Ten years of the Three Seas Initiative within Europe’s East-West divide: driven by economics or politics

Abstract

Persevering cleavages between the European Union's older and newer member states – states which acceded in or after 2004, collectively referred to as Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – continue to attract substantial scholarly attention. Variably interpreted as a developmental divide, a political one, or dismissed as an archaic relic, this so-called East-West divide forms this thesis’ theoretical background. The thesis derives five analytical concepts from existing scholarship – economic development and productivity on the economic axis; nationalism, sovereignty, and transnational coalitions within the EU on the political – and applies them to 11 Joint Declarations of the Three Seas Initiative between 2016 and 2026 through qualitative content analysis. The Three Seas Initiative, the only intergovernmental forum whose membership fully encompasses the CEE region, is treated as an emancipatory tool through which CEE states collectively engage with the divide. The thesis finds that economic factors are definitionally dominant across the Joint Declarations. Its second hypothesis proposes the role of crises as an aggravating factor heightening political salience. It is partially confirmed: the Ukraine crisis produced a marked spike in political content across the 2022–2026 declarations, whereas the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced economic rather than political factors, suggesting the aggravating effect of crises is contingent on their typology. An emergent post-2022 security logic increasingly supersedes both competing framings. The thesis concludes that the Three Seas Initiative's Joint Declarations reveal a forum whose economic foundations are structurally entrenched, but whose political expression is crisis-contingent, and whose self-conception has shifted considerably across its first decade from a convergence-seeking regional platform to an actor with ambitions beyond its region which, by 2026, demands convergence from others.