Sri Lanka In Global Affairs: The Journey Since January 2015
Dr. Jayadeva Uyangoda
My views expressed here today do not represent positions of any political party, or any power center. I do not have any personal or political stake either at the ways in which how the government makes its foreign policy decisions or conducts its policies. Not being a political insider, I am not privy to valuable political gossip that can help place in context, and even alter, most of the points I would be making in this presentation. I am only a student of politics, and not a political actor, before or behind the scenes. I look at Sri Lanka’s foreign policy issues and challenges purely from an academic point of view. Therefore, I will take every precaution not to allow my analysis and arguments naïve, although some may see them exactly to be of that quality.
One thing I have learnt recently – and this is a lesson I urge all of you also to think about — is that foreign policy making is infinitely more complex than what politicians in the opposition, or those who are aspiring to come to power, want the public to believe. Leaders of this government seem to have been learning this simple, yet fundamental lesson, since last January. That is why the foreign policy positions of this government seem to have been in a continuous state of flux.
There is a good reason for it to be so. The government has been compelled to negotiate a number of factors and pressures in steering its journey in order to establish its on ‘foreign policy identity.’ I do not think that there is yet evidence to suggest that the government wants to have, or been able to establish, a firm ideological identity in its external relations, as it has been the case with many governments in the past, particularly the previous one. Avoiding an ideological identity as such to its foreign policy strategies seems to be a key defining feature of the Maithripala Sirisena-Ranil Wikremasinghe administration at present.
Some see this flexibility as a weakness of the government. There is, however, another way of looking at it. It represents the essential dimension of pragmatism in foreign policy, necessitated by a range of complex domestic, regional and global factors. Muddling through is not necessarily a sign of weakness, or prelude to disaster, in a context where the government has been experimenting different responses to some key foreign policy determinants.
What are the key determinants that have impacted on the shaping of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy since January last year? We can put them in two groupings.
The first is electoral and regime change compulsions. Any new government would want to steer a new path of foreign policy. Given the atmosphere of extreme hostility between the two camps, the new government was compelled to abandon immediately the foreign policy orientation of its predecessor. The new orientation was seen in the restoration of closeness with regional as well global powers that had earlier been marginalized. This core dimension of the foreign policy continues with only a slight change.
