Abstract
Regional cooperation within and across South Asia has been an exercise in hope and frustration for decades. There is no other regional cooperation like the South Asia Association for Regional Development (SAARC) where two members have been either at war or on the brink of war for almost 70 years. Little wonder, regional trade hovers around 5% of total trade and less of India’s foreign trade. The World Bank calls South Asia the least integrated region of the world. The European Union is still India’s largest trading partner. India’s trade with the EU is more than with all her neighbours together, including China, her major individual trading partner. Still, the so called India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA), under negotiation since years, is not even mentioned in the External Sector chapter of the latest Economic Survey, other than to the risks of not joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. One may ask whether India will continue pursuing her policy of exceptionalism: Bilateralism and at the same time trying not to be left out of international trade groupings—regional, continental or global. In this context: What would be the role of the India-EU FTA after the Brexit?
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Zingel, WP. (2017). India-EU FTA: Indian Bilateralism vs. South Asian Regionalism?. In: Bandyopadhyay, S., Torre, A., Casaca, P., Dentinho, T. (eds) Regional Cooperation in South Asia. Contemporary South Asian Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56747-1_16
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