The Foreign Policy Attitudes of Indian Elites: Variance, Structure, and Common Denominators

Abstract

Foreign policy belief systems have received much attention. Yet nearly all work examines attitudes in western democracies, chiefly the United States. The current security environment requires that we ask whether the foreign policy views of individuals in other nations—particularly regional powers—are similar in structure to those found in the US case. This article does so for the Indian case. Drawing on studies of US opinion, we develop a set of claims and test them on an original data set on Indian elites. We make four contributions. First, we show that Wittkopf’s framework applies to the Indian case. Second, we demonstrate how this framework can be made more generally applicable by revising its emphases on different types of internationalism and on rethinking the meaning of isolationist preferences. Third, we place the Indian case in comparative perspective. And last, we model the dimensions of Indian attitudes as a function of domestic ideology. Results of our analyses provide insights into the structure of foreign policy belief systems outside the Global North.

Analytical interest in the structure of foreign policy attitudes is now entering its seventh decade. Initially, it was assumed that structure, especially at the mass level, was mainly absent from world views (Almond 1950; Converse 1964). Decades later, it had become increasingly clear that attitudes on foreign policy at both the elite and the mass levels are structured, in the sense of being organized consistent with political attitudes more generally (Hurwitz and Peffley 1987). Structured analyses of foreign policy attitudes suggest that public opinion is more coherent and stable than it was once thought to be and thus more likely to play a meaningful role in the political arena. Yet one question that has still received very little attention is whether foreign policy attitudes are structured similarly around the globe. And what we do know with respect to national similarities stems almost exclusively from studies of advanced industrial societies. What about the views of publics outside rich western democracies? Although there is evidence of similar structures in a handful of states in the Global North, we know very little about foreign policy attitudes in the Global South.

In this study, we analyze elite foreign policy attitudes based on a 2014 sample of Indian elites. By examining Indian respondents, the first analysis of its kind of a large power outside the Global North, we are able to break out of the developed world straitjacket and see how belief structures cohere in one part of the southern hemisphere. Our main objective is to assess whether a framework developed originally for US Cold War analysis (Wittkopf 1990) but found to apply to Canadian and European attitudes can be applied to Global Southern contexts. Does a common structuring framework, first advanced in the particular context of 1970s United States, fit the case of India in 2014? If this is indeed the case, then we could reason that some version is applicable elsewhere as well. In other words, if this structure of foreign policy beliefs structure fits the Indian case, we can be reasonably confident that the dimensions of the model reflect quite basic, almost reflexive, issues that create scaffolding for foreign policy discourse.1 How important is national defense? How is foreign policy best conducted? Can we trust allies and international organizations or should we depend on our own efforts exclusively? Should we focus exclusively on national self-interest or pay more attention to global welfare?

We proceed as follows. We begin with a discussion of Wittkopf’s (1990) militant internationalism/cooperative internationalism (MICI) framework and its interpretation. We then develop a set of expectations on the framework, construct a research design, and introduce our Indian survey data. We show that the two-dimensional MICI framework is applicable to Indian elites: the attitudes of survey respondents on specific issues are not random but are organized according to more general belief systems pertaining to general policy goals and the means to achieve them. However, our analyses also reveal a variety of problems in how the most popular framework is interpreted. To overcome these shortcomings—and, in turn, to offer a more globally applicable framework—we advocate abandoning the earlier conceptualization of MICI in favor of continua framed in terms of national security assertiveness and liberal-realist tactics/ontology. We further show that earlier references to isolationist tendencies are mistaken because neither the original internationalisms nor the suggested replacements actually encompass isolationism sentiments. Last, we return to issues of how foreign policy attitudes are organized by showing how issue dimensions are shaped by political ideology. We conclude with a discussion of the universality of the bases of foreign policy belief systems.