Accommodation does not mean marginalisation. It is another word for partnership. There are a number of synergistic areas where India and Europe can benefit from a deeper partnership. Europe continues to be a dominant presence in the world today, and its influence is generally for the greater good. Indeed, given the common vision of the future, it is in India?s strategic interest that Europe continues to play an important and guiding role in global governance to counter depredatory hegemons and competing, and may I add not so progressive and even backward-looking, visions of the future that have embraced the defunct Westphalian concept of the nation state. Ironically, the latter is being discarded by Europe itself in pursuit of higher levels of integration consistent and commensurate with globalising forces.
Trade and investment links are already strong and growing, and these can certainly be strengthened. In particular, India has much to learn from Europe in the area of soft or social infrastructure, such as education and improving human resources, including universal and inclusive education, developing social security nets and universal healthcare. There is also much that India could learn from Europe?s experience in developing modern infrastructure, and managing densely populated urban sprawls in particular. Innovation and technology, particularly high-end green technologies, are a critical forward-looking area for cooperation. There is no question that India would need to become a global node of research, innovation and technology development in its own right for its role in institutions of global governance to be commensurate with its economic size.
Intensifying economic co-operation has the potential for win-win outcomes, since Europe has to find a way to get back to a higher growth trajectory in view of rising expenditure on welfare spending, and rapidly expanding public debt. The European experience indicates that while economies could put in place elaborate social protection and entitlement schemes while they were young and growing fast, these became increasingly unsustainable as economies aged and growth slowed. Social compacts are however difficult to unwind politically. Emerging market economies like India not only need to be mindful of this dilemma as they put social protection and entitlement schemes in place, but also look to Europe for guidance as it transforms its unsustainable welfare state into something that slow-growing ageing societies can sustain.
As a federal state, India has much to learn from the European Union in democratic governance and macro-economic management. Democratic governance in Europe involved the abolition of local feudal fiefdoms that exercised several functions of the state through a process initially of centralisation by absolutist monarchies acting through modern bureaucracies, subsequent limits on absolute power through elected Parliaments, and finally decentralisation of democratic power to elected local bodies for effective self-governance. India is a diverse country at different stages of political evolution, and local autonomies continue to exercise great local influence and exercise state functions in some parts of the country, even as other parts of the country are ready for democratic decentralisation. The European experience cautions us that local autonomies need to be first broken through a process of centralisation, before democratic decentralisation is attempted lest local self-government institutions are captured by extant local power elites.
In the area of macroeconomic management, India watches keenly the manner in which Europe handles the tensions arising from financial intermediation, and the unstable combination of monetary union and fiscal independence of nation states at vastly differing levels of productivity and development. Like the European Union, the Indian Union is also based, inter alia, on the principle of a common currency and fiscal federalism with underlying and growing developmental asymmetries. The crisis in southern Europe is perhaps an opportunity to evaluate how the Indian system of imposing hard budget constraints on state governments compares with the European model of fiscal forbearance, and whether it is time to move beyond both. Europe gave to the world, including India, the overarching Westphalian notion of the inviolable sovereignty of the nation state, and within it parliamentary democracy, and the great secular religion of our time, namely nationalism. As the world gets more and more integrated, it is again Europe which is giving us a glimpse of what lies beyond the nation state and nationalism.
Indeed, choices about how to combine decentralised loyalties and management of state systems within larger economic national and supra-national groupings are areas where both Europe and India could learn much from each other and also teach much of the world.
These are only illustrative examples of areas of cooperation and partnership between Europe and India. There would be several other areas, considering that they are at different but complementary stages of the demographic cycle, and that most Indians see in Europe the vision of its own future as presciently pointed out by the great European thinker, Karl Marx, a century and a half ago.
As India endeavours to establish itself as a new, sustainable node of growth in the post-crisis world, and as a rising power, it has much to learn and gain from its relationship with Europe. Europe and India share a common passion for economic freedom, human dignity and democratic ideals with similar visions of the future that place man and human perfectibility centrestage. There is, therefore, great scope for an expanded partnership at the level of government, in civil society and in multilateral fora such as the G20, WTO, UNFCCC, and the UN Security Council, to jointly take responsibility for global outcomes. The urgency for?an expanded and closer dialogue and cooperation between Europe and India on a new footing is manifest and self-evident.
This concludes a two-part series. The author is a civil servant. Views are personal
