CHINA AND SOUTHERN EUROPE Zsófia Gulyás–Noémi Szőke–Norbert Miklós China’s rising role in international politics has become a problematic issue for many Western nations during the last decade: the emergence of an Asian nation to become the second-largest country by nominal GDP has certainly caused the US leadership to feel uncomfortable. This unease has also manifested itself in US foreign policies since the beginning of the 2010s, when President Barack Obama launched the “Pivot and Rebalance” (or “Pivot to Asia”) strategy, later to be abandoned by President Donald Trump, who, in turn, introduced his concept called “A Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” 1 The new president, Joe Biden, has so far seemed to keep a close eye on China, just as his predecessors, as the global race for supremacy has already begun and the divide between Washington and Beijing has been widening. The clash of rhetoric and the fight for political and economic influence keeps on surfacing almost all around the world from the East Asian theatre to the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. A key piece of this jigsaw puzzle is, of course, Europe. As the Central and Eastern European bloc began its closer cooperation with China in the last decade and the Belt and Road Initiative’s construction works broke ground, Europe now finds itself between two superpowers, which are both vying for influence in the continent. One of the most important regions in this competition for influence in Europe is the Mediterranean Sea, as it could play a substantial part during the new era of strategic competition. That is why this article aims to take into account some of the most significant regional nations and how Chinese influence is growing over these countries, traditionally allied to the US. It focusses on three different parts of the Mediterranean: The Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Greece and shows how Chinese political and economic capital set foot and grew in importance in the region.
ITALY According to historical records, the first diplomatic exchanges between China and Italy took place in ancient times, when the Han Empire and the Roman Empire laid the foundation for what later became known as Sino-Roman relations. In the following centuries and, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Italian merchants, travellers, and missionaries, such as Marco Polo, Giovanni da Montecorvino, and Matteo Ricci, deepened relations through the ancient Silk Road. In modern times, the legal predecessors of contemporary Italy and China gradually developed their political and economic ties, and the Italian Republic and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) finally established formal diplomatic relations on 6 November 1970, almost five years before the European Community recognised the latter. As Italy is one of the founding members of the European Union (EU) and a member of the Group of Seven, which comprises the world’s most advanced economies, the Mediterranean state has been of paramount importance to China over the past fifty-plus years. Until the early 1990s, bilateral relations between the two countries developed dynamically, with Italy and the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) serving as China’s gateway to the Western world. Although economic ties continued to develop in the following years, diplomatic relations came to a halt when the PCI, which maintained good relations with the Communist Party of China (CPC), split after the fall of the Soviet Union. 2 After more than a decade of no significant progress in the development of bilateral ties, the governments of Italy and China issued a joint communiqué in 2004 to improve Chinese–Italian diplomatic relations. The document underscored the importance of close dialogue on antiterrorism and human POLITICS
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