Escaping the ‘European noose’, embracing a Chinese one? Serbia’s selective alignment with the EU criteria

In navigating a complex international landscape, Serbia, an EU-candidate country, has traditionally pursued a multivector diplomacy and hedging strategies against the pressures of other powers, with China and the EU being the country’s two main foreign policy poles. However, the sustainability of this strategy has increasingly been tested amid a changing geopolitical situation, including Russia’s war in Ukraine, rising tensions between China and the EU, and growing domestic unrest in Serbia. Building on the special issue’s novel understanding of the agency of small states, the paper unpacks the set of factors shaping Serbia’s agency vis-à-vis China at the intersection of the Balkan country’s foreign and domestic policies, including personal diplomacy, ontological security, and the vested interests of the ruling elite. The article argues that by prioritising the regime over the public interest, Serbia’s authorities have maintained the appearance of hedging by making declared commitments to the EU’s normative and legal agenda, which runs counter to authoritarian forms of power, while gradually leaning towards China. This narrowly defined elite agency vis-à-vis Beijing will likely result in the country’s growing dependence on China, while limiting its European perspective: the situation in which the ‘European noose’ may be replaced with the Chinese one.