The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [76]
As in China, however, in India cultural DNA has to be layered with more recent history. In fact, India has lived through a unique Western experience as a part of the British Empire—learning English, adopting British political and legal institutions, running imperial policies. Liberal ideas now permeate Indian thought, to the point that they have become in many ways local. Nehru had his worldview and foreign policy formed of influences that were predominantly Western, liberal, and socialist. The debate about human rights and democracy that courses through the West today is one that finds a comfortable place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai. Indian newspapers and NGOs raise the same concerns and alarms as Western ones do. They make the same critiques of government policy as those in London, Paris, and Washington. But these attitudes are most true of India’s English-speaking elite—still a minority in the country—that is in some ways more comfortable in the West’s world than in its own. (Ask an educated Indian businessman, scholar, scientist, or bureaucrat what was the last book he read in a language other than English.) Mahatma Gandhi was a more distinctly Indian figure. His foreign policy ideas were a mixture of Hindu nonviolence and Western radicalism, topped up with a shrewd practicality that was probably shaped by his merchant class background. When Nehru called himself the “last” Englishman to rule India, he sensed that as the country developed, its own cultural roots would begin showing more clearly and would be ruled by more “authentic” Indians. These crosscutting Western and Indian influences are playing themselves out on a very modern and fast-changing world stage, where economics and politics are pulling in sometimes different directions.
Nuclear Power
The proposed nuclear agreement between America and India offers a fascinating illustration of tension between a purely economic view of globalization, on the one hand, and power politics, on the other. In 2007, Washington put its relations with India onto a higher plane of cooperation with the negotiation of a nuclear agreement. This might sound like an issue for policy wonks, but the nuclear deal is actually a big deal. If successful, it will alter the strategic landscape, bringing India firmly and irrevocably onto the global stage as a major player, normalizing its furtive nuclear status, and cementing its partnership with the United States. It puts India on par with the other members of the nuclear club, America, Britain, France, Russia, and China.
According to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a country that had nuclear weapons in 1968 is a legitimate nuclear-weapon state, and any country that developed them later is an outlaw. (It was the mother of all grandfather clauses.) India, which exploded a nuclear device in 1974, is the most important country, and the only potential global power, that lies outside the nonproliferation system. The Bush administration has argued that bringing it in is crucial to the system’s survival. For similar reasons, Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (which is charged with monitoring and enforcing nonproliferation), has been a staunch supporter of the Indo-U.S. agreement.9 The nuclear nonproliferation regime has always tempered idealism with a healthy dose of realism. The United States, after all, goes around the world telling countries that a few more nuclear warheads are dangerous and immoral—while holding on to thousands of nuclear weapons of its own.
For India, the nuclear deal comes down to something quite simple: Is India more like China or more like North Korea? New Delhi argues that the world should accept that India is a nuclear power, while India should in return be willing to make its program as safe