And, India chose to break ranks consistently to be with its new friends.
Beyond the nitty-gritty of emission cuts and technology transfers, the broader significance of the two-week-long United Nations’ climate summit in Copenhagen lay in the manner in which it exemplified how the geostrategic contours of the 21st century are shifting.
These are contours in flux, not wholly settled but clearly discernable, nonetheless. The shaping and breaking of old and new alliances, and the multiple centres of power that the Copenhagen talks wound around, heralded the emergence of the kind of multipolar world that could have scarcely been imagined even a decade ago.
At Copenhagen, Robert Zoellick, president, World Bank, walked through the conference site, the Bella Centre, almost unnoticed, because reporters were busy rushing behind Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese spokesperson for the G-77 plus China group.
This was not a one-off. Day after day, the headlines tapped out on keyboards from the Bella Centre’s cavernous media centre were dominated not by Merkel and Brown but by Singh and Wen. As much newsprint was devoted in the last few days of the meeting to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as to the actions of economic giant, Japan.
And in the end, the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord’ that was the summit’s main outcome, was not the dreaded Danish draft by another name, but a US-BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) accord that surgically cut the Danish hosts of the conference right out of the final deal.
Possibly, the greatest loser of the new strategic geography is Europe. Despite having finally passed the much beleaguered Lisbon Treaty, in which the European Union has reposed its hope for renewed relevance, the EU was not only overrepresented at the conference but, in the end, largely ignored.
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For two weeks, Europe tried to play a mediating role, attempting to bring the US on board while persuading the major emerging economies to commit to more than they seemed willing to. In return, they were painted as the main villains of the piece by the BASIC countries and disregarded by the US.
For the developing world, European hypocrisy was embodied in its preaching of climate change urgency on the one hand, while on the other attempting to free itself from its Kyoto Protocol commitments by imposing a new ‘Danish’ treaty on poor countries.
And when push came to shove, the EU’s cross-Atlantic ‘ally’, the US, coolly concluded its closed-door deal with the BASIC group, leaving Europe still tied to legally binding emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, while Washington itself got its desired non-binding pledge and review system in place.
But although the “new” world as revealed by Copenhagen is clearly multipolar, the climate summit also showed that while “all poles are equal, some, or more precisely two, are more equal than others”.
At the climate talks, there may have been the G77, the Umbrella Group (the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand), the Aosis (Association of small island states), the LDCs (least developed countries) and the BASIC group, but over and above all these alliances, there was a G-2 universally acknowledged as holding the keys to any deal, comprising the US and China.
It was clear from the outset that without the world’s biggest economy and its fastest growing rival signing on to a deal, there would be no deal.
India’s strategy for the conference was to clearly pin its colours to the China mast. As Indian minister for environment Jairam Ramesh repeatedly boasted, India and China were meeting up to six times a day to coordinate their negotiating positions.
But while India may be part of BASIC, New Delhi would do well to keep it in mind that it is not part of the G2. It suited China well to have the backing of other emerging economies like India and Brazil in the context of the climate conference. Without this support, Beijing would have been isolated and found it considerably harder to position itself as the spokesperson for the developing world.
Nonetheless, a look at the domestic media coverage of the UN conference in China shows that Beijing’s closeness to BASIC was vastly underplayed compared to the same coverage in India.
Whether or not the India-China strategic alliance on climate translates into any longer term partnership remains an open question. What is more clear is that the UN conference has demonstrated how the line diving the world into North and South, rich and poor, is no longer straightforward or even appropriate.
Between these two poles, there is now a distinct core of countries in the “centre.” As Ramesh has taken to saying, “BASIC is a basic reality”. India has chosen to count itself in that centre, a choice that clearly unhinges it from the South. It is also a choice, the consequences of which will be difficult to undo, going forward.