Three Seas Initiative – Geopolitics without Politics
The Three Seas is a political-economic project that emerged at the turn of 2015 and 2016 at the initiative of the Presidents of Poland and Croatia. The group includes: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary. Its idea is to intensify cooperation among countries in the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Sea basins. The initiative involves the construction of transport and energy infrastructure, as well as other projects aimed at creating real, material foundations for common interests.
Inheritance from the bipolar world of the Cold War is the meridian direction of economic exchange and political cooperation, at least in Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. The geostrategic arrangement resembles a bicycle wheel without a rim, where the axis is currently the strongest capital, and the spokes run to smaller and weaker countries. For Poland and most of the Three Seas countries, Moscow used to be the axis, and later it became Berlin. The initiative aims to create the rim of this wheel so that, without losing relations with the great powers, cooperation between the countries of the region can be intensified. And for this, infrastructure of all kinds is needed.
Poland’s infrastructural development over the decades has focused on creating east-west lines: initially for military reasons, then more for economic ones. Anyone who has tried to drive from Warsaw to Berlin and Budapest, located at roughly the same distances from the Polish capital, knows this. Not to mention Bucharest.
Poor infrastructure not only hinders and reduces trade and other forms of economic cooperation but also distances countries in terms of security and politics. Overcoming this, historically and politically conditioned difficulty, is precisely what the Three Seas initiative aims to achieve.
The first summit of the initiative took place in 2016 in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and focused on creating a catalogue of goals and directions. The most spectacular project adopted (or rather adapted, as it dates back to 2006) by the initiative is Via Carpathia, a highway intended to run from the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda to the Greek city of Thessaloniki. In Romania alone, it is expected to stretch over 1500 kilometres.
At the second summit in Warsaw a year later, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, appeared, strongly endorsing the initiative (which, from the American point of view, was closely related to the development of NATO’s eastern flank) and declaring accession to the Three Seas Fund, announced at the Warsaw summit, aimed at financing various development projects related to the initiative. A catalogue of joint investments in the fields of transport, energy, and digitization, which are common priorities of the Initiative countries, was also presented.
In 2019, seven stock exchanges from the region announced the creation of a Three Seas stock market index: CEEplus.
In total, the initiative now includes 13 countries from the region with 122 million inhabitants. The United States and Germany have observer status, and Ukraine and Moldova have expressed their desire to join the Three Seas (although the initial idea was for membership to be limited to EU countries only).
After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Donbas, and before the pandemic, interest in building common interests among countries in the region increased, as many countries realized that they should not rely solely on open globalization, especially through any of the major European capitals (led by Berlin). This does not mean that all countries joined the initiative with equal enthusiasm and commitment. Much depended, for example, on the mutual relations between the often-changing political options in the member states. For example, the Czech government of Andrej Babiš showed considerable reservations about the project, much more than the cabinet of Petr Fiala. In some countries, it was the other way around.
In the largest countries of the old Union, especially in Germany, the initiative was perceived by some political elites as a “European Union bis,” a kind of competition to the existing one. Or even as a Polish power project. It’s hard to resist the irony here that some German politicians applied the mechanism of projection, attributing their way of thinking to others.
The perception of the Three Seas as a “Polish” project also occurred in other countries, especially smaller ones. It must be remembered that Poland is by far the largest country in the group – with the largest population, the largest economy, the strongest army, and centrally located in Europe. And with ambitions to conduct independent, i.e., independent of Berlin or Brussels, policy. Hence the caution of some leaders of the region, as well as Polish politicians, who wanted to avoid being accused of “imperial” intentions. Polish infrastructure projects, such as the construction of the Central Communication Port, ports, energy, and military infrastructure, as well as an intensive armament program, can also be associated with Three Seas intentions, although they are a response to various challenges of the contemporary world and depend to a much lesser extent on the arrangements of successive summits of the initiative, and to a much greater extent – for example, on Vladimir Putin’s aggressive policy. It is also not impossible that unfriendly, covert actions of great powers, which perceive – albeit distant and indirect – threats to their interests and unique position, are also at play.
It is also worth mentioning that the concept of the Three Seas may be confused with the project of the so-called Intermarium. Although these are two completely different projects, they are sometimes confused even in Poland. Intermarium is a 19th-century concept of creating a strong military-political alliance, and ultimately even a federation of Slavic nations bordering Russia, to stop its imperial ambitions. This concept was developed at the Paris centre of the Hotel Lambert by Prince Adam Czartoryski and guided successive generations of Polish politicians and geopoliticians. It was an idea to solve the old problem of smaller nations of Central Europe being placed between aggressive and ruthless great powers. It was never realized (except for a small fragment, such as the Polish-Romanian military alliance in the 1930s). On the sidelines: a twin concept, but directed against Turkey rather than Russia, was… Yugoslavia. This, in turn, was created.
Intermarium did not take on a real form, among other things, due to the gravitation of the nations of the region towards different centres, young nationalisms, and the ambition to play a leading role in the region, which were mutually irreconcilable.
The Three Seas does not have political ambitions, even if it is accused of having them. Nor does it aim to compete with the European Union. It aims to strengthen its cohesion and make the nations inhabiting it prosper even more.
Łukasz Mróz
The material was created as part of the project “North and South – internationalization of activities of the Republican Foundation” co-financed by NIW-CRSO under the Civil Society Organizations Development Program for the years 2018-2030 (PROO).
