23 October 2021, NIICE Commentary 7498
Dr. Ajay Kumar Mishra & Dr. Shraddha Rishi
In the wake of the Afghan crisis it is asked should India be engaged with the Taliban government in Afghanistan? The present piece of opinion will reflect upon why and how India should engage with the opposite ideologies to protect its national interest and the Taliban is no exception to it. Notably, civilisations come through a varying value system which affects negotiation strategy to protect and promote its interests. Both integrative and distributive bargaining strategies are explicit in India’s dealing with countries of the world. In the book “Bargaining with a Rising India: Lessons from Mahabharata” (2014), Narlikar and Narlikar have explored India’s negotiation strategy that varies across a spectrum from distributive to integrative. ‘Distributive strategies include tactics such as refusing to make any concessions, threatening to hold others’ issues hostage, issuing threats and penalties, and worsening the other party’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). Integrative strategies comprise attempts to widen the issue space and explore common solutions. It targets the attainment of the goal that is not in fundamental conflict with each other and thus can be integrated to mutual gain’. Distributive strategy emphasis on competitiveness and need suggests a view of the world as containing limited resources. Distributive negotiators have been motivated by a zero-sum game and focus upon splitting the pie. It is an isolationist policy that India had pursued in the era of non-alignment. In a globalised world, a competitive race to achieve the need is an over hypothesised concept. Free trade and technical advancement of knowledge have reduced the applicability of zero-sum-game. It is an age of positive-sum-game whereupon something is available for everyone on the table of negotiation. The purpose of this article is to investigate the tack of India’s negotiation strategy in a globalised world. India now seems to come out of its historical baggage of distributive strategy the description of which has been widely explored.
The Rationality of Deontology and Consequentialism in Negotiation Strategy
The evaluation of the rationality of deontology and consequentialism is instrumental to check the effectiveness of both integrative and distributive negotiation strategies. Integrative negotiation tests the rationality of deontology (action-oriented) and consequentialism (result-oriented). ‘Rational choice must demand something at least about the correspondence between what one tries to achieve and how one goes about it….. what we aim to achieve should also satisfy some criteria of rational assessment, so that a purely instrumental concept of rationality may be quite inadequate’. It explains that consequentialism which negates the importance of processes encompassing diverse ways and means may not be a rational choice. The distributive strategy of negotiation ignores deontological perspectives by refusing to make any conciliatory deal to rival. It believes in consequentialism and the attainment of idealised goals. For distributive negotiators, there are only extremes of black and white, make it or leave it. It shrinks the available bargaining space. It leads to disengaged tolerance, i.e., you are right in your way, I am right in my way. Meanwhile, integrative strategy believes in a rational assessment of process-oriented criteria. It does not set any specific goal to attain rigidly. There is a huge grey space between black and white. It signifies trans-positional capacity that enables it to negotiate with diverse opinions to attain mutual gain. It believes in engaged tolerance by consistently engaging rival views.
Integrative Negotiation in Global and Regional Organisations
The onset of global institutions post-World War II has led to the emergence of world institutions based on largely integrative principles of bargaining. For instance, the WTO has conceptualised MFN status to ensure every member country enjoys the best trade terms given by its trading partner without any discrimination. The WTO has also provisioned for Regional Trade Agreements under Article XXIV of GATT to eliminate customs duties and other trade barriers on substantially all the trade between member countries. It has also provisioned for Early Harvest Scheme for selective tariff liberalisation to ensure smooth reach towards comprehensive trade agreements. India’s willingness to sign FTA with countries across the region reflects India’s integrative bargaining strategy. Similarly, India’s persistent and gradual efforts to reform world institutions, namely IMF, World Bank, UN and WTO to make them be better representatives of today’s world shows the prevalence of its integrative strategy of negotiation. India is also engaged with the countries and regional groupings having differing political regimes and economic systems. BRICS and the newly emerged regional arrangement of Quad are the cases in point. It is the leverage and resilience of India’s integrative negotiation strategy to yield its wherewithal to encourage engaged tolerance for differing views.
Integrative Negotiation and Mixed Economy
India’s integrative bargaining strategy is reflected in its mixed economy approach to economic development in the post-liberalisation age. The mixed economy recognises and encourages the existence and promotion of both private and public sectors. It is the resilience of integrative strategy to conceptualise the simultaneous co-existence of opposite interests. It saved India from the ideological onslaught of differing political and economic ideologies of socialism and capitalism. The contours of a mixed economy have yielded enough space for engagement with the world economy. The integrative strategy of negotiation has better chances to attain mutual gain in the mixed economy. Furthermore, it makes India a poster child of Keynes’ ‘liberal socialism’ since the 1990s the decade in which substantive measures of liberalization took place. Liberal socialism broadly consists of the virtues of economic freedom and political liberty. These virtues help to find out the shared solution to the shared problems in the integrative negotiation.
Integrative Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Now we shall consider the prospects of India’s integrative negotiation strategy with emerging problems of instability and change in governance in some of the countries. The integrative strategy believes in wider consultation and conciliatory measures to attain goals that are not in fundamental conflict with each other. The democratic form of governance with enough deliberations ensures some common goals that are fundamental to human security, integrity and liberty. The tack of integrative negotiation in democratic India must preserve those fundamental values in any deliberation with rival opinions. It means deliberation of any kind with anyone must be conditional to preserve those values which are very much essential to ensure the right to life along with exploring diverse channels of negotiations. Persistent engagement is necessary. We must be mindful that an engagement with contrary arguments does not imply settling conflicting reasons in all cases save to some fundamental ones as already mentioned. Complete resolution is neither rational nor reasonable. Engaged tolerance of contrary arguments is the solution. To sum up, we can argue that the integrative way of negotiation is best suited to attain democratic goals in a globalised world.
Dr. Ajay Kumar Mishra is Faculty at Samastipur College, (A constituent unit of Lalit Narayan Mithila University, India. Dr. Shraddha Rishi is a Faculty at Magadh University, India.
