Love thy neighbours

They say you can choose your enemies, but not your neighbours. This rings true especially for small nation states bordering much larger ones.

And that is also what Mao Zedong told King Mahendra in Beijing in 1967, and it is the message successive Chinese leaders have given to Nepal’s rulers ever since: be clever, don’t rock the boat, learn to live with India. 

In Beijing in 1988, Deng Xiaoping and Rajiv Gandhi demarcated each other's  spheres of influence: south of the Himalaya India calls the shots, and north of it (including Tibet) China does. 

Lila Nyaichyai, who did her PhD on Chinese Public Diplomacy in Nepal from Yunnan University, says China’s main concern in Nepal is stability.

“As a country grows to become a global power, its aspirations do too,” she says. “But China hasn’t cared much about whether Nepal is a monarchy, a democracy, or a federal republic as long as it is politically stable for development.”

Nepal’s royal rulers navigated the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States successfully, getting both to contribute to the country’s development. But the dramatic rise of India and China as global powers, and the fact that they are rivals in Nepal’s immediate neighbourhood has made the need for balance much more critical now. 

A template could be the way Finland survived the Cold War between next door Soviet Union and the West. It did not join the Warsaw Pact, but its reference group was the other Nordics. The country decided to keep Moscow at arms length by appeasing it — a strategy that came to be called ‘Finlandisation’.

“Finlandisation was this attitude of yielding to pressure from a big brother,” Finnish journalist and author Katri Merikallio explained to me during a recent visit to Helsinki. “Finland remained independent, but its sovereignty was narrowed. There was a price to pay. We must acknowledge the risks that such a balancing involves, both for the sovereignty of a nation but also for internal politics.”

It was a survival tactic that saved Finland from being arm-twisted by the Soviet Union, like Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But today with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ‘Finlandisation’ is not in vogue anymore and Finland has joined NATO.

Nepal’s strategy of ‘equidistance’ between New Delhi and Beijing is somewhat similar to how Finland survived the Cold War. But it is a little more complicated than that. Indian strategists do not like the term ‘neutrality’ to characterise Nepal’s dealings with its regional rivals China and Pakistan. 

South Asia is now in America’s blindspot with Trump’s turbulent second term, and without Washington’s countervailing presence geopolitics has become much more slippery than Prithvi Narayan Shah’s yam analogy. 

Back in Kathmandu, former Foreign Minister Bidhya Rai Paudyal of the UML contends that despite their differences, bigger countries do come to an understanding, often at the expense of smaller neighbours. An example of this is China’s refusal to get involved in Nepal's Limiyadhura dispute with India.

“It will not be easy, but we must maintain our policy of equidistance in dealing with India and China,” Rai Paudyal told us. “We must assure both that we are not a security threat, and that Nepal’s prosperity and stability is in their national interest as well.”

Nepal is the oldest nation state in South Asia, and has survived invasions, expansionist empires, and neighbours who do not see eye to eye with each other thanks to master strategists like Jang Bahadur Rana, Chandra Shumsher and King Mahendra.

Today, Nepal is one of the few remaining open societies in Asia with a free press, and a fragile yet rambunctious democracy. Yet feckless governments with leaders unskilled to steer a safe course in a volatile region means Nepal has never been as vulnerable to outside interference as it is today (page 1).

Here in Helsinki, NATO membership has finally finished off Finlandisation. It is a lesson for Nepal about how quickly the geopolitical terrain can shift and upend a nation’s established foreign policy doctrine.  

Nepal needs to be supple and agile, pragmatic and self-confident. This will require monumental political reform marked by greater accountability, transparency, and good governance at home. 

In other words, secure relations with our two giant neighbours needs sturdier domestic politics.

Sonia Awale in Helsinki