The Baltic resilience to China’s “divide and rule”

Funding Information: Methodologically, the article employs qualitative approaches to data, including discourse analysis, document analysis and historic analysis. The primary sources include documents, agreements and statements of officials from China, the Baltic states, Italy, and the EU, as well as secondary sources including research publications, media reports, and mutually comparable national data. This article draws on findings from a research project investigating the implications of China’s Belt and Road Initiative for the OSCE conducted by the OSCE Network of Think Tanks and Academic Institutions and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The article is a part of international collaborative project ‘China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Implications for the OSCE’, implemented by a team of international scholars, including this article’s author. The project objectives include: mapping the presence of China and its manifestation across Central Asia, the South Caucasus, the Western CIS, and the Western Balkans over time, in particular since the inception of BRI; identifying the implications that this presence has had in terms of economic, environmental, social, political and military security of the OSCE region; compiling and presenting a research report to inform OSCE institutions and participating state governments (China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Implications for the OSCE). As an output of the joint research project, this article adopts its general methodological approach towards the complex nature of the implications of China’s presence and activities in the OSCE region, and the acknowledgement of the difficulties of formulating and implementing an OSCE response. Yet it also views the “China challenge” as an opportunity for the OSCE response (Wolff, 2021). Publisher Copyright: © 2021, National University Odessa Law Academy. All rights reserved.The article examines the interactions of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with China in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) format. First, it explores three most widespread criticisms of the Chinese BRI approach, namely: 1. The risk of Beijing becoming legitimating factor for strains on democracy, freedom and the rule of law; 2. Support towards the Chinese interpretation of values and tolerance of censorship; 3. Debt arising from infrastructure loans. Further, the article tries to establish to what extent did the Baltic states remain resilient to them, offering possible explanations to the Baltic cases along three lines – systemic resilience, discursive resilience, and financial resilience. The article concludes that BRI is taking different shapes in different regions, and that local political culture along with wider supra-national organizations determines the range and response to BRI, therefore, national institutional frameworks in combination with overwatch from supranational standard-enforcing institutions are the leading factors of countries’ resilience to risks stemming from BRI. Methodologically, the article employs qualitative approaches to data, including discourse analysis, document analysis and historic analysis. The primary sources include documents, agreements and statements of officials from China, the Baltic states, Italy, and the EU, as well as secondary sources including research publications, media reports, and mutually comparable national data.publishersversionPeer reviewe