International Relations Class 01

 International Relations Class 01

EXAM RELEVANCE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS(IR)(5:12 PM):

• In mains, we expect almost 50 marks- two questions each of 10 and 15 marks, in General Studies paper 2.
• In prelims, earlier we saw 2-3 questions, some years saw 8-10 questions too.
• After 2022, we are seeing around 10 questions from IR in the prelims paper.
• The questions are expected to also have a background in World Geography, but the context will be IR.
• Earlier, at least one Essay question was based on International relations.
• As per the last few years, essay topics are getting abstract, and we do not expect an International Relations-based essay topic for at least a couple of years.
• IR is essential for Interviews, especially if the candidate has a higher preference for Indian Forest Services.
• IR can also be useful for our ethics paper for certain questions and conditions.

Important IR areas for Prelims :

International Organisations:

• Membership.
• Headquarters.
• At times, the venue and year of the first summit.
• Important declarations

Disputed territories:

• Locations and the countries involved.
• For example- Nagorno-Karabakh, Kherson, etc.

Geopolitics with World Geography:

• Location of regions like Maghreb, Levant, Donbas, etc.
• Littoral stares of important water bodies like the Caspian Sea, Aral Sea, etc.
• Locations of important mountain ranges.
• Important reports published.

The demand for the Exam:

• Students must realize that demand for the exam, including IR is different from university exams, or other academic exams like NET.
• We are more concerned with the analysis part, rather than factual events, primarily from the Indian point of view.
• We have to be concerned with the effects of global events on India, regardless of the fact India is involved or not ( like the Russia-Ukraine war).

SYLLABUS (5:30 PM):

• India and its neighborhood.
• Politics and policies of the developed and developing countries & their impact on India(only important events).
• Bilateral/ Regional/ Multilateral groupings/agreements/treaties, etc of which India may or may not be a part and how it affects India.
• International organizations - Structures and mandates.
• Diaspora- NRI, Persons of Indian Origin( PIO), etc; questions can get very specific too- diaspora in South Asia, etc.

Sources:

• Class notes.
• Handouts.
• Vision IAS monthly current affairs magazine only as reference material and not as primary material).
• Editorials.
• Relevant explained section.
• No book is recommended as such.

Very important:

• In no condition, we will be supposed to write more than 250 words on any topic,
• We must never approach IR( or any other subject) with a research mentality, and go behind multiple sources.
• Compilations of summaries of newspaper editorials are not a substitute, and students must go through newspaper editorials themselves.
• Students are not supposed to make notes of all the IR editorials, and noting down only important and new points would be enough.

Lecture Plan:

• Introductory:
• Terms and concepts of IR.
• Indian Foreign Policy and Determinants
• India & its neighborhood:
• The policies followed by India.
• Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other SAARC neighbors.
• SAARC, BIMSTEC, etc.
• India & Indo Pacific:
• ASEAN.
• India-Japan.
• India -USA.
• India-China.
• India & Eurasia:
• Central Asia, Russia.
• India West Asia.
• India- Africa.
• India- Latin America.
• India's nuclear doctrine, Multilateral Export Control Regimes like Wassenaar group, NSG, etc.
• Some very important organizations as per current affairs- BRICS, G 20.

Terms & Concepts of IR:

• Schools of IR:
• I. Realism: 
• Try to describe things as they are.
• It is the most dominant school of IR since IR study has begun.
• All other schools are regarded as footnotes/commentaries/reactions to the realistic school.
• It considers "Power " to be the central theme of international relations.
• It believes that all nations/nation-states are interested to secure their national interest.
• The international domain is a domain of chaos and anarchy; this means that there is no sovereign at the international level.
• National-level sovereignty means the supreme organization to take domestic decisions and engages in foreign relations, like the Central government.
• In this absence of central sovereignty at the international level, there is no enforcement of the "Rule of Law".
• There is hence the prevalence of Matsyaraj at the world level- Bigger fish consumes smaller fish.

II. Idealism:

• It is a utopian philosophy of "how things should be".
• It helps in setting standards and hope.
• It says that international relations are governed by cooperation on the basis of morality, rules, conventions, etc.
• For example- Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) was not totally out of idealism but was very much driven by Indian national interests.
• Idealism gives much focus on Conventions- unwritten rules practiced as per traditions and mutual understanding.

III. LIBERALISM (6:00 PM):

• Emerged as a response to realism., in the backdrop of World-Wars.
• Liberalism does not totally deny some basic tenets of realism- chaos, national interests, etc., but is optimistic.
• League of Nations can be considered the first global step taken under liberalism.
• It held that larger economic interdependence diminishes the probability of going to war, regardless of the status of morality in the nations involved.
• It believes that economic cooperation will reduce the propensity to go to war. for example- USA and China.
• It believes that nation-states are rational and they will seek to reduce chaos at the international level.
• It hopes to replicate the chaos-free model at the national level at the international level through the creation of international bodies.
• It hopes that people-to-people ties will check misunderstandings and reduce the chances of war.

Various means to achieve peace:

• Realist Suggestion: Balance of power:
• By not allowing any country to gain the preponderance of power.
• It plays out mainly at a regional level.
• It will need 3-5 similar strong powers.
• They will try to maintain a balance of power among themselves.
• And if any one country wants to accumulate more power, the others if need be will be willing.
• Historically, Europe has seen a balance of power.
• Presently, we are seeing a balance of power in West Asia- Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

Liberalist Perspectives:

• (1)Strengthening of International Organizations

(2) Diplomacy:

• Track I- Government to government/State to State:
• When official position holders meet their counterparts from other nations- Heads of state, bilateral meets, Ambassadors, etc.
• Track II- Non-Government to non-government
• It involves non-government officials like retired bureaucrats, heads of think tanks, and academicians.
• For example- the Neemrana dialogue( India and Pakistan)
• Track III- People-to-people interactions.
• For example- Diaspora, Hollywood, Yoga, etc.
• Track 1.5:
• Government and non-government officials interact with their counterparts from other countries.
• For example- Raisina's dialogue- is organized by the think thank Observers Research Foundation( ORF) in collaboration with the Ministry of External Affairs.
• The participants include ministers, ex-ministers, bureaucrats, retired bureaucrats, policy experts, etc.
• It is modeled on the lines of the Shangrilla Dialogue( an example of Track 1 diplomacy- Defence ministers and military heads of Asia Pacific).

Public Diplomacy :

• It is an idea where the official leadership of a country engages with the citizens of another country.
• The purpose is to influence public opinion so that the people of the other country do not oppose their government's policies for the other country.
• It is a new idea in the age of globalization due to the proliferation of democracy.
• The government of India has established the Division of Public Diplomacy, under the Ministry of external affairs.
• For example- the Namaste Trump program and the Indian embassy in the USA organize cultural programs in the USA for spreading awareness about Indian culture.

Multi-Track diplomacy:

• Multiple Tracks of diplomacy exist simultaneously.

Back-Channel Diplomacy:

• It is a type of diplomacy that happens away from the media glare.
• It can be both Track I and Track II in nature.
• This is required when leaders wish to reduce/avoid public pressure.

Power:

• It simply means the ability to influence the decisions of others, even against their wish.
• Politics is essentially a contest for power.
• The realist school(the most dominant) held that power is the central concern of all international politics.

Types of power:

• I. Hard power:
• It is the power of coercion.
• It is tangible in nature.
• It comprises both military and economic power.

II. Soft Power:

• It means the power of attraction and is intangible in nature.
• The concept was given by American thinker Joseph Nye.
• Even before the coining of the term, soft power has been in use as long as countries have engaged with each other.
• Important sources of soft power include- Culture, sports, mythology, and philosophies like Vedanta, Yoga, and alternative medicines( Ayurveda, Unani -Greece, acupuncture- China, etc).

SMART POWER (6:30 PM):

• The concept was again by the American thinker Joseph Nye.
• He realized that neither hard nor soft power is sufficient on its own, and we need a proper mix of both under smart power.

Relevance of Soft power:

• The lack of Soft power is regarded as a reason behind the disintegration of the USSR.
• No scholar had predicted such a major event.
• The USA, despite being an expansionist and colonizer was able to accumulate substantial soft power.
• The White Man's Burden and the American image of being a "land of opportunities" boosted American soft power.
• We have seen a large economic and military rise in China, but it is yet to accumulate credible soft power.
• Shashi Tharoor- India would have been a thumping superpower if power would have been calculated only as soft power.
• Indian hard power when it spearheaded the Non-Alignment Movement(NAM) was negligible.
• It was only the Indian soft power that helped India in the creation of a third front amidst the Cold War.
• This third front was able to get the support of more nations than either of the two major power centers of the Cold War.

WORLD ORDER (6:55 PM):

• It refers to the overview of the global distribution of power.
• It uses various models as:
• Unipolar order: Only one superpower- USA post disintegration of USSR during the 1990s.
• After the American actions post-9/11 bombing, the unipolar world order, along with USA's hegemony began to decline.
• Bipolar order: Two superpowers in the world.
• During the Cold War, countries were dived into two camps- one led by the USA( Capitalist) and the other led by the erstwhile USSR (communist).
• Multi-polar order:
• Multiple centers of power in the world, normally more than three powers.
• Between the two world wars.

Superpower:

• A superpower is an all-powerful country whose power cannot be cumulatively balanced even by all other countries coming together.
• A superpower can be balanced by another superpower only.
• In the situation of unipolarity, the only option is to bandwagon with the superpower.
• Bandwagon is a technical term in international politics where weaker powers just align with the stronger power to be safe/benefitted
   

Nation v/s Nation state v/s State Nationv/s Civilisation State:

• Nation:
• A nation is more of an emotional concept.
• The nation comprises a group of people sharing ethnolinguistic similarities and having a sense of belongingness
• Group of people living together in a common area with a sense of belonging.

Nation-State:

• Nation-State is a legal concept of people with common cultural traits( religion, language, etc) under an organized state( sovereignty).
• Its four constituents are- 
• Population Territory, Government, Sovereignty.
• It is a group of people with commonality living in a territory that enjoys sovereignty.
• India is more accurately understood as a nation-state.

State- Nation:

• Simply speaking, it can be considered as the constituents of a national state- like Gujarat, Maharashtra, etc.

Civilization state:

• A country that does not merely reflect a historic territory or an ethnolinguistic group, rather it represents a unique civilization.
• For example- India, China, etc.
• There is a school of thought that believes that India and China can peacefully coexist today, just as they did for thousands of years.

Mercantilist state:

•  A state that practices mercantilism- Active government interference in international trade so as to secure a favorable balance of trade.
• For example- All colonial states, present-day China. 

Actors in international politics:

• Nation-states.
• Non-state actors- MNCs, terrorist groups, NGOs, Think tanks, International organizations( EU, UNO, IMF, WTO, UNFCCC, etc).

Foreign policy:

• Foreign policy is a strategy or a planned course of Action aimed at achieving National Interest in International politics.
• The Foreign policy of a country is determined by a set of factors referred to as determinants of Foreign policy

The factors are:

• Geography
• Economy
• Politics/Political Party Format.
• History
• Culture
• Social Demography
• World order

GEOGRAPHY AS A DETERMINANT IN FOREIGN POLICY (7:30 PM):

• Napoleon considered geography as a prime determinant of a country's foreign policy.
• Geopolitics as a school studies the importance of geography in determining power politics among nation-states.
• Prominent geopolitical scholar Alfred Mahan emphasized that those who control the Indian Ocean will rule the world.
• India's strategic location at the center of the Asian arc extending from Aden to Tokyo makes India a gateway to Southeast Asia, Central, and West Asia.
• India's strategic location at the head of the Indian Ocean, along with other factors makes India the net security provider in the Indian Ocean region.
• 
• It was because of India's such location that both the USA and the USSR initially competed to bring India within their sphere of influence during the Cold War.
• However, India, which was ideologically closer to the liberal world, but in geographical proximity to the communist sphere, apart from other reasons adopted the policy of Non-Alignment.
• Even in the context of the Russia-Ukrainian war, India's neutral stand is because the war is an issue of European concern.
• India's national interest lies in the containment of China's rise, therefore to achieve the said national interest or the mentioned national interest both the West and Russia are important.
• West is important for the maritime balancing of China while  Russia is critical to its continental balancing 
• India's size in terms of its area and population makes it an important contender for UNSC permanent membership.
• India's Act East policy and look west policy are geographically determined and also expressed in geographical terms.

Culture as a determinant of Indian foreign policy:

• There are a few civilizational states, and India is one of them.
• India's worldview cannot be separated from the fact.
• India's first prime minister who had been the primary architect of Indian foreign policy had commented that he is not developing any new foreign policy for India.
• Rather he is merely "rediscovering" it from the past.
• India's commitment to international peace is evident in Article 51 of the Indian constitution.
• India is a unique country to have such commitments embodied in the constitution itself.
• It is borne out of the Indian civilizational values of Vasushaiv Kutumbakam, Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinaha, etc.
• Instead of hard power, India preferred soft power for increasing its international influence.
• Indian focus on non-violent soft power is rooted in Buddhist values.
• For example- India hosts the Buddhist council, India builds Ramayana & Buddhist circuits, etc.
• Interest in Indian mythology, Indian philosophy, alternative schools of medicine, Yoga, Bollywood, etc. are other sources of Indian soft power.
• Despite the dominance of passive tradition in Indian foreign policy formulation traditionally, there exists a strong realist tradition.
• Kautilya gave the Mandal Siddhant- immediate neighbor is a natural enemy and neighbor's neighbor is a natural friend due to sharing a common enemy.
• This is most evidently seen in the relations between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
• The present dominant political party in India lays greater emphasis on the realist tradition.
• Civilizational states like India are not merely satisfied to pursue a foreign policy to achieve national interest alone.
• Rather they seek to shape the world order according to their cultural values.
• For instance, India carved out the third pole(NAM)  in international politics based on sovereign equality, and domestic non-interference.
• This was done when the world was divided into two military camps led by the USA and USSR.

The topics for the next class are determinants of International Relations, India-Pakistan relations, etc.