Via 2point6billion.com, The Hindu recaps the most significant concrete outcomes of the RIC foreign minister summit:
In a joint communiqué, adopted at their eighth meeting, the Foreign Ministers of the countries “reaffirmed the commonality” in their views on the global situation and, for the first time, set out coordinated positions on Kosovo, Iran, Afghanistan and the Asia-Pacific region, as India displayed a greater readiness to go along with its partners in the triangle on these issues.
Meanwhile, Nikolas Gvosdev reports that the “Southern Democracy-Eastern Autocracy” alignment he’s been positing seems to have held up during UN Security Council discussions over intervention in Burma. Gvosdev has noted in the past that in the debate over sovereignty vs. multilateral intervention, southern democracies (Brazil, South Africa, India) tend to side with the eastern autocracies (Russia, China), for both historical and contemporary reasons.
As he has also noted, that’s a sticking point in the League of Democracies idea being floated by John McCain (and to some extent Robert Kagan), since it demonstrates how democracy in and of itself does not create uniformity of interest. The idea of a “democracy clause” that would render democracies immune to interventions has subsequently been floated as a way to ease the democratic emerging powers’ anxieties to what they see as remnants of Western paternalism. But it’s interesting to note that the urge to intervene is far from universal.
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