• China-US tensions over the Balkans have risen since 2017 under the hawkish Trump administration
• The West is nervous of China’s investments and soft power in several Balkan countries, explains Dr. Ivan Lidarev
• The US has led a pushback which has successfully limited, but not eliminated, Beijing’s influence in the region

The Balkans have become an important arena in the global strategic rivalry between the US and China, which intensified post-2017 under the hawkish Trump administration, a strategic update from LSE IDEAS, the London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank, reveals.

According to Dr. Ivan Lidarev, the 2023-24 Mladena and Dianko Sotirov Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS and author of the report, attempts by both superpowers to influence the region centre on its strategic potential as a gateway to the EU for Chinese trade and investment. Beijing wants to fling the gate wide open; Washington wants it to remain closed.

For now, he believes Washington has maintained its dominant position, buttressed by strong bilateral relations with most Balkan states and an overwhelming NATO presence in Southeast Europe. However, he says that Beijing’s influence in the region is here to stay. While most Balkan countries have aligned themselves with the US to advance their own interests, they may pivot if the cost-benefit analysis changes.

“The competition has created a new competitive strategic framework for the Balkan states in which China has emerged as a counterweight to the West, prompting the US to reengage the region. Washington has succeeded in partly reducing Beijing’s influence but has not eliminated it,” he says.

The Balkans is a relatively underdeveloped region of Europe, and many countries on the peninsula are keen to leverage their increased strategic importance to secure more trade, infrastructure investment, and diplomatic assistance. For example, Lidarev predicts the West’s concerns about China’s influence in the area will likely revitalise the accession process for countries in the Western Balkans to join the EU.

He identifies three general types of responses the US-China competition has elicited from Balkan states.

First, a group of primarily smaller nations which are not EU members and are heavily diplomatically reliant on Washington have taken a harder stance towards Beijing as a means to strengthen their special relationships with the US. This includes Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania, and Romania.

A second group have reduced their engagement with China and aligned themselves more closely with the US, but without adopting an especially hard-line position towards Beijing. This includes Greece, Bulgaria, and Croatia.

The last group comprises nations which are using their partnership with China to gain some leeway in their relations with the US. Due to their relative weakness, these countries cannot align too closely with Beijing for fear of provoking Washington, but they can keep a certain balance between both sides and use it for tactical manoeuvring. This includes Serbia and, to a lesser extent, Montenegro.

When were the seeds of competition planted?

Lidarev explains that, while Beijing enjoyed special relations with Albania and Romania during the Cold War, it had limited influence in the Balkans during the early 21^st century. This gradually changed after the 2008 global financial crisis weakened the West and the Eurozone crisis damaged European economies, undermining the EU’s political position in the Balkans. As EU investment dwindled, China swooped in to replace it.

“The logic is simple. Chinese economic presence and political influence in non-EU Balkan countries, such as Serbia and North Macedonia, will eventually end inside the EU, once these countries join the union,” he says.

In 2012, Beijing inaugurated the ‘16+1′ mechanism, demonstrating its intent to make investing in 16 Central and Eastern European economies a priority. One year later, President Xi Jinping announced his landmark Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a huge infrastructure investment initiative which highlights the importance of Southeast Europe, as one of the BRI’s corridors is projected to pass through the region on its way to Central Europe and Germany.

Lidarev highlights China’s investment in Greece’s Piraeus port as an example of Beijing’s focus on improving transportation infrastructure in the region. Athens agreed for Chinese company COSCO to run the port in 2008. In 2016 and 2021, the company purchased stakes in the port, and now owns around 67 percent of the Piraeus Port Authority.

At the same time, Beijing has strengthened its soft power in the Balkans by establishing a network of Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese language and culture. It has also launched Mandarin language programmes and facilitated cooperation agreements between Chinese media like Xinhua News Agency and regional information outlets, according to the LSE IDEAS report.

In Lidarev’s view, the US started to push back in earnest after 2017, driven by the hawkish Trump administration. At the continental level, the US supported the Three Seas Initiative, which originally aimed to counterbalance Russian energy projects in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and Adriatic, but later shifted focus to competing with the BRI and former 16+1 in infrastructure development.

The US is also a key presence in the Clean Network initiative, launched in 2020 to promote democratic standards for data technology and communication networks, de facto excluding Chinese companies such as Huawei from 5G networks.

At the level of individual nation states, he says the US has played an active role in courting important players, such as Serbia, Greece, and Romania. For instance, close ties with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has enabled Washington to encourage Greece’s growing scepticism towards Beijing.

More importantly, he points to US investments in strategic port projects such as the Alexandroupolis port and the Elefsis Shipyards west of Piraeus, reportedly to counter Chinese interest in them.

The Pushback Meets With Success

These revitalised efforts have led to a number of victories for the US and its allies. For instance, a delegation of members of parliament from Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Romania visited Taiwan in March 2023 – a move supported by the US.

Several Balkan countries, including Albania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia also supported a letter condemning China’s human rights record in the Xinjiang province at the UN Human Rights Council in 2020, aligning their positions with that of Washington.

“As the Balkans are a gate to Europe, while Beijing has managed to push its foot and shoulder through and hopes to eventually get inside, Washington has blocked that gate from fully opening,” says Lidarev.

Nevertheless, he believes a permanent US policy focus on the Balkans is essential, as China’s influence in the region may grow in the future. He also advocates the US and EU forging closer relations with Serbia, China’s main partner in the area, tilting Belgrade towards the West before Beijing’s influence has reached critical mass.

The West also needs to spend more on infrastructure investment in Southeast Europe, particularly in the Western Balkans, he says. One way he suggests doing this is to relax the conditionality rules and bureaucratic procedures associated with such investments.

Washington should also engage major political parties in the region, especially those which are more China-friendly, in order to build consensus on China policy. Lidarev says the US could propose a multinational format between the Western Balkans, EU, and NATO, to help coordinate a common regional approach to China.

Interested in this topic? You might also like this…