Introduction

In theory, the future of the war–state relationship seems assured in the Western world. There is a consensus that we have returned to a new era of great power competition, which has been reaffirmed by the recent Russian intervention in Ukraine. Other non-traditional threats are tacitly acknowledged but, as in the past, the driver of strategy and operations remains fixed on the high end of the military spectrum. Within this context, capital-intensive warfare, including nuclear weaponry, and the expansion of warfare into space and the cyber domain will ensure the state remains the principal agent through which increasingly expensive military technologies will be developed, deployed and sustained. This is so even though the cost of these capabilities is increasingly beyond the means of the nation state. The logic of this strategy can be questioned as demonstrated by the use of less expensive dual-use technologies, which in theory, challenge the traditional dominance of platforms like tanks, aircraft and ships. Such a development offers hope to smaller states and violent non-state actors eager to exploit these technological substitutes. However, as illustrated in the last chapter, recent operational experience indicates that specific and local conditions may have allowed cheaper disruptive technologies to prevail in engagements between Russian and Ukrainian forces. As such, it is difficult to extrapolate a meaningful trend from this analysis. In addition, countermeasures are available to challenge these technological disruptors and, for now at least, a conservative orthodoxy continues to shape and drive the war–state relationship. However, while the preservation of the status quo seems plausible and sensible over the coming decade, could this vision of war and the state set out in the previous two chapters be overturned by developments either discounted or not seen in the longer term? In this final chapter, I want to look at how technology in the future will shape and drive war and the state, and their interaction. My argument is that as we move into the fourth industrial revolution technologies, many of which had their genesis as military R&D programmes and were then spun out into the broader economy, are now feeding into politics, economics and society, and this will have significant consequences for the war–state relationship.

Since the early 2000s, it has become commonplace to consider India an ‘emerging’ or ‘rising’ power, or actually one of the most important countries in an emerging multipolar world (see, among many others, Cohen, 2002; Pant, 2008; Narlikar, 2010; Kahler, 2013; Pardesi, 2015; Basrur and Sullivan de Estrada, 2017; Plagemann et al, 2020). With its stunning economic growth, India gained increasing international visibility and attention. This was paired with an active foreign policy on the part of New Delhi, with India improving its relations with the USA, expanding its engagement in South–South cooperation, and becoming active in a number of minilateral and multilateral forums such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), but also in the G20.

At the same time, with its population of almost 1.4 billion inhabitants (in 2021; see The World Bank, 2022), India is now an indispensable actor for solving all kinds of global problems, from climate change mitigation to global health or disarmament. In global affairs, successive Indian governments have long pursued a surprisingly consistent and coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing India's international status – much in line with the goal outlined by India's founding father Jawaharlal Nehru on the night of the country's independence: that India ‘attain her rightful place in the world’ (Schaffer and Schaffer, 2016: 1; original emphasis). The preferred means for such status-seeking policy had always been that of pursuing an ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ foreign policy. During the Cold War, this policy manifested itself in the guise of non-alignment, while in the following decades it was variously labelled by decision makers or observers as ‘strategic autonomy’, ‘non-alignment 2.0’ (Khilnani et al, 2012), ‘multialignment’ (Hall, 2016a) or ‘all-alignment’ (Haidar, 2022a). Regardless of the label used, what the foreign policies of successive Indian governments had in common over the decades was the effort to pursue an independent approach, which did not bind India to one specific alliance (partner) but instead gave it greater flexibility in international politics. Despite the broad ideological differences of successive Indian governments (Destradi and Plagemann, 2023), this approach can be considered a guiding thread in India's foreign policy, which was pursued very consistently.

The military is frequently accused of using the tactics of the last war to fight the next, a tendency that has sometimes led to disaster, for example, the Fall of France in 1940 or the more general catastrophe that befell all nations in the opening phases of the First World War (Strachan, 2005, 156–87). In both instances, failure was believed to be a consequence of military doctrines that bore little relationship to the prevailing realities of contemporary war. The modern-day military as an organization knows and understands the need to control this behavioural trait and has made a concerted effort to avoid repeating past mistakes. However, one thing that has not changed in the Western military establishment is a continued fascination with technology as a force multiplier when thinking about future conflict. This perceived obsession is strange because it feeds into a broader debate that focuses on the role played by technology in facilitating the defeat of Western militaries in a series of what might be loosely described as irregular wars since 1945 (van Creveld, 1991; Lyall and Wilson, 2008). However, despite the experience gained from two decades of war waged by Western states across the Middle East and Central Asia, the one salutary lesson learned from the war on terror, including the war against Islamic State, is that, even in irregular warfare, technology has its uses. However, it is no substitute for a strategy based on an understanding of the human domain of conflict, which is manifest in the political, ideological and economic strands of power. The challenge, then, is to ensure technology does not become a substitute for other more appropriate forms of power, which implies a more nuanced use of this capability. In a sense, the debate between technology and the operational context in which it is employed – a conventional interstate or an unconventional intra-state war has become increasingly irrelevant as recent conflicts have become hybrid in nature. This blending of conventional and unconventional is itself seen in part as a consequence of new technologies enabling non-state actors to acquire state-like military capabilities via the adaptation of commercial off-the-shelf products and services (Niam, 2014, 107–21).

Introduction

One of the principal arguments made in this book is that the shift from a model of war based on the use of mass to a more capital-intensive form of warfare focused on precision changed but did not end the war–state relationship. Most importantly, the state played a vital role in facilitating this transition and remained crucial in creating technologies that changed the face of war and facilitated a broader revolution in economics, politics and society. These technologies have evolved and grown in the commercial sector and are now feeding back into the domain of war. However, brand new technologies are also emerging, and the state is facilitating the development of capabilities such as AI, quantum computing and encryption. In the previous chapter, we explored how Western militaries are engaging with the challenges posed by this latest technological revolution through MDI, this sets out the Western view of the future of war. This construct provides a conceptualization of war that widens our understanding of the subject and blurs the distinction between war and peace. An essential consequence of this reconceptualization is that it also assigns the state a more prominent role in its efforts to contest war in the grey zone. This means the state continues to fulfil its principal function as the primary provider of security.

The aim of this and the following chapter is to question the ideas underlying the current Western theorization of war. This goal will be achieved in two ways. This chapter takes advantage of the opportunity to explore the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to determine how well expectations set out in US and British versions of MDI coincide with the unfolding reality of this war. As important is the need to explore the implications of what has happened in this war in terms of the role played by technology and to ask if its application challenges or undermines Western military conceptions of future war. Within this context we also need to ponder what this war reveals about the nature of the war–state relationship that might unfold in the future.

In order to explain why reluctance occurs, this chapter develops a theorization of reluctance in world politics. The conceptual discussion in Chapter 2 forms the basis of such theorization: as Goertz (2006: 5) argues in his seminal work, concept building is always strongly connected with theorizing because all social science concepts always inherently entail a causal dimension. In this chapter, I will therefore proceed by building on the two constitutive dimensions of reluctance – hesitation and recalcitrance – to develop a theoretical framework that helps explain why reluctance occurs in some cases but not in others, and why it occurs to different degrees. At the core of this theoretical framework is the very notion of foreign policy as a field that brings together domestic and international factors: on the one hand, foreign policies are clearly the result of a domestic process through which a range of actors within society aim to influence the government's approach to international affairs, and a number of domestic actors and institutions interact to reach foreign policy decisions. On the other hand, a country's foreign policy is always embedded in an international context, and subject to a range of constraints and expectations articulated by other actors.

This interplay of domestic and international factors will be the overarching framework to explain variations in the occurrence of reluctance. Those factors are clearly related to the two constitutive dimensions of reluctance: hesitation (with its elements of indecisiveness, flip-flopping and delaying) can be analysed in relation to domestic factors, and more specifically to the domestic process of preference formation, which can make it particularly difficult for a government to pursue a consistent and determined foreign policy (Destradi, 2018: 2224–5). As we will see, these difficulties in domestic preference formation can emerge for several reasons (political weakness, limited capacity, cognitive problems or normative struggles). Recalcitrance, which by definition refers to the idea of not conforming to others’ expectations, is related to international factors, specifically to the expectations raised by international actors (Destradi, 2018: 2224–5). As we will see, these domestic and international explanatory factors are deeply interrelated.

The following sections will build on a diverse set of literatures from various theoretical traditions of International Relations (IR), Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), Social Psychology and Psychology, to detail how different kinds of difficulties in domestic preference formation and competing international expectations will lead to reluctance.

The future of ISDS is at a historic crossroads. In this final chapter we provide an overview of the ISDS reform process in the UNCITRAL and discuss the EU proposal for a Multilateral Investment Court in the context of this reform. First, we contextualise the current ISDS reform against earlier attempts to negotiate multilateral international investment agreements to explain how the current reform is different. Second, we discuss the scope of the reform and its process in the framework of UNCITRAL, particularly focusing on the identified ISDS concerns. Third, we outline the reform options that have emerged in the discussion and explain their correlation to the EU’s MIC proposal. In the final part of this chapter, we consider the potential contributions that an MIC could make to the rule of law and the legitimacy of international investment law. While the negotiations are set to conclude in 2025, the aim of this chapter is to place the EU’s proposal in the broader ISDS reform context and reflect on its external challenges in this reform process.

In this final chapter of Part II, we analyse the key legal issues related to the allocation of international investment competence within the EU and examine their implications for policy efficiency and choices in external EU trade and investment relations. Following the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, the EU has gained competence for international investment treaty-making, which previously fell within the scope of the Member States’ competence. Given the relevance of international investment for the EU, on the one hand, and the cross-cutting nature of investment within the range of domestic policy areas on the other, the exercise of competences relating to foreign investment has been surrounded by controversies. Importantly, treaty-making procedure in the EU is not a matter of political inter-institutional preference but it is defined by the delineation of competences, grounded in primary law. The focus of our analysis in this chapter is placed on the internal EU institutional framework regarding competences between the EU and its Member States for investment and the conclusion of EU international investment agreements, and the role of the CJEU in defining the scope of EU policy. The content of EU international investment policy is then analysed in Part III.

International investment law (IIL) and its dispute settlement mechanism is a rare model in international law that allows foreign investors to bring claims for monetary awards directly against States in an international forum, on the basis of international law. Traditionally, individuals have not been subjects of public international law, while State sovereignty has been the main tenet of public international law. How then could individuals, let alone foreign private entities, compel States to engage in dispute resolution with far-reaching consequences? Born out in the 1960s of necessity to protect cross-border investment flows, this area of international law has developed into an extensive and yet fragmented system of instruments for protection of foreign investments and liberalisation of international markets. The development of IIL in a relatively short period of time has been stimulated by an increase in the number of international investment agreements (IIAs) and driven by the rise of investment treaty arbitration (ITA) and jurisprudence. Consequently, the institutional design for investment disputes has become the focus of intense criticism. Debate has evolved around questions of the legitimacy of the international investment regime and its compliance with the rule of law.