A Friendless EU Seeks India’s Approval Amid Shifting Global Dynamics

In a bid to re-energize relations, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and her fellow commissioners made a hastily arranged visit to India last week. The bonhomie on display in New Delhi sent a clear message that Europe still has friends, contrasting starkly with the unfolding events in Washington.

Von der Leyen and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a set of promises aimed at bringing India and the EU closer together. They committed to concluding a free trade agreement by the end of the year and discussed creating a “defense and security partnership” similar to recent agreements Europe has signed with Japan and South Korea.

This positive energy marks a significant shift from three years ago when India, in European eyes, failed to offer a strong enough condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It isn’t India that has changed its tune since then; rather, European politicians appear to have concluded that the continent’s strategic autonomy requires them to woo even an imperfectly committed New Delhi.

Europe faces a dilemma: no country on the world stage can replace the US as a security ally or China as an economic partner. Compared to what it is giving up, what it is seeking out will always appear small. For example, the Commission managed to push a free trade agreement with the Latin American trade bloc Mercosur over the line, even though the grouping of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay has an even smaller share of world trade than India.

Europe’s leaders have correctly decided that they now need as many friends as they can possibly cobble together, including Japan, the South Americans, India, and the Gulf kingdoms. Expanding ties with India might prove very useful to European security as much as to its trade. While India’s economy may not be the world’s most advanced or competitive, it is one of the few countries with an industrial base useful for a continent determined to re-arm.

Indian companies can scale up basic manufacturing quickly. Just last week, Bharat Forge Ltd. announced that it had exported more than 100 155-mm artillery systems in 2024. The commission president noted India’s “interest in joining defense industrial projects under the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation” program. Perhaps Europe’s ballooning defense budgets will give local companies the incentive they need to increase capacity.

Europe may feel somewhat friendless at the moment. It had barely begun to accept that China was a systemic rival before it discovered that the US thought of itself as a competitor, as well. However, there is little chance that India will be able to fill China’s role in European supply chains. China and the EU both conduct more than 15% of the world’s trade, while India’s share has long been stuck around 2%. Most years, India trades more with the EU than with anyone else, but it does not occupy as prominent a position in the European economy and is only the bloc’s ninth-largest partner.

If nothing else, Von der Leyen and her peers will have recognized they need to keep countries like India invested in the rules-based world order that has kept Europe prosperous. It is too easy to follow America’s lead and drift away from multilateralism. Even as the EU commissioners were landing in New Delhi, India’s finance minister said that multilateralism was “sort of out.”

Brussels’ technocrats may not have planned to give off a faint air of desperation as they lined up for photographs with Modi in New Delhi. But, given the situation that their region is in, desperation is better than the alternative. Indians, meanwhile, accept they can’t solve all the EU’s problems. But they also know that the EU needs to build and repair as many relationships as it can, as soon as it can.