India is recalibrating its approach to Europe

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. (File image: Reuters)

Europeans are frittering away 25 years of uninterrupted prosperity built on cheap Russian energy, and a lucrative Chinese market. The continent’s security is at the crossroads too — not because Russian tanks are about to roll into mainland Europe as they once did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia — but because European governments are belatedly nursing self-inflicted wounds caused by policies of outsourcing their defence to the United States.

Without explicitly saying so in deference to diplomatic niceties, India is distancing itself from Continental Europe, which cannot redeem itself in the medium term from the colossal mistakes and miscalculations it made in its false sense of comfort since the end of the Cold War. In June, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, speaking at the Globesec 2022 Bratislava Forum, was constrained to pull up Europe for its myopia. “The days when they (in Asia) expected Europe to come (with humanitarian responses), the difference today is that nobody is even thinking of that anymore. The world is changing...The world cannot be that Eurocentric as it used to be in the past. A new agenda must come...Why would anybody in Asia trust Europe on anything at all?”

Until the all-round chaos created by Liz Truss during her short, 44-day Prime Ministership, it appeared that for India, the United Kingdom would be an exception in exploring new horizons in mutual engagement in the region. But then, that was because the UK had opted for Brexit, and Boris Johnson, Truss’ predecessor, had designated India as one of three countries to implement his policies outside the European Union envisioning a new ‘Global Britain’. That vision is now on a slippery slope unless the UK’s political class can put their house in order.

Which makes France the only country in Europe which matters to India. New Delhi’s relations with Paris remain robust, but it has nothing to do with the EU. They stand on their own merit, and bear comparison to India’s engagement of Russia and the United States in scale and diversity. France is the country India trusts most today, even more than it trusts its historically longer-term partner, Russia. Therefore, whatever happens within the EU because of the war between Russia and Ukraine, India’s engagement of at least one important European country — France — will continue on a bilateral track. On the other hand, the creativity and dynamism with which India and Europe approached each other after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is destined to be shelved for the foreseeable future.

Soon after the differences between Russia and Ukraine spilled into the battlefield, perspicacious Indians gave expression to fears that Europe’s prosperity, built on creaky foundations, was at a dead end. Europeans, especially in the echelons of decision-making in the EU’s high offices in Brussels, were slower than these Indians to acknowledge this uncomfortable reality. The EU wanted to believe so much in its fantasies that it dug itself deeper into holes of its own making, after the Russian military operation in Ukraine. A comprehensive, un-blinkered, and truthful EU analysis on the road ahead did not come until October 10 when Josep Borrell, the 27-member group’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, acknowledged that “our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market.”

This was precisely what DB Venkatesh Varma, who headed Indian diplomatic missions in Spain, Geneva, and Moscow, warned in speeches and writings in the very first week after Russian troops crossed into Ukraine. Seven-and-a-half months later, Borrell told a gathering of EU Ambassadors from across the globe: “Our prosperity has been based on Russian gas – cheap and supposedly affordable, secure, and stable. It has been proved not to be the case. And access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. The Chinese workers with their low salaries have done much more to contain inflation than all the (European) Central Banks together...The fact that Russia and China are no longer the ones that they were for our economic development will require a strong restructuring of our economy.”

That is easier said than done. India is clearly factoring in these calculations into its strategy for Europe under the changed scenarios there.

The fall of the Iron Curtain was a historic opportunity for Europe to stand on its own feet in security matters and build a defence mechanism away from reliance on the Pentagon. Instead, the entire continent — especially the former adherents to the Warsaw Pact — put all their eggs in the basket of a mindlessly expanded North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

So, now Europe finds itself beholden to the US against threats — both real and imagined. But there will be no free lunch here: it will be Europe which the NATO will ask to bankroll in support of Ukraine. Such a predicament will add further to dents in European prosperity. Smaller European nations will, at the same time, badger the Pentagon with defence demands, which the US Congress may be in no mood to concede.

It is reasonable to expect that under such circumstances, the US pivot to Asia in security matters will slow down, or pause. Europe and NATO will henceforth be Washington’s defence priority. Unless Borrell’s worst fears, which he shared with EU Ambassadors, come true in the US mid-term elections next month: “While the cooperation with the Biden Administration is excellent...who knows what will happen two years from now, or even in November? What would have happened if, instead of Joe Biden, it would have been Donald Trump or someone like him in the White House?” These are questions for which Europe has no answers, and the fault lies entirely with them.