This work, then, is first and foremost about scientific and intentional ideas and worldviews (Kitchen 2010) and their conflictual relationship to each other, which is seen as constitutive in
50 Today the list of eminent thinkers of strategic theory might be more limited than the classical European canon, which cherished Greek (Thucydides, Xenophon, or Aeneas the Tactician) and Roman (Vegetius) works as well as icons of strategy like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Pyrrhus, Marius, or Caesar and a broader range of Occidental thinkers and practitioners like Niccolo Machiavelli or King Gustav Adolf of Sweden or Frederick the II of Prussia or Sokolowski in the Soviet union to name but a few.
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shaping any discourse on grand strategy formulation. Now, how should this discursive plurality be studied in order to develop the proposed ‘subculture-cleavage’ model? First of all, due to its conceptualization of strategic culture the thesis leans evidently to the interpretive-understand- ing side of the ‘erklären’ versus ‘verstehen’ dichotomy51 (Hollis and Smith 1990) which to this day helps to frame the debates about epistemology as well as methodology in the field of Inter- national Relations. This strand of social enquiry stands in line with the so called ‘linguistic turn’ in the social sciences, which postulated the central role of language and the reappraisal of ac- companying cognitive processes in interpreting and negotiating human reality52. Hence propo-
nents of ‘understanding’ and interpretation consider the study of both the ‘internal’ meanings, motives, and beliefs actors have and how they act accordingly to be central. What is not ‘ob- servable’ in the positivist sense may also be relevant for understanding the subject of IR like meanings, beliefs, perceptions or ideologies emerging from context, culture or historical expe- riences. According to Robert Keohane interpretivist and constructivist53 scholars “all empha- size the importance of historical and textual interpretation and the limitations of scientific mod- els in studying world politics” (Keohane 1988, 382). Thus, for interpretivism meanings and beliefs are the relevant aspects in any analysis of social phenomena. In order to study these essential factors, hermeneutics (as the theory of interpretation) is employed, that is knowledge is gained through interpretation that is the attempt to understand the different layers of meanings of textual as well as symbolic artefacts humans produce. In general, qualitative, discursive as well as historical methods like Max Weber’s ‘historical sociology’ are the instruments of choice, which all aim at resisting positivism. Reflectivists or post-structuralists specifically ad- vocate the adoption of interpretive methodological approaches, thus challenging rationalist as- sumptions regarding the superiority of quantitative methods. The same is true for the author as
51 The methodological debate between understanding as a mode of social inquiry (theory should proceed in an ‘individualistic or ‘bottom-up’ fashion from unit to system) versus explaining as part of the con- troversy between positivists (rationalism) and reflectivists (a label made popular by Robert Keohane’s presidential address to the International Studies Association (ISA) in 1988 to get hold of interpretivism). 52 The dissertation aims at adding to a ‘constitutive theory’ of ideational cleavages rather than to explan- atory, critical or normative theories. Such a theoretical approach does not create or trace casual patterns in time but rather inquires ‘how is this thing constituted’. For example, “how are ideas as social objects constituted?” It is a kind of theory that also attempts to grasp the worldview ‘inside the heads’ of actors and discourse participants.
53 Under the term constructivism a wide range of post-positivist positions can be subsumed. One of the major charges levelled against the rationalist mainstream has been the claim that the so called ‘scientists’ in the ‘behaviouralist tradition’ of the 1950s were confusing positivism with theory (Ferguson and Mans- bach 2003, 41). “At root, the ‘scientists’ ignored theory while focusing on method” (Ferguson and Mans- bach 2003, 38). “Like empiricism, positivism allows knowledge derived solely from sensory perceptions or the tools that extend those perceptions. ‘A positivist ignores metaphysics and knowledge gained through reasoning and reflection’” (Ferguson and Mansbach 2003, 39).
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he prefers a historicist or interpretive form of IR, that is a sympathy for traditionalists in terms of humanistic methodology, who see the theory of IR as a study in history and political philos- ophy. To do this the methodology usually involves categorizing different traditions of political thought according to an analysis of underlying norms and values (ideas) like Martin Wight’s work on the three traditions of IR theory (Wight 1991).
Principally, then, a pragmatic discourse analysis of the ‘discursive’ strand of ideational plurality within the meta-debate of Indian grand strategy is conducted. The author is studying this debate (the source of data) between 1991 and 2014 because he wants to find out how India’s strategic subcultures can be delineated in order to help the reader to understand better how discursive plurality on grand strategy is constituted. As this debate is predominately a scientific debate the empirical focus is on the contributions of scholars (the sample size is around 60 texts; sample selection follows judgement or purposeful sampling (Marshall 1996)). Hence the main bulk of empirical material will stem from secondary sources provided by area specialists, policy ana- lysts, historians, and journalists. Scholarly authority54 was so salient in establishing and con- structing the discourse on India’s strategic pluralism, as except for the popular term of ‘Neh- ruvians’ self-designations (Bajpai 2003, Mehta 2009a) are quite rare in the Indian case, that assessing their propositions as primary experts promises to bring a rich empirical yield. This qualitative research in terms of a systematic enquiry of the labels and explanations given for the different strategic subcultures proposed by researchers is set up as an interpretivist text study. Such a qualitative literature analysis has been based on a qualitative methodology soft- ware called MAXQDA 12 which helped in coding and mapping the content (labels and con- nected possible sets of explanations) of each scholarly input of the fairly well developed ana- lytical literature. The procedure of coding and category-building has been guided by Johnny Saldana’s “The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers” (Saldana 2013); Udo Kuckartz’s “Qualitative Text Analysis: A Guide to Methods, Practice and Using Software” (Kuckartz 2014) and Margit Schreier’s “Qualitative Content Analysis in Practice” (Schreier 2012). This approach to content analysis was accompanied by a written survey send to around 30 scholars and analysts working on India’s grand strategy and its ideational tenets55. These findings were further refined by the analysis of publically accessible presentations by renowned specialists in the field on cspan and youtube (IDSA channel), accordingly have these artifacts been examined
54 For reasons, why IR scholars in the Indian context enjoy a strong position of see chapter 2 section 4.4. 55 Additionally, the author had many informal expert conversations during the genesis of the project.
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for designations of strategic worldviews. After mapping patterns of labels in the existing liter- ature the next crucial step has been to inductively deduce the (implicit) ideational cleavages. Analytically answering the question of how or under what conditions India’s strategic pluralism is delineated. As these cleavages function as the ‘structuring instruments’ constituting the dis- cursive plurality in terms of the central strategic paradigms (CSP) of the nine possible Indian strategic subcultures of India’s strategic culture and other debates on foreign and security pol- icy. This ‘subculture-cleavage model’ will be outlined in more detail the next section of the introduction.
Methodologically the next step has been to apply this newly devised model in a case study regarding the debate of India’s Israel policy as an example for a niche conflict that still has grand strategic implications and thus should reflect to whole array of competing subcultures assessing India’s options and proposing alternative strategic decisions. So, in order to trace the range of strategic subcultures engaged in ideological contestations and to examine the devel- oped model, the author first sought to find explicit labels like leftists, or Nehruvians, or neo- liberal globalists in the secondary scholarly literature as well as in newspaper editorials and other news sources of leading Indian English-speaking newspapers like ‘The Hindu’, the ‘Times of India’, the ‘Indian Express’ and other relevant news outlets. In a second step, he used the four ‘indicators’ or filters of the two cleavages (normative grand strategy-cleavage [NGSC] and cultural identity cleavage [CIC]) to find evidence for the existence of the predicted strategic worldviews. The analysis of media coverage as well as of the small but growing analytic liter- ature on India’s relations with Israel between 1992 and 2014 has also been embedded in a qual- itative media content analysis using again MAXQDA 12 for coding the discernable schools of thought and answering questions regarding the role of conflict in human affairs, the nature of threats, the status of territoriality and the significance of history for defining a grand strategy.
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2. India’s Strategic Culture Debate
“No formal efforts or institutions of government exist to develop strategies for India, but on an ad hoc and pragmatic basis.” (George K. Tanham 1992, 67)
“India’s strategic culture (…), as a composite is more distinct and coherent than that of most contemporary nation-states.” (Rodney W. Jones 2006, 3)
"I read her [India’s] history and read also a part of her abundant ancient literature, and was powerfully impressed by the vigor of thought, the clarity of language, and the richness of mind that lay behind it [...] There seemed to me something unique about the continuity of cultural tradition through five thousand years of history, of invasion and upheaval, a tradition which was widespread among the masses and powerfully influenced them […] Like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these existed in our conscious and subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them." (Jawaharlal Nehru 1981, 50, 52, 59)