Ashok Malik: A year without leadership

Where have all the good men gone,
And where are all the gods?
Where’s the street-wise Hercules,
To fight the rising odds?
Bonnie Tyler, Holding Out for a Hero, 1984

As 2011 limps its way to the exit door, what is the big picture emerging from this year? It is tempting to say the big picture about 2011 is there is no big picture. In India and internationally, there are instead myriad little pictures.

This was the year of the Arab Spring and the overthrow of three longstanding strongmen in North Africa. This was the year of economic disquiet, when even the Indian economy, seemingly decoupled from the West’s recession, faltered following a kiss of death from its own government. This was the year of anti-corruption activists taking to the streets. This was the year when the question mark became the abiding symbol of our world.

There is no finality and closure to 2011. Everything was and remains up in the air. Which way will Pakistan go? How much will America remain invested in Afghanistan after it begins to bring the troops home? Will the Arab streets’ energies lead to better lives and meaningful democracies or constitute a false dawn?

Will the UPA government manage to salvage anything or tumble unerringly towards even greater lows? Will corruption and policy paralysis sink India’s economic story? Will China become a responsible great power or still try and take from the global system more than it gives back?

The year has left us none the wiser. Those questions could have been asked — and indeed many of them were being asked — in December 2010 with the same uncertainty. In that sense, 2011 has solved little, taught us nothing new and will go down as a year history decided to just waste.

The overriding presence this year has actually been an absence: the absence of leadership. This is true at the level of individuals and societies, specific countries as much as the world as a whole. By some malefic coincidence, a series of major democracies has been blessed with weak leadership.

President Barack Obama’s estrangement with Middle America is only growing larger. In Australia, a one-seat majority in parliament contracts space for a new though admittedly plucky prime minister, and it is unsure how long she will last. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi ran a vaudeville government till he simply had to go.

In India, the downside — was there ever an upside? — of institutionalised diarchy, a system where the prime minister is the administrative head but not the political leader, was never more apparent than in the previous 12 months. This mechanism was innovative in its early days; now it is plain unworkable. It allows both people concerned to duck responsibility — and without ownership of responsibility there can be no leadership.

The ‘absence of leadership’ contagion spread from individuals to nation-states. China is Asia-Pacific’s economic hyper-power but made little effort to step into the role of the region’s organic leader. It spent the year inviting distrust in India, pushing Australia deeper into an American military embrace, and putting off a dozen smaller — but proud — countries in Southeast Asia.

In Europe, the economic influence-political leadership asymmetry was marked. As the European Union floundered from economic crisis to crisis, as countries risked bankruptcy, as the very idea of the EU began to be interrogated, the biggest power could only gingerly pull its weight. Germany is Europe’s standout economy. It represents the only economic and social model that is working within the EU. Yet it cannot take a natural leadership position because it is so easy to put it on a guilt trip.

What is true for two continents is true for the global system as well. Two wars, high unemployment and economic pessimism have weakened America’s resolve to lead. That aside, Obama is not an instinctive commander-in-chief. He has no grand strategy and doesn’t want to develop one. He is quite comfortable being part of the crowd rather than standing away from it and showing it where to go. That second situation is what the world has come to expect of America and American presidents. Uncle Sam’s gentle abdication — perhaps temporary — has created a gap no country is rushing to fill, and no country can fill.

Where does that leave us, as individuals, as countries, as planet Earth? In 2011, we were all echoing Bonnie Tyler, all waiting for that streetwise Hercules, all longing for leadership. May 2012 lead us to leaders.