At a meeting on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly session in New York last week, the leader of Bangladesh’s interim government, Muhammad Yunus, blamed India for derailing the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation while offering up his country as a bridge to rebuild regional trade and cooperation. Yet Mr Yunus’s silence on the deeper tensions dividing South Asia and his decision to engage in finger-pointing underscore the real challenges facing regional integration. He is right that South Asia needs a multilateral organisation like SAARC to help countries work together, make the movement of goods and people across borders easier, and drive up trade and investments for the betterment of the nearly two billion people who call the region home. In many ways, increased global volatility and chaos make such a platform even more vital. It would give South Asia greater bargaining power when faced with shared threats like climate change and tariffs on exports. Despite being the world’s most populous region, cross-border trade and movement of people across the region are negligible in South Asia. The success of the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations provides evidence of what South Asia could gain if it were to become better integrated.
However, for South Asia to replicate what those other blocs have done, it would need the region’s countries to set in stone a series of underlying principles — and to then adhere to them. European Union members and ASEAN nations do not engage in terrorism against one another; they do not get the right to be selective about transit rights to the vehicles of other countries in their groupings; they do not covet one another’s territory. Moreover, they have rules in place to penalise members that stray from these principles. If South Asian nations can converge on such basic norms and stick to them, regional integration can dramatically help deliver on the economic and the strategic advantages that different countries offer. That can be done without erasing the individual national priorities of member states. Without such fundamental parameters for cooperation, however, an organisation like SAARC, even if notionally revived, will always be a step away from its next crisis and will never be able to deliver on its promise. That would be a stain on a region with shared history and heritage as well as an invitation to a never-ending cycle of conflict.