Sri Lanka: The case for an active nonalignment

The Sri Lankan presidential election last month produced an historic outcome, and its full implications are yet to be seen or felt across the body politic.

Of singular importance is that the new President, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, represents the radical left. His Marxist-oriented People’s Liberation Front (PLF), transformed by incorporating left leaning and center left liberals to create a new popular front, the National Peoples Power (NPP), succeeded in ousting traditional political elites who have ruled Sri Lanka since independence in 1948.

While it is tempting to assume Mr. Dissanayake’s foreign policy would reflect his purportedly hard leftist pedigree, he inherits a strong international relations tradition – at least in terms of ideology – that will act as a constraint.

Sri Lanka played a key role in laying the foundations for the nonaligned movement as host of the 1954 Colombo conference, which paved the way for the Bandung meeting of Asian and African nations the following year.  The Colombo conference was one of the few strategic masterstrokes of our former leaders.

Mr. Dissanayake has positioned himself within this broad tradition. His election manifesto identified Sri Lanka’s pivotal role as an “International consensus builder” and reinforced a deep commitment to nonalignment.

The new government’s key messaging for now is that it will adopt a pragmatic nonalignment aimed at discouraging great power competition or aggression in or around the country. In implementing this loose framework, the new government will need to build confidence by establishing a rapport with others in the region.  This will be decisive in reassuring neighbours of policy continuity.

But work will have to be done by the new government to inject content into the policy of nonalignment. Unlike the pledges from the new NPP leadership of widespread domestic reform, from constitutional to social change, over which the government exercises some direct control, foreign policy requires navigating an increasingly complex geopolitical environment over which Sri Lanka exercises little control.

Sri Lanka has long failed to articulate clear objectives and means for its foreign policy, notwithstanding its success in developing a bipartisan consensus on foundational principles or pillars of foreign policy.

Sri Lanka’s foreign policymakers and diplomats have been comfortable – perhaps complacent – in not constructing a fully-fledged foreign policy that is committed to print in either a white paper or other strategy document.

Instead, the conventional wisdom has been to simply worship the idea that, as a small state, Sri Lanka has no need for a formal foreign policy. If this proposition was ever sustainable, it is not now, amid increasingly challenging regional circumstances, such as great power rivalry, fraught Sino-Indian relations, the rollout of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and various competing Indo-Pacific strategies.

This has reduced foreign policy to a series of tactical manoeuvres that yield short term benefits at the expense of strategic coherence. In the current geopolitically charged environment, it is necessary to have a clear-sighted grasp of how individuals, institutions, and countries function, and how Sri Lanka relates to them in its own national interest.

In other words where is Sri Lanka’s strategic assessment of its external environment? Encouragingly, the new government has pledged to work on creating a coherent foreign policy strategy, and we wait with interest to see how that is articulated.

A test will be whether it starts to rectify the strategic myopia that has hindered Sri Lanka in effectively participating in regional or global bodies, limiting its ability to reap benefits from institutions such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association and other multilateral forums or to even carefully calibrate bilateral relations with key countries.

During debates in Sri Lanka’s founding constitutional council, our first prime minister D.S. Senanayake spoke of the dilemma of being a small state and of the implications of being situated in a strategic location on the southern tip of India, guarding the entry to the Indian Ocean. The need to find the right partners was reinforced by the existential fear of having a much larger nation at its border.

From the time of Sri Lankan independence, the key diplomatic relationship has been with India. Fast forward to the present day, the Indian government a few months before the Sri Lankan election invited the leader of the NPP to New Delhi where he met foreign policy leaders. This demonstrated India’s prescience of future scenarios in Sri Lankan politics, providing an opportunity to signal India’s sensitivities to the novice, who then was a presidential hopeful.

India has recently expanded its strategic relations with Sri Lanka, particularly. in maritime security cooperation, amid concerns over a growing Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean.  India’s outreach to Sri Lanka has included the transfer of maritime surveillance platforms, such as Dornier aircraft. A $US 6 million Maritime Emergency Rescue and Coordination Centre provided by India was commissioned earlier this year. The US has followed suit with the gift of a Beechcraft King aircraft. Australia too has pledged an air asset on top of other maritime related technology, equipment transfers and capacity building programs.

But management of relations with India remains a critical test for any administration in Colombo. With President Dissanayake hailing from a Marxist-leaning party, he has his work cut out to counter narratives emerging from Indian media on the possible sympathies the new leadership may harbour towards China.  The fact such doubts are expressed abroad only serves to underline the importance of a better elaborated foreign policy.

Other relationships will require a careful balance to preserve Sri Lanka’s nonaligned status.

While China, India and the United States remain constants requiring careful calibration, it will be the all-weather friendships Sri Lanka develops with middle powers in the region, like Australia, that may provide the most valuable partnerships for Sri Lanka to navigate its course in the 21^st Century.

Dr Harinda Vidanage is Director Centre for Strategic Assessment and Director International Relations Office, Gen Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU) Sri Lanka.