Europe and India

Krishnan Srinivasan

Dialogue Without Intimacy

Despite long historical connections, India was a latecomer on the scene for post–World War II Europe. Only in the mid-1990s was India bestowed with a European Union (EU) 'strategy', and that was due to the modest economic reforms in India that promised to open India's vast consumer market. Despite a high level of dialogue and optimistic statements since then, the relationship has been lacking in real substance. The strategic partnership of 2004 has yielded no result; politically, India bewails the EU's perceived tilt towards China and Pakistan and its lack of understanding of India's non-proliferation credentials. There are splits in the EU on such issues but that only lowers the EU's credibility in India. The blame can be laid equally on India and Europe for the lack of entente. Europe considers India politically and socially incomprehensible, and India feels that Europe fails to recognize India's rightful status as a pole in a multipolar world. The Indian profile in Europe is low compared to other global powers; it struggles with an image problem due to the lack of a strong Indian lobby, and Europe, due to its restrictive visa policies, remains largely unknown to Indian professionals, and its profile in India is largely confined to bilateral dealings with Britain, France, and Germany.

India is one of the big three in Asia along with China and Japan. It has a trillion-dollar economy and joins the other two among the top ten in the world gross domestic product (GDP) table. It has the second highest population after China, both topping the one billion person mark. Along with the other two, it has greater military and human resource strength than any other country in Asia. Japan's economic prowess was apparent even in the 1960s; India was a latecomer and followed China as a high-growth economy after 2003. After the Soviet Union's disintegration, India put in place a 'Look East' policy and associated itself with Asian structures like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) and the East Asian Summit. The varying degrees of cooperation and confrontation among the three Asian giants makes it difficult for the EU to formulate any single strategy towards emerging Asia, but it will have to extend a measure of priority towards India despite the general perception that India underperforms on the world stage.

India seeks a stronger stake in the international community; without this, it will continue to be a naysayer in the challenges of change, like climate, energy, and non-proliferation. For the EU, its foreign policy in India is trade policy, and cooperation in political, strategic, and cultural issues is far from optimal. The EU is India's most important trade and investment partner, but the seven-year-long negotiations on a trade and investment agreement have floundered on predictable lines. Both Europe's and India's importance as global players is derived from expectations of future power potential rather than current achievement, and both seem minimally interested in a mutual special relationship despite the commonalities of being the biggest democracies and unions of over twenty-five linguistically, culturally, and ethnically diverse states. They are often at loggerheads in the United Nations (UN) Climate Change conferences and th