European Union officials are meeting in Brussels on Thursday, where they are soon expected to grant EU candidacy status to Ukraine in a gesture of solidarity amid the conflict with Russia.
At the same time, the bloc has been carrying out a global lobbying campaign to boost support for Kyiv, with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Finnish President Sanna Marin and other European leaders travelling to South Asia – namely India, Africa, the Asia Pacific and Middle East.
New trade deals have been signed and more humanitarian and financial support has been pledged, in an attempt to support some of these nations to ease off their dependency on Russia.
But speaking at the GLOBSEC forum in Bratislava earlier this month, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, said that Europe should grow out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems.
“The world cannot be that Eurocentric that it used to be in the past,” he said.
“If I were to take Europe collectively, which has been singularly silent on many things which were happening, for example in Asia, you could ask why would anybody in Asia trust Europe on anything at all,” he added.
According to Vivek Mishra, fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in New Delhi, “Eurocentrism has been challenged in academia on multiple occasions but perhaps for the first time by a leading Indian policy maker on Europe’s turf.”
He told Al Jazeera that Jaishankar’s comments were “consistent with the EU’s shift to the Indo-Pacific from the transatlantic and underscore the idea that Asian problems are as important as anywhere in the world”.
He added: “There cannot be a comparative advantage to Europe or the West over Asia or Asian affairs. There is a colonial tinge there, which needed to be called out.
India’s balancing act of appeasing both Russia and the West has caught the EU off guard but in New Delhi April in April, von der Leyen reiterated the dangers of the war in Ukraine at a press conference.
“The outcome of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war will not only determine the future of Europe but also deeply affect the Indo-Pacific region and the rest of the world. For the Indo-Pacific, it is as important as for Europe that borders are respected. And that spheres of influence are rejected. We want a positive vision for a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” she told reporters.
At the time, the EU had established a joint trade and technology council with India with an aim to bolster economic and strategic ties with the country.
But India has continued to maintain its neutral stance towards Russia.
The African Union has also not bought into the EU’s lobbying efforts to isolate Russia.
Concerned about the global food crisis, at a recent meeting with EU leaders, Macky Sall, the president of Senegal and chairperson of the African Union (AU), said that the bloc’s sanctions on Russia threatened the import of grains and fertilisers to Africa.
In an interview with the French weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, Sall said that the AU wants to pay (for imports of grains and fertilisers) but it was now “becoming impossible”.
“So we ask the Europeans for the same mechanism as for gas and oil,” he said.
