A great of economic strategy in Mauritius can be classified as a strange species of wishful thinking. The Mauritian attitude towards China’s belt and road initiative is a case in point. Just last week, the governor of the central bank gave a speech on African states in the project and how they could benefit from it.  The trouble is that it betrayed just how disjointed our foreign policy is. 

Mauritius tends to view the project from its own prism of becoming an entrepot between Asia and Africa. The trouble is that Mauritius is not well-placed to really benefit from it: it’s too far down south in the Indian Ocean to straddle the trade routes emerging in the belt and road project. It tried becoming an outsourcing destination for Chinese manufacturing (Jin Fei) that failed. It’s too small and undeveloped to become a logistics hub. From the stress that the central bank governor laid on the theme, it seems that Mauritius is eager to become a financial centre to facilitate Asian-African trade and commerce. The trouble is that here too there are some obvious problems. According to the Global Financial Competitiveness Index, Mauritius is overshadowed by more competitive financial centres in Africa such as Casablanca and Cape Town. Why would anybody come to Mauritius?

So if there is no geographical or economic reason for Mauritius to play a big role in the project, the best that Mauritius can hope for is that, out of political considerations, China gives Mauritius a role in the emerging network. This is not as crazy an idea as it sounds. There have been plenty of economic success stories where it was politics, rather than economics, that was decisive. The Western European welfare state – the apotheosis of liberal progress – was delivered by billions injected by the US in the Marshall Plan following the Second World War. Economically, it made no sense to revive one’s economic competitors, but keeping communism from spreading into Western Europe was the bigger concern. The result was an economic success story that’s only recently begun to unravel. 

Mauritius too benefitted from two political (not economic, it must be stressed) developments. Europe gave it generous trade concessions to keep Moscow out of the Indian Ocean and capital fleeing Hong Kong in the 1980s (wary of reunification with communist China) combined to create what is called the ‘economic miracle’. None of these things flowed out of economic logic, a fact that unfortunately tends to be forgotten by the self-flattery of Mauritian policymakers. Similarly, the belt and road project is as much a geopolitical as it is an economic project. It is a reheated strategy outlined by Halford Mackinder (the father of modern geopolitics) who in 1904 stated that if any great power in Eurasia managed to criss-cross the continent with internal transport infrastructure and marshalled its resources effectively, it would dominate the continent, and hence, the world. There are clearly Mackinder’s admirers in Beijing. It follows then that politics as much as economics plays a part in the project and there is no reason why Mauritius cannot leverage its diplomatic links with Beijing to carve out some role for itself, as it did in the past with Europe. 

Except here too, Mauritius has shot itself in the foot. It wants to keep the US base on Diego Garcia (it can tell Beijing that that was a fait accompli it has to live with) but, more problematically, it has given India a base on Agalega too. This makes Mauritius the one African state that could end up hosting the militaries of the two powers that are most hostile to the belt and road project, pitting Port Louis against not just China but also against most states on mainland Africa looking to benefit from it. The central bank governor can wax eloquently all he likes; the likelihood is that Mauritius will become even more irrelevant in the world’s biggest emerging trade network.  

For more views and in-depth analysis of current issues, Weekly magazine (Price: Rs 25) or subscribe to Weekly for Rs110 a month. (Free delivery to your doorstep). Email us on: weekly@lexpress.mu