Diverse and democratic, the European Union and India can claim to share a similar temperament. Yet, theirs is a relationship that remains underdeveloped and underwhelming. The EU has tended to focus its attention on China, the country it trades to the tune of almost euro300 billion with. While India prefers to deal with individual European member states like the UK and France bilaterally, rather than invest time and resources on an EU unable to speak with one voice on the issues it cares about.
From New Delhi’s desire for a seat on the permanent security council of the United Nations to support at the nuclear suppliers group in 2008 for the civilian nuclear energy deal with the US, the EU has consistently been unable to formulate a united stance.
This broad context, within which the 11th EU-India summit will take place in Brussels on Friday, has remained unchanged since the beginning of their bilateral summitry. However, beneath the surface constancy, sharp shifts in the geo-strategic landscape have Brussels’ mandarins scurrying to devise ways to inject the EU-India relationship with new urgency.
Plagued by a series of economic predicaments at home and struggling to recast itself as a foreign policy actor of weight, recent months have witnessed the EU floundering in a quagmire of gloom, as pundits warn of its increasing irrelevance, uncertainty and decline.
With economic power shifting East to the growing and populous nations of Asia, the internal wrangling within the EU exposed by the ongoing sovereign debt crises in Greece and Ireland has done little to promote confidence in Europe’s wishes for global leadership role.
At the same time, 2010 is the first year since the coming into effect of the Lisbon Treaty, a series of changes to the EU’s rule book, one of whose intended aims is to create a more coherent foreign policy for the 27-member bloc. Europe now has a President, Mr Herman Van Rompuy, as well as a High Representative of foreign affairs, Baroness Catherine Ashton. Their job is to ensure that the EU is able to speak with one voice on important geo-strategic issues while strengthening its relationships with “important” global actors, including the EU’s six strategic partners of whom India is one (along with the US, Canada, Japan, China and Russia).
The upshot of these shifts is the desire in Brussels, for a sharper focus on India. The traditional EU complaints of India as a “difficult” and truculent country to deal with have not disappeared but these are tempered by changing perceptions of its global heft. Moreover, India is increasingly seen as important, not only in its own right, but also as a counterweight to China.
Worried about an economically powerful China’s growing clout in the region, particularly following the euro zone’s recent woes, Brussels is beginning to cast about for a counterweight to Beijing’s might. And, like its transatlantic cousin, the US, the EU views India as the most likely candidate.
But unlike the US, under current circumstances, the EU remains unable to make the kind of game-changing, grand gesture à la the Indo-US nuclear deal, which could truly infuse meaning to its “strategic” partnership with India.
Instead, the Lisbon Treaty has in many ways put the cart before the horse, by creating the institutions for a European foreign policy in the absence of the existence of such a policy. The hope in Brussels has been that the institutions will eventually serve as the catalyst for member states to harmonise their positions, but so far there are scant signs that this is the direction the EU is in fact moving in.
The last year has seen the Union hamstrung by internal divisions. With Germany openly at odds with other, particularly southern European, member countries on economic and fiscal matters, developing a common foreign policy has not been a priority.
In September, a foreign policy summit of leaders in Brussels had the stated aim of working out the EU’s approach to its strategic partners. “We have strategic partners, now we need a strategy,” European President Herman Van Rompuy had pronounced in the run-up to the meeting. In the end, the two-day summit ended with no results, the leaders having spent their time arguing over the controversial French policy of deporting its Roma immigrants instead.
Given that euro zone countries have found it so difficult to agree on matters of strategy pertaining to rescuing their own fiscally-weak members, it is difficult to envisage a united Europe taking a common stance on prickly issues like reform of the United Nations Security Council.
From an Indian point of view, therefore, the EU remains essentially a trading bloc. And, indeed, trade is really the one domain where the bloc’s members have ceded a real degree of sovereignty to Brussels.
As a result, despite all the talk of attempting to move the bilateral relationship beyond trade, the only big-ticket announcement one could have hoped for from Friday’s summit would have been an agreement on the ongoing free trade negotiations.
But even after three years of discussions and much pre-summit optimism at the ostensible new momentum to the process, the trade accord remains elusive. Instead of an in-principle agreement, Prime Minsiter Manmohan Singh and President Van Rompuy will merely announce a status report and express hopes for a conclusion early next year.
From an Indian perspective, the FTA talks only serve to demonstrate the lacunae in the EU as a negotiating partner, even when it comes to trade, the one settled competence of the bloc.
One of India’s key interests in securing the agreement is to get the EU’s help in facilitating visas for Indian nationals offered jobs in Europe. The recent move by the UK to curb non-European immigration into the country is an example of the practice New Delhi would like to be able to take up with the EU. But immigration is a member state competence and Brussels says it cannot help.
Again, the main sticking point to the talks are not the core trade-related chapters on goods and services but an additional chapter on “sustainable development” by which the EU insists on binding India to a range of human rights and environment-related clauses.
In private European Commission officials confess they agree that such a chapter is extraneous to the negotiations, but insist that the European Parliament will refuse to ratify any trade agreement in its absence. The fact that Europe is unable to make the modest gesture of waiving the need for the “sustainable development” chapter in an FTA, despite New Delhi being a signatory to every major United Nations human rights, labour and environment convention, speaks to the EU’s limited ability to affect the desired paradigm shift in its India ties.
To paraphrase Rompuy, until Europe can get its act together, India and the EU seem fated to remain strategic partners without a strategy.
