【Text/Observer Network Columnist Filippo】
"European Union", a term that Serbia loves, hates and entangles. If you open the official website of serbia's ruling party, there is a paragraph in the party profile: "The Serbian Progressive Party is committed to promoting Serbia's accession to the European Union, and is also committed to working closely with the Russian Federation, the United States, China, Japan and third world countries, which are becoming increasingly important carriers of world development." ”
This position of the Progressive Party of Serbia and the ruling coalition is in line with the mainstream development direction of Serbian politics and the general trend of the world towards multipolarization. The Serbian parliament has issued a special national strategic document for joining the European Union. Recently, President Vucic said frankly: "Serbia will be more determined on the road to Europe." ”
But if we briefly review the various statements made by Serbian politicians in recent years, we can see the following remarks:
"In the last two years, Serbia's public opinion base against the EU has declined. Although the public still supports entering the EU, the support is getting smaller and smaller. (Vucic, May 16, 2018)
"The EU's position is in the interest of the Kosovo Albanians, who do not want to prevent the formation of a Greater Albania. I hope that serbian senior management will think about whether we need such an EU and whether it is necessary to change its position on the EU. (Serbian Defense Minister Wulin, January 3, 2019)
"Serbia is increasingly unmotivated about joining the EU because it has dragged on too long and is not seeing progress." (Vucic, September 2, 2021)
"For the first time, the proportion of Serbian people who are reluctant to join the EU has exceeded the proportion of people who are willing to join the EU, 44% of the former, and 35% of the latter." (Vucic, May 7, 2022)
Of all the rhetoric that cast euroscepticism and disappointment, perhaps best known to Chinese readers is Vucic's line during the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020: "European solidarity is no longer there, and European solidarity is like a fairy tale on a blank page." ”
Obviously, Serbia is a country that wants to develop friendly relations with all parties while maintaining its sovereign independence. But there are two huge alliances that surround her: one is NATO, which bombed its own military alliance in the last century, and it has only hurt Serbia; The other is the European Union, a huge economic-political union whose member states are highly overlapping with NATO.
Under this double encirclement, various interdependencies are naturally unavoidable. Although Serbia can be neutral in the military field, the economy cannot be as absolute (at least in theory) as the military, which brings various advantages and disadvantages. Not only that, there are various regional contradictions between the Western member states of the European Union and Serbia, coupled with the unfair attitude of Western powers towards Serbia, making Serbia's "European road" full of bumps.
The EU's own attitude is also wavering, on the one hand they want to put maximum pressure on Serbia, on the other hand, if Serbia does the opposite, they will immediately appease.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with a country wanting to take the road of independence, but the reality is sometimes helpless. What exactly does the disconnect between the EU and Serbia look like? How should there be a balance between national development and national dignity? Under the pressure of double encirclement, how should Serbia adhere to the path of independent development?
Joining the Eu: From "Axioms" to "Fantasy"
Joining the EU has been one of Serbia's core diplomatic strategies for nearly 20 years. After a series of international sanctions, wars and bombings in the 1990s, Serbia saw a change of government in 2000 – a color revolution to be exact. The newly elected democratic government set out to create a political atmosphere in which "we have no choice but the EU", and in their propaganda, the EU is like a utopia to be pursued, Serbia should move closer to it at all costs, and eulogy has become "axiom". It was not until 2012, with more than a decade of propaganda campaigns, that democrats basically persuaded the people that "joining the European Union is the best and only solution for Serbia's national development and people's livelihood progress."
And that's true. As a supranational actor, the EU has become the sole ruler of the Balkans except the United States by virtue of the unipolar hegemonic status and absolute geographical advantages of the Western powers, which is mainly reflected in both institutional and economic aspects. In terms of system, the EU requires Serbia to completely complete the democratization reform, integrate with the EU in political, judicial, diplomatic and other aspects, and align with the EU on various foreign policy issues; On the economic front, EU investment and bilateral and multilateral free trade have played a considerable role in Serbia's economic recovery.
Today, the EU is Serbia's largest trading partner and the largest investor for many years in a row. No matter how Serbia's position on the EU changes in the future, no matter how the two sides play at the political level, no matter what institutional inequalities exist in The economic relations between Europe and Serbia, they cannot avoid the fact that Serbia's trade with the EU accounts for more than 60% of the country's total trade volume, and there are 300,000 people employed in EU enterprises in Cyprus. Germany accounts for 13% of Serbia's total foreign trade and is Serbia's largest bilateral trading partner.
In contrast, China is Serbia's second-largest trading partner and second-largest source of imports, accounting for about 9% of the total trade volume. If the trade between Germany and Serbia and China and Serbia is compared, the gap between 13% and 9% of the total trade volume does not seem to be a particularly large gap, but if you count other EU countries together and compare the entire Trade between Ethiopia and China and Serbia, it is not difficult to see that the main direction of Serbian trade is still the EU market.
Serbia's main trading partner
In the context of the era of great disparity in power in Europe, a group of Serbian people even developed the so-called "fear of missing out". After all, the pro-European politicians who were influenced and financed by the West at that time were quite prestigious in the private sector, and almost all of Europe except for a small number of countries joined the European Union. What's more, even if the Balkan countries around Serbia are facing an economic crisis, their living standards have still improved to a certain extent after joining the EU, which undoubtedly became the best argument for Serbia to join the EU at that time.
Thus, Serbia after the 2000 color revolution embarked on somewhat tragic transformational paths. For example, in the area of economic transformation, the process involves the change and sale of ownership of state-owned enterprises (mainly to multinational enterprises in the European Union and the United States), which has led to the loss of many people. Although the EU lifted visa restrictions on Serbia in 2009 as integration progressed, giving long-sanctioned people great freedom and a "sense of belonging" to the European family, it also set off a wave of migration to the EU, making Serbia's already poor demographics worse. In Serbia today, the price of housing construction is even higher than that of developed countries in the European Union. Because the eu powers and the United Kingdom have attracted a large number of able-bodied and skilled skilled immigrants to fill their own vacant labor positions for their own needs, except for Serbia, the most common skilled migrants come from other Eastern European member states.
Institutional transformation has taken place in a number of nerve-stirring events, including reforms at the level of the rule of law and various cuts from past history. This made the Cypriot people realize that in the process of joining the European Union, they actually had to face external actors who had deprived themselves of their land and were eager to legalize this deprivation.
Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal at the level of international law is a case in point. This "cooperation" is a necessary condition for Serbia's accession to the European Union, but its essence is to require Serbia to hand over to The Hague for trial all military generals and state executives who served in the 1990s, and most of them Serb politicians have been convicted of felonies on various trumped-up charges.
From top to bottom, he was the former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Milosevic, the former President of the Republika Srpska Karadzic, and the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Republika Srpska of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mladic
At the level of international relations, subject to the single hegemonic system after the Cold War, Serbia's cooperation with China and Russia has been forced to be marginalized, and Serbia's domestic development is mainly based on investment from the European Union and the United States, which is usually in the form of the sale of state-owned property and various pre-accession funds and assistance.
Not only that, since 2009 (Serbia officially submitted its application), Serbia needs to go through 35 "negotiation chapters" before it can finally join the EU. But one of these "chapters", dubbed "Other Issues: Relations with Kosovo", was created specifically for Serbia. This chapter has no precedent for negotiating the rule of law and will be the one that will be the most difficult to complete – because it aims to achieve the so-called "normalization of relations with the Pristina side".
Readers who are familiar with the situation in Serbia should know that Pristina is the capital of the autonomous province of Southern Serbia for Kosovo and Metohija (Ko-May, Or Kosmet in Serbian for short), and in 2008 the Albanian minority regime in the region unilaterally declared its independence in an illegal form. The EU powers, together with most of the other developed countries in the West, knowing that they are violating international law, have chosen to recognize the independent status of the autonomous province of Kosovo, in spite of the fact that this move has opened up a Pandora's box of turmoil and division in many parts of the world where there are separatist tendencies. Ironically, there is no consensus within the EU on whether to recognize Kosovo's independence: as of now, five of the EU's 27 member states have not recognized Kosovo's independence for various domestic and foreign reasons: Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia.
Obviously, the government did draw a big cake in the 12 years from 2000 to 2012, but this cake was not delicious in reality, and even some of it deteriorated and moldy. The Progressive Party, which has taken up the baton, is also struggling on the road to Eujects. From the "Stabilization and Linkage Process" to the "Berlin Process" to the "Western Balkan Plan" and the new Western Balkan expansion strategy introduced by the European Union in recent years, the West Balkan-EU summit after the Western Balkans-EU summit, one process and document after another, 20 years later have been exchanged for only a sub-"candidate" status, two closed negotiating chapters, regional disputes that have never been justly resolved in accordance with international law, and the reality of standing still. I remember when I was still in elementary school, the news was saying that Serbia would definitely join the European Union, and now that I am graduating from graduate school, the news is still talking about this sentence.
This series of events has also directly led to the emergence of two main factions in Cyprus: the pro-European faction that still has a longing for the EU and the discouraged Eurosceptic faction. With the passage of time, Serbia's support for EU accession has declined significantly as the pattern of international relations has changed, the impact of the epidemic and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the increasingly unscrupulous support of the West for the Kosovo authorities, the weakness of the EU itself, and the almost deliberate increase in the threshold for entry into the EU.
According to a survey conducted by the European Balkan Public Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG) in 2021, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia accounted for 94%, 83%, 83% and 79% of domestic respondents, respectively. Serbia has the lowest percentage of the public in the Balkans, with about 53% supporting eu-entry and 43% believing that it should not join the EU. Just one year later, as mentioned at the beginning, support for EU membership has slipped to 35 percent, the first time in nearly 20 years that Euroscepticism has prevailed. Polls also show that Serbian respondents prioritize economic cooperation over membership, as eu-accession is becoming a distant future: 25 percent believe Serbia will become a member state within the next 10 years, while 44 percent say it's a complete fantasy that will never happen.
Under the influence of this sentiment, the Cypriot government retreated to the second place, while maintaining the original road to Europe, and chose to develop a regional economic integration process with the characteristics of the Balkan region with neighboring countries, such as the "Open Balkans" plan. Moreover, China's Belt and Road Initiative is increasingly seen in Cyprus as some kind of future-oriented, unprecedented alternative, even as it is just beginning in Eastern Europe today.
The vast majority of Cypriots would prefer to see countries outside the West put forward such economic initiatives on an emotional level, because this undoubtedly marks serbia's appropriate reduction of dependence on THE EU powers. Not only that, but by looking at neighboring EU member states, they can also feel that neighboring countries have a certain degree of lack of national identity after joining the EU, and if we consider the influence of the United States on Europe and the radical agenda of liberal left politicians throughout the EU bureaucracy, the concern of Cypriots about the loss of ethnic, religious and cultural identity will only be greater.
The Belt and Road Initiative: A New Dawn
Theoretically, the identity of EU member states has a considerable positive effect on the stable development of regional countries: in addition to the global influence that a common system can produce, the EU's single market can bring great benefits to consumers, provide high-quality institutional guarantees in production, environmental protection, and industrial relations, create higher average incomes and better jobs, and provide development funds for the sustainable development of the country.
However, if political realities are taken into account, such as NATO's military presence in the Co-May region and the systematic discrimination of the EU powers against Serbia's table, at least at the Serbian level, joining the EU seems to be little different from entering the tiger's mouth – Serbia has to worry about when the EU tigers will bite again.
For example, in the most unfortunate extreme case, if Serbia did join the EU at the expense of recognizing the "pseudo-bureaucracy", how could it be guaranteed that the Western countries would not gain inches and further dismember Serbia by encouraging the independence of Sanzac and Vojvodina? After all, in the eyes of the West, serbia's sovereignty and territorial integrity do not seem to be the same thing as Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
In addition to Kosovo, there is also the autonomous province of Vojvodina in northern Serbia
In order to safeguard the country's most central sovereignty and economic interests, Serbia must strike a good balance between East and West. Many people will say that this is two boats, but in fact, in a multipolar world, cooperation with diverse actors and major powers is what international relations should look like.
More precisely, the process of Serbia's accession to the European Union requires a positive combination of the traditional friendship between China and Serbia and Russia and the positive effects of such friendly relations, and on the basis of this interaction and integration is the attraction of investments and projects that are essential for the development of the country. Realistically, EU countries are Serbia's largest trading party, while Russia has been Serbia's traditional partner for centuries, and Serbia is largely dependent on Russia for its energy development.
Since the Progressive Party came to power in 2012, Serbia's relations with the eastern powers have been comprehensively updated and upgraded. In addition to further cooperation with Russia in the energy and military fields, Serbia has also signed a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union. In terms of China-Cyprus relations, the relations between the two countries have reached an unprecedented height after the development of recent decades, bilateral trade has been growing uninterruptedly for many years, and the key industrial projects of Chinese investment in Cyprus have flourished under the framework of the "Belt and Road" initiative.
Chinese-invested projects focus on infrastructure and energy sectors such as steel, roads, minerals, railways, automobiles, urban sewerage, etc., mainly including the Hungarian-Cypriot railway, the Smederevo steel plant, the "Danube Corridor" expressway, urban sewage collection and treatment, and mining in the Burr mining area. Serbia is even arguably the most active of the Central and Eastern European countries involved in the development of the Belt and Road Initiative, and one of the most recent landmark political initiatives is the recently established national Belt and Road Institute. The goal of the institute is to strengthen all cooperation in the field of "five links" ("five links" are policy communication, facility connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bonds). During his visit to Serbia at the end of 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointed out that China and Cyprus "agreed to strengthen strategic docking, jointly build the 'Belt and Road' with high quality, implement key cooperation projects, and support serbia in running the 'Belt and Road' research institute."
Blast furnace at the Smederevo steel mill
China's investment undoubtedly has a positive effect on Serbia's GDP, and this investment has also accompanied Serbia's GDP growth in recent years. It is worth mentioning here that the infrastructure projects invested by China are actually industries that the EU capital group is neither able nor willing to develop, but from the perspective of a country's industrial development, these facilities that have been blown up by NATO and are on the verge of bankruptcy are too important for the development of serbia. From this point of view, the nature of Sino-Serbian cooperation is undoubtedly life-saving for Serbia. In addition, on the issue of state sovereignty, that is, on the issue of Kosovo and Metohija, China, together with Russia, the five EU countries and many countries in the world, respects Serbia's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the Serbian people deeply respect this position.
Serbia has been an important part of the Belt and Road Initiative since its first few years. In the nearly ten years since the development of the initiative, Serbia has become a model for tapping the potential of the initiative, which has gradually become another focus in the development of Serbia's foreign policy, and the areas of cooperation have begun to develop from industry to education, science and technology, finance, culture and other fields. In addition, Serbia encourages and actively supports cross-border projects such as the Hungarian-Serbian railway, which further enhances Serbia's importance in the initiative and demonstrates the potential of the Belt and Road Initiative to other neighboring countries as a success story.
On 19 March, the Belgrade-Novi Sad section of the Hungarian-Cypriot railway opened
The China-CEEC "16+1" mechanism, launched a year before the Belt and Road Initiative, can be seen as the first step towards China's successful implementation in the region. Cooperation under the framework of the 16+1 mechanism is like a weather vane, showing the region and neighboring countries how to promote a regional initiative that is beneficial to all parties, as well as subsequent global initiatives, in an orderly manner in areas with uneven development, political instability, and even geopolitical contradictions and conflicts. As a developing country, With the help of its location advantages, Serbia naturally hopes to see a world with more diverse values, systems and norms, which can include both the system under the FRAMEWORK of the European Union and the "five links" of the "Belt and Road", as well as various initiatives and platforms covering developed and developing countries such as the United Nations Vision 2030, the "BRICS+" country mechanism, the non-aligned countries mechanism, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Can accession to Europe and the Belt and Road be combined?
Since its inception, the EU has struggled to raise the living standards of its member states, but has also tried to enhance the organization's economic, political and geostrategic influence through "synergies". In the process, the EU will encounter many problems, which sometimes make the EU strive to be strong, but more often it will expose its weaknesses, and the biggest problem is to reach consensus on key issues and global issues.
To reach consensus, some countries may have to abandon independent decision-making, especially smaller countries with weaker influence. At critical junctures, the EU has become a tool for the big powers to expand power, while for the small ones it means giving up some of its sovereignty – a situation that applies not only to member states but also to candidate countries. To put it more bluntly, the EU, as a regional integration organization, is becoming less and less equal and mutually beneficial at the economic level, while political and political exploitation is increasing day by day – but Serbia values the economic part, not the political part. In this context, the behavior model of the "Belt and Road" initiative that does not impose political conditions on other countries and the concept of win-win cooperation advocated by it naturally have extraordinary attraction.
The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian crisis at this stage has once again demonstrated the weakness of the international mechanism under the leadership of the Western powers, which do not want rational and objective solutions, but make collective actions that appear to be coordinated but are actually imposed in accordance with the interests of the major powers. Double standards and impulsive ideologically based decision-making have unfortunately become the main themes of contemporary Western international organizations.
Such decision-making will undoubtedly bring great harm to the development of the world. Pressure on small States, and even the deprivation of their economic and political sovereignty through institutional means, will undoubtedly lead the world to further inequality and have long-term malignant consequences. At this stage, Serbia is facing pressure from the European Union due to the Ukraine crisis, and Western countries want all countries in the world to impose sanctions on Russia like them. But peace is the common interest of every country and people with reason and conscience, and it is also the basis for equal development. Serbia, like China, is adhering to the path of peaceful development, and the Serbian top brass is well aware that ideological sanctions will not solve any substantive problems except to add fuel to the fire.
By refusing to join the sanctions against Russia, the EU has put heavy pressure on Serbia
As an orderly, coordinated organism with a clear direction of development and efforts to strengthen its political and economic influence, China may be the most stable developing country in the world. In contrast, the EU, feeling the pressure of China's growth, is trying to maintain or even strengthen its role and influence regionally and globally without undermining its laws, norms, mechanisms and obligations. In short, Europe sees China as a competitor on the one hand. But on the other hand, even though the EU is often lip serviced to the capital, industries and infrastructure from China, the EU powers are "quietly" and "shyly" developing trade relations with China – of all Chinese European investments, the largest and richest EU members actually attract the most capital compared to Central and Eastern European countries.
Although the possibility is very slim, Serbia's accession to the European Union has advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of "Belt and Road" cooperation. EU administrations and bureaucrats often act as supranational coordinators and policymakers under the pretext of protecting competition, the environment, workers' rights, etc. (which should of course be reasonably protected), and thus hinder and limit potential development projects in initiatives. On the other hand, if Serbia conforms to the trend of growth and development and becomes a member of the European Union as a stable, orderly and prosperous country, it can become an important advocate of "Belt and Road" cooperation and a model platform for cross-regional cooperation. In the best case, Serbia, as a member of the European Union, with its good relations with China, can also help China dispel the concerns of EU powers about China in the Balkans and build a more comprehensive platform for cooperation and people-to-people exchanges between East and West Europe for China-EU cooperation.
But which bridge on both sides is so good? When the theme of the times is peace and development, bridges can play their due role. But what should Serbia do if the world moves towards turmoil and conflict? If you look at the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, for Serbia on one side is the EUROPEAN Union, the largest trading partner with decent and friendly relations, and on the other hand, Russia, the largest energy partner with centuries of traditional friendship.
The fact that it was caught between East and West in turbulent times made Serbia's balancing strategy much more fragile than before. When Serbia is wrong in which direction, what kind of choice can most effectively protect Serbia's national interests? If one day China becomes the target of comprehensive Western sanctions, who will stand up to protect this bridge in Serbia?
The distant entry into Europe: the helpless current optimal solution
Overall, even at the political level, even when the EU powers unabashedly and brazenly demand that Serbia give up its territory, the two sides are economically interdependent – of course, Serbia is more dependent on EU countries. This is why even if the majority of the people in Serbia are reluctant to join the European Union, the government is still adhering to the policy of entering the European Union with no end in sight, and declaring that "Serbia will be more determined on the road to joining the European Union." On the other hand, the EU is hanging serbia, giving a carrot and a big stick. It can even be directly argued that the troubled EU at this stage is not willing to accept Serbia, which has a relatively lagging economy, but it cannot directly give up and give up the Western Balkans to others, so it has adopted a delaying strategy.
On several recent occasions, President Vucic has repeatedly stressed that Serbia is "militarily neutral but not politically neutral", a statement that is not so much a fact as a helpless statement in the face of this dependence. Serbia is not in a position of complete neutrality at the present stage to maintain relations with both the East and the West without economic and political loss, especially in the context of the complete tearing of the West and Russia. Therefore, the current state of "candidate country" seems to be the optimal rational solution at present. Ironically, this awkward middle ground is also in the interests of all parties – after all, serbia cannot avoid Serbia's location advantage, and Serbia cannot do without economic and trade cooperation with major actors.
However, the status of "candidate state" cannot be permanent after all, and the pressure on Serbia will only be greater, not less. The Belt and Road Initiative, as an unprecedented alternative, has given Serbia the key to strengthening its national strength and independence. Although the "Belt and Road" has just completed its initial stage in Central Europe at this stage, there is huge room for growth. If China and Cyprus can sign a free trade agreement as soon as possible, the "steel friendship" between China and Serbia and Serbia will undoubtedly go up to a higher and more diversified level. If Sino-Cypriot cooperation is well developed, Serbia will have the opportunity to become a bridge between the East and the West, thus better promoting the overall situation in the Balkans, including Eu-Cypriot relations. The bridge may remain fragile in the face of a wave of western hysteria against the East, but in the context of scholars and politicians shouting that "a new Cold War is coming," the East and the West need dialogue rather than confrontation.
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