Europe should draw inspiration from the Indian union

The subcontinent was also once split into small states speaking different languages, but the Indian union has brought great success. As the EU and India strike a trade deal, there are wider lessons.

On Monday, at my book launch event in Brussels, Alberto Alemanno made a point during the panel discussion that has stuck with me all week – comparing the awakening and liberation needed in Europe to the awakening and liberation of Italy during the Risorgimento. 200 years ago, Italians did not yet know they were Italian, he said. Today, Europeans do not yet know they are European.

I was thinking about that the following day as I watched the images coming from India of President von der Leyen signing the new EU-India trade deal. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the merits or demerits of that deal and whether it really lives up to the hype the EU is making about it (my general take would be that it’s a good thing but its mostly just optics and not a silver bullet against American aggression). Instead, I want to talk about the lessons that Europeans can draw from the subcontinent while they are there this week.

I often hear even well-meaning Europeans say that the idea of EU federation is impossible because “we’re just too different”. It is usually the retort when I put forward the used-to-death comparison of the United States and how by shunning the articles of confederation and embracing federalism Americans made the US into the superpower it is today. People counter by saying that only worked because they all spoke the same language. A multilingual continent like Europe, where countries have hundreds of years of separate histories (debatable), could never unite like the US did, they tell me. So I ask them: do you think therefor that India shouldn’t be a country?

India is in many ways, as modern British empire apologists like Niall Ferguson like to put it, a British invention. 250 years ago the subcontinent was divided into many different states that had little to do with one another. They speak separate languages that are in entirely different language families. They have different religions. And the subcontinent is home to different races - with Aryans in the North and Dravidians in the South. They were then and are now, in short, more different from one another than the peoples of Europe.

When I give this response, the person I’m talking to is usually flummoxed. “Well, I don’t know anything about India,” they say. “That’s exactly the point,” I reply. “Think about where your assumption comes from that differences between the peoples of Europe must be more important than the differences between the peoples of India.” Or the peoples of Indonesia. Or the peoples of Nigeria. I could go on. We know what the difference is. It is a reflexive Eurocentrism, and latent racism, that assumes European national histories are more important and therefor unbridgeable. But India bridged differences that are far more stark. And look where they are today – leaping past Europe in many ways, and forcing EU leaders to the table to beg for a desperately-desired trade deal.

We’re told that the EU could never be a full federation because the union has 23 official languages. Well guess how many official languages India has? There are 22 - with an additional 100 unofficial minor languages. Just like in the EU, there is one language which serves as a lingua franca between them. In the EU, it is English, spoken by 50% of the population (post-Brexit: 2% natively, 47% as a second language). In India, it is Hindi, spoken by 57% of the population (43% natively, 14% as a second language). Just like in the EU, English is also used as a neutral third language in India to deflect tension between the North and the South, where there has been resistance to Hindi because it is a different language family from Dravidian languages. 10% of people in India can speak English (and people in the South often prefer to speak English with people from the North rather than Hindi).

Separate histories, modern union

The situation in India before the arrival of the British closely resembled pre-modern Europe. Just as Italy and Germany were late unifiers, and just as Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire were mosaics of peoples and laws, India lacked a single, enduring political centre. Empires such as the Maurya, Gupta, Mughal, and Maratha periods imposed partial unity, just as the Romans and Franks did in Europe, but none permanently integrated the entire subcontinent into a shared civic framework. The concept of the nation-state was only invented in Europe three centuries ago, and it was exported to India via colonialism.

From this perspective, the idea that India is “naturally” one nation while Europe is “naturally” many is historically misleading. For most of their histories both regions have been plural, decentralised, and frequently in conflict with themselves.

The crucial difference lies in how unity emerged. India was unified administratively by a colonial power. At first the British East India Company started co-opting the various states of the subcontinent and vassalising them. Over time, their control grew more and more overt. Eventually, the British government took control of the administration of these various colonies. By the time they did so the Indian states had long stopped being truly sovereign in any meaningful sense of the word, even if they were on paper. The British government decided to merge them into one large entity over a prolonged process in the 19th century. They merged these ancient states and imposed a single legal system, centralized bureaucracy, common infrastructure, and a shared political vocabulary across the subcontinent. Railways, civil services, and a unified market created material interdependence where little had existed before.

When independence came in 1947, Indian leaders faced a stark choice: fragment along linguistic, religious, or princely lines, or preserve the inherited union structure. They chose unity, with semi-federalism as the compromise. India reorganised its internal boundaries, recognised linguistic diversity, and devolved power to states, but kept sovereignty at the centre. That didn’t entirely hold, and civil war broke out between Muslims and Hindus. The majority Muslim areas seceded, creating an artificial fissure that still exists today. The countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh have no historical basis, they are the modern creations of religious divisions. But even the traumatic partitions that produced Pakistan and later Bangladesh did not unravel the core idea that the subcontinent’s future lay in large-scale political integration rather than Balkanization.

Europe never experienced an equivalent moment. While empires existed, none unified the continent in a way that later translated into a shared democratic inheritance. Crucially, Europe as a whole has never been ruled outright by a foreign colonial power whose departure forced a clean institutional choice between unity and fragmentation. The American protectorate is the closest this continent as a whole has come to such an occupation. But the Americans never tried to unite their protectorate into one civic space because it was never in their interest to do so - Europeans were easier to exploit when divided. They didn’t stand in the way of the European Union as an intergovernmental project precisely because it was intergovernmental and not federal. Integration in Europe has been gradual, voluntary, and partial—and therefore constrained by the continuing primacy of nation-states.

A Counterfactual India: The Cost of Non-Union

India united because fragmentation carried obvious risks: economic weakness, perpetual conflict, and vulnerability to external powers. A single federation offered scale, internal peace and geopolitical weight. Federalism allowed diversity to survive without threatening the whole.

Europe, by contrast, has remained divided largely because its wealthy constituent countries have maintained an illusion that their dominance of the world in previous centuries could continue giving them importance in the modern world. Integration therefor focused on markets and regulations rather than full political union.

The result is that India can act decisively as a single state – setting industrial policy, managing redistribution, and speaking with one voice internationally – while Europe struggles to do the same. The European Union has achieved remarkable coordination, but its lack of full federation limits its ability to respond coherently to economic shocks, defence challenges and global competition.

Imagining an alternative history makes the contrast clearer. Had India fragmented after independence into dozens of nation-states – Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Punjab, Maharashtra, Hyderabad, Assam – the subcontinent would likely resemble a more volatile version of today’s Middle East or Hispanophone South America. Trade barriers, border disputes, water conflicts and military rivalries would dominate. None of these states would wield global influence. Many would depend heavily on external powers. They may have developed the same US dependence as Europe. If they had, they would not have been able to tell Trump to fuck off last year with his tariff threats. They would have had to surrender just as the Europeans. Or perhaps these small European states would have become dependent on China by now.

India’s current challenges – inequality, regional tension and the rise of Hindu nationalism – are real. But they exist within a framework that allows large-scale coordination and long-term development. Fragmentation would almost certainly have made those problems worse, not better.

When you compare the two, it’s obvious why India has an advantage going into the 21st century and Europe has lost its way. A continent-sized economy split among sovereign fiscal systems, defence policies and political authorities cannot easily match the strategic coherence of continental federations like India, China or the United States.

Europe’s reluctance is understandable. Without a unifying colonial inheritance or a single independence moment, federation would require nations to relinquish sovereignty voluntarily – a far harder political task. But are we now experiencing that independence, brought on by the threat posed by Europe’s erstwhile ‘colonial’ protector? While Britain sought to unify India, America has sought to keep Europe manageably divided. Will Europe react to this new era of American aggression by doing what the Trump White House fears the most?

India isn’t the only example of a multi-nation country that seems to have done better as a union than their neighbours split up into tiny states. Indonesia reinforces the point. Like India, it is a vast archipelago of distinct languages, ethnicities, and histories, unified administratively by colonial (Dutch) rule and preserved as a single state after independence. Its leaders, too, concluded that unity was preferable to fragmentation, even at the cost of internal tension. Indonesia’s survival as a single polity underscores that colonial-era unification, once internalised and democratised, can become the foundation for durable multinational states.

Clearly, neither India nor Indonesia are perfect. The Javanese have been accused of simply replacing the Dutch as the new colonial administrators of far-flung lands they have no historical, linguistic or ethnic connection to – particularly in the case of Papua New Guinea. Likewise, the Hindu Aryan majority in India has been accused of trampling on the rights of minority Muslims in the North and Dravidians in the South. Both countries are not proper federations but are only semi-federal. While Indonesia started out as a federation, it has since become quite brutally unitary.

But the questions remains: even with all of these tensions and power abuses, would these countries be better if they were split up along ethnic and linguistic lines into many different nation-states as Europe is? It would be hard to argue that they would.

Both Europe and India have similar conditions of diversity and division. Their divergence was the result of political choices shaped by history. India inherited unity, debated it, and decided to keep it – transforming an imperial structure into a federal democracy. Europe, lacking that catalyst, continues to integrate cautiously, balancing cooperation against sovereignty. As we enter a new era of great power politics in which Europe is being easily taken advantage of by stronger powers, that caution does not seem to be serving Europe well.

The comparison does not imply that Europe should simply copy India, nor that India’s path was painless or inevitable. But it does suggest a broader lesson: large, diverse societies are not doomed to fragmentation. When political structures embrace diversity within a shared framework, unity can be a source of strength rather than suppression.