India and China: Conflict, Competition, Cooperation, and Prospects for Peace

As realists contend, if in the international system all nation states (actors) are potential adversaries, and the distribution of power is crucial to understanding their behavior, as John Spanier points out, it is still true that security concerns, and the struggle for power is not the whole of international politics. In many of their interactions, nations are not primarily concerned about their security, nor are they struggling for power. Some states such as Costa Rica, Sweden, Bhutan, Iceland, and Switzerland do not exhibit the characteristics of states driving for power. Spanier therefore, characterizes international politics not just as a struggle for power but also a mixed game comprising of conflict, competition, and cooperation, and he describes what these components entail.Spanier shows that particular conflicts among and between nations can occur for many different reasons: nations may be seeking incompatible interests such as each wanting to control the same territory or perhaps one country seeks stabilization of a particular government and the other its overthrow. Maybe a nations' prestige is involved, and compromise is impossible; events may snowball until a conflict develops that no one anticipated. Incorrect and inadequate information or certain preconceptions may bring about poor decisions that can produce an unnecessary conflict. It may be possible that ethnic, racial, and religious differences just cannot be reconciled.There exist endless possibilities for conflict to erupt among states. But states not only engage in conflict but also in competition, which is especially true with great powers, even if they are not in conflict. States engage in military, economic, and cultural competition with their potential adversaries in order to serve their national interests, protect their allies and friends, maintain their prestige, and influence in world politics. Nations also engage in cooperative relationships that may vary from those that are limited and informal to those that approach complete agreement on objectives and on the rules of coexistence.Given the anarchical structure of international system, there are limits to cooperation among and between nations. First, being concerned about their security or wealth, nations cannot let themselves be too dependent on other states fearing that they might become vulnerable to threats to reduce or eliminate any ongoing exchange of goods and services such as embargoes. Second, even when states cooperate on crucial issues such as arms control, with the belief that both parties might gain from that cooperation, each might still worry about the distribution of benefits and sharing of costs, as well as who might come out ahead of the cooperation. These concerns and fears may dampen the existing cooperation and the future cooperative relationships between  So, to summarize Spanier's approach to international politics, conflict between nation states arise due to a variety of reasons such as incompatibility of interests, prestige in world affairs, misperceptions of each other, and ideological differences. Even if they are not in conflict, nations engage in military, economic, and cultural competition with their potential adversaries to serve their national interests. As nations coexist, they also seek cooperative relationships in areas of trade, commerce, and nuclear proliferation although they are constrained to avoid dependency, economic domination, and sanctions by larger powers.This article applies Spanier's analytical views of conflict, competition, and cooperation to the discussion of India China relations from 1947 to the present, and assess prospects for peace between India and China. Since China's annexation Tibet in 1950, India and China have become border states creating border conflict accompanied by war in 1962, and frequent tensions and clashes. China's annexation of Tibet and its imposition of oppressive communist rule over Tibet has also added to tensions between the two countries.