New India, Old
Europe
NEW DELHI – The recent Indian-Italian bilateral dialogue,
held in Milan on November 7, at a time when Italy was reeling from the euro
crisis and Silvio Berlusconi’s impending political demise, offered a fraught
reminder of the potential, and the limits, of India’s relationship with the
European Union.
India has a long history of relations with Europe, going
back to the days of the Roman Empire. Its southwestern state of Kerala boasted
a Roman port, Muziris, centuries before Jesus Christ was born; excavations are
now revealing even more about its reach and influence.
The discovery of ancient amphorae has confirmed that
India used to import products such as olive oil, wine, and glass from Italy, in
exchange for exotic items like ivory and spices. Interestingly, an ivory statue
of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, dating back to the first century BC, was found
during excavations of the ruins of Pompeii in southern Italy.
After languishing for centuries, trade is once more
shaping the relationship between these two world regions. The EU is India’s
second-largest trading partner, with turnover reaching €68 billion ($93.5
billion) in 2010, accounting for 20% of India’s global trade. Exports of
services from Europe to India are worth €10 billion, while services imports are
valued at a little more than €8 billion.
India has a several affinities with the EU, not least
that it, too, is an economic and political union of linguistically, culturally,
and ethnically different states. But, in practice, these affinities have not
translated into close political or strategic relations.
In 1963, India was one of the first countries to
establish diplomatic relations with the European Economic Community (the
predecessor to today’s EU), and the India-EU Strategic Partnership and Joint
Action Plan of 2005 and 2008 offer a framework for security cooperation. But it
will take time for the EU to develop a common strategic culture. The EU member
states must develop a collective approach to national-security problems before
meaningful strategic cooperation between the EU and India can occur.
Another important impediment to India-EU relations is
that Indians don’t like anyone lecturing to them. One of the great failings in
the EU-India partnership has been Europe’s tendency to preach to India on
matters, such as human rights, that Indians believe they can handle on their
own.
A democracy for more than six decades (longer than some
EU member states), India regards human rights as a vital domestic issue.
Neither Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, nor any European institution
has exposed a single human-rights problem in India that Indian citizens,
journalists, and NGOs have not already revealed and handled within India’s
democratic political space.
Given this, the EU’s effort to write human-rights
provisions into a free-trade agreement with India, as if they were
automobile-emissions standards, gets Indians’ backs up. Trade should not be
held hostage to internal European politics about human-rights declarations. On
the actual substance of human rights, India and the EU are on the same side and
have the same aspirations. Once this irritant is overcome, negotiations over
the free-trade agreement, which have long been in their “final” stages, can be
concluded, and should transform trade.
There is also room for technological cooperation. India’s
abundant and inexpensive scientific brainpower and its growing reputation for
“frugal innovation” offer interesting potential synergies with Europe’s
unmatched engineering capacity.
Of course, there are serious structural impediments.
Ironically, despite its human-rights rhetoric, the EU has long favored China
over India: for every euro that the EU invests in India, it invests €20 in
China. Admittedly, this is partly India’s fault, because it has not created an
equally congenial climate for foreign investment.
Another stumbling block is that India prefers bilateral
arrangements with individual member states to dealing with the EU collectively.
Arguably, this is necessary, given European institutions’ lack of cohesion on
strategic questions. Since the Maastricht Treaty created the EU 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 clamoring for a third.
Yet the case for India-EU cooperation could not be
stronger, since the bulk of the world’s problem areas lie between India and
Europe (or, as Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt once put it, between the
Indus and the Nile).
The danger is that India could write off Europe as
charming but irrelevant, a continent ideal for a summer holiday, not for
serious business. The world will be poorer if the Old Continent and the rising
new subcontinent fail to build on their shared democratic values and common
interests to offer a genuine alternative to US-Chinese dominance.
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