The EU’s new leadership team all agree that relations with India should be a priority, and both sides stand to gain by deepening co-operation. Renewed great power competition should give the relationship a fresh impetus.
India is clearly on the agenda of the new EU team. Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement on January 21st that the first trip of her new term would be to India, accompanied by the full college of Commissioners, builds on her 2022 statement that the relationship with India was one of the Union’s “most important for the coming decade”. This was echoed earlier this month by European Council President, António Costa, when he described India as one of the EU’s main global partners and said it was time to boost relations and “engage in a new strategic agenda”. Additionally, in her confirmation hearing, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas told the European Parliament that the EU’s relations with India had “so much unexplored potential”.
But despite the warm rhetoric, the EU-India relationship is currently much thinner than it could be. India has seen the EU as a trade bloc rather than a political actor, and has focused on developing bilateral relations with member-states, whilst senior EU officials, speaking privately, have acknowledged that “Europe knows too little about India”. In 2018 the EU released an embryonic strategy, ‘Elements for an EU strategy on India’. However, this lacked the strategic clarity of the EU’s 2019 joint communication on China, with its triptych of ‘partner, competitor, systemic rival’, and the Commission’s call for a more joined-up European approach remains unanswered. EU-India relations are currently governed by a ‘roadmap’ which, though broad, contains little that is operational and is due to be renegotiated in 2025. Shared concerns about dependencies on China and an increasingly polarised world should, however, push both parties to try to overcome the obstacles to closer co-operation.
Both Europe and India have a shared interest in maintaining a balance of power in an Indo-Pacific region increasingly shaped by China. The EU is paying more attention to the region, resulting in the launch of European strategies on connecting Europe and Asia and on the Indo-Pacific more generally. India’s ambitious domestic agenda of sustainable modernisation and development dovetails with several of Europe’s foreign economic priorities, and both the EU and India are seeking to reduce their dependencies on China in areas such as critical minerals. India could play a role in helping Europe to derisk and diversify supply chains, in line with the call in the Draghi report for a European foreign economic policy. These clearly converging interests could overcome potential divergences on aspects of trade and foreign policy.
About the Author
Anunita Chandrasekar is the Clara Marina O’Donnell fellow (2024-25) at the Centre for European Reform.