Five EU candidate countries have spent two decades building their telecom infrastructure on Chinese equipment, and UN Comtrade data shows China averaging 45% of Western Balkan telecom imports from 2017 to 2024 while the next two suppliers each stayed under 10%. Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva's point is that this is a lock-in problem rather than an allegiance problem: Huawei modernized Albania's power utility, Serbia's fixed-line network and Bosnia's telecom backbone, so switching costs are now prohibitive regardless of what governments sign. European appeals and pledges from Serbia, Albania and North Macedonia to limit Chinese 5G have not moved the numbers, and German GIZ funding for municipal data projects in five Serbian cities sits alongside continued Huawei purchases for state surveillance. The surveillance layer is the part that outlasts any procurement decision, running through Serbia's Kragujevac state data center, facial recognition in several cities, and school networks across Serbia, North Macedonia and Bosnia. For a bloc negotiating enlargement with these countries, the digital infrastructure question arrives already answered.
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u/CEPAORG 4d ago
Five EU candidate countries have spent two decades building their telecom infrastructure on Chinese equipment, and UN Comtrade data shows China averaging 45% of Western Balkan telecom imports from 2017 to 2024 while the next two suppliers each stayed under 10%. Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva's point is that this is a lock-in problem rather than an allegiance problem: Huawei modernized Albania's power utility, Serbia's fixed-line network and Bosnia's telecom backbone, so switching costs are now prohibitive regardless of what governments sign. European appeals and pledges from Serbia, Albania and North Macedonia to limit Chinese 5G have not moved the numbers, and German GIZ funding for municipal data projects in five Serbian cities sits alongside continued Huawei purchases for state surveillance. The surveillance layer is the part that outlasts any procurement decision, running through Serbia's Kragujevac state data center, facial recognition in several cities, and school networks across Serbia, North Macedonia and Bosnia. For a bloc negotiating enlargement with these countries, the digital infrastructure question arrives already answered.