VOL. 56 STUDIA I ANALIZY S T U D I A P O L I T O L O G I C Z N E DOI: 10.33896/SPolit.2020.56.15 Tomasz Lukaszuk * The evolution of India-Central Europe relations after the Cold War Keywords: Central Europe, India, developing countries, cooperation Abstract: The primary purpose of the article is to present the long term ties between India and Central Europe, and examine the transformation of their relationship after the end of the Cold War. Using J.A. Braveboy-Wagner’s liberal approach to diplomacy and foreign policy-making of developing countries as a tool of analysis, the article shows how the executive preferences of political leaders, historical narratives, and the strength of local values such as soft power, have influenced the political and economic cooperation between India and the Visegrad Group of countries that constitute the core of Central Europe – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. This method helps to show that contrary to the widely held opinion 1 that the bonds between the Indian subcontinent and Central Europe were an artificial creation of the Soviet Union, they were instead created much earlier by contacts of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore in the first half of the 20 th century. Indeed, a mutual interest and fascination between the two parties, combined with the complementary of needs of both sides after * ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5613-7503, former Ambassador of Poland to India (2014–17) and former director of Asia and the Pacific Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland (2010–2012), Research Assistant at the Department of Regional and Global Studies, Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw; Marie Sklodowska-Curie European Training Network Global India (Call identifier: H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016, MSCA-ITN-ETN European Training Networks), the article is the part of the research within the Global India program financed by the European Commission. 1 N. Mathur, East meets east: foreign relations between India and Poland during the Cold War , «South Asian History and Culture» 2014, Vol. 5, Issue 3, p. 320. 231 STUDIA I ANALIZY