China, India and the Future of International Society [Illustrated] 1783482591, 9781783482597

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China, India and the Future of International Society

China, India and the Future of International Society Edited by Jamie Gaskarth

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2015 by Jamie Gaskarth All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-259-7 ISBN: PB 978-1-78348-260-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data China, India and the future of international society / edited by Jamie Gaskarth. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78348-259-7 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78348-260-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78348-261-0 (electronic) 1. China--Foreign relations--21st century. 2. India--Foreign relations--21st century. 3. International organization. I. Gaskarth, Jamie, 1976- editor of compilation. JZ1734.C544 2015 327.51--dc23 2015009488 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Jamie Gaskarth 1 2 3

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Evolution and Practices of the Indian Notion of Sovereignty Happymon Jacob Chinese Notions of Sovereignty: A Historical Perspective Chen Yudan Great-Power Aspiration and Indian Conceptions of International Society Chris Ogden Rising Powers and International Society: Lessons from the Past and the Case of China David Armstrong Normative Power India? Ian Hall China’s Search for Normative Power and the Possibilities of the Asian Century David Kerr Sovereignty versus Human Rights in a Post-Western World? Chris Brown

Conclusion Jamie Gaskarth Bibliography Index

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147 155 173

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Acknowledgements

This book emerged from an Economic and Social Research Councilfunded seminar series entitled “Normative challenges to international society: rising powers and global responses” (ES/J021261/1). The editor is very grateful to the ESRC for their support for this initiative. Many of these chapters derived from the first seminar at King’s College, London in November 2012. We would like to thank Mervyn Frost who generously hosted the event. Details of the seminars and a bibliography of rising powers literature are available at http://www. risingpowersglobalresponses.com. Thanks also go to Aneta Brockhill, Nicola Langdon and Ben Nutt for their research assistance during the project. An earlier version of Chris Brown’s chapter was presented as a Keynote Address to a Conference on ‘Democracy, Empires and Geopolitics’ at the Center for Political Thought, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan in December 2011. It was also presented at the second ESRC Seminar Series at Chatham House, 22 March 2013, as were a number of other chapters. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the participants at these events for their comments. The editor would like to extend a special thanks to Ian Hall for all his encouragement and efforts throughout the project. This book would also not have been possible without the encouragement and patience of Anna Reeve at Rowman and the excellent production support from Laura Reiter. Thank you kindly for all your hard work. The editor would further like to note his appreciation for Plymouth University, and his dedicated colleagues within the School of Government, who have provided advice, time and support in various ways to help these events come to fruition. Lastly, the editor’s wife, Ellie, deserves a particular mention for being incredible and incredulous at all times.

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Introduction Jamie Gaskarth

The twenty-first century is said to be the ‘Asian’ century. A substantial literature has developed over the past decade predicting a global shift of power from West to East, driven by China and India’s rapid economic rise (Fukuyama 2011, 506n24; Babones 2011). The numbers are remarkable. China became the second-largest economy in the world in 2010 and in 2014 was home to the second-largest stock market, in both categories overtaking Japan and ranking behind only the United States. 1 Its unprecedented growth rates, averaging 9.8 percent a year in the decades after it embraced market reforms in 1978 (World Bank 2015), have driven it up the economic rankings, and commentators predict that China’s economic size may have already overtaken the United States in terms of purchasing power parity in 2014 and will do so in dollar value by the end of the decade (Fray 2014). In its wake, India too has experienced considerable economic growth, averaging 8 percent in the first decade of the new millennium (Hoge 2004; World Bank 2011). Although its growth rate fell to 4.7 percent in 2013/2014, Goldman Sachs predicts this will increase to 6.3 percent in 2015, and India is expected to overtake China’s rate of growth in 2016 (Panchal 2015). India too has risen in the global rankings, becoming the third-largest economy in the world in 2011 (measured according to purchasing power parity) in a World Bank report released in 2014 (Economic Times 2014) and eighth in terms of GDP in current US dollars in 2013 (World Bank database). These statistics are viewed as having international significance because they mean a reversal of the economic dominance of ‘Western’ countries in favour of the Asian continent. Indian commentators proudly note that ‘the fastest growing region in the world today is Asia and not Europe or America’ (Choudhary 2009, 5). The G7’s proportion of global trade has dipped below 50 percent, from about 70 percent in the mid1980s (Adam and Kollet 2010), and the OECD predicts that China and India’s ‘combined GDP will exceed that of the major seven (G7) OECD economies by around 2025’ (OECD 2012). Such a change in the distribution of relative economic power is expected to have major ramifications for the values and norms of international society (Muni and Mohan 2005, 52). Bill Emmott sees Asian eco1

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nomic growth leading to a ‘commensurate transfer of political power and intellectual influence away from the West’ (2007, 16–17). Christopher Coker views international society as ‘under threat’ as ‘international law is Western law; most international conventions are Western in origin and even spirit’ (2008, 6; Makinda 2001, 336). The decline in the West’s economic power, so the argument goes, will lead to a decline in the influence of Western rules and values (Ferguson 2006). In their place, a more Asianinfluenced ‘Eastphalian’ international society is predicted to emerge (Fidler and Ganguly 2010). This process is viewed as inevitable, even if China and India’s policy makers do not wish to project their values or assert their dominance in the institutions of international society. Joseph Stiglitz points out that Chinese participants in the World Bank’s International Comparison programme threatened to walk out when they realized that its measurements predicted China would overtake the United States in 2014 because ‘being No. 1 comes with a cost’, namely, the expectation that China would start ‘paying more to support international bodies such as the United Nations’ and be pressured into adopting ‘an enlightened leadership role on issues such as climate change’ (Stiglitz 2015). Meanwhile, India too has begun to attract attention, with calls for it to act responsibly on global issues such as climate change and the responsibility to protect (Reuters 2014; Mohan 2014). Discussion of the workings of international society and its normative basis are now dominated by the implications of the rise of these two states in particular and the challenge they might represent to prevailing global norms. This volume is designed to engage with this debate, question some of its assumptions, and explore what the rise of China and India will mean for international society. It is a problem of huge importance, in terms of both international theory and global policy making, encompassing debates about the problems of translating economic power into soft power (Nye 2005), about how far states have become socialized into an agreed pattern of international norms (Dunne 1995; Buzan 2004, 2010), about how far international society’s norms are ‘Western’ or universal (Perry 1997; Chandler 2002; Bellamy 2006), and about whether the Asian identity of China and India overrides individual differences in their normative outlook (Segal 1999; Sen 1999; Steinglass 2005). Much of the literature on the rise of China and India either focuses exclusively on economic and military matters or looks at these countries in isolation. This volume is original and innovative in that it explores the normative implications of their rise together and brings out points of comparison and difference between both countries and the way they view international society. Recent leadership changes in both countries make this particularly timely. Before outlining the specific structure of this book and the contributions of each chapter to this discussion, the introduction will seek to unpick some of the assumptions of the literature on the rise of China and

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India and note the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments it contains. The most immediate question has to be why these two states should be grouped together for analysis. China and Russia’s triple veto over UN Security Council resolutions towards Syria might suggest that pairing is of greater relevance as a challenge to global norms such as the responsibility to protect. The emergence of BRICS may indicate that the Asian character of China and India is less relevant than their self-identification as members of an emerging alternative global group to the G7 with its own attitudes to responsibility, development, sovereignty, and trade (Cooper and Thakur 2014). Yet there is something compelling about these two states and the extent to which they seem to mirror each other in a number of ways. In addition to their spectacular economic growth, increasing capacity, and predicted dominance in the coming decades, their shared historical legacy of colonialism, mass of population, geographical size, and civilizational identity arguably puts them in a different category from other emerging states. Smaller states such as Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey have also seen impressive economic growth rates but do not have the potential to become globally significant powers comparable to the United States—as predicted for China and India. Geographically large states such as Russia and Brazil may outrank India at present in terms of proportion of global GDP, but the Russian economy is contracting substantially due to sanctions, dependency on oil revenue, and demographic pressures while Brazil struggles to project power globally due to its location, relations with neighbors, internal domestic problems, and economy largely based on raw materials rather than high-value technological goods and services. By contrast, the intertwined fortunes and shared characteristics of China and India have given rise to the label ‘Chindia’ to reflect a ‘broad strategic partnership’ that is expected to exercise substantial influence in the coming decades (Ivanovitch 2014; Ramesh 2005). That said, there are problems in the way the ascendance of China and India are portrayed. For one thing, the measurements used to ascertain the value of their respective economies are notoriously dubious (Ferguson 2015). An emphasis on economic growth and future potential can lead to a serious misreading of the current situation with regard to global powers. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom continue to have larger economies than India in dollar value terms and are major centers of global finance and economic influence. For all its current economic difficulties, the European Union remains the largest global economic actor and, if it continues to exist, is likely to remain so well into the century. Aside from these technical issues in assessing economic power, there is the larger problem of how and when economic and other forms of material power translate into normative influence. Much of the literature on the rise of powers such as China and India implicitly takes for granted

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the rationalist/materialist fallacy that ideas and norms are merely the epiphenomena of economic interests. Certainly, growth in a state’s economic power can mean it has a greater capacity to assert ideas and norms that further its own interests, has broader interests to defend—widening its spheres of engagement—and can become more attractive to other states based on its newfound economic power. Yet that does not mean that all norms are merely a cover for underlying economic self-interest. For one thing, humans, individually and socially, are motivated by a whole series of emotions such as love, pride, hatred, jealousy, empathy, revenge, fear, guilt, and duty. Economic theory has largely abandoned attachment to the notion of humans as rational egoists, even though many international relations theorists still cling to this notion at the state level (Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Gilpin 1983; Waltz 1996; Mearsheimer 2010). At the international societal level, some states continue to exert normative influence after their material power has declined while others fail to do so despite a rise in their fortunes. Debate over how far material power translates into international societal influence has a long history in English School theory. Ian Clark has noted that ES theorists generally tended to see the social act of recognition as crucial to achieving great power status; however, Martin Wight asserted ‘the existence of what is recognized determines the act of recognition, and not the other way round’ (as cited in Clark 2009, 211). In other words, Wight felt that changes in material circumstances are prior and necessary to exerting the kind of influence that comes with great-power status. Yet more recent scholarship has tended to note the problems rising states have in exerting their normative ideas without social recognition from other states (Hurrell 2006). For Clark, great power status involves more than ‘a set of attributes and capabilities’ but is also about being embedded within social relationships with other states (Clark 2009, 214). This is relevant to our discussion since it implies that China and India cannot simply expect to see a growth in their normative impact in accordance with their economic rise. Rather, their ideas and status must gain the social acceptance of other actors in international society. From a contemporary perspective, we can see that so-called rising powers often exert influence in their region based on their economic capacity—Russia’s involvement in the former Soviet states of central Asia is one example (Herd 2014). Yet to have an impact on the norms of international society requires the support or acquiescence of a broader range of states, many of which may not be tied to the kinds of local reciprocal economic relationships that could be used to leverage political support. This leads us to one of the internal contradictions of the rising-powers literature: it tends to describe the rise of these states as if they are separate and discrete units; but to shape global norms, states have to offer ideas that apply beyond their borders and make a contribution to wider society. If they retreat to a more pluralist understanding of sovereignty

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(Wheeler 1992), they seem to be resisting the converging pull of globalization, and with it the global public goods that have flowed from greater interconnectedness. It is because of the tangible benefits of the liberal world order, including freer trade, peaceful settlement of disputes, freedom of movement, and the free exchange of ideas that scholars such as G. John Ikenberry see it as persisting beyond the relative decline of the United States and its European allies (Ikenberry 2008, 2011). Some commentators argue that rising powers such as China and India, while seeing the benefits of multilateralism and cooperation, are increasingly concerned about the homogenizing force of global institutions and so are moving towards more regional forms of cooperation or global clubs and coalitions (Stern 2000, 243; Narlikar 2005, 2010). In that future, international society could become more fragmented and even disintegrate into coalitions of like-minded states operating in their own normative spheres. 2 However, this tendency can be overstated. China and India are clearly prospering within the current international system, and so it is doubtful that they would wish to subvert it unless it came to hamper their prosperity, threaten their identity, or seek to coerce them into changing their domestic norms and values. To understand what China and India might want from international society and what kind of international environment they wish to foster in the coming decades, a number of questions need to be considered, such as: what is unique or new about China and India’s normative outlook compared to prevailing norms? What existing norms would they wish to enhance, and which might they resist? How do their normative goals differ from each other, and what points of similarity are identifiable? Furthermore, we also need to consider how these states generate and promote norms and what obstacles exist to their adoption. These are key parts of a number of chapters that follow. Thinking about how states such as China and India understand international society and interact within it also leads us to reflect on the concept and practice of society at a global level, to ask questions such as: what is international society? How is it structured? How do actors within that society interact and uphold its norms? How is change managed within it? Two key aspects of this discussion revolve around the structure of international society and how its norms should be enforced. It is these two parts that I wish to consider further here as a prelude to the specific discussions on China and India in the rest of the volume. When it comes to the structure of international society, there is considerable disagreement over the extent of US dominance and how far the unipolar moment has faded and the system has become multipolar (Wohlforth 1999, 2009; Hiro 2010; Layne 2012). Most scholars see the events of the past decade as evidence of the limits of US power, with normative developments such as the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto treaty, and the treaty on arms sales emerging in the teeth of US

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opposition while US policies towards climate change, trade, and development have been thwarted in the Doha Round and G20 summits. In addition, the failures of US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Arab-Israeli peace process imply a decline in the US capacity to effect change and enforce its policy solutions. But powerful states throughout history have seen individual policy goals frustrated. The fact that the United States doesn’t always get its way tells us little about its relative influence. Would another state have achieved more, and, if so, why is the United States frequently the actor called upon to intervene? More interesting for our discussion is an underlying debate over the broader stratification of international society. While states, especially China and India, tend to propagate the myth of all states being equal, legally, politically, and socially, international society as currently constituted is hierarchical (Clark 2011; Waltz 1979, 132; Donnelly 2006, 141; Held 2014, 66). In legal and political terms, the United Nations Security Council confers significant rights and privileges on its members—especially its permanent members. In the past, India has resisted this arrangement, but its regular attempts to be elected to the council, as well as its campaign along with other G4 countries to be afforded permanent member status undermines the credibility of this challenge. Meanwhile, China’s use of the veto in UNSC is demonstrative of its own claim to special privileges within international society. The different rights and responsibilities delineated in the current international legal order led Gerry Simpson to describe states as ‘unequal sovereigns’, with great powers able to decide who is accepted within international society and who is excluded as an ‘outlaw state’ (Simpson 2004; Zhang 2014). Beyond these institutionalized forms of hierarchy are other social markers which can have an important impact on a state’s normative influence (Dunne 1995; Aalberts 2010). In his discussion of international societies in history, Evan Luard noted that actors within them were ranked according to features such as the rank of the ruler, the state’s power, and its status, either in the society as a whole or in subgroups; to this list we might add a state’s contribution to that society (Luard 1976, 201–29). With regard to the rank of the ruler, Luard notes that states in the past were ranked according to whether their leader was a duke, a prince, a king, or an emperor. After a fashion, this kind of stratification continues to this day. Some leaders, due to their personal charisma or moral authority, can exercise an important influence over international events in a way that exceeds their material resources. Nelson Mandela’s input into Libya’s reintegration with the international community and Pope Francis’s involvement with the warming of US-Cuba relations are two recent examples (Sengupta et al. 2011; Dias and Miller 2014). Both India and China have opted for leaders that are more bureaucratic than charismatic in recent years, adept at managing the technical challenges of rapid development but less imposing on the world stage. That in itself

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could be seen to have shaped the normative influence of each state in this period. A number of authors in this volume ponder what difference the more charismatic and media literate Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi have made to their countries’ respective impact since taking office. Material power is a significant aspect of the ranking of states and an attractive force in its own right, particularly when exercised successfully. An advantageous change in this regard can lead to increased prestige— the attention paid to China and India as a result of their economic growth rates is symptomatic of this process (Goh 2013, 1–2). Luard also identifies a number of states whose political influence has grown or declined as a result either of military victories or defeats. In recent times, Britain’s recapture of the Falkland Islands was a pivotal moment in reestablishing its credentials as a major power. Before it overplayed its hand in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s military operations in Georgia and Crimea reinforced its identity as a military power of the first rank. However, ranking a state by the recent direction of changes in its relative power can be problematic. Japan continues to be one of the largest economies in the world, despite two decades of low growth and deflationary pressures. France and the United Kingdom experienced major contractions in their geographical scope with the end of their respective empires. This fed into a declinist narrative, persisting today, that downplays their residual power. Thus, Deo and Pradhan question the permanent member status of France and the United Kingdom on the Security Council when India does not have a seat since the former two are ‘economically and morally exhausted nations’—even though they were the fifth- and sixth-largest economies in the world (in dollar terms) and the fifth- and sixth-largest military spenders, respectively, in 2013—ranking higher on both indices than India (World Bank database; SIPRI 2014). Similarly, predictions of decline surrounding the United States have been around for decades, yet it continues to have an overwhelming advantage in key metrics of power such as military capacity and doctrine, technological sophistication, wealth per capita, and economic size. For this reason, some scholars have questioned how far the supposed decline of the West is a real phenomenon and asserted that these states are likely to rise again in response to challenges (Rosecrance 2013). With regard to status, this is partly linked to regime type and a state’s position within groupings of like states. In contemporary international society, states interact and converge on policy issues based on whether they are liberal democracies, monarchies, authoritarian regimes, Arab states, or former colonies. States self-identify with these categories and shape their relations accordingly. These patterns are not automatic—the United States has often found itself voting with authoritarian regimes on issues such as international criminal justice and the death penalty. They can also overlap. Yet when we are considering how a state might expand its normative influence, the extent to which other states have similar

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domestic political structures is likely to be an important factor affecting how much traction its attempts to spread normative ideas to other states will have. If they keep their current political systems as they are, this might seem to offer India, a liberal democracy, more natural allies among ‘free’ countries with liberal political arrangements, while China would likely gravitate towards countries that were more authoritarian. In 2014, Freedom House evaluated a minority of countries globally (45 percent) to be free, with 30 percent partly free and 25 percent not free (Freedom House 2014). India would have more in common with countries from Europe and the Americas, where 88 percent and 68 percent of countries in these regions, respectively, are designated free. By contrast, in Eurasia, no countries are defined as free, and 58 percent are seen as not free; in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 66 percent are not free and only 6 percent free; and in sub-Saharan Africa, 41 percent are viewed as not free and 39 percent only partly free. Meanwhile, in Asia-Pacific, 41 percent are viewed as free but 59 percent only partly free or not free (Freedom House 2014). As noted, there is no automatic link between a state’s domestic political character and its pattern of alliances, but this is often an underlying factor. Based only on the configuration of political systems within international society, one might expect India to struggle to exert normative influence in sub-Saharan Africa, MENA, and Eurasia due to the authoritarian nature of regimes in the region. China, on the other hand, with its authoritarian government, has an advantage in most of the world’s regions apart from Europe and the Americas. As Freedom House identifies a decline in freedom globally in 2014, this trend is likely to increase (Freedom House 2014). Of course, there are other elements to any state’s self-identification within a particular group. The legacies of colonialism will make maintaining cordial relations between India and Europe difficult at times and give India a natural affinity with postcolonial states such as those in the MENA and sub-Saharan Africa regions. Nevertheless, if India represents itself as the world’s largest democracy and an example of liberal values, its relations with authoritarian regimes will have an inherent tension. Obversely, China is likely to struggle to exert normative influence among the minority of states globally that are free— especially in Europe and the Americas, where they are the majority. In addition to these social elements, there is also a functional aspect to the ranking of states (Donnelly 2012, 154). South Africa’s incorporation into the BRICS grouping is clearly not founded on its absolute material wealth since the other members far outstrip its economic capacity. Instead, it seems to be included because it fulfils a symbolic role of including a state from the African continent. In the same vein, membership of the G20, though supposedly based on a state’s ‘systemic significance for the international financial system’, also includes criteria such as geo-

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graphical size and population such that Argentina and Indonesia qualify but Spain does not, despite the latter having a larger economy (Council on Foreign Relations 2009). These kinds of considerations are a backdrop to much discussion of China and India’s importance in international society since the fact that they represent ‘two-fifths of humanity’ in terms of their population size is in itself seen as a reason for their voice carrying substantial normative weight in global forums (Ministry of External Affairs 2004a; Bidwai 2006). The symbolic function their involvement serves to any normative initiative is one avenue of influence that may be exploited in coming decades. 3 However, there is a further functional issue in terms of the ranking of states, and that is the contribution they are able to make to the operation of that society. France and the United Kingdom retain their status in global affairs in part because they are able to offer considerable legal knowledge, diplomatic expertise, and technical skills when it comes to drafting diplomatic papers, conducting negotiations, or devising new international institutions and rules. In contrast, Shashi Tharoor notes that ‘India is served by the smallest diplomatic corps of any major country, not just far smaller than the big powers but by comparison with most of the larger emerging countries’ (as cited in Ramachandran 2013; Mohan 2013). China too has not until recently had the kind of geographical diplomatic reach of its Western counterparts. Although China is keen to emphasize that it has contributed more to UN peacekeeping than other permanent members of the UN Security Council and intends to increase its contribution in the future (Foot 2014), David Shambaugh noted in 2011 that it was not in the top ten contributors to the UN annual budget and continued to ‘essentially “free ride”’, contributing ‘only as much to global governance as is necessary to deflect Western criticism’ (Shambaugh 2011). In 2014–2015, China will still only be the sixth-largest contributor to the UN’s annual operating budget (UN 2013). Beyond foreign ministries, Western states are also supported by substantial policy communities made up of elite academic departments, think tanks, NGOs, and business groups which provide intellectual support to policy formation (Hall 2012; Hall and Smith 2013). China and India have both sought to encourage more critical policy thinking, but such networks are not easily developed and take time to mature. In addition, China’s political system creates difficulties for the open expression of dissenting opinion and genuine freedom of thought. Overall, unless both countries make a more demonstrable commitment to the global public goods of international society, they are likely to struggle to project normative influence. In this regard, China’s promotion of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is both a challenge to existing international institutions such as the World Bank as well as a tangible positive step to recycle China’s trade surpluses in a way that will benefit the region (Evans-Pritchard 2015).

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An important feature of the ranking of states within international society is how changes are managed. The rise of China has led to a debate on power transitions—the supplanting of one or more dominant states by rising challengers—and hegemonic successions—who gets to manage and preserve the international order (Clark 2011, 14). The first supposes conflict will emerge, as occurred with the rise of Germany and Japan in the twentieth century, while the latter sees the possibility of the peaceful transference of responsibility—as happened between the United Kingdom and the United States in the same period (Gilpin 1981; Mearsheimer 2010; Chan 2008). The key difference between historical analogies and contemporary world politics is the density of today’s multilateral institutions and their capacity to absorb new entrants. Instead of forcing their way into new markets through military conquest, states can now join regimes such as the World Trade Organization and participate in global trade on equal terms. The International Court of Justice is available to arbitrate territorial disputes. Meanwhile, the UN exists as a diplomatic forum for managing disagreements (Ikenberry 2010). That said, these institutions have been slow to adjust the relative voting weight of states in executive decision-making forums. The UN Security Council has been notoriously resistant to reform, with its last significant procedural change in 1965, expanding its members from eleven to fifteen and raising the required majority from seven to nine (Weiss 2003, 149). The pithily titled ‘Open-Ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council’ started work in January 1994 and finally provided its report in 2008, but this only gave way to the intergovernmental negotiations (IGN) which have continued falteringly since that time. An advisory group of permanent representatives provided a non-paper for the consideration of the IGN on 10 December 2013 (Ashe 2013), but this proved controversial, and the General Assembly resolved in September 2014 to continue negotiations (Center for UN Reform 2015). Yet the sluggish pace of reform is not likely to lead to conflict as China, the primary rising power, already has permanent member status on the UN Security Council. Moreover, India’s candidature for permanent member status appears to have secured broad agreement. The main obstacles to its accession are not the ‘established’ powers of the United States, France, and the United Kingdom but, in India’s case, Pakistan (as well as China’s wish for India to drop support for Japan’s bid for the same status). The distribution of voting rights in the World Bank and IMF has been a source of ongoing controversy, but this process has been managed with diplomacy, and changes have been implemented. In November 2010, reform of the IMF’s governance structures was announced, including a redistribution of 9 percent of quota shares to ‘dynamic emerging market and developing countries’ (IMF 2010). That same year, the World Bank

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increased the voting power of developing and transition countries as well as agreeing to review its shareholdings every five years to better reflect changes in the global economy. In short, while there is considerable disagreement over how the political and economic institutions of international society should be structured and changes implemented, this has been managed peacefully. One area of change that has proved more acrimonious is in the emergence of the responsibility to protect doctrine, in particular, the military enforcement of the idea of sovereignty as responsibility. This has been spearheaded by norm entrepreneurs, such as Canada, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and, in certain respects, the United States, but rhetorically resisted by key states such as Russia, India, and China. At the same time, Brazil has proposed adding a rider to the doctrine, responsibility while protecting, which threatens to make it impractical to enforce (Pattison 2013). Underlying this debate is the hugely important issue of the use of coercion to enforce the norms of international society. As Reinhold Niebuhr once pointed out, ‘All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion’ (2005, 4). Indeed, Niebuhr went so far as to say that force is ‘an inevitable part of the process of social cohesion’ (2005, 6). Both China and India have rejected the use of force to compel recalcitrant leaders to respect human rights (Harris et al. 2012; Hall 2014). Their decision to allow the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011 (by abstaining in the crucial UN Security Council vote) seemed to constitute a recognition of the ultimate need to resort to force at times to promote human rights norms. Yet India and China’s subsequent rhetoric about NATO’s supposed misuse of the resolution to institute regime change rowed back on this interpretation. China’s vetoes on action in Syria are an important marker that it does not subscribe to the view that force should be used to promote human rights over the norms of sovereignty and nonintervention. There is a question mark over how far either state currently supports the use of force by the international community to uphold its societal values across the board. While both have contributed to international peacekeeping efforts in recent decades, they have tended to avoid direct involvement in coercive military actions such as Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. 4 China has reportedly offered to contribute unilaterally to air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq, at the invitation of the government, and has assisted in antipiracy operations around the Horn of Africa (Bozorgmehr and Hornby 2014), but India is often ambiguous in its pronouncements on the use of force by the international community. In addition to these concerns about the overt use of coercion, China and India have both arguably exhibited an ambivalent or even disingenuous attitude to the latent coercion apparent in their economic relations with developing countries. While both have sought to portray their in-

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vestments in Africa as founded on sovereign equality rather than exploitation, critics have pointed out relations of domination and subordination which are not so distinct from phases of colonialism by European powers (Economist 2013). The balance of Chinese trade towards developing states, even larger ones such as Brazil and India, tends to involve extracting raw materials and then selling them back manufactured goods (Davies and Taylor 2015; Economist 2014). This is of questionable benefit for the longterm development of these states. Drawing attention to the coercive aspects of Western involvement in multilateral institutions while denying their own patterns of domination is not only intellectually dishonest, it also stores up trouble for the future. Unless China and India acknowledge their part in the coercive mechanisms of international society and take steps to ameliorate their negative effects, they are likely to attract resentment. To summarize, there is an interesting and varied backdrop to discussions about China and India’s rise, their understanding of its constituent norms, and the kinds of norms they are likely to promote in coming decades. In addition to specific questions about the identities of India and China, their normative outlook, and societal practices, it is important to ponder how these relate to international society and its future makeup and functions. Consideration of the rise of these states offers profound insights into the structure of international society, its capacity to change, and the means of enforcement that are used to coerce its members into compliance with its norms. THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This book is structured to build a sense of the normative beliefs and practices of China and India, from their domestic interpretation outward, to their interaction with regional and international society. In doing so, it aims to construct an understanding of how their normative beliefs are shaped by internal processes of norm generation, regional attitudes and identities, and international societal forces. The volume begins with chapters by Happymon Jacob and Chen Yudan which explore China and India’s attitudes to sovereignty. These two states are often portrayed as jealously guarding an interpretation of sovereignty as an inviolable principle of international society, entailing nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other states in all but the most extreme cases. This idea is often contrasted with that of sovereignty as responsibility, promoted by a number of mostly Western states in the post–Cold War era. The latter sees sovereignty as more contested and contestable, depending on a state’s behaviour. Happymon Jacob and Chen Yudan offer a more nuanced account of how India and China view

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this norm by exploring historical attitudes to the concept and their evolution over time as each state’s economic power has increased. For instance, contrary to the dominant view that India defines sovereignty in material terms, in relation to territorial integrity and stasis, Jacob argues that it has for much of its history understood this norm ideationally. Rather than clinging to territorial borders, India has shown a willingness to negotiate and even relinquish its claims for the sake of peace. Furthermore, it has on occasion been willing to violate the norm of nonintervention—as in the interventions in East Pakistan and Sri Lanka—though it tends to justify such actions in terms of domestic security concerns. For Jacob, Indian sovereignty is more about symbolism than material concerns. Yet there are tensions and contradictions in India’s normative influence. Its policy makers talk about promoting values but then resist democracy promotion; were instrumental in establishing the UN Declaration of Human Rights but seem ambivalent about how far these are universal; and often emphasize the equality of states while seeking greater importance within the hierarchy of international society. Jacob concludes that India is becoming more aligned with the normative claims and practices of international society and so is likely to become less of a challenger to its principles in the future. In Chen Yudan’s chapter, the author argues that the concept of sovereignty was only introduced into China in the nineteenth century and was imposed through the forcible intervention of outside powers. This has led to some ambiguity in China’s emotional attachment to this norm. Exploring China’s attitudes to sovereignty in three eras, the late Qing dynasty to 1949, 1949 to the 1970s, and the 1980s to the present, the chapter sees the Chinese understanding of sovereignty evolving. In the first period, the norm of sovereignty is used by external powers to disrupt the regional dominance of China and compel it to participate in an international society in which it occupied a subordinate position. In the second period, China was seen to embrace sovereignty as emblematic of its independence from foreign interference (thanks to Communist Party rule), but also to align itself with other like-minded communist and/or postcolonial regimes against imperialist countries. In practice, this meant that China was willing, at times, to cede control of territory to other states—as in border negotiations with Vietnam in 1953 and North Korea in the early 1960s. Therefore, sovereignty was important but interpreted differently according to the nature of the regime with which China was interacting. In recent times, China is seen as becoming more rigid in its interpretation of sovereignty—at least in the political realm—no longer willing to yield its sovereignty to other states on an ideological basis. However, it has also shown some flexibility when it comes to noninterference in the sovereignty of other states. The author concludes that China’s understanding of sovereignty is a mix of ideas from different periods which are not necessarily compatible. Thus, as with India, we reach an

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interpretation of sovereignty which is much less absolute and rigid than often presented. Building on this foundation, the volume then proceeds with Chris Ogden’s chapter, which explores the various norms that India has sought to operationalize in international society since 1947. This is portrayed as an interactive process whereby India’s experience of its relations with other participants in international society shapes and adapts its own normative ideas. Ogden traces some of the governing principles of India’s foreign policy, such as nonalignment and the promotion of equality among nations, and sees the problems India encountered as a result of the hierarchical nature of international society as well as domestic and international pressures for India to assume great-power status. Exploring India’s interactions with major global regimes such as the UN and the World Trade Organization, Ogden reveals tensions between norms that identify India as a distinct actor in world politics with a particular contribution to make and its desire to assume great-power status within international society—with all the attendant compromises and socialization processes that would entail. Although India’s heightened future power may bring these contradictions into sharper focus, the author notes that it has currently managed to suppress such issues by promoting its norms in clubs of like-minded states such as the BRICS and IBSA. In the following chapter, David Armstrong takes the literature on power transitions to task for presenting an overly negative view of the implications of China’s rise. Picking up on some of the themes of Chen Yudan’s chapter, Armstrong identifies how China’s history continues to influence its attitude to international society in the present. This makes sense of some of the more belligerent statements on sovereignty of the Chinese leadership. Yet exploring how China might be seen to challenge the West in the economic realm and in terms of soft power, Armstrong critiques the idea of a substantive ‘Chinese’ model overtaking Western normative influences in the near future. In reality, global economic interdependence weakens the sense of separate economic systems and practices. Although qualified in important respects, China is also showing signs of liberalizing its political culture to bring itself in closer alignment with liberal democratic states. The huge governance challenges of China’s rise mean its government would be very unlikely to be able to mount a significant challenge to the current configuration of international society—even if the will existed. That said, Armstrong does admit that tensions could break out with neighboring states over territorial matters. The chapter concludes by outlining seven possible international societies that might emerge, depending on how China’s rise is managed by its leaders and the other participants in wider international society. These are delineated according to ordering principles, the ranking of states, and the geographical scope of influence.

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From there, we move on to Ian Hall’s analysis of India’s status as a normative actor. In particular, utilizing the concept of ‘normative power’ more usually applied to the European Union, Hall notes similarities between the EU and India—such as their common constitutional commitment to upholding and promoting certain norms in international society. In the early period of its existence, India is seen as seeking to promote its norms abroad and effect their ‘contagion’—particularly through the charismatic leadership of Nehru. Yet towards the end of Nehru’s life, inconsistencies began to emerge in relation to norms of nonalignment and nonviolence, and these became more pronounced after his death. Although still conceiving of itself as a normative power, India became increasingly concerned with its relative power and status in international society and so appeared to be becoming a ‘normal power’. The use of force against neighboring states such as China, Sri Lanka, and East Pakistan, acquisition of nuclear weapons, and closer relations with the Soviet Union and, more recently, the United States undermined the sense of moral mission that infused India’s early foreign policy. Hall sets out the various domestic actors that have resisted this change and outlines attempts to institute a reboot of India’s normative influence, such as NonAlignment 2.0. Yet there remains a lack of clarity, according to the author, about which norms India wishes to promote and how. David Kerr also seeks to theorize the concept of normative power in his chapter as more important to understanding power transitions than a simple calculation of material capabilities. He then proceeds with an analysis of China’s search for normative power to identify which norms the Chinese leadership are pursuing and how domestic norms link with international identities. One important feature of China’s norm promotion in recent years has been its efforts at developing cultural soft power. Interestingly, Kerr sees a distinction between Western and Chinese attitudes to this concept. For him, China sees soft power as being centred on the state, a form of political control which reinforces other forms of power such as material dominance, and a zero-sum game in which Chinese soft power is competing to supplant other ideas internationally. Kerr goes on to examine China’s civilizational identity in world politics and analyses how this is reconciled with its realpolitik and focus on core national interests. He notes the contradictions and problems with how China projects its normative identity abroad and sees these as heavily influenced by the incoherence of China’s domestic norms. The coexistence of Confucianism, socialism, and neoliberal economic theory within China’s domestic politics creates problems for the unity and distinctiveness of Chinese identity. The chapter rounds off with sections on China’s relations with its neighbors and efforts at region building within Asia to see whether this really might be the ‘Asian century’. What it finds is that historical narratives and identities continue to sow division and undermine efforts to

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forge common Asian normative frameworks. Rather than the region’s being built on a spirit of cooperation and shared normative understandings, Kerr perceives many of its multilateral forums to be motivated by competitive instincts and designed to ‘neutralize the power ambitions of others’. The author’s conclusion is that the sense of Asia as a normative actor cannot progress without the emergence of transcendent normative values, which are currently lacking. Rather, the unbalanced nature of Chinese power in the region, normative and material, means the focus will be on that state rather than the wider regional political community. The final chapter sees Chris Brown explore probable changes to both the architecture of global politics and the normative foundations of international order. Taking issue with the materialist account of rising powers and its focus on military capabilities, Brown notes that economic and soft power are also important features of international society and a state’s position within it. In the global architecture of the coming decades, Brown sees US military primacy continuing as an underlying facet of international order, but the economic rise of China and India might lead to a balance-of-power structure globally, with Brazil exercising influence in its region. Contrary to the idea that sovereignty as responsibility is a new development, Brown suggests that the concept of sovereignty has always been contested and has gone through a variety of meanings in its modern history. Interventions were deemed permissible even during eras where sovereignty was supposedly absolute—such as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That said, there have been important normative innovations in recent decades. The development of international criminal law with its notion of universal jurisdiction does challenge the dominance of the idea of sovereignty as allowing separate moral spaces. Although rising powers such as China and India were concerned about this development, they have acquiesced in a number of situations rather than directly confront the principle in international forums. The chapter goes on to ponder why the BRICS, the most overt grouping of rising powers, have been so skeptical of the norm of sovereignty as responsibility. As with a number of previous contributors to this volume, Brown sees the importance of history, and especially the legacies of colonialism, as important in this regard. Having won political freedom from external interference, many of these states are reluctant to put it back into the hands of former colonial powers. Nevertheless, Brown sees the possibility that these states might revise this attitude as a result of domestic reforms and their own ascendance to dominant positions of influence. He concludes by noting that advocates of sovereignty as responsibility must demonstrate responsibility in turn if they are to win over the skeptics, by reconstructing societies in which they have intervened and being more discriminate in their arms sales to oppressive regimes. The book concludes by identifying points of agreement and dissent among the authors about the nature of Chinese and Indian attitudes to

Introduction

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international society and the extent to which they are likely to challenge the existing normative basis of international society. NOTES 1. China became the second-largest economy in 2010 in terms of GDP in US dollars. It did briefly become the second largest stock market in 2011 after Japan experienced an earthquake but the 2014 development was the first time this had occurred without a natural disaster, see Bloomberg (2014). 2. For an alternative view which sees regions as important sources of normative innovation for international society, see Hurrell 2007. 3. Interestingly, Preetam Kaushik (2014) questions China’s commitment to expanding the UN Security Council to include India as it ‘doesn’t want to lose its coveted status as the only Asian country in UNSC permanently’. 4. China did offer assistance to operations in Afghanistan in the form of intelligence and information sharing; however, its rhetoric has been notably cautious since that date (see Kan 2010).

ONE Evolution and Practices of the Indian Notion of Sovereignty Happymon Jacob

Making sense of the Indian understanding of sovereignty is as difficult as making sense of India itself: confusing and contradictory more often than not, its influences come from various sources and have transformed many times over the past six and a half decades of its independence. And yet it’s a journey worth the travel. Indeed, an interpretive analysis of the Indian notion of sovereignty throws up certain clear threads running through India’s postindependence history. As would be the case with most other countries, India’s images, understanding, and practices of sovereignty are determined by both external and internal influences and material as well as ideational forces. Only the specifics differ. In the Indian case, some of the roots of its notion of sovereignty are anticolonialism, antiapartheid/antiracism, the struggle for independence from British colonial rulers, the congressional legacy, Gandhian philosophy, and the Nehruvian vision, among others. More importantly, the Indian notion of sovereignty is an ongoing project. The Indian practices of sovereignty can be roughly divided into three phases: in the immediate postindependence phase, India was much more relaxed and conciliatory about its claims of sovereignty. This position underwent a clear change with the humiliation of the 1962 war with China. Post-1962 Indian practices of sovereignty seem more rigid and nonconciliatory. A further shift is then apparent with the 1998 nuclear tests and the integration of India into the international system. This chapter makes five interrelated, often overlapping arguments: one, the Indian understanding of sovereignty tends to be nonterritorial in 19

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its articulation. Sovereignty is seen more in terms of social relations, symbolic representation, and reputational claims; two, there is an apparent inside-outside tension 1 in how India has practised sovereignty in the past. This tension is primarily due to normative and existential reasons rather than a result of clear strategies of statecraft; three, there seems to be a relationship between the country’s understanding and practices of sovereignty and its sense of security and confidence in itself and others; four, Indian arguments and practices of sovereignty are also shaped by its own and other states’ perceptions of its role in the international system; and five, the end of the Cold War and the changes in India’s domestic political and economic processes have given rise to new practices of sovereignty. However, how can we hope to explain the basic features of the Indian notion of sovereignty if such a notion is dynamic and is constantly evolving? First of all, as is the case with all ‘social’ interactions leading to the construction of social realities, sovereign notions of states, being essentially socially constructed realities, also evolve and transform. Secondly, the continuous evolution of India’s sovereignty does not negatively complicate a study about it because the change and transformation in such notions takes place over a period of time. Another analyst looking at the same theme after the lapse of another decade might reach different conclusions or even draw an altogether different sketch of the evolution of the Indian notion of sovereignty. Nevertheless, it is important to trace the historical development of these ideas and capture a sense of their understanding in particular periods, if only to allow future analysts to identify changes that have occurred and continuities that persist. SOVEREIGNTY AS SYMBOLIC The Indian understanding of sovereignty tends to be nonterritorial in its articulation. Sovereignty is perceived and articulated more in terms of social relations, symbolic representation, and reputational claims. Indeed, the idea of India is articulated more in ideational than territorial terms. That is, a territorially compact India without its underlying ideational basis may not amount to much or sustain for very long. The idea of India, in a sense, precedes the territory that came to be called India. More so, the Indian struggle for independence was not as much a territorial one as it was an ideational one. The emphasis during the freedom struggle was not on the territorial integrity of an ‘imagined’ India as a successor state from the Mughal or the earlier empires. Indeed, the relative ease with which the Indian National Congress leaders agreed to a separate Muslim state to be carved out of British India is indicative of the fact that territorial concerns were secondary. Indian leaders also had a relatively ‘minimalist and understated’ approach to territorial sovereignty in the early

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years after independence. The fact that they agreed to have external mediation over Kashmir rather than a military fight to get back the lost territory from Pakistan, offering special status to Kashmir and the willingness to live with the idea of a not-so-territorially unified India from an absolute sovereignty point of view, indicate that the emphasis was on the symbolic idea of sovereignty rather than the territory. A closer look at the Mughal practices of sovereignty also shows that symbolic sovereignty was a strategy of statecraft adopted by the Mughal Empire. André Wink writes that during the Mughal Empire, ‘In India, as in all Islamic societies, sovereignty was primarily a matter of allegiances; the state organized itself around conflict and remained essentially openended instead of becoming territorially circumscribed’ (Wink 1986, as cited in Vivekanandan 2011, 147). Undoubtedly, a newly independent India would have materially benefitted by joining one of the two superpower alliances. A purely material understanding of sovereignty, one that is based on power balancing and military strength, would have prompted India to do precisely that. Instead, persuaded by ideational underpinnings of security and sovereignty, India gave importance to an ethical, value-based and nonaligned foreign policy. For the newly independent India, the most significant desire was to gain international recognition rather than raw power, and hence when claims to power are made, even today, they are more for symbolic rather than material purposes. George Tanham writes: ‘Gaining recognition of India’s status in the region and in the world also plays a pivotal role in Indian strategic thought. Indeed, external recognition and validation of India’s place is almost as important as actually having that status’ (Tanham 1992, 60). The history of the Indian nuclear programme is a good example in this regard. Ever since the 1960s, the international community, and particularly the United States, tried to make India fall in line with global nuclear nonproliferation efforts. It used political isolation, diplomatic pressure, and economic sanctions to make India give in to the demands of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, none of which worked. Only when the international community ‘recognized’ and appreciated the Indian arguments that choosing a particular nuclear path would be India’s ‘sovereign’ decision and that India would do that with utmost responsibility did India start negotiating with the managers of the nonproliferation regime about ways of collaborating with the regime and avoiding a collision course with it. The same is true of India-US bilateral relations. The relations between the two sides were not the best during the Cold War and even in the early years of the post–Cold War world. The United States was uneasy with India’s nonaligned stance, which some of them described as an immoral policy. 2 Throughout the Cold War, even though the American government did provide occasional assistance to India, it didn’t do so generous-

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ly because India was not aligned to the Western bloc. Indian policy makers saw the United States as wanting India to be its client state on the chessboard of Cold War games, which it was unwilling to be. Relations began to improve only when the Americans started engaging India in a completely different way: as equals. When the language and mode of engagement changed from a client-patron relationship to one between two great democracies, of equals, and so on, India began to change its stance towards the United States. It was after the visit of President Bill Clinton that relations started reaching new heights, the path for which was paved by the Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh negotiations. Today, the two countries share a very robust strategic partnership. In sum, what mattered to India in its relations with the United States was not merely material benefits, which it would have received in plenty if it were to be an ally of the United States during the Cold War years (and may even have avoided the defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962), but the symbolic recognition of being an equal with the United States of America, of its sovereign status, nothing short of which would have satisfied India. This need for recognition and sovereign equality, in a sense, comes from the fact that for India, sovereignty means equality of nations—that they enjoy the same rights and duties. The Indian resistance to any attempt by outside forces to dictate India to adopt a certain policy measure comes straight out of such a world view. India’s nonproliferation policy is another example. India has always maintained that it would never accept any treaty under pressure from powerful countries. Hence, although India was one of the key proponents of nuclear disarmament treaties during the 1950s and 1960s, it refused to sign the NPT since the treaty was considered by India to be discriminatory, through its division of the world into nuclear ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Indeed, various Indian political parties have argued that signing the Indo-US nuclear deal would have negative implications for India’s sovereignty. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) argued during the Indo-US negotiations on the civilian nuclear deal: ‘The Hyde Act would severely compromise India’s independent foreign policy and sovereignty’ (Hindu 2008). The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also made a similar argument in the same context: ‘We are also in favour of nuclear and political cooperation with the US. Our opposition is limited only to those unbalanced positions in the deal that endanger the nuclear sovereignty of India’ (Economic Times 2008). The CPI-M had also opposed the signing of the CTBT, arguing that ‘in effect, by throwing the entire burden of the CTBT coming into force on India’s shoulders, by making India accountable for the treaty not entering into force and its consequences, and by fixing a deadline, Article XIV of the CTBT represents a direct demand on India’s sovereignty and also an ultimatum’ (CPIM 1999).

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This uneasiness is seen in the manner in which India has responded to international institutions. Not only has India been stridently arguing that the UNSC does not reflect the changed realities of the international system, it has also been arguing that global financial institutions also need to democratize and become friendlier to developing countries. 3 The prime minister of India recently argued at the Sixteenth Summit of the NAM that ‘India remains convinced that until comprehensive reform of the UN Security Council is undertaken, the overall reform of the UN can only be regarded as piecemeal and incomplete. We also need a more representative international financial architecture, with an increase in the voice and representation of the developing countries. The current slow pace of quota and governance reforms in the International Monetary Fund must be expedited’ (Deccan Herald 2012). In the Seattle and Doha meetings of the WTO (in 1999 and 2001, respectively), the Indian leadership of the developing nations was clearly visible in preventing the developed nations from imposing their agenda on the developing countries on issues such as labor, agriculture, and market access for agricultural products (Nayar and Paul 2002, 12). Self-sufficiency was the mainstay of the Indian economic, foreign, and defence policies for a long period since independence. Even when a particular technology originated abroad and was then imported to be used in India with only slight modifications, the Indian scientists would make claims of it being indigenously developed. The Indian state, especially under Nehru, wanted to develop the major sectors of its economic infrastructure so that it could produce the goods needed for itself rather than depending on the Western powers for finished goods. Nehru famously said in the 1960s, ‘I believe, as a practical proposition, that it is better to have a second-rate thing made in our country, than a first-rate thing that one has to import’ (Forbes 2002, 143). As Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer point out: ‘Beginning in the 1950s, the Indian government implemented a strategy of import substituting industrialization (ISI), in which local industry was to produce manufactured goods to replace imports. This approach followed the pattern of many developing countries at the time and also fitted in well with the notion of self-reliance, which was interpreted as self-sustained growth without dependence on foreign aid’ (Dedrick and Kraemer 1993). While there certainly was an economic logic to it, the argument from sovereignty cannot be ruled out. The underlying thinking clearly was that economic dependence on others could lead to erosion of India’s sovereignty. Nehru also argued: ‘In our external and internal domestic policy, in our political policy, or economic policy, we do not propose to accept anything that involves in the slightest degree dependence on any other authority’ (as cited in Tanham 1992, 57). India was also concerned about the dependence that acceptance of foreign aid would bring about. Given this apprehension, there was always a conscious attempt to diversify the sources of foreign aid. Today,

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there is an ongoing effort to reduce foreign aid, and the Indian government has declared that it will accept aid only in certain specified areas from specific countries (Economic Times 2005). But even when India does accept aid, it no longer accepts ‘tied aid’ which has strings attached to it. An official position paper on the external aid accepted by India clearly argues: ‘The disadvantages to the recipient country of credit tying by donor countries are well recognized by India. Tied aid implies that loans from a particular country have to be utilized for imports from that country alone. Though in the initial years of planning, aid to India was mostly tied, India’s dependence on aid has reduced with time, and it has affirmed its stand on not accepting tied aid. As of February 4, 2003, India is not availing of any tied external assistance’ (GoI 2008). According to the Economist, ‘Between 1951 and 1992 India received about $55 billion in foreign aid, making it the largest recipient in history’ (Economist 2011). Yet India has now set up an aid agency—Development Partnership Administration (DPA)—with the aim to coordinate all aidrelated projects, lines of credit (LOCs), technical cooperation, and training of foreign nationals to bring greater coherence and strategic intent to India’s economic and technical assistance activities. It was initially afforded an aid budget of $15 billion to be spent over the next five years on countries in need (Tareja 2012). India has always been sensitive about other countries discussing its internal problems like the Kashmir issue. Such criticism is often seen as a violation of its sovereign space. Recently India reacted negatively to the antinuclear agitations in Koodankulam in the state of Tamil Nadu, saying that the troubles were created by foreign-funded NGOs based in India (Sharma 2012). The government’s decision to strengthen and formalize its engagement with the Indian diaspora also emphasizes social relations, rather than mere territoriality, as an important aspect of the Indian idea of sovereignty. With over twenty-five million people of Indian origin living outside India, the country has a powerful new global community to capitalize on which it has not been doing purposefully and consistently. One of the major reasons for this ‘underutilization’ of the Indian diaspora has been that India has traditionally looked at its expatriate population as a source of remittances. It has, however, now realized that there is a need to look at the Indian diaspora in a more strategic sense so as to better project India’s public diplomacy and soft power. With this understanding, the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) has been undertaking a number of initiatives to engage the Indian diaspora more creatively and fruitfully. In many countries, powerful Indian communities have played a significant role in the host countries’ policies towards India. This was evident during the negotiations of the Indo-US nuclear deal when the Indian expatriate community in the United States was lobbying with the US

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government on behalf of the Indian government. India’s new diaspora policy, in short, shows the social basis of the idea of India and the evolution of the country’s socially constructed sovereign space. Remember that it was the Bharatiya Janata Party–led government that spearheaded the new diaspora policy of the country. One of the major ideologues of the Hindu right in the country, V. D. Savarkar, put forward the idea of pitrbhumi-punyabhumi (fatherland-holy land). The concept treats the nation as holy land, and all those who reside in the land must inherit the nation as fatherland. According to this argument, non-Hindus in the country are not Indians because their holy land is not India, and any Indians living anywhere are Indian because their holy land is India. Even as India is seemingly striving to be a military power of significant proportions, its leaders still find it hard to accept the notion of India being a hard military power. The current president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, had this to say on the question of India becoming the next global superpower: I am somewhat uneasy with the very word ‘Superpower’. For too many of us, it evokes images of hegemony, of aggression, of power politics, of military might, of division and conflict. But that is not what India has been all about through the centuries and it certainly is not what I would like to see India become. During long periods of our past, India exercised a profound influence on the course of world history, and it did so without exercising any kind of overt power. Consider, for instance, how Gandhiji, mocked as ‘a half-naked fakir’ by the British, took on the Superpower of the day through the mere force of his values and ideas. We Indians have always known our place in the world even when the world was treating us lightly. (Gandhi 2006)

THE INSIDE-OUTSIDE TENSION There is an apparent inside-outside tension that one can identify in India’s arguments and practices of sovereignty (Walker 1992). This tension is primarily due more to normative and existential reasons than the result of clever strategies of statecraft. To see this in terms of a clever strategy based on double standards would be a simplistic assumption since, more often than not, this contradiction has a normative basis to it. The following section looks at this broad inside-outside tension at multiple levels. On the one hand, Jawaharlal Nehru advocated peaceful resolution of international conflicts and did indeed mediate many of them. The most prominent example of Indian mediation was in 1954, when India, despite not being invited, had successfully mediated among the various parties to the Korean conflict. Quoting reports, Harish Kapur writes that during the first phase of the conference Nehru’s emissary, Krishna Menon, met leaders of various national delegations many times over, and during the

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final phase of the conference he ‘interpreted each side to the other, cleared up misunderstandings, and persuaded each of the participants to take into account the problems of the others. The formula he finally produced was the basis of the joint declaration signed by all powers, except the US, thus bringing an end to an eight year war’ (Kapur 1994, 128). Indeed, the country’s self-perceived role for the promotion of international peace is enshrined in its constitution. Article 51 of the Indian Constitution, subtitled ‘Promotion of international peace and security’, reads as follows: The State (India) shall endeavour to: (a) promote international peace and security; (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations; (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised people with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.

At the same time, India also campaigned for the cause of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. This was a major cornerstone of India’s foreign policy. Panchsheel, or the five principles, that India had used as a basis of its relations with China after enshrining the principles in a treaty in 1954, was premised on this logic. These principles are: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual nonaggression; mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence (Singh 1998). India has also clearly opposed the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine, saying that it infringes on the sovereignty of states and that it has been used selectively for regime change. 4 The Indian stand on R2P has been that there is a ‘need to be cognizant that creation of new norms should safeguard against their misuse. In this context, responsibility to protect should in no way provide a pretext for humanitarian intervention or unilateral action’ (Puri 2009b). India has also, for far too long, been shy of democracy promotion, though subtle changes are visible today. India’s traditional reluctance against the promotion of democracy to other nations is succinctly expressed in Indira Gandhi’s words: India’s foreign policy is a projection of the values which we have cherished through the centuries as well as our current concerns. We are not tied to the traditional concepts of a foreign policy designed to safeguard over-seas possessions, investments, the carving out of spheres of influence and erection of cordons sanitaires. We are not interested in exporting ideologies. (Gandhi 1972)

Yet at another level, India has actively interfered in the internal affairs of its neighboring countries. India has allowed refugees from conflict regions of neighboring states to set up ‘governments in exile’. Most prominently, Tibetan refugees based in India have been openly engaging in political activities. India’s own policy on Tibet has gone through many changes, ranging from idealistic to pragmatic.

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India resists every potential attempt by a foreign power to control India’s sovereign functions. Yet it has been guiding the defence policies of Maldives and Bhutan and trying to dictate the foreign and defence policies of Sri Lanka and Nepal. In 2007, the then national security advisor of India, M. K. Narayanan, said that ‘New Delhi does not approve of Colombo looking to Beijing or Islamabad or any other world capital for its defence requirements’ and that India was ready to respond to Sri Lanka’s ‘defensive requirements’ (Reddy 2007). Even as India decried the nuclear nonproliferation regime as ‘nuclear apartheid’, it criticized countries that openly went against this regime. Take the example of Iran. India has argued that it does not support the Iranian nuclear programme because it goes against the NPT guidelines. One would wonder why India is so bothered about a treaty that it considers an example of apartheid. George Tanham (1992, 55) does a good job of highlighting this ‘paradox’: Independent India sees itself as continuing the tradition of nonaggression and nonexpansion outside the subcontinent. Nehru's foreign policy rested on these principles, and subsequent leaders have followed suit. The tradition of nonaggression, however, has never applied internally. Warfare within the subcontinent has been the norm for centuries. States fought to gain power and wealth, to establish empires, or to destroy them.

What does this ‘inside-outside’ tension show? Is it that Indian foreign policy and its practices of sovereignty are full of double standards and clever strategies that are adopted to cater to its national interests? I would argue that this tension has a more normative (as opposed to a hard-nosed strategic calculation) underpinning to it. Take the Iranian case. The Indian decision to criticize the alleged Iranian attempts at going nuclear comes from the fact that Iran, by pursuing nuclear ambitions, is indeed violating a treaty that it had voluntarily signed. India has consistently maintained that dialogue with Iran is the way to resolve the crisis, yet the Iranian government is in the wrong if it is indeed developing nuclear weapons as it is against the treaty it has signed (NPT) (Hindu 2012). When India argues that mediation should be undertaken to resolve international conflicts, it does not mean to advocate intervention to resolve conflicts, hence the nuanced stance towards R2P and democracy promotion, all of which it believes will infringe on the sovereignty of other countries. On the question of intervention in other countries, the Indian argument has been that it has genuine concerns and clean intentions in ‘interfering’ in Sri Lanka and East Pakistan. In the case of Sri Lanka, India argued that it was supporting the Tamils, who were being discriminated against and persecuted, primarily because of the negative domestic political and ethnic implications this had for India. Later on, when India actually intervened in Sri Lanka, it was armed with the clear invitation from

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the Sri Lankan government. On the question of East Pakistan, India argued that the influx of tens of thousands of refugees in 1971 was causing security, communal, and political problems, and the direct intervention of India in East Pakistan was preceded by preemptive strikes from Pakistan on Indian soil. Indian involvement in Bhutan and Maldives is again not without the explicit request and support of the regimes in those countries. Despite the fact that the international community called on India to act in favour of democracy in Myanmar, India refused to do so because the situation in Myanmar hardly had any domestic political implications or genuine security threats for India. India also feared that various ethnic and other issues in its neighborhood have a tendency to ‘spill over into India that, in turn, give a significant boost to the secessionist movements in India’ (Kapur 1994, 31). The ‘coordination among different movements, supported from the outside, may well lead to the development of cooperation between them and the neighboring states to destabilize India, the ramifications of which can only be horrendous on India’s national security. . . . With the extension of external support to the already existing destabilized internal situations, or with the development of cooperation among them, or with the influx of refugees from neighboring countries, it is no longer easy to separate the internal from the external’ (Kapur 1994, 33). In sum, there is an apparent double standard in India’s practice of sovereignty. While it is vehemently opposed to any external efforts at interfering in what is within the domestic sphere of the country, it does not always practice the principle of nonintervention when dealing with its neighbours. Yet the Indian practices of intervention in the domestic affairs of others are reasoned through normative articulations. SOVEREIGNTY AND SECURITY There is a clear relationship between India’s understanding and practices of sovereignty and its sense of security and confidence in itself and others. Since the medieval Indian empires operated more or less in an ‘international system’ of their own without many sources of external insecurity, the sense of security was higher, and this corresponded to practices and claims symbolizing more relaxed and conciliatory forms of sovereignty. While independent India started out with a great deal of confidence and sense of security, the initial years witnessed similar practices and attitudes to this concept. The defeat at the hands of the Chinese, however, made India overly conscious about itself, and the remainder of the Cold War years witnessed India becoming greatly conscious of and rigid about its sovereignty. After the end of the Cold War, especially in the new millennium, we see India beginning to relax its claims of absolute sovereignty. Pratap Bhanu Mehta makes a similar argument:

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So long as India feels worried about threats posed by internal revolts and secessionist movements (as in Assam and Kashmir), it is more likely to cling to the sovereignty principle. There is some evidence that as India feels less pressure from the international community on issues such as Kashmir, New Delhi feels more willing to relax its dogmatic support for sovereignty. (Mehta 2011, 101)

I wish to extend this argument further to take it beyond territorial security considerations. Let us trace this argument from the Mughal times. Jayashree Vivekanandan (2011, 147) argues that the Mughals did not try and dominate each and every part of the empire by force but rather tried to build the empire and hold it together by various strategies: The Mughal grand strategy of accommodation was distinct for its coherence and integrated approach towards eliciting the support of diverse social groups. Socialization was a crucial component of Mughal hegemony, and in the Rajput case, performed the systemic function of order maintenance by mitigating its reliance on the use of force.

However, it is important to remember that the Mughals were the predominant power at the time and that they were not facing any real external security challenges when they were employing these empire-building strategies. This means two things: one, India has historically had a tendency to look at the question of sovereignty through social relations and ideational prisms, and two, this nonterritorial approach to sovereignty especially manifests itself in times of relative stability and security. Let’s build on the latter hypothesis as the former was dealt with in the earlier section. Independent India’s behaviour towards nation-building efforts shows that India was willing to live with less-than-perfect notions of sovereignty. Not only was Kashmir given a special status within the Indian constitution, the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution [articles 244(2) and 275(1)] provided special provisions in the governance of the country, and the state of Sikkim was given a special status of protectorate. A treaty was signed between India and Sikkim which even ratified and hence legitimized the existing monarchy there. This continued until 1975, when due to internal disturbances in the state it was fully integrated into India. India had voluntarily taken the Kashmir issue to the United Nations to resolve when Pakistan invaded Jammu and Kashmir and took control of part of its territory. India was also actively involving itself in the international system in the first decade after its independence even as it shied away from getting into any military alliances. India was very vocal about independence movements around the world and actively participated in the promotion of a peaceful world. There was a clear de-emphasis on securing its material interests from a ‘realist’ point of view. India was also actively participating in global nuclear disarmament campaigns. India

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felt secure, and that is why it was less dogmatic about its claims and practices of sovereignty. As Harish Kapur writes about Nehru’s defence policy: Designing a defense policy was an anathema to him. Immediately following the partition of the subcontinent, he apparently made it clear that India did not ‘need a defense policy’ since ‘we foresee no military threats’ and ‘the police are good enough to meet our security threats’ (Kapur 1994, 22).

He further writes that at the ‘regional level, Nehru’s whole thinking and strategy on national security was to seek out political solutions to situations of conflict. (Kapur 1994, 23) Manu Bhagwan (2010) points out that India was instrumental in the shaping of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations in 1948. India also took an active role in promoting decolonization. It advocated for the decolonization of Indonesia at the UN and argued that France and Italy should give up their colonies around the world. Indeed, when the Dutch forces were unwilling to withdraw from Indonesia and were attacking the freedom fighters there, the Indian interim government in 1946 withdrew Indian troops from Indonesia, and Nehru later, in 1948, invited the Indonesian nationalist leadership to set up a government in exile in India (Josh 1985). However, much of this ‘thinking beyond oneself attitude’ seems to undergo a sharp change after the 1962 military defeat at the hands of the Chinese, where India found itself friendless. More importantly, it was a wake-up call for the country that it needed to worry less about the welfare of the world and more about its own security. In this sense, the phase of feeling secure (false feeling though it was) was now practically over: it was now time to take care of its security. This sense of insecurity makes India, one could argue, more rigid and dogmatic about its practices and claims of sovereignty from then on. India spent more on defence preparedness, was unwilling to talk about a plebiscite in Kashmir, and consistently watered down the provisions of the special status given to Jammu and Kashmir. Eventually, India abrogated the special status given to Sikkim, started rethinking its nuclear options, and started talking to the United States about the possibility of a nuclear umbrella for itself. When Indira Gandhi came to power, this quest for power and status reached a high point. In other words, India was becoming more conscious about the need to protect its sovereignty in the traditional manner, like every other ‘normal state’. In this sense, one could suggest that it was insecurity and instability that prompted India to become more conscious about its sovereignty. Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that ‘in the aftermath of India’s experience with the UN on the painful Kashmir issue, and the domestic vulnerabilities that this issue

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exposed, New Delhi began to invest much more heavily in the sovereignty principle’ (Mehta 2011). The post–Cold War years, the crucial years of uncertainty, witnessed India becoming more sure of its nuclear pursuits, its global role as a ‘normal power’, and the need to pursue diversified partnerships. Indian practices of sovereignty were nowhere close to what they were in the first one and a half decades of its independence and, to a great extent, the uncertainty prevailing in the international system, the heightened levels of Pakistan-sponsored insurgency in Kashmir, and the American pressure on the Indian nuclear programme could be seen as probable causes of it. However, this rigid attitude towards practices of sovereignty seems to undergo changes in the new millennium, especially after the beginning of the Indo-US dialogue following the Indian nuclear tests of 1999. The first few years of the new millennium witnessed increased tension with Pakistan but better relations with the United States and the rest of the international community. The relationship with Pakistan took a new turn with the changed policies of Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf, who sent clear signals of reconciliation with India. The new government in New Delhi headed by Manmohan Singh then took the India-Pakistan peace process inaugurated by Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee and President Musharraf forward. Indeed, the Indo-Pak peace process between 2004 and 2008 is widely understood to be the most successful in the history of their bilateral relations. India is also highly regarded in the international system. The Indo-US nuclear deal has given it a new status in the nuclear nonproliferation regime even though it has not signed the NPT. It is currently seeking support from major international players to be admitted into various export control organizations in the nuclear arena. India could potentially find a place in the renewed UN Security Council and is increasingly seen as a rising power, a regional stabilizer, and a responsible nation that upholds enlightenment values. Recognition of India by the global nuclear order as a stakeholder and not as an outlier rule breaker in the system has changed India’s behaviour towards the regime. For instance, the Indo-US nuclear deal and the India-IAEA nuclear safeguards agreement has led to an increasing engagement between the two. In February 2009, India and the IAEA signed the Agreement for Application of Safeguards to Civilian Nuclear Facilities in India that entered into force on 11 May, 2009. As part of the agreement, India pledged to place fourteen civilian reactors under the IAEA inspection regime (Economic Times 2009). More importantly, it has recently been more forthcoming, especially after the 2008 India-IAEA agreement, regarding the safety review of India’s nuclear facilities by IAEA. India’s civilian nuclear power plants are now reviewed by the Operational Safety Review Team (OSART) of the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO). Indeed,

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the IAEA inspection by OSART happened for the first time in 2012 (Times of India 2012). India also requested the Integrated Regulatory Review Service (IRRS), the peer review mission of IAEA, to conduct a review of nuclear power plants in India, which concluded on 27 March 2015 with positive preliminary findings (IAEA 2015). These developments indicate that India feels secure about the global nuclear order (unlike in the past) and as a result is now willing to allow more ‘infringement’ of its sovereignty in the nuclear field. This new sense of security and accommodation in the international system has had its implications for Indian practices of sovereignty. On Kashmir, the recent India-Pakistan negotiations have produced some out-of-the-box solutions to resolve the Kashmir issue. The former Pakistan president Musharraf had proposed a ‘four-point solution’ to the Kashmir issue in 2006: soft or porous borders in Kashmir (but no change of borders); autonomy or ‘self-governance’ within each region of Kashmir; phased demilitarization of all regions; and, finally, a ‘joint supervisory mechanism’, with representatives from India, Pakistan, and all parts of Kashmir, to oversee the plan’s implementation. The Indian side cautiously welcomed this idea of a settlement, with the Indian prime minister saying that the borders between the two sides of Kashmir should be made irrelevant (Baru 2010). It is now abundantly clear that the resolution of the Kashmir conflict lies in an approach that goes beyond the rigid confines of Westphalian sovereignty, and the two governments seem to have started thinking along those lines. There are already some admirable confidence–building measures (CBMs) that have been put in place in Jammu and Kashmir that essentially revolve around the idea of unifying, through trade, contacts, and other consultative mechanisms, the erstwhile Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. If one sees that as the beginning of a settlement process in Kashmir, what we are actually witnessing, in a sense, is the elements of a post-Westphalian approach to resolving the Kashmir issue. It is true that this is not yet a widely accepted idea among the New Delhi–based strategic community, let alone in the rest of India. However, what is clear is that there are likely to be more takers for such a settlement that symbolically crosses the limits of Westphalian sovereign notions than for a redrawing of the borders to find a solution for Kashmir. India had objected to the UNSC-mandated US-led liberation of Kuwait from Saddam’s forces, calling it great-power bullying led by the United States (Hall 2013). India also objected to the intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Indeed, this aversion to foreign powers’ presence on the soil of other nations goes back to the colonial era. Even though the mandate system of the League of Nations had no effect on India, the Congress Party and Nehru were against it and had called it ‘a new form of colonialism’ (ICWA 1957, 6).

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However, in the recent past India had begun to subtly nuance its position on the question of intervention and related issues. India voted against Iran in the IAEA thrice over in 2005, 2006, and 2009. While India had taken a pro-Syria position in 2011, India voted against Syria in the UNSC resolution on Syria sponsored by the United States, France, Germany, and Portugal. Commentators have argued that this ‘is not consistent with India’s opposition to foreign military intervention to settle internal conflicts’ (Bhadrakumar 2012). On Libya, while India did criticize the coalition airstrikes on Libya, it did not vote against them when they were put to a vote in the UNSC, which can be seen as silent approval for them. Later, India approved of the African Union intervention in Libya, arguing that ‘decisions relating to Africa should be left to the Africans’ (Ramesh 2011). These subtle changes in Indian policy towards intervention show that the country is willing to look at the question of sovereignty in a new light. This has to be seen in the context of a newfound sense of security as well as the acceptance and accommodation that India finds in the international system. There are changes with regard to the issue of democracy promotion as well. C. Raja Mohan argues that ‘since the end of the Cold War, however, supporting democracy abroad as an objective has begun to factor into India’s policy making. This priority has been triggered by intensive engagement with the United States since the early 1990s’ (Mohan 2007). Mohan points out that in 1999, India joined the Community of Democracies initiative, which had ten founding members. This initiative gained greater prominence during the Bush era. He writes that ‘India and the United States declared that they “have an obligation to the global community to strengthen values, ideals, and practices of freedom, pluralism, and rule of law” and agreed to assist states seeking to become more open and democratic’ (Mohan 2007). The Indian understanding regarding the support for democracy was clearly laid down by the then foreign secretary in 2005: ‘As a flourishing democracy, India would certainly welcome more democracy in our neighborhood, but that too is something that we may encourage and promote; it is not something that we can impose upon others’ (Saran 2005). India does not really see human rights as universal rights, at least not yet. Gentle nudges are all India is willing to give when it comes to democracy or human rights promotion. This applies to others as well when dealing with India. Narendra Modi, former Gujarat chief minister and now prime minister, was for some time accused by the Congress-ruled central government of being a mass murderer of Muslims. Yet when the US government refused him a visa to visit the States, the Indian government did not support the US decision. This is seen in the Indian attitude towards caste and race issues as well. While soon after independence India had no hesitation in equating the two, contemporary India is un-

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willing to do that. India was against the inclusion of caste in the resolution against race in the 2001 Durban Conference against racism (Mitta 2009). However, India’s economic policy seems to remain disconnected from the above linkage between security and practices of sovereignty. The command economy model that was adopted pretty much at the beginning of the nation’s journey after independence, with its focus on core sectors of the economy and import substitution, continued until the early 1990s, when systemic forces compelled India to shift to an open, globalized, and privatized economy. While the Indian state seems to have openly embraced the principles of a globalized economy, there are indeed differing voices from within the country. The various communist parties of India, in particular, have been critical of the government’s new economic policies. They have also critiqued the concept of special economic zones. Although right-wing parties (under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar) have been advocating economic self-reliance, while the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was in power the country’s economic policies were hardly different. One reason India’s centralized economic policy did not open up along with the other transitions that India went through after the 1962 debacle was that it was felt that continuing with the policy of economic selfreliance was important in the country’s national security. Moreover, economic globalization was in any case not a powerful idea in the early 1960s. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE ROLE OF PERCEPTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS Indian arguments and practices of sovereignty are also shaped by India’s perceived and expected role in the international system. Nehruvian, postNehruvian, and contemporary arguments and practices of sovereignty clearly show this relationship. This argument is linked to previous ones about the connections between security and practices of sovereignty in the sense that India felt more secure when the international system was willing to accept the country into its fold on terms decided by India, and as a result India was willing to think out of the box on issues relating to sovereignty. Moreover, the country’s self-perception of its role in the system also had an impact: when it felt that it had a global role to play, it was more open minded vis-à-vis its practices of security and sovereignty. In the Nehruvian world view, India had a global role of promoting and building peace, cooperation, and understanding in the international system. Although the international community did not necessarily endorse this self-conceived role, the Nehruvian project was to use the support of like-minded states in the international system to make the

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difference it wanted to. This perceived role made India adopt practices of sovereignty that were open ended and less dogmatic. India, after Nehru and the 1962 war with China, looked at the international system very differently. While Nehruvian India saw a pacific international system and peaceful coexistence as desirable and achievable objectives which it clearly worked towards, the post-Nehruvian India saw a world that was friendless and dangerous. Not only that, the international community was not accommodative of Indian concerns. The major powers of the system, indeed, argued that the policy of nonalignment was a problem in itself. This had a clear impact on Indian openness to the international system and its practices of security. This phase continued till recently. In the new millennium, India is nuclear-weapons capable, has a thriving and globalizing economy, and is increasingly accepted into the international system. India is expected by the international community to play a bigger role in the management of regional conflicts and security and to partner with the great powers in sharing various system-maintaining responsibilities. It sees itself as an emerging power that has a responsibility towards the international system. Not only have the Indian positions on nonproliferation issues changed (subtly though), but also it has now started taking an active interest in the global commons. From the language of nonalignment, the country now uses the language of strategic autonomy that essentially means that India can and will enter into strategic partnerships, unlike earlier, even as it will steadfastly maintain autonomy. EMERGING PRACTICES OF SOVEREIGNTY The end of the Cold War and changes in India’s domestic political and economic processes have given rise to new practices of sovereignty. India is no longer characterized by the ‘Congress system’, to borrow a term from eminent political scientist Rajni Kothari. The era of one-party government is practically over. Domestic politics in India is today characterized by regional and national coalitions as well as constant political bargaining among them. The arrival of coalition federal governments in New Delhi has ramifications not only for the country’s political system but also for its federal relations as well as foreign and security policy making. This is because it coincided with the economic liberalization process in the country, giving Indian states far more political, economic, and even foreign policy making power than ever before. Mattoo and Jacob have argued: In practice, the central government has exercised strong control over India’s external relations since the Constitution came into force in 1950. The constituent states have, with some notable exceptions, played little role in the formulation or implementation of the country’s foreign rela-

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They further argue that there are a number of reasons for the increasing influence of states, such as the special constitutional status given to some states, the political weight of some state leaders on foreign policy making, coalition governments at the centre, and the forces of globalization (Mattoo and Jacob 2009, 176). What are the implications of this new federal identity for the Indian conception of sovereignty? While giving special status to federating units is nothing new for the Indian state as it happened in the case of Jammu and Kashmir, what is happening now is that even though the forces of globalization and coalition politics have not conferred any special status to any unit in the federation, they have indeed made it possible for the Indian states to encroach on the traditional sovereign roles of the union government. This has led to practices of paradiplomacy and new notions of state sovereignty. These centrifugal tendencies are further strengthened by the realization in India that the country should become part of the many regional economic partnerships, in which the border states play a crucial role (Saran 2005). The emerging focus on regional interconnectedness and regional economic partnerships has the ability to further redefine Indian notions of sovereignty. CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that Indian conceptions and practices of sovereignty have been in constant evolution in response to the internal and international environment, both ideationally and materially. Based on the above discussion, one could conclude that these conceptions and practices are positively responding more to systemic pressures and incentives than ever before. While various domestic structures have indeed formed the basis of the Indian view of sovereignty, the template thus formed is not inflexible, as is increasingly seen in the Indian practices of sovereignty today. One core variable in this context is the country’s desire for, and invitation to, great-power status in the contemporary international system. This ‘aspirational identity’ is clearly playing a role in nudging India to become more receptive towards the international system and various global norms and values. If so, the emerging trends in the Indian foreign/diplomatic policy may be better understood if looked at as a series of negotiations that are taking place between the need to retain the basic foundations of its notion of sovereignty and the desire to mainstream itself into the international system, in its own way, at its own pace. India has traditionally been a major critic of the prevailing international order. However, contemporary India is clearly willing to partici-

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pate in the affairs of the world rather than merely critiquing it from the outside. The preceding discussion on the Indian notion of sovereignty also demonstrates that India is fundamentally a normative actor. While in its Cold War avatar it used to harbour revisionist normative claims, its normative claims and practices today are increasingly in line with the existing international order. Hence, its increasing participation in international affairs will likely strengthen and benefit the various normative frameworks of the contemporary international system. NOTES 1. By this I mean a certain contradiction in the country’s practice of sovereignty inside and outside India’s state boundaries. 2. John Foster Dulles called it ‘immoral’; see Economist 2000. 3. This argument comes with a caveat. India was not only an enthusiastic supporter of the UN but had also supported its veto system, saying that it should be used sparingly. However, this is in sharp contrast to the position that India had taken with regard to the League of Nations and the mandates system of the league. India argued that the league was a tool in the hands of the great powers and the mandate system was a new form of colonialism. 4. India does admit that there could be exceptional circumstances: ‘Willingness to take chapter VII measures can only be on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations with a specific proviso that such action should only be taken when peaceful means are inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail in discharging their duty’ (Puri 2009a).

TWO Chinese Notions of Sovereignty A Historical Perspective Chen Yudan

This chapter studies Chinese notions of sovereignty, as well as territory, from a historical perspective. The concept of sovereignty was introduced into China in the late Qing dynasty in the nineteenth century, when China was pulled into the modern sovereign state system which originated in the Western world. I thus divide the evolution of Chinese notions of sovereignty into three periods, namely, from the late Qing dynasty to 1949 (the establishment of the PRC), from 1949 to the 1970s (Mao’s era), and from the 1980s to the present. The main arguments are as follows. First, China’s acceptance of the concept of sovereignty was due to the expansion of modern European international society, which conflicted with and finally overwhelmed the traditional regional system centring on China. Second, the understanding of sovereignty was, and to a large extent is, based on the collective Chinese memory of a humiliating modern national history. Third, it is thus hard for China to change its idea and practice of sovereignty at the same pace as its Western counterparts since its notion of sovereignty originated in a historical situation far from that of European countries. Fourth, a traditional view of the world which rejects the idea of sovereignty still counts in Chinese thought. This was especially apparent in Mao’s time but is possibly also evident today since China’s rise has made it take ‘rejuvenation’ into consideration. Fifth, the reactions of other parties (neighbouring countries and major international powers) in China’s terri-

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torial disputes have done much to shape its idea of sovereignty and territory in recent years. THE BUILDING OF A SOVEREIGN STATE AND THE EMERGING NOTION OF SOVEREIGNTY: LATE QING DYNASTY TO 1949 It was not until the nineteenth century that the notion of sovereignty was recognized by the Chinese. Before that, the ideal image of world politics was represented by the famous lines in Shi Jing (a Confucian classic compiled no later than the sixth century BC) as ‘Under the wide heaven, All is the king’s land. Within the sea-boundaries of the land, All are the king’s servants’ (Legge 1871). In two thousand years of political practice, China had, of course, never ruled the entire earth; nevertheless, an ‘all under heaven’ sense dominated Chinese minds. The ‘central kingdom’ (what Zhongguo means in Chinese) rarely recognized any equals within the known world. States out of its direct control were either affiliated authorities or tributary states which, alongside China, constituted an encircled ‘tributary system’. This popular term—invented by John King Fairbank, one of the most renowned sinologists of the twentieth century—is somewhat inaccurate but still enough to illustrate the idea of hierarchy in ancient Chinese views of their surroundings. The notion of sovereignty then made no sense since, in their minds, the central authority was, and would be, the only sovereign in the regional order. For example, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the last dynasty in Chinese Imperial history, during most of its reign did not establish a ministry of foreign affairs. The equivalent department in charge of external relations was named lifanyuan, which can be roughly translated as ‘the ministry dealing with the dependent-authority affairs’. Ironically, Sino-Russian affairs were among the duties of lifanyuan before the mid-nineteenth century, since Russia was the only Western country maintaining bilateral relations with China, and the relationship had to be accommodated into the existing framework of the empire in an odd way. Put simply, China, before the nineteenth century, tended to treat the external world similarly to its domestic society, with an ‘all under heaven’ sense of governance, which was incompatible with the idea of ‘sovereignty’ invented in modern European history. The Macartney embassy to China from Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century was the most significant, if not the first, encounter between the emerging European conception of sovereignty and the traditional Chinese world view. This event has been interpreted variously in both China and the Western world. 1 The symbolic ‘kowtow’ dispute during Macartney’s mission is a renowned story in which the mandarin officials insisted that the ambassador kowtow in the presence of Emperor Qianlong. The request was firmly refused as a humiliation to Lord Macartney, being the representative of his country and His Majesty. This

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was not a matter of dignity at all from the perspective of the Qing officials, who could only consider Lord Macartney as a tribute envoy like others from afar. The tension in these views was more obviously demonstrated, though less well known, in the correspondence between King George III and Emperor Qianlong. While the British king said, ‘We are Brethren in Sovereignty’ and proposed an ‘amicable intercourse, between such great and civilised Nation as China and Great Britain’ (Morse 1926, 244–47), the Chinese emperor replied: If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar. Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. 2

Half a century later, the Western world tried another way to convert China into a modern state, this time by war. Ironically, China was forced to accept the notion of sovereignty, at least in practice, while its sovereignty was violated. The Treaties of Tianjin, signed in 1858 between China and Britain, France, Russia, and the United States as the result of the Second Opium War, established permanent diplomatic agents in Beijing and in the capitals of the countries above, which was phrased in the treaty between the United Kingdom and China as follows: [I]n accordance with the universal practice of great and friendly nations, Her Majesty the Queen, may, if she see fit, appoint ambassadors, ministers, or other diplomatic agents to the Court of Peking; and His Majesty the Emperor of China may, in like manner, if he see fit, appoint ambassadors, ministers, or other diplomatic agents to the Court of St. James. 3

Similar articles appeared in the treaties with the other three states. Thus, the modern principle of sovereignty, on which ‘the universal practice of great and friendly nations’ lies, was introduced into and accepted, though unwillingly, by the empire which had previously refused equal relations in its external affairs. A new agency named Zongli Geguo Shiwu Yamen (literally, Office Dealing with the Affairs of Foreign Countries) was established in 1861 as the first modern diplomatic organ in Chinese history. More than a decade later, Guo Songtao became the first Chinese ambassador to another state (the United Kingdom and then France). Thus, China not only learned to regard itself as one among the many countries in the world, but also it practically became a member of an international system consisting of sovereign states instead of the central kingdom in a tributary system. The collapse of the Qing Empire and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, then, mark the birth of China as a modern state in the true sense. While the norms of the sovereign state system were introduced in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, China also began

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to accept the fact that it was a weak player in the arena of power politics, and its own sovereignty was constantly threatened by the Western powers and, later, Japan. In response, China identified two strategies to protect its sovereignty: self-strengthening to become a stronger state, and applying international laws while it was still weak. Both of the two endeavours failed. The failures in the way of law, especially during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and after Japan’s invasion in 1931, brought about suspicions among the Chinese of international law and organizations (for a concise discussion, see Kent 2008, 57). China’s unchangeable weakness, meanwhile, made it very sensitive to all kinds of issues related to sovereignty, from territory to China-made products. China’s acceptance of the notion of sovereignty, though traced back to more than a century ago, is enormously significant since it has been integrated into Chinese collective memory as a critical historical moment. This past-present connection operates in two ways. On the one hand, sovereignty has become a ‘sacred’ notion firmly engraved in the hearts of Chinese through constant reminding of foreign violations of the country. In China’s official discourse, the period of modern history begins at 1840, when the British army launched the First Opium War to invade China. The ‘old society’ until 1949 is defined as one that is ‘semifeudal and semicolonial’, and thus the major credit of the CPC and the main source of its legitimacy is to establish a ‘new China’ whose sovereignty is no longer violated. Furthermore, sovereignty to the Chinese is a matter of power rather than simply a juristic concept. The collective memory of modern history is mainly filled with facts about how the governments of the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China (ROC) ceded territories and paid indemnities, which is often concluded by the popular slogan that ‘The lagged will be beaten’. Power is regarded as the essential, if not the only, way to maintain sovereignty, and sovereignty, especially territorial integrity, is a prerequisite for being a power in the world. On the other hand, a cosmopolitan or ‘all under heaven’ view embedded in China’s tradition, though to a large extent dismissed in the overwhelming discourse of sovereignty, has not totally been dispelled from the mind of the Chinese. According to Ge Zhaoguang, a leading Chinese historian, China during the late Qing dynasty and the early period of the ROC was ‘in a really strange situation . . . nationalism and cosmopolitanism, pursuing for modernity and sticking to tradition, these elements seemed tangled and interlinked in a complicated way’ (Ge 2011, 194–95). One only needs to consider the teachings of Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the ROC, who declared that the ultimate aim was ‘to advance into the great universal harmony’ rather than ‘to establish the republic’. These words are still in the national anthem of the ROC in Taiwan today. In fact, the cosmopolitan notion has survived and reappeared in various forms throughout China’s modern and contemporary history, and is

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sometimes, ironically, related to the notion of sovereignty, with both ideas referring to the struggle for power and status. A SOCIALIST CHINA WHICH HAS ‘STOOD UP’ AND A DIFFERENTIATED NOTION OF SOVEREIGNTY: 1949–1970S What best represents China’s attitude to sovereignty is the famous statement of Mao Zedong that ‘the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up’. 4 The context of the ‘stood up’, however, is noteworthy. In the exact paragraph beginning with the quoted statement, one can divine Mao’s, and China’s, notion of sovereignty: [I]t is only in modern times that they [the Chinese people] have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors. . . . And we have acted accordingly. We have closed our ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign oppressors through the People’s War of Liberation and the great people’s revolution, and now we are proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China. From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world and work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilization and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom.

First, foreign oppressors and imperialism are blamed for China’s weakness in modern times, but now they are defeated and China is no longer a country whose sovereignty is violated. Second, such a great victory could only be achieved by the CPC after the unsuccessful struggles of other parties. The legitimacy of the newly founded PRC was largely based on this achievement. Third, the world is divided into two parts. China is a member of ‘the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations’, but there is implied another camp of imperialism which stands against ‘world peace and freedom’. In other words, the ‘new China’, when obtaining its own independence, will follow different norms in the international arena: peaceful and friendly relations with the other peace-loving and freedom-loving nations, and uncompromising struggles with the imperialist countries which oppressed Chinese people before 1949 and are still oppressing many other peoples in the world. It is not surprising that the three major diplomatic principles, conceived in mid-1949, were ‘starting anew’, ‘putting the house in order before inviting guests’, and ‘leaning to one side’. The first two principles were made ‘to make a clean break with the foreign policy of the old and semi-colonial China and uphold the inde-

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pendence and sovereignty of New China’, and the third meant leaning to the USSR (FMPRC 2015). 5 Mao’s statement was echoed and developed by the ‘Common Programme of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’, which acted as the de facto constitution of the PRC in the first five years. It provides that the ‘principle of the foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China is protection of the independence, freedom, integrity of territory and sovereignty of the country,’ and ‘the People’s Republic of China shall unite with all peace-loving and freedom-loving countries and peoples throughout the world, first of all with the USSR, all People’s Democracies and all oppressed nations. It shall take its stand in the camp of international peace and democracy, to oppose imperialist aggression and to defend lasting world peace’ (FMPRC 2015). Thus, there were three kinds of countries with whom China not only conducted different foreign policies but also had different notions of sovereignty. The first category was the ‘imperialist’ states, which were judged as aggressive in essence. In the eyes of the Chinese, these states, represented by the United States, were threats to the sovereignty of the peaceful and democratic countries, including China. Thus, China’s major effort in the face of them was about struggling to protect its sovereignty, especially territorial integrity. For example, though China’s real motive to participate in the Korean War is still in dispute, vigilance against ‘imperial’ America was undoubtedly in the minds of Chinese leaders. The ‘Marching Song of the People’s Volunteer Army’ in Korea, which was popular around China, gives a simple but persuasive reason: to ‘defend peace and motherland’, one needs to ‘resist the US aggression and aid Korea’, to ‘defeat the imperialistic US, the ambitious wolf’. Among the ‘peace-loving and freedom-loving countries’, China also distinguished the ones in the socialist camp from the developing countries which were not. To the latter, China appealed for friendly relations based on the principle of sovereignty or, rather, respect for sovereignty. ‘Mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity’ is just the first of the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, one of the most significant contributions China has made to normative discussion about international society. The principles were articulated in China’s agreement with India in 1954 and emphasized again in the joint communiqué between China and Indonesia, another nonsocialist developing country, in the same year, and universally accepted as a base for relations among countries of different social systems, when promoted by China’s premier Zhou Enlai in the historic Afro-Asian Bandung Conference in 1955. The Sino-Indian War in 1962 is an excellent case for studying China’s notion of sovereignty when facing countries in this category. In the 1950s, China and India did not have an agreement on their borderline. However, China gave little reaction to India’s territorial claims. Both of the two parties showed ‘respect’ in the spirit of the ‘Five Principles’. What triggered the

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conflict was India’s acceptance of the Dalai Lama in 1959, when he fled across the border for political asylum. China took offence since it was considered an open challenge to its sovereignty over Tibet. We should also note that disputes over the Dalai Lama and the borderlines set by the British (especially the McMahon Line, which China might set as the Line of Actual Control but would never publicly acknowledge as legitimate) were both jogging China’s memory of a time when its sovereignty was violated by Western powers. When facing countries in the socialist camp, sovereignty in China’s consideration was second to the ideological ‘brotherhood’. It had nothing in common with the notorious Brezhnev doctrine of ‘limited sovereignty’. 6 On the contrary, China tended to solve territorial disputes in favour of the other country. For example, China’s negotiations with the DPRK from 1962 to 1964 over borders resulted in a large amount of land, lake, and islands ceded to its neighbour with little hesitation. The modern principle of sovereignty did not seem to weigh much in China’s consideration. Chinese leaders not only defined the ‘brotherly’ Sino-DPRK relations as ‘internal’ rather than ‘external’ but also volunteered to provide the possibility, after the generous cession of territory, that the whole of northeast China, and even other parts of China, was open to North Korea (Shen and Dong 2011, 41, 46). It looks very much like a mixture of an ideological supranationalism and a Sinocentric generosity derived from the traditional ‘all under heaven’ sense, both refusing a rigid notion of sovereignty. A similar case could be found in Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1953, when Chinese premier Zhou Enlai changed the eleven-dotted line drawn by the ROC government in the South China Sea into a ninedotted one, ceding the two-dotted-line portion in the Gulf of Tonkin to the DRV led by Ho Chi Minh (Li and Li 2003, 290). The most noteworthy case is China’s relations with the USSR. Though the latter was the leader of the socialist camp as well as the major source of aid to China, and China formulated the policy of leaning to the USSR as its diplomatic doctrine, sovereignty has always been taken very seriously by Chinese decision makers in handling the bilateral relations ever since the establishment of the PRC. According to the 1945 Sino-Soviet Treaty, signed between the USSR and the ROC, China ceded Port Lvshun to the Soviet Union as a naval base, and the two parties agreed to run jointly the strategic Changchun Railway in Northeast China. These were among the major focuses of the newly founded PRC in its negotiations with the USSR for a new alliance treaty in 1950. The Russians were considerably shaken by the tough stance of the Chinese delegation in these discussions (Yang 2005, 6). As a result, the presence of the Soviet Union in Northeast China was substantially undermined, and China resumed its sovereignty over the lands and railway ceded only a few years earlier. After the Sino-Soviet split in 1960s, China condemned the USSR as ‘revisionist’ and did not hesitate to use armed force to defend its sovereignty.

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The radical change from assisting Communist Vietnam in fighting against the United States to punishing it by means of war should also be understood against a background of Sino-Soviet rivalry. China in Mao’s era thus had a complicated notion of sovereignty. First, sovereignty, especially territorial integrity, was obviously a high priority in ‘new’ China’s diplomatic considerations. To break with the ‘semicolonial’, ‘old’ China, the PRC was bound to take a tough stance in the face of Western powers, who were blamed for the ‘imperialism’ that had oppressed the Chinese people and infringed China’s sovereignty and independence. On the contrary, mutual respect for sovereignty was China’s guideline in relations with other developing countries, whose sovereignty had long been ignored by the Western world as colonies. Second, ideology played such an important role that China was flexible with other socialist countries on territorial issues, since the ‘brotherly’ relations among them were not entirely ‘external’. Third, the traditional ‘central kingdom’ idea still mattered implicitly, such that China, or rather Chairman Mao, could on the one hand volunteer to concede territory to weaker states yet, on the other, compromise little with the USSR, even though the latter was the leader of the socialist camp. A RISING CHINA AND THE MULTIPLE NOTIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY: FROM THE 1980S TO THE PRESENT The ‘reform and open’ policy conducted since the 1980s significantly changed China’s general perspective of the world and thus its notion of sovereignty. A sovereign state, according to the classical definition of Max Weber, is ‘that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory’ (Weber 1994, 310–11). Sovereignty here refers to a line between what is inside and what is outside, a line which is largely constructed and imagined by words and behaviours as well as physical manifestations. It is important, then, to study how and why China attempted to draw this line during a period of rapid change within both the domestic and international spheres (Carlson 2005, 1–2). Ideology was no longer a critical element, and the generosity derived from a combination of communist internationalism and an ‘all under heaven’ sense faded. Instead, national interest became the first priority in China’s foreign affairs. This brought about two results. First, China would not differentiate states by an ideological standard (socialism vs. capitalism, former colonies vs. Western powers). There was no longer a special community in which China could yield its sovereignty to other members, whether to developing or developed countries. More specifically, China took a stance as tough to Vietnam or the USSR as to the United Kingdom or the

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United States. Though more and more open to Western countries, it would never compromise if sovereignty mattered. The notion of sovereignty was highlighted in the 1984 Sino-British negotiation of Hong Kong’s return when Deng Xiaoping told Margaret Thatcher that ‘sovereignty is not negotiable.’ What followed was Deng’s statement that ‘if [Hong Kong was] not returned, Chinese government today would be no more than the government of late Qing Dynasty’. This implied that the legitimacy of the CPC-ruled PRC was, and would still be, based on its defence of China’s sovereignty and independence—a mission not fulfilled by the ‘old’ China in modern history. Similarly, the only serious crisis threatening the Sino-US ‘honeymoon’ in the early 1980s was arms sales to Taiwan. It was so intolerable that both Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Vice President Bush had to visit China. The third joint communiqué between the two parties was produced to solve the problem, which alongside the previous two has played a crucial role in SinoUS relations. Second, though territorial integrity was still a top priority, the notion of sovereignty was enriched and sometimes redefined during the last two decades of the twentieth century due to China’s increasing engagement with the world as well as changes in the domestic political agenda. Aside from territorial sovereignty, sovereignties of jurisdiction, economic rights, and authority emerged in China’s external affairs considerations from the late 1980s. The pressure and sanction of the international society on China following the events surrounding Tiananmen Square in 1989 combined with the collapse of the USSR made Chinese policy makers increasingly focus on the safety of the political system (or, more specifically, the leadership of the CPC). With China as a socialist country, the CPC’s rule had always been of primary importance since the establishment of the PRC, and the principle of noninterference had already been stated and emphasized repeatedly in China’s foreign affairs. Nevertheless, seeing the enormous challenges to socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both inside and outside China, Chinese leaders became very sensitive to foreign interference in the name of human rights and the so-called peaceful evolution threatening the leadership of the party. While China never compromised on the safety of the regime, it did not take an unyielding stance over the discussion of sovereignty to all politically related areas. It is notable that the annual China-US human rights dialogues can be traced back to as early as 1990, though the Chinese side has always requested that ‘the US side will respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, existing political and legal systems, and self-chosen development path’. 7 On the other hand, due to domestic economic reform and the corresponding integration with the world economy, China’s notion of economic sovereignty did become more flexible. Taxation and tariffs are a mark of sovereignty in the traditional sense, especially to China, whose

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collective memory of the humiliations of modern history is scarred by the fact that its Customs Service was long administrated by Westerners. China was cautious in the early 1980s since the planned economic system was not yet prepared to open itself to the global market. It notified the GATT of its wish to resume the (original) contracting party status in 1986 and, after prolonged and arduous negotiations, became a member of the WTO in December 2001. 8 There were continuous discussions on the GATT/WTO and its impact on state sovereignty both before and after China’s accession. The government was not unaware of the restrictions on economic sovereignty but proceeded firmly despite voices of opposition within China. Another noteworthy case is the Yinhe event in 1993, which posed new questions about China’s notion of jurisdictional sovereignty. Yinhe was a container ship run by a Chinese company between China and Kuwait. The US government alleged that chemical weapons materials were being carried by the ship to Iran, dispatching its navy to stop the ship on the high seas and insisting on a complete inspection despite China’s official report, which denied the allegation that had been based on the CIA’s intelligence. The deadlock was broken after a month, when the Chinese government agreed to an inspection on board by American technicians (nominally Saudi Arabian experts), and no traces of such materials were found. But the US government refused to apologize. This event provoked many Chinese, who saw it as a severe humiliation. Several jurists published articles in the same year and the next in top Chinese law journals, arguing that what the US had done was a violation of China’s sovereignty (see, for example, Shao 1993; Lin 1994), not to mention the many comments with similar views in mass media. However, the Chinese government tried to play the matter down both during and after the event. The decision to allow the inspection operated by the Americans, according to Sha Zukang, China’s then chief representative, was based on a practical consideration, that is, whether to accept or refuse the rude request would involve the greater loss of face. It seems that Sha and the Chinese government preferred to downplay the sovereignty issues raised, and the compromise is still seen as a correct choice since the Americans also lost face from finding nothing illegal. 9 In contrast to the Yinhe event, China’s official positions were much tougher in the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the 2001 aircraft collision in the South China Sea. The bombing during NATO’s air strike on the former Yugoslavia destroyed the building of the embassy and killed three Chinese journalists, inciting public outrage and massive anti-US demonstrations in China. Hu Jintao, then vice president, delivered a televised speech in which he mentioned twice the phrase ‘defend state sovereignty’, by both Chinese people and government. 10 President Jiang Zemin repeatedly condemned the bombing as a serious

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and barbaric violation of China’s sovereignty in his talks to the top leaders of the CPC (Jiang 2006). Allen Carlson is insightful when he writes that ‘changes in the Chinese approach to sovereignty during the reform era were impressively deep, but defined more by a divergence in positioning than by the consolidation of a single unified stance’, and such an approach was ‘grounded by power, interests, and ideas’ (Carlson 2005, 5, 231). In other words, the radical changes in both domestic and international societies and China’s physical presence in and perception of the world made its notion of sovereignty in the last two decades of the twentieth century not only complicated and multifaceted but also confusing sometimes. The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed China’s rise in all aspects: economically, politically, militarily, and culturally. The question is whether a stronger China has been tougher and more aggressive, or milder and more cooperative, over sovereignty issues. At first glance, China has attached as much, if not more, importance to sovereignty in the past ten years. A simple way to reveal official attitudes is to review how China’s top leaders have talked about sovereignty in their reports to the National Congress of the CPC every five years, which are critical documents to understanding Chinese politics. Jiang Zemin, then general secretary of the CPC and president of the PRC, did not speak much on sovereignty in his report at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002. He mentioned that the ‘Chinese government has resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Macao’, and that in the previous thirteen years, ‘We have responded confidently to a series of unexpected international events bearing on China’s sovereignty and security’; on the Taiwan issue, ‘China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity brook no division. . . . We Chinese people will safeguard our state sovereignty and territorial integrity with firm resolve’; and generally, ‘We will, as always, attach paramount importance to our state sovereignty and security’ (Jiang 2002). In 2007, his successor, Hu Jintao, seemed a little more definite on sovereignty in his report to the Seventeenth Congress. He demanded to ‘resolutely safeguard China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation’. As for Taiwan, he phrased his comments in the same way as his predecessor, asserting that ‘China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity brook no division’. On national defence he argued: ‘We are determined to safeguard China’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity’ (Hu 2007). Hu’s report to the Eighteenth Congress five years later, however, provided some new formulations. He asserted that ‘Our endeavors to strengthen national defence aim to safeguard China’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and ensure its peaceful development’, and the ‘underlying goal of the principles and policies adopted by the central government concerning Hong Kong and Macao is to uphold China’s sov-

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ereignty, security and development interests’; in foreign affairs, ‘We should advance democracy in international relations, respect sovereignty, share security, and uphold world peace and stability’; and finally, a strong statement that ‘We are firm in our resolve to uphold China’s sovereignty, security and development interests and will never yield to any outside pressure’. 11 The tough stance was perhaps due to a number of challenges to China’s territorial sovereignty since 2010 in the Diaoyu/ Senkaku Islands and South China Sea issues. In a recent article testing China’s ‘assertiveness’, Iain Johnston argues that ‘the data on the official sovereignty discourse suggest that 2010 was not a watershed in Chinese diplomacy toward sovereignty and territorial integrity issues’ (Johnston 2013, 14–15). Two Chinese scholars, however, debated that ‘China’s assertiveness should be viewed in a broader sense’. They divide assertiveness into three types, namely, offensive, defensive, and constructive assertiveness. While little evidence is found for offensive assertiveness, China ‘has adopted a defensive assertiveness approach’ in territorial disputes (Chen, Pu, and Johnston 2013/2014, 177). At the very least, none of these scholars denies that China’s government has taken a tough stance on sovereignty since 2000 or argues that China has become less assertive. In contrast to the ‘assertiveness’ concerning its own sovereignty, China seems to be more flexible as to the sovereignty of other states. Chen and Pu mention that China ‘has come to realize that the principle of noninterference has its limitations, as there may be practical reasons to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries’, as evidence for its constructive assertiveness (Chen, Pu and Johnston 2013/2014, 177–78). Similarly, Chaziza and Goldman, in revisiting China’s noninterference policy towards intrastate wars, suggest that noninterference is more a declaration than a policy and argue that China since the end of the Cold War has widely interfered in practice, while emphasizing noninterference even more in declaration, mainly for the sake of its economic interests (Chaziza and Goldman 2014). Does China have a double standard on sovereignty? The often-cited Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute may help to clarify. China has been much more assertive after the 2010 incident, when Japan arrested a Chinese captain whose fishing trawler collided with Japanese coast guard boats in disputed waters. However, a fishery agreement signed in 1997 in fact suspended the sovereignty dispute in a way more favourable to Japan’s claim. Chinese boats regularly fished and were occasionally expelled by the Japanese coast guard in the waters near the islands, but nothing serious happened. What provoked China was that Japan kept a high profile during the 2010 incident, which made China unable to keep silent anymore. Therefore, China’s tough stance on its own sovereignty is not only about sovereignty and territorial integrity in and of themselves but is also a matter of national dignity. Ever since the nineteenth century,

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sovereignty has rarely been an isolated theme but always related to dignity, and dignity per se has been defined mainly by the maintenance of sovereignty. ‘Face’ is sometimes more important than the actual control of territory itself. What matters most is the struggle for status and stable relationships acquired on the basis of mutual respect (or a ‘balance of relationship’, as Shih and Huang put forward in a recent book; see Shih and Huang 2014). That is why, according to Chen and Pu, China’s defensive assertiveness has been always ‘in reaction to unwelcome and unforeseen events often initiated by other countries in the region’ (Chen, Pu, and Johnston 2013/2014, 177–78). In short, China takes an uncompromising posture on sovereignty in discourse but is more pragmatic in diplomatic practice, treating its own sovereignty and the sovereignty of others alike. What lies behind the seeming contradiction between language and behaviour is the pursuit of greatness and respect. The rise of China in the twenty-first century has brought it both more capacity for, and more challenges to, a languagebehaviour balance on sovereignty. CONCLUSION While sovereignty as the fundamental norm of the Westphalian system has been questioned by the Western world today, especially EU members whose sovereignty has been ‘pooled’ and transferred to some extent, it seems impossible for China to keep pace. The emergence of sovereignty in the European continent was a natural process complying with economic and societal developments in that region. China was forced to accept this notion of sovereignty, but it was grounded and has grown in a historical environment differing much from the Western world, resulting in its specific significance to China. The Chinese notion of sovereignty is today based on collective national memories, which are a mix of ideas from ancient, modern, and contemporary eras. Callahan observes that with a dual discourse of ancient national pride and modern national humiliation comes a Chinese ‘identity dilemma’, which makes the country a ‘pessoptimist nation’ (Callahan 2010, 13). Xi Jinping, the new leader of China, has called for the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ and promoted Confucianism enthusiastically, which may serve as a resource to transcend the imported notion of sovereignty. But he still firmly supports the principle of sovereignty in public and commemorated the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’ in a high-profile fashion. It is still hard to say how open China would be to a normative change of sovereignty in practice, as it has already done in economic interference and peacekeeping missions. However, one may conclude that the key for the further evolution of the Chinese notion of sovereignty is how the ‘pessoptimist’ identity dilemma

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is resolved in future interactions between China and international society. NOTES 1. For a controversial ‘postmodern’ study of the Macartney embassy, see Hevia 1995. 2. The English translation is cited from ‘The Emperor Qianlong’s “Mandates”’, https://archive.org/stream/annalsmemoirsoft002081mbp/ annalsmemoirsoft00208mbp_djvu.txt. The words quoted from the letter from King George III, however, were never translated correctly in the Chinese version submitted to the emperor. 3. ‘Treaty of Tien-tsin’, http://jds.cass.cn/Item/5689.aspx. 4. This statement was made when Mao Zedong delivered the opening speech at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on 21 September, 1949. Although famous, it is often mistakenly located in Mao’s speech in the founding ceremony of the PRC on 1 October. The English version of the address can be found at http:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_01.htm. 5. The official interpretation of the three principles is cited from the website of the Foreign Ministry of the PRC. See ‘Formulation of Foreign Policy of New China on the Eve of Its Birth’, http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/ziliao_665539/3602_665543/3604_ 665547/t18057.shtml. 6. The Brezhnev doctrine of ‘limited sovereignty’ was a policy announced in the late 1960s that limited the independence of the countries in the communist camp, under the leadership of the USSR. For detailed studies, see Jones 1990; Ouimet 2003. 7. The quoted words are from an official Chinese media report on the dialogue in 2012, but similar expressions can be found every year. See Xinhua News Agency, ‘China, U.S. Agree to Continue Human Rights Dialogue’, http://news.xinhuanet.com/ english/china/2012-07/26/c_131738912.htm. 8. For a detailed introduction of China’s accession to the GATT/WTO, see the website of the WTO: http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres01_e/pr243_e.htm. 9. The opinion of Sha Zukang is cited from an interview made by China Central Television in 2007: http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2007-02/12/content_5731057.htm. 10. http://www.people.com.cn/item/ldhd/hujint/1999/jianghua/jh0001.html. 11. Jiang Zemin’s Report at the Sixteenth Party Congress on 8 November 2002; Hu Jintao’s Report at the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China on 15 October 2007; Hu Jintao’s Report to the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China on 8 November 2012.

THREE Great-Power Aspiration and Indian Conceptions of International Society Chris Ogden

International society relies upon states finding shared ground through common values, interests, and world outlooks. From this basis, states can ‘form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another and share in the working of common institutions’ (Bull 1977, 13). Furthermore, international society can be described as the ‘institutionalization of shared interest and identity among states, and puts the creation and maintenance of shared norms, rules and institutions at the centre of IR theory’ (Halliday 2009, 25). This article is concerned with the interplay between certain principles structuring Indian foreign policy (such as anti-imperialism, nonviolence, nonalignment, self-reliant development, and nonintervention) and India’s interaction with international society, as personified by its dealings with various rule-led multilateral institutions. Enhancing India’s international influence, status, and prestige has been a critical aim for generations of leaders since India’s emergence as an independent state in 1947, primarily the long-standing aspiration to become a great power. Multilateral regimes are interactional locations where such recognition can be fruitfully gained, with Gilpin defining prestige as ‘the perceptions of other states with respect to a state’s capacities and its ability and willingness to exercise its power’ (quoted in Nel 2010, 955). Drawing upon norm-driven approaches from international relations (IR) theory, this chapter highlights how India’s experience of international affairs has shaped its attitude towards international society. Here norms are defined as ‘long-standing values and beliefs’ and are used in 53

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reference to how a state conducts its international interactions multilaterally. Various perspectives from across IR inform this approach—from seeing multilateralism as ‘a particularly demanding form of international cooperation . . . [that] requires a strong sense of collective identity in addition to shared interests’ (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002, 576) to one that highlights ‘the cultural context of actor behaviour—the dominant . . . understandings that characterise a society’ (Kowert and Legro 1996, 459). Utilizing norm-based accounts can indicate how India’s leaders and foreign policy makers perceive of their state and India’s expected place within international hierarchies and how these perspectives overlap with other states across various global regimes. Understanding India’s interaction will help us appreciate where it sees ideational similarities and shared values (such as with the United Nations—UN) and where it does not (primarily security regimes) and how these bodies give shape ‘to international society over historical time and geographical space’ (Wight, quoted in Bull 1977, 17). This chapter consists of two major sections. In the first, we consider the core principles central to how India conceives of its foreign policy as well as their relationship to global norms (including resultant attitudes towards the conduct of international political economy) and provide an outline of India’s approaches to multilateral engagement from its independence in 1947 onwards. After this largely chronological overview, section two considers India’s approach to various global groupings— primarily the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In particular, it explores how they reflect or detract from India’s core principles and underlying aspiration to become a great power. It concludes by contemplating what India’s developing and embryonic vision of international society will entail as the twenty-first century develops, details two nascent groupings (BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and IBSA—India, Brazil, and South Africa) that are forming around certain key shared norms, and finally evaluates which international societal norms India is either reinforcing or challenging. NORMS AND INDIA’S CORE FOREIGN POLICY PRINCIPLES As ‘long-standing values and beliefs’, norms trace and structure ideational accounts of IR and are thus an appropriate mechanism for the study of common values between India and its conception of international society. Accounts of norms (both domestic and global) predominantly reside within social constructivism and classical realism and largely eschew competing realist approaches that give primacy to material, structural, and ahistorical factors (Barkin 2003; Gilpin 1986, 305). Concerned with ideational factors, norms act as ‘collectively held prescription(s) about the right way to think and act’ (Legro 1997, 36), becoming a core influence on

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the enactment of a state’s security practice. The consideration of history and precedent is critical in this regard (Adler 2002; Gaddis 1992; Walt 1998), whereby history acts as an experiential mechanism that builds up and ingrains beliefs. These beliefs are formed and entrenched via interaction and orientate foreign policy narratives, helping to trace and explicate how states ought to conceive of—and approach—the wider international sphere. Central to norms that are regulative (those which order and constrain behaviour) and constitutive (those which define identities) is learning, which acts as a fluid behavioural guide inherent to preference formation. This learning primarily stems from observation, interaction, and experience (Levy 1994, 283)—here indicated by India’s interrelations with other states and various international groupings (and their core values) seen to be emblematic of international society. Furthermore, interaction highlights dominant values and beliefs that then become norms, representing ‘a particular set of interests and preferences’ (Hopf 1998, 175) and acting as a key process of socialization between states. In sum, norms have considerable analytical strength to explain the formation, development, and persistence of state beliefs, behaviour, and interaction. A range of norms has informed how Indian elites have dealt with various regimes representative of international society, critically influencing their historical and contemporary interaction. India’s security community—made up of the senior politicians and bureaucrats, academics, the heads and staff of think tanks, journalists, ex-members of its armed services, and ideologues—promotes these principles. As such, it acts as a ‘norm entrepreneur’, framing, endorsing, and transmitting norms concerning the conduct of Indian foreign policy (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 898). The promotion and safeguarding of India’s national interests have been the paramount concern among these norms, most ostensibly via an unshakeable belief in sovereignty that seeks to ensure India’s complete independence (purna swaraj). This concern is most clearly shown through principles of nonalignment and noninterference. In particular, the latter was regarded as being ‘a moral norm’ (Acharya 2011, 118) intended to protect against any recurring colonial desires from the two emergent Cold War superpowers. India’s own historical experience through its centuries-long subjugation under the British Raj was a key touchstone for such sentiments and further informed other related principles of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism. Collectively, these principles structured India’s world view and its accompanying attitudes towards the global system and its incumbent institutions and states. They also impacted upon India’s initially inward-looking and distrustful approach to international political economy. New Delhi’s insistence upon protecting India’s autonomy in international affairs included further principles of ahimsa (nonviolence) (see Dutt 1984; Misra 1977; Prasad 1979) and self-reliance (especially concerning the economic sphere during

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the Cold War period), as well as the explicit avoidance of great power politics through a stance of positive neutralism. It was the policy of nonalignment that provided the platform through which many of these principles could be enacted in order to project India’s favoured world view. Pragmatically reflective of India’s limited resources (especially immediately postindependence), this conception of international society included the promotion of international peace and security and general detachment from power politics, as well as an emphasis on tolerance, equality, and progress through national development and modernization. Intrinsically, Indian diplomacy aimed to treat all states equally, irrespective of their rank or standing (Panda 2003, 48; Smith 1963, 40). While idealistic and internationalist (core beliefs held by India’s first prime minister and foreign minister—Jawaharlal Nehru), nonalignment allowed for an autonomous foreign policy stance that went beyond neutrality by fully maintaining India’s strategic choice in its multilateral behaviour. Democracy, despite its curtailment during the 1975–1977 emergency under Indira Gandhi, is also a critical principle for India’s engagement with the international sphere and its incumbent institutions. With a record unprecedented for a postcolonial state after the Second World War, supporting and promoting democracy has continually informed some of New Delhi’s interactions with international society but in a complimentary rather than critical central manner. Underlying these principles and acting as a collectivizing linchpin pulling them all together has been a desire among its elites for India to be regarded as a great power that is fully autonomous, influential, and respected in the global comity of nations (see figure 3.1). India’s aspiration to become a great power arguably has its roots in the perceived greatness of earlier Indian empires dating back several millennia, as often embodied in classical Indian texts such as the Mahabharata and Kautilya’s realpolitik-evoking Arthashastra. Other factors have

Figure 3.1. Great Power Status and the Core Principles of Indian Foreign Policy

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also played into the great-power aspiration, including the various conquering powers who had sought control of India throughout history (from Greek and Muslim invaders to the French and the British) and also India’s physical location as the meeting point of Asia (for details, see Pardesi 2005). These beliefs, combined with India’s struggle for independence, which India’s leaders interpreted as part of an ‘Asian Renaissance’, contemporarily link to the current geopolitical shift towards Asia (as personified by the rise of China). Underlying such desires are also fears of India’s influence being limited to South Asia, of India being used as a pawn in the international politics or economics of other states (something particularly apparent during the Cold War), and of India losing its strategic autonomy. As both India’s political and economic power continue to increase within the international system (complemented by its large landmass and population and an extensive and diverse civilizational heritage), this aspiration continues to drive its actions and status in global politics. It is tempered by ancient Hindu practice, which has instilled virtues such as pragmatism and patience into Indian psyches. Moreover, the hierarchical structure of the Hindu caste system has been argued to reinforce an expectancy of greatness among the state’s elites whereby ‘India’s status is a given, not earned’ (Jones 2006, 7). As per the principles of nonalignment, India’s leaders have espoused a preferred vision of the world that is inclusive, nonhegemonic (including China) and multipolar (whereby there are multiple poles of power). In turn, they express a general opposition to security regimes, carrying on the criticism of Nehru that defence blocs act as ‘a continuation of power politics on a vaster scale’ (quoted in Acharya 2011, 107). These understandings directly link with regular iterations of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the whole world is one family) by Indian leaders and encompass Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s global mantra of ‘cooperative pluralism’. Evolution and Caveats The principles outlined above stratified the development of India’s interaction with global regimes. At the same time, they have evolved in their emphasis and importance as reflective of the notion of yugadharma (changing with the times)—an ‘ethos of accepting anything useful coming from outside’ (Chandra 1997, 132). This evolution also highlights a series of phases important to the development of Indian foreign policy, namely idealism, realpolitik, and pragmatism (Ganguly and Pardesi 2009, 4). After gaining independence, Indian leaders adopted a ‘strategy of balance of power for a militarily weak but large and self-confident nation in a bipolar world’ (Subrahmanyam, quoted in Mansingh 2005, 46 ). With a dearth of material capabilities (including military), Nehru was keen to advance India’s position in the international system through

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diplomatic means, most notably the UN. Such an avenue avoided the machinations of the advanced industrialized states, appeared to lead away from any involvement in the dichotomous politics of the Cold War, and provided the means with which India could build a constituency of support from similarly impoverished postcolonial and (to some degree) marginalized states. This method complemented the underlying aspiration to become a great power, as per India’s territorial extent, its large population, and the ‘special responsibility’ of being the first state to gain independence after the Second World War (Jain 2011, 226). By helping to establish and then lead the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) (as discussed in detail by Ian Hall in chapter 5), core principles of autonomy, positive neutralism, and self-reliance were fulfilled as New Delhi sidestepped any involvement with the two superpowers, which was seen to threaten India’s ‘eventual emergence as a future major player’ (Nayar and Paul 2002, 157). By refusing to engage in the arms races and military-dominated dynamics of Cold War bipolarity, Indian leaders also injected a degree of ‘soft power morality’ (Scott 2011, 120) to their interaction and engagement with multilateral regimes. As such, and courtesy of India’s natural dominance over its neighbours in South Asia, ‘India’s reluctance to join Asian regional groupings, whether economic or security-oriented, lay in its principled objections to blocs of any kind’ (Jain 2011, 215) and belied a global rather than regional focus. In the first years after independence, Indian leaders and diplomats proved themselves to be adept at mobilizing the Third World as a particular grouping distinguished from the First World (the two superpowers) and the Second World (other developed states). Supporting anticolonialism and nonviolent freedom struggles drove this success, as did lobbying for conventional and nuclear disarmament—all areas which facilitated India’s self-definition as being quite different and alternative to the larger and more established international powers. Central to this success was the leadership of Nehru, who, as a charismatic, respected, and influential global statesman, was able to garner India prestige in a variety of international institutions. Nehru inherently believed that India had ‘special rights and duties in the management of international society based on its status as one of the world’s major civilisations’ (quoted in Buzan and Wæver 2003, 119). In turn, India’s international interaction was to be based upon ‘positive neutralism’ that set it apart from big power games, an approach Nehru often termed as enlightened national self-interest. Such a policy was central to establishing India as a self-determining, powerful, and stable nation on the international stage. Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of ahimsa (nonviolence) also imbued India with an aversion to pure power approaches. Ahimsa was linked to conceptions of an emerging alternative world order after the Second World War in which the use of force was minimal, racism was repudiated, and all states were to be emancipated from imperialism. However,

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from the late 1960s, after the death of Nehru and an increasing tendency towards realpolitik within India’s strategic thinking and behaviour (primarily as a reaction to India’s humiliating 1962 war defeat against China), India’s involvement in multilateral regimes, and to a degree international society, became more marginal. A series of events in the 1970s appeared to typify this reorientation, many of which appeared to defy the core principles structuring India’s approach to international society. This modification encompassed India’s unilateral invasion of Bangladesh in 1971 that ostensibly reversed avowed norms of nonintervention. In turn, New Delhi’s policy of nonalignment and positive neutralism were called into question by the August 1971 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the USSR. Later in the decade, India’s 1974 peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE) seemed to contradict its previous calls for universal disarmament, as did its failure to criticize the violation of sovereignty represented by the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. While India helped to establish the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s (intended to redress inequalities between the developing and developed world), it had alienated many of its previous partners through these contentious actions and was effectively marginalized in the multilateral arena. This relegation in status was due to the increasingly visible disconnect between India’s purported norms and values and its international behaviour and actions. As the Cold War ended, the extent of India’s isolation within international society reached its nadir and demanded the formulation of new policy directions. Critically, the break-up of the USSR signified the loss of New Delhi’s most important strategic and diplomatic partner and the loss of one of its key economic markets. In conjunction with the preceding forty years of isolationist economic policies, which had promoted neither trade nor investment (Calder and Fukuyama 2008, 69), India also experienced a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 that led to a raft of IMFimposed liberalization reforms. This ‘new focus on export promotion and foreign direct investment shifted India’s foreign policy focus’ (Wagner 2010, 339), and its leaders (most notably I. K. Gujral) attempted to rehabilitate its regional and international position in order to enhance New Delhi’s diplomatic and economic standing. The beneficial structural conditions of the post–Cold War peace dividend facilitated such endeavours, as ‘India was compelled to take a more national interest based approach to different regions’ (Mohan 2008, 44). With elements of pragmatism and realism now at the fore of India’s attitudes towards international society, the previous dominance of idealism and universalism dwindled, as the key (and most translatable) means with which to ascend global hierarchies became economic growth. Over the next decades, New Delhi’s gradual acceptance of the efficacy of globalization and liberalization would begin to pose particular pressures on the key norms structuring its international interaction. The contradiction between wanting to represent smaller

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states and to promote global equality yet desiring to fulfil its long-term aim of being a great power typified these tensions. These tensions continued into the twenty-first century as India’s standing in the international system continued to increase, as characterized by its mounting global economic significance, New Delhi’s testing of nuclear weapons in 1998, and the country’s key role as the world’s largest democracy (a significance magnified by the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror). Within the UN, India continued to contribute to an ever-increasing number of international peacekeeping operations (PKOs) (Bhatnagar 2011). As the international system increasingly witnessed a ‘shadow of the future’ effect concerning its perceived future standing, India also became more involved in discussions concerning global issues such as international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, world trade, and climate change. Through such discussions, New Delhi began to project India’s interests and values outwards regarding these issues, in particular regarding asserting greater levels of equality, peace, and development in the global system. Most pertinently, India embraced the principles central to the existing liberal order, whereby the gains of heightened interaction outweighed any potential losses. As Ikenberry observes, ‘in a world of rising economic and security interdependence, the costs of not following multilateral rules and not forging cooperative ties go up . . . as the global economic system becomes more interdependent, all states—even large, powerful ones—will find it harder to ensure prosperity on their own’ (2011a, 58). Through this new cost-benefit equation, India’s leaders sought to find common ground for their national values within international society. Such factors heightened India’s interaction in institutions such as the WTO and its impact upon their common guiding beliefs and norms. While still preferring an overtly bilateral emphasis in the majority of its global relations (whereby the gains to be made are much clearer and discrete), India also began to participate in smaller multiregional groupings to promote specific shared, and often developing-world, concerns. Via bodies such as BRICS and IBSA, the realization of its great-power desires (India’s linchpin foreign policy belief) were increasingly vocalized among equally status-concerned states and, when joined with heightened economic and multilateral engagement, pointed to continued elements of adaptation, flexibility, and evolution within India’s international society behaviour. Prior to our analysis of India’s engagement with specific global institutions, we must acknowledge some major limitations. Firstly, residual suspicions from the colonial era continue to influence India’s approach to international institutions (Zurn and Stephen 2010, 99), which are still often seen as forums where regional and global rivals will criticize India. This view stems in part from when the Kashmir issue was taken to the UN in 1948 by Nehru and Pakistan was favoured, and also from a belief

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that international institutions are used by the larger powers as a means through which they can assert their power influence. Although rising in international status and recognition, India remains pledged to resist any threats that could undermine its norms of absolute self-reliance, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency in international affairs. For this reason, New Delhi has a preference for a top-down embrace of institutions, whereby it prefers to craft regimes to fit with India’s own norms and overall world view rather than having to acclimatize to organizations (and their own founding norms) as created by others. The NAM (a rejection of Cold War bipolarity), the G77 grouping (to represent the developing world), the NIEO (a counterweight to western-led Bretton Woods institutions), and the G4 (grouping together states wishing to reform the makeup of the UN Security Council [UNSC] and secure a permanent veto) all typify such an approach and act as important provisos concerning how India regards and correlates with conceptions of international society. India’s residual distrust of international regimes has also led to a particular negotiating style consisting of a defensive, hard-line, and naysaying posture—seen by some analysts as comprising a ‘strict distributive strategy’ (see Narlikar 2006). As Mehta relates, India ‘has approached its foreign policy through the language of entitlement more than the language of bargaining’ (Mehta 2008, 227). This approach portrays India as being obstructionist in discussions, unwilling to compromise, and having a ‘negative reputation of running a moralistic commentary on world affairs’ (Tharoor, quoted in Malone 2011, 264). Powerful domestic (primarily business but also media) groupings buoy this attitude and prefer such a high-stakes approach, regardless of the consequences. Anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and self-sufficient principles all bolster such behaviour and highlight the constructivist interplay of (sometimes opposing) values, principles, and norms, which rests upon Indian conceptions of themselves and the world. The sense of entitlement also informs New Delhi’s search for recognition and great-power status, seeking ‘deference and respect because of its intrinsic civilizational qualities’ (Cohen 2002, 52). INDIA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH MAJOR GLOBAL REGIMES Examining India’s connection with global regimes allows us to understand how its core foreign principles link with its conception of international society. Some of this engagement entails a harking back to restoring India’s position of being a precolonial great power in the seventeenth century, a power central to the workings of the international system. Such a stance has been characterized by New Delhi’s participation with the current paramount international regime—the UN—and India’s attempts to use it as a means to achieve heightened recognition. Important-

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ly, India seeks ‘limited revisionist changes in the international system . . . (and) wishes to partake in the management of international relations through an enhanced role in . . . global institutions’ (Pardesi 2007, 225). The ongoing quest by India’s leaders for a permanent seat on the UNSC characterizes such an approach, as does being given a fuller presence and voice within global economic regimes—such as the WTO. Such aims are juxtaposed with assertions that ‘emerging great powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership within it’ (Ikenberry 2011a, 57). Here, India’s continued need for economic growth necessitates a deepening interaction in debates critical to the current liberal order— especially concerning key related issues such as trade, development, and climate change—and the need to work within existing forums and frames of meaning. The United Nations (UN) India believes in the founding principles central to the establishment of the UN—primarily a dedication to international law, the settlement of international disputes via arbitration, pursuing peace and security, and seeking cooperation and development. New Delhi has also been a leading light in anticolonial and antiracist initiatives within the UN. Further to Nehru’s internationalist and socialist perspectives, these principles essentially replicated most of the core norms critical to India’s outlook visà-vis international society. Despite such clear commonalities, India’s interactions with the UN would remain tinged by elements of underlying suspicion of the institution and a fear of its perceived manipulation by others against India’s interests. Nehru’s taking of the Kashmir issue to the UN General Assembly in 1948 summed up such concerns when the United Kingdom and the United States sided with Pakistan and demanded a plebiscite, which was not in line with India’s territorial claim. This event ‘permanently coloured Indian thinking on the UN’ (Malone 2011, 251) for generations of its diplomats, especially concerning New Delhi’s core understanding that equality and Nehruvian idealism ought to trump self-interest in international society. Not only has India since blocked taking any of its bilateral issues to the UN, dimensions of caution and caginess have consistently impacted upon how India responds to debates concerning ‘self-determination, human rights, disarmament, peacekeeping, democracy and religious freedom’ (Sreenivasan 2009, 476). Within the wider institutional sphere of the UN, India is opposed to the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction New Delhi ‘perceive[s] as representing a violation of the consent of states, and thus a threat to sovereignty’ (Ramanathan 2005, 627). The ICC is also regarded as a seat of potential criticism against India’s domestic legal system and decision-making process. As such, New Delhi fears that the actions of the

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Indian army (in Kashmir and other areas of unrest in India) will be unfairly scrutinized and referred to the ICC, with concerns that alleged human rights abuses may be used as a pretext for intervention in India’s internal affairs. Such fears are in accord with India’s long-standing norms of noninterference. The failure to get adequate agreements that reflect India’s core principles has thus led New Delhi to consistently criticize the ICC (most recently concerning its investigations in Sudan and Libya), which India further sees as reflecting the wider inequalities of the UNSC—whereby larger states can use it to control smaller ones. It remains to be seen whether any future Indian UNSC permanent veto seat would assuage such doubts, and notably the United States, China, and Russia are also not involved with the ICC, on similar grounds to India. A parallel experience is present concerning nuclear nonproliferation regimes (as shown by Happymon Jacob in chapter 1), as Indian leaders campaign for their ‘own vision of fairness’ (Narlikar 2006, 65). Despite its disagreement with such prevailing (and opposing) principles within the UN, India is determined to gain a permanent seat on the UNSC and join the elite rank of the existing P5 powers (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—those states inviolable to UN action). Such a claim rests upon India’s geography, civilizational history, economic size, and rising influence—all elements bolstered by a sense of entitlement whereby a UNSC permanent seat is viewed as ‘India’s rightful due’ (Singh 2000). Related core principles towards international society concerning multipolarity, antihegemony (although seemingly disavowing any norm of equality), and its political orientation add to India’s claim, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stating that ‘the voice of the world’s largest democracy surely cannot be left unheard on the Security Council’ (Singh 2005b). Such claims are exacerbated by the fact that ‘India’s self-image is primarily that of a global power rather than a regional power’ (Jabeen 2010, 247). Indian elites also perceive that having a seat would truly indicate their state as a realized great power and permit its active contribution to the international order (and by extension international society), including influencing its core normative settings in its own image. India, along with other potential contenders such as Germany, Brazil, and Japan (collectively known as the G4), fits most of the criteria set out by the UN’s 2004 Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change concerning UNSC expansion (see Thakur 2011). India has also taken the lead in promoting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), proposed the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism in 1992, and was elected to the UNSC unopposed for the 2012–2013 session. India’s reliable contributions to UN PKOs also act as a valuable source of legitimacy for its UNSC ambitions. In September 2014, it was the third-highest contributor, sending 8,093 out of its total current deployment of 104,184 troops and police (UN 2014b). In turn, of 3,304 peacekeepers killed as of October

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2014, 157 were from India—more than any other nationality (UN 2014a). With an expanding presence, further paradoxes appear to be emerging for India, particularly regarding the UN’s increasingly powerful ‘responsibility to protect’ mantra that has given the international community greater legal powers and obligations to intervene in states. This mantra seemingly defies New Delhi’s long-standing norm of nonintervention but competes with India’s conception of being a responsible great power. Regardless, because of the country’s rising capabilities, more pragmatic observers reflect that a permanent seat ‘will come to India unasked as its economic and other strengths grow’ (Rasgotra, quoted in Malone 2011, 260). This latter voice indicates a residual conviction in the long-term efficacy, strength, and, ultimately, acceptability within international society of India’s core strategic aim to become a great power and its commensurate structuring principles. Despite India’s clear ambitions and self-conception as an important international power, New Delhi’s latent misgivings of how the institution can be deployed as a tool of great power politics remain in place. While its sympathy with the UN’s core principles is palpable and has deepened via India’s greater contribution to, and involvement in, global issues, there is a continuing perception that its security can only be assured by itself, not by others, and not by any multilateral body. At the same time, New Delhi’s UN role is embryonic—as India moves from being a developing to a developed state economically, its status in the UN is changing from being a recipient of its altruism and voice from the margins to one where New Delhi can embrace India’s mounting authority and realize its great-power aspirations. If India ever gains a permanent UNSC seat, this evolution will be tested, along with many of India’s foreign policy principles regarding any vision of international society. The World Trade Organization (WTO) India’s rise and its need for continued high economic growth has made interaction, engagement, and agreement with economic regimes more necessary than in the pre-1991 era. Compared with security-based regimes, economic institutions are New Delhi’s preferred forums of interaction, primarily as they offer a greater degree of transparency, have clearer mutual benefits, and are limited to trade and material domains. Moreover, within the setting of a globalized world, economic power has been recognized by India as the means with which to achieve greatpower status, primarily due to its highly translatable nature. As this centrality persists, the necessity of India being a part of, rather than being opposed to, such groupings is paramount—not only to forcefully negotiate New Delhi’s position but to also allow India’s diplomats to influence the very nature of the principles delineating the nature of these regimes. Such a process is a two-way one and encompasses the mutual socializa-

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tion of states to one another’s guiding values and norms regarding their conception of international society. This understanding crucially underlines our focus upon the interplay of Indian foreign policy norms and their applicability (or not) to the context of the wider international society. India was a cofounder of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in October 1947, which evolved into the creation of the WTO in 1995. Notwithstanding the distinct socialist orientation of India’s earliest leaders, core principles of equality, development, self-reliance, and developing world leadership all encouraged this participation, as typified by an Indian delegate to the GATT stating that ‘equality of treatment is equitable only among equals . . . a weakling cannot carry the burden of a giant’ (quoted in Narlikar 2005, 55). More so than in most other forums, New Delhi’s ardent negotiating style has been undeniably visible in the GATT’s and the WTO’s various trade rounds, especially from the 1990s onwards. Resonant of India’s Third Worldism and desire for greater equality on behalf of the global South, Narlikar has noted how ‘India’s hard-line positions in the GATT and the WTO have contributed greatly to its position as a leader of the developing world . . . [via] the idea that “India is the voice of the voiceless”’ (2006, 75). At its core, this stance is premised upon guaranteeing Indian self-reliance and self-sufficiency but also upon increasing Indian credibility and building solidarity among other states. Major Indian domestic constituencies also inform this approach, which ranges from independent farmers to big business (all of whom are important political constituencies). Typical of this positioning, during the current Doha Round, the uncompromising stance of India’s chief negotiator has been ‘cheered as heroic in India, where his refusal to offer major concessions to rich nations was being portrayed as a classic David vs. Goliath case’ (Faiola 2008). India’s leaders have been very successful at bringing ‘together a group of countries [mainly from the Third World] with a very diverse set of interests under the roof of a shared ideology’ (Narlikar 2008, 278). Often this coming together has been based upon shared opposition to much of the WTO’s policy of liberalization that seems to ostensibly give preference to the developed over the developing world. As a result, in the 1980s and 1990s, shared resistance against some GATT tariff and trade demands led to India taking the helm of groups such as the G10 and the Like Minded Group (LMG). 1 On multiple occasions (such as during the Uruguay Round in 1996 and at the Doha Ministerial Conference in 2001), this latter group disintegrated as all its members accepted bilateral concessions in some way or another during negotiations, with the exception of India. Critically, when another Third World grouping called the G20 (developing nations) came into being during the Cancún Ministerial Conference of 2003, negotiations reached a stalemate. Again led by India, accompanied by Brazil, and formed in response to US and European

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Union (EU) agricultural policy, none of its members took concessions. Although its members have altered, this grouping persisted into the 2010s, and its endurance is testimony to India’s historically hard-line perseverance and leadership. It is via these efforts, and so as to increase their contemporary relevance, that India ‘wants to “democratize” institutions of global governance . . . as they would give New Delhi actual influence in managing global issues and enhance its foreign policy autonomy, while according it recognition as a great power’ (Pardesi 2007, 225–26). As such, ‘India’s multilateral preoccupations ha(ve) changed from those of a poor developing nation relying on strength of numbers to those of an emerging power with the ability to hold its own against the major players in the WTO’ (Malone 2011, 261). India’s need to preserve its current trajectory as an emergent economic behemoth (the core facilitating method to realizing itself as a great power) does, however, mean that New Delhi must increasingly expedite positive outcomes in its WTO dealings. Thus, India has at various junctures made concessions to avoid being seen as a spoiler of talks—most notably concerning Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) as part of the 2011 Doha Declaration. Symptomatic of this new positioning, India’s interaction with the G8 (the world’s eight largest economies) is increasing, and its diplomats now frequently attend G8 meetings (along with other emergent economies). New Delhi also goes to the WTO’s ‘Green Room’ sessions, where the negotiation position of the developed economies is resolved via closed-door ministerial sessions, which first took place at the September 2003 WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancún. India had previously vehemently criticized such a process until it was invited to it. Moreover, India is one of the Five Interested Parties (sometimes called the Quint), along with the United States, the European Union, Brazil, and Australia—a position that endorses India’s global economic centrality and key voice in negotiations and swells its authority at the WTO. As such, we can see contradictions between India’s desire to become a great power and norms concerning equality and nonintervention (especially if seen in globalizing economic terms), with these latter principles gradually declining in significance. Again, forums that India once criticized have now been embraced. CONCLUSION: PROJECTING AND PROMOTING COMMONALITY As this analysis has shown, a stable and sustained set of norms present within Indian foreign policy has dictated India’s interaction with various multilateral organizations. Often balancing between India’s historical experience and development needs (diplomatic, strategic, and economic), these norms have informed (and at times given priority to) New Delhi’s long-term foreign policy goal of attaining great-power status. Important-

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ly, this investigation has shown that the principles upon which India views international society largely coalesce with the global norms underpinning various major institutions and underscore India’s overwhelmingly global over regional focus. This agreement especially relates to principles concerning international peace and security, democracy, nonviolence, and development. India’s norms have not, however, always been uniformly applied, with evidence that India is willing to sometimes limit its interaction and acquiescence if its core strategic needs are not met, especially in terms of enhancing its overall international status. This observation suggests a certain limit concerning the degree to which India intrinsically subscribes to global/international society norms. New Delhi’s negotiating style and an underlying historically and experience-derived suspicion of multilateral organizations as potential extensions of (great) power politics further inform these perspectives. However, in institutions such as the BRICS and IBSA (see below), where India has been instrumental from their very beginning or which were specifically crafted to its foreign policy norms, this suspicion has been largely absent except to unify its members against external inequalities. As the influence of these groupings increases, ‘it may turn out that India’s caution will serve it better than the recklessness that comes with illusions of power’ (Mehta 2008, 232). We have also observed some apparent incongruities within the norms and values structuring India’s interaction with international society. These contradictions revolve around desiring domestic economic modernization to become a great power in the international system yet advocating greater equality, solidarity, and leadership among developing states. So far, India has proven that the two can go hand in hand (within limits), but as it rises within the international system, this paradox will become more prominent, particularly as India gains greater leveraging powers to project, promote, and instil its preferred world view. Nevertheless, many of its core foreign policy norms (such as development, antihegemony, nonintervention, and multipolarity) now clearly resonate with the developing world (especially the global South) and are a viable platform from which to articulate India’s desired image of international society. Concurrently, with the ending of the Cold War, the passing of the US unipolar moment, and the rise of India and China, there has been a realization among developing states that they can ‘often wield influence disproportionate to their individual economic size or formal voting power’ (Hart and Jones 2010, 74). For India, this collective strength is being gradually translated into the enunciation of various transregional power blocs that are acting in unison to pursue shared interests and aims, such as subinstitutional groupings in the UN (as noted above) but also the BRICS and IBSA, which are often based upon many of India’s foreign policy norms.

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In particular, the BRICS countries mimic India’s key international society norms regarding progress (via development), equality (primarily with other would-be great powers), nonintervention, global antihegemonism, multipolarity (a system in which they all desire to become a major centre of influence), and—most critically—great-power status (Hart and Jones 2010, 65). Dating back from its involvement with the NAM, ‘India has a long and well-entrenched tradition of identifying with and leading the “value-claiming” negotiation strategies of Third World bloc coalitions’ (Nel 2010, 958). Desired greater voting shares at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank underpin these sentiments, as do mutual concerns about terrorism, food and energy security, climate change, and setting up a development bank (BRICS 2012). As with mature global institutions, the core principles shared by BRICS countries inform us of their preferred future vision (and India’s) for international society and its constituent norms. With a specific emphasis on their mutual multiracial, multicultural, and democratic characteristics, the IBSA Dialogue Forum was formed in June 2003 to enhance multilateral collaboration on common positions concerning ‘proposed reforms of the UN, peace and security, . . . and sustainable and social development’ (Alden and Viera 2005, 1089). As postcolonial states, the members also wish to redistribute current power, wealth, and privilege disparities via ‘the flattening out of hierarchical patterns of world order by means of the recognition of full and equal membership rights for all states in multilateral institutions’ (Nel 2010, 955–56). In addition, IBSA stresses ‘the need to make the structures of global governance more democratic, representative and legitimate by increasing the participation of developing countries in the decision-making bodies of multilateral institutions’ (Cooper and Alexandroff 2010, 7). Indian norms of multipolarity, development, equality, anti-imperialism, antihegemony, and democracy, and to a lesser extent great-power status, are thus all evident in terms of IBSA’s interactions. In sum, within the overarching aim of becoming a great power, we have witnessed an occasionally shifting hierarchy or fluctuating menu among India’s core foreign policy principles, with their prioritization or delimitation often dependent upon New Delhi’s conception of India’s national strength and standing relative to the rest of the international system. The aspiration to be a great power has thus been India’s driving concern, with its orientating set of norms often appearing to act as the ideational means to deliver this eventual end. However, while the order of these preferences may have changed, their content as representing India’s core values has remained remarkably consistent—displaying continuance, coherence, and concordance among institutions as diverse as the UN, the WTO, and more nascent regimes such as BRICS and IBSA. This regularity has not only served to validate our norm-based approach but has also critically shown the major irrevocable principles upon which

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India interacts with the international system and, therefore, how its leaders continue to conceive of international society. As ingrained and entrenched foreign policy norms, they form the basis from which India wishes to contribute to such a society, the ways in which other states can build commonalities with it, and the interests, sensitivities, and fears inherent to its preferred world view. Given their long-standing nature, they offer a critical and reliable source of knowledge concerning India’s past, present, and future interaction within the sphere of international society. NOTES 1. G10 members—Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, India, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Peru, and Tanzania; LMG members—Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Uganda.

FOUR Rising Powers and International Society Lessons from the Past and the Case of China David Armstrong

THE COMING WARS The past fifty years have seen numerous predictions of imminent war between major powers as a consequence of fundamental shifts in the balance of power among them. Such transitions are seen as leading inevitably to conflict as the declining power tries to protect its position in the global order by resorting to force or the rising power decides the time has come to impose its rightful place upon its rivals. In 1969, Harrison Salisbury predicted The Coming War between Russia and China (Salisbury 1969), and in 1992, George Friedman and Meredith LeBard did the same in their four-hundred-page thriller, The Coming War with Japan (Friedman and LeBard 1991). More recently there have been numerous predictions of wars between the United States and either China, Russia, or Iran or, more vaguely, ‘Islam’—the first stage of the many ‘clashes of civilizations’ that are doubtless on their way (Huntington 1996). While enough time has passed for us to be able to laugh at most of these scenarios, what all of them have in common is a particular interpretation of the underlying nature of international politics, one that perceives fundamental and recurring patterns in the way states interact with one another. Whether or not these writers have ever heard the term ‘realism’, they are, of course, employing what is still the dominant set of IR theories, albeit a set with many prefixes (classical, traditional, neo-, de71

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fensive, critical, etc.) and variants such as bargaining theory in security studies. These are working from an understanding of history as a ceaseless struggle for power among all states that leads inexorably to war, especially in a situation where one or more powers are declining and others are ‘rising’ (in the sense that the growth in their economic and military power is outstripping that of the established great powers). One of the high priests of such thinking, John Mearsheimer, cites in evidence the following changes in ‘shares of European wealth’ since 1860: 1860: UK 68 percent, France 14 percent, Prussia 10 percent (when the latter unified the German states, this figure had increased to 16 percent in 1870) 1890: UK 50 percent, Germany 25 percent, France 13 percent, Russia 5 percent 1903: Germany 36.5 percent, UK 34.5 percent (Mearsheimer 2001, 71) The message is clear enough: shifts of this magnitude in the overall balance of material power lead to war. Ideological challenges can also upset the existing order. In the case of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the rise of values such as national self-determination and liberalism posed a threat to the old dynastic regimes. When combined with Napoleon’s transformation of war by issuing a call to arms to ‘the nation’ (rather than the mercenaries involved in other eighteenth-century wars), the balance of power was thrown into disarray. There are also situations, dating back as far as the Peloponnesian War, when preponderance of power in one state encourages others to combine against it. This is especially the case where clear distinctions may be drawn between ‘satisfied’ and ‘dissatisfied’ states: those—like Britain at the peak of its imperial days—with a more than ample share of the world’s resources and those like ‘new’ arrivals Japan, Italy, and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century (or in the 1930s), whose underlying power was not matched by what they perceived to be a sufficient share of the normal rewards of power. In these examples, material power and justice claims linked together to threaten prevailing social structures. NEW WORLD OF GLOBALIZATION OR STILL THE GREAT ILLUSION? From this view of history we should, therefore, anticipate major conflict between the established and the rising powers sooner rather than later. Given the effectively unipolar position of the United States combined with economic weaknesses there and in Europe, that means, in reality, conflict between the United States and one or more of the rising powers, most probably China. There are, of course, alternative scenarios to the realist arguments about the inevitability of competition among the pow-

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ers, with a balance of power offering the only prospect of a (temporarily) stable order. For example, a 2007 study argues that there was ‘a basic hierarchical logic’ in the East Asian system over time so that ‘evidence of balancing processes over six centuries is hard to find’ (Kang 2007). China’s neighbours essentially accepted Chinese preponderance, with stability enhanced by trading links and ‘a complex set of norms about international behaviour that was generally observed by the main political units’. This gives rise to another possible future, with three hegemonial regional orders, dominated by China, the United States, and Germany, and a more complex range of possible futures for Africa, depending on the degree to which that continent’s current phase of economic growth can be maintained and accompanied by greater political stability. A far more fundamental alternative perspective on the future world order focuses primarily on economic factors. There are several variants on this particular theme. In 1986 Richard Rosecrance argued that the emphasis on territorial control and military preparedness that went alongside the emergence of the modern state was being displaced by a new ‘trading world’ in which ‘the benefit of trade and cooperation greatly exceeds that of military competition and territorial aggrandisement’. He accepted that ‘a tolerable balance in world military politics is necessary to permit a trading system to function’ but claimed that ‘international “openness”, low tariffs, efficient means of transport and abundant markets offer incentives to many nations that have only to find a niche in the structure of world commerce to win new rewards’. Ever-increasing economic interdependence becomes the dominant feature of such a world order (Rosecrance 1986). Although Rosecrance does not put it in quite these terms, his future world would eventually come to resemble a kind of global European Union—a possibility to which I will return. Susan Strange reaches similar conclusions in The Retreat of the State, among other works. In an attempt to find an alternative to the statecentric understandings of world politics she finds so limited, Strange develops a more complex explanatory model based on the interaction between three variables: technology, markets, and politics, with different actors and processes at work in each. Prophetically, she suggests that ‘one of the most important questions for international political economists today [writing in 1996] is how to create that kind of authority for the integrated world financial system and thus for the good of the world economy’ (Strange 1996, 194). Countless studies of globalization make similar points about how the world of competing states is being displaced by something much more complex, seen by some as ‘neomedievalism’, by others as ‘cosmopolitanism’: a world in which the Internet, global finance, common cultural referents, transnational corporations, international civil society, postmodernism, and other forces combine to produce a world in which the inter-

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play between ‘rising’ and ‘declining’ powers is of only marginal significance. One problem with such arguments is that we have been here before— most notably with Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion. Angell’s book was written in 1909 as a counter to ‘one of the universally accepted axioms of European politics, namely that a nation’s financial and industrial stability, its security in commercial activity—in short, its prosperity and wellbeing, depend upon its being able to defend itself against the aggression of other nations, who will, if they are able, be tempted to commit such aggression because in so doing they will increase their power, prosperity and well-being at the cost of the weaker and vanquished’. This he regarded as ‘a gross and desperately dangerous misconception, partaking at times of the nature of a superstition’. His reasoning was, in essence, very similar to that of the globalization and cosmopolitan theorists: in an age when economic activity had reached such a highly developed level, and given the ‘delicate interdependence of the financial world’, political and military power was ultimately futile. Trade could not be ‘captured’ nor destroyed (Angell 1913). Of course, Angell was simply putting what he saw as a rational case against the many who were arguing the opposite, but ‘irrationality’ won through in 1914 and again in 1939, and several decades were to pass before the world’s economic and financial interactions regained their 1909 levels. It is, nonetheless, reasonable to take the line of cautious optimism and argue that—whatever the future does have in store—another great-power war is a fairly low possibility. A key reason remains Angell’s emphasis on economic factors and the interdependence stressed by globalization theorists. The reason why this did not have the outcome hoped for by Angell is not because he was being hopelessly naïve but because in the world before 1945 great powers viewed their economic situation through the prism of a world characterized by competing global empires. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it did so after more than a decade of severe economic difficulties, when it had also been denied access to some of the natural resources—notably oil—in its own region, partly by American power. At the same time the European imperial powers were trying to organize their empires into preferential trading systems, which would establish barriers to Japanese trade. After 1945, Japan was able to achieve everything it sought in the 1930s through entirely peaceful means. Between 1949 and 1979, China fought the United States and its allies India, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam first over Korea and later over border issues. Economic factors were never a significant motivation, but even if they had been, China too was later able to obtain infinitely superior economic gains through trade and—more significantly if we are concerned with ways in which the total Western enterprise may finally be reaching the end of its five centuries of dominance—through ‘state capitalism’.

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The next two sections consider the degree to which China might be considered a challenge or a threat to the West. CHINA AS A CHALLENGE TO THE WEST History and geography are key determinants of any state’s outlook on the world, none more so than in the case of China. China’s history is, of course, so rich that it is impossible to do more than detach a few elements from it. China’s geography has also been an important factor in forming China’s view of its place in the world. Surrounded, for the most part, by deserts, mountains, jungles, and seas, China was generally able to maintain its culture and develop free from external interference. This also helped the Chinese to develop a view of China as a superior civilization, which was probably an accurate appraisal over a long period. Crucially, China had no concept of equal relations among sovereign states. Until the nineteenth century, China had only been conquered twice, by the Mongols and by the Manchus, from what is now Northeast China, or Manchuria. However, in both of those cases, the conquering forces adopted Chinese ideas and established their own dynasties, which attempted to rule, to a significant degree, in accordance with Chinese traditions. Ideas and ideologies have always been important in Chinese history, whether Confucianism, the bizarre form of Christianity adopted by the Taipings, who engaged in a major revolt against imperial rule in 1850–1864, or Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The emperor’s ‘mandate of heaven’ was thought to rest in part upon the degree to which he ruled in accordance with Confucian principles, and Mao Zedong’s claim to power was always in part based upon his claim to have a more profound understanding of how Marxist-Leninist principles should be applied in the Chinese context. Some would see the Chinese Communist Party as attempting to perform a similar role to that of the mandarin class in imperial China. Western ideas about individualism have never been accepted by the governing authorities in China. Both Confucianism and Maoism emphasize the individual’s social responsibilities rather than his or her private rights. The Chinese word for ‘democracy’ is closer in meaning to ‘government over the people’ than ‘government by the people’. Similarly, when China began a period of legal reform, partly in response to its need to engage in ever-closer economic relations with the West, it tended to talk in terms of ‘rule by law’ rather than ‘rule of law’ (Womack 1991; Keith 1994). If the two thousand years of imperial rule, mandarins, and Confucianism provide the deeper, underlying context necessary to understand China today, the hundred years from the First Opium War in 1839 to China’s war with Japan from 1937 are crucial to an appreciation of several specific aspects of China’s foreign policy. First, China’s humiliating defeats in the

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two Opium Wars opened the floodgates to a series of demands by Western powers for various extraterritorial rights for their diplomats and traders. Sometimes these demands were made in the name of an ‘international law’ with which China was completely unfamiliar, not least because it was based upon the doctrine—unacceptable to a state seeing itself as the supreme ‘Middle Kingdom’—of sovereign equality. China was deemed by the Western powers to be incapable of meeting the requirements necessary for the status of sovereign equality, and this further humiliation may be seen as one reason for China’s insistence today on the principle of nonintervention in a state’s internal affairs, as in the case of Syria today. Secondly, China’s conflicts with Japan from 1894 to the particularly brutal war of 1937–1945 have clearly cast a long shadow over Sino-Japanese relations today. While it is clear that the nationalist and anti-Japanese movements that have been much in evidence in the past twenty years have at times been manipulated by the Beijing government, they do derive fundamentally from deep-seated and widespread historical memories. It should also be remembered that the rise of both nationalism and communism in China began with the May Fourth Movement, a studentled protest against the Japanese demands after the First World War for the German-controlled Shandong region. Thirdly, China’s encounter with the West, an encounter that was not just violent but one between radically different notions of civilization, sparked a debate that is far from ended about the degree to which—if at all—China should adopt Western political, social, and economic ideas. From the middle of the nineteenth century this debate could be summarized in terms of the struggle between ‘ti’ and ‘yong’, where ‘ti’ refers to the basic political and economic system of a country, while ‘yong’ denotes the methods employed to achieve objectives (Spence 1999, 255–56). At that time the argument was, in essence, that China’s imperial system and its Confucian ideas should be the foundation, while Western technological knowledge could be borrowed for strictly limited purposes, so long as these did not undermine ‘ti’ in any way. The defeat by Japan in 1894 led to much deeper soul searching, including calls for an adoption of the Western democratic system as well as its scientific knowledge. This in turn led to an anti-Western reaction, culminating in the Boxer Uprising in 1890. The debate about the necessity—or otherwise—for China to adopt Western approaches remains fierce. When Deng Xiaoping began his economic revolution in the 1970s, he opted for a strictly pragmatic approach: China shouldn’t lose itself in a debate about how socialism could be reconciled with the adoption of a market economy but should just get on with constructing one. However, as China’s economy maintained high growth rates through succeeding decades, debate shifted towards the issue of whether China should adopt other aspects of Western culture— in particular, its notions of democracy and individual freedom. The

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award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo provoked a furious response from Beijing. He is a literary critic and human rights advocate, who, after speaking out on numerous controversial issues, including supporting US action against Iraq on human rights grounds, proclaimed: ‘Modernization means whole-sale westernization, choosing a human life is choosing Western way of life. Difference between Western and Chinese governing system is humane vs in-humane, there’s no middle ground . . . Westernization is not a choice of a nation, but a choice for the human race’ (Liu 1988). For this he was imprisoned—for the third time—in 2009, for eleven years. Chinese actions after his award of the Nobel Prize in 2010 included cutting off the mobile phone connections of the two lawyers who defended Liu, criticizing the US Congress for passing a resolution supporting Liu, increasing security measures against Liu’s friends, and imposing additional import controls on Norwegian salmon in 2011 in retaliation against the Oslo ceremony, where an empty chair was placed onstage to symbolize Liu’s enforced absence. Notwithstanding such repression, many Chinese intellectuals and media elite supported Liu’s views. After his award, a group of one hundred journalists, scholars, writers, and ordinary citizens signed a public letter calling on the Communist Party to realize the goals of democracy and constitutional government espoused by Liu. Just prior to Liu’s award, a group of retired party elders submitted a letter to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress calling for freedom of speech and press and the abolition of censorship. This group included many former senior media officials, such as the former director of People’s Daily, the editor in chief of China Daily, the deputy director of Xinhua News Agency, and even the former head of the News Office of the Central Propaganda Department (Economy 2010, 3). Such arguments, however, coincided with the global financial crisis, and the apparent success of China in avoiding the worst aspects of this led to a very different debate—and one that was not confined to China. This revolved around the issue of whether, through its variant of ‘state capitalism’, China had devised a system that, far from needing to adopt even more characteristics of Western societies, might actually be superior to the Western version of market capitalism combined with individual freedom. Indeed, a serious debate began as to whether the Western system as a whole faced a fundamental challenge to its core tenets. ‘State capitalism’ is a term that has been used in many different contexts since the nineteenth century. Here it refers to one way of depicting the current politico-economic situation in China, where an increasingly capitalist/ free enterprise economy coexists with an authoritarian state controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. In an interview on CNN in 2008, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said: ‘The complete formulation of our economic policy is to give full play to the basic role of market forces in allocating resources under the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the

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government. We have one important piece of experience of the past thirty years, that is to ensure that both the visible hand and invisible hand are given full play in regulating the market forces’ (Jiabao 2008). According to the Economist, state-backed companies account for 80 percent of the value of China’s stock market. The journal added: With the West in a funk and emerging markets flourishing, the Chinese no longer see state-directed firms as a way-station on the road to liberal capitalism; rather they see it as a sustainable model. They think they have redesigned capitalism to make it work better and a growing number of emerging world economies agree with them. . . . [They argue] it can provide stability as well as growth. (Economist 2012)

An additional issue concerns the use to which China might put its huge reserves of foreign currency—around three trillion dollars. Although the China Investment Corporation, which manages part of this as a sovereign wealth fund, maintains that its objectives are strictly commercial, given that China is a major power and that it is not an open society, the possibility that it might use its sovereign wealth funds for larger strategic or political purposes has caused increasing concern in some of the main targets for investment from such funds, notably the United States and the European Union. For example, in 2010 a company owned in part by the Chinese government bought a 5.1 percent stake in the only Americanowned provider of enriched uranium for use in civilian nuclear reactors. Sovereign wealth funds can also be used to purchase companies that then provide expertise for Chinese companies—for example, when China’s company Geely International took over the Swedish car firm Volvo for $1.8 billion (Global Times 2012). A different kind of challenge to Western approaches derives from the fact that major companies in the West are increasingly constrained by domestic public opinion in their economic dealings with countries regarded as committing major human rights abuses or which are engaged in policies strongly disapproved of by Western governments (such as Iran and North Korea). China has no such constraints and has hugely increased its economic involvement with Zimbabwe, for example. In 2009 one Chinese company reached a $7 billion mining contract with Guinea just two weeks after 157 pro-democracy demonstrators there were shot down by police (Samb 2011). There are now more than a million Chinese citizens living in Africa and, especially in view of the fact that China’s economic strategy in the continent has been a significant factor behind Africa’s relatively high levels of economic growth in the past ten years, it would hardly be surprising if increasing numbers of African states looked to China rather than the West for inspiration regarding their own development strategies. Another issue is that, while foreign companies operating inside Western countries have full access to courts of law in disputes with Western

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governments, this is much less the case of foreign companies operating in China. For example, when Google decided in 2010 to confront China over cyber attacks against the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists by redirecting Chinese users to a Hong Kong site, it was eventually forced to compromise with China in order to have its licence renewed in July. Also in 2010, Rupert Murdoch announced that he was pulling out of his stake in three Chinese TV companies after twenty years of constant difficulties with Chinese authorities. He had, in 1993, argued that capitalism was a major force working against authoritarianism, particularly because of the ongoing revolution in communications technology. Some saw his decision to pull out as evidence that he had been proved wrong on this (Liu 2011). Western and especially American global influence has not derived simply from economic and military power but from numerous ‘soft power’ attributes, ranging from Hollywood movies to popular music and, most obviously, from the widespread use of the English language. In the past five years, China has sponsored around five hundred ‘Confucius Institutes’ around the world to promote Chinese language and culture and has indicated its intention to increase this number to one thousand by 2020. Some see these, which normally involve collaboration between a Chinese and a foreign university, as an exercise in Chinese ‘soft power’. In Canada, an intelligence report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 2007 said, ‘Beijing is out to win the world’s hearts and minds, not just its economic markets, as a means of cementing power’ (CSIS 2007). Similar criticisms have appeared in India, Germany, and Japan. In Israel, Tel Aviv University officials shut down a student art exhibition about the oppression of the Falun Gong movement in China. A Tel Aviv district court judge said the university ‘violated freedom of expression and succumbed to pressure from the Chinese Embassy, which funds various activities at the university, and took down the exhibit, violating freedom of expression’ (Selig 2009). This ruling was criticized by the dean of students, who ‘feared that the art exhibit would jeopardize Chinese support for its Confucius Institute and other educational activities on the campus’. While China is obviously a considerable distance from having anything remotely close to the range of soft power instruments of the United States, its intention to promote an alternative model to the West in cultural as well as economic areas is clear. Yet, while China—like Japan and India—will retain many distinctive cultural features and the popularity of the Chinese language will continue to grow in schools and universities, along with global interest in China more generally, there are many reasons why China cannot be seen as constituting a serious alternative model to the West. First, China’s economic success seems to have faltered somewhat in the past year, not least because, in reality, the Western and Chinese economies are interdependent: China needs Western purchasers of its goods, and the reason why

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much of its investment ends up in the United States and Europe is not because of some dark plot but simply because the most stable and reliable returns are to be found there. If that may be interpreted as one consequence of the compelling forces of globalization, another is the fact that the growing Chinese middle class, especially its younger generation, while respectful of China’s traditional culture, has tended, not least through online debates, to push for greater individual freedom. One popular argument, for example, is that fundamental political reform is necessary for continued economic growth. An editorial, ‘The Only Answer Is Political Reform’, published by the Economic Observer in late October 2010, argued: Without reforming the political system, we cannot guarantee the benefits that economic reform brings, nor will we be able to continue to push ahead with reforms to the economic system and social reform will also fail. . . . In fact, whether it’s breaking the deadlock on economic reform or making a breakthrough on social reform, both rely on pushing ahead with political reform. (Economic Observer 2010)

Political reform advocates also often suggest that social stability—one of the Communist Party’s top priorities—can be ensured only by more fundamental reform. Hu Shuli, the editor of Caixin and Century Weekly, for example, argues that political reform has stagnated because of ‘fears that a misstep would lead to social unrest’. She goes on to note, however, ‘Overblown worries that delay what’s needed only exacerbate the very tensions threatening to destabilize society’ (Yoshioka 2013). Political reform as an integral step to improving China’s foreign policy and image is also becoming a widely supported theme. Academics, journalists, and reformers have argued that China needs more exposure to the outside world and better education within China as well as comprehensive internal political and social reforms. An editorial in Century Weekly, entitled ‘At Last, A Magic Moment for Political Reform,’ echoes this theme, noting that social problems, such as forced evictions from peasant landholdings, have strained relations between the government and people, causing people to lose faith in their country and damaging China’s image abroad. 1 The growing role of the Internet in Chinese political life also merits close attention. While it has been invaluable to the leadership in giving insights into changing popular opinion, its diversity and dynamism mean that the party’s attempts to control information and to channel public opinion in approved directions are doomed from the start. There have been countless incidents where bloggers have drawn attention to blatant falsehoods in the official reports of various pollution, construction, and transport disasters and helped to provoke popular protests. On other occasions dissidents have successfully used the Internet against official attempts to prosecute them. For example, the artist Ai Weiwei has

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pursued justice for families whose children died in the Sichuan earthquake and criticized the officials dealing with that case. Once again, the Western culture and political system forms a key backdrop to such conversations—just as it did 150 years ago. This does not mean that the Chinese middle class is bent on adopting the Western model in its entirety. A recurrent theme is a willingness to modernize but without swallowing Western ideas wholesale. Qin Xiao, the former chair of China Merchant Bank Group, argues the need for such a balance: ‘An historic theme in modern China is the search for a unique model and way to modernize. A major part of this theme revolves around a “dispute between the west and China and a debate of the ancient and modern.” . . . It misreads and misinterprets universal values and modern society. It is a kind of narrow-minded nationalism that rejects universal civilization. . . . Adhering to universal values, while creating Chinese style approaches, is truly the objective for our time’ (Fu and Wang 2010). The Chinese daily newspaper published in English and Chinese, Global Times, notes, ‘China has to continue its political reforms in the future, including drawing beneficial experiences from Western democratic politics, however, China will never be a sub-civilization, and it will only follow its roadmap in a gradual manner’. 2 China’s very economic success has given rise to the need for legal reforms that might have significant political consequences. For example, China has had to introduce increasing numbers of rules relating to corporate governance that might impact over time on state governance—the need for shareholders to have transparency and full disclosure from company managers, shareholders’ rights to challenge board decisions, their right to information, and various rights for aggrieved shareholders to pursue their grievances through legal means (for example, reforms to the Company Act in 2005)—although local courts are inefficient and can be reluctant to take up corporate governance issues. In an address in 2011 to the US Council on Foreign Relations, leading sinologist Elizabeth Economy argued that there has been increasing official recognition of the need for political reform. 3 In October 2010 the party issued a communiqué stating, ‘Great impetus will be given to economic restructuring while vigorous yet steady efforts should be made to promote political restructuring.’ A series of People’s Daily editorials published at the same time articulated the central party leadership’s interest in a reasonably constrained version of political reform. The editorials argued that in the process of political restructuring, it is ‘imperative to adhere to party leadership, to the socialist system and to socialism with Chinese characteristics’, and that the aim of political reform is to ‘enhance the vitality of the Party and the country and to mobilize people’s enthusiasm’. Beijing has launched several notable initiatives to develop a system of official accountability and promote greater transparency within the exist-

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ing political system. These include anticorruption campaigns; regulations to promote public access to information in areas such as the environment and to govern ‘the convening of party congresses; selection for and retirement from official posts; and fixed-term limits’ and experiments in budgetary reform. Beijing has also permitted a few non–Communist Party members to hold key positions within the government, such as Wan Gang, Minister of Science and Technology, and Chen Zhu, Minister of Health. With social unrest on the rise, the party is also searching for ways to be more responsive to the interests of the Chinese people without transforming the system entirely. One effort is an online bulletin board, ‘Direct Line to Zhongnanhai’, where the Chinese people can leave messages for the top leaders. Both former president Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have participated in active web-based dialogues with the Chinese people. Local officials may appear on radio shows, and some delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and district congresses have also established times to meet with their constituents to listen to their concerns. There has been discussion within the NPC, however, that such meetings are problematic because officials may develop their own individual constituencies and popular followings. Elizabeth Economy also argues that some of China’s recent reform initiatives, such as the drive to develop a ‘harmonious society’, derive from an element of the political spectrum that is concerned overwhelmingly with social justice. Some intellectuals, as well as former military officials, workers, and farmers have raised serious concerns about the downside of thirty years of unfettered economic growth. Crony capitalism, the failure to ensure an adequate social welfare net, and growing environmental challenges are all seen as failures of the current Chinese political economy. Sometimes grouped as ‘the New Left’, these scholars are suspicious of further market reforms and want a stronger state hand in the market to ensure social justice. A related issue is that until it embarked on its experiment in state capitalism, China had one of the most equal distributions of wealth in the world. Now it has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in Asia, and the number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty (less than a dollar per day) has grown to somewhere between one hundred million and two hundred million. Wealth is also unevenly distributed among different parts of China. There have already been some signs of serious political unrest because of this. A similar social phenomenon has been the emergence of a large middle class of more than two hundred million managerial, administrative, professional, and technocratic individuals. Additional problems arise from the (often corrupt) involvement of local and national government officials and also the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in various economic activities. There has been much debate in recent years about the internal political aspects of all these

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developments. There is, for example, a classical argument that a growing middle class increases pressure for democratic reform, although many argue that there is no evidence for this in China and, indeed, the opposite may be happening as the new emerging elite seeks to protect its favoured position by resisting democratic reforms that might give a voice to poorer sections of society. In 2012, China’s outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, issued a number of statements that appeared to indicate his strong support for fundamental political reform. For example, in March 2012 he warned that China’s economic gains could be lost if political turmoil broke out: ‘Without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gains we have made in this area may be lost. . . . New problems that have cropped up in Chinese society will not be fundamentally resolved’ (Branigan 2012). In this he was repeating more emphatically arguments he had advanced on a number of occasions in the past. His successor as premier, Li Keqiang, and the more powerful president, Xi Jinping, who took office in 2013, appear to have moved back to a more repressive approach, although this may simply be another example of China’s oscillation over the past few decades between cautious moves seemingly aimed at greater liberalization and harsh treatment of dissidents when, most notably in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, the government appears to judge that things are getting out of hand. In his public statements, Xi Jinping seems to have focused on the need for China to return to the much less corrupt system that operated under Mao, so one interpretation of his approach is that his target is corruption rather than Westernization—although, of course, an abiding concern of China’s leaders has always been to defend the legitimacy of one-party rule. In short, China is still some distance from posing a fundamental ‘challenge’ to the West in the economic or political domains. On balance, it seems more likely to continue to shift slowly but surely towards a model that will resemble the West rather than be a serious alternative to it. China is also likely to remain preoccupied by its many internal problems—the increasing divide between rich and poor, massive corruption, and hostility from its ethnic minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere, not to speak of numerous environmental issues. Like other rich societies, it also faces a ‘demographic time bomb’—in 2030, the number of people over sixty-five will more than double, to 350 million; in 2065, 54 percent of the population will be over sixty and only 22 percent working unless the government permits larger families or immigration. It is, of course, not impossible that China will find innovative and successful means of dealing with such problems, in which case the ‘China model’ might again rise to prominence, but at present the problems are more in evidence than potential solutions.

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CHINA AS A THREAT If ‘coming wars’ are relatively unlikely, what about more complex scenarios in which China’s growing military power becomes an increasingly decisive element in determining the outcome of specific confrontations in ways favourable to China’s interests? Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, stated in June 2010 that ‘I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned’ about China’s military programmes. 4 How justified is such concern? First, it would take some dramatic setbacks in the next twenty years for China’s progress towards greater military power to seriously falter. China will continue to acquire the aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, and space satellites that are seen by all as the necessary accoutrements of great-power status. However, given that US military power is still much greater than the next ten most powerful states combined, and given that most of the other nine on this list are allies of the United States, we are still some considerable distance from a Chinese global or even regional hegemony. China embarked upon what appeared to be a major increase in military spending in 2011, by 12.7 percent, to $91.5 billion, with a further increase of around 11 percent in 2012, but some of this was due to the need to increase military pay because of rising inflation in both years. US military spending is still more than $600 billion. Military expenditure by another potential rival, India, is around $30 billion, but much of that is devoted to countering various threats emanating from Pakistan. This does not mean that tensions, confrontations, and even some incidents involving actual conflict will not occur, but all-out war is extremely unlikely. In recent years, Sino-Japanese frictions have increased, particularly in relation to their dispute over islands in the East China Sea. Japan has responded to what it interpreted as a more aggressive approach by adopting more assertive public positions and, in September 2013, requesting its biggest increase in defence spending in more than twenty years. The United States has also indicated its intention to focus more on the Pacific in its overall security perspective, and there have been occasional frictions with China over Taiwan, most recently in 2010, when Beijing suspended contact with Washington after new arms sales from the United States to Taiwan. However, on balance, the United States has sought to engage with China rather than pursue a Cold War–style policy of containment. In September 2013, for example, the two sides held their fourteenth annual defence consultative talks, a few weeks after the United States and China completed a counterpiracy exercise in the Gulf of Aden (McClure 2013). In 2014, China also participated in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) international maritime exercises with twenty-two other nations (Tiezzi 2014). Taiwan remains strategically, psychologically, and symbolically vital to Chinese interests, and China has shown on several occasions its deter-

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mination to resist, by show of force if necessary, any change in Taiwan’s status. For example, in 1996, China engaged in military exercises in the area as a protest against what it saw as US support for Taiwan to shift from its current ambiguous status towards the possibility of being recognized as an independent state. When the Democratic Progressive Party, which advocated a push for Taiwan to be formally recognized as a separate state from China, won elections in 2000 and 2004, China reacted by passing the Anti-Secession Law in 2005, which formalized the possibility of China’s using ‘non-peaceful means’ as an option to stop Taiwanese independence, although the same law also acknowledged the possibility of Taiwan’s gaining access to international institutions. In general, China has consistently stressed its desire to achieve a ‘peaceful rise’. During the 2009 US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a leading Chinese foreign affairs official said: ‘China’s number one core interest is to maintain its fundamental system and state security; next is state sovereignty and territorial integrity; and third is the continuing stable development of the economy and society’ (Zhao 2013; State Department 2009). This list of priorities is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. CONCLUSION Given our assumptions that major wars are unlikely and that China’s rise will continue, what does the future hold? In very broad terms, we may envisage seven possible directions for international society over the next few decades. The first is a continuation of what we have at present: a mixture of the traditional ‘anarchical society’ of competing states, with the United States remaining in a somewhat hegemonial situation alongside the constantly evolving forces involved in globalization. In such a world there would also continue to be occasional ‘cosmopolitan’ elements involving various kinds of interventions for humanitarian purposes in the internal affairs of states undergoing internal crises. Although China’s early implacable hostility to anything resembling an attack on state sovereignty has softened in recent years, China would, on balance, remain opposed to, or, at the very least, extremely cautious about such interventions (Carlson 2006). A second scenario would have the same underlying features except with much less American hegemonial power. The precise implications of such a world order would depend in part on the degree to which the European Union had been able to progress towards the ‘ever closer union’ promised in its foundational treaty, whether such a closer union had the greater normative elements that some commentators have observed, and whether the United States and the European Union were able, for the most part, to work in harmony. This would clearly be an international society in which ‘the West’ remained the strongest force, politically, eco-

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nomically, and culturally. In such a world, China would seem less like an alternative model, and Beijing would tend to adopt the pragmatic approach of accommodating Western policies unless they conflicted with fundamental Chinese interests. A third possible international society would resemble a global version of the European Union, in which increasing economic interdependence had led to more regulation and more global institutions. While still some distance from a world government, such an order would inevitably involve some diminution of state powers, and it would also contain a process of ‘socialization’ in which states had to conform increasingly to agreed standards of governance, much as has been the case of states seeking admission to the EU (Armstrong 1993). This would inevitably push China towards continuing along a path of gradual westernization. A fourth eventuality might be termed a ‘neomedieval order’ in which, as in medieval Europe where kings, popes, bishops, chivalric orders, and groups of trading cities contended for power and influence, many types of actors coexisted—state, substate, transnational, global, regional, economic, social, electronic, political, and religious. Such a world would be open to the maximum possible diversity, making it the least predictable. A fifth possibility might be that China returned to being the Middle Kingdom—the richest and most powerful state in the world. While this prospect frightens some, if we observe Chinese historical practice over centuries, a more reassuring picture emerges in which China’s oftenproclaimed desire to achieve a ‘peaceful rise’ means precisely that. Several recent analyses of China have drawn attention to a number of key features in its foreign policy over the past ten years which, taken together, may be seen as constituting an updated version of China’s traditional view of its place in the world, somewhat aloof in certain respects so long as its wishes and interests were observed and occupying a position in its own region in which China’s hegemony was maintained not by manipulating a balance of power and using force but by earning the respect and gratitude of its neighbours. Brantly Womack, for example, argues that China has learnt over centuries the importance of making unilateral accommodations to smaller powers simply to avoid becoming entangled in conflict, asking only for ‘deference’ from its neighbours (Womack 2012). Similarly, Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne’s 2008 book points to China’s ‘newly invented official rhetoric of befriending, pacifying, and enriching neighbours’ (Wu and Lansdowne 2008, 269). A popular Chinese book, China Does Not Want to Be Mr. No, urges China to avoid the mistakes of the Soviet Union in adopting a negative if not hostile response to American power. Instead, China should pursue what another author terms ‘pragmatic nationalism’ and shrewd diplomacy requiring ‘rationality and calmness’ (Zhao 2009, 247–48). As part of this strategy, China has shifted a considerable distance from its earlier suspicions of some multilateral institutions. As Mi-

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chael Yahuda puts it, ‘It was the experience of cultivating better relations with the neighbouring states that led China towards the embrace of multilateral associations of states as vehicles within which to work with others on cooperative endeavours within which it could also enhance its own interests’ (Yahuda 2008, 75). Analysts point to China’s conduct in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to illustrate such arguments. This organization was established in 2001 between China, Russia, and several former Soviet republics, with India, Pakistan, Iran, and Mongolia having observer status. While some more suspicious commentators have viewed this organization as essentially a Sino-Russian counter to American power, others have drawn attention to China’s increasing dominance of it through careful diplomacy and Beijing’s ability to use it for a range of purposes in the region (Wu and Lansdowne 2008, 269–70). None of this is to deny the sometimes negative aspects of China’s internal and external conduct, but if China operates within an international context comprising multilateralism and globalization, the possibilities of its rise to be the world’s leading economic and military power may well be less intimidating than some fear. Two further possible international societies might be briefly considered. The first sees China’s rise to near unipolar status as accompanied by China’s having taken on board most Western values, including a freer and more open capitalist system and much greater individual freedom. In such a world, it is even conceivable that China might become a global advocate of such values and a supporter of humanitarian intervention, the International Criminal Court, the responsibility to protect principle, and the other human rights–centred developments that, with globalization, have gradually undermined a strict sovereignty doctrine. The second envisages the world dividing into several distinct regional orders, with reasonably strong free trade provisions between them. In such a world, the EU might retain its incipient federalist features, China its modern version of the tribute system, the Americas a balance between states in close partnership with the United States and others resisting US power and Africa, with its own emergent structure, perhaps including distinctive features such as the ‘truth and reconciliation’ approach to human rights offenders advocated by Nelson Mandela rather than the more Western model of trial and punishment. At the risk of repeating Angell’s unfortunate error, either of these might well produce a more peaceful, harmonious world and one more observant of human rights than realist theory might permit. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to argue that the way in which world politics evolve over the next few decades depends to a significant extent on whether Angell’s arguments prove more persuasive to the leaders of the major powers than they did in 1914. Of the seven possible future international societies outlined here, only the first retains the inevitable tendency towards conflict that has marked the traditional

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‘anarchical society’. All of the others, in different ways, reflect the impact of globalization, with its numerous nonstate actors and ever-increasing economic interdependence, and with a China interacting peacefully with the other members of international society. NOTES 1. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/century-weekly/. 2. Global Times, 10 September 2010. 3. The following discussion is drawn mainly from a series of publications and statements by Elizabeth Economy at http://www.cfr.org/experts/asia-chinaenvironment-us-china-relations/elizabeth-c-economy/b21. 4. International Relations and Security Network, 5 September 2013.

FIVE Normative Power India? Ian Hall 1

A vision of ‘normative power India’—a ‘righteous republic’ influencing the rules of international order not by the use of economic or military means but by principled moral and political argument—was central to postcolonial India’s understanding of itself and its role in the world (Vajpeyi 2012). Its first prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, envisaged an India ‘great among nations, foremost in the arts of peace and progress,’ and designed the original version of ‘nonalignment’ in pursuit of that goal (Nehru 1961a, 3; Nehru 1961b, 29). With that policy, Nehru helped to shape the postwar evolution of international society, working—not wholly successfully—to delegitimize and dismantle the European empires in Asia and Africa, limit the testing of nuclear weapons, and inculcate principles of ‘peaceful coexistence’ among the new states that emerged from decolonization. But after the Sino-Indian War in 1962 and Nehru’s death two years later, India turned away from that vision and sought instead to focus on domestic development and pursuing its interests by more traditional diplomatic and military means, attempting only periodically to influence the normative order of international society. Although change has occurred in Indian foreign policy over the past twenty years, most obviously in its improved relations with the United States, the consensus view is that it remains cautious and reactive when it comes to the normative order, rather than ambitious and entrepreneurial (Chiriyankandath 2004). At the same time, however, a significant debate has been conducted about what kind of power India is—and what kind of power it ought to be (Ganguly and Pardesi 2007; Sagar 2009). Amid this debate, some leading Indian politicians and thinkers have argued 89

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that India should indeed advance new normative agendas, arguing that its cultural and intellectual inheritance provides India with a wealth of insight and ‘soft power’ with which to bring about change in international society (Hymans 2009; Wagner 2010; Blarel 2012; Tharoor 2012; Thussu 2013). In 2012, the NonAlignment 2.0 report, authored by eight leading Indian scholars and businessmen and published by the Centre for Policy Research, presented a Nehruvian vision, suitably updated, which was widely discussed—and criticized—within and outside India (Khilnani et al. 2012). 2 These ideas (and others) found some currency in the latter stages of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And the debate did not end there. In 2014, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) election manifesto presented an alternative vision, emphasizing the concept of ‘Brand India’ and the desirability of leveraging India’s soft power to the country’s advantage and for the greater global good (BJP 2014, 39–41). These concepts have been echoed by the new National Democratic Alliance government of Narendra Modi, as his speech to the United Nations General Assembly later that year demonstrates so well (Modi 2014). This chapter assesses the promise of a revivified ‘normative power India’ and the challenges that the various normative agendas proposed by Indian scholars and politicians might face in contemporary international society. To that end, it explores what it might mean to be a ‘normative power’, drawing upon the significant body of literature that has grown up since the early 1990s on that concept and, in particular, on the experience of ‘normative power Europe’. It then looks back to Nehru’s earlier effort to make India an active participant in the shaping of the normative order of postwar international society—at the means that he utilized and at the reasons for what success he managed to achieve. The final part analyses what the theoretical literature and the history of India’s attempt to act as a postcolonial ‘norm entrepreneur’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) tells us about the prospects for ‘normative power India’ today. WHAT IS A ‘NORMATIVE POWER’? The concept of ‘normative power’ is relatively new, but the use of such power is arguably age-old. The term itself was coined by Ian Manners in a now-famous and much-discussed analysis of the emerging role of the European Union (EU) in international society (Manners 2002). Manners argued that the EU was a different kind of power to the familiar ones—a power that sought to promote values and norms by mainly noncoercive means rather than a power that sought to realize interests by whatever means necessary, including what Thomas Hobbes famously termed ‘force and fraud’. His idea of ‘normative power’ harked back to earlier

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ideas of ‘power over opinion’ in the work of E. H. Carr in the 1930s and of ‘civilian power’ in that of François Duchêne in the early 1970s (Carr 1939; Duchêne 1972), but he gave it a more robust theoretical foundation. Manners argued that ‘normative powers’ are qualitatively different kinds of actors in international society. They are polities that prioritize the promotion of what they conceive to be norms that ought to have universal application over the pursuit of interests, even where the promotion of norms might undermine the protection of interests. Such normative powers ought thus to be treated as distinct from regular polities—those which promote certain norms more selectively or which are more dependent on military power to attain compliance. For Manners, the EU was the quintessential normative power, a supranational polity with a distinct and distinctive mission, to be pursued noncoercively, or at least nonviolently. The EU has, Manners observed, an overt and explicit commitment to promoting within and outside its borders the norms set out in both the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, the Treaty on European Union (TEU) of 1991 sets ‘the consolidation of democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’ as foreign as well as domestic policy objectives (articles 6, 11, and 177) (Manners 2002, 241). For these reasons, Manners argued that the EU cultivates a distinct identity in international society ‘characterized by common principles and a willingness to disregard Westphalian conventions’ (Manners 2002, 239). The EU is a normative power partly because it prioritizes the projection of norms over the projection of military might. It is also a normative power because it refuses to play by the normal rules of power politics, disregarding the notions of noninterference and nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other states. In both its internal politics and its external relations with states outside its borders, Manners claimed, the EU promotes two sets of norms, one major and one minor. The major set includes peace, liberty, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights—norms laid down in successive European treaties, declarations, and conventions since the late 1940s. The minor includes norms that have emerged and been agreed on more recently, during the 1980s and 1990s, namely, social solidarity, antidiscrimination, sustainable development, and good governance (Manners 2002, 242). Manners argued that the EU promotes and diffuses these norms to states outside Europe in six distinct ways: unintentional ‘contagion’, deliberate ‘strategic’ and ‘declaratory communications’, institutionalization of certain bilateral or multilateral relationships, ‘transference’ via ‘goods, trade, aid or technical assistance’, ‘overt diffusion’ by EU representatives abroad, and use of a ‘cultural filter’ to teach, adapt, or reject local norms (Manners 2002, 244–45). He showed all of these at work in the pursuit of EU policy on the abolition of the death penalty, which

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was promoted—sometimes successfully—even in cases where pressing the issue might damage diplomatic, economic, or other relations with target states. In these ways, Manners argued, the EU has set out to acquire capabilities and to utilize techniques ‘to define what passes for “normal” in world politics’—a power that he called ‘the greatest power of all’ (Manners 2002, 253). These bold conclusions have not escaped criticism. Some argue that the true power of the EU is not only soft and ‘normative’ but also hard and principally economic and military, and that the EU is not shy in utilizing economic and even military coercion when it wishes. Moreover, they maintain, claims about the importance of values and value-promotion have been used to make the case for augmented coercive capabilities, not just better aid, development assistance, public diplomacy, and knowledge transfer (Aggestam 2008). Others suggest that the notion of ‘normative power Europe’ rests on an idealized account of European values and practices and patronizing assumptions about non-European polities and societies (Diez 2005; Keene 2013). Still others observe that the EU is not the only power seeking to define what is normal in world politics; the United States, most obviously, has long pursued foreign policies that place the promotion of certain values, such as democracy or good governance, at their core (Sjursen 2006, 241–42). These debates about normative powers have value, but they are also incomplete, as they overwhelmingly concentrate on Western polities as paradigmatic cases. As Amitav Acharya (2011) and others argue, they overlook the roles played, past and present, by non-Western states that have sought (and are seeking) normative change in international society. And one example of this behavior looms above all, the prolonged campaign by India and other postcolonial states to delegitimize imperialism—and with it, racial discrimination—and ‘power politics’ as ‘normal practices’, aiming to establish new rules for the interactions of postcolonial and developed states (see especially Crawford 2002). From the mid1940s until the mid-1960s, India’s leaders, like those of other postcolonial states, conceived of their country as a quintessential ‘normative power’, aiming to transform the normative order of postwar international society (Bhagavan 2013). NORMATIVE POWER AND NONALIGNMENT Like the EU, India was deliberately conceived as a complex, multilayered polity. And like the EU, India’s claim to be a normative power lies in its constitutional structure as well as in its world views or behaviour. It is a federal union of (now) twenty-eight states and seven union territories, governed by a federal parliament of two houses, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, serving under a president. The constitution, which came

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into effect on 26 January 1950, gives executive power to the president as both head of state and government (5, 53[1]), but these powers are devolved to the prime minister (PM) and cabinet, who conduct the everyday business of governing. The Seventh Schedule (article 246) of the Indian Constitution allocates responsibilities and powers to the federal, union government and to the states and union territories, with all the former given competency over all matters concerning external relations. Unusually, India’s Constitution also lays out ‘directives of state policy’ deemed ‘fundamental to the governance of the country’ and mandates that it ‘shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws’ (4, 37). Equally unusually, but like the Treaty on European Union, these directives concern foreign as well as domestic policy. Article 4, 51 instructs the Union government to ‘endeavour’ to a. promote international peace and security; b. maintain just and honourable relations between nations; c. foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one another; and d. encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration. Like the EU, in other words, India’s government is thus—in theory, at least—constitutionally bound to uphold and promote certain norms of behavior in international society. The lists of norms is, however, somewhat shorter than the EU list; indeed, they amount to little more than a reiteration of the basic principles underlying the United Nations and the commitments made by its members. These principles were nevertheless an expression of the view that India ought not simply pursue its interests in international society and do so by the traditional means of power politics but actively seek normative change. Under Nehru, as India’s first PM, they were supplemented by an additional set of anticolonial and what might be called ‘antirealist’ principles which challenged more directly the ‘normal’ in postwar international society. First, Nehru looked to India to become a leader of ‘the freedom movement of Asia’ and to promote the self-determination not just of Indians but also of other Asians under European colonial rule (Nehru 1961c, 12). Imperialism, he argued, was corrupting both to the ruler and the ruled. It was an obstacle to lasting peace since it generated tensions between the colonizer and colonized that were all too often resolved through violence (Nehru 1961d). Second, Nehru sought deliberately to challenge the mentality and methods of ‘power politics’. Earlier, in The Discovery of India, a series of letters to his daughter, Indira, written while imprisoned during the Second World War, he mocked claims by Nicholas Spykman and Walter Lippmann that power politics represented ‘realism and practical politics’ in the contemporary age (Nehru 2004 [1946], 600–601). Conquest and expansion, alliances, and the balance of power, Nehru argued, lead merely to more war and more misery. What was

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needed was peaceful and constructive association in international society, as Mohandas Gandhi had earlier envisaged, 3 based on mutual respect between both states and peoples. In office, after 1947, Nehru sought to promote this normative agenda in various ways. What evolved into his policy of ‘nonalignment’—of not locking India into a political, military, or economic relationship with one or another Cold War rival—was intended from the start to embody a campaign for normative change. Of course, as Nehru himself acknowledged, nonalignment was also a realistic response to India’s weakness and a pragmatic approach to securing the national interest by encouraging new postcolonial states to stand aloof from the Cold War, requiring the superpowers to outbid one another with aid and development assistance for their support. 4 But nonalignment was also about creating a space from which to promote a new normative agenda in international society. Nonalignment, Nehru argued, did not mean disengagement. India should and must speak up to criticize, he believed, when one of the great powers acted unethically or in contradiction to its declared principles. India ought to stand in ‘judgment of issues as they arise’, as he put it, ‘on their own merits, with an open and independent approach’ (Nehru, quoted in Zinkin 1955, 179). By those means, India aimed to bind others to its cause and bring about changes in the normative order of international society. As Itty Abraham has argued, in well-chosen terms, nonalignment concerned ‘the formation of a “social movement” of nonaligned nations’ dedicated to the ‘international circulation of ideas critical of the prevailing status quo’ (Abraham 2008, 196–97). How was this achieved? No doubt Nehru hoped for what Manners calls unintentional ‘contagion’—and his Western critics feared for most of his premiership that that hope was too often realized. 5 But just in case contagion did not work, Nehru also made significant investments in the infrastructure for ‘strategic’ and ‘declaratory communications’. Alongside the conventional (and sometimes unconventional) mechanisms used by the Ministry of External Affairs and India’s foreign missions, Nehru brought into being or sustained instruments for public diplomacy and strategic communications, an All-India Radio network, broadcasting in many languages to countries in India’s immediate region, an Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) promoting art, music, and literature, and an Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) as a counterpart to Chatham House or the Council on Foreign Relations (Hall 2012, 1098–1102). These provided stages from which Nehru and like-minded officials or prominent persons could expound their views. At the same time, they utilized means honed during earlier anti-imperial campaigns, pamphleteering and the circulation of books and newsletters, giving invited talks to civil society associations and political parties, and so on. Nehru and his representatives also showed themselves highly adept at using other platforms for declaratory communications, convening

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meetings like the Asian Relations Conference (ARC) in April 1947, for example, or utilizing the United Nations General Assembly for highprofile, set-piece speeches. Nehru used these opportunities—to varying effect—both to build and leverage networks with Asian anti-colonialists and to project a new political conception of Asia and the wider colonial world (Singh 2011). The ARC, organized by the ICWA at Nehru’s instigation, marked the beginnings of attempts by Nehru to assert a distinct Asian civilizational identity intended to inform the relations of soon-tobe independent Asian states and to generate greater unity among anticolonial forces, as well as the start of what became the Non-Aligned Movement. At the UN, Nehru and his ambassadors could reach further. He personally addressed the UN General Assembly in Paris in early November 1948, then again in New York in December 1956, 1960, and 1961, as well as meetings of the Asian-African and Commonwealth group, both in 1956. These settings provided Nehru with the opportunity to set out his normative agenda in full. In Paris, for instance, he reaffirmed his commitment to the principles of the UN Charter but moved on to extol the virtues of ‘peaceful struggle’ over violence and the need to free Asia from European imperialism, remarking that ‘it is an astonishing thing that any country should still venture to hold and to set forth the doctrine of colonialism’. He denounced racial inequality as a ‘menace to world peace’, arguing that ‘to tolerate it is obviously to sow the seeds of conflict’ (Nehru 1961e, 162, 164). Nehru also showed willingness to institutionalize his preferred norms, albeit somewhat conservative ones. He used the 1954 treaty recognizing China’s sovereignty over Tibet to set out the ‘Panchsheel’, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for territory and sovereignty; mutual nonaggression; mutual noninterference; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence (Ministry of External Affairs 2004b). These were intended to inform Sino-Indian relations for an initial period of eight years, and although the treaty was not formally renewed, Indian diplomats continue to refer to the principles as guides to their foreign policy. Nehru was keen to see a public declaration of these principles again at Bandung the following year, and at Colombo and Belgrade in 1961, at the meetings that paved the way for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Moreover, Nehru was keen to use UNGA resolutions to give these principles further institutional form, such as the Indian cosponsored (with Yugoslavia and Sweden) resolution on ‘Peaceful and Neighbourly Relations among States’, passed on 14 December 1957, which reiterated the basic norms of the UN Charter and the Panchsheel. Nehru was particularly keen, however, on ‘overt diffusion’ of his norms. He took great pains to represent himself as a ‘statesman’ and to utilize the mass media to convey his vision of international society. He wrote to newspapers and produced pamphlets and books. He gave many interviews to influential American and other foreign journalists, such as

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Marquis Childs (1903–1990), as well as Indian ones. His image was reproduced on the cover of Time magazine no less than six times—compared with a mere three for Gandhi himself, five for Ho Chi Minh, and seven for his old foe, Winston Churchill. Nehru also used trusted family members, scholars, and activists as diplomatic special representatives, giving them ambassadorial posts but allowing them much wider remits than their formal roles would ordinarily allow. The most prominent of these activist-diplomats was Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who had campaigned in the United States during the Second World War for Indian independence and then served as ambassador in various places, including Moscow and Washington, as well as president of the UN General Assembly. Others were distinguished scholars. The historian K. M. Panikkar, author of Asia and Western Dominance (1946), was dispatched to China as ambassador, while the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, later vice president and then president of India, was sent first to UNESCO (1946–1952) and then to Moscow (1949–1952). Still others were activists, with long experience of fighting for a cause. Until his fall in the wake of the disastrous Sino-Indian border war in 1962, V. K. Krishna Menon, in particular, acted as a kind of diplomat-publicist, giving speeches and interviews, making declarations, and ensuring his constant availability with a pointed quote or comment on issues of the day. Personally odd and extremely voluble, arrogant, and intolerant, Menon had earlier been a hugely energetic campaigner for Indian independence, working in London throughout the 1930s and 1940s. 6 India’s diplomat-activists were encouraged to put themselves forward as mediators and peacemakers. During the Korean war, Menon played a leading role—first as Indian high commissioner in London, and then at the UN—in resolving one of the most difficult challenges to ending hostilities, helping to broker a deal on the return of prisoners of war. He had a hand in negotiating the replacement of British and French troops on the Suez Canal after their invasion of Egypt in 1956, helping to persuade General Nasser to accept the Canadian-sponsored idea of a UN emergency force, and in sending Indian troops to the Congo in 1960 as part of the UN’s first authentic peacekeeping operation (Brecher 1968, 9–10, 85–106). Under Nehru, then, India operated as a kind of ‘normative power’ or state norm entrepreneur, championing the causes of peace, anticolonialism, the basic principles of the UN Charter and the Panchsheel, and, to a lesser extent, quasi-socialist economics. It utilized both conventional and unconventional means of promoting new norms in international society that were not compatible with a number of inherited norms. In some areas, its entrepreneurship was rewarded. India played a major role in discrediting imperialism as both an ideal and as a state practice (Edwardes 1965). Nehru was also the first political leader to push for a moratorium on nuclear testing, paving the way for the 1963 Limited Nuclear

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Test Ban Treaty (Kennedy 2012, 206–7). Elsewhere, India and Nehru were less successful. Nonalignment did not lead to India being acknowledged as the natural leader of postcolonial African and Asian states; indeed, by the Belgrade Conference of 1961 that formally instituted the “NonAligned Movement” (NAM), Nehru had become isolated and alienated from the demagogues and dictators that had risen to power elsewhere in the developing world (Sahgal 2010, 64–65). Nor did nonalignment triumph over “power politics” or displace the balance of power as a core institution of international society, and India itself abandoned the policy, if not the idea, soon after Nehru’s death in 1964. FROM ‘NORMATIVE POWER’ TO ‘NORMAL’ POWER . . . After India’s 1962 war with China and Nehru’s death, India did not cease to project or conceive of itself as a ‘normative power’, but it did make changes to its foreign and security policy that undermined its ability to do so convincingly. In the last years of Nehru’s leadership, India’s behavior had begun to belie its rhetoric; after it, that trend continued. As Chris Ogden rightly notes in chapter 3, India continued to serve as one of the world’s leading providers of peacekeepers, and it engaged in other significant humanitarian activities, including a fateful intervention in Sri Lanka’s civil war between 1987 and 1990. India was also active in other areas, notably in promoting the concept of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), advanced at the UNGA in 1974. But elsewhere, India increasingly behaved more as a ‘normal’ state than a ‘normative power’. In the twenty-five years between 1964 and 1991, India modernized its military, fought two wars against Pakistan (in 1965 and 1971) and became involved in a protracted conflict in Siachen, shifted away from nonalignment to a closer diplomatic, economic, and defense relationship with the Soviet Union (also in 1971), and tested a nuclear weapon (in 1974). In short, India sidelined Nehruvian idealism in favor of what some have called ‘muscular Nehruvianism’—a blend of moralistic rhetoric and pragmatic action (Cohen 2001, 43–45). The end of the Cold War accelerated, for some observers, India’s move towards a more ‘realist’ foreign policy. As C. Raja Mohan (2004) put it in an influential formulation, India has ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and begun in earnest to transform itself into an aspirant conventional great power. Its acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1998 was one major sign of change; another was its subsequent reconciliation with the United States, with which India began to forge a ‘strategic partnership’ during the early 2000s (Schaffer 2009). Its program of military modernization also fits with the general idea that India is ‘normalizing’ itself—changing to fit in with prevailing power political norms in international society rather than trying to change them. And India is moving to open itself up—slowly,

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sometimes unwillingly—to the world economy, leaving behind some of its inherited socialist inhibitions about the supposed iniquities of global capitalism and entering into interdependent relationships which bring with them significant security challenges. . . . AND BACK AGAIN? This reshaping or normalization of India’s foreign policy has not gone unquestioned in India, where, as elsewhere, the principles by which it should be conducted are keenly debated (Narang and Staniland 2012). The establishment position, best described as ‘modified Nehruvianism’ and which has both facilitated normalization and provided a running critique of its development, is being challenged by other views. At one end of the spectrum is the militant nationalism of some elements of the Hindutva movement that finds political expression in parts of the main right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, or BJP), and in other more extreme organizations, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (Ogden 2010, 2014). At the other end is the equally militant Marxism of the various communist and Maoist parties and groupings, who reject the strategic partnership with the United States and want what they regard as a truly ‘independent foreign policy’ (Declaration of the National Convention of Left Parties 2013). The middle is contested by a variety of political realists and conventional liberals, such as former external affairs minister and BJP stalwart Jaswant Singh or Congress Party politician Shashi Tharoor (see Singh 1999; Tharoor 2012). Almost all of these different views include some space for ‘soft power’—a concept as popular in India as it is elsewhere in Asia (Hall and Smith 2013)—but few discuss in detail the normative agendas that their advocates prefer. In that sense, the publication of NonAlignment 2.0 in early 2012 was exceptional. Coauthored by eight prominent figures close to the then-Congress-led government—Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Prakash Menon, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran, and Siddharth Varadarajan 7—the document proposed a lengthy, seventy-page agenda for change in Indian foreign policy and international society. As Ashley Tellis has observed, it was ‘drafted with the blessings of senior national security officials in the current government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’ with the ‘express objective’ of promoting ‘a national consensus in support of a new version of nonalignment as the optimum grand strategy for a rising India’ (Tellis 2012, 8). Above all, it emphasized India’s role as an example to others and the influence that India could have—through this ‘power of example’—on the rules of international society. It urged that India set aside domestic squabbles and nagging reservations about aspects of contemporary international society and instead act to ‘proactively shape’ global norms that

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align with the ‘highest human and universal values’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 36, 69). NonAlignment 2.0 affirmed Nehru’s belief in India’s capacity to be a moral exemplar and his desire for ‘strategic autonomy’ as well as his conviction that norms matter in international society. 8 But it also departed from Nehru’s understanding of nonalignment in crucial ways. It recognized that India cannot avoid closer engagement with the global economy—that swadeshi, or ‘self-reliance’, is no longer a viable development strategy—and that such engagement is necessary to raising Indian living standards. It acknowledged that there are dangers in passivity or overreliance on moral argument in international society, urging that India ‘develop a repertoire of instruments to signal—and where necessary to establish—that there will be serious costs to attempts to coerce Indian judgements or actions’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 8, 10). All of this aside, however, it remains the case that NonAlignment 2.0 conceived of a kind of ‘normative power India’. The document argued, as we have seen, that the ‘fundamental source of India’s power . . . is going to be the power of its example’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 7). Like Nehru, it conceived of India as a wellspring of ideas—‘If there is to be a common Asian century’, its authors wrote, ‘the flow of ideas from India will be vital to it’—yet it does not make clear which ideas the authors had in mind. It implied the ideas may be political, in talking of Asia as ‘a theatre of competition in ideological hegemony’ and ‘a region where battles over democracy are likely to continue’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 13). It discussed the need for India to help put its own region in order, ending conflicts, integrating economies, protecting human and minority rights, and addressing demands from external powers, including China (Khilnani et al. 2012, 15–17). It also talked of the need for reform in international institutions, especially those concerning the governance of the global economy and global security (Khilnani et al. 2012, 33–37). Last, but by no means least, the document argued that India should be, as its founding fathers wished it, ‘a site for an alternative universality’, standing for the ‘highest human and universal values’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 69). The problem with NonAlignment 2.0, however, was not so much the idealism or utopianism of this vision, as some of its realist critics have argued (Tellis 2012, 8–10), but rather that the norms and values for which its authors think India ought to act as entrepreneur and protector are not at all clear. Where nonalignment ‘1.0’ had obvious principles—anti-imperialism, racial equality, peaceful change, nonaggression, nuclear disarmament, and so on—the revised version does not. The report was ambivalent about democracy, for example, and reflects the generally antipathetic view of the Indian establishment towards democracy promotion. It reflected Indian pride in its own democratic institutions, its own version of ‘exceptionalism’ (Hall 2010), and the hope that India can be a model to others. But it is deeply skeptical of the idea that India ought actively to

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advocate democratic principles among its neighbors or to others. The authors write, ‘We are committed to democratic practices and are convinced that robust democracies are a surer guarantee of security in our neighborhood and beyond. Yet we do not “promote” democracy or see it as an ideological concept that serves as a polarizing axis in world politics’. They add that they hope that India might act as a ‘unique bridge’ between the ‘different worlds’ of the West and Asia, democrats and others, but leave the details of what that might entail unclear (Khilnani et al. 2012, 31). This view fits with what others have observed about India’s fitful and uncertain engagement with democracy promotion since at least 2000 (e.g., Stuenkel 2013). While, as Jan Cartright has shown, there has been a perceptible shift away from the Gujral Doctrine’s tolerant stance towards undemocratic and authoritarian regimes in India’s region, 9 its efforts to support or promote democracy in South Asia have been selective and quiet. In Afghanistan and Nepal, India has provided tangible assistance; in the Bhutan and the Maldives, it has been more circumspect; and its role in the ongoing liberalization of Myanmar/Burma is not wholly clear (Cartright 2009, 407–9). Elsewhere, India has been active, but not always obviously or prominently so. It became a founding member of the Community of Democracies in 1999—one of just ten—but has been somewhat reluctant to take leadership within that organization (Mohan 2007). NonAlignment 2.0 was similarly ambivalent—and in places significantly more hostile—when it comes to the issue of human rights. Its authors observed that India must recognize and take advantage of its own extraordinary history in the evolution of international law and norms. It was an active participant in the creation of modern human rights norms. It has stood for a world order that was more equitable, just and non-discriminatory. It has been a major advocate of more rational security structures.

But they quickly added a considerable caveat; ‘[n]orms in the international system often mask the exercise of raw power’, they wrote, and the ‘enforcement of these norms is selective’. ‘Any discourse on norms not allied with prudence’, they counsel, ‘can be self-defeating’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 36). They observed too that ‘India is often accused of not participating in the creation of international norms and of free riding on the current system’ and that this charge ‘can amount to a tactic to pressure India to do the Western powers’ bidding’ (37). Finally, when they did come back to the point, they did admit that new norms like humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect are not necessarily bad. India must, of course, reiterate its ‘commitment to important values like human rights, democracy, and [the] prevention of genocide’ and its belief that armed intervention can be warranted in the right circumstances, as it

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was, for example, when India acted in 1971 to prevent abuses of the civilian population in what was then East Pakistan (37). This somewhat tortured treatment of human rights, humanitarian intervention, and R2P neatly captures ambivalence about liberal norms in India’s establishment and the tensions that feed it. On the one hand, there is an abiding commitment to high ideals; on the other, lingering suspicion of the West and its motives hold the Nehruvians back from endorsing what many in the West consider to be emerging norms, as it did when it decided not to sign the Rome Statute in 1998 and as it did during the Libyan crisis in 2011 (Hall 2013). At the same time, there is the clear absence of any alternative account of how the normative order of international society ought to evolve. NonAlignment 2.0 insisted that ‘it is in India’s interests to proactively shape the evolution of . . . norms and the contexts of their application’ and note that this may ‘require considerable investment in diplomatic and intellectual capacity’. But then it moved on to say that norm generation and norm setting is occurring beyond states and international institutions, in ‘informal associations and networks’, as if to say that entrepreneurship should be left to the nonstate sector while India works out its position (Khilnani et al. 2012, 34–35). When it comes to economic governance, this passive and reactive attitude is again suggested but not fully embraced. NonAlignment 2.0 urges India to engage with the global market, liberalization, and multilateralism in ways in which it has traditionally been reluctant. It criticizes India for going ‘missing in action’ since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and for not making more use of its place in the G20 (Khilnani et al. 2012, 35). Yet it remains unclear about how India might wish to reform the norms, practice, and institutions of global economic governance. The authors argue that the Bretton Woods institutions, as well as the UN, ‘require fundamental reform to reflect the new distribution of power in the world’ but do not indicate which principles ought to guide that process (Khilnani et al. 2012, 33). LEVERAGING BRAND INDIA The most powerful alternative vision to that offered by India’s foreign policy establishment comes from the BJP and especially from Narendra Modi. Skilled and savvy in public relations, Modi promised Indians at the 2014 election a ‘strong, self-reliant and self-confident India’ capable of taking its ‘rightful place in the comity of nations’ (BJP 2014, 39). In part, of course, this would entail military modernization—indeed, the BJP promised to accelerate India’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, too. But in part also, this task would be achieved by restoring core values to Indian foreign policy. At base, Modi and the BJP argue in their 2014 manifesto, it should be grounded in the ancient Vedic concept of vasud-

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haiva kutumbakam (Sanskrit for ‘the world is one family’) as well as in the national interest (BJP 2014, 39). They promised a ‘proactive diplomacy’ that would utilize India’s soft power—the appeal of its philosophy and religion, in particular, and its ‘principles . . . [of] . . . harmony and equity’. More tangibly, they insisted that foreign policy be approached pragmatically, with a sense of ‘enlightened national interest’; that India would not be ‘led by big power interests’, especially in its own region; and that it would continue ‘dialogue, engagement and cooperation’ with international institutions (BJP 2014, 40). It is an open question as to where this vague agenda might lead. Modi’s foreign policy in the early stages of his government has emphasized good relations with India’s immediate neighbors and pragmatic engagement with both China and the United States. His UNGA speech in September 2014 reiterated these themes and the concept of vasudhaiva kutumbakam but did add some others. In a departure from Nehruvian aloofness on the issue, Modi observed and welcomed the progress of democracy as well as rising prosperity in the developing world. And it made calls for three changes in international society. First, Modi called for ‘genuine peace’, to be pursued by ‘genuine dialogue and engagement’ at fora like the UN, reform of that institution to make it more democratic and inclusive, fighting terrorism with a comprehensive convention on international terrorism, and pursuing nuclear disarmament. Second, he called for ‘inclusive’ development, with the caveat that international agreements on trade must ‘accommodate each other’s concerns and interests’—a not-so-veiled reference to the stalled Doha round of trade talks, at which India is insisting on protection for its farmers in particular. Lastly, Modi urged that sustainability be central to development (Modi 2014). CONCLUSION The prospects for a revivified ‘normative power India’ are mixed. As we have seen, India has a significant history as a diplomatic activist and norm entrepreneur, as a key shaper of the normative order of postwar world politics. It retains a constitutional commitment to the promotion of foundational norms; it also retains a diplomatic service that, despite some very significant capacity constraints and old-fashioned world views, emphasizes intellectual achievement and the centrality of moral principle to diplomacy (Tharoor 2012, 318–53; cf. Markey 2009; Chatterjee Miller 2013). And India retains significant instruments of public diplomacy and soft power, like its radio networks, established, widely distributed publications, and newer online tools for social networking. The difficulties for ‘normative power India’—at least as the authors of NonAlignment 2.0 or

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Hindu nationalists conceive it—lie not so much in these areas but in norms themselves. Nehru’s vision of an anti-imperial, racially tolerant, rule-bound order has not been fully realized, but it has been surpassed by newer and more expansive understandings of the normative order that ought to prevail in international society. The Panchsheel vision of mutual respect of sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference, equality, and peaceful coexistence was once a radical vision but is now regarded, at least by Western liberals, as a conservative relic. Yet it is central to both NonAlignment 2.0 and to the normative agenda of Hindu nationalists. To use English School language, in their attachment to these postcolonial principles, they remain ‘pluralists’ in the face of Western, ‘solidarist’ demands that they be relaxed or set aside in favor of expansive understandings of human rights, democratic promotion, and deeper international institutional engagement (Wheeler 1992). One of the most revealing aspects of NonAlignment 2.0 is the account it offers of American decline. At the ‘global level’, it argues, ‘the relative decline of the American alliance system is already evident’. The authors go on: ‘The U.S. has been aware of this reality for more than a decade and the challenge of finding a viable strategy has led to a lot of policy debate and even confusion in the various arms of U.S. government’ (Khilnani et al. 2012, 31). Passages like this, as Tellis has observed, must have ‘raised . . . eyebrows’ in Washington (Tellis 2012, 43). They point to an underlying preference in NonAlignment 2.0 and more broadly in New Delhi for a multipolar order rather than the unipolar one we have now—an order without the kinds of cosmopolitan norms about democracy and human rights that dominated international society since the end of the Cold War. This conservative, statist, noninterventionist order would be a realization of postwar Indian thinking and would embody significant and positive norms concerning aggression and noninterference but would also involve a winding back from the Western-built liberal normative order created since 1991. NOTES 1. I am very grateful to Jamie Gaskarth for the invitations to contribute to this volume and to present at his ESRC-funded workshop in London. My thanks also go to Andy Kennedy and Chris Ogden for discussions about various ideas included in the chapter, as well as the workshop participants. 2. Most, if not all, of the responses to the report can be found on the website of the New Delhi–based Centre for Policy Research, http://www.cprindia.org/ workingpapers/3844-nonalignment-20-foreign-and-strategic-policy-india-twenty-firstcentury. 3. On Gandhi’s political ideas and their relevance for international relations, see Tercheck (2011). 4. On this aspect of nonalignment, see especially Rana (1969). 5. See, for example, the scathing reference to ‘neutralism’ as a ‘social disease’ in Scalapino (1954, 49).

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6. There are a number of studies of Menon, but the best remains George 1964. 7. Sunil Khilnani is the director of the India Institute at King’s College, London; Rajiv Kumar is an economist and former member of the Indian Prime Minister’s National Security Advisory Board (2006–2008); Pratap Bhanu Mehta is the president of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi; Lt. Gen. Prakash Menon is the military advisor to the National Security Council Secretariat, New Delhi; Nandan Nilekani cofounded Infosys and is the chair of the Unique Identification Authority of India; Srinath Raghavan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi; Shyam Saran is the chair of the National Security Advisory Board, New Delhi; and Siddharth Varadarajan is the editor of The Hindu newspaper. 8. This has irritated realist critics, who argue that NonAlignment 2.0 misunderstands the nature of contemporary international relations. See, for example, Rajagopalan (2012). 9. The Gujral Doctrine, named after Prime Minister I. K. Gujral (PM 1997–1998), held that India should not seek reciprocity in relations with its neighbours but give without expectation of gaining in return; South Asian states should not allow themselves to become proxies of other powers; noninterference was inviolable; mutual respect was crucial; and all disputes should be resolved peacefully (Gujral 2011, 407).

SIX China’s Search for Normative Power and the Possibilities of the Asian Century David Kerr

Economic analysis is divided into two branches: positive and normative economics. Positive economics is concerned with measuring change and asks volume questions: what accounts for change to volumes of prices, output, or productivity in an economy? Normative economic analysis is not concerned with volume change but assesses economic values or purposes: what is the value or purpose of international aid, public health care, or a minimum wage? 1 Rising powers analysis has taken on some similarity to the two branches of economics. There is much discussion of new volumes of power, their expansion, and their diffusion so that the rising powers debate is often cast as a new global geopolitics (Brzezinski 2012; Kupchan 2012; Layne 2012). There is rather less discussion of the possible normative consequences of rising powers—the values that rising powers want to promote or how they might want to redefine the purposes of power. This seems best explained by an elasticity issue between positive and normative power—the established powers seem to have command of both positive and normative power, but rising powers seem most focused on accumulating power volumes and less confident or interested in defining new values or purposes for power. This connection between volumes, values, and purposes of power—and their relative distribution globally—is especially important because successful power systems tend to assume a political and social identity. The terms used in international power analysis—Chinese world order, American hegemony, Western international society—not only express the interaction of 105

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volumes and values in these systems but assign them an international identity so that this identity can be employed in social organization and mobilization among states. As John G. Ruggie famously pointed out, ‘It was the fact of an American hegemony that was decisive after World War II, not merely American hegemony’ (Ruggie 1992, 593). So normative power commits international society not only to certain purposes but to a collective identity around which power can be shared and governed. The ultimate aim of such consensus will be the creation and legitimation of international rules—American hegemony resulted not only in common values or purposes among its adherents but in coordination around the American rules (Ikenberry 2011b, 11–15). More generally, the elasticity problem between positive and normative power may provide some explanation as to why so many states embark on the journey of rise but only a few arrive. In the international relations literature it is often argued that this is because the established powers act collectively to prevent a power transition (Organski 1968; Organski and Kugler 1980; Gilpin 1981). In practice it may be because putting volumes, values, and purposes together in a system of power that is accepted across international society is a difficult thing to do. For these reasons, it seems that the analysis of rising powers should devote more attention to the normative potential of rising states and rather less to purely positive concerns with new power volumes. 2 In evaluating where rising powers are in the pursuit of normative power, we know broadly what we should be asking. To what extent are they able to generate new values and purposes around power? How well do their volumes, values, and purposes for power fit together and transfer into international society? How close are they to establishing a new version of the international rules that can be used to advance new international identities? STRUCTURAL AND NORMATIVE POWER IN THE NEW ASIA Any account of new kinds or sources of power in international society should begin with an account of power itself. Susan Strange’s version of structural power seems a useful place to start (Strange 1988). Strange posits two kinds of power—structural and relational. Structural power has four pillars—production, finance, knowledge, and security—and changes to these power pillars can often be quantified. But Strange includes in the operation of structural power all the norms, practices, and institutions employed by the dominant agents of production, finance, knowledge, and security to order and defend their power. As such, structural power is always hierarchical but not necessarily hegemonic: hegemony depends on the capacity of a centralizing authority, typically a state, to achieve a dominant position over structural power, internally and internationally. While Strange argues that structural power is the

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organization of power domains through a hierarchical system, relational power expresses the relations between actors within that system—states, corporations, and civil societies. Strange’s categories of relational power are commerce, resources, logistics, and public goods. So those who are becoming powerful pursue command over structural power; and as they do this they can begin to organize relations among states, corporations, and civil societies. Norms, regimes, and institutions are the vital binding forces that provide for articulation (Strange’s term) across power domains. Strange’s conceptualization of international power as a hierarchical structure organized around power categories that have both positive and normative aspects has good explanatory capacity for Asia’s shift from subordinate to rising region. In the Cold War era, Asia had little structural power of its own, and such power that did exist had to be shared in a vertical relationship with the US production, finance, knowledge, and military systems. This hierarchical order relied significantly on the United States to maintain relational order around commerce, resources, logistics, and public goods within Asia and provided for Asian connections into the global system. The perpetuation of this system and US hegemony over it relied not only on suppressing international communism but on nonparticipation by China and India. As long as China and India followed internally oriented and self-reliant systems of production, finance, knowledge, and security, US predominance in Asia was assured. In the past thirty years China and India have followed earlier Asian internationalizers and transformed their structural power so that their domestic systems of production, finance, knowledge, and security are increasingly embedded in Asian regional and global equivalents. As they conducted this structural power transformation, so they developed new capacity and interest in exerting relational power over commerce, resources, logistics, and international public goods. The perception of Asia’s rise—and the corresponding perception of the weakening of US hegemony—is driven by this reorganization of structural and relational power: from a smaller and compartmentalized Asian system that depended significantly on US hegemonic capacity to organize structural power and deliver relational order to a larger and integrated system that is increasingly exercising power independently of the United States and aspires to its own version of Asian order. This is a condition of dual power, therefore: the US system and its ability to enforce rules is still in place—and indeed is being reinforced under the socalled pivot to Asia—but this is inevitably being displaced by Asian rising capacity and interest in independent structural and relational power. How this dual power system will evolve is hard to say, and certainly conventional power transition theory is unhelpful. This assumes that a rising and an established state will be driven to a conflict of hegemonic transition as their power disparity narrows (Kugler 2006; Rapkin and

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Thompson 2003). 3 However, neither the United States nor the rising Asian giants—China or India—can make their situation better by fighting such a war of hegemonic transition. If the United States fought and defeated China, would this in any way solve the US problem of hegemonic decline relative to Asia’s independent power? It would not. Conversely, if China fought and defeated the United States, would this posthegemonic Asia be more or less favourable for China? In fact, containment—the thing that China fears most—would follow almost automatically (Garver and Wang 2010). 4 Therefore, while there is a strong trend to power competition—structural and relational—among the Asian rising powers and between China and the United States, this is unlikely to lead to open contests of hegemonic transition in the immediate future. 5 However intense the contestation of new volumes of power in Asia is likely to prove, analysis of this problem should not be considered separate from the search for new normative power. As noted, this will involve defining new values and purposes for Asians and perhaps ultimately a new identity for Asia under Asian rules. This has long been recognized as perhaps the primary goal of Asianization. In his landmark paper of twenty years ago, ‘The Asianization of Asia’, Japanese commentator Yoichi Funabashi noted: Asia has at long last started to define itself. Asian consciousness and identity are coming vigorously to life. Western nations are increasingly impressed by the economic power and political gravity of the region. But Asia’s success in the far-ranging and relative terms of global competition should not obscure those forces, in internal and absolute terms, now authoring a cohesive Asian worldview. (Funabashi 1993, 75)

In this way, the idea of the Asian century has various aspects of power attached to it: it means an Asia that is more powerful in itself and in relation to the world but also an Asia that imbues and advances the values and purposes of new Asian generations. As the new Asia emerged, it would express a cohesive world view just as Europeans and Americans did in their centuries. It also suggests that from the Asian viewpoint a new Japan, a new China, a new India or Indonesia would be able to see their futures as closely tied to the project of Asianization. There are then great ambitions for normative power in Asia, but when we ask what has happened to this normative aspect of Asianization in the twenty years since Funabashi’s paper, we see that being Asian has become more complex and contested, not less. The sources of this conflict are not hard to locate. It is certainly harder to do normative power than positive power—it is harder to build institutions and identities for the new Asia than ports, factories, highways, and hospitals. But even more significantly, elites have found it difficult and sometimes contradictory to do nation building and Asia building at the same time. For example, in

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his acceptance speech on 15 November 2012 for the general secretaryship of the Communist Party of China (CCP), Xi Jinping said: Our nation is a great nation. During the civilisation and development process of more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation has made an indelible contribution to the civilisation and advancement of mankind. . . . Since the founding of the CCP, we have united and led the people to advance and struggle tenaciously, transforming the impoverished and backward Old China into the New China that has become prosperous and strong gradually. The great revival of the Chinese nation has demonstrated unprecedented bright prospects. . . . Our responsibility is to unite and lead people of the entire party and of all ethnic groups around the country while accepting the baton of history and continuing to work for realising the great revival of the Chinese nation so that the Chinese nation can stand more firmly and powerfully among all nations around the world and make a greater contribution to mankind. (Xi 2012)

In his short speech, Xi said ‘socialism’ once; he said ‘great revival of the Chinese nation’ (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) three times and ‘Chinese nation’ multiple times. This is the new Chinese leadership’s view of its role in managing and advancing China’s rise, but it is not atypical of other leaderships in Asia, which devote so many resources to building the nation, the state, and the ruling party that they have little normative power left over for building the new Asia. It can also be detected that this mobilization of values and purposes for national revivalism can often be at the expense of a common identity for the regional community: if China, India, or Japan advance Asianization, must it not surely be an Asianization that favours and supports Chinese, Indian, or Japanese revival? Yet will that be an Asianization that is acceptable to others? Therefore, the question of what it will mean to be Asian in the Asian century is still unknown and buried within the intense ambitions of the Asian rising states to have normative power that reflects national values and purposes. Even as the structural and relational capacity of rising Asian states has expanded, so their ability to define common values and purposes remains checked by national strategies of revival. This might be problematic for a number of reasons, but one evident issue is the governance deficit. Asian power accumulation has also generated a number of significant liabilities: demographic, environmental, and urban change have combined to present a range of complex challenges that transcend national jurisdictions. 6 The need for pan-Asian governance to address these challenges and more conventional security management issues around geopolitics and proliferation is evident; but the demand for regional coordination continues to outstrip the willingness of Asian leaderships to agree on common values and purposes around which regimes and institutions could be based. However, it is reasonable to assume that at some point in the future, somebody is going to define Asia in norma-

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tive power terms and attempt to attach this to a new Asian international order. What we need to know is whether this will unite or divide Asia in the process. Since it is not possible to discuss all Asian approaches to the relationship between nationally organized normative power and regional change, this chapter first discusses the Chinese leadership’s ambitions to develop China’s normative power and then returns to the possibilities of the Asian century by looking at normative power in the broader regional context. CHINA’S SEARCH FOR NORMATIVE POWER In China today, as in most other countries in Asia, public and political life centres on the struggle for modernization. In Chinese, ‘modernization’ is xiandaihua, which means ‘becoming modern times’. As China joins modern times, it is hardly surprising that elites have to look to normative renewal to both explain and justify the changes that Chinese society is experiencing. To use one indicator of modernity’s impact, the urban population of Asia rose from 897 million in 1991 to 1,668 million in 2012, an increase of 771 million in just 21 years. Of these new urban citizens, half were in China alone, where the urban population more than doubled from 314 million to 699 million (World Bank 2015). These urban citizens reflect and embody the changing economic, educational, environmental, and cultural context of modern China, but they are also redefining the values and purposes of Chinese politics. China is producing something like a civil society for the first time, and the Chinese state can no longer govern as it did in the past, when society was treated as passive recipient of the government’s instructions. The incoming leadership of 2013 seems to have understood the challenges of governing a large, modern society with a nascent civil society (Kerr 2014, 35–64). On becoming president in March 2013, Xi Jinping pointed to the China dream of great rejuvenation: To realise the goals of building a well-off society, of building a strong, prosperous, democratic, civilised, harmonious and modern socialist country, to realise the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, it will be necessary to sincerely reflect the ideals of the Chinese people for a strong and prosperous country, national revival, and popular happiness, and also profoundly embody the honourable tradition of earlier generations in their untiring struggle in the pursuit of progress. (Xi 2013)

It is hard to say how these momentous changes inside China will interact with China’s view of the world and shape a new Chinese grand strategy. It is only correct to say that the Chinese leadership is very unlikely to define new normative purposes and values that contradict its ability to maintain control over the tumultuous politics that it confronts internally at the same time as it negotiates the many challenges of China’s

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expanding global interests. Therefore, we should ask: what kind of normative power is the Chinese leadership promoting as it pursues the dream of national rejuvenation, and what is the relationship between the domestic norms of rising China and China’s search for a new international identity? China’s Norms: Traditional and Modern, Cultural and Realist Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the Chinese leadership’s search for values and purposes to express its new power to domestic and international audiences has been its interest in developing cultural soft power (wenhua ruan shili), so that when we look to what Chinese officials and analysts are saying about new values and purposes, we often encounter this term. 7 Its unexpected character lies in two aspects. First, it has often involved resurrecting values from Chinese traditional ethics, such as harmony, virtue, and benevolence (he, de, ren) that were supposed to be abandoned as antisocialist. Second, when we look at the discourse employed, it can be seen that soft-power rhetoric is often mixed in with hard-power assumptions so that Chinese discussion of soft power is often connected to a realpolitik political culture. In exploring this paradoxical ‘ethical realism’, Sook-Jong Lee argues that China’s soft-power advocates can be divided into two tendencies—culturalists and strategists (Lee 2009; see also Barr 2011; Suzuki 2009). The culturalists see soft power as being primarily defensive, so that China should adhere to principles or ideologies that reflect its unique political culture and can be employed to deflect assimilation into external normative systems, most obviously the system of the West. Soft-power strategists, in contrast, see soft power as creating new political space for China and its rise. In particular, China’s development of soft power can be used as an antidote to attempts to generate ‘China threat theory’: the attempt to cast China as a radically anti–status quo rising power. Both the cultural-defensive and strategicopportunity elements were present in a speech to the CCP central committee given by President Hu Jintao in October 2011, where he offered this characterization of cultural soft power: As the contemporary world is in a period of great development, great change, and great restructuring, and modern China is forging ahead towards new historical objectives of struggle, the functions of culture are even more wide-ranging and profound. In international terms where competition in comprehensive national power is a notable characteristic then the position and functions of culture are even more prominent, so that major great powers have a prominent strategy of raising up cultural soft power so as to strengthen national core competitive power. Against a background in which all kinds of thinking and cultures are being exchanged, blended, and coming in to conflict at the global level, those who occupy the commanding heights of cultural

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In contrast to the Western perception that realpolitik is associated with hard power—military capability, industrial development, and advanced technologies—and soft power with nonrealist capacities such as persuasion and attraction, the Chinese view of soft power has strong realpolitik characteristics. Soft power is competitive like any other kind of power, and the normal vehicle for power competition remains the state; soft power can be hostile: some kinds of soft power may promote coexistence, but others are forms of control exercised by hegemons; and finally, soft power appears to be zero-sum: if you have it and others don’t, then you have the advantage, and, conversely, if you don’t have it and others do, then you are at the disadvantage, hence the need to think about soft power as a dimension of comprehensive national power (zonghe guoli). These three aspects of China’s soft-power perception—state-centricity, the use of culture as political control, and the zero-sum nature of softpower competition—are worth attention when evaluating China’s pursuit of normative power. It is also important to ask why the Chinese leadership chooses to endorse cultural soft power as its preferred form of normative power and why it excludes other ways of extending normative power in international society. The question of why China should choose to associate normative power and cultural soft power is, of course, greatly influenced by the legacy of Confucianism, or the Great Tradition, as it should properly be known (C. R. Hughes 2009). It may be natural to look to the values of traditional China to inspire and locate China as a new kind of rising power of the global era, but the question of whether feudal normativism can perform the role of defining values and rules for modern politics is problematic. William A. Callahan identifies the ambiguities of traditional normativism in the debate over China’s rise: Chinese debates about traditional culture and world order serve as good examples of how soft power takes shape as the romanticisation of a particular national culture into ‘universally desirable values.’ It is certainly interesting to trace patterns of global hegemony in terms of the spread of a universalized national culture—Americanization, Europeanization, Japanization, and Sinicization. Yet this analytical framework risks limiting our analysis to singular understandings of national cultures as they go global. Rather than comparing the soft power of Americanization with that of Sinicization, . . . it is more productive to examine recent Chinese debates in terms of different forms of Pax Sinica. (Callahan 2011, 7)

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The generation of norms that can provide connection and momentum from nationalized (romanticized) political culture through externalized soft power towards change to world order has become a central focus for Chinese official and public intellectuals in negotiating China’s rise. This in part explains why the discussion of soft power that began in academic debates in China in the 1990s ended up being a central concern of the government in recent times. Soft power is an interface between normative choices, values, and rules within a state or society and their ability to reshape international orders in their own image. China’s privileging of norms taken from the Great Tradition is substantially a restorationist project; therefore, the traditional Chinese world order was organized around a mix of norms and customary practices, with the ultimate aim of according the Celestial Kingdom the status of ‘civilization’ (wenming). So the first reason why the Chinese leadership assumes that normative power is cultural soft power is because this is the conventional Chinese route to Pax Sinica, from which the proletarian internationalism that prevailed from 1949 to 1976 was a temporary diversion. Shih Chih-yu and Yin Jiwu argue that there is no contradiction between China’s continued commitment to ‘civilization’ as an international identity and its adherence to realpolitik norms. They describe this uneasy hybrid as ‘harmonious realism’ so that ‘contemporary Chinese foreign policy is composed of the civilisational processes of learning realism and preaching harmony’ (Shih and Yin 2013, 61). The importance of the civilizational discourse of harmony is that it allows China to escape the bounds of the conventional territorial state. This has three advantages from the perspective of the current Chinese leadership. First, the term being used by Chinese leaders to define the nation that is being revived is not a political nation but a cultural one. The term used is ‘Zhonghua Minzu’, which means ‘peoples of the central civilization’, so even though the rhetoric of revival is intensely nationalist, the nation that is called into being transcends territory and embraces people who are not racially Chinese in China (and in the view of the Chinese state may be in particular need of harmonization, such as Tibetans or Uyghurs) or are Chinese outside of China—it is a way of cosmopolitanizing the nation. Second, in its claim to be a civilizational state, China does not have to feel unequal in the face of any other civilization, such as that of the West. Nation-states are all judged by the same standards, but each civilization is judged by only its own standard; therefore, this civilizational China is immune to judgement by standards other than its own. Third, the idea of harmonious world points to teaching and learning between societies—China needs to learn some things from others, but others will also need to learn from China. So China can be both student and teacher in world affairs. In contrast to this civilizational revival in the Chinese world view sits a continued awareness of, and attention to, realpolitik rules. Shih and Yin say these are now quite closely focused on the concept of core national

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interests (Shih and Yin 2013, 69–73). The term ‘national core interests’ (guojia hexin liyi) has some antecedence but has been revived in response to the challenges China encounters in its era of rise. Hu Jintao’s senior foreign policy advisor Dai Bingguo offered this definition: What are our core interests? In my personal understanding, the first is China’s state system, form of government and political stability, namely the leadership of the Communist Party, the socialist system, and socialism with Chinese characteristics; the second is China’s sovereign security, territorial integrity, and national unity; the third is the fundamental guarantee of sustainable development for China’s economy and society. These interests brook no infringement or violation (Zhexie liyi shi bu rong qinfan he pohuai de). (Dai 2010)

Thus, although China wishes to advance its civilizational identity, it also has to operate in the world of coercive power. In this realm of learning realpolitik it has to be prepared to punish those who infringe on the Chinese rules—the CCP’s monopoly of power, disputed national territories from Xinjiang to the South China Sea, and continued economic growth and global integration. One key problem with this attempt to marry civilizational identity and interest-based realpolitik is that the former can evaporate quite quickly when the latter is operable. China may have invested considerable time and resources in public diplomacy and regularly enters normative phrasing into its diplomatic documents, but these tend to lose significance when territorial politics take a realpolitik turn, as they have in Asia in recent years. China’s Institutions and the Institutions of International Society Cultural soft power may not be as potent an instrument as the Chinese leadership assumes. 8 The norms that are being advanced by the Chinese leadership and supported by the many agencies of cultural production organized by the Chinese state are more about the image of China in the world rather than a form of normative power that proposes new values and purposes for international society or advances a system of China rules that operate beyond national interest. This new imaging of China has both internal and external functions. At home, it builds an image of political unity and public support around the party leadership and its strategy to channel and control the manifold political pressures of the new Chinese society and its public opinion. Internationally, it builds an image of China as a conservative rising power and a reliable partner: a China that is safe and predictable. As this reveals, what China is trying to do with its soft-power imaging is to manage domestic and international expectations of its rise, not advance new rules for international society. There are some discernible rules in place in the notion of core interests, but these are more about defending the internal system of China from

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normative challenges rather than approaching the issue of international change. This contributes to the problem of China’s international identity: China is advancing an international image, but it has not yet established a clear international identity, at least in part because the normative dimensions of its power are still fluid and open to multiple pressures. Explanations for this identity fluidity are complex, but one source must be the problematic nature of the norms and institutions within the Chinese system. Once China’s value systems were entirely defined by socialism, but today socialism only defines the operation of the ruling party—it has no broader meaning in society. All kinds of normative proposals are being introduced into the vacuum created by the retreat of socialism, including democratic proposals, but the leadership is intent on controlling and managing these for the state-building project. As this suggests, China’s use of ‘cultural soft power’ as its preferred medium for developing a favourable international identity is only one option, and there are many other ways to build a connection between domestic values and systems and international orders. Indeed, most states would consider institutional connectivity to be more effective for developing normative power than appeals to culture. Therefore, it can be seen that China’s preference for cultural soft power is not only the result of the Great Tradition and the persistence of the civilizational mentality, it is due to the leadership’s reluctance to permit convergence between Chinese institutions and the institutions of international society. This is the primary context for Xi Jinping’s proposal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation known as the China dream: the leadership knows that if it does not come up with a ‘big idea’ that seeks to control the normative turbulence of modern China, then other normative proposals will gain strength. At the same time, the leadership is extremely reluctant to allow open discussion of reform or evolution of China’s institutions. For example, in response to Xi Jinping’s ‘China dream’ message at the end of 2012, editors at the Guangdong newspaper Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo) attempted to publish a New Year message on 3 January 2013 titled ‘The China Dream Is the Dream of Constitutional Government’, which included the following argument: The Chinese people should be a free people. Therefore the China dream should be the dream of constitutional government. Under constitutional government the nation can become strong and prosperous, under constitutional government the people will be truly mighty. Fulfilling the dream of constitutional government will further enable national sovereignty externally, safeguarding the nation’s freedom; and further enable civil rights internally, safeguarding the people’s liberty. 9

This was blocked by the censors, and an article espousing the orthodox version of the ‘dream’ was imposed. As this suggests, China’s normative future is a contentious area and nowhere more so than when discussing

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the future of China’s institutions and whether these should remain recognizably Chinese or come to resemble those elsewhere in international society—constitutionalism, open media, civil society, independent system of law, and so on. In his account of the China dream, Xi Jinping has been more at pains to sustain the China difference than to promote the notion that Chinese norms and institutions were likely to converge on those of international society elsewhere. In his speech on becoming president in March 2013, Xi said that the realization of the dream of national rejuvenation required three commitments: ‘to realise the China Dream we must keep to the Chinese way; to realise the China Dream we must carry forward the Chinese spirit; to realise the China Dream we must consolidate Chinese power’ (Xi 2013). The idea of a Chinese way linked China’s era of reform and opening to a longer-term historical struggle for national revival. The idea of a Chinese spirit linked China’s traditions of patriotism to the spirit of unity in the Chinese people. The idea of consolidating Chinese power linked the dreams of individual Chinese citizens to the collective dream of a China restored to its status in the international system. Each of these commitments stressed the particularity of the Chinese experience. Due to its political culture and history, its spiritual unity, and the tying of individual ambitions to the fate of the state, China would follow its own distinctive path, retaining its own norms and institutions, and not converge on those of international society. Therefore, far from following the path of other rising powers that aspired to extend their institutions into international society, China is most concerned with quarantining its institutions from change in international society, including contemporary change to institutions and civil society across Asia. Overall, we can conclude that China’s search for normative power lags some way behind its development of raw volumes of power. This may be understandable given the extraordinary pace of expansion in its production, finance, knowledge, and security power in the past twenty years; but China’s search for normative power is also facing unresolved restrictions. The Chinese leadership’s assumption that cultural soft power is a route to normative order is questionable: China’s traditional normativism may be an important cultural inheritance, but it is unlikely to deliver the norms and rules that are necessary to articulate Chinese power from the domestic system into international society. The continued discourse of civilization is significant since it is not only a claim to equality among civilizations but also a rejection of a singular international society: the civilizationist discourse implies that China will never have to join ‘the’ international society since it will remain its own international society. The alternative route to normative order by institutional convergence is not being promoted as the leadership fears that if there were a direct connection between Chinese norms and international norms the latter might overwhelm the former. To date, therefore, the leadership has

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been most concerned with developing new normative claims and narratives to manage and control modern China and has made limited progress in bringing a new wave of Sinicization to Asia. This is not to say that Chinese positive power is not increasingly evident across Asia and farther away; but this is not Sinicization in the sense experienced by international society in the past—there has been very little transfer of Chinese ideas about power into international society in ways that will generate commitments to China as a new kind of international actor. We can therefore turn from this consideration of China’s efforts at normative power at the national level to discussion of the possibilities of the Asian century. THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE ASIAN CENTURY Normative power in Asia is clearly in an era of flux. Change expressed through modernization of production, finance, knowledge, and security has charged ahead, leaving normative construction of rules, institutions, and identities in a position of playing catch-up. In time, however, this elasticity gap between positive and normative power will close. At the end of this transition lies the ambition to have an Asian century—a new relationship among Asians and of Asia to the world. The present preoccupation of Asian elites with national forms of normative power—the China dream, the Indian dream, the Indonesian or Malaysian dream—is entirely understandable given the stresses of the great transformation across Asia and the need to both explain and justify to citizens who the modern Asian nation is. But the aspiration to have an Asian century requires that these individual dreams of revival move towards some kind of collective understanding. As this suggests, at the core of the Asianization question lies an identity problem—is it possible for Asians to develop norms that express and advance a shared identity; and in political terms, can that common identity be linked to progress in regional rules and institutions? These are large and complex questions that cannot be fully explored in the space of this short chapter; it is best to look only at certain dimensions of the two questions. The first part of this section looks at the ongoing problems of history in the question of Asian identity; the second part looks at the relationship between Asian identity and the ambitions to develop institutions of regional governance. The Collision between History and Identity History is now a very live issue in the domestic and international politics of Asia. Deciding what happened in the history of Asia, and particularly in the era of the rise and demise of imperialism, is often the entry point for understanding and conducting contemporary politics.

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Most of the elites and ruling parties in Asia rose to prominence and power in the era of the defeat of imperialism and still base many of their primary ideologies and institutions on a historical narrative that begins in this era and continues into the present century. In this way, history is used as one of the main determinants not only for the conduct of politics but for establishing the legitimacy of institutions and the content of national ideologies. The Chinese case is instructive in this regard. In his keynote speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress of the CCP, President Hu Jintao described the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as the historic mission of the party: Since the day our Party came into being it has courageously undertaken to lead the Chinese people in the creation of a happy life and to realise the historic mission of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (shixian Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing de lishi shiming). Generation after generation of Chinese communists have fought for this historic mission and countless revolutionary martyrs have given their precious lives. Today’s communists must continue to undertake this historic mission. (Hu 2007)

This means that the current government, its institutions and ideologies, are defined in part by a historical logic of loss and renewal. This logic of history not only underpins the nation-building project at home but also connects to China’s international relations. The Chinese leadership needs to control ‘history’ to control the politics of China, but this historical narrative also shapes how China experiences the world and how the world experiences China. Those who assist China in the state-defined mission of rejuvenation and respect China’s interpretation of history become its friends; those who infringe the mission of rejuvenation and question the meaning and use of history by the Chinese leadership are revisionists and potentially threats to China’s historic mission. The rise of geopolitical questions on China’s frontiers is partly a product of this historical logic. China is shifting its frontiers as rising great powers do, but the interactions between China and its neighbours are shaped by history as well as strategy. We can contrast China’s relations with the states of the former Soviet Union and its relations with Japan. Treaty relations between the Chinese and Russian Empires began with the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. This established the northern frontier of the two states at the River Argun, where it remained for 170 years. From 1858 onwards, however, China was forced to make territorial concessions to the Russian Empire, transferring more than 500,000 square kilometres on the western frontier in today’s Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and more than 1 million square kilometres on the northern frontier in today’s Russian Far East. Though the border dispute was a crucial factor in the Sino-Soviet Cold War, as Russia and China moved towards normalization after 1989 the territorial questions were peacefully re-

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solved—China made no revanchist claims on its neighbours, and the border was fully delineated by 2008. China’s pursuit of reconciliation with the northern and western neighbours had both strategic and normative motives: China needed to secure Russian agreement on its greatpower rise and advance their mutual interest in restricting US presence in Eurasia, but China acted from normative ambition also. It held to a general posture of trustpolitik towards Russia and the Central Asians—bilaterally and multilaterally through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation— with an emphasis on new kinds of partnerships and new norms for economic and security relations (Kerr 2010). In essence, to the Eurasian interior, China’s strategic and normative ambitions worked together neutralizing the potentially very serious history question. This pattern of international relations can be contrasted with China’s Japanese relationship and the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. These islands were until the 1870s in an intermediate area that was covered by both Chinese and Japanese tributary relations—China considered the islands part of the Taiwan tributary area, and Japan the Ryukyu tributary area. Japan realized before the Chinese empire that the old system of relations would have to give way to the new Western system of sovereign territories and peoples and incorporated the Ryukyus into the Japanese state in 1879. 10 Japan did not assert a specific claim over the Senkaku/Diaoyu rocks until 1894, as it was preparing to annex Taiwan, when it did so under the terra nullius principle (Su 2005). China views the contemporary Japanese claim on the islands as revisionist since the territory was stolen at the earliest stages of Japanese imperialism that was to culminate in the attempt at the complete colonization of China some forty years later (State Council 2012). China believes that Japan should concede the territory both as a legal requirement but also to show that it sincerely repudiates its imperialist past. Japan’s refusal to concede is taken by the Chinese leadership and public as part of a broader pattern of behaviour and thinking in Japan that seeks to deny or dilute Japanese historical guilt. As such, the islands dispute is not about conventional geopolitics, such as strategic or resource geopolitics. The Diaoyu/Senkaku islands have a land area of 7 square kilometres, and even if the surrounding sea area is included, the territory comprises nothing like the 1.5 million square kilometres conceded to Russia and the Central Asian states. What is being disputed in East Asia is historical geopolitics—the rights and wrongs committed as modern territorial conventions were imposed and the use of historical narratives to define contemporary patterns of trust and distrust. Of course, China’s mistrust of Japan is strategic as well as normative— Japan remains America’s most important ally in East Asia, and the current Japanese leadership of PM Shinzo Abe is using the confrontation with China over the islands as part of the justification for revising Japan’s role in the alliance and Japan’s military posture in the region more broad-

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ly. Therefore, the twin directives of China’s relations with the former Soviet Union—strategic convergence and normative trustpolitik—operate in the reverse direction with Japan: strategic competition and normative distrust continually elevate the history question to a dominant position, and geopolitical change—over specific territories or the strategic situation in the region as a whole—is viewed through this frame. In effect, neither China or Japan can escape the history question and reach resolution of their disputes unless strategic and normative distrust can be reduced in some way. This pattern of using history to interpret the mix of strategic interests and normative ideas about trust and distrust is quite prevalent in Asia (Moon and Suh 2007). Claims of historical entitlement—interpreted by others as historical revisionism—play a big part in shaping twenty-firstcentury relations. Quite often the national narrative is strongly imbued with the idea that the nation is owed something by history, so national and international histories are interwoven with claims of just entitlement or unjust denial by others. These two aspects of historical reasoning—the manipulation of history to justify institutions and ideologies internally and the deployment of contested memory to define patterns of trust and distrust internationally—strongly shape the potential of Asians to get beyond nation-building narratives to the common norms and common identity on which an Asian century might be based. In this way, Asia still has to get beyond the normative past to get into the normative future, but progress is seemingly very difficult, not least because some elites keep their version of the contested past alive as ideological fortification for national or international ambitions. Asia’s Great Powers and Region Building The second aspect that connects national dreams to the Asian future is, of course, that normative power is still about power: it may sound preferable to positive power organized around industries, technologies, and militaries, but Asians are aware that Europe and the United States wanted normative power for the same reason they wanted other kinds of power—to make others comply with their values and interests and build an international society in their own image. Therefore, precisely because the Asian century is a place where different norms about power will meet with the purpose of shaping an Asian international order, it is likely to operate under conditions of political competition, especially among the Asian great powers who believe they have special responsibility for Asian region building. This politics has been expressed in two parallel processes over the past twenty years: the first has been the search for some transcendent political values that could be used to build a common identity among Asians; the second has been through the process of ad-

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vancing a new regionalism for Asia. This section considers each of these briefly in turn. The primary issue with developing a common identity for Asians is that it cannot be based on traditional values, since an emphasis on race, religion, culture, or history would divide rather than unite Asians. This was the main problem with the ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s—not only that it was backward-looking but that it had no potential for overcoming Asian diversity. If Li Kuan Yew was right and ‘culture is destiny’, then Asia would remain an archipelago of large and small cultures and not a macrocontinent advancing regional governance and negotiating its interests with the rest of the world (Zakaria 1994). However, if Asia were to get beyond tradition, it would be necessary to find new norms on which to build Asian collective identity. However, in seeking a universal value that Asians can share, the only noncontentious norm is development, so often discussions of the Asian century idea treat this as a project not about rules and identities but about Asian capitalism (Asian Development Bank 2011; Australian Government 2012). The search for some political value around which Asians might unite has been more problematic. The example of the attempt of the Japanese government to use democratic unity as the basis for regional integration is instructive. When speaking to the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha, in 2007, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe made the following appeal: Japanese diplomacy is now promoting various concepts in a host of different areas so that a region called ‘the Arc of Freedom and Prosperity’ will be formed along the outer rim of the Eurasian continent. The Strategic Global Partnership of Japan and India is pivotal for such pursuits to be successful. By Japan and India coming together in this way, this ‘broader Asia’ will evolve into an immense network spanning the entirety of the Pacific Ocean, incorporating the United States of America and Australia. Open and transparent, this network will allow people, goods, capital, and knowledge to flow freely. Can we not say that faced with this wide, open, broader Asia, it is incumbent upon us two democracies, Japan and India, to carry out the pursuit of freedom and prosperity in the region? (Abe 2007)

India’s leadership had also recognized the importance of democratic politics in establishing its international identity. In his inaugural speech to the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in January 2005, PM Manmohan Singh had noted ‘that the 21st Century will be an Indian Century’ and that ‘the world will once again look at us with regard and respect, not just for the economic progress we make but for the democratic values we cherish and uphold and the principles of pluralism and inclusiveness we have come to represent’ (Singh 2005a). The barrier the Asian democratic states have faced is that it has been very difficult to convert democracy into a new regional politics: it has not served to create strong panregional bonds, and it has not proved superior to strategic interests. Most obvious-

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ly, Indian and Japanese strategic interests would not be well served by refusing close relations with nondemocratic states in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, or the Middle East. For these reasons, Japan’s attempts to build what Christopher W. Hughes calls a ‘value-based diplomacy’ proved short-lived, and the incoming DPJ administration in late 2007 moved quickly back to a pragmatic stance (C. W. Hughes 2009). A similar effect of strategic perception and interest proving weightier than normative ambition is evident if we consider the interaction of the Asian great powers in the process of regional institution building. Even if Asians could not be united by common political values, it might still be possible to advance regional identity and governance by developing a norm of ‘regionness’ itself. However, as blueprints for building regional institutions have evolved over the past twenty years, the Asian great powers have become engaged in an increasingly intense competition to define regional membership and rules. This is the primary explanation for the shift in the pattern of region building from the immediate post–Cold War era into the first decades of the current century. In the first era, the Asian great powers, the United States, and Russia stood outside region-building processes and were content to support the efforts of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to extend the ASEAN system of normative management—known as the ASEAN way—to the wider Asian region. In the first decade of this century, the Asian great powers found themselves drawn into competition to decide not only the functional objectives of regional institutions but who was to be considered a member of the region and thus the scope of regional identity itself. In 1995 ASEAN issued an invitation to the foreign ministers of China, Japan, and South Korea to attend an adjunct meeting of their ASEAN counterparts (Soesastro 2006, 219). The ASEAN Plus Three (APT) summit process took off in late 1997 in response to the Asian financial crisis. South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung, at APT 1998 called for an East Asia Vision Group (EAVG) to create a longer-term pathway for East Asian integration and cooperation. At the 2000 APT summit, Kim proposed the creation of an East Asia Study Group (EASG), which would move from a vision of the regional future into the field of policy. Submitted to the APT summit in 2001, the EAVG report ‘envisions East Asia moving from a region of nations to a bona fide regional community where collective efforts are made for peace, prosperity and progress’ (EAVG 2001). The East Asian community goals were defined as: Preventing conflict and promoting peace among the nations of East Asia; Achieving closer economic cooperation in such areas as trade, investment, finance, and development; Advancing human security in particular by facilitating regional efforts for environmental protection and good governance; Bolstering common prosperity by enhancing cooperation in education and human resources in development; and Fostering the identity of an East Asian community. (EAVG 2001, 2)

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Malaysia proposed to host the inaugural East Asian summit in 2005, at which the invited states would set the terms for progress towards an East Asian community. But the three criteria for participation that emerged from discussions within the ASEAN states contained no firm definition of regional membership. They were: having substantial relations with ASEAN; being a dialogue partner of ASEAN; and being a signatory to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. This allowed the inclusion of India, New Zealand, and Australia at the December 2005 summit, creating an ASEAN+6 mechanism that seemed to cut across the APT exclusivist project. As Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh noted approvingly, the ASEAN+6 format created a hub-and-spokes structure, with ASEAN at the centre and other powers operating as spokes (Outlook India 2005). In contrast, in his speech to the summit, China’s premier Wen Jiabao endorsed an open and transparent East Asian regionalism; but in his press conference he argued that ‘the East Asia Summit should respect the desires of East Asian countries, and should be led by East Asian countries’ (Manila Times 2005). This proliferation of region-building projects across contradictory inclusivist and exclusivist lines can be explained only by the penetration into institutional planning of the strategic calculus of the regional states. Asian regionalism is strategic in the sense that it is penetrated by the strategic interests and perspectives of states, and leaderships participate in the hope of advancing their strategic objectives, including national identity building, not regional identity building (He 2004, 120). Conversely, they may see regionalist participation as a means of blocking—if necessary—the strategic objectives of others. This explains the failure of the APT exclusivist project to eliminate other alternatives. The original aim for APT, put forward by ASEAN states and supported by South Korea, was to create a regional organization that permitted Chinese-Japanese coordination under ASEAN-style normative binding. In practice, Japan and China showed only limited interest in coordination within APT and continued to compete vigorously for unilateral advantage, such as through their individual plans for economic cooperation with ASEAN. At the same time, some ASEAN states seemed to recognize that APT would inevitably be Sino-centric: even with South Korea and Japan in the institution, there would be insufficient weight to constrain China. Thus the APT exclusivist model might have provided for stronger identity convergence as the EAVG envisaged, but it did not provide the correct power geometry. The drift towards a larger, inclusivist model followed inevitably from this. As Shaun Breslin notes, the East Asian Summit process aimed not so much at the production of a region as an ‘anti-region’: not a region in identity terms or even very strongly in functional terms, but one aimed at resolving problems of strategic geometry, especially those generated by China’s rising regional presence: ‘Just as Chinese policy towards regional integration is partly designed to neutralise the power

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ambitions of others, so the EAS represents an attempt to neutralise Chinese power. This new vision of Asia is essentially constructed to prevent the emergence of a Sinocentric APT regional organisation, or even Chinese domination of an ASEAN+1 region’ (Breslin 2010, 727). The logic of strategic regionalism reached its culmination when Russia and America joined EAS in November 2011, creating an ‘Asia’ that stretches from the Baltic to the Atlantic coast of North America. Thus, the normative competition among the Asian great powers had three consequences for region building. First, divisions on institution building for Asia reflect and reinforce competitive instincts, particularly between China, India, and Japan. Second, when a regional system was proposed—the East Asian summit process—it was necessary to stretch this to include Australia, New Zealand, India, Russia, and the United States, creating a global East Asia precisely to disguise the absence of consensus on the regional future and to check the competitive stresses within APT. Third, the result of this ‘region stretching’ was to dilute the actual or potential ‘Asianness’ of the EAS. That is, in the absence of agreement on what it meant to be Asian, it became necessary to avoid the question altogether. In the end, the requirement to provide the correct strategic geometry within the region-building process proved stronger than the aspiration to get to consensual norms of regional membership and identity. There is therefore a great deal of normative power being generated in Asia at present, but very little of it is about Asia or for Asia. Traditional values—race, religion, history, even civilization—are routinely resurrected for nation-building or party-building purposes, but this often intensifies rather than resolves identity differences among Asians. Asians do not yet have a universal norm beyond development. Even the purposeful norm of regionness, which all leaderships agree should exist, is contaminated by the strategic calculus of Asian states and the connection to external powers like Australia, the United States, and Russia, who have concluded that Asia is too important to be left to decide its own future. Thus the Asianization of Asia—at least in normative terms—is substantially stalled until some transcendent values are generated around which Asian leaderships and civil societies can converge. CONCLUSION The Asian century in normative terms is probably no nearer than it was twenty years ago when Funabashi lauded the Asianization of Asia, and it may even have receded. Elites are strongly focused on state power, national power, and national wealth. The norms they are developing are about managing the dynamic distributive and democratic politics of their societies, not about ‘authoring a cohesive Asian worldview’. When

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Asians think of the Asian century, it is conceived in terms of the raw structural power of production, finance, knowledge, and security; there are few values that yet unite Asians and no clear idea of what being Asian in the Asian century might mean. There is still intense awareness of tradition—race, language, religion, history—but there are very few norms here that can be deployed for the purposes of building shared identities; and narratives of historical entitlement and denial are often deployed in the service of statist and nationalist projects, so the legacy of the normative past is still an obstacle to the arrival of the normative future. Even if claims to transcendent political norms are weak, there has been vigorous debate about the need for a norm of regionness for Asia; but even here the pressures of strategic uncertainty and competition have prevented the emergence of a stable region-building process in which Asians can interact without the involvement of non-Asians. As far as there are institutions and rules operating across Asia, they tend still to be those of the twentieth century, not the twenty-first. This is the ultimate paradox of Asia’s rise—levels of normative competition among Asians about ‘which Asian identities’ and ‘which Asian rules’ should be deployed to build the regional order sustain the continuation of the American century more than the arrival of the Asian century. This said, all kinds of power are moving so fast in Asia that it is possible that the gap between positive power and normative power may close quite quickly in coming decades. The attention being given to China as a new kind of international actor may be mistaken on several counts. As argued, it is not yet clear that cultural soft power, as defined by the Chinese state and its agencies, is effective normative power: does this lead to mobilization around China’s identity as a new international actor and a willingness to accept a Chinese version of the rules? The debate is open, but there are grounds for scepticism. The problem with China is not that it has a clearly defined identity and relationship with international society but that it does not. Until China’s international identity is more clearly delineated and formed, it is hard to see how it can begin to transfer its own norms and preferences into international society. At present, China’s preferences for culture or civilization as a basis for its international identity may not be a way of connecting China to the world but a way of distancing China from international society: the civilizational mentality is an inherited preference, but it also clearly reflects a reluctance to permit direct contact between Chinese norms and institutions and those of international society. Xi Jinping’s China dream of national rejuvenation sustains this paradox, both asserting China’s restoration as a world power at the same time as insisting on Chinese separateness by appeals to the Chinese way, to Chinese spirit, and to Chinese forms of power. In consequence, China may be rising, but it is rising alone.

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Asia shows some signs of returning to Sino-centrism, but to date this relies overwhelmingly on Chinese positive power: there has been relatively little Sinicization of Asia in normative terms. This may change, and China may find new and better ways of doing normative power that allow it to merge its identity with the identity of the new Asia. However, there is another scenario: China’s very size and complexity suggest it will always be preoccupied with managing the Chinese identity problem and may not have the resources to unlock the Asian identity problem—the question ‘Who is China?’ will always overshadow the problem ‘What does it mean to be Asian?’ 11 In any case, China’s desire to emerge as a leader for the Asian century will remain only an aspiration until it resolves its own identity dilemmas. NOTES 1. In discussing the different branches of economics, Friedman cites the typology given by John Neville Keynes in 1891: ‘a positive science . . . a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science . . . a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be; an art . . . a system of rules for the attainment of a given end’ (Friedman 1966, 3). 2. The limitations of focusing on power as a purely positive capacity were discussed by David Baldwin, who pointed to the relative infungibility of power in terms of scope and domain. In 1979 he argued that ‘one of the most crucial weaknesses in current thinking about international power relationships is the failure to specify scope and domain, and the consequent tendency to exaggerate the fungibility of power resources’ (Baldwin 1979, 173). Some parts of the rising powers debate have ignored this warning, focusing on ‘big numbers’ rather than asking complex questions about how rising powers will cope with the problems of power infungibility. Examples of hyperpositive analyses of China’s rise include Beckley (2011/2012) and Subramanian (2011). 3. For critiques of power transition theory and Asia, see Chan (2008) and Levy (2008). 4. For Chinese views of how to avoid the geopolitical consequences of the US rebalance, see Wang (2012). 5. For diverse interpretations of the strategic future of Asia, see Friedberg (2012); Ikenberry (2008); and Luttwak (2012). 6. For analysis of China’s role in Asian human security, see the essays in Wu (2012). 7. The official imprimatur for cultural soft power was given in documents such as the Resolution on the Central Committee Report of the Seventeenth Congress of the CCP, October 2007. See “Full text of resolution on CPC Central Committee report” at http://www.china.org.cn/english/congress/229158.htm. For academic commentaries on Chinese soft power, see Huang and Ding (2010) and Deng (2012). 8. For a summary of the Chinese state’s cultural diplomacy, see Shambaugh (2013, 207–68). Shambaugh argues that China faces a major soft-power deficit due to its statecentricity and inability to build a bridge between cultural uniqueness and cultural universality (2013, 212). 9. ‘Nanfang Zhoumo Yuandan xianci liang banben bijiao’ [Two versions of Southern Weekly New Year’s message compared] is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ zhongwen/simp/chinese_news/2013/01/130104_nanfangzhoumo_newyear.shtml. 10. For the historical origins of the dispute as the rules of the regional system changed, see Leung (2011).

China’s Search for Normative Power and the Possibilities of the Asian Century 127 11. I borrow the question ‘Who is China?’ from William A. Callahan (2010).

SEVEN Sovereignty versus Human Rights in a Post-Western World? Chris Brown

This chapter explores probable changes in the architecture of world politics and the consequent normative foundations of the resulting international order. The main emphasis will be on the latter topic, but first it is necessary to provide a sketch of the former. The term ‘architecture’ is meant to indicate that the nature of international order in our time is a little more complicated than it once was. It used to be conventional to describe international systems in terms of their polarity; for example, one could distinguish between multipolar and bipolar systems and consider their relative stability—thus, one of the distinctive features of Kenneth Waltz’s highly influential work Theory of International Politics was his argument that bipolar systems, such as the superpower conflict between the United States and the USSR, were inherently more stable than multipolar systems because of the capacity of the two poles to manage their relationship (Waltz 1979). Previously, the conventional wisdom had been that multipolar systems were more stable because of the flexibility offered by shifting patterns of alliances (e.g., Morgenthau 1954). In contrast to both multi- and bipolar systems, a unipolar system identifies one state as hegemonic, and there is much debate as to whether such a system can be stable or whether the existence of a single dominant power will stimulate a new balance of power (Wohlforth 1999; Waltz 2000). Obviously, this way of thinking about the world is still widely employed—think, for example, of the quite vigorous debates over whether the ‘rise’ of China constitutes a threat to the United States (e.g., Cox and Kitchen 2009; Mearsheimer 2010; Rachman 2011; Cox 2012)—but it does 129

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rely on a rather one-dimensional account of the international system, that is, as composed simply of states whose position in the world can be understood in terms of their power, understood as basically military in origin. This account may once have made sense—although even in the heyday of the old European states system, measuring power was always a tricky business—but nowadays it seems to bear only a distorted relationship to reality. In the twenty-first century, military power certainly remains significant and in some circumstances can be decisive, but economic power (itself a composite notion) is no longer directly correlated with military power in the way that it once was, and ‘soft power’ (admittedly an amorphous notion) has to be taken into account (Nye 2005; Berenskoetter and Williams 2007). Moreover, the significance of nonstate actors—international governmental organizations (IGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and business international nongovernmental organizations (BINGOs)—is difficult to deny, even if the much heralded emergence of a ‘borderless world’ remains a business school fantasy (Ohmae 1990). In short, we live in a very complex world, and the term ‘architecture’ is designed to reflect this. So what, in substance, can be said about this complexity? Following the argument of William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, I assume that American military primacy will remain a feature of the architecture of twenty-first-century international relations for the foreseeable future, that is, at least until mid-century (Wohlforth 1999; Brooks and Wohlforth 2008). Primacy appears to be an objective to which the US political establishment is committed, and American military expenditures on hardware and research and development are still such as to more or less guarantee the achievement of this objective, pace Chinese and Russian attempts to upgrade their forces—thus, in 2012, the United States spent more on defence ($682 billion) than the next ten countries combined ($652 billion) (SIPRI 2013). Moreover, as Wohlforth and Brooks and Zbigniew Brzezinski argue, rivalries among the potential challengers to US power will be as salient a feature of the future world order as their putative opposition to the United States (Brzezinski 2004). 1 The existence of nuclear weapons and minimum deterrence force-postures muddies the picture somewhat (which, incidentally, is why the United States pursues antiproliferation policies and may soon commit to the virtual elimination of nuclear weapons), but it does not fundamentally change the fact that the United States has defensive and force-projection capacities that no other state can match. As recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, this, of course, does not mean that the United States will always get its way whenever it deploys its military, but it does give options to the United States that no other state possesses or will possess for some time. In short, and contrary to the argument of structural realists such as John Mearsheimer or Kenneth Waltz, there will be no reemergence of traditional balance-of-power politics because military power has always been central

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to such a balance, and on this dimension, unipolarity will remain a reality (Mearsheimer 1990; Waltz 1993). However, beyond the realm of military force, something that does look a little more like a traditional balance of power may indeed emerge. China and India may not be able to (or wish to) challenge the United States in military terms, but their current levels of economic growth and increasing technological sophistication mean that they will increasingly exert influence in other areas of international relations, and this will remain the case even if their growth rates return to something more like historically normal levels, as may already be beginning to be the case. The meetings of the G20 since 2008 illustrate the point—the voices of the emerging economies have been heard there in a way they had never been heard before, and they continue to play an important role in formulating global responses to the ongoing problems posed by the stagnant US economy and the Eurozone. Nor is this influence simply a matter of directly economic issues. At the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change in December 2009, the role of China and India was decisive in shaping the outcome; the fact that President Obama had to, in effect, gatecrash a meeting of the Chinese, Indian, and South African delegations to ensure that America’s position was taken into account is an indicator of the extent to which the world is changing (Newsweek 18 December 2009). 2 The other two BRIC 3 countries—Brazil and Russia—will be less influential, certainly than China if less certainly than India, but Brazil at least is the most important player, along with Mexico, in what, even bearing in mind current difficulties, is an increasingly economically powerful Latin America. Russia’s influence, on the other hand, is likely to be tied to global raw materials prices rather than determined by its own efforts. President Putin’s highly effective, albeit ruthless, diplomacy and his willingness to treat military force as an option in places he considers to be part of his own backyard, such as the Ukraine, gives the impression of power, but President Obama’s judgement that Russia is a regional power that acts from weakness rather than strength is fundamentally correct (Obama 2014). Beyond the BRICs, Europe (collectively, and its leading countries individually) and Japan will still look to exert their influence in world politics when they can. And, final clarification, to write of the increasing importance of China and to a lesser extent India is not in any way to buy into ‘declinist’ accounts of American power. Over the past quarter-century, accounts of US decline have alternated with accounts of US hegemony. Modern heralds of future Chinese supremacy need to be able to explain why their account is different from, for example, the accounts of Japan’s inevitable rise that proliferated in the late 1980s. 4 All that is being said here is that China, India, and Brazil inter alia will be increasingly influential players in all areas of world politics where American military power is not immediately relevant.

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This new architecture will be complex, will work with multiple indicators of power, and will certainly involve nonstate actors and, more to the point perhaps, the kind of ‘government networks’ persuasively described by Ann-Marie Slaughter (2004)—but it will still be in essence a system of states, not least because, as I hope to show later in this chapter, the emergent powers want it to be that way. The question I wish to investigate is what the normative foundations of this international order will be, in particular whether the fact that many of the major players in this system will be non-Western states with authoritarian forms of government will serve to derail the shifts in the nature of state sovereignty and the relationship between sovereignty and rights that have taken place over the past quarter-century. Before looking at these shifts there is one last piece of ground clearing that is necessary, namely, to dispose of the idea that in a ‘self-help’ system power and interests are everything, and so-called normative foundations are of no real significance, at best merely window dressing drawing attention away from the real action taking place elsewhere. This idea is sometimes termed ‘realist’, but while classical realists such as Hans J. Morgenthau certainly believed that there was sometimes a tension between ‘moral command and the requirements of successful political action’, they also understood that norms and values shaped the way in which interests were formed and limited the kinds of action that could be taken (Morgenthau 1954; Williams 2005). It may well be that, to use Stephen Krasner’s formulation, the ‘logics of consequences’ often (he would say always) trump the ‘logics of appropriateness’, but even on a realist understanding of the world the latter are not without significance (Krasner 1999). SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE STATES SYSTEM We live now in a world of sovereign states, as we have for the past four centuries and as we will for the foreseeable future. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often said to signal the arrival of a system of sovereign states, the UN Charter of 1945 confirmed that system, and even the various treaties and covenants that have, over the past few decades, established the international human rights regime, usually contain language which restates the centrality of sovereignty and the right of self-determination. However, this universal endorsement of sovereignty has to be read in the light of the fact that the meaning of the term has always been contested. Over the past two decades it has become commonplace to observe that the notion of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ has come into contest with the older notion of sovereignty as an absolute, but this is actually a misleading way to characterize the history of the term—contests over the meaning of sovereignty have been present since the begin-

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ning of the modern states system, and this long-term contest has some significance when we consider the future of the notion. In the seventeenth century, when the system first coalesced, most states were monarchies, and sovereignty resided in particular individuals, ‘sovereigns’. Friedrich Kratochwil has traced the way in which medieval notions of rulership according to which the prince stood enmeshed in a web of relationships with external and internal actors came to be replaced by a world in which ‘sovereignty’ was understood in terms of the Roman notion of real property or dominium (Kratochwil 1995). Rulers came to think of themselves as owning their domains, and, just as one can dispose of one’s own property as one wishes, so they could dispose of their states. This position supports a strong norm of nonintervention; unless rulers behave towards their own people in such a way as to cause a threat to the peace and security of other rulers, they are entitled to the protection of this norm. This emphasis on the untrammelled rights of the ruler is consistent with the position set out in Leviathan. Hobbes’s sovereign is created by, but is not party to, a contract made by the people and thus recognizes no internal equal. The second half of the book is devoted to establishing the sovereign’s independence from any external power, specifically, for Hobbes, the Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church (Hobbes 1651/1996). This absolutist doctrine of sovereignty is often thought to have been endorsed in the Westphalia settlement of 1648 and is certainly reflected in the positive international law of the nineteenth century, influenced as it was by the understanding of law as the command of a sovereign. Interestingly it is also partially represented in the UN Charter of 1945. The charter is intended to remove one of the traditional powers of sovereign states, the right to wage war, but it actually restates very firmly the doctrine that the state is sovereign in its own territory. Article 2(7) declares, ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under chapter VII.’ Chapter VII concerns actions with respect to threats to the peace— the basic idea that states are sovereign within their own territory except insofar as their actions affect other sovereigns is thus preserved. Article 1(3) of the charter does refer to ‘promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’, but this was understood as a task to be undertaken by sovereign states, and, as Samuel Moyn has persuasively argued, even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was not read at the time as undermining a strong doctrine of national sovereignty. According to Moyn, the idea that ‘human rights’ are to be understood in opposition to the state comes much later, in the 1970s (Moyn 2010).

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Still, within a very few years of the signing of the charter, the ‘domestic jurisdiction’ clause was under threat. The newly independent Indian government argued that the apartheid system then being established in South Africa constituted a ‘threat to international peace and security’ under chapter VII and therefore overrode article 2(7). This reinterpretation of 2(7) became the standard way in which domestic issues were raised at the UN and has been used to justify a number of interventions over the decades (Wheeler 2000). It has become the legal link between the much expanded contemporary international human rights regime and the UN Charter. What is interesting in the context of current debates is that this challenge to the absolutist account of sovereignty can actually be found repeatedly in the history of the states system, starting at the very point at which the system was coalescing into something recognizable as a genuine international system. Stephen Krasner has pointed out that the Westphalian treaties actually endorsed intervention in a number of circumstances, mostly to do with protecting religious minorities. He asserts that the principle of nonintervention, though frequently affirmed, was as frequently violated (Krasner 1999). Krasner actually defines ‘interventions’ very widely—to include limitations on sovereignty established by freely entered into treaties—but an important recent collection of essays put together by the historians Brendan Simms and David Trim establishes that specifically ‘humanitarian’ interventions have been a feature of the system throughout the period (Simms and Trim 2011). These interventions were sometimes justified by the ‘threat-to-international-peace-and-security’ argument but equally were sometimes justified simply by reference to the violation of decent standards of behaviour by the ruler intervened against. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this argument was generally deployed within the Holy Roman Empire, which Simms establishes continued to be a political reality in a way that conventional accounts of Westphalia sometimes denied, but in the nineteenth century explicitly humanitarian interventions took place in a number of geographical locations far beyond the confines of empire. As Gary Bass and Martha Finnemore have documented, these latter interventions were often framed in imperialist and racist terms and frequently involved the protection of favoured groups, in particular, Christian minorities (Bass 2009; Finnemore 2004). Similarly, notions such as the ‘standards of civilization’ which were developed in the second half of the nineteenth century were applied only to non-Western civilizations—but still, the nature of these standards is revealing (Gong 1984). Countries subject to this form of imperialism were treated as second-class members of the international community until they established the rule of law and protected basic property rights. Although existing members of the international community were not subjected to these standards, this was because of the (rather optimistic) assumption that they already abided by

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them. In effect, their membership in the community of nations was conditional on a particular way of conducting internal policy—hence the outcry when the Ottoman Empire, allowed to enter the society of states at the end of the Crimean War in 1856, patently violated such standards in the case of the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ so emotionally described by Gladstone in the 1870s. The point of this brief overview of the history of the European states system is to emphasize the importance of the unspoken background assumptions that accompanied and nuanced what might otherwise have been seen as an unambiguously absolutist account of the doctrine of sovereignty. When in 1945 the UN Charter was drawn up and the normative foundations of the system were uprooted from Europe and replanted in a global context, some of these nuances were lost. The General Assembly’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 could be seen as a way of bringing them back in again—which is why Moyn is inclined to understate the novelty and force of the declaration (Moyn 2010). The declaration did not create the idea of rights from nothing; rather, it recognized, elaborated, and placed on record ideas that had, for the most part, been present in the old system but which the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism had caused people to forget (Boucher 2011). Sovereignty as Responsibility: If the 1945/1948 settlement harked back to the past history of the European states system in order to ground the new global order, over the past quarter-century there have been genuine innovations in the way the normative foundations of the system are understood. There are two closely related dimensions to this change: the emergence of the individual as a legally recognized international entity, symbolized by the development of universal jurisdiction, international criminal law, and the International Criminal Court, and the development of the doctrine of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, articulated in the 1990s and given more concrete form in the notion of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) in the 2000s. The Universal Declaration of 1948 announced the existence of human rights, but on the implicit understanding that these rights were to be underwritten by the state. No global mechanism whereby individuals could claim these rights against the state was envisaged, and the same was true in the two International Covenants on Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966. This partly reflected the political realities of the day, but it also reflected the common-sense understanding of a ‘right’, which was that it was something that existed within a particular legal system—even such apparently universal past declarations of the ‘rights of man’ reflected this understanding. The classic French Revolutionary statement is actually entitled ‘The Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, and it is the latter term that dominates the document. International

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law was a dialogue between states, and individuals had no standing to bring cases on their own behalf or on behalf of others. There were no legal procedures by which governments that violated human rights could be held to account by anyone other than their own peoples. Such was the situation everywhere in the world except in Europe, where the European Convention on Human Rights did involve international oversight on such matters; but from the 1970s on, this was a situation that seemed to many to be unsatisfactory. Gradually, the outline of a new legal order began to emerge. Part of this change involved a shift in foreign policy rhetoric on the part of the major Western powers, but more important has been the development of international criminal law (ICL)—the notion that certain kinds of actions are criminal and subject to international oversight, even when the actors in question hold official positions (Cassesse 2008, 2009). One element of ICL has been the idea of ‘universal jurisdiction’, namely, that a serious breach of the international human rights regime or international humanitarian law could be prosecuted in any country and not just the country of origin of the perpetrator. The various international tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s to prosecute those who committed crimes in the former Yugoslavia or during the Rwandan genocide are another manifestation of ICL, but perhaps the most dramatic development has been the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which came into force in 2002 on the basis of the Rome Statute of 1998 (Schabas 2007; Peskin 2007). The ICC is a permanent court, sitting in The Hague alongside the International Court of Justice, and represents a step-level change in international law—even if its scope of action is quite severely constrained, and, as we will see, its membership is limited. International criminal law has developed in parallel with the idea that state sovereignty should not be understood simply in terms of self-determination and autonomy but is normatively justified only so far as sovereign states accept responsibility for promoting the rights of their peoples. The idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ was expressed in the 1990s by various UN officials, most notably Dr Francis Deng, partly as a way of containing and justifying in legal terms the notion of humanitarian intervention and in particular of preventing the latter term from being understood as a form of neo-imperialism (Deng et al. 1996). The same motivation lay behind the idea of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), which was given substance in the report of an international commission set up after the Kosovo intervention of 1999 (Bellamy 2008; Orford 2011; Brown 2013). A somewhat modified version of R2P was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 and has had some impact on recent events, in particular the intervention in Libya by NATO on the basis of a UN Security Council resolution in 2011.

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This is, of course, a very abbreviated version of the changes that took place in these years, but enough, I hope, to get across the fact that a new understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and rights has emerged. How is this new understanding to be characterized? Samuel Moyn suggests that we should understand the new orientation towards human rights as essentially utopian. In the 1970s, he argues, the old utopias were crumbling, and the idea of human rights existing over and above the state took their place (Moyn 2010). This makes a great deal of sense, but the feature of the new thinking that I would like to stress is that it represented a specifically European vision of world politics—a European utopia, if you like. The driving force behind each of the changes outlined above has been European. One way of looking at these changes is to see them as an attempt to make the world as a whole look more like the kind of political order that has developed in Western Europe since the Second World War and West-Central Europe since 1989, that is, an order with a significant pooling of sovereignty, a recognition of substantial areas of economic, political, and social life as subject to supranational decision making, and the abolition of the possibility of interstate war. This generates a not unattractive picture of a legal order of global governance, support for which certainly extends beyond the borders of Europe. In setting up the ICC, for example, Latin American and African support was crucial—although now that the ICC is in operation and with, so far, an exclusively African clientele, support on that continent is waning fast. Other parts of the world have been less enthusiastic for the changes. The UK and France have ratified the Rome Statute, but the other three permanent members of the UN Security Council have not and have no intentions of doing so. The position of the United States has been, perhaps, more ambiguous than that of Russia or China. The Clinton administration was initially enthusiastic about the idea of an ICC but found the actual details of the Rome Statute unacceptable. The George H. W. Bush administration was actively hostile to the ICC tout court, and even though the second Bush administration softened its attitude somewhat and on occasion supported references to the ICC by the UN Security Council, a practice also followed by President Obama, there remains no possibility that the Senate will ratify US membership, even if the current or a future administration were to ask them to do so. But in the Russian and Chinese (and, to a great extent, the Indian) positions there is no such ambiguity—they are opposed to the ICC and to universal jurisdiction. All five permanent members of the UN accepted the watered-down version of R2P (the so-called R2P Lite) set out in the UN in 2005—but with obvious reluctance and a great deal of suspicion. The US representative, John Bolton—a major critic of the new international legal order—agreed to the resolution only after being assured that no new legal obligations for the United States were involved, and Russia and China adopted the same stance (Bellamy 2008).

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The differences between the P5 members of the UN Security Council were highlighted by the debates and votes in the UN on the Libyan crisis of 2011. Resolution 1973 of 17 March 2011—which employed R2P language to authorize members to establish a ‘no-fly’ zone over Libya to protect Libyan civilians from a threatened massacre organized by their government—was driven by the desire of Britain and France to act in the crisis. The US reluctantly went along with its European allies, albeit only after a fierce debate within the Obama administration, and Russia and China abstained on the key vote, which passed by 10 votes to 0 with five abstentions. Also included in the abstentions were the two other BRICs, India and Brazil, along with Germany. In the latter case, the latent pacifism of contemporary German culture outweighed European enthusiasm for R2P, although it should be noted that the decision to abstain was very controversial in Germany. 5 Resolution 1973 was supported by the Arab League (with Lebanon on the council voting in favour) and by the African members of the council, Gabon and South Africa. It seems to have been the position of these African members that persuaded Russia and China not to veto the resolution—a decision the latter and South Africa came to regret when NATO interpreted ‘protecting civilians’ as legitimizing acting as the air arm of the ‘rebel’ National Transitional Council’s successful campaign to overthrow Gaddafi (Alden and Schoeman 2013; De Waal 2013; Brown 2013). 6 The abstentions of Russia, China, India, and Brazil on Resolution 1973 should not be overinterpreted. But they do, I think, suggest that the emergent powers collectively and individually have a rather different approach to issues of sovereignty from the European powers who have been behind the drive to establish sovereignty as responsibility over the past few decades—different even from the attitude of the United States, which has itself been very ambiguous in its approach to this shift. Subsequent, repeated Russian and Chinese vetoes of UNSC resolutions proposing sanctions on the Syrian government in late 2011 and 2012 confirm this difference, and similar indications can be found in other aspects of the policy of the emergent powers—consider, for example, the position of China in Africa, where it has explicitly rejected any link between Chinese assistance and human rights (Alden and Hughes 2009). The attitude of the emergent powers to sovereignty issues clearly requires further investigation. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE EMERGENT POWERS Why have China, India, and the other emergent powers adopted the attitude they have to the new thinking on sovereignty? 7 More to the point, to what extent is the broadly hostile attitude they currently display towards this thinking likely to continue in the future, when their increas-

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ing general importance in international politics could enable them to reverse the normative shifts that have taken place over the past few decades? Is it possible that future generations will look back on the history of the international human rights regime since 1945 and the emergence of ideas of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ not as laying the foundations for a radically different, less state-centric world order but as the last gasp of the ‘Vasco da Gama Epoch’, that is, a Europe-dominated world (Panikkar 1961)? 8 It is possible to offer a simple, uncomplicated answer to the first of these questions. It is certainly the case that the emergent powers are deeply suspicious of the power of the United States and its allies. They are inclined to interpret an active human rights policy and the redefinitions of sovereignty adopted by the latter as moves in a power-political game rather than as normatively driven actions. Add to this generic suspicion the fact that China and Russia are deeply vulnerable to criticism on human rights grounds and the fact that these two countries, along with India, have national minorities who would very much like to claim the protection of the international community if given the chance to do so, and resistance to the new thinking is easy to understand. In practice, of course, there is no possibility that the international community (which these states regard as a synonym for the United States and its friends) is going to actively intervene on behalf of Tibetans, Chechnyans, or Kashmiris, but it is easy to see why events such as the 1999 campaign on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians send shivers down spines in Beijing, Moscow, and New Delhi. Moreover, this general attitude of resistance to the new thinking is likely to continue even as China and India become more central to world politics, given that, as argued in the opening of this essay, the capacity of the United States to project its military power is likely to remain unchallengeable, even as its relative economic strength declines. Still, emergent power resistance to new thinking on sovereignty and human rights cannot simply be understood in terms of the contingencies of power politics, important though such considerations may be when it comes to specific cases. There are principles involved here and not simply interests. When the representatives of China or India have criticized operations in Kosovo in 1999 or Libya in 2011, they have done so from principle, and the thinking behind their opposition deserves to be considered on its own terms. What are those terms? The best way to approach this, I think, is to begin with the ways in which China and India have experienced the Westphalia system over the past few centuries. It was noted earlier that in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries the European states system had a rather more complicated and ambiguous approach to the notion of sovereignty than is usually conveyed by the term ‘Westphalian’. Rather more to the point in this context is that the intra-European ‘rules of the

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game’—however defined—were very different from the rules which applied outside Europe. Edward Keene has given one account of the rules ‘beyond the anarchical society’ of Europe, and Carl Schmitt, from a very different perspective, has given another—but what they both agree on is that the kind of normative framework which governed relations within Europe, Schmitt’s Ius Publicum Europaeum, was absent from Europe’s relations with the rest of the world and indeed in the relations of European states with one another ‘beyond the line’ (Keene 2002; Schmitt 2003). Unlike the situation within Europe, where European rulers recognized each other as legitimate, albeit sometimes legitimate enemies, European states did not recognize the rulers they came across in the rest of the world as possessing legitimate dominium, and their relations with them were, accordingly, governed simply by relative power. In what became the Americas, such relations were wholly one-sided in favour of the European powers, while in the Indian subcontinent and the East until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century they largely favoured the indigenous rulers—but in both cases it was power that counted rather than the kind of minimal normative framework that existed in Europe. In acting in this way, it should be said, the Europeans who encountered Indian rulers or the Chinese emperors were, in fact, conforming to the local rules of the game. Whereas in Europe the notion of the legal, if not political, equality of rulers had taken hold, China’s relations with other peoples was based on a tributary system in which other rulers, however politically powerful, were in no sense to be understood as the equal of the Chinese emperor, while in India the Mogul emperor in Delhi had a similar—albeit rather more contestable—view of the world. 9 The European intruders were not making themselves felt within a system of states in the European sense of the term, and their behaviour needs to be understood partly in this light. Nor was it the case that before the imperial systems of China and India were established there had been in those lands a normatively grounded states system. Certainly, in both cases, there had been multiple sovereignties, but without the European sense that this state of affairs was normatively desirable and not simply the result of the contingencies of power. Thus, the period of the warring states in China (approx 475–221 BCE) produced a great deal of interesting international thought which is now beginning to be related to contemporary conditions—see, for example, the work of Yan Xuetong and the commentaries thereon translated as Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power—but it seems that this period did not produce the equivalent of the notion of an ‘international society’ (Yan Xuetong 2011; see also Callahan and Barabantseva 2012). The normative goal of all the thinkers of this period seems to have been empire. The notion of a normatively grounded international society was introduced to China and India via European imperialism once the forces of capitalist industrialization (temporarily) delivered the East into the hands

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of Europe. Chinese and Indian civilization initially experienced the idea of an international society of states from a subordinate position, which the new elites that imperialism created in place of the Chinese and Indian imperial governing class were understandably determined to overcome. However, and here a very long story is being cut short, these new elites— the nationalist movements of China and India and the Chinese Communist Party—did not aspire to recreate the old empires but rather to enter international society as independent and powerful members in their own right. The UN Charter of 1945, by divorcing the normative framework of the states system from its European origins and providing an alternative grounding for a potentially universal international order, made this easier than it would have been previously. The new states that were created after 1945 no longer had to look to the old European powers for recognition. Their international legitimacy was guaranteed by UN membership. Entry into international society was by no means unproblematic. China was a founding member of the UN and a permanent member of the Security Council, but the People’s Republic of China’s occupancy of China’s seat at the UN did not take place until 1971. The PRC under Mao saw itself as a leader of world revolution rather than as a state in any conventional sense, and it was only in the 1970s, under his successor, that Chinese membership of international society became regularized. India was a founder member of the UN (albeit under ultimate British control between 1945 and 1947) but in the 1950s attempted to develop an alternative code for the conduct of international relations, the Panchsheel, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first formally established in a treaty with the PRC in 1954. 10 These principles were intended by India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to constitute a major break with the past and a signpost to a future world order not dominated by European norms. Certainly, they did have some influence in the thinking of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), established in Belgrade in 1961 but prefigured at the Bandung Conference in 1955. However, a less enthusiastic reading of the principles would suggest they were actually an unnecessarily long-winded restatement of the traditional notions of sovereignty and nonintervention—and in any case the Sino-Indian Border War of 1962 revealed the hollowness of the pact with the PRC. This event led India into a de facto alliance with the USSR driven by balance-of-power thinking, and thereafter India’s foreign policy has, somewhat reluctantly, followed conventional lines. Thus, by the mid-1970s both India and China had become fully functioning members of the postwar international order who, in the main, respected the central principles of that order—such as the procedural rules of international society, nonintervention, nonaggression, respect for treaties, and so on. These two countries remain more or less committed to this conventional account of what being a sovereign state involves, but— perhaps largely because of the long and difficult road they have had to

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take in order to have that status recognized by the major powers, their new peers—they are very resistant to the idea of revising that account, which was what the leading European members of that society were beginning to attempt to do at exactly the point when India and China finally achieved full membership under the old rules. Having only recently escaped from the experience of being dominated by European imperialism, these countries were now experiencing new attempts to circumscribe their freedom of action in the name of human rights and sovereignty as responsibility. In order to defend their hard-won freedom, they both became, and have remained, firmly committed to an account of sovereignty as untrammelled autonomy, an account that is in keeping with the formal rules of the ‘Westphalian’ order but which, as noted in the second section of this chapter, is not entirely consonant with the actual practice of Westphalian international society. Moreover, this account of sovereignty seems out of kilter with the other developments in international society noted in the first section of this chapter, the increasing importance of nonstate actors, and the increasingly dislocated nature of political power. Still, out of kilter with the times or not, the substantial and increasing economic power of China and India probably means that their vision of what it means to be sovereign will be of increasing importance as time goes by—assuming, that is, that this vision does not itself evolve as their power grows. LOOKING TO THE FUTURE Will this vision evolve? Will economic growth, rising wealth, and an increasing stake in the success of the world economic system, within which this growth takes place and upon which it is dependent, change attitudes in the emergent powers? This has become a subject for intense debate in academic and policy circles in the United States and elsewhere. The discussion is generally cast in contemporary terms but is actually grounded in classic notions of modernity and society. G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney have summarized the arguments of the classics in modern terms in an article in Foreign Affairs: capitalism leads to political democracy because rising wealth and education levels create a demand for political participation; capitalist property systems need the rule of law, and economic growth leads to a diversity of socioeconomic interests and the need for political pluralism; autocratic regimes are disadvantaged by corruption, which can be controlled only by institutional checks and balances, by political struggles against the autocracy generated by the inevitable inequalities that accompany economic development, and by weak accountability and information flows which hamper policy development (Ikenberry and Deudney 2009).

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This chapter responded to a 2007 article by Azar Gat, who argued on the basis of past history that in practice, authoritarian powers are by no means handicapped in the race for economic growth and that there is no reason to assume that as China and Russia become wealthier and more powerful internationally they will become more democratic or that their attitudes on matters such as sovereignty and human rights will shift (Gat 2007). The argument was continued in a later debate rather portentously titled ‘Which Way Is History Marching?’ (Gat et al. 2009). This is an interesting discussion—but an argument that focuses on the long-term viability of authoritarian politics isn’t quite to the point I wish to explore. India, after all, is a liberal democracy governed by the rule of law with a constitution that guarantees human rights at home, but it remains very sceptical about any attempt to promote human rights internationally, has declined to join the ICC, and rejects anything more than a nominal commitment to the principle of a responsibility to protect. Even if Ikenberry, Deudney, and others are right in believing that economic growth will eventually democratize China, it does not follow that China’s views on the relationship between sovereignty and human rights will change. More to the point is the way in which Ikenberry has extended his argument in several articles on ‘Liberalism 3.0’ and in his Liberal Leviathan (Ikenberry 2009, 2011a, 2011b). Here he anticipates that the old liberal international order based on US hegemony (‘Liberalism 2.0’) will be replaced by a posthegemonic international order which remains basically liberal capitalist in inspiration but with an expanding core membership, increasingly interdependent security and economic regimes, and a further expansion of policy domains with new realms of network-based cooperation of the kind envisaged by Ikenberry’s colleague at Princeton Anne-Marie Slaughter (Slaughter 2004). His vision of this future world order is that China, India, and perhaps Russia and Brazil will take leading roles in preserving the global economy, accepting that they now have a stake in the system, but he does not expect that these countries will also necessarily buy into the current liberal vision of sovereignty as responsibility. Whereas Liberalism 2.0, the postwar liberal order, saw the development and expansion of the international human rights regime and of international criminal law, this is not something that is built into the DNA of Liberalism 3.0. The key question is whether this exclusion will hold. If the emergent countries do become enmeshed in new forms of network-based cooperation in order to cope with an increasing number of international problems that can be dealt with only by generating higher levels of interdependence (such as global ecological degeneration, financial instability, and threats to global health), will it be possible to keep human rights issues off the agenda? Increased cooperation will increasingly depend on social networks and the rapid exchange of information and, pace the ‘Great Firewall’ of China, it is difficult to see how even the authoritarian

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emergent powers will be able to control this process in such a way that unwanted topics are kept off the agenda. On the one hand, even behind the Chinese firewall, a very active blogsphere has developed, and Chinese ‘netizens’ seem unwilling to accept the restrictions on their freedoms that the Chinese government would like to impose. Equally, the great disparities in wealth in China already stimulate a great deal of unrest, which will certainly increase as the Chinese economy slows down. On the other hand, there is very little evidence that the burgeoning Chinese property-owning class is itself committed to political change. For the moment, it seems that China’s new rich would rather deal with the existing political class than with the kind of turbulence that democratic reforms would produce. CONCLUSION The past few decades have seen two strong trends: the increasing importance of human rights–based policies and ideas of sovereignty as responsibility, and the increasing importance globally of powers that reject these ideas. These two trends are now converging, and one or the other (or perhaps both) will be changed as a result. Is it possible to envisage that China, India, and the other emergent powers could be integrated ever more tightly into a new global architecture which recognizes their increasing importance in most spheres of human activity while at the same time allowing them to opt out of being influenced and affected by the new meanings of sovereignty and human rights that have developed over the past two or three decades? The simple answer is yes, it is possible to envisage such a future. The new understandings of sovereignty that have emerged did so initially in Europe, gradually spreading out to Latin America and Africa and beginning to establish toeholds in the East. It is not too difficult to imagine this process of expansion coming to an end and indeed being reversed. For much of the past four hundred years there has been one rule for Europe and another rule for the rest of the world, and it is not impossible that in the future this will once again be the case—only this time it will be the rest of the world which is operating to Westphalian rules while Europe (including in this category much of Latin America and the Anglosphere) moves to a different drum. But there are some reasons to think that this rather depressing picture of a superficially unified but actually deeply divided world may not come to pass. Apart from the aforementioned changes that might come about in China and the other emergent powers as a result of increased prosperity, it is also the case that the self-confidence that will come from their universally recognized importance as mainstays of the new world order may translate into a more relaxed view of the need to maintain a rigid understanding of sovereignty. The passage of time will also help in

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this respect. As the era of colonialism, overt imperialism, and Western dominance fades into the distant past, so it might be hoped that the rulers of these countries will be less influenced by the desire to avoid any interference with their hard-won independence. In summary, the question mark in the title of this chapter represents genuine uncertainty. It may be that the future will see a revived contest between the idea of sovereignty and the idea of human rights, and the fusion of the two notions incorporated in the idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ will go into abeyance—but other futures are possible. Which of these paths is taken will depend, ultimately, on the peoples of the emergent powers themselves. A final point worth making is that current advocates of the fusion of sovereignty and rights also have a part to play. They must show that respect for human rights is not simply something demanded of others but applies equally to their own societies. They must show that when, as in Libya, R2P demands the use of force, this is followed by generous aid in reconstruction. They must ensure that they do not arm the genocidaires they condemn. In short, they must demonstrate that the principles they promote are truly worthy of support and in no way reflect Europe’s past methods of dealing with the rest of the world. NOTES 1. Witness the way in which Chinese assertiveness over the past year or two has pushed its neighbours towards closer relations with the United States. China is in danger of engaging in something similar to the ‘self-encirclement’ of post-Bismarckian Germany (I owe this point to G. John Ikenberry). 2. That the outcome of the Copenhagen Conference was widely considered to be disappointing, at least partly because of the attitude of the Chinese and Indian governments, highlights the point that solving the world’s problems is not likely to be made easier by the relative decline of the United States, even taking into account the latter’s frequent resistance to multilateral diplomatic solutions to those problems. 3. The notion of the BRICs as a group was first mooted by Jim O’Neill in a Goldman Sachs paper, ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’ (Goldman Sachs 2001). 4. For an extreme version of the China rising argument, see Subramanian (2011). 5. Rather confusingly, the day after the vote, Chancellor Merkel announced, ‘We unreservedly share the aims of this resolution. Our abstention should not be confused with neutrality’ (BBC 18 March 2011). 6. In response to NATO’s conduct of operations, Brazil has argued for a doctrine of ‘Responsibility while Protecting’ to accompany R2P, but it is not clear yet how seriously this initiative should be taken (Brown 2013). 7. In what follows the focus will be on China and, to a lesser extent, India rather than on Russia or Brazil on the grounds that the former two countries have greater potential importance than the latter. 8. K. M. Panikkar was one of the most important diplomats in the first decade of Indian independence and a very astute observer and author—it would be good to see a revival of interest in his long-out-of-print book, which is one of the first studies to recognize the shift that was beginning to take place in the architecture of world politics, even in the 1950s.

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9. The Hindu rulers of the southern half of the subcontinent were never content to pay homage to the Muslim Moguls in the north. 10. The five principles were: (1) mutual respect for one another’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; (2) mutual nonaggression; (3) mutual noninterference in one another’s internal affairs; (4) equality and mutual benefit; and (5) peaceful coexistence (UN Treaty Series 1958).

Conclusion Jamie Gaskarth

As noted in the introduction, a considerable number of writers on the rise of China, India and Asia more broadly, posit that this development represents a challenge to Western-dominated international society, implying a simple connection between material power and normative influence along the way. The chapters in this book take issue with that narrative. In some cases, this argument is refuted on its own terms. David Armstrong asserts that states such as Japan and China have found that there are far greater gains to be had from trade and participation in the international economic order than would be achieved from resistance. Therefore, open conflict between the United States and a rising China, for instance, is seen as highly unlikely. Similarly, David Kerr argues that changes in relative power are unlikely to lead to a war of hegemonic transition because, if the United States won, this would not detract from the reality of increased Asian economic capacity, and if China won, it would lead to China’s containment by other states. In other words, neither side would benefit. Furthermore, the authors in this volume posit a number of other criticisms of this discussion on an ideational basis. The debate’s common representation of China and India as wedded to a rigid doctrine of sovereignty as an absolute and inviolable principle, especially when it comes to territory, is subtly questioned in the first two chapters. Both Jacob and Chen note that India and China, respectively, have been prepared in the past to compromise on sovereignty issues and redraw borders to their own detriment for the sake of peace or for ideological reasons. Instead of this being a matter of material security, the willingness to negotiate on sovereignty issues seems to be a matter of symbolism and national prestige. Concessions are allowed, provided they are interpreted as a sign of magnanimity rather than weakness. While China and India do appear to have become more concerned about sovereignty in recent years, their behaviour has actually been ambiguous and is arguably reflective of internal debates over engagement with international society and their place within it. Put simply, neither state seems to have fully made up its mind about the direction of normative innovations such as the responsibility to protect and international criminal law. 147

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Chris Brown also highlights the error of seeing sovereignty as something that was in the past absolute and relatively uncontested but which has become challenged in the post–Cold War era by Western powers. Citing Stephen Krasner and others, Brown notes that sovereignty has always been qualified in important respects and intervention has been permissible throughout the history of the modern states system, under the right circumstances. When it comes to the coherence of either state’s normative beliefs, a number of the authors in this volume highlight domestic divisions which hamper a coherent alternative world view being projected abroad. In the first place, domestic inequality is a major problem for China and India. The disparities in wealth within Indian and Chinese society represent a profound governance challenge to the governments of each state and keep their focus on domestic over international matters in many sectors. Beyond economics, there are also tensions between supposedly indigenous values and those seen as foreign. Both states have incorporated ideas from regions, states, and social groups from outside their borders into their political discourse but in doing so have given rise to domestic debates over their own identity and place in the world. Chris Ogden notes that India has sought to adopt a philosophy of ‘changing with the times’, taking up ideas from abroad they feel might be useful to their prosperity and peace. This is portrayed as a pragmatic measure. Yet Ian Hall identifies divisions in Indian politics that have arisen over the realist turn towards strategic alliance with the United States. David Armstrong highlights the similarly practical Chinese decision to embrace market reforms in the 1970s but also draws our attention to later debates over what other ideas should be co-opted into Chinese society and the impact these might have on Chinese values and identity. In his chapter, David Kerr records that rapid social and economic change has given rise to fears over Western norms and ideologies and the threat they may pose to Chinese domestic harmony. Global phenomena such as globalization and interdependence, combined with the cascading processes of norm diffusion, seem to threaten the notion that norms can be compartmentalized and selectively applied in the way elites from India and China might have wished. Indeed, the pressures of a more interconnected world are a backdrop to a number of these chapters. The very idea of a rising China and/or India conveys a sense of independent units which are linked but separable from the international society they inhabit. These two states share a common historical perception of autonomy as a mark of sovereignty and international status. In some respects, this continues to shape their attitudes to developments, such as international criminal law, that appear to threaten these assumptions. Thus, Chris Ogden describes India’s promotion of nonalignment as fundamentally about asserting autonomy and self-reliance in contrast to its previous subjection under colonialism. Lat-

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er, David Kerr portrays China’s stance on global norms to be motivated more by a desire to quarantine its society from negative foreign influences rather than a desire to project its own values onto other states. Indeed, Chen Yudan’s discussion of the way Chinese thinkers are reconnecting with past understandings of China’s position vis-à-vis other states—such as the ‘all under heaven’ philosophy which dominated for centuries—is interesting because such concepts are inherently self-limiting. The ‘central kingdom’ system described by Chen is only practicable at the regional level, and even then it is imaginable only with regard to China’s relations with smaller neighbours. Larger states such as Russia and India would not be willing to exhibit the required level of deference and submission. In practice, the idea of constructing a distinct, separable, and autonomous normative space is continually threatened, both from within—via their citizens’ social connections with the wider world—and from outside, as the governments of these states are asked to adjudicate on matters of international societal importance, such as how to respond to the events in Libya in 2011 or Syria from 2012 onwards. Depending on how kindly one interprets inconsistencies in their foreign policy, China and India have been either ambiguous or at times hypocritical in their normative pronouncements. Jacob notes that India has often emphasized sovereignty and nonintervention as moral precepts while at the same time demonstrating a willingness to interfere with the security policies of neighbours such as Nepal, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. In a similar vein, Brown contrasts India’s recent emphasis on noninterference in domestic affairs with its earlier opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Meanwhile, both states are seen by that author as overstating the extent to which European infringements of their sovereignty in the colonial era were alien to their regional norms. Rather, Brown suggests that such transgressions were common, albeit usually committed by the ruling powers in China or India against their weaker neighbours. This raises the importance of history, and its multiple interpretations, to how these states view international society and their place within it. Both are, in fact, not rising so much as resurgent, and memories of lost influence and the indignities of domination by foreign powers are still keenly felt even today. The sense of international society and moralism, as imposed by Western states and used as a means to subjugate the two countries, is something many of the authors in this volume see as resonant in the rhetoric and beliefs of Indian and Chinese domestic policy makers. In each case, their rising power and growing status in international society are leading elites to reconnect with older norms and value systems which are viewed as more authentic than those such as socialism, nationalism, or liberalism, that were imported either under colonialism or after their full entry into the modern states system. In this way, India and China might appear to be forming a nascent challenge to Eurocentric conceptions of the norms of international society.

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Yet an emphasis on history can also undermine the prospects for such a challenge, particularly on a regional basis. David Kerr and David Armstrong both demonstrate that the resurrection of historical grievances can inhibit regional cooperation and conceptions of a common regional identity. This is particularly the case when it comes to China’s relations with Japan. The recent tendency in historical self-examination constructs national narratives over regional ones and as such limits the capacity of either India or China to convey transcendent normative understandings that might appeal to other political communities with different backgrounds. Indeed, when it comes to attempts to playing the role of normative power globally, both India and China are seen as struggling to forge a coherent identity and set of beliefs to which others might be attracted. Ian Hall notes that to Western eyes, Indian efforts to revamp nonalignment along the pluralist, Panchsheel lines of sovereignty, nonaggression and noninterference look less like a radical new vision than a ‘conservative relic’. The assertion of normative difference as the foundational creed of international society is likely to struggle in the face of the connecting and homogenizing processes of globalization and interdependence. Furthermore, Hall argues that while India does benefit from some soft power resources such as radio networks, print media, and social networking, the capacity constraints of its diplomatic service hamper its projection of norms at the global level. Obversely, although Kerr sees China as having extensive positive power to build infrastructure and extend its material reach, it has found it much harder to build the institutions and ideas that would service China’s normative power. Its efforts to embrace the ‘Great Tradition’ are conveyed as about trying to leverage norms to restore China to its position at the top of the civilizational hierarchy. This is problematic, in part because it is hard to see why other states should wish to support a goal that ends with their subordination. There is also a tension between the professed goal of promoting harmony and the more selfinterested and conflictual realist behaviour that often seems to inform practice. As Kerr points out, civilizational identity can ‘evaporate quite quickly’ if state actors scrabble to attain short-term advantages in line with realpolitik thinking. Recalling the introduction’s discussion of the ranking of states within international society, we can see that some of these processes are evident in how India and China promote global norms and how well these efforts are received. Both Ian Hall and Chris Ogden note that India’s early success in representing itself as the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement was spearheaded by Nehru and declined with his death—highlighting the importance of charismatic leadership to norm promotion. They also hint at the potential for Narendra Modi to advance India’s image in the world via his more extroverted personality compared with his predecessor’s. Yet there are cultural biases at work in terms of which leadership

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characteristics are seen as admirable, and some characteristics which play well in Europe or the United States may be less resonant in Asia. In China, while Xi Jinping is generally seen as more dynamic and media literate than his predecessor, Armstrong points out that the focus of his normative agenda has been an internal one of clamping down on corruption (or at least being seen to do so) rather than seeking changes abroad. With regard to the other forms of ranking outlined earlier, none of the authors in this volume disputes the sense of China and India as emergent powers in material terms. However, they do highlight a series of problems in how these states perceive the hierarchy of international society and their place within it. As noted above, many of the authors in this volume see national prestige as an important motivating factor in Indian and Chinese foreign policy. Thus, Jacob describes Indian policy makers’ wish to reduce incoming aid despite continuing poverty as motivated by the desire to shake off the image of India as a dependent state. In the following chapter, Chen Yuden sets out the importance Chinese politicians place on China’s standing up and experiencing rejuvenation after a century of interference from outside powers. Clearly, both states want to be respected by other actors in international society and to achieve a position of privilege within international society. But a problem seems to lie in this ideological attachment to autonomy. Emphasizing their separation from other states and normative developments in international society distances them from the collective process of norm generation and diffusion. Thus, Chris Ogden describes Indian scepticism over security regimes—a posture that prevents India from having real influence on how global norms in relation to security are interpreted and applied. The fact that it explains such opposition as based on a belief that security regimes are exclusive and so inhibit wider cooperation still leaves India outside the decision-making circle. Meanwhile, China’s ‘pursuit of greatness’, in Chen’s words, carries with it problematic assumptions of regional domination that, however benign, are likely to be resisted by China’s neighbours. According to Martin Jacques, a prominent commentator on Chinese affairs, Chinese policy makers ‘have long had a hierarchical view of the world, with China at the top. And the rise of China is likely to accentuate these views’ (Jacques 2012). Notions of peaceful rise and great harmony have enabled China to achieve a material prominence in world affairs, but if they wish to reform international society’s normative agenda and gain the support of other states for their leadership, they will have to explain what public goods a hierarchical structure with China at its summit would bring. Armstrong notes the deliberate attempt by some Chinese policy makers to avoid the mistakes of the Soviet Union, with its hostility to US power and bullying attitude to weaker states, in favour of a more magnanimous set of bilateral relations. Yet its territorial disputes over the South China Sea have undermined this impression.

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India, too, needs to articulate more coherently how its greater prominence could serve the normative interest of international society’s members. Its participation in global clubs such as IBSA and the BRICS gives India a degree of status and negotiating power (Cooper and Thakur 2014), but their exclusive nature contradicts earlier Indian assertions of the norms of equality and unity. Moreover, the sense that IBSA in particular represents a veto coalition more than a representative group trying to improve global governance and bring about positive normative change hampers the extent to which these clubs could be a springboard to future influence. This recalls the discussion in the introduction about the need for acceptance from other societal actors before a state is able to exert normative influence as a great power. An important part of this acceptance is recognition that a state is willing to bear the burdens of its exalted position in the global hierarchy (Bull 1977). Thus far, India and China have identified their particular contribution to global peace as their efforts to assist international peace support operations as well as maritime antipiracy operations. But this does not address the major policy problem of what to do with those actors, from bad leaders to insurgent groups, and even, arguably, powers like Russia, that might threaten international peace and security. To confront these challenges requires an acknowledgement that societies are underpinned by coercion and those transgressing a society’s norms have to be subject to some form of deterrent punishment, whether it be sanctions, social exclusion, derecognition, or military force. Both states have been ambiguous on this point. China’s triple veto of action on Syria has done little to help move that conflict to a resolution and has, arguably, paved the way for the rise of the Islamic State. Yet it has apparently offered military assistance to Iraq. Meanwhile, Jacob notes that India was prepared to vote against the Assad regime in Syria in 2012. But its offensive military capabilities are not utilized to help stabilize the region or compel an end to conflict. In this way, neither state seems overly willing to enforce norms through overt coercion. This reluctance may be why the concept of normative power is appealing. Ian Hall notes that this originates within the literature on Europe’s influence in global affairs and conveys a sense that it is possible to shape the beliefs and outcomes of other actors in international society through persuasion and attraction rather than the coercive use of force. In the densely institutionalized liberal order of contemporary world politics, this might seem possible. However, Hall asserts that behind this image is a lack of clarity about what norms India might wish to promote and how they would be upheld. Moreover, some important norms, such as human rights, are ultimately maintained by force. The writers of NonAlignment 2.0 recognize this, but as the only example they offer is India’s own intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, it is hard to avoid the sense that using force to protect human rights is only justifiable when India

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does it. In David Kerr’s account, China acknowledges the need for coercion but associates it with core national interests such as domestic peace and territorial integrity more than global norms. In short, the previous chapters identify real ambiguities in India and China’s normative agenda and praxis. Despite the increasing commentary predicting a normative shift towards Asian or Chinese norms, neither state has constructed a coherent alternative vision of how international society should be structured, what functions its institutions would be designed to serve, or what costs they would be willing to bear to uphold this new arrangement. What we can see is a self-conscious debate in both states beginning to emerge over the configuration of domestic values. Important issues, such as the relationship between the state and the citizenry, the distribution of wealth, the interpretation of national and regional history, and the influence of transnational social beliefs, are all being worked out in real time as economic growth proceeds. Out of this discussion is likely to emerge a normative agenda for each state’s foreign policy that will have to provide some answers for the policy problems of future international society. It is a process that will involve considerable interaction with, and interpretation of, regional and global ideas, norms, and practices. China and India’s increasing material power will not dictate the direction of their normative agendas but does create problems for the continuance of circumspect, inward–looking, and narrowly self-interested policy making. The members of international society expect those states with greater resources and privileges to provide public goods and shoulder more of the burden of responsibility for upholding global norms.

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Index

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 66 anarchical society, 85 Angell, Norman, 74, 87 ‘architecture’, of international order, 16, 129, 130, 132, 144 ASEAN. See Association of South East Asian Nations ASEAN+1, 124 ASEAN+6, 123 ASEAN Plus Three (APT), 122 Asian century, 1, 15, 99, 109, 117–126; and power, 108; receding, 124 Asian identity, 2–3, 95, 108–109, 117, 120–121, 122, 123, 124, 125–126, 148; history, 118; and normative power, 108; and structural power, 107, 125; rising, 1, 107 ‘Asianization’. See Asian identity; China and identity; India and identity Asian universal norms, 124 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), 122–123 balance of power, 57, 73, 93, 131 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 22, 89, 98, 101 ‘borderless world’, 130. See also interconnectedness; complexity The Boxer Uprising, 76 BRIC+3, 131 BRICs, 131, 145n3 BRICS, 3, 8, 54, 60, 66–69, 131; and India, 14, 67–68, 152; and liberal sovereignty, 143 China: and ‘central kingdom’, 40, 41, 149; and domestic issues, 83; and

domestic reform, 74, 79, 80–83; and economy, 1, 47, 76, 77–78; and foreign policy, 15, 49, 79, 84–85, 110, 111–113, 112, 114, 119; and great power status, 84, 150, 151; and human rights, 47, 77, 79, 87; and identity, 15, 51, 113–115, 121–126, 148, 150; and India, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11; and military power, 84; and nonintervention, 76, 85; and normative power, 116, 117, 150; and ‘pragmatic nationalism’, 86; and press freedom, 77, 79; and region, 15, 87; rising, 1, 2, 76; and Russia relations, 40, 45, 87, 118; and Western norms, 15, 76–77, 79, 81, 83, 86, 142; and role in international society, 75, 85–88, 114, 115, 116, 125–126, 141 The China dream, 115–116, 117, 125 ‘Chindia’, 3. See also China and India Chinese civil society, 110 Chinese embassy bombing, 48 Chinese national interest, 114 Chinese sovereignty : 1900-present, 46–51; 1949-1970s, 43–46; conceptualisation of, 13, 39, 41–42, 49–50, 51; economic, 47; jurisdictional, 48; late Qing dynasty1949, 40–43. See also Qing dynasty Communist Party of China (CCP), 22, 75, 77, 80, 109, 114, 118, 140 Community of Democracies, 100 complexity, 73, 130. See also interconnectedness; borderless world Confucianism, 15, 51, 75, 112 Confucius Institutes, 79 cosmopolitanism, 42, 73–74, 85, 103, 113

173

174

Index

Development Partnership Administration (DPA), 24 Doha Round, 6, 65, 102 DPA. See Development Partnership Administration Eastphalia, 1 economic interdependence, 73, 86. See also interconnectedness emerging powers. See rising powers English School Theory, 4, 103 ‘ethical realism’, 111 European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 91, 135 European states system, 139 European Union (EU), 86, 91–92, 136, 137, 152 ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, 44, 51, 95, 103, 141, 150 foreign policy. See China and foreign policy; India and foreign policy Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma), 58, 94 GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 47, 52n8, 64–66 global governance, legality, 137 great powers, 2, 4, 6, 53, 54, 56, 58, 63, 64, 66, 67–68, 94, 97, 111, 118, 120, 122, 124, 152 The Great Tradition, 112, 113, 115, 150 hegemonial regional orders, 73 Hobbes, Thomas, 90, 133 human rights and China, 47, 77, 79, 87; and emerging powers, 11, 139, 142, 143, 144; and EU, 91, 136, 137; and India, 30, 33, 63, 100, 103, 143, 152; and UN, 30, 134, 135; legality, 135 IBSA, 14, 54, 60, 67–69, 152 identity. See Asian identity, China and identity; India and identity Ikenberry, G. John, 5, 60, 142–143, 145n1

India : and BRICS, 60; and decolonization, 30; and democracy promotion, 33, 99–100; and economy, 1, 34, 64–66, 101; and foreign policy, 23, 57, 59, 68–69, 89, 97, 98, 99, 101–102, 149; and global institutions, 60–61, 61–62, 101; and global regimes, 61; and great power status, 56–57, 68–69; and human rights, 30, 33, 63, 100, 103, 143, 152; and IBSA, 54, 60; and identity, 36, 121, 148; and International Criminal Court, 62; and international norms, 93, 100–101; and intervention, 33; and nationalism, 98; and national security, 30; and nonalignment, 94, 148. See also Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) ; and G8, 66; and sovereignty, 12–13, 19, 20, 20–21, 21, 22, 25, 25–28, 32, 35–36, 36; and United Nations (UN), 62; and United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 63–64; as normative power, 15, 89, 90, 99, 102; as norm entrepreneur, 14, 55, 96; as nuclear stakeholder, 31; constitutional structure of, 92–93; rise of, 1, 2, 60; role in international society, 25, 34–35, 53, 56, 57–58, 59–60, 61, 66–69, 89–90 Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), 94 Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), 94 Indian diaspora, 24 India-Pakistan bilateral relations, 31 India-US bilateral relations, 21–22 Indo-Pak peace process, 31 institutional reform, 10, 23, 99 interconnectedness, 73, 148. See also complexity; interdependence interdependence, 74, 88, 150. See also interconnectedness; complexity International Court of Justice, 136 International Criminal Court (ICC), 5, 62, 135, 137 International Criminal Law (ICL), 136 international norms, description of, 54–55

Index international order : changes to foundations, 16; description of, 129; post-war, 141; and India, 36 international society, 1, 4, 5, 6, 53, 149; and emerging powers, 4, 140–141, 147, 149, 152 Islamic State, 152 Kyoto Treaty, 5 leadership characteristics, 6, 150 liberalism, 5, 72, 149, 152. See also liberal world order liberal world order, 5, 62, 149, 152. See also liberalism Libya, 149; NATO intervention in, 136; and Arab League, 138; and R2P, 138; and regime change, 11 Like Minded Group (LMG), 65 Lord Macartney ‘kowtow’ to Emperor Qianlong, 40–41 Luard, Evan, 6, 7 Mandela, Nelson, 87. See also truth and reconciliation Manners, Ian, 90–92 Maoism, 75, 98 Marxism, 98 Marxism-Leninism, 75 material power. See power May Fourth Movement, 76 Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA), 24 ‘modified Nehruvianism’, 98 Modi, Narendra, 101–102, 150 MOIA. See Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs Mughal Empire, 21, 29 NAM. See Non-Aligned Movement National Democratic Alliance, 90 Nehru, Pandit Jawaharlal, 15, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 56, 57–58, 62, 89–90, 93–97, 99, 103, 141, 150; and antirealist principles, 93; and international norms, 94–96; and worldview, 19, 34, 62, 90, 97 ‘neomedievalism’, 73, 86

175

network-based cooperation, 143–144. See also interconnectedness ‘new China’, 42, 43–44, 109 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 59, 61, 97 NIEO. See New International Economic Order NonAlignment 2.0, 98–101, 152 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 58, 61, 95, 97, 141, 150 non-intervention, 133, 134 normative power. See power opium wars, 41, 42, 75 ‘outlaw state’, 6 ‘Panchsheel’. See Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence polarity, 87, 103, 129 power : coercive, 92; conceptions of, 129–130; cultural, 111; material, 4, 7, 72, 131, 147, 151, 153; military, 84, 130; normative, 15, 89, 90, 90–91, 99, 102, 105–106, 107, 108, 116, 117, 150, 152; relational, 106–107; soft, 79, 111–113; structural, 106–107, 107, 125; power transition theory, 10, 71–72, 107, 147 Qing dynasty, 13, 39, 40, 42, 47 ‘the Quint’, 66 regional institution building, 122–124 regionalism, 5, 12, 16, 35, 36, 39, 40, 58, 59–60, 63, 66, 73, 87, 109, 121–124, 149, 150 responsibility to protect (R2P), 2, 3, 11, 26, 64, 87, 100, 101, 130, 135, 136, 137–138, 143, 145, 145n6 rising powers, 2, 3, 11, 71, 105–106, 131, 139, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150 Russia, 3, 7, 11, 71, 122, 124, 131, 137, 138, 143, 149 SCO. See Shanghai Cooperation Organization self-help, realist notion of, 132 Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, 119

176

Index

Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 87, 119 Sinicization, 112, 117, 126 Sino-Japanese relations, 76, 84, 119, 150 socialism, retreat of, 115 ‘socialization’, 86 soft power. See power sovereign states system, 132–135 sovereignty and emerging powers, 138–142, 144–145, 147; and human rights, 137; and international criminal law, 136; and security, 28; and UN Charter, 133; as responsibility, 136, 138, 144–145; as symbolic, 147; historically, 148 Strange, Susan, 73, 106–107 Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh negotiations, 21 structural power. See power Syria, 149; UNSC resolution on, 3, 152. See also UNSC, Resolution on Syria ‘tied aid’, 23 Treaty on European Union (TEU), 91 TRIPS. See the Agreement on TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights truth and reconciliation, 87. See also Mandela, Nelson UN and human rights, 30, 134, 135 UN and state recognition, 141 ‘unequal sovereigns’, 6 United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 6, 17n3, 23, 32–33, 61, 62, 63–64, 138 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 91, 133, 135

universal jurisdiction, 136 UNSC Resolution 1973, 138. See also Libya, NATO intervention in; Libya and R2P UNSC, Resolution on Syria, 3, 152. See also Syria, UNSC resolution on United States (US) : and decline, 103, 107; and foreign policy, capacity of, 6; and military power, 130; and pivot to Asia, 84, 107; and limits of power, 5 utopianism, 99 ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ (the world is one family), 57, 101–102 Waltz, Kenneth, 129 Weiwei, Ai, 80 Western decline, 1, 7 Westphalia, Peace of, 132, 133, 134 Westphalian sovereignty, 32; and China and India, 139 world financial system, 73 World Trade Organization (WTO), 64–66 Xiaobo, Liu, 77 Xiaoping, Deng, 76 Xi, Jinping, 51, 83, 109, 110, 115–116, 125, 151 ‘yugadharma’ (changing with the times), 57, 148 Zedong, Mao, 43, 75 Zhonghua Minzu (peoples of the central civilization), 113