THE RISE OF THE MULTIPOLAR WORLD – VOLUME IV
India, Europe, and the Emerging Centers of Power
By Lucian R. Varen
CAN NEW CENTERS OF POWER EMERGE BEYOND THE UNITED STATES, CHINA, AND RUSSIA?
The transition toward a multipolar world cannot be understood solely through competition among the United States, China, and Russia.
Economic transformation, demographic change, technological development, industrial expansion, military modernization, and increasingly diversified international relationships are distributing capabilities across a wider range of actors.
But possessing significant capabilities does not automatically make an actor a global pole.
A large economy can remain dependent on external security guarantees. A major military power can lack the economic or technological foundations required to sustain its position. Advanced industries can generate international influence without creating strategic autonomy. And enormous demographic potential can remain constrained by infrastructure, productivity, education, or institutional capacity.
The decisive question is not simply who possesses power—but who can organize capabilities into sustainable strategic agency.
The Rise of the Multipolar World – Volume IV: India, Europe, and the Emerging Centers of Power examines this question through two fundamentally different cases.
India and Europe may both become increasingly important centers of the emerging international system.
But they are traveling very different paths.
WHAT MAKES AN ACTOR A GLOBAL POLE?
Multipolarity requires more than the existence of several large economies or militarily powerful states.
A genuine global pole must possess sufficiently broad, resilient, and internationally consequential capabilities to pursue important strategic objectives with meaningful autonomy.
Volume IV therefore distinguishes between capability and strategic power.
Economic scale, military strength, technological sophistication, population, industrial capacity, financial resources, institutions, and diplomatic relationships all contribute to power—but their strategic significance depends on how effectively they can be organized, integrated, sustained, and converted into influence.
The book examines the role of strategic autonomy, strategic dependency, optionality, resilience, international reach, and conversion efficiency in determining whether an actor can become an independent center of global power.
This creates the analytical foundation for comparing India and Europe.
INDIA’S RISE FROM REGIONAL POWER TO POTENTIAL GLOBAL POLE
India represents one of the most consequential long-term shifts in the distribution of global capability.
Its demographic scale, expanding economy, technological sectors, industrial development, nuclear status, military modernization, geographic position, and growing diplomatic influence provide the foundations for a substantially larger international role.
Yet India’s transformation remains incomplete.
Infrastructure requirements, economic disparities, technological dependencies, industrial development, energy needs, domestic transformation, regional security challenges, and competition with China continue to influence the speed and direction of its rise.
Volume IV therefore examines India not simply as an emerging economy.
It asks whether India can convert its expanding national capabilities into the strategic architecture required for sustained global power.
INDIA’S STRATEGIC AUTONOMY AND MULTI-ALIGNMENT
India’s international strategy differs fundamentally from conventional bloc politics.
Its historical tradition of non-alignment has evolved into a more flexible architecture of multi-alignment.
India cooperates with the United States and other Indo-Pacific partners while preserving important ties with Russia, participating in BRICS, expanding relations with Europe, strengthening its role across the Global South, and seeking economic, technological, energy, and security relationships with multiple partners.
These relationships are not necessarily contradictory.
They can provide strategic optionality.
By maintaining credible alternatives across different domains, India seeks to expand its freedom of action without becoming decisively dependent on a single external center.
Volume IV examines whether this model can provide India with sufficient autonomy to pursue an independent strategic role—and how relationships with the United States, Russia, China, Europe, BRICS, and the Global South affect that ambition.
THE INDIAN OCEAN, THE INDO-PACIFIC, AND INDIA’S EXPANDING STRATEGIC REACH
Geography places India at the center of one of the most strategically important regions of the twenty-first century.
The Indian Ocean connects major energy routes, commercial networks, maritime chokepoints, and the economies of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the wider Indo-Pacific.
India’s geographic position therefore creates significant strategic potential.
But geography becomes power only when it is supported by economic capability, infrastructure, naval capacity, technology, partnerships, and the ability to sustain influence beyond immediate national borders.
Volume IV examines whether India can expand its role beyond South Asia and become an enduring factor in the wider balance of global power.
EUROPE’S PARADOX: ENORMOUS CAPABILITY, FRAGMENTED STRATEGIC AGENCY
Europe begins from almost the opposite position.
Collectively, European states possess one of the world’s greatest concentrations of economic, technological, industrial, financial, institutional, diplomatic, and human capability.
The European Union adds another dimension through the scale of its integrated market and its ability to influence trade, regulations, standards, commercial behavior, and institutional relationships far beyond Europe itself.
Yet Europe is not a sovereign state.
Political authority, foreign policy, defense, fiscal capacity, industrial interests, and strategic priorities remain distributed among national governments and European institutions.
This creates the central paradox of European power:
Europe possesses extraordinary collective capability—but does not always possess an equivalent capacity for unified strategic action.
Volume IV examines whether this institutional model can nevertheless develop sufficient strategic agency to function as an independent center of global power.
EUROPEAN STRATEGIC AUTONOMY, NATO, AND THE TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONSHIP
The question becomes particularly important in security and defense.
NATO and the transatlantic relationship provide Europe with an exceptionally powerful security architecture. At the same time, the United States continues to provide capabilities that remain central to European defense.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated both dimensions of European power.
Europe has shown considerable capacity for coordinated political, economic, financial, and military action. At the same time, the conflict has renewed questions surrounding military readiness, defense production, energy security, political cohesion, strategic dependencies, and reliance on American capabilities.
The issue is therefore not whether the transatlantic relationship strengthens Europe.
It clearly does.
The deeper question is whether Europe can maintain that relationship while simultaneously developing greater strategic autonomy and independent capacity for action when European and American priorities do not fully coincide.
INDIA AND EUROPE: TWO DIFFERENT PATHS TOWARD GLOBAL POWER
The comparison between India and Europe reveals one of the most important features of emerging multipolarity:
There is no single model for becoming a global pole.
India possesses sovereign political authority and a strong tradition of strategic independence, but many of the economic, technological, industrial, and military foundations required for a larger global role are still developing.
Europe already possesses enormous advanced capabilities, but those capabilities are distributed across multiple sovereign states and institutions.
India therefore faces primarily the challenge of expanding and integrating national capability.
Europe faces the challenge of converting existing collective capability into coherent strategic agency.
One possesses unified political authority but incomplete material capability.
The other possesses extraordinary material capability but fragmented political authority.
Their trajectories demonstrate why the future multipolar order may contain centers of power whose internal architectures differ fundamentally from the American, Chinese, and Russian models.
FOR READERS WHO WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE NEXT CENTERS OF GLOBAL POWER
This volume is particularly relevant for readers interested in:
- India geopolitics and India’s rise
- Europe and the European Union as a global power
- Multipolarity and the changing world order
- Strategic autonomy and multi-alignment
- India–US relations
- India–China strategic competition
- India–Russia relations
- BRICS and the Global South
- The Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific
- European strategic autonomy
- NATO and the transatlantic relationship
- European defense and security
- Economic and technological power
- Strategic dependencies and resilience
- Emerging global powers
- Great-power competition and international relations
PART OF THE GLOBAL POWER ARCHIVE
The Global Power Archive is an independent long-term geopolitical research and publishing initiative dedicated to understanding the structures through which international power is created, organized, projected, and sustained.
Its publications combine historical analysis, political science, economics, finance, technology, security studies, institutional analysis, and systems thinking to examine geopolitical developments within their wider structural context.
Volume IV marks an important transition within The Rise of the Multipolar World.
Volume I examines the breadth and global integration of American power. Volume II analyzes China as an emerging competing center. Volume III examines Russia’s more asymmetric configuration of strategic power.
Volume IV expands the analysis beyond these established centers and asks whether the changing international system is creating space for additional actors capable of consequential influence with meaningful strategic independence.
India and Europe provide two fundamentally different answers to that question—and two different tests of what becoming a global pole actually requires.
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WHY READ VOLUME IV?
The emerging world order will not be determined solely by what happens between Washington and Beijing—or by the strategic choices of Moscow.
It will also depend on whether other actors acquire enough capability, autonomy, resilience, and international reach to influence the system according to their own interests.
India and Europe are among the most consequential candidates.
But their significance lies precisely in how different they are.
India must transform extraordinary demographic, economic, technological, military, and geographic potential into a broader and more resilient architecture of global power.
Europe must determine whether extraordinary existing capabilities distributed across multiple states and institutions can produce sufficiently coherent strategic agency.
Neither outcome is predetermined.
India has strategic autonomy but must continue building the capabilities required for global power.
Europe possesses extraordinary capabilities but must determine how independently and coherently they can be used.
Together, they reveal why the multipolar world may contain not one model of power—but several.
