“Regional cooperation makes sense only in the event of there being, at least as the bottom line, a degree of ideological cohesion and/or economic dependence. The SAARC members have neither.” Comment. (1994)
The statement belongs to the early 1990s, when SAARC was negotiating its first trade instrument, SAPTA (1993), amid doubt that South Asia could cooperate at all. It sets two alternative preconditions for regionalism, shared ideology or economic dependence, and finds both absent. The verdict reached here: largely right on the facts, wrong as theory.
The case for the statement
- Theoretical support. Karl W. Deutsch and colleagues (Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, 1957) listed compatibility of major values among the conditions for a security community; the statement echoes that tradition.
- No ideological cohesion. The members’ founding ideas collide: a secular, federal India and a Pakistan founded on the two-nation theory cannot both be right about the same territory. Regimes have ranged from India’s continuous democracy to military rule in Pakistan and Bangladesh, absolute monarchy in Nepal and Bhutan, and later Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
- Identities built against India. Several states defined nationhood partly in opposition to India, so pooling sovereignty looks like absorption.
- Little interdependence. Import substitution left the region trading with the West; export baskets compete rather than complement. Intra-regional trade is still under 6% of the total.
- SAARC’s later record. No summit since 2014, SAFTA hollowed out by sensitive lists, India–Pakistan trade suspended since May 2025.
Where the statement fails
- ASEAN refutes it as a general law. Its founders in 1967 were a military-led, anticommunist Indonesia, a PAP-ruled Singapore, a Thai monarchy, the Philippines and a Malay-majority federation, trading modestly with one another. Amitav Acharya (Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, 2001) shows how the ASEAN Way built a regional identity: cohesion and interdependence were outputs, not inputs.
- Integration theory agrees. For Ernst B. Haas (The Uniting of Europe, 1958), interdependence grows by spillover from initial cooperation; Robert O. Keohane (After Hegemony, 1984) shows institutions creating the interests that sustain them.
- Half wrong on dependence. Nepal and Bhutan rely heavily on India for trade, transit and power, and Bangladesh on Indian electricity and land links. The flaw is that dependence is radial, running to India rather than between neighbours, so it breeds resentment, not community.
What is actually missing
Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver call South Asia a conflict formation: members locate their main threats in one another. ASEAN shared fear of communist insurgency; Western Europe shared the Soviet threat and settled the Franco-German quarrel before integrating. South Asia lacks both an external threat and a settled central dispute, and SAARC’s Charter keeps that dispute off the table. The resulting deficit is of trust more than of trade.
The Indian experience since
Where politics is kept out, cooperation works: the BBIN motor vehicles framework (2015), trilateral power trade from Nepal to Bangladesh through India (2024) and the SAARC COVID-19 fund (March 2020). India’s turn to BIMSTEC, whose Charter entered into force in 2024, shows variable geometry without ideological unity.
Conclusion
The statement describes South Asia’s condition but misreads its cause. Regionalism needs neither prior ideological cohesion nor prior interdependence; ASEAN built both. It needs a shared judgement that the main threat lies outside the region, or at least quarantining of the central rivalry. South Asia has neither, and that, more than ideology or trade, explains SAARC’s paralysis.