In Colombo, Asia redefines sovereignty

Harleen Kaur

Four years ago, Colombo was the world’s cautionary tale. A sovereign default, fuel queues that stretched for kilometres, a presidential palace occupied by its own citizens.

This week, the same city is hosting trade unionists, party cadre, scholars and ministers from across Asia, from Nepal to the Philippines and from Iran to Indonesia. They have gathered under a banner that would have sounded utopian in 2022: Hands Off Asia.

The choice of venue is the argument. Sri Lanka’s crisis was never only Sri Lankan. It was the compressed experience of what much of Asia lives in slow motion: production structures designed under colonialism to serve the core, debt that disciplines every budget, and an international order that punishes any attempt to exit.

The three-day assembly, convened by the International Peoples’ Assembly and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, opened on 16 July with a plenary that set out its central claim.

Sovereignty in the 21st Century is not a flag and a seat at the United Nations. It is an integrated condition spanning finance, technology, data and defence.

And Asia, where the world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting, is where this battle will be decided.

Domination has changed its clothes

Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, former Prime Minister of Nepal, opened by naming the moment: a degenerating unipolar monopoly, and a multipolar opening that Global South countries have long desired because it gives suppressed voices space to be heard.

But his caution was sharper than his optimism. The question, he argued, is not whether power shifts from one region to another. The question is what kind of order emerges from the shift.

Direct political domination may have receded. But the mechanisms of domination have not.

Prachanda described a techno-imperialism proper to the era of the fourth industrial revolution: control exercised through financial and structural dependence, through military alliances, and increasingly through data, digital ecosystems and what he called algorithmic appropriation. Information war is not a metaphor but a daily reality.

On this reading, contemporary imperialism is an integrated system, and sovereignty must be equally integrated. It means not merely a government of one’s own, but independence in finance, freedom from debt, and control over national resources – all won through the active, democratic participation of peoples.

Nepal’s own experience carried a double lesson, he suggested: progressive movements can learn from its victories and from the attacks on them.

His conclusion was organisational. Strategic cooperation must come before competition of views, and unity of the progressive front above all.

Political independence is not independence

Dr Dammika Patabendi, Sri Lanka’s Environment Minister, grounded the frame in his country’s rupture. Sri Lankans, he noted, delivered an electoral mandate against decades of onslaught.

Yet the challenges before the new government remain enormous, precisely because the nation is still held in the grip of the international order.

The lesson Asia keeps teaching is that political independence does not deliver independence. Structural dependence survives the transfer of flags.

His definition of the conference’s paired watchwords was the most concrete of the morning.

A sovereign path means the freedom to formulate independent economic policy, to direct national resources toward national development, and to provide people with decent work.

A socialist horizon means not merely changing governments but securing progress for all: deepening popular participation, pursuing technological equality, and each nation taking its own path according to its resources, needs and history.

Crucially, he insisted this is not a call for isolation. What is demanded is constructive international cooperation as equals, with the recognition that the level ground for equality does not exist and must be built.

Practical cooperation, he suggested, may be this conference’s real takeaway: coordination between trade unions across borders, because labour’s adversary is already organised internationally.

Hands Off Asia, in his framing, is not just a ‘no’ to the world being increasingly militarised but also a positive affirmation. It is the right of Asian peoples to shape their own future through mutual cooperation, without intervention.

From diagnosis to construction

Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental pushed the discussion from diagnosis to construction. Even as imperialism shudders, he warned, the movements are not prepared for what comes next.

The task is to advance a new socialist development theory, and to fight the battle of ideas needed to make socialism visible in the present, in cooperatives and other ‘not yet’ forms that are already being built but rarely noticed.

Two of his arguments deserve to travel.

First, the youth revolts sweeping Asia, driven by joblessness, gig precarity, environmental destruction, and rage at genocide, constitute a class rebellion camouflaged as a generational one. The mainstream media’s framing of these as ‘Gen Z movements’ is itself a political operation.

The left’s task is not to be suspicious of these revolts but to organise within them and sharpen their understanding of class realities, before these movements are co-opted, as Prachanda too warned, by imperialist powers or domestic bourgeois forces.

Second, left governments do not come to power to hold power, but to build social power effectively using the instruments of the state.

Where alternative governments fail, they fail for lack of an agenda. That agenda cannot stop at redistribution. It must be broadened to rebuilding productive capacity through popular participation. This is the road by which socialist projects abolished absolute poverty, an achievement without capitalist equivalent.

China, he mentioned, has also shown that national dignity and material improvement through the expansion of productive capacities reinforce each other; that is what makes hope concrete.

The greatness of a nation, he argued, is measured not in its big fat wealth-owners but in the absence of starvation.

Standing against this agenda is what Tricontinental has termed hyper-imperialism: a lattice of debt service, structural adjustment, sanctions, technology embargoes and military bases. There are over 900 such bases worldwide and more than 400 in Asia alone, with the largest concentration in Japan. This lattice exists to destabilise any government that seeks to end hunger.

However, Iran’s recent fightback in the illegal war against it, Prashad argued, has taught East Asia something it must absorb: a US base is not a shield but a target.

Hands Off Asia, then, is not only a military demand. It is an economic and financial one. No rating-agency vetoes, no dollar dependence, no International Monetary Fund conditionalities, no sanctions, so that the governments Asian peoples elect are permitted to govern.

History, Prashad closed, moves in zigs and zags. In Colombo this week, the attempt is to give the next zig a direction. – Globetrotter

Harleen Kaur is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

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