India, EU to focus on multilateral order with rise of assertive China
NEWDELHI:India and the European Union (EU) will focus on strengthening multilateralism during their upcoming summit this week amid uncertainty created by the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of an assertive China, people familiar with developments said on Sunday.
The 15th India-EU Summit, which was delayed by the Coronavirus disease outbreak, will be held via video conference on July 15. The summit will be co-chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The people cited above, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said both sides felt the need to take the lead in bolstering multilateralism and cooperative international relations against the backdrop of the US ceding its leading role on the world stage.
“This has created a vacuum that needs to be plugged, or else an aggressive China will only become more assertive,” one of the people cited above said. “The whole multilateral system is under stress and many experts have expressed doubts about the future of the global system.”
In a blog titled “In a world of disorder, Europe needs partners” written on July 10, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, noted that China has become increasingly assertive, while the Covid-19 pandemic was the first major world crisis “where the US is not in the lead” as the US administration has “mostly withdrawn from the global order it has built”.
He further wrote of a “real crisis of multilateralism”, with the G7 and G20 being absent and the UN Security Council paralysed. He added: “Europe feels somewhat lonely, trying to hold the multilateral ring. For sure we know that we need partners.”
Some preparatory work has already been done in this regard and external affairs minister S Jaishankar joined his European and other counterparts for a virtual meeting of the informal Alliance
for Multilateralism on June 26, the people said.
This alliance was launched by France and Germany in April 2019 after they felt the need to protect the rules-based multilateral order to ensure international stability and to resolve common challenges through cooperation.
The alliance met in February and April before holding a virtual ministerial meeting on June 26. While participating in that meeting, Jaishankar reiterated India’s call for reformed multilateralism along with purposeful reform of existing structures so that they continue to serve the world even more in this complex and uncertain time.
Jaishankar also referred to the two-pronged attack of “a viral pandemic and misinformation going viral”, and highlighted the need to strengthen scientific approaches to analyse the causes of the Covid-19 pandemic, assess multilateral health mechanisms, and take concrete steps to counter the “infodemic” in the context of a statement adopted by more than 130 states and observers on Covid-19 at the UN.