Intermarium: A Bid for Polycentric Europe

ABSTRACT

The Three Seas Initiative was launched in 2015 by Croatia and Poland; today, it brings together 12 European states located in the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Seas basins. To understand the rationale behind this seemingly precarious regional project, this paper employs the optics of critical geopolitics, which shifts the focus away from the exclusive concerns of great powers machinations, counters the dominant narrative by emphasising the multiplicity of voices in the geopolitical spectrum and stresses the emancipatory nature of the whole project balanced by its heterarchical characteristic. This angle allows us to capture the full complexity of this geopolitical design characterised by two phenomena: ‘being in between’ (monolithic powers, areas of domination, or at least domination, one religion and one language) and ‘fragmentation and multinationality’. The analysis demonstrates that Intermarium is an attempt to break away from everything that prevents the region ‘between Berlin and Moscow’ from being a subject, not an object of political affairs, and shows how Central and Eastern Europe fits into the post-liberal international order.

KEYWORDS:

• Intermarium
• Central Eastern Europe
• Mitteleuropa
• critical geopolitics
• Poland

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Prof. Klaus Dodds for his helpful advice and comments on the earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Formed in 1833, a monarchist conservative-liberal camp operating in exile after the failed November Uprising (1830-31). The name comes from the place where the members convened, a palace in Paris.

2. Stanisław II Augustus, reigned from 1764 to 1795 as the last monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

3. A leading Polish émigré literary-political magazine, published from 1947 to 2000 by Instytut Literacki (the Literary Institute), initially in Rome, then in Paris.

4. All quotes from the book are the author’s translation of the Polish text.

5. However, on January 12, 2021, during the foreign visit of the President of Moldova, Maia Sandu to Kiev, a declaration was signed, in which both countries, Moldova and Ukraine declared their interest in participating in the Three Seas Initiative.

6. Author’s translation of the Polish text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic [MUNI/A/1324/2020].