Peculiar chauvinism or strategic calculation? Explaining the negotiating strategy of a rising India

International Affairs

Volumn 82, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 59-76

  Narlikar, Amrita ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645131933     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2006.00515.x     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Robert Chase, Emily Hill and Paul Kennedy, The pivotal states: a new framework for US foreign policy in the developing world (New York: Norton, 1999).
2. A Goldman Sachs report argues that over 'the next 50 years, Brazil, Russia, India and China - the BRICs economies - could become a much larger force in the world economy ... If things go right, in less than 40 years, the BRICs economies together could be larger than the G6 in US dollar terms'. See Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, Dreaming with the BRICs: the path to 2050, Global Economics Paper no. 99 (New York: Goldman Sachs, Oct. 2003).
3. C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: the shaping of India's foreign policy (New Delhi: Viking, 2003), pp. 260-63.
4. Robert Keohane, After hegemony: cooperation and discord in the world political economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
5. It could be argued that the costs of toughness have increased further in the post-Cold War hegemonic order. In the absence of the balancing alternatives that were available under bipolarity, and as countries fall over each other to establish their credentials as law-abiding members of multilateral organizations, the costs of staying out of the system become much higher. Lloyd Gruber provides a detailed argument on the costs of going it alone in his article 'Power politics and the free trade bandwagon', Comparative Political Studies 34: 7, Sept. 2001, pp. 703-41.
6. In his book India: emerging power (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2001), Stephen Cohen aptly entitles his chapter on Indian diplomacy 'The India that can't say yes'.
7. See Andrew Hurrell's article, 'Hegemony, liberalism and global order: what space for would-be Great-Powers', in this issue of International Affairs.
8. Hurrell, 'Hegemony, liberalism and global order'.
9. For instance, most civil servants in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry are drawn from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), which prides itself on being an 'All-India Service'. This means that members of the IAS serve both the central and state governments, and are trained accordingly. Civil servants in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in contrast, are drawn from the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), which is a Delhi-based 'central service'. Even though members of both are recruited through the same examination system of the Union Public Service Commission, the IAS and the IFS have each developed their own unique esprit de corps, and until recently coordination between the two was minimal. On the IFS, see K. S. Rana, Inside diplomacy (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2000),
10. and J. Bandyopadhyaya, The making of India's foreign policy: determinants, institutions, processes and personalities (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1970);
11. on the IAS, see David Potter, India's political administrators: from ICS to IAS (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). India's nuclear establishment, in turn, differs from the trade bureaucracy as well as the foreign ministry in the predominance of a small coterie of scientists who have close access to the Prime Minister;
12. see Deepa Ollapally, 'Mixed motives in India's search for nuclear status', Asian Survey 41: 6, 2001, pp. 925-42.
13. John Odell, Negotiating the world economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
14. Thomas Franck, Fairness in international law and institutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
15. Amrita Narlikar, 'Fairness in international trade negotiations', paper presented at conference on 'Political economy of fairness and globalization', Murphy Institute, Tulane University, 1-2 April 2005.
16. Quoted by Karin Kock, International trade policy and the GATT, 1945-67 (Stockholm: Almqvist Wiskell, 1969).
17. The merits of pursuing such a strategy of import-substituted industrialization present a different question, which lies beyond the scope of this article.
18. The core, hard-line members of this group were Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, India, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Peru and Tanzania.
19. Its original members were Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tanzania and Uganda. By the time of the Doha ministerial meeting it had 14 members.
20. Amrita Narlikar and John Odell, 'The strict distributive strategy for a bargaining coalition: the Like Minded Group in the World Trade Organization', in John Odell, ed., Negotiating trade: developing countries in the WTO and NAFTA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2006).
21. The original proposal by the coalition was signed by 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Venezuela.
22. Amrita Narlikar and Diana Tussie, 'The G20 at the Cancún Ministerial: developing countries and their evolving coalitions in the WTO', World Economy 27: 7, July 2004, pp. 947-66.
23. From the perspective of developing countries, Cancún represented the culmination of years of learning and adaptation in the WTO, in the refusal of developing countries to accept yet another bargain that effectively worked to their disadvantage. For instance, Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister, wrote: 'The real dilemma that many of us had to face was whether it was sensible to accept an agreement that would essentially consolidate the policies of the two subsidizing superpowers-with very modest gains and even some steps backward (the new broader definition of "blue box" subsidies to accommodate the US for instance)-and then have to wait for another 15, or 18 years to launch a new round, after having spent precious bargaining chips': Wall Street Journal, 25 Sept. 2003.
24. Quoted by Ziba Moshaver, Nuclear weapons proliferation in the Indian subcontinent (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 108-9.
25. Ollapally, 'Mixed motives'.
26. Sumit Ganguly, 'India's pathway to Pokhran II: the prospects and sources of New Delhi's nuclear weapons program', International Security 23: 4, Spring 1999, pp. 148-77.
27. Moshaver, Nuclear weapons proliferation, p. 110.
28. Quoted by Moshaver, Nuclear weapons proliferation, p. 112.
29. Ganguly, 'India's pathway to Pokhran II', p. 155.
30. For details on the Indian opposition to the NPT, see Moshaver, Nuclear weapons proliferation, pp. 114-18.
31. Ganguly, 'India's pathway to Pokhran II'.
32. Brahma Chellany writes: 'The CTBT made India acutely aware of the technical imperatives of its long-held nuclear option, and of its closing opportunity to test its prototype weapons. By seeking forcibly to "capture" India through a coercive entry-into-force provision, and making a thinly veiled threat of sanctions if India refused, the CTBT left New Delhi with little choice.' See Chellany, 'After the tests: India's options', Survival 40: 4, Winter 1998-9, pp. 93-111.
33. Ganguly, 'India's pathway to Pokhran II';
34. Baldev Raj Nayar, India and the major powers after Pokhran II (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2001).
35. UN Security Council Resolution 1172, S/Res/1172 (1998), 6 June 1998.
36. Cohen, India, p. 74.
37. Cohen, India, p. 308.
38. Julius Sen, Negotiating trade agreements with India: the reality below the water line, SAIIA Trade Policy Briefing no. 8, Nov. 2004 (South African Institute for International Affairs).
39. Ollapally, 'Mixed motives', p. 940.
40. Robert Dahl, 'Can international organizations be democratic? A skeptic's view', in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, eds, Democracy's edges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
41. Telephone interview with Indian negotiator, 21 Oct. 2003.
42. Interviews, New Delhi, March 2004; S. Narayan, 'Trade policy making in India', paper presented at workshop on 'Trade policy making in developing countries', International Trade Policy Unit, London School of Economics, 25 May, available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ internationalTradePolicyUnit/ Events/May2005/IndiaPaper.doc, accessed 12 June 2005.
43. The lack of domestic opposition to India's negotiating positions in the WTO, despite the apparently greater involvement by businesses in the policy-making process, may be partly explained by the nature of India's liberalization, which continues to be state-led (see Suma Athreye, 'Trade policy, industrialization and growth in India', in Simon Bromley, Maureen Mackintosh, William Brown and Marc Wuyts, eds, Making the international: economic interdependence and political order (London: Open University/Pluto Press, 2004);
44. Atul Kohli, State-directed development: political power and industrialization in the global periphery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
45. As some of our interviewees indicated, established big business may have more to gain from working hand-in-hand with the government and continuing to reap the benefits of state-led liberalization. Except for a small number in areas such as software, the few entrepreneurs who do have a liberalizing agenda have low risk thresholds and minimal safety nets to withstand the potentially disruptive effects of liberalization. As a result, despite increased participation, actual inputs by business into the policy-making process are limited.
46. Interviews, New Delhi, March 2004; Andrew Hurrell and Amrita Narlikar, 'A new politics of confrontation: developing countries at Cancún and beyond?', paper presented at DESTIN LSE seminar series on 8 March 2005, available at http://www.crisisstates.com/News/seminars4.htmhttp:// www.crisisstates.com/News/seminars4.htm, accessed 15 June 2005.
47. Cohen, India, p. 70.
48. Hurrell and Narlikar, 'A new politics of confrontation'.
49. Cohen, India, p. 273.
50. Cohen, India, p. 283.
51. Interview with a member of the Indian delegation, Geneva, 20 May 2003.
52. Interviews, New Delhi, March 2004.
53. Cohen, India, p. 52.
54. Interview with a member of the Indian Foreign Service, Brasilia, 18 April 2005.
55. http://www.indianembassy.org/press_release/2005/June/31.htm, accessed 18 Aug. 2005.
56. Tills particular phrase was used by a former developing-country ambassador: telephone interview, 21 Oct. 2003.
57. Narlikar and Odell, 'The strict distributive strategy for a bargaining coalition';
58. Narlikar and Tussie, 'The G20 at the Cancún Ministerial'. Note, however, that even a coalition of developing countries with considerable bargaining power and a credible threat to block will need to make some concessions, i.e. use a mixed strategy with some integrative moves, if agreement is to be reached.
59. Amelia Gentleman, 'New era on defence for India and US', International Herald Tribune, 30 June 2005.
60. Narlikar, 'Fairness in international trade negotiations'.