India’s neutralism in theory and practice.

It has become a truism of international politics to say that the power configuration in the atomic age is vastly different from that which existed during the 18th and 19th centuries--the classical era of European interstate relations. But in what way does it differ and how do these differences affect the position of the would-be neutralist in the mid-20th century? In the belief that hypotheses about both these questions are essential to an understanding of neutrality and its progeny, neutralism, this chapter offers some propositions about the structure of international politics in the pre-atomic and atomic eras