Ljubljana: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar Thursday said there is a “sharper awareness” in Europe today regarding Indo-Pacific as what happens in Asia, Africa and the Middle East impinges directly on the interest of Europe.
Participating in a Bled Strategic Forum panel discussion, titled ‘Partnership for a Rules Based Order in the Indo-Pacific’, Jaishankar also said that the India-European Union relationship “will have milestones as it keeps unfolding”.
He said, “For a long time Indian foreign policy was focused on the larger European national states, most of them have been good time-tested partners of ours. I think the fact that Europe had evolved so much was not necessarily reflected in our way of working...
"And I say that as self-criticism. So one of the first things I did when I became foreign minister was to visit Brussels, and I tried to make sure that we engage all the 27 EU members; which is why I am particularly happy to be in Slovenia today," the Minister said.
“Because we do realise that Europe is a collective enterprise and, we do need in a collective enterprise to have all the stakeholders with you as partners as much as possible,” he noted.
Jaishankar said there are a lot of issues where India and Europe have meeting points.
“And it’s important to come to Europe, engage with your European counterparts, discuss it with them; and one of them is actually, where does Europe stand vis a vis Asia and the Indo-Pacific, because I would argue that after especially 2008, for reasons which we all know, Europe has been more reticent about articulating its interests and backing them up beyond its immediate confines, and in a globalised world that is not even in Europe’s own interest,” he said.
He was referring to the 2008 financial crisis which exacerbated Euroscepticism within the EU.
He said Europe “needs to know that it has friends in Asia, in the Indo-Pacific”, and that a lot of principles and values and outlook that Europe has other countries too share it. “I think the binary Western non-Western is a false binary, I think it is a very self-serving binary, and I think by strengthening India-EU relations we refute it very convincingly,” Jaishankar added.
He said the world in the midst of Covid “has raised fundamental issues of whether the current globalisation model is the right model".
“The words strategic autonomy which used to be heard politically in India decades ago is now heard today in Europe, economically.
“Today issues of trust and transparency, reliable and resilient supply chains – these are the terms which the Covid world has formed. I think it is important in a world where all of us have expanded our perception of national security to cover something more than a kind of a military, political, physical, intelligence security to a larger sense of well-being vulnerability.”
Jaishankar said in today’s world “I do think there is a kind of a new basis for conversations which are coming out in a Covid world”.
“Today you are pointing to India and the EU, but I think it applies equally to India and Africa and presumably to Europe and Africa as well. I would certainly sense that there is a sharper awareness in Europe today that what happens in the Indo-Pacific, what happens in Asia, what happens in Africa and the Middle East, impinges directly on the interest of Europe.
“I think that realisation is sharper in 2021 than, let us say 2014. And because of that there is a much greater interest in Europe to deal with other regions, especially a region like the Indo-Pacific. And some of that interest we saw reflected in the EU 27 Leaders’ Summit with India on May 8 (2021)," the Minister said.
“The India-EU partnership has definitely economic deliverables, I think it has a connectivity deliverable, certainly it has a values and outlook deliverable, it has a political deliverable,” he added.
On the future of the India-EU relationship, he said,“I do think this relationship will have milestones as it keeps unfolding, which you can say, on this issue these decisions came out of India-EU confabulations.”
Jaishankar is on an official visit to the three European Union countries of Slovenia, Croatia and Denmark from September 2-5.
Slovenia currently holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and has invited the EAM to attend an informal meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of EU Member States on September 3.
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