According to historian Daniel Headrick, the opening of Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the 19th Century geopolitics and geo-economics and accelerated the globalization of the world. In the 21st Century, the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor promises to do it once again.
Zachary Karabell’s award-winning book, ‘Parting the Desert’ explains the complex engineering, economic, political and diplomatic challenges which the French diplomat and entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps faced, while building the strategic waterway of Suez Canal and bringing Orient and Occident closer to each other by reducing thousands of miles and days of costly and perilous sea travel. The Suez Canal also brought the rising industrialized powers of Western Europe closer to their Eastern colonies and markets, which provided them cheap labor and free raw material. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) worth $46 billion will do the same. It will enable Beijing to sustain its economic rise, by bringing South Asian, Central Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Western European markets and raw material suppliers, closer and making its products cheaper in the international markets. CPEC will also allow China to sustain it rapid economic growth by making the energy producing West Asia and the Middle East closer and more accessible.
However, Karabell’s book also lucidly traces the complex and multi-dimensional challenges which the French empire faced while building the Suez Canal during the 19th Century and later the British Empire encountered, in trying to maintain its exclusive control over it during the 20th Century. The building, use and security of the Suez Canal have been overshadowed by the great power rivalry, throughout its existence. Sharing the socio-economic benefits of the Suez Canal with the local populace was less of a concern for those who built it or later fought for it. The sobering experience of building and controlling the strategic waterways of Suez Canal offers various useful lessons for those who plan to build the CPEC.
The Suez Canal was built at a time of intense rivalry between major powers, in a multi-polar world, which was more competitive than inter-dependent. In addition, during the 19th Century, the developed world was more connected to their colonies than to their strategic competitors and the relationship between the great powers and their colonies was more exploitative than based on a desire to equitably sharing the ensuing wealth and opportunities. Hence, during the 19th and first half of the 20th Century, the inter-state competition for wealth and power was viewed as an intense zero-sum game between the great powers and it also led to a few peaceful and mostly violent independence movements within their colonies.
In contrast, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor aims to reinforce the strong Sino-Pak geostrategic and geo-political bonds with a deeper, more lucrative and lasting geo-economic inter-dependence between the two neighboring nations. This will not only enable the governments of China and Pakistan to cooperate with each other but also allow the societies of the two nations to become closer and wealthier than ever before. Moreover, CPEC should make Pakistan, more not less, acceptable as an economic corridor and investment hub, not merely for China but also for the rest of the developed world.
The Chinese paradigm of peaceful rise rejects international politics as a zero-sum pursuit of wealth and power. Instead, Beijing aspires for a world, in which wealth and opportunity should be shared in an all-inclusive manner between all nations rather than via a mutually-exclusive or hostile method of statecraft, conducted between the developed and developing nations. This will enable not only the existing and rising major powers but also the developing nations, to mutually shape a more peaceful, secure and stable world order, rather than to return to the competitive great power rivalry, which made the 20th Century, the most vicious and bloody era in human history. Despite unprecedented technological progress, the sobering lessons of the 20th century inform us that without socio-economic justice, equitable sharing of wealth and progress and a universal, criteria-based approach towards arms control, peace and security is less, not more likely.
Pakistan and China face three key challenges in the successful implementation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. First, at the global level, both nations need to convince the major powers, which have an interest in maintaining and benefiting from the geopolitical and geo-economic status quo, that this corridor is not against any other major power or alliance but presents an opportunity not merely for the nations of China and Pakistan but also for the rest of the world to benefit by investing in and trading through this strategic route, akin to Suez Canal. Major powers fought many a times for the control over Suez Canal, only to realize after the crisis of 1956 that all nations will mutually benefit more in its peaceful and collective use instead of violently vying for its exclusive control.
Second, both Pakistan and China aim to eliminate terrorism from their respective territories. The timely success of the Counter-terrorism efforts by both the nations in their respective territories is fundamental to ensuring that this region benefits from the promise which it has always offered but seldom yielded. Third, development besides being a socio-economic subject is also a political phenomenon. It is vital for both China and Pakistan to ensure that the opportunities and rewards of CPEC are visibly, equitably and fairly shared with all the social and economic strata. This will allow the local and particularly the millions of poor people of this region to develop a collective stake in CPEC, as a ray of hope towards their socio-economic emancipation, welfare and empowerment rather than to further expand the socio-economic divisions. This approach will be useful not merely in terms of regional economic progress but more importantly towards nation building.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, like the Suez Canal, will bring different parts of the world closer to each other, like never before. Thanks to technology, the age of shrinking distances has never been faster and costlier. Humanity’s common dream of a prosperous, progressive and peaceful world can be realized if we learn from past mistakes and our collective dreams can conquer our individual fears. The US has pivoted towards East Asia, through a strategic rebalance while China has pivoted towards rest of the world, through Pakistan. The former is based on fear, the latter on hope. Let us give hope a chance.
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