Indian Foreign Policy

3	Rejecting the ‘fear complex’ Constructing an international politics of friendship

Friendship has long been marginalized in a discipline in which both critical and conventional approaches have assumed that fear, enemies and ‘threatening others’ are the most important factors governing relations between states. Nehru too recognized fear as a driver of world politics, but he was convinced that this was not inevitable but could be changed. Indeed, Nehru saw the amelioration of fear, as the emotion governing social relations both within and between nations, as a key part of both the anti-colonial struggle and his post-independence attempt to construct an ethical modernity which could overcome the destructiveness of modern inter-state relations. ...