India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar emphasized the pivotal role of the India-China relationship in shaping the future of Asia and the world during his address at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York on Tuesday. In a rapidly evolving “multipolar” world, Jaishankar said that the dynamic between the two Asian giants will be crucial in determining the trajectory of the region.
Speaking on the changes reshaping global politics, Jaishankar said, “Asia is very much at the cutting edge of that change. Within Asia, India is part of leading that change. But that change is today stretching the fabric of the global order.”
He further highlighted the significance of the India-China relationship, saying, “If the world is to be multipolar, Asia has to be multipolar. And therefore, this relationship will influence not just the future of Asia but perhaps the future of the world as well.”
Jaishankar emphasised the need for India to navigate this period of volatility and unpredictability as it rises on the global stage. “India, which is rising, has to prepare to rise amidst volatility and unpredictability. Typically, when big powers rise, they hope for congenial circumstances,” he remarked.
In his address, the External Affairs Minister chose three key terms to describe the current state of global affairs: “rebalancing,” “multipolar,” and “plurilateralism.” He said that “rebalancing” is driven largely by Asia, which has seen its economies grow significantly in recent decades. “Asia has been key to that rebalancing… Among the top 20 economies of the world, many more are now from Asia. India, which was the 10th largest economy a decade ago, is currently the 5th and is likely to become the 3rd by the end of the decade.”
The second term, “multipolar,” reflects the increasing number of independent decision-making centers worldwide, reshaping global politics and moving away from the once-dominant bipolar and unipolar world orders.
Jaishankar said that the other word was “multipolar,” as it was the consequence of the rebalancing as it overlaps and convergences the international politics impacting the global architecture that was there during the initial years of the United Nations.
“The word that would occur to me when I again tried to describe the world would be multipolar and this is a consequence of rebalancing in the sense that there are many more independent centres of decision-making in the world and what it does is it really shifts international politics more in the direction of finding convergences and overlaps, and that actually has an impact on the global architecture that from what was in the initial years of the UN, a very much more bipolar world briefly went into unipolarity,” he explained.
Finally, Jaishankar introduced “plurilateralism” as a concept to describe the growing importance of cooperation between countries in ways that go beyond traditional bilateral relationships.
“A third word that would occur to me is plurilateralism. It’s a very ugly word, but it in a sense describes a world beyond bilateral relations, but in short, a multilateral one where countries form combinations based on these convergences and overlaps that I’ve talked about,” he said.
“I think this is the latest step in the growth of that platform now rebalancing multipolar plurilateralism,” he added.
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