Neoclassical realism
Before outlining the proposed “subculture-cleavage” model in more detail, the book should be put into a broader theoretical perspective. The quest for generating a typology of Indian strategic thought rests upon neoclassical realism, an IR approach with a diverse range of variables, be it leader images or strategic culture (Ripsman, Taliaferro and Lobell 2016) that are employed in the study of grand strategy.
The plurality of strategic traditions (ideational strategic pluralism) is exactly such a variable that can be theorized within the neoclassical realist theory of international politics (Ripsman, Taliaferro and Lobell 2016), more specifically within neoclassical realism’s model of grand strategy formation (Kitchen 2010), which conceives strategic pluralism as intervening ideational variables in terms of strategic subcultures.
Against the widespread criticism that neoclassical realism’s limited capabilities cannot do more than explain in an ad hoc fashion behaviour at odds with systemic imperatives. So-called Type III neoclassical realism (Ripsman, Taliaferro and Lobell 2016) can account for a broader range of foreign policy choices as well as grand strategic adjustments and, as a consequence, neoclassical realism can even explain systemic outcomes and structural change, making it a full-fledged theory of IR. For neoclassical realism, like for structural realists (Waltz 1979, Mearsheimer 2001), the international system is still the independent variable. However, according to neoclassical realists, states are rarely faced with an international environment that presents a clear and imminent threat that dictates an optimal policy choice in the structural-realist sense. More often, as in a setting like that faced by India after the end of the Cold War, states have a range of policy options to choose from. And according to neoclassical realism and highly relevant for the study of strategic pluralism, the actual decisions states make may have far more to do with the worldviews of the elite, the strategic cultures, and the nature of the domestic coalitions, which neoclassical realists have conceptualized as intervening variables at the unit and sub-unit level.1 When, for example, as Steven Lobell argues, British hegemony in the late 19th century was challenged by French, Russian, German, Japanese, and American contenders, it was not clear a priori how British grand strategy should respond. Various “domestic coalitions competed to determine what degree of threat each challenger posed and whether that threat should be met with cooperative or competitive policy responses” (Ripsman, Taliaferro and Lobell 2016, 29) – in the same vein, India’s strategic subcultures are engaged in determining a grand strategy that suits both the country’s changed capabilities and structural outlook. Similarly, Gideon Rose writes,
[S]ystemic pressures and incentives may shape the broad contours and general direction of foreign policy without being strong or precise enough to determine the specific details of state behavior. Often in this view, structure compels states to act as unitary, rational actors in situations of a high level of threat, but when these conditions are not present, other factors enter into the analysis. (Rose 1998, 147)
According to Rose, neoclassical realists
argue that the scope and ambition of a country´s foreign policy is driven first and foremost by its place in the international system and specifically by its relative material power capabilities. This is why they are realist. They argue further, however, that the impact of such power capabilities on foreign policy is indirect and complex, because systemic pressures must be translated through intervening variables at the unit level. This is why they are neoclassical.
Hence neoclassical realism is not rejecting structural realism with its core organizing principle. It considers anarchy to be an “anthropological constant” which structures but does not determine behaviour. However, neoclassical realism as both an explanatory and a normative theory problematizes any deviations from the logic of structural realism or neorealism as “self-defeating” conduct (neoclassical realists propose, following Schweller, a “theory of mistakes” (Schweller 2003)), which is explained by the influence exerted by domestic institutions and strategic ideas (not in line with realism’s prescriptions). Structural realism argues that the system limits but does not determine state action (Waltz applies the analogy of a company being “pressed by market forces” but eventually having the ability to choose) and where foreign policy leaves the path of ideal behaviour according to a state’s structural position, domestic politics and ideas are usually the cause. “You can evade reality, but you cannot evade the consequences of avoiding reality” (Hewitt 2001, 157, attributed to Ayn Rand). Neoclassical realism expounds when states are not able to adjust to systemic constraints and highlights the severe consequences that result from such deviation (Rathbun 2008a). That is why neoclassical realists have taken up internal politics and ideology into their analyses.
Strategic culture as an ideational unit-level variable
Such a move of neoclassical realism has met with disapproval from neoliberals and constructivists: the most trenchant critique has been voiced by Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, whose objections target the integration of domestic and ideational variables, which they contend are a legitimate part of the “liberal” and “constructivist” paradigms, correspondingly. They argue that bringing ideas and domestic actors into realist research would lead to paradigmatic incoherence and indistinctiveness. Nonetheless, if the international state system is lenient enough to permit substantial deviations from the formalized structural-realist representation of unitary actors and objective perception, then it would be hard to differentiate neoclassical realism from liberal and constructivist approaches – two perspectives that put more weight than does post-Waltzian realism on agency. The more a state’s foreign and security policy institutions are taken over by narrow-minded and ideological actors, and the more leaders tend to follow alternative social constructions of reality at odds with “objective” reality defined by neorealism, the harsher the consequence. The situation is worsened if due to social and elite cleavages a dominant subculture that might believe in worldviews that violate the “objective” precepts as detected by neorealists. These distorted interpretations of reality lead to self-delusion. Decision-makers might end up having faith in such a socially constructed alternative reality, but the “objective” conditions of the anarchic system nonetheless persevere. The foreign and security policies that become most imbued with these sets of ideas all confront severe policy disaster. Correspondingly, following Schweller (Schweller 2003) again, different ideological worldviews push leaders towards differing notions of threat and, consequently, strategies for managing them. The outcome is, eventually, to justify Waltz, not to debilitate his claims. Part of the misunderstanding surrounding the epistemological position of neorealism and its bond to neoclassical realism revolves around the problem of how determining the former is thought to be and what determination actually means. Opponents of neorealism tend to overlook that the theory is one of limitations and inducements and thus does not provide fixed prospects for state behaviour. Neoclassical realists occasionally incorrectly contend that due to that less determinant character, structural realism lacks any consequence for the analysis of grand strategy and foreign policy (Rathbun 2008a); however, as is true for all the other realisms with adjectives, realism displays a cogent logic in all areas of international studies – including grand strategy. Neoclassical realism aids and asserts neorealism. These two theories should, however, not be regarded as adversaries, competitors, or different. In the best case, both approaches epitomize a division of labour. Rathbun maintains that neorealism has to use domestic political processes and their ideational underpinning to explicate why states are not attentive towards the necessities of the international system (as a consequence, however, one is forced to provide evidence if and how this system is actually penalizing its units) (Rathbun 2008a).
Especially its sub-systemic focus is relevant for the present project that claims to refine the study of grand strategy and is therefore closely connected to strategic studies. What neoclassical realism does is to take the unit level (the second image or level of analysis (Waltz 1959)) AND ideational variables (ideas and, importantly, strategic culture) into account. Strategic culture is seen as a supplement, not supplant, in relation to other variables. Perceptions and worldviews are considered to be just one factor in any attempt to grasp the complexity of strategic choice. Apart from the never-ending quest for legitimacy and public consensus, decision-makers and the strategic community as such do have to take structural and material variables into account, as the argument goes. Examples of these additional significant variables in terms of neoclassical realism, to which all Indian subcultures are equally exposed, are the aforementioned structure of the international state system and the intricacies of bureaucratic politics. But still, “what they make of” those structural settings (Wendt 1999) again depends to a large degree on their respective “lenses of interpretation.”
Now, what kinds of ideas are studied? The ontological units are aggregated ideas understood as “conceptual frameworks for thinking about strategy” (Nau and Ollapally 2012), for which the central strategic paradigm of each strategic subculture is a vessel. Some neoclassical realist scholars share the conviction, as do I, that the ontological consensus of constructivist approaches, which claims that reality is socially and discursively constructed, is applicable also to strategic culture as being used by neoclassical realism. This understanding contrasts with “material” ontologies of rationalist approaches like neorealism, institutionalism, and other variations of liberalism (Checkel 1998). Neoclassical realism conceives of ideas as being forceful along with material interests and, in this sense, ideas in the context of IR may be subdivided into ideas that tell us, firstly, how the world works – scientific ideas (the strategic culture approach); secondly, into ideas that articulate aims or goals – intentional ideas (the central strategic paradigms of a subculture); and finally, into those that articulate the appropriateness of means – operational ideas (grand strategic preferences of a subculture). A neoclassical realist approach practically necessitates that ideas should be conceptualized as objects with force, in other words, as elements of power. Nonetheless, though, is the connection between ideas and power dissimilar from the link between money and power, or military equipment and power, for example? While in the case of material capabilities, power is principally inherent and static, ideational power can be conceptualized as dependent and variable. Hence, Kitchen suggests contexts where ideas may exert their influence at the unit level: via people working as interlocutors and propagators; in the way of institutions that have been taken over by these ideas; as well as by shaping the wider culture of the state’s society. “Epistemic communities” of experts are seen as having the expertise to shape policies by forming the stances espoused by many other participants of the political process. The degree to which these communities can influence policy depends on their capacity to take over significant posts in the bureaucratic apparatus, which would provide a more solid consolidation of power by institutionalizing the sway over the collective. Nonetheless, does their capacity to capture positions within the bureaucracy rely, partly, on the openness of the current bureaucratic order to their ideas (Kitchen 2010), which will be facilitated by a sovereignty of grand strategic discourse? Additionally, cultural variables discreetly set the limitations for any policy discussions for both individuals and institutions, and consequently exert “a profound effect on the strategic behaviour of states” (Desch 1998, 167). Thus these variables have the potential to elucidate “why some states act contrary to the structural imperatives of the international system” (Desch 1998, 167). Strategic culture approaches, following neoclassical realism, can thus clarify how likewise structured states may react in dissimilar ways to similar pressures according to divergent ideologies present within the state, whether that results from individuals promoting an ideology, cultural preferences, history, or else. Moreover, the CSP entail composite thought figures or patterns of narratives connected to identity politics (its foreign and security aspects) and nation-building and, as was mentioned earlier, these schools of thought draw on history and the collective memory in their selective reuse (“invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983)) and hybridization of the past in their constant struggle for ideological hegemony.
Thus, neoclassical realism represents the middle ground between structure and agency (Rose 1998) with a not-so-slight tilt towards constructivist approaches – this kind of “soft constructivism” is also what I do by devising a typology of grand strategic worldviews in the framework of neoclassical realism.
Constructivism as an ideational approach entered IR theory as a critique of a specific variety of realism, namely structural realism (Wendt 1987, Onuf and Klink 1989). Therefore, constructivists often seem to have worldviews that could be grouped under the label of liberal idealism or liberal institutionalism. Barkin argues that scholars like Wendt (Wendt 1999) and Moravcsik (1997) were successfully “trying to rehabilitate the terms idealism and liberalism (although in very different ways) from the charge that these concepts reflect a normative approach too social science: an ideology” (Barkin 2003, 332). As a result, most textbooks and overview articles in the field introduce the reader to the trio of realism, liberalism, and constructivism; see, for example, Doyle (1997), Jervis (2002), Nau (2007), Rittberger (2004), Smith et al. (2008), Snyder (2004), and Walt (1998). In the literature, constructivism is often depicted as a distinct paradigm of IR like liberalism or Marxism (Hughes 2000, Kegely and Wittkopf 1997, Hughes 2000). But this claim is misleading as constructivism identified either as epistemology, ontology, or methodology is not in opposition to realism but rather to materialism or rationalism (Barkin 2003). Among the “not-so-great debates” (Ferguson and Mansbach 2003, 36) or inter-paradigmatic disputes of IR theory, this rationalism–constructivism controversy has been...
