India’s European Pivot: From Engagement to Structural Alignment

Prime Minister Modi’s May 2026 four‑nation European tour marked a turning point in India–Europe relations. Against the backdrop of systemic flux—wars in Eurasia and West Asia, U.S. unpredictability, and China’s rise—the visit consolidated India’s role in Europe’s diversification strategy. Key outcomes included Tata’s semiconductor partnership with ASML in the Netherlands, the India–Sweden AI Corridor, Norway’s Green Strategic Partnership with Arctic dimensions, and Italy’s support for the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor. These agreements build on the EU‑India FTA, the UK CETA, and the EFTA‑TEPA, embedding India into Europe’s economic and technological architecture. The institutionalisation of ties raises the cost of misalignment, positioning India as both indispensable and structurally integrated. Looking ahead, whether the global order stabilises into multipolarity, reverts to bipolarity, or remains unstable, the India–Europe relationship now carries resilience and strategic weight, signalling India’s shift from managing its place in the order to shaping its future contours.

Key Words: India–Europe Relations, Strategic Autonomy, Strategic Ambivalence, India–EU FTA, UK–India CETA, EFTA–TEPA, ASML Semiconductor Partnership, AI Corridor (India–Sweden), Green Strategic Partnership (India–Norway)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi undertook a multination European tour visiting the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Italy from 15-20 May 2026. This visit assumes significance as it comes at a time when the whole world is undergoing a greater churn, grappling with multiple challenges, such as from wars in Eurasia and West Asia to the rupture in global order with post-Cold War alliances reshaping and a transactional approach towards foreign policy becoming a new norm. It also assumes criticality due to President Donald Trump’s unpredictable and disruptive policy approach creating greater complexities for the American allies such as European states and strategic partners like India, which are forced to walk a geopolitical tightrope.

India and the European countries have responded to these changing realities and structural shifts in global politics through greater multilateral and bilateral engagements as evidenced by the signing of three major trade deals that together cover 32 European states. It includes the historic India–EU Free Trade Agreement¹, concluded in January 2026, which provides for establishing a free trade zone across 27 European Union member states, slashing tariffs on over 90% of goods and establishing a shared market of over two billion people. This is complemented by an earlier India–UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), signed in July 2025, which completely eliminated duties on 99 per cent of India's exports to the UK while aiming to double bilateral trade to $100 billion by 2030. In addition, the India–EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA)², implemented from 1 October 2025 onwards, connects India to four non-EU states including Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. This deal brought a legally binding commitment of over $100 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) into India over the next 15 years.

In this context, the latest four-nation visit by the Indian prime minister adds to the heightened India-Europe engagements of recent years, producing a certain level of interdependence on both sides. This issue brief examines the significance of this visit in the broader context of growing India-Europe relations, arguing how gradually transforming global order is pushing the two sides closer.

Cold War Legacies and Divergent Strategic Cultures

As the United States and the Soviet Union cemented their positions as the two global powers after end of Second World War in mid-1940s, the two sides entered into a prolonged contestation for global supremacy resulting into what took shape of Cold War. This had Europe divided into two camps with the Eastern and Central Europe becoming part of the USSR’s communist bloc and the Western European countries aligning with the capitalist bloc of the US. The Western European countries for their part were pushed to play a second fiddle to the American in the new bipolar world. For India which gained independence from the British colonial machinery in 1947, its foreign policy under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was defined by commitment to anti-colonialism and strategic autonomy, which coalesced into a policy of non-alignment³ within the broader Cold War dynamics. Yet despite being a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), founded in 1955, India was drawn toward the Soviet Union (USSR) driven by a degree of realist logic⁴ and the communist bloc’s anti-colonial posture. As a result, several Central and Eastern European states, which were part of Soviet bloc maintained crucial trade relations with India⁵ during the Cold War.

At the same time, despite growing relations with the Soviet Union, India maintained working relations, mostly trade oriented, with much of the Western Europe such as the United Kingdom and France during the Cold War. While the political ties with the UK were often strained due to disagreements on Kashmir among other issues, there was a degree of warmness in relations with France⁶, which even extended to the defence sector. This dynamic was however constrained by the lack of technology transfer which eventually drifted New Delhi towards the USSR, which emerged as its most prominent defence partner in subsequent decades. 

The disintegration of USSR in early 1990s that rendered the US as the sole global power and brought them into the American sphere of influence meant that their foreign policy choices were reset to Washington’s choices. The foremost US led NATO bloc’s goal shifted to containing Russia,⁷ the USSR successor state. For the Western European states, the decades of cold war NATO alliance with the United States rendered them overwhelmingly dependent on Washington which that left their foreign policy choices significantly constrained. Though the NATO framework provided the security umbrella under which European integration proceeded under the EU, it came at the cost of strategic autonomy with Europe’s foreign policy ambitions always bound by American approval and its military protection. It created a dynamic where the Europe became economically powerful, normatively ambitious and yet lacked strategic bandwidth of its own because hard power was outsourced to Washington. The limits of this arrangement became acutely visible when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the European powers requiring American weapons, intelligence, and political will to frame a coherent response to Moscow in support of Kyiv and that all three would be forthcoming⁸ nevertheless became uncertain at times. This bitter experience has since led to a rethinking across European capitals about strategic dependency over the US, and has been fastened by President Trump's trade war against both European allies and other alike besides threats of overtaking the Greenland from Denmark.

As such, both India and Europe arrive at this moment carrying the legacies of structural dependencies they are simultaneously trying to manage: India its dependence on Russian defence hardware, Europe its dependence on American security guarantees. This shared condition of managed dependency with both seeking diversification without rupture is perhaps the most underappreciated driver of the current convergence. They are not coming together primarily out of shared values, though values are invoked but because they share a structural problem, and offer each other a partial way to manage the situation.

America, China, and the End of Strategic Certainty

The second factor driving the current convergence between India and Europe is the transformation of the global geopolitical landscape, which has made their calculations more urgent and compatible. Within this, there are three structural shifts which matter the most. The first is American unpredictability⁹ under President Trump whose foreign policy has been characterised by tariff wars, transactional bilateralism, and a visible impatience with alliance obligations. This has fundamentally altered the risk calculus for every state that previously treated the American security and economic guarantees as a stable baseline. For European countries, this has meant confronting the possibility that Article 5 of the NATO Charter that states that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all may be rendered inconsequential. For India, American tariffs on its exports entering the US market and some explicitly linked to India's energy imports from Russia have demonstrated that economic relations with Washington carry political conditionality that can be activated without warning. As such, India and Europeans have responded by accelerating the diversification of their strategic partnerships, finding in each other a partner of sufficient scale and reliability to be worth the investment.

The second shift is China's continued rise and the anxieties it generates across both regions. China's economic scale has made it a structural dependency¹⁰ for much of the world, including European economies which have become deeply integrated into Chinese supply chains for semiconductors, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, and green technology components. The effort to reduce this dependency, which is now a stated policy priority of the European Commission, requires alternatives at scale. India is the only country that plausibly offers this across multiple sectors simultaneously. Therefore, the India-EU FTA can be considered as much an instrument of supply chain diversification away from China as it is a conventional trade agreement, and European policymakers understand it as such even when they do not say so publicly. For India, the China factor¹¹ operates differently but with equal force: a rising China with which it shares a contested border and a deepening strategic competition is a permanent feature of the Indian security environment. Hence, the European partnerships across in technology, defence procurements, and connectivity infrastructure serve New Delhi’s interests in managing Beijing without requiring any explicit confrontation.

The third shift is the Russia-Ukraine war and the reorganisation of European security it has produced. Europe has since 2022 been forced to rearm,¹² rethink its energy infrastructure, and articulate its continental security commitments more independent of Washington than at any point in the post-Second World War era. This process has made European capitals more interested in relationships with major democratic powers outside the traditional Western alliance which in essence may not be to replace American security but to hedge against its conditional nature. India, as the world's largest democracy with a growing economy and significant military capability, provides a suitable alternative to fulfil such a kind of role. While New Delhi’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created a degree of friction between the relations lasting till 2025, it has gradually given way to a more pragmatic recognition by European countries of India's relationship with Russia.

The Historical Burden in India–Europe Relations

History is the third factor which has shaped India-Europe relations and it operates in more complex ways than either foreign policy choices or contemporary structural shifts. The residue of colonial relationship between India and European powers continues to inflect the tone of the engagement to this day. India has long demanded being treated as an equal partner than any junior actor reflected in its refusal to submit to any European conditionality such as accepting the framing that aligning with Western positions is the natural behaviour of a democracy. This reflects a deep institutional memory of their historical relationship wherein European powers defined the terms of engagement and rendered Indian interests subordinate to European ones. Take for instance the case of joint op-ed column published by the French, German, and British ambassadors in India on the eve of the December 2025 India-Russia summit was received in New Delhi as a demonstration of exactly this residual condescension¹³ — the assumption that European moral authority translates into a right to shape Indian foreign policy choices. India's response of proceeding with the summit in its entirety, with full diplomatic warmth was a reassertion of the terms on which it is willing to engage: as an equal, not as a subordinate democracy expected to align with Western positions as proof of its democratic credentials.

This history also explains the particular resonance of the cultural dimension of Modi's Netherlands visit. The restitution of the Chola copper plates — royal charters of eleventh-century South Indian emperors held by Dutch institutions and returned to India during the bilateral summit — was not incidental to the diplomatic programme. It demonstrated the nature of the relationship being constructed where historical debts are acknowledged and settled, and in which India is not merely a future-oriented growth market but a civilisational power with a history that predates and exceeds the terms of any bilateral trade agreement.

Why the 2026 European Tour Matters

Against this triple backdrop of foreign policy choices, structural global shifts, and historical residue, the specific outcomes of the May 2026 tour assume significance. It saw a number of deals being concluded by India with these European partners. For instance, in the Netherlands, India’s Tata group entered into a semiconductor partnership¹⁴ with ASML, the Dutch company’s first such agreement with any Indian entity, represents India's entry into the most strategically sensitive tier of global technology supply chains. This is significant as given ASML's gatekeep the manufacturing of advanced semiconductor being the sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, a technology that the Netherlands has not shared with China due to American pressure. Though the Dutchess have as of now only committed to share their deep ultraviolet technology with India as of now, the growing collaboration, it is possible, could lead to EUV’s extension as well. It demonstrates the willingness of European countries to share high-end technology with India, allowing it to assume a role in the global technology hierarchy.

During Prime Minister Modi’s stopover in Sweden, apart from elevating their bilateral relationship to a strategic partnership level, the two sides signed to establish India-Sweden Technology and Artificial Intelligence Corridor¹⁵. This allows India to strengthen its participation in the governance of AI, one of the most consequential arenas of international standard-setting currently underway.

In the case of Norway, New Delhi and Oslo elevated their relations to the Green Strategic Partnership¹⁶. This has an explicit Arctic dimension which extends India's footprint into a governance arena that will assume significance as the warming Arctic opens new shipping lanes and resource competition intensifies. In Italy, the Special Strategic Partnership and the shared support for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor point toward the connectivity architecture that, if realised, would physically bind Indian and European economic interests in ways that no diplomatic agreement could match for durability.

These outcomes represent collectively represent the institutionalisation of a relationship that has, for most of the last eight decades failed to transform into a genuine all-round strategic cooperation. Whether this institutionalisation proves durable and its inter-dependencies are deep enough to outlast the political conditions that produced them will remain have to be seen. However, what is evident is that both India and Europe have arrived, through very different journeys and for overlapping but distinct reasons, at the same conclusion that the relationship is worth the investment of the kind of institutional seriousness that was, for too long, withheld from it. In a transforming international system, the two sides have discovered that their structural interests have become more compatible than ever. Why then this matter is that structural compatibility, once institutionalised, tends to persist beyond the political conditions that created it. As such, India's interest in European stability is not the same after the ASML agreement, the AI corridor, the EFTA-TEPA, and the EU FTA as it was before them. Going forward, these engagements will create greater interdependencies between the two sides it European firms investing in Indian semiconductor fabrication, Nordic companies building green hydrogen infrastructure in Gujarat, Italian companies embedded in IMEC supply chains. While interdependence of this kind may not guarantee alignment, it sure raises the cost of misalignment in ways that gradually reshape what governments find politically feasible.

Possible Scenarios for this Partnership

India's approach of maintaining its relationship with Russia, deepening cooperation with Europe, managing ties with America, watching over China should not be understood as confusion or contradiction but as a deliberate cultivation of as many options as there could be. For New Delhi, this ambivalence to practice its strategic autonomy approach rests on the assumption that the international system will remain sufficiently multipolar and India indispensable to multiple parties so that the forced choice between blocs never arrives. But the question remains whether the structural conditions that make strategic ambivalence viable are themselves durable. Three scenarios are worth considering.

In the first scenario, multipolarity deepens and stabilises the international order: the US retreats further; China consolidates dominance without achieving true global hegemony; and Russia, weakened by war and economic isolation, becomes a secondary power a degree of independent agency. In such a scenario, India's approach is not merely viable but optimal, positioning it as the swing state in a genuinely multipolar system whose alignment matters to multiple competing poles, and who can extract maximum value from that position. The European institutionalisation of the current moment would, in this scenario, be one component of India’s multilateral engagements with strong ties with Russia, deepened technology partnerships with US through the Quad framework, and expanded engagement with the Global South through forums like BRICS.

In the second scenario, bipolarity reasserts itself in a US-China form. If the international system bifurcates with technological decoupling, financial system fragmentation, and military competition, producing two genuinely distinct and incompatible economic and security orders, then strategic ambivalence becomes increasingly costly to maintain. States will face pressure, from both poles, to choose sides in ways that have real economic and security consequences. In such a scenario, the European institutionalisation would matter, because it would represent India's deepest integration into the Western-aligned order and therefore shapes which direction the forced choice, if it comes, is likely to go. The ASML agreement is particularly significant here as a country whose semiconductor fabrication remains dependent on Western technology infrastructure cannot easily pivot to a China-aligned technological ecosystem without paying costs that are not merely diplomatic but industrial. The institutionalisation of this period would, in a bifurcating world, function as a slow-motion alignment which is not chosen explicitly but produced by the growing dependencies that would make gravitating towards one direction easier.

In the third scenario, the current moment of flux produces not a new stable order but prolonged systemic instability which would be a world of multiple overlapping conflicts, broken supply chains, contested norms, and no settled distribution of power. This is arguably the scenario that the current evidence most supports: the US-Israel war against Iran (2025, 2026), the unresolved Russia-Ukraine war, the Taiwan Strait tension, the fragmentation of global trade governance under Trump tariffs, which together suggest a system in which the old order has lost its coherence but no new order has emerged to replace it. In such a scenario, India's strategic ambivalence would be both most valuable and most precarious: most valuable because a state with maintained relationships across all competing poles is a necessary mediator in a world without stable hierarchies; most precarious because sustained instability eventually forces choices that optionality-preservation cannot indefinitely defer.

What this visit represents, in the long run, depends on which of these scenarios the international system moves toward. But across all three, one structural observation holds: the institutional weight being constructed around India-Europe relationship in this period makes the relationship more resilient to disruption than at any previous point. Even in a bifurcating world, the domestic constituencies created by the FTA and the technology partnerships create friction against any dramatic reorientation.

These reasons make the recent four-nation European tour by PM Modi, in the long run, potentially significant beyond its immediate institutional outcomes. It shows that India is moving from being a state that manages its position within the existing international order to being a state that participates in defining what the next order could look like. Europe is similarly seeking to practice its own strategic autonomy by pivoting beyond American dependency and Chinese competition. The question would be whether the two sides could leverage their growing bonhomie and create institutional architecture for something durable. For now, it can be argued that the conditions for such a foundation exist, the structural incentives are aligned, and the moment, for once, appears to be meeting the ambition.

*Harsh Pandey is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for European Studies, School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi. He is also a Life Member of Delhi-based Centre for Peace Studies.

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