ndia – EU relations

While China uttered the loudest condemnations of Indian nuclearization, one may see exactly how very short-lived any actual condemnation was from the EU, since the first EU-India summit took place in Lisbon in the year 2000⁵⁵. Since then, there have been regular annual summits, culminating in the 2004 Strategic Partnership Agreement. The Partnership Agreement includes multilateral cooperation in the international sphere, with emphasis put on conflict prevention, anti-terrorism, non-proliferation, the promotion of democracy and the defence of human rights; a strengthened economic cooperation (the EU is India's largest trading partner); cooperation in development so as to enable India to achieve the Millenium goals as set up by the United Nations; intensifying the mutual intellectual and cultural exchanges; and finally, improving the framework of Indo-European relations.⁵⁶

The Strategic Partnership Agreement, while ambitious, so far has had few concrete achievements, other than Indian participation in both the GALILEO satellite navigation system project and the ITER international fusion nuclear research and engineering project, neither of which have much benefit when it comes to promoting non-proliferation around the world.

The next year, in 2005, the EU and India signed the Joint Action Plan, centered around five pillars:

democracy and human rights, multilateralism, conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction, disarmament and non-proliferation, and terrorism; this was supposed to be an expansion of the relationship. However, just before the Joint Action Plan was signed, two EU countries (France and the Netherlands) held referendums in which their respective populations turned down the budding European Constitution. Therefore, the EU was incapable of ratifying it, which critically weakened the EU and prevented it from reforming its decision-making processes, which would have allowed it to become a more unified actor on the global scene. From this point, India-EU relations slightly

55 http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/er/09552.en0.html

56 Jaffrelot, C. (2006) India and the European Union: the Charade of a Strategic Partnership, CERI-Sciences Po publication, p.6

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stalled; it bears noting that this made the EU unable to support India's bid for a permanent seat at the UNSC as a whole, even though individual member states may support it. The support of the entire European Union would have meant much for India.

While the EU is fragmented, and different countries have different perspectives and objectives when it comes to India, as a whole the EU does seek to further its relations with the budding Asian giant. Indian leadership however doesn't always quite know what to make of the EU; India tends to cultivate a plurality of partnerships with different EU member states, as do many third countries, the EU being somewhat difficult to deal with as a whole. This necessarily limits the perception

countries may have of the EU as a single actor. Furthermore, as a country that tends to attribute a great deal of importance to hard power, and leans towards following realpolitik ideas, India can be somewhat disdainful of the EU's more idealistic notions and its ongoing support for things such as world governance based on norms, international law, and multilateral institutions. Indian elites' tendency towards hard power makes them closer to the US, which is less circumspect about the use of force than the EU would be; and Indian strategists often think that more benefits are likely to come to India from the possession of nuclear power than from the soft power attraction of being the world's largest democracy. Therefore, India turned away from the EU, and towards the US.

Furthermore in 2005 the US made India the offer of a special status outside of the NPT, thus proposing a change in international rules, in a way that would allow India to be a participating member of what one may dub the “nuclear club”, and recognising India as a «responsible state with advanced nuclear technology». This offer obviously drew India closer to the US, and further away from the EU, seeing the US as the only way to achieve its goals.

The relationship with the EU is important; it is India's largest trade partner⁵⁷, as well as a major source of high technology -- for things such as defence equipment, civilian planes, space

cooperation, and scientific cooperation programmes -- and it also has the possibility of being a role model for a country as diverse as India, through its conflict-solving capacities for its many different

57 http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/india/eu_india/trade_relation/index_en.htm

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states. India however is not strong enough to go it alone, and it doubts, with reason, that the EU is able to offer what it needs to secure its place as an emerging great power.

In 2005, India signed its Strategic Partnership Agreement with the US, and the same year, the US offered India the possibility of the nuclear deal. While India gets the recognition it craves, and help it needs, the US gets a partner that may help it counterbalance, if not contain China in the future; all this leaves less space for the EU in India's psyche. Furthermore, in the past India has seen the EU as eager and willing to engage with China, India's more advanced but undemocratic rival, which has left a sour taste in the mouth of some Indian analysts, as a sign of Western hypocrisy once more.

While the EU touts its support of democracy, human rights and environmental protection, it has spent more time engaging China, with its less than stellar track record on all these issues, than India, which has done nothing to further the EU's case in Indian eyes. Deepening cooperation with China is likely to hurt the EU's relation with India, unless the cooperation entails bringing China closer to international norms. Additionally, if the EU as a whole had pushed for the nuclear deal, matters might be very different; however, it is unlikely that the EU would be able to bypass its values to offer such a game-changing deal, even if it had been able to come together for this purpose.

Contrasting the two different strategic partnerships serves to show the differences between EU-India and US-EU-India relations. While the EU-EU-India strategic partnership focuses on dialogue and cooperation, the US-India partnership is more security and challenges (geopolitical, energy, technology...) oriented. The EU partnership centers on multilateralism, and points out that France and the United Kingdom support India's bid for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat.

When it comes to security, the discussion targets peacekeeping, peace-building, and post-conflict assistance, while the EU doesn't really know how to handle the nuclear issue, this being before the US deal changed matters. The US partnership on the other makes no mention at all of the UNSC bid, likely because the US sees reform of the entire UN as necessary before reforming the UNSC, as the UN's apex (although it bears mentioning here that in 2010, president Obama pledged to support

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India's bid for the UNSC during a speech to the Indian parliament⁵⁸). When it comes to security, the US encourages India's emergence as a force to deal with on the international scene, even when it comes to India's military dimension; and as to the nuclear issue, as mentioned previously the year of the Strategic Partnership the US offered to change the rules of the game just for India, and

welcomed it as a nuclear state. However, while the US is most likely the only power that could offer this in reality, it is still referring the case to the international community, since it needs the approval of the Nuclear Suppliers Group for this to go forward. This is where the European nuclear countries' support became important for India, but French and British support for this was quasi-assured; the UK's relation with India made it unlikely to push against this action, and France would jump on the opportunity of a new market for its nuclear technology and know-how.

This is only reinforced by the fact that in 2006, two weeks before the US-India nuclear deal was finalized, India and France signed an Indo-French Joint Statement. This one contained explicit support for India's UNSC bid and an agreement on defence cooperation. At the same time, an additional document specifically devoted to the nuclear issue was signed, the "Joint Cooperation on the Development of Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes".⁵⁹ This would imply that both parties were expecting the US-India negotiations to pave the way for the "adjustment of international civil cooperation framework with respect to India". Both knew it was going to happen.

France and India started their own strategic dialogue in 1998, and in 2002 set up a Joint Committee for Nuclear Energy; it would appear that while the EU is not ready to move strongly on sensitive issues ( as mentioned before, there is no consensus line, since the reforms on the decision-making process that were part of the Constitution were not adopted), this did not prevent certain EU member states to prepare for full-fledged cooperation with India once "international commitments and obligations" are redefined. France, being one of the leading exporters of nuclear technology in

58 Obama bakcs India's quest for UN permanent seat, Reuters (2010, November 8)

http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/11/08/idINIndia-52749720101108 accessed May 2, 2012 59 Nucléaire Civil: l'Inde et la France coopèrent, Le Figaro (2006, February 20)

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2006/02/20/01003-20060220ARTWWW90537-nucleaire_civil_linde_et_la_france_cooperent.php accessed May 20, 2012

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the world, would have a great deal of potential profits from the possibility of trade with India. There is no possibility an EU state could have managed to redefine these rules on its own, since none of them are strong enough to pull other countries alongside themselves; indeed, only the US could have introduced this redefinition.

France's behaviour, for one, only serves to show how eager some, if not most EU states are to profit from India's booming economy; while the rest of the world, and especially Europe, lags behind, still affected by the ongoing recession, India, China and other developing countries maintain decent to impressive growth rates; it is little wonder that Western countries should try to profit from it, especially given the current economic climate.

In 2008, the EU extended its civil nuclear cooperation with India, in a move championed by former President Sarkozy of France, who was expected to sign a bilateral deal with the Indian Prime Minister. The same year, the civilian nuclear agreement was cleared by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, giving India access to dual-use technology, in return for placing fourteen of twenty-two nuclear reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision as well as separating military and civilian reactors, as mentioned before. This would serve to show that even divided, the EU seeks to further its cooperation with India; after all, it would likely only be beneficial.

India has since made bids to enter export control regime groups such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Australia group.