Last week’s mindless assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent shock waves across the world. The longest-serving Prime Minister of Japan fell to an assassin’s bullet and succumbed almost immediately. While the world mourns the loss of a statesman and a leader, the academic community is bereft of a scholar.
The term, ‘Indo-Pacific’, has increasingly gained currency across the political and foreign policy spectrums around the world today. Prime Minister Abe was among the first to articulate it when he addressed the Indian parliament in 2007 (it is famously known as the ‘Confluence of the Two Seas’ speech). Quoting Swami Vivekananda and from Prince Dara Shikoh’s work ‘Majma-ul-Bahrain’, Abe introduced two concepts.
First is the intermingling of different streams to converge into the seas. Second, he emphasised the interconnectedness of the Indian and Pacific oceans as ‘seas of freedom and prosperity’. Abe also noted how India’s relevance to the emerging contours of the Indo-Pacific would shape the latter’s strategic vision.
This approach to the Indo-Pacific clearly endorsed a shift in how the maritime perspectives of regional states were reshaping themselves. Arguments of Asian states emerging from the cold war with an external focus and a willingness to engage more robustly ushered in the growth of multilateralism in the region, led in many ways by the ASEAN mechanisms.
When the East Asia Summit emerged in 2005, it was seen as a precursor to the idea of the Indo-Pacific, bringing a mosaic of countries together despite a vertical divide between them. China and several ASEAN states were on one side with a tilt towards the authoritarian models of governance. The United States, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, along with a few ASEAN states, represented the democratic side of the divide. Around this time, specifically in 2007, Abe proposed the ‘Arc of Freedom and Prosperity’, which identified multilateral engagement promoting the key pillars of free trade, connectivity and the rule of law.
As the concept of the Indo-Pacific took firmer shape, this divide became more prominent with the emergence of the Quad, which too found significant support from the Abe administration. The Quad was initially conceived as early as 2007, but countries like Australia shied away from it because of their close economic ties with China. As the regional dynamics were impacted by China’s rise and its unilateral posturing, the need for the Quad re-emerged and from 2017 it began to take a more institutional shape. Though the concept of the ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ was unveiled by President Donald Trump in November 2017, it was Prime Minister Abe who conceived that idea, pointing to it a year earlier in a speech in Nairobi while discussing Africa’s developmental issues.
The idea highlighted the need to bridge the continental divides, bringing the African continent into the Indo-Pacific dynamic. It was seen in the context of China’s growing focus on Africa where African needs for infrastructure were driving Chinese investments into the region and China’s demands for resources were being met in return.
Following this initial reference to a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’, Prime Minister Abe and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2016 began to evolve the framework for the Asia Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC), to establish a critical developmental link between the continents, pushing forward the possibility of collaborative engagement in the wider region.
The concept of ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ thereafter became the pivot for the re-convened Quad meetings with individual members articulating their separate visions of what constitutes each country’s Indo-Pacific strategy. While the member states of the region have used various adjectives to describe the region, the core focus always revolved around the concepts of ‘free and open’. The phrase went beyond mere semantics and looked at three crucial pillars that Japan prioritised for the region. These three pillars endorsed the following: first, adherence to international law, right of passage and navigation. Second, preserving the region’s open economy and trade relations, a key component where Japan’s views converged with the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. Third, promoting a stable and peaceful Indo-Pacific, where both traditional and non-traditional security issues could be addressed. Similarly, several European states also pushed forward their individual and collective views on the Indo-Pacific, bringing greater global focus on the shifts in the immediate region.
Behind this evolving vision of the Indo-Pacific was a leader who saw the regional maritime conflicts from a nationalistic perspective. Chinese assertions in the East Sea and the South China Sea were issues that critically undermined the relevance of international law and the existing normative order, impacting interstate relations at the bilateral and multilateral levels. Prime Minister Abe’s approach was to make a concerted effort at global governance of maritime commons. Prime Minister Abe represented a kind of collective approach to managing both security and economic ties in the larger regional expanse through a rules-based order subjected to unilateral changes by rising powers. What Abe envisioned was a more international and governance-based approach to the Indo-Pacific where all states, big and small, could exercise their rights through respect for international law and normative values. This is the legacy of the Indo-Pacific that needs to be enshrined, even though the voice behind it has been lost too soon.
Shankari Sundararaman
Professor at School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi
(shankari@mail.jnu.ac.in)