Institution Making of Foreign Policy in India
INTRODUCTION
This paper is an attempt to explore the relationship between international relations scholarship, Indian public opinion and foreign policy making in India. The paper assumes that all large nations, democratic or otherwise, need solid domestic political support for the effective pursuit of interests abroad. The internal support for the conduct of external relations rests on the existence of an ‘establishment’ that sets the broad terms for the ‘mainstream’ discourse on foreign policy; facilitates continuous and productive interaction between the bureaucracies making the foreign policy, the academia that expands and reproduces knowledge and expertise on the subject, the media, and the political classes; rationalises external policies as well as promotes alternatives to them; and defines and redefines national political consensus on foreign policy amidst changing circumstances and unexpected opportunities. The need for such an establishment is far more critical in large democracies, where the governments must continuously cope with volatile public perceptions and the imperatives of popular legitimation.
In the older democracies the mechanisms for forging ‘elite consensus’ on foreign policy and the role of the mass media have come in for some trenchant criticism.3 It is not our purpose to join that debate on the alleged manipulative nature of elite consensus within a democracy. This paper merely assumes that elite consensus is critical for the conduct of state business in democracies and informal mechanisms do exist in most of them to shape and reshape national consensus on a range of issues, including foreign policy. The paper also believes that reformulating domestic consensus is especially important in periods of structural change at home or in the international system. There are some studies that help understand changing
Given the absence of similar studies in India, this paper relies, to a large extent, on the author’s own last three decades of
This paper is an attempt to explore the relationship between international relations scholarship, Indian public opinion and foreign policy making in India. The paper assumes that all large nations, democratic or otherwise, need solid domestic political support for the effective pursuit of interests abroad. The internal support for the conduct of external relations rests on the existence of an ‘establishment’ that sets the broad terms for the ‘mainstream’ discourse on foreign policy; facilitates continuous and productive interaction between the bureaucracies making the foreign policy, the academia that expands and reproduces knowledge and expertise on the subject, the media, and the political classes; rationalises external policies as well as promotes alternatives to them; and defines and redefines national political consensus on foreign policy amidst changing circumstances and unexpected opportunities. The need for such an establishment is far more critical in large democracies, where the governments must continuously cope with volatile public perceptions and the imperatives of popular legitimation.
In the older democracies the mechanisms for forging ‘elite consensus’ on foreign policy and the role of the mass media have come in for some trenchant criticism.3 It is not our purpose to join that debate on the alleged manipulative nature of elite consensus within a democracy. This paper merely assumes that elite consensus is critical for the conduct of state business in democracies and informal mechanisms do exist in most of them to shape and reshape national consensus on a range of issues, including foreign policy. The paper also believes that reformulating domestic consensus is especially important in periods of structural change at home or in the international system. There are some studies that help understand changing
Given the absence of similar studies in India, this paper relies, to a large extent, on the author’s own last three decades of
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