Royal Society of Canada. His books include Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (2018); The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (2013); Globalization and the National Security State (with Norrin M. Ripsman, 2010); The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons (2009); and India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status (with Baldev Raj Nayar, 2002). He is the lead editor of The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (2021).
Paul applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi, and reported the following:
Page 99 is actually a very important one in the book. It happened to be the opening page of Chapter 5 of the book which discusses the Great Powers and their responses to India’s rise. A full quotation from the page reads:Visit T.V. Paul's website.In January 2020, I met former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at his residence in New Delhi for an informal discussion. Singh was the primary architect, along with President George W. Bush, of the 2005 U.S.-India Nuclear Accord. I asked him what the key motives behind the deal were, and he answered that the main aim was to remove India from the “nuclear apartheid” to which it had been subjected for over four decades by the nuclear powers, especially the United States. The implication was that the material benefits from the deal (i.e., acquisition of nuclear power plants from the United States and other supplier states) was secondary, but the accommodation of India as a de facto nuclear power was the prime objective, showing its status value in both symbolic and substantive dimensions.Indeed, page 99 tells a lot about The Unfinished Quest, in particular the challenge of a new rising power getting accommodated by status quo great powers and included in their ranks. In the past, most power transitions led to wars, and a few such as the UK-US and US-China cases, happened peacefully partially due to balance of power reasons. This problem of peer-group acceptance is something that has major resonance in India’s case, as the opening sentence in page 99 discusses India’s efforts at nuclear acquisition that produced the most virulent opposition from the P-5 states and the pivotal role the 2005 US-India nuclear accord plays in India’s partial status accommodation. The international challenge for India was that it missed two crucial events when new powers were accommodated. The first was the 1945 San Francisco meeting that formed the UN and its key organ, the Security Council. India was still a colony and the British opposed efforts at adding India as a permanent member despite the fact that some 2.5 million Indians fought alongside the British and Allied forces. The second occasion was in 1968 when the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was concluded that gave nuclear weapon states the right to keep their weapons while depriving others the right to acquire them. India, not having tested its weapon, was placed in the category of non-nuclear state with lower rights and ever since then India became the most vociferous critique of the Treaty and the regime. The special status given to India by the nuclear accord with the US partially resolved the challenge here, but the demand for membership in the Security Council still remains unfulfilled. All P-5 states except China and a few pivotal regional states support adding India along with others such as Germany, Japan and Brazil to the Security Council with veto power.
As rising powers wish to be accepted as coequals, or to surpass the established powers, it is incumbent upon the latter to accept the new state into their fold, so that peaceful power transitions are made possible. Like other social-status settings, peer group acceptance is pivotal to status acquisition by a new power. In the past, in the majority of cases of status contestation, great power war was the outcome, as the established powers refused to accept newcomers with material capabilities and status ambitions into their fold, generating much resentment and eventually violence. As Graham Allison states, 12 out of the 16 power transitions during the past 500 years have occurred through wars. Although some cases, like the U.K.-U.S. transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stand out as examples of peaceful status accommodation, war has been the lingua franca of great power accommodation or decline. As political scientist John Vasquez puts it: “The price of world power is death.” New power configurations were often recognized as a result of wars and were accomplished in the immediate postwar settlement when new institutions were created in which the winners were given a leading role. The states whom the winners did not want to be included were denied their privileged position. The 1815 Vienna, 1919 Versailles, 1945 Yalta/Potsdam/ San Francisco settlements, following the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II, respectively, often neglected the claims of the defeated, except in the case, where vanquished France restored its status as a European great power through deft diplomacy.
This book is the result of several years of work and it draws from the literature on status, rising powers, and historical materials on India as well as contemporary data on India’s hard power and soft power indicators. It also discusses India’s challenges in human development and how this factor drags India’s status despite the aggregate growth in the Indian economy in the past three decades. The growing majoritarianism, Hindu nationalism, as well democratic backslide are also discussed to show soft power’s importance in legitimising India’s status in the 21st century. The book concludes that India constitutes over one/fifth of humanity and it is needed to be accommodated to solve major collective action problems, including climate change.
The Page 99 Test: Restraining Great Powers.
--Marshal Zeringue