The term 'Indo-Pacific', recently in fashion, describes a supposedly vital and contiguous strategic arena encompassing the eastern Indian and Western Pacific oceans. Accompanying the concept is the notion of a revived partnership: the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the United States, Australia, India and Japan (or 'Quad'). One of these countries is not like the others. India's maritime interests and strategy sit uneasily with those of the other Quad powers. India's is an Indian Ocean vision, rather than an Indo-Pacific vision. Bound by the strategic primacy of the Indian Ocean and by the constraints on its sea-power projection, in the short term, India's engagement with the Indo-Pacific framework will remain largely diplomatic, economic and rhetorical. India's core strategic focus lies west of the Strait of Malacca. The return of the Quad The Quad, previously initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and discontinued after the withdrawal of Australia under then-prime minister Kevin Rudd, was revived at a meeting of senior diplomats from the four nations on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Manila in November 2017, resulting in parallel commitments to maintain a free and open order in the Indo-Pacific. 1 The Indo-Pacific construct is partly material, reflecting a vast increase in activity along the sea lines of communication that link the two oceanic regions in trade and energyand in turn, it is partly strategic, as this greater interdependence brings greater vulnerability and risk. Yet the currency of the Indo-Pacific idea lies also in its framing as a space of shared values. Prime Minister Abe's now widely cited 'Confluence of the Two Seas' speech, delivered before the Indian parliament in 2007, spoke not only of the 'dynamic coupling' of the Indian and Pacific oceans, but also of their identity as 'seas of freedom and of prosperity'. 2 Australia's 2017 foreign-policy White Paper referred to a vision of an 'open, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, in which the rights of all states are respected'. 3 US President Donald Trump's five-nation tour of Asia late last year was punctuated by his frequent invocation of the phrase 'free and open Indo-Pacific region'. 4 And India's press release in response to the November quadrilateral meeting declared that 'a free, open, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region serves the long-term interests of all countries in the region and of the world at large'. 5 Two ideas are implicit in this values-based framing: one about China, the other about India. Firstly, despite claims from the White House that the term is 'certainly not' 6 an effort to contain China's influence, it is clear that the Indo-Pacific construct is a response to perceptions that China is deploying infrastructure development and investments in the region for geopolitical gain, and that Beijing is, at best, weakly committed to a rules-based international order, particularly in the maritime domain. Secondly, in a way that the term 'Asia-Pacific' did not, 'Indo-Pacific' explici...
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Pragmatism'-and its promise as a medium of change-has a distinctive connotation in the context of India's foreign policy. In the post-Cold War era, a number of scholars within and outside India's foreign policy establishment have both identified and championed greater 'pragmatism'. 1 A 'pragmatic' foreign policy implies a rejection of India's earlier reliance on Nehruvian 'idealism' or 'moral posturing' and, instead, a focus on power and material interests. Many argue that 'idealism', indelibly associated with the premiership of Jawaharlal Nehru, led to major foreign policy failures 2 as well as the entrenchment of redundant policies. 3 Thus, post-Cold War pragmatism is warmly welcomed by these scholars. Indeed, they argue that pragmatism represents the approach that India must follow in order to become a 'normal power that is no longer focused on transforming the world', and to emerge on the world stage as a materially powerful state in the twenty-first century. 4 The discourse on pragmatism in Indian foreign policy-consistent with the post-Cold War scholarship and most evident in sections of India's print media-has experienced a resurgence since the assumption of the premiership by Narendra Modi in May 2014. Modi's election was heralded as a seminal moment for India's foreign policy. 5 As one commentator pronounced: 'There is little question that Modi's foreign policy constitutes a departure from India's stances of the past.' 6 These predictions of change have been based on hopes and alleged signs that Modi's * The authors' work originates in research funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. The authors would like to thank the participants in the Indian foreign policy workshops at the University of Oxford and Boston University, the anonymous reviewers, Rohan Mukherjee, and the editorial team at International Affairs for their valuable inputs to this article. 1 We discuss this literature at length in a later section of this article. 2 Such as India's defeat in the 1962 border war with China. 3 Such as India's policy of non-alignment. 4 C.
China and India, as rising powers, have been proactive in seeking status as nuclear responsibles. Since the 1990s they have sought to demonstrate conformity with intersubjectively accepted understandings of nuclear responsibility within the global nuclear order, and have also sought recognition on the basis of particularistic practices of nuclear restraint. This article addresses two puzzles. First, nuclear restraint is at the centre of the pursuit of global nuclear order, so why have China and India not received recognition from influential members of the nuclear order for the full spectrum of their restraint-based behaviours? Second, why do China and India nonetheless persist with these behaviours? We argue that the conferral of status as a nuclear responsible is a politicised process shaped by the interests, values, and perceptions of powerful stakeholder states in the global nuclear order. China’s and India’s innovations are not incorporated into the currently accepted set of responsible nuclear behaviours because, indirectly, they pose a strategic, political, and social challenge to these states. However, China’s and India’s innovations are significant as an insight into their identity-projection and preferred social roles as distinctive rising powers, and as a means of introducing new, if nascent, ideas into non-proliferation practice and governance.
Ambitions for India to enact the role of vishwaguru or ‘world teacher’ are a conspicuous feature of foreign policy discourse under contemporary Hindu nationalist rule in India. This discourse, and India's foreign-policy practice, engage the international realm with a puzzling intensity given Hindu nationalism's inward-looking and exclusionary emphasis on majoritarian cultural unity. In this article, I leverage International Relations scholarship on social closure, international order and recognition struggles to examine the historical lineages and recent articulations of nineteenth-century religious reformist ideas about India's world mission and spiritual superiority. I argue that different Indian civilizational imaginaries across time produce a pedagogical imperative, aimed at the transformation of global social hierarchies. Centred on a quest to assert social superiority and remake the terms of recognition, any given vishwaguru project nonetheless relies on international recognition. The recent domestic and diasporic appeal of Hindu nationalist foreign policy stems from how it appears to intervene to rectify the longstanding misrecognition of India. In this context, western liberal states' instrumental recognition of India as a democratic partner and defender of liberal order in the face of a ‘China challenge’ works to endorse and bolster the vishwaguru project of India's current domestic political moment.
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