Constructing India as a Similar Enough Other: The Bush Administration's Strategic Narrative of the US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates how senior Bush administration officials publicly legitimized the administration's proposal for a United States-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement in 2005–2006, in their efforts to get the proposal approved by Congress. Adopting a critical constructivist approach, I argue that the Bush administration's proposed nuclear deal with India, a nonparty to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), clashed with, and destabilized, official United States self-identity representations as a creator/upholder of the global nuclear nonproliferation regime. The Bush administration's efforts to mediate this conflict took the form of a strategic issue narrative, to create a discursive “moment of possibility” for the proposed policy shift. This narrative drew on existing United States discourses of India's subject positions and naturalized the latter as a Similar Enough Other deserving exception under United States, and global, nonproliferation regimes. The narrative aligned these constructions of India, and of the proposed deal as an “unprecedented opportunity” for the United States to forge closer strategic relations with India, with representations of a global order as shifting toward Asia. In doing so, it reoriented United States-India relations toward a highly desirable future, contingent on congressional approval of the proposed deal. The analysis makes an important conceptual contribution to the literature on strategic narratives, and critical constructivist scholarship more broadly, by illuminating how policy actors use strategic issue narratives, and the construction of specific subject positions therein, to redraw the boundaries of acceptable action vis-à-vis an Other that, at first glance, seems precluded in the prevailing normative-discursive environment.