Identity and world order in India’s post-Cold War foreign policy discourse

Thorsten Wojczewski

doi:10.1080/01436597.2018.1552079

Abstract

This article examines the dominant conception of world order in India’s post-Cold War foreign policy discourse. Drawing on a poststructuralist, discourse-theoretical framework, I argue that the discourse uses foreign policy and world order as sites for the (re-)production of India’s identity by placing India into a system of differences that constitutes ‘what India is’. The article shows that India’s foreign policy discourse frames world order in accordance with India’s own national experiences and thus seeks to upheave India’s identity to a position from where it can represent the universal: a global political community. This notion of Indian Exceptionalism constitutes the affective dimension of the discourse that obscures the absence of an extra-discursive foundation on which national identities could be grounded by endowing the Self with an imaginary essence and seemingly unique qualities.

Highlights

The rise of so-called emerging powers such as China, India or Brazil is believed to transform the international system and to pose a challenge to the Western-liberal world order.[1]
By studying how identities shape foreign policy, constructivist-inspired accounts run the risk of essentialising the concept of identity and re-producing nationalistic, ethnocentric accounts of world politics which often come uncomfortably close to the official foreign policy orientations of the respective countries – a tendency, as critics point out,[9] that we find in ‘Post-Western international relations (IR)’10 in general and that might indicate the need for a more critical approach
It sought to contribute to a ‘Post-Western IR’ by analysing Indian textual sources and the understandings of world order constituted therein

Summary

Introduction

The rise of so-called emerging powers such as China, India or Brazil is believed to transform the international system and to pose a challenge to the Western-liberal world order.[1]. The discourse simultaneously constructs the international system as a ‘threatening outside’, which challenges India’s pluralist identity, be it through inter-civilisational conflicts, religious fundamentalism or the demand to join particular power blocs (as during the Cold War), and uses this ‘threatening outside’ as a common negation to re-produce the notion of India as an inherently pluralist country that can allegedly accommodate differences and make an important contribution to world order This ‘threatening outside’ is symbolised in the post-Nehruvian discourse by Pakistan and China in particular which serve as significant spatial-political Others for the self-constitution of India as a pluralist, democratic and non-violent actor. By scapegoating a range of Others, the discourse can preserve a close link between India’s identity and foreign policy and prevent a dislocation of this identity

Conclusion

Notes on contributor