In quest of a leading role among the nonaligned, India was adhering to a concept of international order compatible with the inherited one on both the global and regional level. Its formal articulation was classically Westphalian and congruent with historic European analyses of the balance of power. Nehru defined India’s approach in terms of “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Though given the name of an Indian philosophical concept, Pancha Shila (Five Principles of Coexistence), these were in effect a more high-minded recapitulation of the Westphalian model for a multipolar order of
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