Rhythms of growth: Unpacking infrastructure and geopolitics in the Balkans

Southeast Europe has become a strategic arena where China, the European Union and Russia compete through infrastructural investments, promising growth and development. This paper argues that these struggles are not only material and spatial but also profoundly temporal: geopolitical competition unfolds through attempts to impose, synchronize or disrupt the rhythms of growth. Building on rhythm alignment that stems from rhythmanalysis, I develop the notion of geopolitics of infrastructural rhythms to show ways in which accelerations, delays, interruptions and contingencies shape the trajectories of infrastructure projects and reveal the fragility of the growth imaginaries attached to them. The analysis centres on the Belgrade–Budapest high-speed railway, where international investors and national governments promoted visions of rapid modernization. Yet, the project was marked by delays, mismatched expectations and uneven implementation. These temporal dissonances highlight how narratives of acceleration, flow and synchronicity – key to legitimizing growth infrastructures – are formed and unsettled by the rhythms through which geopolitical competition plays out. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia and EU institutions (2020–2023), including interviews, observations, analysis of political discourses and project documentation, the paper contributes to scholarship on growth infrastructures by foregrounding their temporal politics. It shows that in contexts of geopolitical rivalry, rhythms are contested instruments that organize competition, destabilize infrastructural rationalities, and expose the uneven tempos, interruptions and contingencies through which growth is made and unmade.