“Let us try to get rid of fear and base our thoughts and actions on what is essentially right and moral, and then gradually the crisis of the spirit will be resolved.”
When one examines foreign policy, one sees the United States pursuing its ideological and material interests in the Middle East, Israel and Iran butting heads over nuclear weapons, and the calculus of nations in judging the newest opportunities to grow their economies. Above all, one sees states and non-state actors pursuing their interests, both tangible and intangible. In many ways, the arena of nations is like a society. The scholar Hedley Bull once called the international system an “anarchical society.” In society, each person pursues his or her interests, hedging and calculating all the way. However, in a society of individuals, there is room for perceptible positive and negative attitudes. In the society of states, those attitudes must be inferred. Hedging and calculating inherently breeds negativity and mistrust. Something must be done to engender positivity in foreign policy.
Traditionally, accommodation comes from building institutions that enmesh states into webs of mutual trust and cooperation. Whichever way the dynamic is playing out, however, there is only one European Union, and even that is showing cracks at the seams. Wherefore art thou, policy of positivity?
Finding it involves invoking the moral courage encouraged by I. K. Gujral. On Friday, the path-breaking Indian foreign policy architect passed away, leaving a legacy that appears to be admired, but concerningly, not emulated. The Gujral Doctrine, five principles to build friendly and cordial relations with India’s neighbors, holds valuable lessons in its intentions and its tribulations in implementation.
The Doctrine consists of five specific principles. First, with its neighbors, India should not ask for reciprocity, but instead gives and accommodates what it can in good faith and trust. Second, no South Asian country should allow its territory to be used against the interest of another country of the region. Third, it espouses non-interference in another country’s internal affairs. Fourth, it calls for mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty. Fifth, it prescribes that South Asian nations should settle their disputes through peaceful bilateral negotiations.
In 1990, Indian High Commissioner to Islamabad J.N. Dixit noted that Gujral’s ideas for reorienting foreign policy to characterize a unilaterally positive attitude were naïve. Foreign policy, he argued, should recognize the attitudes of the other party. To Dixit, India’s policies “should be geared to the attitudes of our neighbors toward us and we should have appropriate responses in our foreign policy or appropriate prescriptive elements in our policies to meet negative attitudes or contingencies.” Apparently, Gujral’s first principle was a hard one to swallow in the Indian Foreign Service Corps. Dixit ought to have interpreted foreign policy as more than a relentless pursuit of the national interest. As a human, earnest pursuit of the national interest, respecting within reason the interests of fellow nations.
Was I. K. Gujral misstepping in his dream to build trust and friendliness in the subcontinent? The core criticism of his policy came after the 26/11 Mumbai bombings, in which extremists linked to Pakistan’s intelligence agency carried out targeted attacks in two hotels and a Jewish community center. This criticism was, when boiled down, ‘do not leave the state weak by cutting off policy options that would include intervention into the affairs of your neighbor to ensure the security of your borders.’ Why place a policy of trust and cordiality in place when your neighbor is not deserving of it? Above, Gujral responds to that criticism, for his policy is not as simplistic as it appears to be.
To jump to a hypothetical, imagine an India following the Gujral Doctrine with an active public diplomacy strategy. The hard-liners in Pakistan, and the Maoists in Nepal would not have a leg to stand on in their boilerplate criticisms of India, for it would occupy the moral high ground. Moreover, it would do so because it would project undeniable positivity.
Increasingly, the international system is overtly and actively sympathetic to moral fortitude in international relations. Using U.S. opinion of Israel as an example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently remarked, “[the drive to reach a peace agreement] It gives Israel a moral high ground that I want Israel to occupy. That’s what I want Israel to occupy, the moral high ground.” Clinton, a friend of Israel, wishes this because it would, above most other factors, solve Israel’s sticky regional diplomatic situation. The moral high ground would give Israel legitimacy in the international community, and allow it to project its interests in a friendlier context.
Compromise is not something that emerges instantly from foreign policy tools—it must be “evolved”. Traditional foreign policy tools can engender that compromise, but not engineer it. The solution is a foreign policy approach that allows the logic of compromise to develop organically. At the bottom of things, most often, people do things that they feel are moral: they have the justification for their actions and internally defend their actions. However, in the social realm, morals are not infinitely flexible. In order to justify “oneself” as a nation, a state should consider a socially moral foreign policy approach, one that displays a patently positive attitude outward.
The View from the Bell Tower 