European Environmental Cosmopolitanism As a Call to Indian Gandhian-Style Democracy: The New Environmental Nation-State As Soft Power?

Zygmunt Bauman offers a persuasive argument of the importance of Europe’s post-imperial cosmopolitan role in world politics. Part of a legacy that traces itself to Immanuel Kant, this stance can be argued to be a form a soft power – a way to consolidate legitimacy in the global moral economy. This paper will argue that in the Indian context, and with pertinence to a particular case, it has been received as a call to a similar response. The case concerns the struggle of what was highlighted as an indigenous community protesting against the acquisition of their sacred mountain by a UK-based mining company. The Norwegian government and the Church of England among others, disinvested in the company and also tried to apply diplomatic pressure on the Indian government to ban the company’s mining project – to which the Indian government responded amenably and with an official acknowledgement of the role of the Norwegian government in influencing its decision. However, in further developments related to the case, the Indian Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment that was perhaps as much diplomacy as jurisprudence – it asked for an environmental referendum at the level of the village councils of the indigenous community, which would decide the fate of the mining project. In data collected in relation to this case, many informants emphasized that the government’s stance was more influenced by the management of its image in the international public sphere than it was by domestic imperatives. The paper will argue that the government’s actions were in fact a way to go beyond the European cosmopolitanism to which it responded, and showcase support for a Gandhian-style grassroots-level environmental democracy – thereby enhancing its own stock of diplomatic soft power.