India's Foreign Policy Discourse and its Conceptions of World Order

The Quest for Power and Identity

Thorsten Wojczewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589455
• eBook ISBN: 9781351583176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Given India's growing power and aspirations in world politics, there has been increasing interest among practitioners and scholars of international relations (IR) in how India views the world.

This book offers the first systematic investigation of the world order models in India's foreign policy discourse. By examining how the signifier 'world order' is endowed with meaning in the discourse, it moves beyond Western-centric IR and sheds light on how a state located outside the Western 'core' conceptualizes world order. Drawing on poststructuralism and discourse theory, the book proposes a novel analytical framework for studying foreign policy discourses and understanding the changes and continuities in India's post-cold war foreign policy. It shows that foreign policy and world order have been crucial sites for the (re)production of India's identity by drawing a political frontier between the Self and a set of Others and placing India into a system of differences that constitutes 'what India is'.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Indian foreign policy, foreign policy analysis, South Asian studies, IR and IR theory, international political thought and global order studies.

1 Introduction

This book is about conceptions of world order and identity in India’s post-cold war foreign policy discourse. It examines how competing discourses are ordering the world and seek to fix India’s identity in this order. The study argues that foreign policy and world order have been crucial sites for the (re-)production of India’s identity by drawing political frontiers between the Indian Self and a series of Others and thereby placing India into a system of differences that constitutes ‘what India is’. This central question was at stake after the end of the cold war, which questioned India’s traditional non-aligned stance in international relations, and made it necessary to ‘re-negotiate’ the relationship between the Self and its Others whereby India’s identity and its place in the world were re-ordered. This book explores how and why a particular understanding of India and world order could become dominant in India, and thereby sheds light on the way that India seeks to shape the world order.

It is widely believed today that the centre of gravity in world politics is shifting away from the ‘West’ to ‘non-Western’¹ emerging powers such as China, India or Brazil. Given their growing economic, political, diplomatic and military weight, policy-makers and International Relations (IR) scholars debate the potential implications of this power shift for the ‘Western’-dominated liberal world order and to what extent the emerging powers will engage, shape or contest this order (see Hurrell 2006; Ikenberry 2010; Acharya 2014; Paul 2016; Stuenkel 2016). Given its status as the world’s largest democracy, India’s ‘rise’ has drawn increasing scholarly, policy and media attention in the last decades and raised the question: ‘what kind of power will India become’ (Sagar 2009). While India is often seen as a natural partner of the United States and the ‘West’ in general (see Mohan 2004; Burns 2007; Zakaria 2008), it has so far proved to be a rather difficult partner for the US (Chaudhuri 2014; Jain 2016) or the European Union (EU) (Kavalski 2016). In this context, scholars highlight the resilience of non-alignment or strategic autonomy in Indian foreign policy (Narang/Staniland 2012) and India’s role as a veto-player that has often stood up to the ‘West’ in policy fields such as trade, climate or nuclear non-proliferation (Narlikar 2013) and contested the ‘Western’ hegemony in international institutions and norm-building. However, India is often said to lack a strategic culture, foreign policy frameworks or a grand strategy, resulting in a rather reactive, hesitant or inconsistent foreign and security policy (Mehta 2009; Pant 2009, 2011; Chatterjee-Miller 2014).

The ‘global power shift’ in the international system occurs in a time when there is a growing awareness among IR scholars that the concepts and theories developed to analyse world politics are profoundly ‘Western’-centric in that they privilege ‘Western’ experiences, agency, values and interests and thus treat the ‘West’ as the principal subject of, and normative reference point in, international relations (Tickner 2003; Nayak/Selbin 2010; Hobson 2012; Tickner/Blaney 2012; Stuenkel 2016). This raises the question to what extent existing theories and concepts are suitable for analysing the foreign policies and aspirations of ‘non-Western’ powers such as India and has resulted in calls for ‘de-centering’ the ‘West’ by introducing ‘non-Western’ perspectives into IR.

The approach of the book

This book approaches the relationship between foreign policy and identity, ‘global power shifts’ and world order and the challenge of fashioning a ‘Post-Western IR’ from a poststructuralist, discourse theoretical perspective. Building on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and poststructuralist IR scholarship, this study foregrounds the notions of discourse, identity and hegemony and focusses on the ways in which discourses constitute meanings and identities by relating differences and seek to hegemonize particular understandings of the world.

As such the book seeks to make three contributions to the study of Indian foreign policy and IR in general. First, it fills an important gap in the empirical literature on Indian foreign policy. Building on a discourse analysis of roughly 11,000 Indian foreign policy sources, including government and party documents, speeches, statements and publications by Indian policy-makers and parliamentary debates, this book offers the first systematic, theory-led study of Indian world order conceptions.

A sketch of Indian views on world order was put forward by Kanti Bajpai (2003). In his book chapter, which draws on his research on India’s strategic culture (Bajpai 2002, 2014; cf. also Sagar 2009), Bajpai identifies different notions of world order such as Nehruvianism, Neoliberal Globalism or Gandhianism. Though his study provides important insights, it tends to discuss Indian ideas of world order at a very general level and does not offer an analytical framework that would, for instance, make transparent how these different ideas were identified and what their ontological status is. For example, can we, as Bajpai suggests, neatly distinguish and establish a causal relationship between ideas/culture and practices? How then is it possible to interpret the meaning of these practices if not within the context of these ideas or culture?² Like Rahul Sagar who distinguishes between different strategic visions which ‘represent ideas about politics that wax and wane with circumstances’ (Sagar 2009: 802), Bajpai makes, as this study will show, too much of the distinction between ideas and practices, since whether I understand, for instance, India’s policy of non-alignment as a realist balance-of-power strategy (Pant 2011) or as an idealist policy of friendship (Chacko 2012) will ultimately depend on the interpretative framework that I use to make sense of this practice. This might also explain why Bajpai arrives at partially contradictory conclusions regarding the relevance of the different strands of thought in Indian foreign policy: sometimes Nehruvianism is dominant, sometimes Neoliberalism, sometimes it is a combination of these two strands in that India’s foreign policy rhetoric is said to be Nehruvian, while Indian foreign policy practices are neoliberal (Bajpai 2002, 2003, 2014). This, in turn, would suggest that Indian foreign and security policy is incoherent³ and raises questions about the validity of these frameworks for understanding contemporary Indian foreign policy.

Based on the insights of the discourse analysis, this book identifies a Post-Nehruvian and a Hyper-nationalist discourse as more suitable frameworks for comprehending the worldviews of Indian decision-makers and Indian foreign policy in the post-cold war era.⁴ The Post-Nehruvian discourse, which gradually emerged as hegemonic post-cold war foreign policy discourse by modifying the Nehruvian discursive project, constitutes India as a multi-aligned actor and takes pluralism or polycentrism as foundational and necessary condition of world order. The counter-hegemonic Hyper-nationalist discourse, by contrast, views national strength embodied by a strong and uniform nation-state as the pre-condition for surviving and prospering in a world ridden by geopolitical, civilizational and ideological conflicts. Though this study argues that there are distinctive world order concepts in India’s foreign policy discourse, it does not claim that these are distinctively Indian and thus radically different from other understandings of world order. However, the Indian conceptions of world order do feature distinct aspects such as the emphasis on the role of inter-religious and inter-civilizational accommodation and conflict. This makes the Indian case particularly interesting, since the dealing with difference or the Other is not only at the forefront of the notion of world order, but also of poststructuralist scholarship which argues that identities are constituted in relation to difference and seeks to find ways for the peaceful contention of antagonisms. The identity/order nexus also allows us to go beyond a purely descriptive account of Indian world order conceptions and examine how and why a particular discourse and its representation of India and world order could become dominant.

Against this backdrop, the book’s second contribution is of a theoretical nature. It situates itself within the growing but still limited number of theory-oriented⁵ studies on Indian foreign policy (see, inter alia, Nayar/Paul 2003; Chacko 2012; Destradi 2013; Hansel/Khan/Levaillant 2017). It seeks to contribute to this literature by offering a poststructuralist, discourse theoretical analysis of Indian foreign policy. At the same time, it aims to address shortcomings in the existing poststructuralist IR scholarship. The key premise of the Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT), which was devised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and forms the bedrock of this study⁶, is a particular concept of discourse which transcends the common distinction between a discursive (linguistic or ideational) and a non-linguistic (or material) realm (Laclau/Mouffe 1985) and presumes that ‘all objects and actions are meaningful’, with meaning being conferred by systems of differences (Howarth/Stavrakakis 2000: 2). Hence, a discourse is a relational and differential system of signification that establishes a field of intelligibility whereby a particular ‘reality’ can be comprehended and acted upon. Accordingly, the meanings and identities of subjects, objects and actions do neither depend on reference to a world ‘out there’ nor on ideas we have about an external reality, but are constituted in relation to difference because something can only be known by what it is not (Laclau/Mouffe 1985: 105). In this understanding, the state is, for example, no pre-discursive entity with an objective essence or stable identity but constituted in relation to something that it is not – a shared negativity. By ‘demarcat[ing] an “inside” from an “outside”, a “self” from an “other”, a “domestic” from a “foreign”’, foreign policy is not simply a manifestation of a state’s worldview and internal identity, but plays a crucial role in the constitution of this very identity (Campbell 1998: 9/12). As identities are purely relational and can thus not be grounded on a stable foundation (e.g. reason, religion or geography), they are in permanent need of re-production and thus require the difference of an Other. The Other is not necessarily or merely an enemy, but enables the constitution of a collective identity and marks what the Self stands for. In this sense, foreign policy and identity mutually constitute each other (Hansen 2006: 1).

A poststructuralist approach, with its theorization of the identity/difference nexus in international relations, can help us in accounting for the shifts, continuities and apparent puzzles in India’s foreign policy. A common assertion found in the literature is that Indian foreign policy shifted from ‘idealism’ to ‘realism’ or ‘pragmatism’, which would reflect in India’s 1998 nuclear tests, the engagement of the US and the renouncement of non-alignment and third world solidarity (Mohan 2004; Kapur 2006; Ganguly 2012; Malone 2012). Rajesh Basrur qualified this argument by noting that ‘India’s foreign policy was “pragmatic” in the past’, but ‘the content of this pragmatism has changed’ (Basrur 2014: 169) without explaining how this change happened, though. Moreover, these accounts cannot explain the resilience of non-alignment in India’s foreign policy rhetoric (see Khilnani et al. 2012) or why India is still rather hesitant to associate itself with the ‘Western’ international community and contribute to global public good provision in the liberal world order (Ganguly 2013; Hall 2013), while having no qualms about joining ‘non-Western’ state groupings such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

More recently, constructivist scholars have sought to explain this continuity with reference to India’s identity as a ‘postcolonial’, ‘exceptional’ or ‘ambivalent’ actor (Ollapally 2011; Chacko 2012; Sullivan 2014, 2015). Constructivists have foregrounded the study of identity in IR (see Berenskoetter 2010) and assert that identities, along with other ‘ideational’ factors such as norms and ideas, shape foreign policy (Jepperson/Wendt/Katzenstein 1996; Hopf 2002; Nau 2002; Legro 2005). This research agenda is premised upon an implicit or explicit dichotomy between the ‘ideational’ and the ‘material’ that is usually taken for granted and not theorized. Though claiming that world politics is socially constructed, many constructivists thus seem to suggest that there is an objective, material reality in which we can examine how ‘socially constructed’ identities impact on foreign policy. Such a conceptualization, which ultimately treats identities as a relatively stable property of the state, can easily result in an essentialist account of identity, because constructivists attribute the state a particular essence and contribute to its further sedimentation by showing how this alleged essence has shaped its foreign policy. By portraying India as a ‘moralist’, ‘different’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘peaceful’ and ‘benign’ nation-state, some constructivist works on Indian foreign policy come uncomfortably close to the official foreign policy rhetoric of Indian governments. Though this book shares the constructivist belief that foreign policy change is linked with identity, it posits that poststructuralism’s relational understanding of identities can avoid such essentialism because it overrides the material/ideational dichotomy and identity thus ceases to be something that a state possesses and that impacts on its foreign policy, since it can only be constituted and practiced against the difference of an Other and thus remains incomplete. It is this inherent need for difference and the resulting incompleteness of identities which, as I will show, prompted a transformation of India’s hegemonic foreign policy discourse in the post-cold war period and thus a re-constitution of meaning and identity. By establishing a new dominant interpretative framework, the Post-Nehruvian discourse re-defined India’s place in the world and also defined what a ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ foreign policy is.

Though poststructuralist IR presents the starting point of my analysis of Indian foreign policy, it is not without limitations. By addressing some of these deficits, this book seeks to make a theoretical contribution to the poststructuralist literature on foreign policy analysis. The first deficit concerns the possibility and trajectory of foreign policy and identity change. Although IR poststructuralists generally emphasize the contingency of discourses making them instable and prone to change, their narratives often suggest that the discourses which constitute and re-produce the subjects and objects of IR are relatively stable (cf. Campbell 1998; Waever 2001). Those poststructuralist studies, by contrast, that account for foreign policy change and offer important insights into this dynamic, appear at times not fully consistent with a poststructuralist, discursive ontology by treating the subject as the source of meaning and identity (see Hansen 2006; partially also Nabers 2009). The second deficit concerns the characterization of poststructuralism as a constitutive theory that can only pose ‘how-possible’ questions (cf. Doty 1996; Hansen 2006; Herschinger 2011). This limits the number of possible research questions and implies that poststructuralist approaches cannot explain social phenomena. I will show in this book that recent refinements of PDT by Laclau and others can help us in overcoming these limitations and thereby enrich poststructuralist analyses of foreign policy.

Though several IR studies have cited or utilized parts of the Laclauian–Mouffian theory of discourse (Doty 1996; Campbell 1998; Diez 2001; Hansen 2006), only a relatively few studies (Nabers 2009, 2015; Solomon 2009; Herschinger 2011) fully employ its theoretical framework or take into consideration the further development of this theory by Laclau and others. This book utilizes this refined framework, in particular it draws on the Logics of Critical Explanation (Glynos/Howarth 2007), which conceptua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Discourse, foreign policy and identity
• 3. Global power shifts and world order: The contestation of ‘Western’ discursive hegemony
• 4. The evolution and dislocations of the Nehruvian foreign policy discourse
• 5. Post-Nehruvianism: India’s hegemonic foreign policy discourse in the post-cold war era and its conception of world order
• 6. Hyper-nationalist discourse: Making India strong
• 7. Conclusion
• Index