This is an edited volume of 11 well-researched papers presented at the international conference on “India and the European Union in a Changing World: Perceptions and Perspectives” organised by the School of International Studies of the JNU in March 2012. The papers cover a wide range of topics from the political to the economic, including the Eurozone crisis and climate change.
The first five papers deal largely with political and structural issues. The contributors clearly bring out how India’s perception of and position on issues such as sovereignty, multipolarity and multilateralism are at variance with that of the EU and how this affects their engagement both in terms of expectations for themselves and for the rest of the world.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri’s paper identifies the structural problems and suggests how the EU might better relate to India and other Asian countries. Krishnamoorthy distinguishes between multipolarity which is the objective reality of the distribution of sovereign power in the world today and multilateralism which is the institutional mechanism to cope with that reality. He argues that India and the EU need to be less self-centered in their espousal of multilateralism.
The paper by Hartmut Elsenhans which has probably suffered in translation points out how Indian and EU foreign policy thinking could converge through better self-understanding. Hegde’s paper argues why the common quest of India and the EU to create global norms through soft law instruments must continue despite differences on some issues like counter-terrorism and human rights. Satish Nambiar suggests how India and the EU can share their experience and expertise in peacekeeping and counter insurgency/terrorism to protect innocent civilians in conflict situations.
The remaining six chapters are generally more descriptive and less stimulating. Gulshan Sachdeva’s paper on trade and investment is rich in statistics but offers no clue as to when and how negotiations on the India-EU Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement that commenced in 2007 will be clinched.
The next two papers are on development aid, but with the EU under pressure to reform its aid policy in favour of more needy countries and also to link aid and trade, other bilateral relations have become more valuable to India than the one with the EU. While the two papers on the Eurozone crisis are topical, they hardly fit into the overall narrative of India-EU relations. The last paper only underscores the point that notwithstanding the strategic partnership and various agreements, India and the EU are hardly on the same page on the contentious issue of climate change. The key to making a set of conference papers stand together and grab the reader’s interest is to string the arguments therein into a compelling narrative that retains its relevance even years later. This would have required a fresh overview to also bring in significant policy changes since 2012 and not the perfunctory preface that has been provided.
As Brahma Chellaney has written recently, India is set to move away from nonalignment and become “multi-aligned” to build “…close partnerships with major powers to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings … not only … to advance its core interests but also help it to preserve strategic autonomy, in keeping with its longstanding preference for policy independence.” The book fails to signal whether India and the EU need push their partnership further on the lines already chalked out or rebalance and recalibrate it to factor in the impact of changes initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Another shortcoming in this scholarly work is the intruding shadow of China in a book that sets out to be a collection of papers on India and the EU. Many of the papers dwell at length on China and the EU without bothering to explain how the commonalities and specificities in that relationship do and can influence the India-EU engagement. Finally, given the copious notes at the end of each paper, the book could have benefited greatly from a bibliography listing the major titles referenced.
For all these reasons, the book, despite the high quality of many of the individual papers, comes off as less than the sum of its parts.
