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At the second edition of the Raisina Dialogue — an annual international geopolitics conference ORF co-organises with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — in January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a comprehensive inaugural address. Modi spoke of the key drivers of his active foreign policy and, as expected from such a speech, touched on the major international relations achievements of his government. But it was a single line from his speech, amplified in a tweet of his, that has had the commentariat perplexed.
The Prime Minister, by way of enunciating the broad principles that drives the way his government looks at the world and India’s place in it, noted that “self interest alone is neither in our culture nor in our behaviour”. The implication was that there was more to his foreign policy than a selfish pursuit of material prosperity and national security. Even individuals who have applauded Modi’s vigorous pursuit of India’s interests abroad found themselves asking: What is there to pursue beyond national interest? And why does India find itself repeating the same liberal line that its foreign policy is also a force for greater global good?
This was not the first time that this government has professed a “national interest plus” orientation for Indian foreign policy. Soon after coming to power in 2014, the Modi government spoke of “enlightened national interest” as the driving principle of its foreign policy.
President Pranab Mukherjee, speaking on behalf of his new Cabinet in June 2014, described this concept as a combination of values and pragmatism, deployed towards “mutually beneficial” international relationships.
One way to explain such statements is to view them as rhetorical sugar coating the pursuit of self-interest for international consumption, much like the way the Chinese talk of “win-win relationships”—it sounds good but does not mean much. But taken at its face value, such assertions pose a special problem for those who had hoped that Modi’s principles and actions will serve as a template for conservative governance. And a conservative foreign policy differs significantly from that of a liberal orientation in that the pursuit of national interest is the sole objective of the same.
The conceptual underpinnings of such a foreign policy are provided by a body of theory and practice called realism. A realist orientation for Indian foreign policy will be premised on the fact that force and diplomacy go hand in hand and coercion is often a valuable instrument of statecraft. It will be premised by the fact that international law is of limited use when it comes to advancing national interests. It takes as a fact that peace can only be secured by balance-of-power arrangements. And above all, it suggests that national sovereignty—and the preponderance of sovereign power — is the only absolute in the international system, to be preserved at any cost.
This essay will examine the links between conservatism and various schools of realism. While I will sketch what such a putative conservative-realist foreign policy for India means in practice, this essay is primarily an exercise in highlighting intellectual history. The Indian Right, over the last few years, has set out to define itself in terms of ideas which will then provide policy directions. The economists among them have been quite successful in doing so, but foreign policy scholars have generally shied away from this exercise. This essay is a first pass at redressing this situation.
History of Conservatism
I will take conservatism to mean the belief that establishment and preservation of order, in face of forces that seek to overthrow it, is the primary task of statecraft. Conservatives see good in the status quo—in distinction to revolutionaries who consider it as an impediment to progress. Conservatives seek to “conserve things, when worse things are proposed in their place”, as the contemporary British philosopher Roger Scruton put it in a recent book. But it is a peculiar irony of history that this commonsensical dictum would be translated into a coherent political philosophy in the shadow of revolutions.
Soon after the French Revolution of 1789, the British philosopher Edmund Burke wrote a book that was to define modern western conservatism. But it was in the light of the (failed) revolutions of 1848 that a German journalist, Ludwig von Rochau, would take up a number of Burkean ideas and transplant them into a theory of statecraft, based on balancing antagonising forces both inside a state and in the international system. Rochau’s “realpolitik” will take as its goal the pursuit of “equilibrium” at home and abroad. In time, the most famous practitioner of this art would be the American scholar-diplomat Henry Kissinger who would, in turn, draw lessons from three 19th century conservative statesmen: the Austrian Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, the British Viscount Castlereagh, and the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
Burke is no stranger to Indian conservative thinkers, not the least for the fact that he tirelessly advocated the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal and the author of many misdeeds. Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, wrote: “Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all.” For Burke, desirable change shaped by prudence shaped by traditions and norms — the opposite of how the French Revolution came to be — is gradual and organic.
Burke’s ideas would find much resonance among the counter-revolutionary forces in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. The failed revolutions of 1848 would also cause a lot of European intellectuals to question the foundational assumptions of liberalism. Among them, Rochau would seek to analyse politics and political change not in terms of ideas but in terms of power, an intellectual return to Niccolò Machiavelli. First published in 1853 (with a second expanded edition in 1868), Rochau’s Foundations of Realpolitik would advance four fundamental propositions about the role of power and ideas in politics — and introduce “realpolitik” as a term of art.
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A recent book on the intellectual history of realpolitik by the British scholar John Bew puts these propositions as: all politics — including the rights of sovereignty — is an expression of power; governance is effective when contending forces within a state are balanced to an equilibrium; ideas, in politics, need not be noble to be effective; and that the spirit of the age is of paramount importance in determining a nation’s trajectory. As Bew identifies it, Rochau’s realpolitik was influenced by Burke in two significant ways. Both stressed the importance of organic evolution of the state, as well as the importance of taking history into account while determining the features of political situations.
While Rochau’s book was predominantly a treatise on domestic affairs, the second edition did extend the realpolitikal principles to international affairs. In particular, Bew writes, “Rochau rejected both Gefühlspolitik (senti-mental politics) and Prinzipienpolitik (principled politics) as the basis for a nation’s foreign policy”, and called for Germany to seize the initiative and wage preemptive wars against its traditional adversaries like France. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the great powers of Europe convened in Vienna between late 1814 and the middle of 1815 to negotiate peace. The revolutionary fervour in Eu-rope was a common challenge for all European powers; the challenge for them was to manage discord both at home and prevent would-be-hegemons like Napoleon from plunging Europe into war again. The Congress of Vienna was hosted by Austrian statesman von Metternich and put forward a delicate system of balance of power among European states.
A man called Kissinger
From that point on, a balance-of-power system that maintains equilibrium in the international system would be the lodestar of realism in inter-national relations — and maintaining it, backed by the threat of force if needed, the central goal of diplomacy. And much of the appreciation for the subtlety of the Metternichean system would be explained in a 1954 Harvard doctoral thesis of a 31-year old German-Jewish refugee to America—Henry Kissinger.
Long after Kissinger had completed his PhD and gone on to become, first, Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor (NSA) and, then, Secretary of State, journalists and scholars alike would turn to his thesis to find clues about the organising principles of Kissinger’s often brilliant (and not-infrequently cold-blooded) diplomatic machinations. And they would find them. Kissinger’s thesis—published as The World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 in 1957—would define the necessary and sufficient conditions for peace and cooperation among nations in the international order the equilibrium that balance of power systems seek. Kissinger writes:
“There exists two kind of equilibrium then: a general equilibrium which makes it risky for one power or group of powers to attempt to impose their will on the remainder; and a particular equilibrium which defines the historical relation of certain powers among each other. The former is the deterrent against a general war; the latter the condition of smooth co-operation.”
In a journal article in 1956, Kissinger would term the goal of the Congress of Vienna as one of coming to both equilibriums at once. The British representative Viscount Castlereagh’s conception of an equilibrium in Europe was one where “hegemony was impossible”—of a general equilibrium. Metternich’s as well as the other Continental powers’ conception was that of a particular equilibrium, of “a reconciliation of historical aspirations.”
But it was the introduction of notions of “revolutionary” and “legitimate” powers that would shape Kissinger’s realism the most. A revolutionary power, in Kissinger’s definition, would be a power that would consider the inter-national order unacceptable, and seek to change its basic structure. Revolutionary powers pursue “a policy of unlimited objectives”, and as such cannot be appeased through diplomacy alone—the use (or the threat of use) of force become an imperative while dealing with them. A legitimate power, on the other hand, would seek to redress any imbalance in the order through an appeal to—in Kissinger’s words, “a sense of obligation.” In Kissinger’s own thinking during his time as Nixon’s NSA, North Vietnam was the classic example of a revolutionary power. (I will come to Pakistan as an example of a revolutionary power later in this essay.)
The American journalist Robert Kaplan, an-other great realist of our times, read another key lesson in Kissinger’s World Restored. “Be-cause the real task of statesmen is to forestall revolutions,” Kaplan writes, “the real heroes of history (in Kissinger’s view) are enlightened conservatives such as Metternich and…Edmund Burke.” In Kissinger’s hands, realism and conservatism became two sides of the same coin: both are political quests for order in a world constantly under threat from revolutionary fervour of a Napoleon, a Mao — or an Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
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