Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. x, 217 pp. US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-62616-086-6.
With regular, frequent, well-orchestrated, and reciprocated visits by heads of states, trade, industry, and armies from the four corners of the world, India has graduated from the ranks of the “emerging powers” of the world to the “emerged.” India, no longer the outcast, is now firmly “engaged” and “engaging.” The fine set of essays by Ian Hall, Daniel Twining, H.D.P. Envall, Lavina Lee, Louise Merrington, Harsh Pant, David Brewster, Rajesh Basrur, and Nick Bisley in this handsomely produced and modestly priced volume analyze the consequences of India’s emergence as a major power for global order. The selected cases include countries both large and small, ranging from the United States, Japan, Russia, China, Australia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, to Singapore. Those looking for the general lessons of the “engagement” strategy will find fresh insights in Rajesh Basrur’s “Paradigm Shift: India during and after the Cold War.” Equally interesting is Harsh Pant’s analysis of engagement in its different forms, including the “half-hearted” and the simultaneous in his chapter on “China’s Half-hearted Engagement and India’s Proactive Balancing.”
In the introduction, Ian Hall defines engagement “as any strategy that employs positive inducements to influence the behaviour of other states” (2). He adds a further precision. “Exchange strategies” engage the target state through positive inducements such as trade deals or delivery of weapons systems, aimed at obtaining reciprocity, whereas “catalytic” strategies offer specific inducements to “catalyse something bigger, perhaps even wholesale transformation of a target society” (3), such as the creation of an emerging elite cast in the mould of the engager (the integration of post-communist Eastern Europe with the Western world is a case in point) (3). Hall presents the American overtures to China initiated by President Richard Nixon in 1971–1972 as the iconic exemplar of the application of engagement as the core of the new shift in foreign policy towards China. It paid off for both the engager and the engaged. “In the short term, China secured recognition, the UNSC seat, and a tacit ally against the Soviet Union. In return, the United States secured Chinese help in bringing the Vietnam War to a close and a changed Eurasian balance of power” (4).
The successful transition of conference proceedings to a coherent book is an exception rather than the rule. By this criterion the Engagement of India is a model of its genre. The chapters (initially presented at a conference in 2011) effectively apply the core concept of engagement consistently in their analysis of diplomatic, commercial, and political transactions with India and vice versa. However, this exemplary coherence might have been achieved at a cost to the underlying theory of engagement. The choice of cases, each of which illustrates a successful case of engagement, gives an impression of a selection bias. There are no counterfactuals in this study. The book does not include disastrous cases of engagement such as that of Nazi Germany by Chamberlain in the 1930s. Nor does it delve into the issue of non-engagement, such as that of India by Pakistan. In fact, the Pakistani strategy of privileging armaments (nuclearization, matching delivery capacity) rather than engagement of India through the conventional means of trade, tourism, pilgrimage, joint-ventures, and student-exchange, has perhaps been a more effective strategy in terms of gaining parity with the much larger belligerent neighbour.
Another point where one can take issue with the main approach of the book is that it treats relationships between countries as a dyadic, bilateral game. However, the multipolar world, with cross-cutting alliances and conflicting loyalties, rarely allows such pristine purity in relationships. Most relationships tend to be triangular, with the parties jockeying for position as the pivotal power, seeking to balance the other two against one another in order to gain extra room to manoeuver. This strategy has now become the main goal of Indian foreign policy, seeking to off-set the Chinese “string of pearls tactic” by walking the extra mile towards the United States, taking care, however, to remain friends with the United States and not become an ally. Here, India might have taken a leaf out of the Pakistani book of diplomacy, seeking to match the dexterity with which Pakistan has drawn on China to compensate for India’s superior conventional power. The fact remains, therefore, that the decision to engage or not to is a rational choice. In some conditions, non-engagement might be the optimal strategy. With due respect to the liberal-institutionalism that the authors of the Engagement of India appear to share—a value consensus which, in fact, gives this book its enviable coherence—one has to take into account the fact that under some conditions, engagement is the luxury of the rich and powerful whereas non-engagement, aided by a spot of triangulation, might be the preferred choice of the weak.
Finally, why does the engagement of India work? Successful engagement of two rational players must carry a sense of mutuality and incentives. We learn from Engagement how India is able to offer something (but not the same things!) to all in the game: leverage against China to the US, Australia, Japan, and Singapore; a chance to emerge from Latin American isolation and play a role in global politics to Brazil; markets to European powers; to Russia, a chance to become an important pole in the multipolar world; and finally, to China, markets, and a sense of “Asian solidarity” to balance the West. But, will an “engaged India” have enough heft to be a pivot, fulcrum, and bridge, and become “the key swing state” (197) to facilitate the transition towards a just, multi-polar, orderly, and sustainable world, toning down its immediate self-interest on issues such as global warming for the sake of the global commons? The Engagement of India deserves high praise for setting the agenda on this larger question with great force and unsentimental lucidity.
Subrata K. Mitra
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 687-689