The president of the European Commission and all her fellow commissioners turned up in India last week, in a hastily put-together visit meant to re-energize relations. The bonhomie on display in New Delhi sent out the message that Europe still had some friends — and contrasted starkly with what was unfolding simultaneously in Washington.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi together announced a set of promises meant to drive India and the EU closer together. They would conclude a free-trade agreement by the end of the year, they said. Von der Leyen also told the media that Europe intended to create a “defense and security partnership,” similar to recent agreements it has signed with Japan and South Korea.
All that positive energy did not just feel different from the state of the transatlantic relationship. It also represented a major shift from three years ago, when India failed, in European eyes, to offer a strident enough condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, it is not India that has changed its tune since. European politicians appear to have concluded that the continent’s strategic autonomy requires them to woo even an imperfectly committed New Delhi.
Illustration: Mountain People
The continent’s dilemma is that nobody on the world stage can even begin to replace the US as a security ally or China as an economic partner. Compared to what it is giving up, what it is seeking out would always appear small.
The commission managed to push a free-trade agreement with the Latin American trade bloc Mercosur over the line, for example. It was willing to expend valuable political capital on that effort, even though the grouping of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Argentina has an even smaller share of world trade than India.
Europe’s leaders have correctly decided that they now need as many friends — Japan, the South Americans, India and the Gulf kingdoms — as they can possibly cobble together. They might be right. Certainly, European states’ trade and security partnerships with many of these countries have underperformed or been routed through the US.
In the fractious decade to come, expanding ties with India might prove very useful to European security as much as to its trade. India’s might not be world’s most advanced or competitive economy, but it is one of the few countries with an industrial base useful for a continent determined to rearm.
Indian companies can scale up basic manufacturing — of artillery shells, for example — very quickly. Just last week, one such company, Bharat Forge Ltd, announced that it had exported more than 100 155mm artillery systems last year; the auto component maker famously managed to produce more than 100,000 shells in a month during the last, brief war with Pakistan 25 years ago.
Von der Leyen was careful to note India’s “interest in joining defense industrial projects under the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation” program. Indian domestic production has been growing, although nowhere near as quickly as South Korea’s. Perhaps Europe’s ballooning defense budgets would give local companies the incentive they need to increase capacity.
Europe might feel somewhat friendless at the moment. It had barely begun to accept that China was a systemic rival before it discovered that the US thought of itself as a competitor as well.
However, there is little chance that India would be able to fill China’s role in European supply chains. China and the EU conduct more than 15 percent of the world’s trade; India’s share has long been stuck at about 2 percent. Most years, India trades more with the EU than with anyone else, but it itself does not occupy as prominent a position in the European economy, and is only the bloc’s ninth-largest partner.
If nothing else, Von der Leyen and her peers would have recognized they need to keep countries such as India invested in the rules-based world order that has kept Europe prosperous. It is too easy to follow the US’ lead and drift away from multilateralism; even as the EU commissioners were landing in New Delhi, India’s minister of finance said that multilateralism was “sort of out.”
Brussels’ technocrats might not have planned to give off a faint air of desperation as they lined up for photographs with Modi in New Delhi. However, given the situation that their region is in, desperation is better than the alternative. Meanwhile, Indians accept they cannot solve all the EU’s problems. However, they also know that the EU needs to build and repair as many relationships as it can, as soon as it can.
Otherwise, as we all saw in the Oval Office, Europe is on its own.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
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