The Central Asia Forum, organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Geopolitical Cartographer, opened in two sessions on 21 August in Colombo. 

While the first session in the morning delved into the geopolitical-geostrategic potential of Central Asia, and more importantly what it means for Sri Lanka, the evening session centred on the region’s economic profile. Both were headed by the ministry’s Southeast Asia and Central Asia Division; both ended on a thoughtful note.

This is not the first time Sri Lanka has eyed Central Asia. The country’s first attempt to reach out to the region came about immediately after the 30-year separatist war. 

Back then, the imperative was to secure support, economic and diplomatic, for postwar reconstruction and infrastructure development. To this end, a number of delegations were organised, including to Uzbekistan. But while these got off the ground, they do not seem to have been followed up. Indeed, bilateral interactions took place even as late as in 2021.

A welcome overture

The crisis of 2022 changed everything. In the chaos of its aftermath, the Government came to terms with the fact that Sri Lanka’s foreign policy between 2020 and 2022 had been far from successful. 

This is not to say that it was successful before. If anything, since 1948, our foreign relations have been, for the most part, vague and indefinite. Yet the policies enacted and followed during the first two years of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration lacked any consistency or direction. If the then Government made an attempt at defining those policies, these were never communicated to the public.

The fact that the Government, under a different President, has followed a course correction or given the impression of doing so should not come as a surprise. I think it’s only fair to say that, all things considered, this has been the trajectory of foreign policy in Sri Lanka: a period of kowtowing to one ideological extreme (anti-Sovietism and Sinophobia from 1948 to 1956) followed by a long period of moderation (the post-1956 tilt to nonalignment). 

Viewed that way, the course correction we saw or are supposed to have seen since 2022 is hardly unprecedented. Yet the nature of the crisis – the worst since independence – has drastically reduced the options we have. This has shaped our responses and strategies both on the economic and foreign policy front.

In that sense, the Government’s recent dalliance with Central Asia should not come as a surprise, and should, in fact, be welcomed – that is, if the Government is serious about taking such initiatives to the next stage. 

Here it is worth pointing out that, when the Gotabaya Rajapaksa Government came to power in 2019, the Foreign Affairs Ministry had begun drawing up papers on regions it had not traditionally considered or reached out to before. These included not just Central Asia but also Africa, on which the ministry had devoted a whole paper. Yet it took until 2023/’24 for these initiatives to get off the ground.

Between 2020 and 2022, what we saw was not just a sense of incoherence – something which successive Sri Lankan administrations have been known for, unfortunately – but more worryingly, an almost spectacular and breathtaking tendency to upset multiple partners at the same time. Yet the crisis, and tensions in the Middle East, Indo-Pacific, and Eurasia – from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Israel’s war in Palestine and Gaza – have since compelled a radical reset of the sort we have not seen in years, if not decades.

SL’s balancing act

The island’s traditional partners – India, China, and the US, not to mention the European Union – are engaged in most of these tussles, often simultaneously, as the Russia-Ukraine war and Gaza war illustrate clearly. Logically, for small states like Sri Lanka, that has called for a new, more outward-oriented strategy.

This strategy is what vulnerable states, which do not have the benefit of a dominant alliance with a major power, have usually opted for. It is what states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have preferred for decades and what the Eurasian and Central Asian belt have opted for now, particularly in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war. 

International relations scholars have a term for this: strategic autonomy. In a recent Foreign Policy piece, Michael Kugelman uses this term for Sri Lanka as well. Yet in applying such labels to all states, regardless of size or potential, we tend to overlook the dynamics and complexities which govern each case.

Sri Lanka has, historically, lurched towards balancing acts in its foreign policy. But as I have argued in this space before, strategic autonomy presupposes a state capable of reducing its dependence on major powers. Sri Lanka does not, strictly speaking, fit this bill: in terms of trade and other lines of cooperation, it is still dependent on Western economies and it still is subject to India’s dominance. 

The country’s balancing act, which some analysts see as evidence of its ability to navigate “global conflict and great-power rivalry,” is thus rooted in its vulnerability rather than its autonomy. A state is autonomous if it uses its balancing act to bargain substantively with major powers. We have not been able to do so.

In other words, Sri Lanka’s current foreign policy strategy, even if we located it within the confines of what is called nonalignment, resists categorisation. We do not know for certain what defines the country’s strategy. What we do know is that Sri Lanka is not negotiating from a position of strength. More than anything, it wants to avoid the conflicts that have, through no fault of its own, landed near its shores. 

The Central Asia Forum should be viewed through this lens. The country does not enjoy strong, sturdy ties with the region – at least not yet. But Central Asia is a massive terrain, and it is rife with many possibilities. It can even become the catalyst for the next stage in Sri Lanka’s foreign policy.

At a foreign policy seminar in Colombo last July, Dr. Ganeshan Wignaraja remarked that, for such a small country, Sri Lanka maintained missions and embassies in many countries. In the 1990s, while serving as an Opposition MP, Anura Bandaranaike called for an audit of these missions and, if necessary, the closure of some of them. 

Thirty years later, in the face of our worst post-independence economic crisis, there is now an opportunity to leverage our global outreach to reap dividends for the country and its people. The Central Asia Forum is, in that sense, a first step. But it can hardly be the only step. And, regardless of who comes to power three weeks from now, it needs to be taken forward.

(The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific-focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk)