The new lithium mining project between Germany and Serbia appears to be part of an ongoing imperialist strategy to compete with China. The Serbian people are rising to reject this project and the EU's interference in their nation and fight to protect their environment.
On the 18th of June 2024, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany visited Serbia. The two countries signed an agreement to give mining permits to German industrialists in the lithium-rich region of Jadar in Western Serbia. This will enable Germany to continue to compete with China’s manufacturing capabilities. Mass protests are ongoing in Serbia against this project and the selling of natural resources with complete disregard for the environmental ramifications. This deal between Serbia and Germany comes amidst imperialist tactics that are unfairly trying to compete with China’s advancements in the mass production of electric vehicles (EVs) through tax hikes on Chinese EVs and making Europeans hoard the market share without fair competition. Though some see these happenings as isolated events by western green imperialism, there is a long political history that must be disentangled in order to understand why Serbia, a country of the former Yugoslavia, is being coercively integrated into the imperialist orbit through such extractivist modus operandi at this global conjuncture that is marked by an impending demise of the west and its clinging to its glorious hegemony.
From Yugoslavia to a Chameleon-like Serbia
“Russia's invasion of Ukraine is something Europe has not seen for 75 years.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (24/2/2022)
“And it's true. But this is not the whole truth. This is not just Russia's invasion in Ukraine, this is the beginning of the war against Europe. Against the unity of Europe. Against elementary human rights in Europe. Against all coexistence rules on the continent. Against the fact that European states refuse to divide, yes, to divide the borders by force” (emphases added)
Ukrainian President Zelensky
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a country built on the idea of anti-fascism and non-alignment. When the Partisan forces of Yugoslavia defeated the Croatian Ustashe, the Nazis and their sympathizers, and the fascists in the western Balkans during World War II, they inherited a country that was multireligious and diverse. The unity was predicated on their history of anti-fascism and their dedication to non-alignment (they were communists, but not aligned with the Soviet Union). During liberation wars in Africa, Yugoslavia openly supported the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Angola, (MPLA), and also the Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO, as staunch supporters for the Palestinian liberation. The history of this European country does not fit well with the rest of the image of Europe; a Europe that starved, stole, bombed, and sanctioned most of the global south. Furthermore, Yugoslavia sent doctors and engineers, and transferred technologies to newly independent countries in the Global South, which made many of the South’s leaders have an admiration towards the people of Yugoslavia and their position in supporting liberation and self-reliance.
This political stance did not sit well with western imperialists. Starting from the 1980s, they funded and supported the liberals and the conservatives, so that the values of non-alignment and anti-imperialism became transformed into nationalist sentiment and a European integrationist mindset. The funding, which was also contingent on these republics holding secession referenda, saw first the breakup of Slovenia followed by Croatia, which ethnically cleansed and forcefully deported hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Krajina. Then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombed Yugoslavia when Bosnia and Herzegovina sought to break up like its Croatian neighbor by 1995. And in 1999, NATO launched an aggressive and destructive war on Yugoslavia, without a United Nations mandate, which forcefully led to the breakaway region of Kosovo and Metohija to be a large NATO base that declared its independence in 2008. All of these destructive wars divided European countries by force, something both Scholz and Zelensky tend to forget while ignoring the fact that NATO was the unprovoked aggressor in their fortress Europe.
What is more destructive than the campaign that deindustrialized Yugoslavia was the terms of agreement that were imposed on the separate entities to agree on, which led to the privatization of state enterprises. After these NATO-led wars, Serbia was attacked by a color revolution in 2000 that was orchestrated by the National Endowment of Democracy, where the new leadership was neoliberal and sold whatever was left of the country’s industrial base led to the loss of political and economic autonomy over the country, leaving the working class in disrepair.
Since that color revolution and pro-west leadership in the country, western companies started to infiltrate Serbia and discovered an abundance of lithium reserves. A British company by the name of Rio Tinto was granted state approval for detailed exploration of local deposits. They found a new mineral that was named Jadarit, based on the name of the region where it had been found (Jadar). Under the leadership of pro-Western leadership, on the way towards Euro integration, the NATO objectives were slowly being fulfilled: the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was complete in 2006 when Serbia and Montenegro parted their ways under the common state, and the NATO-backed "Kosovo" government unilaterally proclaimed independence, demonstrating that the international law and peace agreements with the imperialists are nothing but wet paper. The UN Resolution 1244 required the removal of the Yugoslav army from the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, but it contemplated the return of it with the permission of the "peace corps". Yet, Kosovo became the home of the biggest NATO military base in the Balkans, strategically placed to control Pan-European Corridors. The military presence of NATO and its expanding influence was one of the guarantees of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the absorption of its former republics into its own security structures.
In 2012, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came into power on the ticket of addressing nationalist and anti-west sentiments and a market-oriented economy. This party, which has been in power ever since is throwing the combative history of Belgrade into the dustbin and surreptitiously making deals with the West and furtively with the East (China and Russia) and falsely calling it non-aligned policy. Whereas Serbia remains the only country in Europe, besides Belarus, to not impose sanctions on Russia, it still sells weapons to Ukraine via third parties, and numerous arms shipments were delivered to the zionist entity for the genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
So, the chameleon-like policy of Serbia nowadays is mired in pragmatism as opposed to principled politics. But in order to sustain this, the local population must be fed some national sentiment of grievance against NATO’s destruction of the country that keeps people hopeful that the SNS will have NATO pay for its destruction and that the breakaway region of Kosovo will return to Serbia. At the same time providing concessions that take away from the economic sovereignty of the country and turning it into a neoliberal sphere malleable to transnational imperialist exploitation.
Coercive diplomacy to integrate Serbia into the imperialist orbit
While some of Serbia’s policies, such as dealing with China, not sanctioning Russia, and vehemently bringing up NATO’s crimes in the former Yugoslavia where the depleted uranium usage still has a lingering effect on the population (birth defects and skyrocketing cancer rates), are perceived as elusive, recently there have been numerous diplomatic efforts by the West that are slowly pressuring Serbia to turn West as opposed to being merely pragmatic. The ties that Serbia has with Russia are not as the west propagates as being purely driven by the common eastern Orthodox heritage of both nations, it has to do with the political and economic support Russia has been offering Serbia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While Russia provided political support for Serbia in the case of Kosovo and Metohija, China played an important role in the revival of Serbian industry, most notably in the area of mining. With Chinese investments, not only were new jobs created but also the standards of ecological preservation were increased. This should not be interpreted narrowly as a case limited to China and Russia in particular–rather as an alternative to the unipolar order such that Serbian neutrality offers alternative paths to development outside of the tyranny of the neoliberal “rules-based order”. However, everything changed with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
Since the beginning of intense hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić’s government has been under extraordinary pressure to comply with NATO's sanctions against Russia, as have all countries aspiring to become a part of the EU, such as Serbia. In a sphere surrounded by NATO, Serbia was practically cut off from its allies, as was demonstrated by the attempted visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when Serbian neighbors did not permit access to their airspace. Apart from the diplomatic pressure of such kind, the access to Russian oil through neighboring countries’ pipelines was also cut. Since a huge majority of Vučic’s voters are pro-Russia, severing relations with Russia would be considered political suicide. Also, any obvious backing down from the Kosovo issue would most certainly lead to the government’s collapse.
In recent years, the government cabinet has dedicated people who were Euroskeptics and never forgot the crimes that NATO committed against the Serbian people. They even opened the case of the usage of depleted uranium to investigate its impact on not only the Serbian people but also those Italian-NATO soldiers who became extremely ill after serving in the area intensely bombed by NATO. But the recent elections in December 2023, saw SNS continue to hold power but the cabinet was completely transformed to become pro-west. Two months later, Jared Kushner, the notorious son-in-law of Donald Trump, a staunch Zionist with deep pocket connections to Saudi and Emirati sovereign wealth funds, launched an infrastructure campaign in the Balkans that will transform the region into a massive resort for transnational capitalists to relax in. This was contingent on Serbia’s decision to fissure from China and Russia and become more integrated with the European economy. This should be seen as a constellation of economies that are interlinked and serve the expansion of imperialism. In other words, Gulf money is being leveraged to finance the coercive diplomacy of the European Union and the United States to make Serbia disconnect from China and Russia and link its economy with the West.
The Jared Kushner orchestration of the deal in early 2024 wants to transform the destroyed infrastructure by NATO of downtown Belgrade into a massive set of hotels, skyscrapers, and luxurious apartments (to contribute to collective amnesia and erasure of NATO’s legacy). Furthermore, as Serbia was still attempting to play both the east and the west, it met with the People’s Republic of China’s president, Xi Jinping, in May with the hope to allow Chinese exploration and development of the lithium industry in the country. However, given the shifting orientation of Serbia due to the coercive diplomacy of the West that allowed Serbia to buy arms from France and engage more favorably with the EU, that deal with China was never struck and Germany signed the agreement instead.
Serbia’s geographic position is integral to the Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) prospects in the western Balkans and central Europe. In recent years, China has sought to invest in infrastructural developments that help transform the logistic services in the region for overall expansion of development and trade. But the west and its mouthpieces began to repeatedly defame China’s projects in the region as a way of manufacturing consent against the country to the extent that the propaganda machine of the west penned an article that allegedly claims China is building roads that lead to nowhere. Yet this anti-China policy is not rhetorical and propaganda, it is a way for Europe to attempt to compete economically by making its so-called Global Gateway as an alternative to China’s BRI, and Serbia is in the midst of this battle.
Green imperialism and the battle over Serbia’s lithium
It must be stated at the forefront that the West does not care about stability, democracy, and the prosperity of the people. In 2019, the CIA a coup against Bolivia’s Evo Morales to deliver the country’s rich lithium reservoirs to the likes of Elon Musk and electric car industries in the US. (Fortunately, the people of Bolivia went on to defeat the coup government.) In 2022, Peru’s left-wing president, Pedro Castillo, faced a CIA coup that led to increased investments in various minerals that are used as an alternative to oil. One of these companies that managed to infiltrate Peru’s economy is Rio Tinto, the very company now exploring Serbia’s lithium. Democracy and freedom are hostile to the imperialist, especially when there are recession-heading economies and growing discontent from the working class within the imperialist core. So, the west’s interest in Serbia is driven by the need to compete economically with China through coercive diplomacy and dubious agreements, with complete disregard for the working-class population, the environment, and the industrial base of the country.
Recently, the EU pondered taxing Chinese EVs, which contradicts the overall objective of the so-called green transition (making EVs in Europe cheaper as opposed to more expensive). Canada slapped a 100% tax on Chinese EVs to make them more expensive as well. And in order to help save Germany’s failing auto-industry and curb China’s dominance in lithium production and EVs, the Western company, Rio Tinto, is set to open the hugely-opposed lithium mine. Ever since covid the pandemic, the West-aligned NGOs are active in the smear campaign against Chinese companies more often than not based on lies, misinformation, and outright anti-Chinese racism with glaring hypocrisy when it comes to ignoring Western companies operating in Serbia that often have a lot poorer record of environmental protection than Chinese do.
The opposition against this agreement amongst the Serbian people is driven largely by two issues: discontent with the Euro integration path Serbia is being forced to take, and the ecological impact on the agricultural base of the region. The mass protests against the agreement that Vučic dubbed as “this might be a game-changer for Serbia and the entire region” have taken place after German chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the country to blatantly express how the lithium mine is a priority of Germany and the EU, so the current rhetoric goes along the lines of Serbia saving the German car industry, and by extension, the EU economy.
Rio Tinto’s response to the protests was to greenwash the ecological impact of their mine, downplaying it into a cost-benefit analysis of the environment and economic output. Since the opposition to Vučić’s government is mostly pro-Western liberals, it is difficult for them to hijack protests since the Jadar project is backed by countries whom liberals consider allies. In order to solve this contradiction while nominally opposing Rio Tinto, they primarily focus on existing Chinese investments and extractivist activities, often arguing that Rio Tinto is also a Chinese company given that China owns shares in it.
The opposition to the Rio Tinto agreement from liberals and disillusioned investigative journalists who cannot side with any power and view all powers as equally evil and corruptive have taken to different social media platforms to speak against the environmental degradation the Jadar region will experience if the agreement materializes. Unbeknownst to these activists is that imperialism has couped, silenced, killed, and sanctioned dissenting voices for their interests, and in Serbia these activists have been threatened in the same way. Death threats and threats to the family members of these activists were recorded and one of them penned an open letter to the German embassy criticizing the Rio Tinto agreement. However, the issue with these activists in their outcry against Germany and the west is that they still see the West as harbingers of democracy and freedom, that these death threats should be condemned by them, and that they contradict their values of freedom of expression. Lest we forget, Germany recently made it mandatory to recognize the so-called state of “Israel” in order to receive German citizenship. These activists are delusional thinking that the west will keep with its so-called liberal values when their economic interests are on the line.
Yet the people of Serbia are following their instincts, which are firmly anti-imperialist. The protestors are against the Western company Rio Tinto, against which they pointed out overwhelming evidence of ecological misconduct, mostly in peripheral countries. Also, anti-EU and anti-German sentiment is on the rise. The Green New Deal based on Serbia’s resources, for imperialist Western car manufacturers and Western middle-class cars, is not something worth pursuing for the Serbian people. China is the world leader in EV production with an unmatched price-quality relationship that EU and US producers cannot compete with either in terms of technology or price competitiveness. Their only resource is to impose tariffs, if not to become a junior partner themselves. The Jadar project issue instinctively led Serbians to ask for the nationalization of Serbia’s resources to protect the country from predatory capitalist exploitation that would convert Serbian raw materials and labor force into a cheap boost to the EU economy already deep into recession. The EU’s pursuit of resource self-sustainability in order to reduce its economic dependence on Russia and China and continue with political pressure and economic sanctions led to its diplomacy toward Serbia in order for it to follow the same path of delinking from the “rogue states”. The facade of human rights and democracy shatters when imperialist positions need to be preserved.
The Jadar project exemplifies the unequal ecological exchange, where the outsourcing of polluting industries so the people in the periphery will experience the environmental catastrophe while the EU can claim that they are fulfilling their promises to the green transition. The EU and Germany see a cheap alternative to mining in their own countries, a way to comply with their green agendas, a hand of salvation for their declining car industries, and a geopolitical tool with which to reduce dependence on fossil fuel and lithium exporters who are not complying with their policies in the periphery. This practice, often termed “externalization” is a means to maximize profit by offloading risks and costs to the junior partner–in this case, a peripheral country. Also, from an ecological standpoint, compliance with mining standards and regulations isn't the same in the core and the periphery. Bribery, political or economic pressures, blackmail, or a combination of the above are all fair game for imperialists to achieve their goals.
There is no doubt Serbia could gain from this project, but as is usual with raw material exports, a lot more economic and geopolitical benefits are to be gained by imperialists. And the people of Serbia have a choice at this juncture, whether to fall in the path of the EU and be integrated with the imperialist orbit while keeping pressed-down wages of Serbian workers to be used as a reserve army of labor for the western transnational companies, or to align with the new rising bloc that does not impose sanctions or conduct coercive economic measures spearheaded by the BRICS countries. The compass of the Serbian people ought to be their history, a history of true non-alignment for the benefit of the people and not the deep pockets of the western imperialists and their functionaries in Serbia.
RNP-F (Revolutionary People’s Party-Front) is a Marxist-Leninist organization in Serbia that focuses on anti-imperialist struggle, international solidarity with the Third World, and South-South cooperation in the spirit of the Non-Alignment Movement. Credits for making this article more feisty go to Essam Elkorghli. You can find them on their website or on Twitter/X.