INDIA AND THE ANGLOSPHERE: RACE, IDENTITY AND HIERARCHY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ()

India has become known in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia as ‘the world’s largest democracy’, a ‘natural ally’, the ‘democratic counterweight’ to China and a trading partner of ‘massive economic potential’. this new foreign policy orthodoxy assumes that India will join with these four states and act just as any other democracy would. A set of political and think Tank elites has emerged which seek to advance the cause of a culturally superior, if ill-defined, ‘anglosphere’. building on postcolonial and constructivist approaches to international relations, this book argues that the same Eurocentric assumptions about India pervade the foreign policies of the atmosphere states, international relations theory and the idea of the atmosphere. The Assertion of a shared cultural superiority has long guided the foreign policies of the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, and this has been central to these states’ relationships with postcolonial India.