Where China is a friend, European solidarity a "fairy tale"

April 26: Serbia Parliamentary elections
POSTPONED INDEFINITELY

Even before Serbia’s state Election Commission canceled the parliamentary elections, the outcome seemed certain: the populist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), led by President Aleksandar Vučić, would not be leaving power.

On March 4, the opposition parties Alliance for Serbia and the Movement of Free Citizens declared that they would be boycotting the elections. They stated that there was no use, given the president's control over media and the elections.

Now, with the coronavirus, there won't be any election at all. No new date has been set.

Instead, the news coming out of Serbia is one of changing international alliances. Vučić has given dramatic statements discussing his love of China and his "friend and brother, Xi Jinping." This friendship looms over questions about Serbia's relationship with the EU and whether its decade-long campaign to become a member state will ever be successful.

Calling in from Belgrade is Vuk Vuksanovic, a PhD researcher in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He previously worked in the Serbian Foreign Ministry.

This interview was conducted by Madeleine Schwartz. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

A month ago, there was quite a bit of media attention when the president of Serbia, Aleksander Vučić, said that the idea of European solidarity was a fairy tale and publicly thanked China for its support during the coronavirus crisis.

When a shipment of medical equipment arrived from China, he then kissed the Chinese flag.

Can you just tell us a little bit about what has been happening? 

This was a reaction to the decision by the EU to ban the export of certain medical equipment to non-EU member states. 

But on the other hand, I also think that this is part of this well-known pattern of Serbian foreign policy which has been ongoing for quite some time. Serbia balances and pits Western and non-Western powers against each other. It reaches out to non-Western powers like Russia, China, Turkey, Israel or the United Arab Emirates as a way of hedging and leveraging the West. 

In this case, I think they were leveraging the EU, trying to get the EU to provide more aid. Eventually that did happen. The EU provided significant money to Serbia, 93 million euros. But China had achieved a big advantage thanks to the fact that they had much better timing than the EU.

It seemed at least from the foreign media that the arrival of certain shipments of goods from China got a lot more press attention than the EU support.

That is a major part of this new equation that we are seeing.

But not all the data about Chinese aid are fully transparent. We don't have an elegant overview with precise numbers: What was the exact amount of equipment received from China? How much of it was donated by China and how much of it was purchased by Serbia from China?

These transactions have been done in a very non-transparent fashion. And that not just in Serbia, but almost anywhere where Chinese “mask diplomacy” has been implemented.

But there are also two sides to this story.

For Serbian policymakers, China is a very nice PR point to score in domestic political marketing.

It is very good for politicians to be promoted domestically as facilitators of this Chinese financing, to be perceived as those who are setting Serbia as an equal partner with this rising power called China.

So this is very sexy in political PR terms and it is much more appealing to a voter of the Serbian Progressive Party, the ruling political party in Serbia—compared to having a talk with some civil servants from Brussels. So there is this domestic side of it.

But of course, there is also this other dimension, which is the fact that the EU has itself has been quite lagging and underperforming in marketing and public diplomacy in Serbia. They completely lost their eye on the ball in both Serbia and the Balkans and they have been very, very inefficient in communicating with the citizenry of Serbia and other Balkan countries and presenting themselves as a viable option for the future. The EU may be reasonably frustrated over the fact that billboards of the Russian Gazprom line the roads leading into Belgrade or the billboard “Thank you, Brother Xi,” intended for Xi Jinping over medical aid. However, no one is preventing the EU in coming up with its own marketing and public diplomacy campaign and in investing efforts and resources into that campaign afterwards. Maybe there will be EU billboards in Belgrade then.

Can you give a sort of brief overview of how Sino-Serbian relations developed? Why Serbia?

I think that the situation started to change with the Belt and Road initiative, a global building project launched in 2013. China primarily started gaining influence on the account of its infrastructure lending and infrastructure financing. In 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang opened Pupin Bridge over the Danube River in Belgrade, China’s first major infrastructural project in Serbia. The relationship really started to develop further with visits by Xi Jinping to Serbia in 2016, when China pledged 5.5 billion euros for infrastructure financing in Serbia.

That partnership has started to widen significantly, as it completely entailed some new areas.

We  have seen a growing security partnership in particular areas, like the fact that [the Chinese technology company] Huawei is participating in the installment of surveillance cameras in Belgrade, the fact that China is now the number two military supplier to Serbia, after the US.

And of course the fact that there are joint Sino-Serbian police patrols, where Chinese policemen work with Serbian colleagues in cities with a large number of Chinese tourists. (They do not have the authority to make arrests.) However, these joint police patrols are being implemented not just in cities with large number of Chinese tourists, like Belgrade, but also in cities where there are no Chinese tourists but where are Chinese investments, like in city of Smederevo where there is a Chinese-owned steel mill.

Serbia is good geopolitical real estate for the Chinese. It is close to key routes in both the Middle East and North Africa. If the Chinese want to establish infrastructural connectivity across Eurasia and tie China with European markets, that infrastructural network has to cover the Balkans. Serbia is the geographical heart of the Balkans. 

And how does this relationship tend to express itself? Is it mostly in terms of, as you say, arms shipments and technological installments or is it also in terms of soft power diplomacy?

The Chinese government works closely with our president, Vučić, who is at the top of the Serbian political pyramid. He’s essentially the only voice that actually makes a difference. The Chinese essentially know how politics works in this country.

I would say that China has a very specific soft power capital in Serbia. Most people don't know much about China. They have no knowledge of Chinese politics or foreign policy, nor on any internal contradictions in China, like, for example, China’s conflicts and disputes with Hong Kong and its neighbors in the South China Sea.

So this is quite a contradictory situation because while most Serbs, certainly according to public opinion polls would choose to live and work in Western countries, China is still being perceived as a benevolent and peaceful rising superpower.

The expertise and knowledge on China both in the general public as well as in Serbian academic and policy circles is very limited, but there is also the nature of Serbian government which really tries to establish itself as  China's best friend, and will probably try to control the spread of any information that is critical of China. This can be seen from government-friendly media that do not show any critical news on China and particularly Chinese projects in the country. Chinese lending is frequently being portrayed as an investment or even a gift.

What about Serbia's relationship with the EU and the perception of the EU within the country?

This is also a very nuanced and a big question.

On the one hand Serbia cannot erase the EU as a partner. The EU is essentially unavoidable on the account of Serbian geography, and on the account of Serbian economic dependence on the EU, as well as on the account of social ties with European countries.

But the problem is that given all the troubles that the EU is facing, no one knows when Serbia might become an EU member state.

The main leverage of the EU vis-a-vis Serbia was the prospect of membership.

Given the fact that EU membership for Serbia is not a realistic or viable scenario, the EU is having a very difficult time of actually exercising political influence on Serbia on a daily basis. 

Now when Serbs see all the troubles in the European Union and when EU leaders like Macron say that enlargement won't be happening anytime soon, most policymakers in Belgrade and other Balkan capitals are saying, “Well, why should we listen to these guys?”

The EU is, in the long term, the best bet for Serbia, and for other Balkan countries. The problem is that life happens not in the long-term but on the short-term and midterm basis.

And so for those readers who maybe are not so familiar with Serbian politics, what kind of a leader Aleksandar Vučić. What are his politics?

I would say that he has read Machiavelli in a much more thorough fashion compared to many of his opponents in the Serbian domestic arena. There is, of course, a whole set of worrying trends, particularly very big illiberal trends concerning to the rule of law, concerning freedom of the media, and a very strong cult of personality.

But nevertheless, one still has to be realistic and accept the fact that the Serbian opposition parties are still not able to offer a viable and realistic alternative.

This is a very different situation compared to the demonstrations which overthrew Milosevic in 2000. Back then there was a consensus that Milosevic had to go.

But now, there is no unifying platform because most of the citizens are disappointed with 20 previous years of transitions in the post-Milosevic period, so they will not vote for the opposition unless there is really strong anger against the ruling party and the ruling leader and without a clear agenda offered by the opposition to the citizenry.

One of the reasons Vučić is able to remain in power is the fact that the opposition is composed out of the pro-EU parties, which at one point or another were in power between 2000 and 2012 and which are still being identified with an era of cronyism and nepotism as in the case of the period between 2008 and 2012 when the left center, pro-EU Democratic Party (DS) were frequently accused of appointing solely party members in state-owned enterprises and public administration posts. (A practice Vučić additionally perfected.) Many Serbian citizens still view the opposition as leftovers of the older establishment. So it’s not that easy to outvote Vučić.

Serbia was scheduled to have an election on April 26. But this has now been indefinitely postponed. Before then the opposition parties had decided to boycott this election.

There would have been a slight degree of embarrassment for the ruling party if they had won the elections that were boycotted. I believe that they would still have won even if all the parties had run. 

I think that the opposition is making a major strategic blunder in boycotting those elections. The opposition is still trying to unify itself and form a political agenda based on which they can combat this dominant political party. 

I would say that they the opposition is only marginalizing itself because a boycott only makes sense if you have an absolute majority. Then you can knock the political process with your abstention. This way, they are literally only giving the ruling party an even easier win.

Now, given the difficult situation caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, there are talks that some opposition leaders are thinking of participating in the elections anyway once a new date is set.

I think part of the reason is that they see that given the outbreak and the fallout of the outbreak the EU and the international community won't dedicate too much attention to Serbian elections or to the boycott of those same elections.