The 16+1 platform was established shortly before the BRI was first announced in order to assist with the implementation of the project in the CEE. This process started with the establishment of various direct train links between China and the region and the promise of Chinese investments in infrastructure projects. In comparison to the rest of EU, in years 2010–15 the CEE countries were in receipt of only about 5.78% of China’s Foreign Direct Investments to the EU (Pepe 2017: p. 5) and the regional governments have hoped that the 16+1 platform would help to attract such investments, redress the trade imbalance, and help the CEE companies enter the Chinese market. However, these expectations have still not materialised (Matura 2019). Moreover, instead of decreasing the ‘China threat’ perception in Western Europe, 16+1 became a source of increasing insecurity about China’s intentions among the ‘core’ EU states. Yet, despite such reluctance towards the project and the limited tangible outcomes of the BRI investments in the region so far, the CEE governments have gladly embraced and echoed the upbeat and desecuritised narrative of Chinese engagement in the region. The question is therefore why these countries not only succumb to China’s desecuritised portrayal of the BRI, but also actively co-produce it? To what degree is this a result of the deliberate China’s soft power strategy in the region, as described in the previous section, and to what extent a result of the CEE states' own agency?
The main discursive tool of promoting the BRI is encapsulated in the language of desecuritisation as presented in the previous section. The CEE governments keenly adopt this exact language. The 2018 National Endowment for Democracy report reveals that high-profile politicians from Czech Republic (such as Milos Zeman and Bohuslav Sobotka), Hungary (Peter Szijjarto and Victor Orban) and Slovakia (Ivan Gasparovic and Robert Fico) have spoken overwhelmingly positively on China, and that this attitude coincided with the inception of the BRI (Karásková et al. 2018). The CEE politicians echo China’s narratives by focusing on economic growth (while ignoring political consequences) that would come with investments and infrastructure projects, present the BRI projects as important for the CEE states’ own modernisation, and emphasise ‘cultural and scientific exchanges’ which account for the ‘humanism’ of China-CEE relations (see Karásková et al. 2018; Kancelaria Prezydenta 2015; Radio Televizija Srbije 2017). As such language becomes ‘a new common sense’, it justifies the prioritisation of economy, cultural specificity and national sovereignty over common EU norms, such as those regarding human rights and democratic accountability. By doing so, the governments are actively co-producing China’s soft power strategy of desecuritisation, allowing new normative and ideational influences.
But this desecuritisation is only possible, because it is conflated with the governments’ own political aims. This is particularly visible in the case of the recent retreat from the EU’s common approach to human rights in China. Some CEE governments, particularly the V4 states, have either blocked statements criticising China in EU meetings (Reuters 2017) or have on numerous occasions been vocal on the need to withdraw from ‘criticising China over its human rights record’. In 2016 interview for the Chinese CCTV station, Czech president Milos Zeman reflected on his country’s past approach to human rights in China, which had been one of the most critical in the EU (Fox and Godement 2009: p. 5), as a result of the former government’s submissiveness ‘to the pressure from the US and EU’, and therefore erroneous. He then contrasted it with the transformed attitude of the new Czech administration: ‘Now we are again an independent country, and we formulate a foreign policy which is based on our own national interest [and] we do not interfere with the internal affairs of any other country’ (Zeman quoted in CCTV 2016). Likewise, in the 2016 ‘China-CEE Political Parties Dialogue’ speech, Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban referred to China’s engagement in the CEE as one of ‘mutual respect’ and ‘mutual learning’, which as he emphasised was quite unlike the ‘Western way of thinking’, which ‘expects other regions of the world to embrace its international doctrines’ because it thinks that it ‘represents a superior ideal and culture’. In contrast, ‘Hungarian people’ believe that ‘each house has its own customs, (…) each nation its own character, and that this is embodied in specific and unique political systems’ and this is the spirit with which ‘we look upon the Chinese political system’ (Orban 2016). Similarly, in 2016 during the Parliamentary-established Day of Asia-Pacific, Polish foreign affairs vice-minister Jan Parys rejected the right of the Western states to criticise human rights issues in China: a declaration that was praised by the Chinese diplomats present at the meeting as an example of ‘non-interference in the internal Chinese affairs’ (Parys quoted in Tok FM 2016). The changing attitudes towards the Dalai Lama visits to the region, with countries withdrawing from meeting the Dalai Lama since the establishment of 16+1 platformFootnote 6 are also an extension of this new attitude towards human rights. The above cases highlight that while economic favours from China are certainly a motivation here, the countries are also keen to tie the desecuritised ‘non-interference’ approach to their own political aims of boosting domestic popularity by employing the language of nationalism and emancipation from Brussels.
This attitude is not reserved to the issues concerning EU’s common policy towards human rights only; it also targets EU’s common trade policy. In 2016, Hungary supported recognition of China as Market Economy, despite the EU’s decision not to grant China that status. This was announced by the Hungarian trade minister Peter Szijjarto in the following words:
We think that China must be provided with the “Market Economy” status. (…) We understand European countries are eager to build economic and trade cooperation with China. (…) And this cooperation must be built on mutual respect and mutual trust. (Szijjarto quoted in Wu 2016)
Here, Hungary speaks out against common EU policy by directly employing the Chinese desecuritised language of the BRI promotion: that of ‘mutual respect’ and ‘mutual trust’.
The adoption of the language of desecuritisation can result in a normative influence in the region, as it helps to replace the previously coveted values of liberal democracy and human rights with China-promoted norms of state sovereignty, economic pragmatism and even authoritarianism, as it forces the countries to revaluate the past ideological differences over the legacy of Communism and even to question their post-1989 choice of liberal democracy. Some governments claim that Chinese communism should not be criticised because it is ‘of a different type’. In October 2016, during the previously mentioned Parliamentary-established Day of Asia-Pacific, Polish vice-minister of foreign affairs, Jan Parys, announced China as a formally ‘post-communist’ country. According to him, this is because ‘Chinese government has dealt with Communism more decisively than [we did] in Poland. Some communist leaders [in China] actually lost their lives’ (Parys, quoted in Tok FM 2016). In order to justify its cosy relationship with the world’s foremost communist state to its domestic audience, the Law and Justice government is quick to justify such announcements by turning its criticism to the Western states: Jan Parys bashed Western countries for the feeling of superiority of liberalism and free market economy, which Poland ‘does not wish to partake in’ (Parys, quoted in Tok FM 2016). Hungarian prime minister goes even further in its reappraisal of Chinese communism, questioning his country’s own choice of liberal democracy. In the 2014 Victor Orban’s speech at the XXV. Bálványos Free Summer University and Youth Camp in Hungary, he contrasted China’s development model (alongside that of Russia and other authoritarian states), as an alternative choice for Hungary:
Today, the stars of international analyses are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia. And I believe that our political community rightly anticipated this challenge. (…) We are searching for (and we are doing our best to find ways of parting with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them) the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race. (…) In order to be able to do this (…), we needed to courageously state (…) that a democracy is not necessarily liberal. Just because something is not liberal, it still can be a democracy. Moreover, it could be and needed to be expressed, that probably societies founded upon the principle of the liberal way to organize a state will not be able to sustain their world-competitiveness in the following years, and more likely they will suffer a setback, unless they will be able to substantially reform themselves (Orban 2014).
These words come from a man who in 1980s led Hungarian opposition in their fight against the Communist regime. Clearly, as is the case with Poland, China is presented as an alternative to the Western political model, and the appraisal of Chinese version of communism is aimed at criticising the EU’s Western member-states, therefore it adopts and relies on China’s ‘negative soft power’ strategy for the domestic political ends of the regional governments.
The examples above illustrate that by adopting the China-promoted desecuritised language of the BRI as a ‘new normal’, some CEE countries participate actively in China’s soft power strategy in the region at expense of the common EU norms. However, the key factor shaping such response is these governments’ relations with Brussels and their attitudes to the EU, rather than an intrinsic attractiveness of Chinese norms. The turn towards China in the region coincided with the change in the CEE outlook towards the EU which emerged alongside the growing nationalist and populist forces in the region. Indeed, prior to the right-wing populist takeover in 2015 and 2013 respectively, Poland and Czech Republic were listed among ‘assertive industrialist’ countries in the 16+1 group, that is countries sceptical of China’s investments (Fox and Godement 2009), with largely negative image of China and working towards a joint EU policy towards China (Song 2013). At the time, China did not succeed in spreading its ‘charm offensive’ and boosting its soft power strategies in the region, as the CEE populations continued to see China as the Communist ‘Other’ who did not follow liberal principles (Song 2013: p. 12). Yet, these countries governments’ position changed dramatically with the ascent of populist politicians to power, who used their anti-EU and pro-China sentiment in their nationalistic rhetoric, which boosted China’s soft power strategy in the region in new ways.
The transformation of China image in the region shows that the soft power strategy of desecuritisation is a co-produced process, as it can only effectively work when it falls on a fertile ground. In the case of CEE-China relations, this fertile ground is their shared anti-Brussel sentiments (or the ‘community of shared disenchantment’), which then enables the adoption of desecuritisation not because desecuritisation is necessarily convincing—as we have seen it is full of contradiction—but mostly because it helps the local governments to assert themselves against Brussels. This is often achieved through the deemphasising of security matters in relations with China, and these countries’ acceptance of the Chinese vision of BRI as non-threatening and depoliticised. China is seen as an ally in the growing anti-EU sentiments in the region (as seen in the case of the V4 countries) or as an alternative source of investments boosting the non-EU Balkan states’ negotiating position with regard to the EU accession. ‘China model’, in this context, is not a Chinese export which is intended to subjugate and colonise, as some observers fear (Bryant and Chou 2016), but rather as an effective way for the regional nationalist governments to rely on the example of economic success of China to justify their own grab on power to their constituencies. In that sense, China becomes the tool in 16+1 domestic squabbles as much 16+1 is a tool in China’s soft power policy.