New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2017. ix, 338 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-21592-2.
Over the last decade a consensus has formed in academic, diplomatic, and political circles that India is resolutely en route to being a great power. As South Asia’s largest state, the world’s largest democracy, an emergent economic powerhouse, an expanding and increasingly active military power, a significant soft power generator, and possessing a gigantic population, India seemingly fulfils most of the attributes deemed necessary to acquire the status of being one of the top tier states in the international system. Coupled with these debates—
Will India become a great power? When will it become a great power? Does it indeed want to become a great power?—are another set of increasingly pertinent questions: What kind of great power will India become? Will India’s rise transform the nature of world politics? Moreover, and combining these perspectives, will India be able to fully attain its international potential?
It is in the midst of these contentions that this book offers a most welcome, balanced, and deeply methodical assessment of India’s capacity to truly assert itself as a great power, once that status and recognition has been reached. Rather than thinking in terms of how India will gain such a position, and if she is comparable to existing great powers, the authors declare that “states have ascended to elite or great power status without satisfying minimal thresholds of attributes thought to differentiate the powerful from the less powerful” (1). The authors then contend that it is not India’s rise itself that ought to be the critical analytical focal point but instead if India has the appropriate agency to achieve its status ambitions, whereby “state capacity is about getting things done, and there are a plethora of things to get done in India, whether or not elite status in world politics is in the offing” (4).
From this basis the volume deploys Holsti’s triumvirate of factors in relation to state capacity—extraction, violence monopoly, and legitimacy—as the core components for analyzing state strength (in chapters 3 through 5), before applying them to the corollaries of the economy, infrastructure, inequality, political institutions, grand strategy, and defence and security policy (in chapters 6 through 11). Such an approach is carried out in a remarkably clear, erudite, and compelling manner that is ably backed up by reams of evidence to produce a convincing, thoughtful, and sophisticated analysis. In turn, attention is given to other great powers (United States, France, United Kingdom, China, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and Italy), and how they also fare across these measures, which draws out a suitable degree of nuanced, cogent, and lucid analytical insights for the reader. In this regard, the book correctly recognizes that great powers always rise with constraints, but it is what they do with the promise of their rise that matters; and that rhetoric/vision are not sufficient, and actions must back up words. Such an observation is prescient concerning modern India and underlines the timely nature of this valued work.
Also of note is that the authors do not pull their punches. Despite the hype, India’s economy has had a limited economic transformation which will undercut its overall utility as New Delhi strives to replace quantity with quality; the state’s infrastructure is incredibly inefficient and unfit for the task of energy, trade, or business provision and has the potential to curtail much-needed foreign direct investment; and income inequalities have blossomed and 830 million people still live on less than US$2 a day (190). All this, while India’s democracy does not properly protect minority, caste, and women’s rights, and has malfunctioning institutions that are further undercut by human rights abuses, corruption, and a reduced adherence to secularism. As such, and as per Holsti’s model, India’s abilities at extraction are weak but improving (in a way befitting a rising great power) and the state’s violence monopoly is currently inadequate (and has a population experiencing escalating murder, rape, and kidnap rates, 121), yet state legitimacy is remarkably good and in terms of citizens’ trust in major state institutions outdoes all other contenders, including Canada, the United States, Germany, and Switzerland (87). Copious amounts of empirical evidence and data back up these observations, producing a highly fluid line of argument.
The last segment of the book then considers the global angle, and how the factors in the preceding chapters map onto the state’s ambitions, worldview, and desired role in the international system. Importantly the authors note how “structural, domestic and decision-making factors have all shaped the country’s grand strategy” (231) and that they are inter-dependent and co-constitutive entities whereby India’s state capacity (or lack thereof) will innately impact upon what she can achieve outside of her borders. Although accurately portraying the broad proclivities of Indian foreign policy, more could have been done in this chapter to better consider the core normative components of India’s worldview. More detail as per its multipolar imagining of the global order, for example, would have delivered a more concerted analytical edge concerning the state’s foreign policy (including institutional) capacities. That these institutions are currently far from fit for the purpose—especially in the Ministry of External Affairs—but not covered by the authors is a missed opportunity given the book’s wider analytical contentions, even if this is somewhat acknowledged in the conclusion. That stated, the authors’ application of Holsti’s triumvirate remains comprehensive, focused, and scholastically noteworthy in a book that will be of significant ongoing value to practitioners, scholars, students, and observers alike.
Christopher Ogden
University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland