Summary
Contents
This book traces economic and political issues through SAARC’s thirty-year journey. Topical and well-researched, this collection provides a comprehensive assessment of SAARC and provides policy directives for the future. The book points out the issues and constraints that have hindered regional cooperation in South Asia. It establishes that despite being democracies, there has been little effort by member nations to promote regional cooperation in the public domain. It stresses that in view of the increased role that countries wish to play in globalisation, economic cooperation is the way forward. The book further argues that political will is the pivot on which the prospect of regional cooperation revolves.
Reviewing Regional Cooperation in South Asia
Reviewing Regional Cooperation in South Asia
Regional organisation, and the benefits flowing from it, came to be better appreciated after World War II. Chanakya and Machiavelli, and other teachers of statecraft, had laid down a precept that no sovereign should trust his neighbours. Acquisitions of territory, colonies, revenues and people were all legitimate, depending on the power a state exercised. Colonialism and Empire were, eventually, gradually discarded by the latter half of the 20th century, although colonial powers were reluctant and their subjects often had to force the pace. For a while, alliances and spheres of influence, allegedly based on ideology, remained in vogue under the rubric of the cold war. This, too, collapsed as first one and ...