Serbia, China and Russia: friends forever?

For most European public opinion, the Balkans seem to be a parallel reality about which little is known. And yet, the presence of Russia in Serbia, added to that of China, reveals a strategic risk that lies at the heart of the continent and whose general indifference does not correspond well to the instability that the region has caused in Europe for centuries.

Despite the high costs that Europe has incurred due to the Balkan swarm, the European Union has been unable to promote a broad integration of Serbia into the European project, making it easier for structural investment, financial deficiencies, institutional weakness and corruption to encourage development of initiatives with a significant geopolitical burden by other players, including China, which, taking as its starting point its presence in Albania since the 1950s, has carried out a remarkable investment expansion in the Western Balkans in the last decade.

The Chinese vision, whose central axis is to open routes of transit towards European markets, finds a fertile ground in the need for financing of infrastructures in Serbia and the countries of the Balkan area as a whole. Unlike the initiatives coming from the European Union, China does not condition its cooperation to political reforms that question the legitimacy of the status quo, nor are the investments of its banks subject to the regulations and levels of transparency of their Western counterparts. In practice, therefore, the Chinese alternative is much more attractive for the leaders of the region, even from a diplomatic point of view: Belgrade has no problem in claiming China's rights over Taiwan, in exchange for Beijing not recognizing Kosovo. 

Other players, such as Viktor Orban, also show no greater scruples when it comes to establishing strategic alliances with China to promote the modernisation of its railway network, setting in motion a pharaonic project financed and built by China, which will link Budapest with Belgrade, a plan that is not without provocation for Brussels.

The project would confirm the relevance of Belgrade's role in Beijing's geo-strategy for Europe, which has placed Serbia at the apex of Chinese investments in the Balkans, focused on energy and transport and characterised by establishing consortiums with public companies that are part of the established local power groups and their client networks, which operate with no democratic restrictions or restrictions on governance. 

Some other strategic sectors benefiting from the burgeoning Chinese investment affect natural resources and the major industries associated with them, such as mining and steel, the control of which favours the strategic interests of large Chinese state-owned enterprises, while reducing the European Union's regulatory capacity in environmental matters, which will make it even more difficult to implement the Green Pact that was at the heart of the European Union's economic strategy before the pandemic; Especially after China's diplomatic success in holding the summit in Dubrovnik - a platform for supporting infrastructure projects along the new Silk Road encouraged by bilateral investment agreements with China - which involved Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia and, significantly, Greece. A group of countries -many of which are members of the Three Seas Initiative- without whose help major European projects would hardly get past the planning stage, especially if they demand economic sacrifices and promise intangible benefits.

Frictions between the authorities in Belgrade and those in Brussels caused by the pandemic crisis gave Beijing a golden opportunity to score some successes in the field of soft diplomacy, responding promptly and with no small amount of propaganda to the request for health care made by Serbia, a country whose demographic pyramid makes it highly vulnerable to COVID-19, a situation made even more complicated by the mass repatriation of Serbian emigrants from the European Union, following the outbreak of the pandemic in Italy. 

Even if one were to put into perspective the current weight of Chinese investments in Serbia - still relatively modest - and despite the fact that 65% of Serbia's foreign trade is destined for the European Union, Brussels would make a serious miscalculation by positing China's influence in the heart of the Balkans in transactional terms; quantitative rather than qualitative. This is all the more so when Chinese initiatives in Serbia require a kind of Entente Cordiale with Moscow, whose benefits will presumably be greater than the mere sum of the parts, and which outline not a few geopolitical disjunctions in the medium term. 

The next stop is the EU-China summit scheduled for September 2020 in Leipzig, hosted by the German presidency of the European Union. Bearing in mind the lack of European cohesion that the pandemic has revealed, and judging by the interest that the authorities in Brussels have recently taken in not inconveniencing their Chinese counterparts - by censuring a report on Chinese acts of disinformation regarding the pandemic - it does not seem that the result of the Leipzig summit will be anything other than the accommodation of Chinese interests and the consolidation of the exceptional Balkan as a consensual ballast, which will reduce the autonomy of the European Union as much as it will increase China's advantage over the Member States.