Even as India seeks a G20 seat for AU, does the African Union require it?

The Indian strategic community is excited about Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking full G-20 membership for the African Union (AU), the single-largest near-homogenous inter-governmental organisation in the world. This has come at a time, when an African delegation with AU’s current chair and Comoros President Azali Assoumani had travelled to Kyiv and Moscow to try to end the Ukraine War – but in vain.

With 55 members AU is the second largest intra-governmental group within the UN system, next only to the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is not as homogenous and politically united as the other. Both are way off from the number of nations that had signed up for China’s fading fad called Belt and Road Initiative (149 nations), but that is one grouping that is as diverse as the 193-member UN General Assembly, which cannot claim to speak in one voice on any issue at any time.

The AU is at present among the Permanent Guest Invitees of the G-20, along with ASEAN, the UN and a host of UN affiliates. Among them is also the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD), in turn an AU affiliate, focussing more on economic development and cooperation among members and the outside world. Thus, after the UN and its affiliates, only the AU grouping has two permanent invitees in the G-20 list.

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Revisited perspective

From a revisited Indian global perspective, PM Modi writing to the rest of G-20 members to accord a seat for the AU at the high table is a welcome initiative. How other member-nations, especially those from the West react is another matter altogether. Incidentally, Modi’s initiative is limited to the AU, not the ASEAN, among the most successful of intra-governmental regional groupings. The EU is already a permanent member of G-20.

As India’s Covid-centric multiple initiatives showed, there is an even greater need for sustained global efforts to help out poor and developing nations than in the previous century, when alone such concepts evolved and were given some shape under the aegis of the UN and its affiliates in particular. Under the Non Alignment Movement initiative, India was among the leading voices of those nations, scattered across the country as the common colonial past of much of the developing and under-developed nations gave them a common political identity.

All of it changed over time as individual nations drifted away to get identified even more with an economic sponsor from the developed world in return for political and strategic cooperation of the former’s liking in the Cold War era especially. With the downturn of the socialist economic model commencing in the early nineties, India too was in no place to continue lending leadership and direction, both in political and economic spheres.

Thus at the end of the Cold War and the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, so to say, the much talked about North-South dialogue on the economic front collapsed. NAM as a parallel political initiative of the economic South also became increasingly irrelevant. While India under Modi has revived the North-South dialogue concept by pitching in for what is since termed as the Global South, PM Modi has carefully avoided getting directly engaged with NAM.

Through the past years of his prime ministership since 2014, Modi has not attended a single NAM Summit, though India otherwise remains an ‘active’ (?) member of the non-alignment movement. The message is clear. That India is all for G-South as an economic initiative but may not want to get involved with an unachievable common political approach on all matters.

Amoral, not immoral

There is a greater understanding both in New Delhi and other NAM capitals that in political and even economic terms, individual nations at times have individual priorities and preferences, which are not always personality-driven. That was always the case. But in the Nehruvian era, both admirers and critics of the nation’s first prime minister, argued on their known positions that were personality-centric, hence lacked substance and direction.

But even under Nehru and then Indira Gandhi, the nation had always come first. That was also how and why in Indira Gandhi’s time, and even earlier, New Delhi was seen as being closer to Moscow than Washington in the Cold War times. It had nothing to do with misplaced perceptions about the Nehru-Gandhi clan’s perceived leftist tilt. Instead, it owed to a deep understanding that between the two super-powers, the Soviet Union was weak and would need India more than the US, which had already commenced its journey on the top of its socio-economic and politico-strategic achievements during the two World Wars.

Distanced by time and space, there is greater clarity now in India’s approach, where politically, India is not far away from the US-led West but on the economic front, it made its decisions on procuring Russian oil at a cheaper rate at the commencement of the Ukraine War. If there are hassles just now, that owes to Russia’s inability to dispose of the huge pile of Indian rupee in its hands. Some reports put it at $ 140 billion – which is a lot of money. But then, it is now Russia’s problem, not India’s – though it might sound amoral, if not immoral in international relations.

Rich men’s club

The question however is does the AU want a permanent seat on G-20. The reasons are not far to seek. First and foremost, G-20 is still seen as a rich men’s club. Despite the presence of developing nations like India, Indonesia and Brazil, and also China and Russia, that image has refused to go away. It is seen only as an expanded version of the G-7, which is the real rich men’s club, the self-eluding ‘thoroughbred’.

In real terms, where there are contentious issues, like the Ukraine War, for instance, the G-20 has no solution to offer. Rather, as happened at the last summit at Bali, Indonesia, those contentious issues only have the potential to introduce divisions which otherwise might not have been there. This year’s G-20 summit, chaired and hosted by India, does not promise to be anything better, both in form and content.

Does the AU, which has certain homogeneity on such matters, want to be part of it? Does the AU also want to delude itself that a G-20 seat could make the required difference to the political and economic status of individual member-states of the African Union and also Africa as a continent and all Africans? Or, will it drive divisions within that are now not there or have been papered over – but not within a G-20 scheme?

African road-map

It is in this context the visit of an African leadership delegation to try and end the Ukraine War assumes greater relevance and significance. No one expected any wonders to come out of the visit, where leaders of some African countries met Presidents Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv and Vladimir Putin at St Petersburg.

The seven African leaders — the Presidents of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa and Zambia, as well as Egypt’s Prime Minister and top envoys from the Republic of Congo and Uganda — represented the AU and also a cross-section of African opinion. For instance, South Africa, Senegal and Uganda have avoided censuring Moscow over the war while Egypt, Zambia and Comoros voted against Russia in the UNGA. But neither side held it against any AU delegation member-nation, and received them with an open hand as good hosts, but had nothing to offer to end the war.

At the end of the two-nation visit,the AU made no headway. It was anyway an expression of the African anguish at the continuing war, as most nations are depended on food and fertiliser from Russia and Ukraine for long. Yet, Comoros Assoumani, as the AU’s current chair, floated the idea of a “road map” to peace at the joint news conference at Kyiv, which prompted President Zelenskyy to clarify that he did not want ‘any surprises’ at or from their meeting with Putin.

After the three-hour AU’s talks with Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the Africans’ peace plan consisted of 10 elements, but “was not formulated on paper” – meaning that they were ideas but not necessarily functional and “very difficult to implement, difficult to compare positions”. However, Kremlin spokesman clarified that “Putin has shown interest in considering it… Not all provisions can be correlated with the main elements of our position, but this does not mean that we do not need to continue working”.

What matters the most in context is the desire and willingness of the AU to open up, and take up their pressing concerns directly with those involved without waiting any more for the UNSC and the UNGA, among others, to do it for them. It is a new Africa, a new African Union. The question is if they, at this stage of their career as a regional collective willing to stick their neck out for their cause and their cause alone, would want to be identified with G-20, in which Russia is a member alright but not on the same league with the US, the EU and its other western allies – wherever you place India just now, after PM Modi’s current US visit and its multiple outcomes on the bilateral front.

It is a question that Africa will be asking itself in the coming days and weeks – and a lot will also depend on the response Modi’s proposal receives from other members. Some of it will also depend on who are the first ones to welcome the Indian idea, and how it is interpreted by the other side.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views are personal. 

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