In general, the series of meetings and negotiations of the head of state with the leaders of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary demonstrated the possibilities of Baku’s influence on the European economic agenda.
Fragmentation of the European Union
While the outlines of the new world of the 21st century are not yet visible, and the modern constructs of geopolitical order are only beginning to take shape under the influence of wars and economic conflicts, Ilham Aliyev and his foreign policy team are already shaping the response to the challenges arising in the action field of Azerbaijani diplomacy.
As the ability to mount a global response to the challenges of security, migration, energy and food crises is now largely undermined, each major region of the world is beginning to act independently. The European Union, which includes several major regional platforms, is also experiencing fragmentation and strain in these matters.
At the turn of 2023-2024, Azerbaijan found itself at the forefront of regional changes in the belt from South-Eastern Europe to the Caspian Sea, demonstrating its ability to offer solutions, as well as a model of interaction/cooperation on most of the key challenges. This is the essence of the strategy of proactive or flagship role that the Republic of Azerbaijan began to play in the 2020s.
Historically, South-Eastern Europe, shaped as the area of contact between the European and Turkic worlds, was significantly influenced by the Orthodox worldview, and socially demonstrated a traditionally rural way of life with little local urbanization and industrialization.
Specifics of “Balkan” Europe
From time to time this region of the world, as they say, “sparked”, becoming an arena of global clashes (World War I), and during the period of the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century it was a zone of various socialist and right-wing radical experiments (the military coup of 1967 and the regime of “black colonels” in Greece).
In some ways, this region can still be considered the new Europe. However, the south is always different from the north, whichever country or region is used as an example. Greece joined the European Union only in 1981, followed by a decade of war in Yugoslavia and the expansion of the EU’s influence on post-socialist countries, which also cannot be regarded as fully established. For example, after joining the EU in 2007, Bulgaria is still outside the Schengen and euro zone, and Serbia has not yet joined the EU at all.
Today, the “Turkic brotherhood” led by Azerbaijan comes to the Balkans with energy development project: pipeline gas deliveries have started (the Southern Gas Corridor system from the Caspian gas fields of Azerbaijan), with the prospect of exporting electricity (a network of RES stations under construction) and various types of hydrogen fuel. There is also a technical possibility of pumping hydrogen mixtures through the gas pipelines of the Southern Transport Corridor system.
In 2023, Europe received about 12-12.5 billion cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan. Speaking at the inauguration of the Serbia-Bulgaria Gas Interconnector, Ilham Aliyev stressed that the volume of gas sent to Europe is expected to double by 2027, and Azerbaijan is confidently moving towards this goal.
At present, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary are the buyers of Azerbaijani gas in Europe, and deliveries to Serbia will start in 2024. A number of other countries in Europe have also expressed interest in importing Azerbaijani gas.
Baku-Belgrade: connecting lines
Serbia remains on the path to EU membership, but thanks to a balanced foreign policy, it continues to maintain friendly relations with its historical allies, Russia and China. In doing so, Serbia, like Hungary, is shaping an independent foreign policy that does not align with the plans of the European bureaucracy to stay as far away from Beijing and Moscow as possible.
This interaction is quite comfortable for Baku and Belgrade. Serbia sees Azerbaijan as an alternative to the great powers, i.e., a strong international actor with its own political agenda, which, among other things, has significant resources for the execution of its foreign policy plans.
In turn, Serbia for Azerbaijan is, in a sense, a smaller “European reflection” of Russia. And not only because of the similar heraldry (flag colors), but also because of its independent position, different from that of the EU’s central group, which has no clear answer to the systemic crisis of the European Union.
That said, the future of the EU lies rather in the “collective isolation” of regions, where different semantic approaches to international challenges, from energy to security, will be developed while maintaining more or less transparent borders for citizens and capitals. This will be a new Europe, in which Azerbaijan will play an ever expanding role both as an energy supplier and as a “gateway” country to the Central Asian region with access to the Russian economy and land transportation routes to China.
In fact, certain fragments of this future are already manifesting themselves now. Against the backdrop of the 6.6 percent decline in production across Europe, the most significant growth in industrial production in the EU in annual terms was recorded in Greece. The draft budget of this country estimates GDP growth in 2024 at 3 percent, and by the end of the outgoing year 2023 it may reach 2.5 percent. One of the reasons for the stabilization of the Greek economy, attained for the first time in thirteen years, is the deliveries of Azerbaijani gas, which had a positive impact on the overall energy balance of Greece.
The World Bank also predicts a rapid rise in Serbia’s economy of up to 4 percent GDP growth by 2025, a year after the country begins receiving Azerbaijani gas….
Interestingly, part of President Ilham Aliyev’s visit to Serbia was focused on military-technical cooperation. Although there is no official confirmation of any agreements between Presidents Vučić and Aliyev, it is important to mention that the Serbian defense industry is on the rise: they have their own UAV line, a glide bomb, and a number of interesting modifications of Russian air defense platforms…. In 2021, the Serbian government granted local companies a total of 371 export licenses worth $1.23 billion.
In theory, Azerbaijan can find some interesting military products in Serbia to fill its needs for equipment previously supplied by Russian and Israeli defense industry, which is now fully claimed by national orders to be used in their own conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
After Aliyev’s departure, Vučić announced that Serbia had signed a contract with “another country” for the supply of self-propelled artillery systems. He was referring to forty-eight 155-mm NORA B52 self-propelled howitzers on Serbian-made wheeled chassis. The contract is worth €311 million. The NORA B52 howitzer (projectile range up to 41 kilometers) was developed by Serbian military engineers during the Yugoslav Wars, and went into serial production in 2006.
In short, at a time when Europeans are faced with recession, lack of energy resources and other problems, when there is no end in sight to the war in Ukraine, and the likelihood of an armed clash in the Taiwan Strait is rapidly increasing, the Turkic group of states led by Azerbaijan is extending a hand of friendship to its neighbors in South-Eastern Europe.
Ilgar Huseynov
Translated from Haqqin.az
