Once this irritant is overcome, the negotiations for an FTA, which has been long in its ‘final’ stages, should be concluded and should transform trade.
Of course there are structural impediments that will not disappear. Ironically, given its human rights professions, the EU has long favoured China over India, and China is clearly the preferred investment destination: for every euro invested in India from the EU, 20 euros is invested in China. (This is partly India’s fault, in not creating a comparably congenial climate for foreign investment.) An EU ambassador to India, quoted by Malone, observed that ‘each has a tendency to look to the most powerful poles in international relations rather than towards each other, and each spends more time deploring the shortcomings of the other rather than building the foundations of future partnership’.
A major element in the equation is India’s well-advertised preference for bilateral arrangements with individual member states of the EU, over dealing with the collectivity. This is arguably necessary, given the lack of cohesion in European institutions on strategic questions. Since Maastricht in 1992, Europe has claimed to have a ‘common foreign policy’, but it is not a ‘single’ foreign policy. (If it were, EU member states would not need two of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and be clamouring for a third.)
The case for India — EU cooperation could be strongly made, since the bulk of the problem areas in the world lie between India and Europe (or, as Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt once put it, between the Indus and the Nile). To take two examples: more people have been killed in Europe by drugs coming in from Afghanistan than the total number killed in two decades of fighting in that country. India’s security interests in Afghanistan and its greater proximity to that country offer important intersections with Europe’s interests. India’s increasing salience in the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and especially in the security of the Gulf, the source of much of Europe’s energy, suggests another area of cooperation.
And yet the prospects for institutional cooperation between India and the EU — despite all that they have in common, the long history of contact between the Old Continent and the subcontinent, and the contemporary relevance of the challenges and opportunities they confront — remain negligible. India — EU relations currently lack substance and strategic weight, despite the conclusion of a strategic partnership in 2004. The oxymoronic lack of European unity undermines the credibility of the collectivity; policy-makers in New Delhi will not be able to find many instances of the EU, rather than its individual member states, engaging with or standing up to the United States, Russia or China on any major issue. The ongoing eurozone crisis has also not served to enhance India’s confidence in Europe. So New Delhi strengthens relationships with a number of individual European countries that it considers reliable partners, but fails to think of Europe collectively as one of the potential poles in the evolving multipolar world. A European observer, Karine Lisbonne de Vergeron, characterizes the thinking of the Indian elite as follows: ‘Europe lacks a strategic vision and ranks at the bottom of the list of partners in India’s multipolar understanding of the future geometry of world affairs.’ This assessment is not far off the mark.
Conceptually, the foreign policy establishment in independent India sees the nation as a modern state founded on and sustained by strong ideas of sovereignty, territoriality and raison d’état. In contrast, the EU is a post-modern construct, with diminishing regard for sovereignty within its territorial space and a growing desire for extraterritoriality in its aspirations. This basic difference between the conceptual outlook of India and that of the EU might help explain the inherent discomfort of modern India in engaging with a post-modern entity like the EU. In principle and in practice, too, India is wedded to non-interference in the internal affairs of states, whereas the EU is the land on which Bernard Kouchner propounded his theory of a ‘droit d’ingerence’ and its soil has offered fertile ground for initiatives revealing a penchant for intervention beyond sovereign boundaries. India and the EU may have democracy and diversity in common, but in their basic orientation towards statecraft, they diverge fundamentally.
For all these reasons, India has consistently revealed a greater sense of comfort in dealing with individual European nation states; New Delhi sees an affinity with London, Berlin or Paris that it cannot bring itself to imagine with Brussels or Strasbourg. As a result, as my former colleague, the Indian diplomat Sandeep Chakravorty, has observed about Europe, ‘it may not be an exaggeration to state that India’s relationship with the parts is more substantive than with the whole’. It does not help that India also considers Europe with its multiplicity of complex organizations to be over-institutionalized and over-bureaucratized and, therefore, far more complicated and less attractive to engage with than national capitals.
The boot is not entirely on one foot. Where Europe and India have divergent approaches to addressing security issues, for instance, Indian deficiencies are arguably to blame. For instance, the EU has formalized an elaborate Common Foreign and Security Policy, a European Security and Defence Policy, and even a European Security Strategy (by the European Council in 2003), while India has not yet even formally articulated a national security strategy. While Europe may desire closer security cooperation with India, India is really in no position to reciprocate except in terms of generalities. On the other hand, of course, Indian decision-makers could point out that there is no European defence ministry, army headquarters or intelligence service, and so security cooperation is in any case better conducted with individual states.
It could also be argued that the EU adds very little value to India’s efforts to overcome its principal security challenges. In the immediate priority areas of strategic interest to India — its own neighbourhood, the Gulf region, the United States and China — the EU is almost irrelevant, and the story does not get better if one extends India’s areas of security interest to Central and Southeast Asia. On the big global security issues — nuclear proliferation, civil conflict and terrorism — the problem is the same, while the EU has almost nothing to contribute to India’s search for energy security. Even in India’s quest to be part of the global decision-making architecture, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, it is not the EU but the existing European permanent members, the United Kingdom and France, which bring more value to the table for India. India certainly needs European cooperation in counterterrorism and European remote surveillance technology, but it would obtain these from European nation states, not from the EU.
If security is therefore a marginal area for EU — India cooperation, there certainly is scope in the fields of food security, the response to climate change and the protection of the environment, where Europe could share with India its advances in ‘green technology’. In the sphere of science and technology, India’s participation in both the International Thermonuclear Reactor Project (ITER) and the GALILEO satellite programmes came through the EU. But beyond these, there are few visible ‘wins’ in India — EU cooperation. There is certainly room for enhanced technological cooperation, where India’s abundant and inexpensive scientifically savvy brainpower and its burgeoning record in ‘frugal innovation’ offer interesting synergies with Europe’s unmatched engineering traditions and capacity. But the Arcelor-Mittal affair, in which a takeover bid by an Indian steel firm of a European one was challenged in a manner that can only be described as racist (‘Europeans are like a delicate perfume, Indians a cheap eau de toilette’ was only one of the many unpleasantries bandied about) showed India the limits of doing business with and in Europe.