Center for Security Studies
Managing Multipolarity: India's
Security Strategy in a Changing
World
May 2012
By C Raja Mohan for National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR)
An improved economic outlook allows New Delhi to craft a more ambitious Indian security
strategy. As a result, India will need to confront a host of challenges that shape a multipolar
international system.
Introduction
Since the end of the Cold War, India has steadily improved its relative power position
both in the international system and in the theater of primary concern to New Delhi—Asia
and the Indian Ocean littoral—thanks to economic reforms and the resulting high-growth
rates, which reached an impressive 9% per annum in the mid-2000s. The global economic
recession that enveloped the world in 2007 and the fading will in New Delhi for economic
reforms slowed the nation’s growth to about 7% in 2011. Even at this reduced pace of
growth, India is likely to consolidate its position as one of the world’s leading economies.
The country will most certainly move further up from its ranking in 2011 as the ninth-largest
economy in the world. With more rapid growth came the necessary financial resources to
craft a more ambitious national security strategy. A faster pace of economic development
meant that India had the resources for a significant modernization of its armed forces and
the development of a range of instruments to convert its growing capabilities into influence.
As it broke loose from many of the constraints that had held it back for decades, New Delhi
had the opportunity to simultaneously improve relations with all the great powers and the
major regional actors in Asia. The image of an emerging India ready to take its rightful
position on the world stage gained ground. Yet India will confront significant new challenges
arising from the changing nature of the international system.
This essay focuses on one of the challenges at the systemic level—a major change in the
distribution of power. Although India’s own emergence as a global power contributes to
the reordering of the international hierarchy, the faster and more dramatic rise of China,
the relative decline of European powers and Japan, and growing doubts about the United
States’ ability to sustain its primacy after the global financial crisis are generating an
international environment that will test many of the current premises of Indian foreign and
national security policy. This essay is divided into six sections. The first section reviews
the unfolding redistribution of global economic power and implications of the emerging
multipolar world for India’s international prospects. The second and third sections deal
with India’s changing great-power relations. The second section assesses the evolution
of India’s ties with Russia, Japan, and Europe after the Cold War, while the third section
focuses in particular on the triangular relationship between New Delhi, Beijing, and
Washington, which is emerging as the principal dynamic of India’s national security strategy.
The fourth section examines the intersection between the triangular dynamic and the
geopolitical situation in India’s neighborhood—from Southwest Asia to East Asia through
Central and South Asia. The fifth section then looks beyond the regional level at global
issues in the Sino-Indian rivalry and how the United States relates to them.
The sixth and final section parses the paradoxical consequences of India’s goal of
multipolarity since the end of the Cold War. India, which began pursuing a multipolar policy
amid fears of a unipolar world dominated by the United States, is now scrambling to cope
with the extraordinary rise of Chinese power and ensure a measure of multipolarity in
Asia and the Indian Ocean. This essay concludes that the emerging international and
regional distribution of power in favor of China will compel India to abandon the policy of
multidirectional engagement and make consequential choices about deepening the strategic
partnership with the United States. The pace and scope of India’s transition toward the West
will indeed depend on how Washington views New Delhi and Beijing. While the short-term
temptations of hedging are real in Washington, over the longer term Washington too might
have no choice but to invest in stronger security cooperation with India.
(click here for the full essay, in India's Security Challenges at Home and Abroad)
URL der Seite http://www.css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/article.html/143988/
pdf
© 2017 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich