Draft paper
Presented at IDSA International Workshop on National Security Strategy,
December 2010
Not to be cited without permission
Europe in Indian Strategy
Dhruva Jaishankar
German Marshall Fund of the United States
December 22, 2010
Abstract: Despite promising economic and political relations and a litany of common interests
and values, Europe appears to be taking a declining role in Indian strategic thinking. In recent
years, India and Europe have found themselves on opposing sides of critical international issues
such as world trade, climate change, and global governance structures. Yet Europe provides an
opportunity to be a source of investment and high technology, a complementary economy, a
political partner with shared values, and a source of leverage for India’s dealings with other
states. Important barriers to warmer ties remain in the form of divergent political evolutions,
public apathy, weak people-to-people relations, different attitudes towards the use of force,
strategic incoherence within Europe, and disagreements over global governance. These can only
be surmounted if India pursues an active engagement with Europe, with a focus on deepening
long-term socio-cultural relations. In that sense, Europe represents a crucial litmus test for
India’s grand strategic acumen.
Introduction
India is in the midst of recrafting and reinventing its relations with most major states in
the international system. While breakthroughs with the United States over the past
decade have had perhaps the greatest impact on Indian strategy, the same period has
also witnessed attempts at normalizing relations with China and Pakistan, an
increasingly close relationship with Israel, promising new partnerships with Japan and
Brazil, and a reaffirmation of ties with Russia.
In this light, perhaps the least explored and least developed link India has with a major
center of power is with Europe.
At the very least, Europe appears to be playing a
diminishing role in India’s strategic thinking, despite the continuing prominence of
certain aspects of relations with individual countries: Britain, France and Germany, in
particular. Europe is often conspicuously absent in important discussions of Indian
grand strategy.
1
The recent EU-India Summit of December 10 clearly highlighted limits
to New Delhi’s relationship with Brussels. Unlike other recent summits involving India,
the resulting joint statement explicitly called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of
the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks to justice and promised greater cooperation on
terrorism, but contributed little else on the strategic front despite a wide spectrum of
1
See Raja Menon and Rajiv Kumar, The Long View from New Delhi: To Define the Indian Grand
Strategy for Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2010).
