Greece’s membership in 3SI – a platform of economic cooperation between Central European EU countries – is likely at the upcoming summit in Bucharest in September, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said on Tuesday at the Annual Reunion of Romanian Diplomacy, according to Euractiv.
Amid the geopolitical shifts prompted by the war in Ukraine, the Three Seas Initiative has gained relevance and “it must evolve into a more pivotal platform, fortifying both regional and European resilience,” said Iohannis.
“Without anticipating the decisions that will be taken (at the September 6 Summit), the expansion of the Initiative with a new participating state, Greece, is foreshadowed,” he added.
The member states are also going to grant the Republic of Moldova participating partner status, he added.
The Three Seas Initiative member states granted Ukraine participating partner status at a summit in Riga in 2022.
The Three Seas Initiative was founded in 2016 by Polish President Andrzej Duda and his former Croatian counterpart Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović as a platform of economic cooperation between Central European EU countries. It counts twelve states in the European Union, running along a north-south axis from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic and Black Seas.
“There is a strong political economy rationale for Greece’s interest in 3SI, as the country seeks to finance the development of infrastructure projects following several years of a deep debt crisis that dwindled its public finance,” Panagiota Manoli (PhD, University of Warwick) writes in a Working Paper titled “Anticipating the 2023 Three Seas Initiative Bucharest Summit. Advancing the common agenda,” published by The European Institute of Romania.
3SI “still lacks a comprehensive, regional approach to cooperation with our Eastern neighbours”, Julita Wilczek, a researcher at the Institute of New Europe in Warsaw, writes in the cited Working Paper.
Activities carried out are dispersed and left to the discretion of individual states or smaller makeshift coalitions.
There is a lot of enthusiasm, especially for helping Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, but “enthusiasm alone is not a solid basis for future good relationships. What we need instead is a robust framework for Three Seas+ cooperation, built around the community of interest and complementing the existing, though largely forgotten, Eastern Partnership”, Wilczek writes.
Sergiy Gerasymchuk, Deputy Executive Director at the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism,” is expecting specific projects to be announced, particularly in light of obtaining the candidate status to the EU accession by Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.