By Professor Tone Bleie, UiT- the Arctic University of Norway
Understanding small states navigating great power rivalry:
Small states maneuvering between great powers is not in any way a recent global and regional phenomenon.
Currently, intensified influence of geography, economics, environmental change and demography on interwoven domestic and foreign politics – or geopolitics – gain attention from policy makers, analysts, and mass media such as this newspaper.
A “travelling” international symposium with the telling subtitle “Balancing, affecting change and navigating dangers” debated last November recent and past dynamics facing Norway, Nepal, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Japan, and China.
The travelling troupe was organized and hosted by a Nansen Professor at an Islandic university and a colleague of mine at UIT – the Arctic University of Norway, and the Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo. Events in four locations in Iceland, Southern and Northern Norway took the pulse on current strategic dilemmas and balancing acts in and-between these countries.
We also drew lessons from Cold-War cooperation between Norway and Soviet Union.
The symposium dissected excruciating dilemmas and reasoned around “smart and less smart” uses of strategic assets under oft volatile circumstances. Current circumstances are characterized by unequal benefit sharing, sprinkled with soft(er) diplomatic carrots and harder diplomacy, such as alliance-building, coalitions, and deterrence.
The latter is underpinned by rapid militarization and propaganda wars, which ought to worry citizenries, politicians and peace and security-mandated institutions alike.
Moreover, unprecedented rapid global environmental change effects geopolitics perversely.
As new oceanic trade routes are opening in the Arctic, a scramble for market shares in shipping and non-renewable resource exploitation (both on-land and ocean-floor) already impacts the rules of the game. Such massive resource plunder feeds into complicated global and regional bio-physical systems already undergoing destabilizing changes.
The symposium’s dissecting debates could easily fill several op-eds. This piece highlights takeaways the undersigned presented on Nepal’s strategic geography in context of great power rivalry.
Let me begin with debating conceptual issues of “the iron laws of geopolitics” and then end with couple of comments on Nepal’s leverage of key geography-related assets.
Why conceptual clarity and caution matters:
A cautious use of the geopolitical paradigm is required, to avoid a simplistic fixture and determinism about “the coordinates” that decide Nepal’s role in regional and world affairs in the past and currently.
Nepal’s foreign policy maneuvers double identities anchored in two civilizational realms.
The first spans the Tibetan plateau, connections onward of mainland China and the Western Himalayas, apart from plain areas of early Buddhism.
Another is entirely Southbound – intertwined with the Indo-Gangetic plains.
This is at best superficially understood by transatlantic diplomats and analysts. It would be too simplistic to argue Nepal today maneuvers between an autocratic China and India as Western-aligned democracy. Federal Nepal encapsulates an extremely complicated terrestrial and vertical political, religious, cultural, and natural geography.
The 2015 Constitution is a compromise, secularism with a caveat, which betrays what I would call a profound ontological anxiety and contradictions.
Ontology means in this context a conviction that humans exist within a sacred cosmos and geography structured around cyclical calendric exchanges between deities, ancestors, kings (currently removed – partly substituted by elected heads of state), priests and hierarchically ranked worshippers.
Sacred space revolves often around a vertical axis. Alternatively, a secular conviction presupposes that the world around you and beyond is stripped of divine casual forces and interventions in human affairs that unfolds in terrestrial and oceanic (increasingly also outer) space.
Secular ontology tasks every individual with moral and social responsibilities to combat global and domestic (in)justices and ensure own and others material and spiritual wellbeing.
This secular worldview is the foundation for conduct seeking to erase caste and gender-based hierarchical social orders which calendric festivals, vrata (pious observances mostly by women) etc. reestablish and legitimize.
This argument invites debate on a fraught terrain current navigated by elected leaders, also reasserting political authority during e.g., greater dasaī, also called daśaharā or durgā puja.
Regardless of whether such performative politics is motivated by shrewd transactional tactics or deep-felt duty to pay homage to Nepal’s religious traditions, one cannot but be struck about its double message about the nature of the social contract between elected rulers and citizens.
In debating Nepal’s home-grown (geo)politics, I find it essential to comment on ontologies of Nepal’s currently elected and abolished hereditary rulers, current politicians, and electorate, before considering how Nepal’s political culture molds mindsets and current statecraft in a geopolitical climate.
In grappling with the question of intricate spatial logics, steeped in religious/cultural, economic, political, and natural geographies, disciplinary turfs are rather unhelpful.
Political scientists have tended to think mainly economic and political geography matter; anthropologists, if not classical materialists, argue cultural geography holds prime importance.
Natural geography becomes a “stepchild” of sorts. This is unfortunate, not merely for production of valid knowledge, but for an informed public debate and public policies.
One should ask: is Nepal’s high mountains, watersheds, hills, and plains “the iron” of Nepal’s geopolitics? Or are axical identities and mindsets shaped by the (predominantly) Northern and Southern civilizational (including religious) geographics as hard core and important?
The “irons” of Nepal’s geopolitics:
The Hindu notion of land of the pure, began eroding with the influx of foreigners after the fall of the Ranas.
That does not mean the notion has lost all public appeal.
Performative politics of royalist forces mobilize cleverly the ancient territorial notion of unified Nepal as a sacred land, threatened by alien, be they Muslims, Christian agents of conversion or alluring Western aid prophets.
Another overlooked example is the non-securitized sophisticated notion of transborder sacred landscape management under ICIMOD’s auspices.
Its value in borderlands politics and management merits attention in the current context of toughening geopolitics.
Nepal’s Northern borderlands exhibit a striking variety of current and historical strategic interests.
The border and trade-corridor and Indo-China-Nepal disputes around Kalapani and Lipulekh represent a strategic borderlands agenda, which offers leverage to be properly handled or squandered.
Dolpa’s porous and shifting borderlands exhibit continuity back to the Tibetan empire, ancient trade routes and mobile pastoral economies.
The recently opened road Pasagadh (in Jajarkot) to Supani (of Tripurasundari) now connecting Dolpa District to the national road network, marks a historical strategic shift with distinct geopolitical and developmental ramifications.
The 1961 Nepal-China Boundary Agreement settled a fixed border around the Rasuwa Pass. From a (Western) Westphalian vantage point of state sovereignty, this is how international borders ought to be defined.
It was settled in consideration of pastoral user rights, ancient passes, trade, and taxation.
The recent upgrading of the Rasuwagadhi-Kerung crossing point aims in the short run to boost trade, tourism and people-to-people contact between the two countries.
The crossing’s larger long term strategic importance within the Belt-and-Road-Initiative deserves international and national attention.
Similarly, cultural, economic, political, and natural geographies reshape the open Southern Indo-Nepal border and the different federal outcomes (the Madheshi-controlled province-1 versus the Tharus attempt for a separate province).
Alas such analysis deserves more space than affordable here.
These admittingly painfully sketchy examples warrant an overarching historical narrative of key pre (Baisi and Chaubaisi rajas, Newar mandala etc.) – and post-unification (Gurkha) political entities, center-periphery shifts framed by natural geography, the waxing and waning of high-plateau and plain empires – which led to landmark treaties and subsequent shifts in borderlands politics.
In our travelling Arctic symposium, I highlighted several treaties, including the strategic political and territorial effects of the Sugauli Treaty of 1816.
The autocratic regime institutionalized Gurkha recruitment (from a few conquered principalities) to gain leverage in imperial politics.
This, together with an altered economic and cultural geography because of ceding vast Eastern territories to the East India Company, and the Terai border settlements (partly reversed after the Indian Mutiny of 1857) are but few examples.
Historical takeaways of Nepal’s strategic geography:
Nepal navigated a favorable strategic placement between highland Tibet, Eastern mainland empires and the South’s princely states and British India.
The country succeeded to uphold a greater degree of autonomy than Tibet after the Treaty of Betravati in 1792.
Contrary to the idea of the High-Himalayas as hiding isolated Shangri-las, inspired by a popular novel of the English author James Hilton, the High-Himalayas was penetrable.
The massif harbored passes that enabled (and continue to do so) dynamic longstanding cultural and economic interchange between urban trade centers of the Mid-Hills, monastic hubs on the high plateau and distant Eastern mainland cities and trading posts.
The fanciful notion of isolated peaceful mountain communities was not entirely a European phantasy.
Hilton’s inspiration? Captivating narratives of beyuls (hidden valleys) in ancient Tibetan scriptures.
Indeed, my Tibetan colleagues and I found a similar notion of hidden valleys in written scriptures of migrants from Amdo and Kham to Western Chang Tang in the 17th. and 18th. centuries. King Birendra mobilized such imaginations in a bid to establish Nepal as a Zone of Peace in 1975.
Nepal maintains a state-centered martial public memory of Nepal’s unification, expansionism, and periods of circumscribed sovereignty.
This memory- not without its corrective and counter narratives in Federal Nepal – together with a legacy of trans-Himalayan and plains-bound diplomacy, constitute pillars of pragmatic statecraft.
This cannot be properly appreciated and refined unless attention is paid to the fundamentals of sacred time, space, and territory, which coexist uneasily with supra-structural secularization and secular ambitions to dismantle a deeply entrenched hierarchical order.
# About the author: Tone Bleie is Professor of Public Polices and Cultural Understanding at UiT. Her work in and about Nepal, the Greater Himalayan Region, and the Tibetan Plateau spans three decades. Bleie can be reached at: tone.bleie@uit.no