Peace with diplomacy: A Global South perspective for Ukraine

A well-functioning world economy is a global asset, one that the US has had a central role in building. Since the end of WWII, the belief that trade and economic cooperation could foster peace guided the US to take a lead in creating the UN and UN agencies, GATT/WTO, the Bretton Woods institutions, regional development banks and systems and norms (e.g. BIS norms for capital adequacy, legal frameworks for IP rights) that enable different countries to trade, invest across borders, cooperate in research and development, and provide assistance when adversity strikes. The US has also led China’s integration into the world economy and the resolution of world crises such as the collapse of the USSR or the 2008 financial crisis. The European Union emerged from the ruins of WWII animated by a similar conviction that trade and economic cooperation could foster peace.

Developed and developing countries alike have benefited from this vision. The reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the East Asia economic “miracle”, China’s rise or India’s growth acceleration have all leveraged the world economy. Other examples include Bangladesh’s and Vietnam’s recent take-off, Indonesia’s sustained growth, or Chile’s diversification of its economy. Notwithstanding poorly managed social and political consequences in advanced economies, globalisation has been the source of prosperity and poverty reduction on a global scale.

Inevitably, the US-sponsored system enabling countries to prosper has also allowed new centres of economic power to emerge. The clock cannot be turned back. Before the industrial revolution, China and India were the world’s largest economies, accounting for more than half of the world’s GDP. Sheer arithmetic will make them reoccupy this position. Other nations, like Indonesia, Bangladesh or Vietnam, will overtake some of the largest European economies. The emergence of a more even distribution of world power is inevitable.

The US-EU resistance to the rise of China is the most visible indication of these trends. However, the recent vote on the March UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows that broader and more subtle forces are also at work.

The Western media has highlighted that more than two-thirds of the UN members condemned Russia’s aggression. Less prominent in the news has been that the 40 which abstained or opposed the resolution represent 53 per cent of the world population. Countries either abstaining or refusing to take sanctions against Russia include some of the world’s largest democracies: India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa as well as key US allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Indonesia has resisted pressures to exclude Russia from the forthcoming G-20 meeting in October. The developing world takes a moderate approach to the ongoing Ukraine conflict and appears sceptical about the benefits of sanctions.

The reasons vary from India’s “…conviction that differences can only be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy” to China’s view that the UN resolution does not “take full consideration of the history and complexity of the current crisis”. Part of this complexity is the problem of Russian ethnic and linguistic minorities in Ukraine, and the brushing aside of Russia’s concerns with NATO’s expansion. Since the mid-1990s that expansion has been criticised and its consequences anticipated by prominent US experts including George Kennan, retired US secretaries of state and defense, former USSR Prime Minister Gorbachev, Angela Merkel, and, once again, recently and vocally, by Henry Kissinger.

The resistance to the emergence of new centres of power has military, political and economic dimensions. The efforts the US deployed in building the global economy have been followed by decisions which ignore the benefits of peace and diplomacy, the rules established after WWII, the US peace movement, and initiatives to disarm the world. The Wolfowitz doctrine in the early 1990s and the Bush doctrine ten years later codify a US defence strategy, at times supported by the EU, justifying preemptive action against threats, perceived or real, regional or global, and unilateral interventions in the pursuit of democratic regime change. The recent recasting of this strategy as a mythical war of “Democracies” against “Autocracies” is a troubling goal as democracy in the US reveals its frailties.

The US-EU resistance to the rebalancing of the world order includes opposition in the Bretton Woods institutions to China’s and India’s claims for a larger role, the Trans-Pacific Trade Pact, and “friend-shoring”. The WTO has been weakened by unilateral impositions of tariffs and the freezing of dispute resolution mechanisms. Sanctions against Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela, and the unthinkable confiscation of Russian and Afghan funds in Western banks further fragment the global order and weaken the payment system. In contrast, during the India-Pakistan war, India fully respected the World Bank-brokered Indus Water treaty. On the geopolitical front, the permanent membership to the UN Security Council excludes all emerging economies, but China.

The conflict in Ukraine is the most recent clash between the West and the rest of the world's perspectives. The unacceptable Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with the regrettable conviction that, notwithstanding the risk of nuclear war, a military response to the conflict was superior to a diplomatic one.

The rising of superpowers’ tension is the last thing the world needs to find solutions to common threats and challenges — global warming, inequality, poverty, hunger, Africa’s development, regional conflicts, epidemics, immigration. The war has imposed enormous costs to the Ukraine people and the rest of the world. It is causing unemployment, slow growth and rising poverty for the vulnerable in advanced and developing economies. It has distracted from the need to deal with climate change, and it has pushed European countries to increase their reliance on coal. Trade restrictions, export bans on grains, supply chain disruptions, sanctions, increasingly fragment the global economy and threaten its recovery.

The forthcoming G20 November meeting in Bali is an opportunity for the world’s largest democracies, Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, the BRICS and other like-minded members of the G20 to take immediate diplomatic initiatives to demand and work for the return of diplomacy and a peaceful resolution of the European war. It is in everyone’s interest to recognise that finding solutions to the problems the world faces requires cooperation. This would enable the G20 summit to focus on launching actions towards a new world order which recognises that diplomatic efforts trump all other options, and should include renunciations of the use of nuclear weapons and military might, an orchestrated reduction in the massive military investments ongoing in West and East, discussion of a new strategic and security architecture, and the end of sanctions and weaponisation of international trade. There is no reason why in the 21st century the world needs to sort out conflicts with the methods of the 20th. As Merkel indicated recently, “We have to find a way to co-exist despite all our differences.”

Kelkar served as Chairman of the 13th Finance Commission and executive director of India in the IMF. Zagha taught at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and worked at the World Bank. He is a former World Bank country director for India and secretary of the Commission on Growth and Development