The forthcoming 'Fourth Pole': How an emerging Gulf-India axis could lead the developing world

In the long run, the India-Gulf corridor could become the organising locus for the Global South. Getty Images

I have been researching and writing about globalisation for over 20 years, inspired first by the rise, then fall and rise again of the Irish economy. In 2019, I published a book called The Levelling. It prefigured the end of globalisation and the untidy passage towards a multipolar world, which is now under way and likely to revolve around three established, old-power “poles”: Europe, the US and China.

However, as a regular visitor to the UAE, I am beginning to notice the makings of a different, more positive element of the evolving world order that I describe as the “Fourth Pole”, a geo-economic region centred around the fast-growing Gulf states and stretching to parts of India, its vast diaspora and beyond.

Individually, many of these states top the league tables for growth, are emerging as active investors in and consumers of new technologies and are arguably more geopolitically busy than the large European countries. What is new is that trade and infrastructure deals, migration and the consequences of great power competition are creating the conditions for a regional locus, or “pole”, of economic, financial and soft power.

Such a pole needs to have at least two criteria – a co-ordinated economic mass and a coherent method, or way of doing things. For example, Europe, the US and China have “mass” economically and financially, as well as diplomatically (even Europe is increasingly co-ordinated). They all have increasingly focused industrial strategies and are military powers. By comparison, while Russia has nuclear weapons, it is not a pole given its isolation on much of the world stage.

The second and essential element of multipolarity is that each pole has a defined method – Europe is a liberal social democracy with increasingly co-ordinated policies, China has the “China Dream” social contract between the Chinese people and the Communist Party while the US is making itself great, again. Each one has a distinctly different approach to technology, the internet and, lately, to regulating AI.

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So, in terms of mass and method, the idea of the “Fourth Pole” is a nascent one. India and Saudi Arabia, to take two of the Fourth Pole players, are meaningful economically, though less so at this stage as global or military financial players.

Building mass would take time and investment and would demand a coherence in strategy between very disparate countries, and currently there are few policy areas where there is policy collaboration at a detailed and well co-ordinated level. The India to GCC/Saudi Arabia corridor is yet very different in terms of its cultures and development models and is very far from a common method.

This is something that can arrive after at least 40 years of close trade and co-operation, and in my view will be highly influenced by the Indian diaspora, which is present in huge numbers in the Gulf and Africa. For the moment, the old European Coal and Steel Community (a symbol of co-operation on economic infrastructure) is a good benchmark, though there are several factors that suggest quicker co-operation between the Gulf states and their economic neighbours.

The first is attitude. On a lengthy trip to the Gulf last year, I heard for the first time the term “Wena” (Western Europe and North America), akin to how some refer to the Middle East and North Africa as “Mena”, and I took this to suggest a confident position on the world stage.

The region has developed strong independence in its foreign policy (as opposed to being a policy taker from the US and the EU). This is evident in finance, infrastructure, labour markets and trade. On trade specifically, the Gulf has to be geopolitically ambidextrous in how it builds relationships with the US and China, though when it comes to technology, the sense is that it is very much plugged into America.

Building mass would take time and investment and would demand a coherence in strategy between very disparate countries

Another attitudinal aspect is a form of economic agnosticism. While the “great” powers are busy cutting off access to each other’s supply chains, trade through the Gulf is less encumbered by geopolitics. Moreover, there are signs that the tariff war and great power rivalry have attracted more activity and talent to Gulf ports.

Another factor is demographics and development economics. There is a great deal of talk about the Global South – the fast-growing, populous countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It does their individual cultures little justice to group them together, and the idea of the Global South vastly overestimates the ability of these countries to act as a single entity.

The primary challenge for these countries is to find ways to increase the level of trade between themselves, and in the long run it may be that the India-Gulf corridor becomes the organising locus for the Global South.

The rise of individual Gulf states over the past 30 years proves their singular ambitions and visions. A more complicated world, of course, will bring co-ordination challenges, as it does for any region. One is to leverage collective influence to steward lasting peace in the Middle East’s conflict zones, such as Palestine. The second is to actively co-ordinate development plans, though the GCC’s co-operation mechanisms already provide an institutional framework for this.

If these succeed, then the basis of the “Fourth Pole”, one of the positive surprises of the post-globalisation era, will be set in place.