Abstract
The prevailing wisdom in International Relations literature that foreign policies of states may be understood without reference to their history, political values or culture, that is, their national identity, has not gone unchallenged. At the same time, arguments based on identity have yet to make significant headway against conventional realist thinking. In our view, this is due to two factors: (i) the continuing attraction of realism as parsimonious and powerful (ability to explain a lot with a little) and conversely (ii) the inability of identity theorists to put forward a shared operationalized and testable theory. However, it may be that we are at a particular historical juncture in which investigations of national identity are going to become inevitable, whether theories are underdeveloped or not.
The current international system is experiencing clear power shifts not seen since the early twentieth century, with the rise of China and India and continued importance of Japan. The importance of Asia to the global order in the foreseeable future is now taken as a given. Both China and India, however, view themselves not just as normal states, but as civilizational entities. They have a surplus of history overlaid with feelings of pride as well as of hurt, resulting from the national humiliation of their slide into colonial control. Their sense of being exceptional states is just one indication of the importance of national identity in their thinking as they consider their international position. One question we, as analysts, need to ask is: Can we fully understand how these rising Asian states are going to engage globally without taking into account the political values, histories and strategic culture of these states? Or to put it another way, can we extrapolate the foreign policies of these countries simply from their rising economic and military profiles?
We do not think so. However, we are not arguing that military capabilities do not matter or that states in general are not security seekers. We are, however, suggesting that states often make their foreign policy choices based on historical memories, long-standing values and on how they perceive themselves vis-à-vis other states. For example, China and India attach enormous importance to non-intervention norms—something that cannot be adequately explained without reference to their colonial humiliation and feelings of external vulnerability. They also continue to hold a good deal of suspicion about the Western liberal economic model—this is particularly surprising of India which is a liberal democracy, but it is even surprising of China, given its huge involvement in the liberal economic order. On the other hand, India’s democracy gives it considerable soft power on the global stage in contrast to China’s authoritarianism, bringing identity features directly into the foreign policy arena of these two states.
