Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 9

Indian Politics & Policy
states project power via the accumulation
of material power. For structural
or neo-realists, anarchy is the prevailing
condition in the international system,
whereby having a balance of power and
gaining some form of hegemony are the
only guarantees of stability. Objective in
their stance, such realists view states as
“undifferentiated and unitary actors,” 8
and disregard any consideration of state
identities and their construction. Because
structural realists “ignore human
nature,” 9 they assume a blanket definition
of identity that makes it irrelevant
to inter-state relations. Hence, realists
claim that—due to the structural pressures
placed upon them by the international
system—states should act in
the same manner in order to survive
and thrive. The interests of states thus
appear as exogenous to state practice,
which emanate from the system to the
state, while “culture and identity are,
at best, derivative of the distribution of
capabilities and have no independent
explanatory power.” 10 Such an intellectual
basis gives scant recognition to the
potential role played by different types
of government, varying internal decision-making
processes or indeed the
beliefs of a particular state’s political
parties or leaders. This typically culture-neutral
structural realist account
downplays the impact of these factors
because of its assertion that the international
structure dominates how states
conceptualize their foreign policies.
Other strands of realism provide
some more useful openings concerning
how to analyze the particular foreign
policy aims of states, or specific parties/
individuals within them. Importantly in
this regard, classical realist approaches
acknowledge how “identities and values
(a)re more important determinants of
policy than the constraints and opportunities
of the external environment.” 11
Building upon these ideas, neo-classical
realism refines structural realism
by being more attentive to domestic
variables, 12 and rests upon seeking to
understand how “systemic forces can
only influence foreign policy through
the medium of leader’s perceptions and
calculations of relative power and prestige.”
13 These elements are then seen
as intervening variables between the
external pressures of the international
system and the foreign policy behavior
of different states. Within this milieu,
“‘ideas and material capabilities are always
bound together, mutually reinforcing
one another, and not reducible
one to the other’,” 14 highlighting how
aims and aspirations (and their identification)
have an important role to play
within how different states conceive of
their particular foreign policies.
While neo-classical realism appears
somewhat applicable to our study,
other IR theories provide more focused
means of analysis. Most notably, and
in contrast to most realist theory, constructivism
is explicitly concerned with
ideational factors (such as identities and
norms) rather than with more objective
or material conditions. As such, it centers
upon “a cognitive, intersubjective
conception of process in which identities
and interests are endogenous to interaction.”
15 In turn, constructivists declare
that states are social constructions
whereby, “we make the world what it is
... by doing what we do with each oth-
6