any great expectation that things will get better in Russia and with some fear they may get worse.

It has accepted, too, what might be called his pursuit of great power status by other means. Without real military or industrial strength, Putin's Russia tries to maintain itself as a major force by the opportunistic backing of outsiders such as Iraq and by proposing itself, as in the Moscow agreement with China, as somehow having an alternative to the American way.

Would that it had such an alternative, but it does not. At best, Russia's diplomacy can bridge the gap, as it did over Kosovo; at worst, Russia's policies amount to little more than trouble making.

The failure of the Agra summit between India and Pakistan offers yet another example of a power deeply unready for compromise. Mirroring China's intransigence over Taiwan or Tibet, or Russia's over Chechnya, India cannot bring itself to consider any solution to the Kashmir problem other than its own continued control of the territory, by unavoidably oppressive means.

Partly because of American urging, it organized a summit because it wishes both to avoid a war with Pakistan which could easily become nuclear, and to persuade Pakistan to reduce its support for Kashmir rebels.

On the table for Pakistan, in return, were some attractive economic and trade proposals. But New Delhi could not take the necessary step of changing the language in which it discusses Kashmir -- signaling it as an international dispute rather than an internal problem -- even though such changes would in no way alter the realities of control on the ground.

India, which became a nuclear weapons power, insofar as there was any rational reason except prestige, largely because of its fears of China, thus faces a significant threat of nuclear war not because of its difficult relationship with that country, but because of its uncontrolled relationship with Pakistan.

What we have just seen at Agra was the collapse of an effort to make that relationship more predictable and less dangerous for India and Pakistan and for the rest of us. Who can measure how devastating would be the impact of even a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan? It would go far beyond the subcontinent, and would lead to a deep turn for the worse in human affairs.

Agra draws attention to the continued existence of a zone of colonial oppression and manipulation in the heart of Eurasia. Kashmir is one element in a ring of ethnic suppression and strife which includes Chechnya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Tibet, and Sinkiang as well as a gray area of partial Russian recolonization in some of the former Central Asian States of the Soviet Union.

It is perhaps not impossible to have democratic change and at the same time maintain ethnic suppression or manipulate the conflicts of neighboring peoples. But it has to be harder, since rule and misrule do not sit well together.

The democratic possibility in China, India, and Russia, as well as in the smaller powers lining this suppressive ring, must be affected by these inner Asian entanglements and ambitions. The Great Game is too light hearted a notion to cover what is going on. In pursuit of territory and resources, the historic life of whole peoples is being threatened, and war, including nuclear war, is not ruled out.

The G-8 summit is likely to confirm serious differences between the United States and the Europeans which have already been much discussed, while of course glossing them over in public. Put together European differences with America and Chinese and Russian policies and you might come up with a picture of the nations all reacting to a new or more marked American unilateralism.

But the larger scene shows up the unilateralism of all the main powers, to which our peculiarly European contribution is passivity. It is a world full of potentially loose cannons. Realists might say that it does not differ all that much from the landscape of 10 years ago, and that there is still an unprecedented level of international cooperation.

But then, and it is an important difference, there was more hope that things would change, if not on all fronts, at least on some. In this diminishing of hope the Bush administration's security policy plays a special part. It is true that the ABM treaty is not entirely relevant to today's needs. But it is what we have as part of a very imperfect legacy of collective security.

The technicalities of the arguments aside, the fundamental shift, with Bush, is that the world's leading society has moved from the assumption that we probably will be able to control weapons of mass destruction to the assumption that we probably will not be able to do so.

That changes the context in which every country makes its decisions, tips the balance toward acquisition and development, and tends to replace efforts to construct an international regime of control with a preoccupation with one's own defense.

And it makes the international landscape revealed by these recent summits more worrying. Far from so-called rogue nations being the main problem, it is the major powers, often fixed in their obsessions and objectives, whose trajectory gives most cause for concern.

-- Guardian News Service