Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia donated covid-19 vaccines to the island—the only EU countries to do so
WHEN TAIWAN opened a “representative office” in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, on November 18th, one of its first guests was an elder statesman who was born when the island was still under Japanese imperial rule. Vytautas Landsbergis knows about throwing off the shackles of foreign oppression: in 1990, as one of the founders of Lithuania’s independence movement, he led the country’s breakaway from the Soviet Union.
History is one reason. The governments in many eastern European countries can trace their roots back to the anti-Soviet movements of the late 1980s and 1990s. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia are all led by centrist or centre-right coalitions that are increasingly hawkish on China. Many see similarities between the Soviet Union, which once controlled them, and today’s oppressive China.
There are economic reasons too. Some of these countries have failed to reap much benefit from doing business with China. Between 2000 and 2019, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia each received €100m of foreign direct investment from China, but this was far less than other European countries, both in terms of the overall value of investment and as a share of GDP. Only 1% of Slovakia’s GDP came from Chinese FDI, compared with nearly 7% of Germany’s.
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