India's Foreign Policy Discourse and Its Conceptions of World Order: The Quest for Power and Identity by Thorsten Wojczewski

Author:Thorsten Wojczewski [Wojczewski, Thorsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138297180
Google: CNFfswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39223000
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-15T10:07:53+00:00

International unity in diversity

The Post-Nehruvian discourse seeks to establish a direct link between India’s identity, foreign policy and world order. Through the social logic of international unity in diversity, the discourse takes pluralism or polycentrism as the foundational and necessary condition of world order (Subrahmanyam 1998b; Baru 2006: 27; Dasgupta 2010; Ansari 2011: 31f.; Singh [Jasj.] 2013: 12). Accordingly, a world order must, in the words of the Indian diplomat Sanjay Bhattacharyya (2007: 708), ‘promote an ideology of holism, which embraces coexistence, plurality and tolerance’ and provide an institutional framework that can accommodate global interdependence and multiple stakeholders with different cultures, political systems, levels of socio-economic development, interests and traditions. ‘The management of this global diversity under conditions of interdependence’, as External Affairs Minister (EAM) Pranab Mukherjee (2008c: 16) highlights, requires ‘a pluralistic world order’. In such a world order, states ‘coexist and cooperate with each other in a series of networked relationships, including bilateral and plurilateral strategic partnerships that often overlap with each other, rather than in fixed alliances or binary either/or antagonisms’, according to the Congress politician Shashi Tharoor (2012: 42). A polycentric order can be understood as a distinctive form of multipolarity that is ‘profoundly influenced by globalization’ (Mishra 2003b: 350) and ‘marked by the preponderance of several major powers, with minimal likelihood of direct conflict amongst these powers, but where both cooperation and competition among them are intense’ (Menon 2009). In this polycentric order, old mindsets of ‘containment’ or ‘zero-sum competition’ are hardly feasible anymore; rather major powers must strike the right balance between competition and cooperation in their relations (Vajpayee 2003a; Saran 2006; Mukherjee 2007b). Therefore, as PM Singh (2005f) explicated:

We must evolve a new paradigm of security cooperation relevant to an emerging multi-polar world in which global threats obtain global responses. This is precisely what India has sought to do. We have entered into strategic partnerships with the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Union and are pursuing strategic cooperation with China. Today, nations are engaged simultaneously both in competition and cooperation. […] No doubt this involves sophisticated bargaining with each of them. It is unrealistic to expect nations to act for altruistic reasons. International relations are in the final analysis, power relations. This balance of power politics in international relations is more sophisticated than during the Cold War era. […] Consequently, we should develop friendly interactive relations with as many major powers as possible.

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