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Roundtable: Rising Powers and the International Order
Perceptions of international order are first and foremost reflections of a country's domestic structures and orientations. For much of its post-independence history since 1947, anti-colonial nationalism has defined India's identity. For more than four decades this nationalism was expressed through political nonalignment and economic protectionism. Successive leaders believed that this was the best way to preserve "strategic autonomy" in a world system they viewed as constructed to promote Western, especially American, interests and values. India was hardly a fan of global capitalism or the security order underwritten by U.S. military dominance, and was one of the least globally integrated major states. This remained India's international posture until 1991, when the country was hit by twin strategic and economic crises.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the cold war meant that India lost its closest strategic partner overnight. Simultaneously, India faced a massive balance of payments crisis that finally drove home the message that its inward-looking and semi-autarchic economic model had run out of steam. These external pressures had a substantial impact on India's economic outlook, which became more open to the ideas of liberal markets and globalization. Since then, India has steadily moved to integrate its economy into the liberal order in service of becoming a developed country. At the same time, as it sought to achieve great-power status, India shifted its foreign policy away from nonalignment toward much greater engagement with the United States.
India now finds itself in the paradoxical position of finally having recognized some of the benefits of the post-World War II liberal international order just as that order is fraying at the edges: a wave of populist movements in Europe and the United States and an unpredictable economically weakened hegemon have contributed to the unraveling. India's commitment to the current order, however, remains both instrumental and partial; it has not come around to seeing the current liberal international order constructed by the West as an end in itself, and is unlikely to do so. Why is that? I suggest that India's deep-seated postcolonial identity and near obsession with autonomy normatively limit its acceptance of the status quo in multilateral forums dominated by the West, and circumscribe the extent of possible...