Frankly, I didn't find Thomas' piece very exciting but there are some arguments worth exploring.
1) On page 307, Thomas is making a very big claim. He writes "The ease with which foreign powers invaded India, and the rise of grand empires within India, can at least in part be attributed to this disinclination
toward balancing against greater internal or external threats by the subcon-tinent’s competing political units. There is no record of a coalition of forces being forged to contain any of these greater threats. There were tendencies toward bandwagoning among the kingdoms and principalities, however, especially when the invading force or rising power was perceived to be benevolent.". I find it a little bizarre. Was it a general tendency to be benevolent or is it that Indian kingdoms were just defeated in major battles which paved the way for external rule? Thomas is supposed to be a making a case for culture. Are you guys comfortable with his argument? Just explore it.
2) There is a good section on Nehru and balance of power. The real question which needs to be reflected upon is: whether the idea of non-alignment compatible with the concept of balance of power? Was non-alignment a sort of balancing behaviour or seeing non-alignment from the prism of balance of power theory is akin to undermining its complexity and richness as an indigenous Indian response to great power politics? Remember, according to Prof. Sahni, the failure to theorise non-alignment is the biggest failure of international relations academia in India.
3) He also claims that Globalisation forces states to bandwagon with the hegemon but his claim is also contingent on a temporal variable: the post-cold war period where the structure of international politics is hegemonic in character. Think about it.
4) India's response to hegemonic world system is a nice issue area to engage with. I would request you to think about India's response to US unilateralism both before the 1998 nuclear weapons tests and after it. My hunch is that unipolarity had serious consequence on India's foreign policy. Before 1998, it made India to take hard decisions even when those decisions flew on the face of the hegemon. After, India has bandwagoned (soft bandwagoning if I can take some inspiration form T V Paul) with the hegemon to grease its own rise in the global order.
5) The arguments on nuclear weapons and balances of power are worth engaging with. Have nuclear weapons made the concept of balance of power redundant? Think about it in this way: if states are primarily concerned about physical security and balance of power is a mechanism to ensure one's survival, then nuclear weapons have solved the dilemma for all great powers who are nuclear weapon states since physical insecurity is mitigated under the shadow of nuclear deterrence. Does this makes sense? It's my believe that one can actually challenge Waltz structural theory by further extrapolating these arguments.
Lastly some conceptual clarification. He makes some reference to Glenn Snyder's 'stability-instability paradox'. During the cold war, US feared that stability at the nuclear level will allow USSR to launch hostilities at the conventional level. Why? Because the US assumed that the Soviets would assume that US ( I am using the language of strategic theorists like Thomas Schelling) will not resort to nuclear weapons to fight a conventional war which given the preponderance of conventional military resources of the USSR, it could easily win. Hence the stability-instability paradox.
In South Asian case, Paul Kapur has improvised upon Snyder's argument to suggest that in the subcontinent, it is the "instability-instability paradox" which is applicable. By proclaiming artificial instability at the nuclear level- Pakistan's tendency to link all levels of conflicts with the possibility of nuclear exchange between the two South Asian neighbours, she has been able to fuel sub-conventional violence - terrorism and limited infiltration across the line of control - without giving a serious thought to a possible Indian retribution.
1) On page 307, Thomas is making a very big claim. He writes "The ease with which foreign powers invaded India, and the rise of grand empires within India, can at least in part be attributed to this disinclination
toward balancing against greater internal or external threats by the subcon-tinent’s competing political units. There is no record of a coalition of forces being forged to contain any of these greater threats. There were tendencies toward bandwagoning among the kingdoms and principalities, however, especially when the invading force or rising power was perceived to be benevolent.". I find it a little bizarre. Was it a general tendency to be benevolent or is it that Indian kingdoms were just defeated in major battles which paved the way for external rule? Thomas is supposed to be a making a case for culture. Are you guys comfortable with his argument? Just explore it.
2) There is a good section on Nehru and balance of power. The real question which needs to be reflected upon is: whether the idea of non-alignment compatible with the concept of balance of power? Was non-alignment a sort of balancing behaviour or seeing non-alignment from the prism of balance of power theory is akin to undermining its complexity and richness as an indigenous Indian response to great power politics? Remember, according to Prof. Sahni, the failure to theorise non-alignment is the biggest failure of international relations academia in India.
3) He also claims that Globalisation forces states to bandwagon with the hegemon but his claim is also contingent on a temporal variable: the post-cold war period where the structure of international politics is hegemonic in character. Think about it.
4) India's response to hegemonic world system is a nice issue area to engage with. I would request you to think about India's response to US unilateralism both before the 1998 nuclear weapons tests and after it. My hunch is that unipolarity had serious consequence on India's foreign policy. Before 1998, it made India to take hard decisions even when those decisions flew on the face of the hegemon. After, India has bandwagoned (soft bandwagoning if I can take some inspiration form T V Paul) with the hegemon to grease its own rise in the global order.
5) The arguments on nuclear weapons and balances of power are worth engaging with. Have nuclear weapons made the concept of balance of power redundant? Think about it in this way: if states are primarily concerned about physical security and balance of power is a mechanism to ensure one's survival, then nuclear weapons have solved the dilemma for all great powers who are nuclear weapon states since physical insecurity is mitigated under the shadow of nuclear deterrence. Does this makes sense? It's my believe that one can actually challenge Waltz structural theory by further extrapolating these arguments.
Lastly some conceptual clarification. He makes some reference to Glenn Snyder's 'stability-instability paradox'. During the cold war, US feared that stability at the nuclear level will allow USSR to launch hostilities at the conventional level. Why? Because the US assumed that the Soviets would assume that US ( I am using the language of strategic theorists like Thomas Schelling) will not resort to nuclear weapons to fight a conventional war which given the preponderance of conventional military resources of the USSR, it could easily win. Hence the stability-instability paradox.
In South Asian case, Paul Kapur has improvised upon Snyder's argument to suggest that in the subcontinent, it is the "instability-instability paradox" which is applicable. By proclaiming artificial instability at the nuclear level- Pakistan's tendency to link all levels of conflicts with the possibility of nuclear exchange between the two South Asian neighbours, she has been able to fuel sub-conventional violence - terrorism and limited infiltration across the line of control - without giving a serious thought to a possible Indian retribution.
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