BOOK REVIEW. A Eurasia without India?

T he Dawn of Eurasia by Bruno Macaes, a former Minister for Europe in the Portuguese government, is an interesting and very readable geopolitical work, published earlier this year. In it he makes a strong case for Europe and Asia, joined at the hip by geography and history, to accept that they are not separate continents but parts of a Eurasian super-continent.

Read Macaes’s book between the lines and it becomes obvious that he dwells more on the anxieties about the future of the European Union, caught in a period of rapid, and often, violent change than about anything else.

In a world increasingly dominated by China and concerned about a United States in danger of relapsing into 1930s isolationism, Macaes wonders how the European Union should react and refashion itself as a strong and durable union, capable of holding its own when dealing with new economies on the rise.

In the light of Brexit, Macaes is deeply concerned about the very survival of the European Union. Economically strong, he would like to the Union to consolidate itself politically, ‘in order to perform the tasks which the future will call for: to extend its influence outside its boundaries, manage the flow across the borderlands and work for a peaceful future in Eurasia.’

Macaes sees ever-present danger to the European Union in the unabated flow of refugees from conflict zones of West Asia into Europe, the sheer scale of which has flummoxed even the otherwise unflappable Angela Merkel.

He also views Turkey’s cooperation in temporarily stemming the flow sceptically.

Macaes keeps a wary eye on an unpredictable and intriguing Russia as it ruthlessly reasserts itself in parts of Europe it once controlled, nowhere more so than in Ukraine, reviving memories of a cold war everyone thought was over.

As the first President of the Moldovan Republic tells Macaes, “Not even the Great Wall of China is as tall and impenetrable as the wall of the Russian mind.”

The book’s title clearly refers to the emerging economic forces that are drawing the Europe and Asia together today, ‘creating the world’s longest economic corridor, linking the Asia Pacific economic pole at the eastern end of Eurasia and the European pole at its western end.’

Led by China

This spectacular melding of two continents under way, is largely led by China under Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative and mostly financed by Chinese capital, deployed, as some are now finding, on usurious terms and to China’s greatest advantage.

In his book, Macaes wonders if the authoritarian nature of the Chinese system can last and he seems to hesitantly conclude that it, after all, will. The Economist as well as many experts in the West who read China so wrongly in the past, are also now reluctantly coming around to this point of view. One of the earliest to do so was Mark Leonard in his book, What Does China Think?

A recent article in Foreign Affairs , by Yuen Yuen Ang of Michigan University, also suggests that authoritarian China will succeed in becoming a global power, largely because it now possesses a well-trained, result-oriented bureaucracy that delivers and which is also relatively corruption-free.

According to a 2011 Transparency International report, quoted by Yuen, ‘only 9 per cent of Chinese citizens reported to have paid a bribe, compared with 54 per cent in India, 64 per cent in Nigeria and 84 per cent in Cambodia.’

China’s mostly successful post-Mao record in state-directed development clearly shows cool minds and brilliant heads at work in the background, debating policy and implementing programmes that deliver in quick time.

China has what it takes to achieve Xi Jinping’s dream of ‘building a moderately prosperous society by 2021 and turning China into a ‘modern country, when the People’s Republic marks its own centennial in 2049.’

China’s rise and its spectacular development and deployment of a slew of technologies on a mass scale, dazzles Macaes.

‘Returning to Europe after a visit to China,’ he states, ‘feels akin to stepping back in time, to a world where cash, email and business cards are still in use.’

Not counted

For Indians, The Dawn of Eurasia is a cathartic read. For long, there has been a nagging feeling that we do not count in Asia. Macaes’s book only serves to reinforce this view by barely acknowledging our existence.

This of course is a grave mistake the West is making. The world is in urgent need of a countervailing force to China, and in India it has one in the Eurasian space that has so seduced Macaes.

The book is a compelling read with interesting accounts of places Macaes has travelled to, about which many of us know so little about, such as Korgas. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, this massive Chinese entrepot-on-land now constitutes a vital link between the Asian and European parts of Macaes’s Eurasia.

Macaes’s book is peppered with accounts of his meetings with people across Eurasia who have local and regional understandings, so essential to make sense of a new fusing of Europe and Asia which Macaes, quite rightly, believes is under way.

It is odd then, that in a book on Eurasia, Macaes almost completely ignores India.

The writer is visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

Meet the author : Bruno Maçães is currently a Senior Advisor at Flint Global in London, where  he advises companies on international politics, and a Senior Fellow at Renmin University,Beijing, and the Hudson Institute in Washington.

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