Europe in Emerging Asia: Opportunities and Obstacles in Political and Economic Encounters
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Europe in Emerging Asia: Opportunities and Obstacles in Political and Economic Encounters
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Overview
This book explores the relationship between European and emerging Asian economies, as globalization changes the international economic and political landscape. Reflecting on past interactions and possibilities for the future, the book brings together Asian and European perspectives from former politicians, diplomats, and academic experts to examine questions around trade and security, rights and climate change, identity clashes, and the colonial legacy. The book is a timely consideration of highly topical questions that will shape international politics in the twenty-first century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482283 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Krishnan Srinivasan is a former Indian foreign secretary and deputy secretary-general of the Commonwealth. He is presently a visiting professor at ASCI Hyderabad and fellow at the Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies at Kolkata.
Read an Excerpt
Europe in Emerging Asia
Opportunities and Obstacles in Political and Economic Encounters
By Fredrik Erixon, Krishnan Srinivasan
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Fredrik Erixon, Krishnan Srinivasan and ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-228-3
CHAPTER 1
Europe and India
Krishnan Srinivasan
Dialogue Without Intimacy
Despite long historical connections, India was a latecomer on the scene for post–World War II Europe. Only in the mid-1990s was India bestowed with a European Union (EU) 'strategy', and that was due to the modest economic reforms in India that promised to open India's vast consumer market. Despite a high level of dialogue and optimistic statements since then, the relationship has been lacking in real substance. The strategic partnership of 2004 has yielded no result; politically, India bewails the EU's perceived tilt towards China and Pakistan and its lack of understanding of India's non-proliferation credentials. There are splits in the EU on such issues but that only lowers the EU's credibility in India. The blame can be laid equally on India and Europe for the lack of entente. Europe considers India politically and socially incomprehensible, and India feels that Europe fails to recognize India's rightful status as a pole in a multipolar world. The Indian profile in Europe is low compared to other global powers; it struggles with an image problem due to the lack of a strong Indian lobby, and Europe, due to its restrictive visa policies, remains largely unknown to Indian professionals, and its profile in India is largely confined to bilateral dealings with Britain, France, and Germany.
India is one of the big three in Asia along with China and Japan. It has a trillion-dollar economy and joins the other two among the top ten in the world gross domestic product (GDP) table. It has the second highest population after China, both topping the one billion person mark. Along with the other two, it has greater military and human resource strength than any other country in Asia. Japan's economic prowess was apparent even in the 1960s; India was a latecomer and followed China as a high-growth economy after 2003. After the Soviet Union's disintegration, India put in place a 'Look East' policy and associated itself with Asian structures like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) and the East Asian Summit. The varying degrees of cooperation and confrontation among the three Asian giants makes it difficult for the EU to formulate any single strategy towards emerging Asia, but it will have to extend a measure of priority towards India despite the general perception that India underperforms on the world stage.
India seeks a stronger stake in the international community; without this, it will continue to be a naysayer in the challenges of change, like climate, energy, and non-proliferation. For the EU, its foreign policy in India is trade policy, and cooperation in political, strategic, and cultural issues is far from optimal. The EU is India's most important trade and investment partner, but the seven-year-long negotiations on a trade and investment agreement have floundered on predictable lines. Both Europe's and India's importance as global players is derived from expectations of future power potential rather than current achievement, and both seem minimally interested in a mutual special relationship despite the commonalities of being the biggest democracies and unions of over twenty-five linguistically, culturally, and ethnically diverse states. They are often at loggerheads in the United Nations (UN) Climate Change conferences and the World Trade Organization (WTO). What is needed is a better understanding of the other's concerns and limitations, and the potential advantages for India as Europe's strategic partner, and for Europe as India's sympathetic supporter in the western world.
EUROPE
Europe is, even for Europeans, a continent difficult to define. Europe has no centre of authority and no fixed territory; its geographical, administrative, economic, and cultural borders diverge. The EU cannot rid itself of a dichotomy; on one hand, it represents itself, and on the other, it represents its twenty-eight member states. The EU's blend of multipolarity, multilateralism, and inter-regionalism is hard to comprehend and 'no one outside a tiny group of Euro-actors and Euro-academics understands how the EU works'. Europe's size and economy as the world's largest exporter and importer of goods makes it globally important, and it is a lifestyle super-power, having as many as twenty places of the top thirty in the UN Human Development Report Index for 2014.
Collectively, the EU has the instruments — capabilities, technology, finances, population — of a great power but lacks the internal cohesion to assume that status. The financial recession after 2008 and the eurozone crisis placed the union project in jeopardy and have led to continent-wide euro-scepticism. The national interests of member countries often override the EU's common foreign policy, leaving Europe without decisive collective action. Europe's aspirations to promote economic progress, human rights, and sustainability through foreign policy are credible, but gaps appear between the EU's espousal of universal norms and the hard reality of international action due to the competing objectives of different national interests. Furthermore, the United States has made it implicit that it wishes the EU to play no autonomous role in security and strategic issues in South, Southeast, and East Asia.
INDIA
India is a continent, a commonwealth, with a diversity of human talent, originality, and spirituality. It uses English as a lingua franca. It has the best demographics of any large economy; it has the world's largest student numbers; by 2020, the average Indian will be twenty-nine, the average European forty-nine. In a decade, India will have a workforce surplus of fifty-six million against an anticipated shortage of forty-seven million in Western countries. India is a high savings country; 35 percent of the national income is invested. In India's disorderly democracy, due to its youthful profile, there is entrepreneurial energy which finds expression in investments in the developed world. Its growing middle class is gaining attention from European exporters and investors; the number of Indians watching televised cricket matches exceeds the collective consumer class of Europe and the United States. Its general elections every five years, despite poverty, illiteracy, and inequality, involve an electorate of more than eight hundred million eligible voters. It has multiple competing narratives, many of which are highly divisive. To stay stable and peaceful, India has perforce to be a muddle and a mess, and it has evolved a brand of governance in its own chaotic image. The Indian government had assumed that strong investment and savings rates would maintain high growth, but managers of the Indian economy now face the challenge of restoring it to previous levels. Reforms, so far in homeopathic doses, must be completed, with agriculture decontrolled, taxes simplified; foreign direct investment (FDI) permitted in retail, defence, and insurance; and land and labour legislation reformed and made relevant to Indian growth ambitions.
THE EUROPEAN UNION AND INDIA — THE POTENTIAL
India and the EU have many similarities. Both are bureaucratic, cautious, unwieldy, and slow to decision. They have both wrestled with integration and unity in diversity for over six decades. Both look forward to a multicultural and multipolar world, and face common threats of fundamentalism, terrorism, illegal migration, and climate change. They have the challenge of multiple identities, and India is familiar with the debate that is always engaging Europe — the need for a stronger union. But these affinities have not been translated into any intimacy.
With its tolerant, multireligious, plural complexion and without ideological inhibitions, India might emerge stronger than a more chauvinistic competitor like China; a civilization that accepts the equality of nations may prove stronger than the one based on either isolation or superiority. Close cooperation between the EU and India would give both more prestige and geopolitical leverage in regard to third parties like China and the United States, but the partners are not yet of one mind. The relationship has been likened to a 'loveless arranged marriage ... between a well-matched couple but with no spark of chemistry'. India needs a 'Look to Europe' policy to supplement its 'Look East' policy, and Europe needs a better understanding of the opportunities that India has to offer. The EU is India's major trade, development, and investment partner, and Europe is becoming increasingly important for Indian companies as a destination for investment and acquisitions. These are positive trends. India and China have been lonely giants, too big to have any close partners, but as they rise, both nations have to assume responsibilities for regional if not global security. India may never bestride the global stage like China, but neither can it be ignored as an insignificant player.
India is interested in the EU's achievement of social justice, economic modernization, regional integration, and the search for a knowledge economy, and the EU could benefit from engagement with India on global issues and forms of global governance, which could include human security, social development, capacity building, democratic reforms, energy consumption, and subnational governance. Europe and India could cooperate in projects in the developing world in a triangular mode, and in naval cooperation in the Indian Ocean, which is a maritime/littoral space of geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geostrategic importance. Being reliant on sea-based commerce, both are important stakeholders in maritime security in this area with its multiple choke points, piracy, terrorism, failed states, rogue states, overfishing, undersea cables, drugs and arms trafficking, and the ever-increasing presence of China by land and sea.
Brussels pushes to broaden the EU-India framework from the European point of view — for example, with respect to the human rights — in which success is hard to achieve, and New Delhi presses for understandings on current issues — for example, with respect to counterterrorism — and is content to leave optimization of the framework to some future date. The EU-India partnership is still a top-down, executive-driven relationship mainly propelled by corporate interests. The links are therefore less than intense, and there is danger that India could underestimate the degree of coherence that already exists within the EU (as can be seen in the free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations, where the EU is the lead actor and not its member states) and thereby disregard the need for closer contacts with the leading EU institutions.
As the predominant country in South Asia, India does not welcome any European political interventions in its backyard, though the EU's potential impact on democratization and social policies in the Indian subcontinent is small. India and other emerging powers and regions, such as Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and South Korea, are neglected in the European public discourse, though a growing interest in Asia is in how the EU will position itself in relation to the United States' strategic focus on Asia. As yet, the American rebalance or 'pivot' to the Asia Pacific has occasioned little comment or reaction in Europe.
EUROPEAN ATTITUDE TO INDIA
The EU is a global economic actor that desires to be a point of reference and a centre of strategic thought, creativity, and innovation. It is economically strong though politically weak, does not have matching military strength, and finds it hard to formulate any coherent foreign policy position. International policies expressed and implemented bilaterally by its members diminish its credibility, and it lacks cultural engagement. On strategic issues, the EU has no clear standing or role, and in areas of security interest to India, the EU has staked out no clear position.
New Delhi could point out that there is no EU defence ministry, army headquarters, or intelligence headquarters, and security cooperation and global issues can best be dealt with bilaterally with the member countries. The EU is reluctant to confront Pakistan on terror-related matters; it wants to be even-handed between India and Pakistan because it is unwilling or unable, due to its internal competences, to deal with India's strategic problems. Europe and India have different security contexts: while the EU lays stress on Indo-Pakistan dialogue, India references Pakistan's support for terror across its border, and is ready for greater coordination against Islamist militancy, but there is a mismatch of expectations. The EU is more concerned with non-traditional threats like cybercrime, illegal immigration, and human trafficking, whereas for India there are anxieties about national integrity, border violations, insurgencies, and separatism.
The EU feels that India is insufficiently entrepreneurial or proactive, that it is mired in its own problems, that its market is too protected, and complains about the absence of intensive engagement. India engages inadequately with the European Commission as well as with the European Parliament. India's democratic polity earns it scant leverage with the EU, which feels uneasy about strategic cooperation, high technology transfers, and defence cooperation with India. The EU is weighed down by legalistic interpretations of non-proliferation, many of its members are uncomfortable with the US-India 2008 Civil Nuclear Accord, and is unable to take a united stand on India's nuclear weapon status. Indian participation in the European Galileo global positioning system project was first mooted in 2003, but was delayed due to some EU members linking India's membership to arms control and dual-use technologies, and India joined the International Thermonuclear Fusion experimental reactor in 2005 in France only after an American clearance when Washington had started negotiations with India on an escape route from the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) in the form of a civil nuclear agreement. Emerging Asia wants changes in international society to reflect its interests, and the United States has appeared more sympathetic to India's rise, whereas the EU is seen by New Delhi as a staunch defender of the existing order. There are other variations as well. Europe has to outsource business and insource skilled labour; it is threatened by a technology gap with the United States and fears of China taking over European manufacturing and India taking over European services. Europe believes in a post-modern world of norms; India in power, realism, and balance of power, with little faith in collective institutions. If India wants to rise and Europe to remain relevant, they have both to exploit their complementarities.
The EU has a low profile in India, and Brussels has little time and political energy for India. In many ways, Europe and India have both come to be perceived as underperforming, struggling to overcome internal divisions and find a space for themselves in the global order. In India's view, the EU does not consider Asia as multipolar and concentrates too much of its attention on China, greatly to India's chagrin.
INDIAN ATTITUDE TO EUROPE
India established diplomatic relations with the European Economic Community in 1962, but it took another thirty-two years for a ministerial-level dialogue to start. On the European Economic Community's part, with regard to all Asian nations apart from Japan, only after 1990 was there greater interest shown in Brussels, and regular India-EU meetings at summit level began only in 2000, after the euro currency was launched in 1999.
India ranks the EU low in its priorities; it regards the EU more as an experiment than as an international organization. It seems uncertain whether the EU is a super-state, a supra-national entity, or a post-modern state. India finds the changing priorities of the EU baffling: The EU seemed to prefer process rather than outcome, with a plethora of forums producing limited results. An Indian viewpoint similar to euro-scepticism is thus evident. For historical reasons, Indians perceive the EU primarily through the British lens and prefer the bilateral route with key EU states like Britain, France, and Germany, and Britain is more or less the spokesman for the EU in India and vice versa. India has found it hard to see value added in the EU as opposed to its individual members, and influential Indians disregard the EU's relevance for India's desired status in the international arena. India has not seen eye to eye with the EU on Myanmar, UN reform, Sri Lanka, climate change, the Doha Round, or non-proliferation. In India's view of geopolitics, the European mind-set of the Cold War has not substantially changed, and the EU has slavishly followed the American lead on too many global issues.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Europe in Emerging Asia by Fredrik Erixon, Krishnan Srinivasan. Copyright © 2015 Fredrik Erixon, Krishnan Srinivasan and Contributors. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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