Europe needs to know it has friends in Indo-Pacific: EAM Jaishankar

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that there are lot of issues where India and Europe have meeting points, asserting that the EU needs to know it has friends in the Indo-Pacific region.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday that there are lot of issues where India and Europe have meeting points, asserting that the European Union (EU) needs to know it has friends in the Indo-Pacific region.

Jaishankar, who is in the central European nation as part of a four-day visit to Slovenia, Croatia and Denmark to enhance India-EU ties and for bilateral talks, made the remarks during a panel discussion with Slovenian counterpart Anze Logar at the Bled Strategic Forum (BSF) on the subject of 'Partnership for a Rules-Based Order in the Indo-Pacific' here.

There is a sharper awareness in Europe that what happens in the Indo-Pacific impinges directly on its interests, Jaishankar said.

 

Jaishankar said India-EU relations have emerged stronger as the world battles a global pandemic and that issues of trust and transparency, reliable and resilient supply chains have created common ground.

"I do see a lot of issues where India and Europe have a lot of meeting points and it's important to come to Europe, engage with your European counterparts, discuss it with them," he said.

"Today when we speak of a liberal order, trust and transparency, these are issues which at one time may have been more central to a western discourse but are today increasingly shared beyond the western world That binary western, non-western is a false and self-serving binary and by strengthening India-EU relations we refute it very convincingly," he said.

The minister pointed out that while in the past Europe had been much more reticent about articulating interests beyond its immediate regional confines, that can no longer be the case.

"In a globalised world that is not even in Europe's own interests. Europe needs to know that it has friends in the Indo-Pacific and that a lot of principles and values and outlook that Europe has, other countries share it," said Jaishankar.

Welcoming the greater interest in Europe to deal with other regions, including the Indo-Pacific, he pointed to the high-level India-EU summit in May and the India-EU Connectivity Partnership as a sign of things to come.

"This is good for the world. The big development in which all of us have a collective interest is in the faster rise of Africa because only then will the world truly become multi-polar. I would say if all of us took more interest in each other's lives, I suspect as a collective we would be better off," he said.

The minister reflected on India's diplomatic relations with the EU over the years and admitted that they had tended to focus on individual member-states, which did not fully account for Europe's evolution.

"One of the first things I did as foreign minister was to visit Brussels and have tried to make it a point to engage all the 27 EU members, one being in Slovenia, because we do realise that Europe is a collective enterprise and we do need all the stakeholders with you as much as possible," he said.

On the subject of differences within the member-states, he added: "It is natural if there are 27 countries, there will be a spectrum of views and a debate. What is important for us is whether the net result of that is an outcome with which India is comfortable as a basis of a partnership."

His Slovenian counterpart, Anze Logar, dubbed India a "natural interlocutor" in the Indo-Pacific region for the EU and said the country is focused on enhanced bilateral cooperation with India.

Logar said the close cooperation plans on Port Koper had been postponed due to the pandemic but that "there is a determination" to continue those exchanges.

Slovenia currently holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union and has invited Jaishankar to attend the informal meeting of the foreign ministers of the EU states. The crisis in Afghanistan is on the agenda of the closed-door ministerial discussions later on Thursday.

Kenyan Chief Administrative Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ababu Namwamba and Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva were among the other leaders participating the Bled Strategic Forum (BSF).