{"id":22443,"date":"2015-09-14T06:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T20:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=22443"},"modified":"2015-09-14T09:58:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T23:58:12","slug":"oz-india-geoeconomics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/oz-india-geoeconomics\/","title":{"rendered":"Oz\u2013India geoeconomics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"APEC<\/a><\/p>\n

If we wait for Australia and India to develop a common regional vision, we\u2019ll wait forever. Some things will never happen. At least, though, the astigmatism that\u2019s long afflicted the Oz\u2013India ‘views’ of each other is improving. Granted some of this is the bounce you get from a low base, but the Oz\u2013India trend line is positive: interests start to align, \u00a0policies touch, priorities rhyme.<\/p>\n

India aspires to be a leader, not just a balancer. Narendra Modi looks for new partners and lots of countries are eager to play. An India with a broader view will find it easier to fit Australia into the frame.<\/p>\n

The geostrategic music swells\u2014although (that low base thought) it\u2019s easy to improve on past periods of Oz\u2013India silence. Equally\u2014and even more loudly\u2014 trade trends shift the geoeconomic understandings of India and Australia. In the circular way of these things, economic changes feed directly into the geostrategic vision of the Indo\u2013Pacific now loudly proclaimed by Canberra.<\/p>\n

The goal of finalising a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) between Australian and India by the end of 2015 is being talked up as a major opportunity for the two economies.<\/p>\n

Canberra wants a re-run of the magic that China has sprinkled on the Australian economy. That profound shift \u00a0means that in the 21st century, Australia has been de-coupled from two US economic downturns; US recession no longer automatically infects Australia as it did in the 20th century. Australia\u2019s economic fate is tied to Asia\u2014China today, India tomorrow.<\/p>\n

The Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, says Australia and India<\/a> are:<\/p>\n

‘On the cusp of a new dawn in their commercial relationship…There is something special going on in India. The enormous vision of Prime Minister Modi has excited many people. Australia is looking forward to being a part of this very important period in India’s re-emergence as a significant power.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Boosterism is always at a discount in trade negotiations. Yet the way Australia and India are prepared to contemplate each other speaks to that hope about the frame widening and the vision clearing.<\/p>\n

Trade and economic interests are not always definitive, but they have obvious weight and\u2014most importantly\u2014influence the hierarchy and slow re-ordering of national preferences. The shift of economic weight has cumulative effects on preferences which feed into judgements about national interest.<\/p>\n

What were once easy options can become unthinkable or at least look narrow and outdated because of these cumulative changes. This is not soft power influence, but the hard power calculations of dollars and cents.<\/p>\n

On what was once barely considered and now looks distinctly odd, consider how Australian thinking about China and India has shifted over 25 years, using the frame offered by APEC.<\/p>\n

In 1989, Australia \u00a0helped create the key governmental instrument for \u00a0the Asia\u2013Pacific\u2019s economic future while not having China as a \u00a0founding member. Yep, folks, the first post-Cold War expression of the Asia\u2013Pacific didn\u2019t include China! Extraordinary now, necessary then if not necessarily logical: the horror of the Tiananmen massacre meant China couldn\u2019t be in APEC at its founding. And when, a few years later, Beijing did join, it had to walk through the door together with two other \u2018economies\u2019\u2014Taiwan and Hong Kong. Such \u00a0equivalence is today unimaginable, not least because back then Beijing was prepared to swallow it.<\/p>\n

Introducing India makes this walk through recent history even stranger\u2014because the strangeness persists. When APEC was being created, India was far from the threshold of membership.<\/p>\n

As India surged, the threshold kept retreating.<\/p>\n

Australia, as much as anybody, imposed the ten year freeze on new APEC members\u2014read India\u2014in 1997. And a decade later, Australia, as APEC chairman, wouldn\u2019t or couldn\u2019t push for India\u2019s membership. The Howard Government said there was no regional consensus on India joining. Following Howard, Kevin Rudd pledged support for India\u2019s APEC membership but nothing much moved. The pity is that the chances for Australia to matter on this were back when it mattered\u2014in 1997 or 2007.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s approach reflected the blurred-vision history on India. The Howard Government worried about India\u2019s commitment to the APEC core mantra of \u2018open regionalism\u2019 while blocking India from the \u00a0open-regionalism worship group.<\/p>\n

India is still out\u2014although not for much longer\u2014because now APEC is the loser. Australia was guilty of a failure of imagination and leadership when it chaired APEC in 2007 for not crusading on India\u2019s behalf. Back then, China, particularly was quite happy with the existing membership, while ASEAN was more interested in India\u2019s role in the East Asia Summit. Australia didn\u2019t push for India in APEC membership when it had the chair.<\/p>\n

What is \u00a0a glaring gap in the APEC lineup is about to be fixed, more than \u00a0two decades after India first tried and failed to get into the grouping. The APEC summit in Manila this year is set to admit India<\/a> to the club<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If we were creating APEC from scratch today, both China and India would be so essential as to wield a veto. That statement of the obvious drives much else in Australia\u2019s enlarged and clearer view of India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we wait for Australia and India to develop a common regional vision, we\u2019ll wait forever. Some things will never happen. At least, though, the astigmatism that\u2019s long afflicted the Oz\u2013India ‘views’ of each other …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":22444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[558,1056,433,69],"class_list":["post-22443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-apec","tag-bilateral-relations","tag-economics","tag-india"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOz\u2013India geoeconomics | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/oz-india-geoeconomics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Oz\u2013India geoeconomics | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If we wait for Australia and India to develop a common regional vision, we\u2019ll wait forever. 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