EU Regional Strategy in South Asia: Moving Beyond the Role of a Trade Partner
Key Points
- There is an urgent need for the EU to revise its South Asia strategy, given the region’s economic importance but also for the security of the European continent.
- The EU-India partnership has grown stagnant despite shared foreign policy goals because it is set within an old, outdated template that hinders effective cooperation. The EU must prioritise areas where it is clearly perceived as an important actor by Indian elites such as climate change and energy.
- In promoting regional integration and democracy in South Asia, the EU has many interesting policy templates to offer, but these must be based on a ‘needs assessment’ with South Asian partners.
South Asia is quickly emerging as a pivotal region of the world. It boasts rapid economic growth, is a conduit through the Indian Ocean to a large share of the world’s trade, has states in various stages of transition to democracy and faces a number of developmental and security challenges. And of course, it is home to rising powers such as India.
While the United States and EU member states such as Britain, France and Germany have recognised the potential of the region in economic and security issues, the EU is hardly visible as a strategic actor in South Asia. In spite of longstanding partnerships with many South Asian states, the EU is viewed mostly as a trading bloc and not as a political or security actor in the region, despite spending a large amount of aid funds in various sectoral allocations. The EU certainly has an ‘image problem’ in South Asia, and yet the region’s importance has not been duly recognised in recent discussions on the EU’s global strategy1 and the EU’s approach to important partners such as India is outdated, lacking of innovative policy responses.2
This chapter will argue that there is an urgent need for the EU to revise and update its South Asia strategy. The EU is not yet an important player in South Asia, but the region is of increasing importance to the EU – not only for economic reasons, but also for the security of the European continent. Indeed, not only does the EU rely heavily on the Indian Ocean to secure its position as a major actor in world trade, but instability in regions like Afghanistan and Pakistan directly impact European security through their links to home-grown terrorism and similar threats.
This chapter will demonstrate that the EU has not yet formulated a strategy for its actions in South Asia, even with regard to important actors like India. To maximise its impact, the EU needs to conduct a ‘needs assessment’ that helps it to understand South Asia’s evolving needs and to distinguish itself from other actors such as the US and EU member states.
This chapter also argues that the EU’s real strength lies in providing norms, rules and regulations which it has already developed through its historical and institutional experience, for instance, on complex legal questions of cross-boundary resource sharing.3 In addition, it needs to refocus its bilateral partnerships on the common threats and challenges it shares with South Asian states.
The following sections will analyse the EU’s relationship with the region by looking at the EU’s relationship with India, its attempts at promoting regional integration through South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and finally its aim of promoting democratic consolidation in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Each of these sections will provide policy recommendations on how to reconfigure these relationships by identifying common risks and threats, as well as identifying the EU’s unique strengths and capacities in dealing with some of the challenges South Asia is facing.
EU-India Cooperation
The EU – India Strategic Partnership presents a great paradox. In rhetoric, the partnership is based on a solid foundation of shared values and beliefs, such as the shared commitment to democracy, pluralism, rule of law, and multilateralism in international relations. In practice, however, the partnership has stagnated, with very little to show in terms of strategic cooperation.
The EU – India summit, the official bilateral platform that was to be held on an annual basis, had not taken place between 2012 and 2016. Even under the new Narendra Modi administration, which has assiduously focused on foreign policy and on reviving India’s ties with its strategic partners, the relationship has not seen drastic improvements. Brussels was initially dropped from his European itinerary in April 2015.4 Furthermore, the partnership has routinely been held hostage to single issues, such as the detention of Italian marines by India or the Free Trade Agreement negotiations.5
The EU – India Strategic Partnership has grown stagnant despite shared foreign policy goals and values partly because it is set within an old, outdated template that hinders effective cooperation. For example the Joint Action Plan, which is the roadmap of the Strategic Partnership, is a set of statements broadly outlining possible areas of cooperation; it is not a strategic document for joint action and has not been revised since 2008, despite changing priorities on both sides.
The recent EU India summit which took place in March 2016 added a new document Agenda 2020 which narrows down cooperation priorities to a few strategic areas. However, the modalities of cooperation have not been specified still.
Such a broad framework inhibits cooperation on many issues and reduces the ‘strategic’ partnership to mere dialogue. A larger problem is that the EU is mostly invisible in India; it is crowded out by member states in important areas such as security cooperation. EU officials often complain of not being taken seriously by the Indian government, which prefers to work in bilateral partnership arrangements instead.6 Overall, the partnership has focused largely on technical assistance and development projects in India, particularly in areas such as health and education. In that sense, the focus has not evolved much beyond the origins of the EU – India partnership, which lie in the provision of development aid and technical assistance to India.
To overcome this gap, there is an urgent need to update the Strategic Partnership according to the changing needs and priorities of both India and the EU, in addition to making it qualitatively different from India’s bilateral partnerships with the member states by focusing on areas where the EU’s expertise is recognised. This can be achieved by following a two-fold criteria that identifies the most pressing policy needs in India and determines whether the EU can offer templates to address them, and vice versa. Based on these criteria, the areas that show a high potential for cooperation are climate change mitigation and adaptation, maritime security, and technology transfers and capacity building across a number of strategic areas where India is actively seeking policy expertise or has already identified the EU as a model to be emulated.
Climate change is one such area where policymakers in India not only recognise the need to learn from templates from abroad, but also view the EU as a global leader.7 Furthermore, India has already incorporated policies to deal with climate change effects in its core development strategy and the National Action Plan for Climate Change (NAPCC), demonstrating a readiness to work on this issue.8 Despite differences in their normative claims in global climate debates, as well as over legally binding greenhouse-gas emission targets, there is space for stepping up cooperation on several issues within the EU – India partnership.
This is particularly the case for renewable energy, for which the Modi government has made a massive push in recent years, putting forth a number of renewable energy targets to reduce dependence on coal. While the government has formally allotted budget funds to achieve these goals, India needs more investment, particularly in research and development, to reach these targets. The Indian energy market is constantly growing and is one of the most developed markets in the world today.9 Thus, there is potential for the EU to not only invest in renewables and clean energy, but also share policy expertise to facilitate development planning and decision-making in this area.
Maritime security, especially in the Indian Ocean region, is of increasing importance for both the EU and India. Both actors are affected by non-conventional security challenges in the Indian Ocean – notably piracy, human and drug trafficking, and maritime terrorism. As a major actor in global trade, the EU has a vested interest in maintaining and securing the vital sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean. India has also recognised the importance of the region, which features prominently in the Indian Maritime Security Strategy (2015). Despite these threats and the rise of new naval powers in the Indian Ocean there is no effective multilateral cooperation on maritime security in the region.10
Currently, the most relevant forum is the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, which is an Indian initiative and includes a number of coastal states. This represents an important opportunity for both the EU and India to explore multilateral cooperation and to build upon the substantial synergies visible already between the EU’s Blue Growth Strategy and India’s Blue Economy Plan,11 as well as in the Indian Maritime Security Strategy. The Indian Ocean region may be too disparate to replicate the EU model, but given that India aims to be a ‘net security’ provider in the Indian Ocean region, it is in its interest to forge a multilateral consensus around common non-traditional security threats in the region and to replicate the multi-agency and ‑sectoral coordination seen in the EU’s strategy, especially in the Bay of Bengal region.12
Finally, even though India is experiencing rapid economic growth, it still faces immense developmental challenges. The country may not be a traditional development aid recipient anymore, but it still seeks technical cooperation and technology transfers to secure its economic growth. There is great potential for cooperation in initiatives such as Clean Ganga, Smart Cities, solar farms and renewable energy projects – precisely where India seeks policy templates and where the EU has a great deal of experience and technical prowess to offer. Since the member states have crowded out the EU in other strategic areas, the EU’s real strength lies in technology transfers in these specific sectors.
Promotion of Regional Integration
In its interactions with SAARC, the EU primarily seeks to promote regional integration in South Asia in order to “consolidate the ongoing integration process through its economic influence in the region, its own historical experience of economic and trade integration and of dealing with diversity.”13 In practice, the EU has focused on trade by promoting the harmonisation of standards, raising awareness about the benefits of regional cooperation and promoting business networking in the SAARC area.14 While this focus on integration through trade is important, the EU’s approach faces serious impediments due to several South Asian regional peculiarities and the institutional structure of SAARC.
The region is among the least integrated in the world, largely because of India’s hegemonic position as well as present and historical tensions between neighbouring states. Furthermore, ‘institution building is front loaded in the EU but back loaded in SAARC,’ 15 as the latter lacks principles of subsidiarity and has a focus on sovereignty rather than federalism. While other regional organisations like ASEAN are ‘state driven’ and have actively sought models for emulation, including the EU, SAARC has been described as ‘state stalled.’16 It is limited by its purely consultative nature and the in-built limitations of its charter, which prevent it from being effective at regional integration.
Due to these various impediments, there is only limited demand or will in the region, despite the longstanding partnership between SAARC and the EU, to take up on what the EU is offering – namely, learning on regional integration. Since ‘interregionalism’ and interregional cooperation have emerged as an important component of EU foreign policy and external relations,17 it needs to realign its focus to have a more effective partnership with SAARC. In this case, the real potential of the EU lies in exporting regulation, since it has already worked out solutions to many of the pressing problems faced by the South Asian region. These go beyond trade and include legal questions of cross-boundary river and water sharing arrangements, resource sharing, common market, environmental issues and energy grids, and longstanding border disputes. While there is little political will for full integration in South Asia, cross-border resource sharing poses problems that are pressing for most South Asian states. If the EU cannot export institutions to South Asia, it can certainly promote policy transfers and export of regulatory frameworks by training bureaucrats and undertaking capacity building for SAARC institutions in these areas. Moreover, it is key for the EU to recognise that the goal of longer-term regional integration will be difficult in South Asia, and that SAARC certainly does not have an ASEAN-type growth trajectory. But SAARC needs policy templates to be an effective actor in the region – and here, the EU can play an important role.
Engaging in Democracy and Human Rights
The EU has channelled development aid into many South Asian countries, but there remains much work to be done to consolidate democracy and promote institution building in states like Pakistan, Nepal, Maldives and Bangladesh, and to promote human rights in Sri Lanka. To be a strategic actor in South Asia and to ensure the efficiency of its development aid to the region, the EU needs to develop broader policies that go beyond sectoral cooperation, particularly in view of all the threats and various potential destabilising forces confronting the region.
The conundrum faced by the EU is most visible in its relationship with Pakistan. The country is of immense relevance to the EU, primarily because Pakistan is the pivot around which the success of the EU’s efforts in Afghanistan revolves. Pakistan was important for the security of European troops in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and continues to be so for the security of the European continent. Moreover, Pakistan embodies at least five of the key threats outlined in the European Security Strategy (ESS) – namely terrorism, proliferation of WMDs,18 regional conflicts, state failure and organised crime.19
Given the scale of the problem and the EU’s interest in stabilising the region, its policy response in Pakistan has been disproportionately small. Since a cornerstone of EU foreign policy is democracy promotion,20 its relationship with Pakistan has traditionally been based on promotion of human rights, good governance and the rule of law. Under these priorities, the EU has engaged in activities like support for civil society, human rights monitoring and election observation – the latter probably the best-known EU instrument in the country.21 The impact of these efforts, however, is bound to remain minimal, for democratic institutions have been severely damaged after years of interference from military rule in Pakistan. The army elite has developed an economic empire and devoted much of the national budget to foreign and defence policies.22 Thus far, it is unclear if the EU has a strategy for dealing with these systemic problems in the country as part of its democracy promotion efforts. It is obvious that these fundamental problems need to be addressed in order for the EU’s other sectoral approaches and aid streams in Pakistan to succeed.
2012 marked the start of the strategic dialogue between the EU and Pakistan. This could be the opportune platform for working on a range of security issues and for increasing collaboration between the two actors on rule of law, counterterrorism and counter-proliferation. The EU is virtually absent in the field of security sector reform in the country, except for some counterterrorism and police-training programs, which limits its potential influence on Pakistan. Brussels should consider investing in security sector reform, building upon its experience in reforming the security sectors in Central and South Eastern Europe as well as the Western Balkans.23 The ESS advocates security as a precondition for development, which is particularly applicable for Pakistan, where the democratic transition would falter if the deteriorating security situation gives the military new opportunities to intervene in the government.
When it comes to other countries in the region, the EU has often included democracy and human rights approach in its trade policy. This carrots-and-sticks approach is not so effective in third countries and is often perceived as intrusive.24 South Asian countries are signatories to several international conventions and charters on human rights and democracy that are overseen by specialist institutions monitoring compliance. As a result, there is little need for the EU’s trade policy in the region to have democracy and human rights monitoring mechanisms as well. Here, many recommend an alternative approach that can be tailored to the individual requirement of each country.25 Given the large amount of development aid already being channelled by the EU into South Asia, the EU should prioritise political dialogue and capacity building in the region by working closely with South Asian partners.
Conclusion
South Asia is an important region on the global stage. It is characterised by massive economic growth rates and emerging markets. At the same time, it is the centre of global security concerns, from securing the oceans to combating terrorism. Interestingly, while the US and China have been increasing their engagement with the region, it continues to be a blind spot for the EU.
The EU’s partnerships in the region are based on an old development and technical assistance model, which tends to ignore the strategic significance of the region and changing political realities. This demonstrates an urgent need to revive and reset the EU’s partnerships with South Asian states and with the SAARC. To increase its impact as an actor in the region, the EU needs to focus on areas where it is recognised as a policy leader and where there is demand from the South Asian side to learn from the EU’s historical and technical experience. At the same time, there is a need to recalibrate EU strategy to take into account threats and challenges that it shares with the South Asian region.
In the case of India, the EU needs to distinguish its strategic partnership with the country from India’s bilateral relationships with EU member states, in order to avoid being crowded out by the latter. To do so, the EU needs to reset its partnership with India and sharpen the focus of the Joint Action Plan. Cooperation in climate change and renewable energy, maritime security, and capacity building and technology transfers could be a good starting point, as India already recognises the EU as a leading actor in these areas.
The EU also needs to recognise that pushing the goal of integration in South Asia is not the most effective strategy – instead, building SAARC capacities on instruments such as cross-boundary resource sharing, for which there is political will, might prove more effective and eventually lead to greater regional integration. Finally, as a security actor, the EU needs to do much more in countries like Pakistan and promote democratic consolidation in other South Asian states. Here, sectoral cooperation has to give way to a far more holistic push for democratic institutions to make EU aid more effective and to translate its trade presence into political influence.
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This commentary was first published in the April 2016 edition of the LSE IDEAS Special Report, Changing Waters: Towards a new EU Strategy.
For footnotes, please refer to the full report.