India Exploring New Chapters Of Partnership In Central Europe

India Exploring New Chapters Of Partnership In Central Europe

- Bhaswati Sarkar

End of the Cold War witnessed the bipolar bloc division and politics that defined world order in the post Second World War period replaced by a unipolar world order. For India, which in the bipolar world followed a policy of non-alignment while maintaining a special relation with the Soviet Union and the bloc, this meant major foreign policy shifts, alignments and adjustments. Though India welcomed the transformation that Central and East European region was undergoing, the changes in the region and the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a moment of disorientation. This coupled with the fact that the 1990s was also a period of India’s own economic transformation and the Central European states were geared towards Europe and organisations like the European Union and the NATO meant that Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS states had for all practical purpose gone off India’s foreign policy radar. In other words, while both India and Central European states were reworking their foreign policy they were not looking at each other. However recent moves on the part of both India and the Central European countries indicate some course correction.

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