1 Levaillant Mélissa, Sciences Po

Work in progress, please do not cite or release Levaillant Mélissa, Sciences Po. ISA-FLACSO 2014 Analysing Diplomatic Institutions to Understand Foreign-Policy Behaviour: A Sociological Approach to India’s Diplomacy in a Changing World Introduction The early 1990s marked an important shift in India’s foreign policy. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, India lost its principal economic and military partner. During the same period, Indian decision-makers decided to abandon the Soviet-style command economy and to impulse economic liberalisation. The combination of these international and domestic factors provided the Indian government with an incentive to adopt a more pragmatic and flexible foreign policy and to develop an active economic diplomacy. Besides, the realisation of nuclear tests in 1998 contributed to the rise of India’s international status, as illustrated by the signature of a strategic partnership with the United States in 2005 and the recognition of India as a ‘responsible’ nuclear power. Yet, this change in India’s foreign policy has to be nuanced. India’s diplomacy still relies on the implementation of the principles of non-alignment. At multilateral forums, such as the WTO, and poly-lateral summits like the BRICS summit, Indian decision-makers have been proactive in the defence of the interests of developing and emerging countries. In addition, issues like the Iranian nuclear crisis or the international intervention in Libya in 2011 have been intensely criticised by members of the Indian strategic community, who denounce the neo-imperialist attitude of Western countries. Against this background, this paper tries to understand the main challenges of India’s foreign policy transformations since the end of the Cold War, in terms of diplomatic adaptation and practices. Scholarship has struggled to define India’s foreign policy, often seen as a combination of antinomies, such as realism and idealism (Jaffrelot 2008). To a large extent, this difficulty derives from the fact that the policy of non-alignment, which signification has raised many debates among both practitioners and scholars since its elaboration (Chaudhuri 2014; Raghavan 2010), has become more difficult to implement in the post-Cold War era. Many analysts underline India’s willingness to become a great power, while at the same time acknowledging the historical weight of non-alignment. Nevertheless, few studies seek to demonstrate the link that exists between this inherited principle of conduct and the current orientations of India’s foreign policy. In order to contribute to the understanding of India’s foreign policy, this paper provides a sociological analysis of India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). The starting assumption of this paper is that there is a correlation between the processes of foreign policy-making and its content1. The questions investigated are the following: how have India’s diplomatic practices and discourses evolved? What do these evolutions reveal on India’s diplomatic style? 1 This assumption is similar to analyses made on the instruments of public policies. See Lascoumes, Pierre, and Patrick Le Galès (2005), ‘L’action Publique Saisie Par Ses Instruments’, in Gouverner par les instruments (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po), pp. 11–44. 1 Work in progress, please do not cite or release The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a complement to the study of emerging powers’ foreign policies. Indeed, both political scientists and political economists tend to establish a direct correlation between rapid economic growth and the decision-makers’ willingness to acquire a central role at the international level (Hurrell 2006). Yet, few scholars analyse the bureaucratic processes and the diplomatic instruments that are used by the emerging powers in order to achieve their goals. Debates about ideological and material sources of emerging powers’ foreign policies thus often obstruct a more interesting distinction between the definition of the goals and the implementation of the means needed to achieve these goals. Second, the paper seeks to contribute to the academic literature on diplomacy. Broadly speaking, scholarship on diplomacy is made of three main schools (Murray 2008). The ‘traditional’ school (Berridge 2001; Berridge 2002; de Wicquefort 1997; Satow 1957) adopts a very classical conception of diplomacy, mainly defined as the official relations between representatives of States. It offers a descriptive and narrow vision of diplomatic practices and merely serves as a guide for practitioners. The ‘nascent’ school (Evans, Jacobsen, Putnam 1993; Riordan 2003; Mayer 1969) denounces this state-centric analysis and focuses on the crisis of traditional diplomacy and the growing role played by non-state actors. This school sheds light on alternative forms of diplomacy, such as ‘paradiplomacy’ (Soldatos 1990) or ‘guerilla diplomacy’ (Copeland 2009). Finally, the ‘innovative’ school (Mellissen 1999; Sharp 1997) looks at the interactions that take place between States and non-State actors. For example, Brian Hocking analyses the Foreign Ministries’ adaptations to the context of globalisation and highlights the development of ‘catalytic’ or ‘network’ diplomacy (Hocking 1999). This last school opens an interesting agenda for research and this paper aims to contribute to this reflection. Indeed, studying diplomatic institutions offers a rare potential insight into one of the key aspects of diplomacy, namely, the extent to which diplomacy is determined by bureaucratic aspects, such as routine and ‘path dependency’, and inversely how the interactions of agents both within the bureaucracy and with the external environment contribute to influence the evolution of diplomatic practices. These questions are of the utmost importance for the study of the evolution of the international system, as they offer important insights into the evolution of the state’s diplomatic practices in the context of globalization. Nevertheless, my aim is not to explain the broad trends of diplomacy, but rather to show how the singularities of one institution contribute to shape the evolution of particular diplomatic discourses and practices. Methodologically, I rely on the tools provided by the sociology of institutions. The empirical portion of this paper is based on about 50 interviews conducted with retired officials and serving diplomats in Delhi, between September and December 2013. More specifically, I explore in this article the institutionalisation of India’s MEA, understood as a relational, contingent and continuous process by which norms, beliefs and practices solidify (Hmed and Laurens 2011, p.132). Institutionalisation is treated both as a dependant and an independent variable. On the one hand, I argue that institutionalisation is made of a combination of socio- historical, cultural and strategic dimensions. On the other hand, this process determines India’s diplomatic style, defined as a way of acting internationally, which manifests itself through a wide range of performed practices and discourses, such as political postures, visions of the world and discursive constructions of the State’s identity (Macé 2010). In the remainder of this article, I first discuss the added value of using the sociology of institutions as a methodological tool for this study. In the following section, I highlight the structural characteristics that have shaped India’s diplomatic culture since the genesis of the MEA. The third part then shows the effect of the institutional conversion of the MEA in the post-Cold War era on India’s diplomatic practices and discourses. The last section focuses on 2 Work in progress, please do not cite or release the case of India’s diplomacy in the Gulf and highlights the causes, manifestations and effects of India’s prudential diplomatic style. Part I. Institutionalisation and its three dimensions. Against the myth of the dissolution of the State, the sociology of institutions assumes that political and administrative institutions structure collective action (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985). Institutions are defined as a ‘set of shared practices, particular tasks, rituals and rules of conduct, as well as beliefs and representations that concern these practices, define their signification and justify their existence’ (Lagroye, François, Sawicki 2006, p.141). While stability, recurrence and routines are seen as central components of an institution, the institution is not seen a priori as a factor of resistance to change, but rather as a social field that gives space to social transformations (Lagroye et François 2011, p.18). Applied to the case of India’s bureaucracy, this approach allows to avoid two main pitfalls: the first would be to assume the decline of the MEA, caused by the rise of new actors in foreign policy, without questioning the adaptation of the functions and roles of the diplomats (Michelmann, Soldatos 1990); the second would be to adopt a functional approach to the MEA’s adaptation and therefore overlook the resistances and conflicts that emerge from this process (Mellisen 1999). Drawing on literature from sociology of institutions, this paper isolates three dimensions that constitute the process of institutionalisation: the socio-historical, the cultural and the strategic dimensions. The Socio-Historical Dimension The socio-historical dimension of institutionalisation treats institutions not as isolated and a- historical entities, but rather as sociological objects, determined by past history as

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