In sharp contrast to the world in which Józef Piłsudski originally proposed an Intermarium alliance, the political climate today is ripe for regional collaboration. Eastern European nations are now long established and, therefore, unlikely to express the reticence that 1920s Lithuania and Ukraine did in returning into union with Poland.

In interwar Europe, newly-independent nations in the east found themselves suspended between two competing threats: German expansionism to the west and Russian imperialism to the east. In an effort to combat these threats, Józef Piłsudski, chief of state and First Marshal of the Second Polish Republic, advocated for a federation of Eastern European nations, interconnected in terms of economics, defence and politics.

A review of The Intermarium as the Polish–Ukrainian Linchpin in Baltic–Black Sea Cooperation. Edited by: Ostap Kushnir. Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2019.

Intermarium, a concept largely forgotten during the Cold War, has been rediscovered and remodeled by Ukrainian nationalists.

Western decision-makers should signal to the new East-Central European NATO and EU member countries that they can, and should, engage in cross-border multilateral coalition building with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. There is an urgent need for institutional structures that will make Eastern Europe’s grey zone, between Russia and the West, less grey.

Most interpretations of the current geopolitical instability in Eastern Europe focus on the intricacies of the region’s peculiar past, recent resurgent Russian imperialism and Ukraine’s specific significance for the Kremlin. While these and similar approaches address important themes, many such explanations tend to miss, or dismiss, the first and foremost cause and crucial aspect of the issue at hand. The current international crisis in Eastern Europe has arisen due to concerns over the East European institutional structure – or lack thereof. One can easily explain and assess the current tensions in Eastern Europe without much knowledge about the region by simply pointing to the organisational underdevelopment of post-Soviet international relations.

A review of Słowiańska geopolityka. Twórcy rosyjskiej, ukraińskiej i czechosłowackiej geopolityki oraz ich koncepcje ideologiczno-terytorialne (Slavic geopolitics. Shapers of Russian, Ukrainian and Czechoslovak geopolitics and their ideological-territorial conceptions). By: Piotr Eberhardt. Publisher: ARCANA, Kraków, 2017.

The Intermarium strategy was developed in Poland as a political doctrine at the turn of the 20th century. It was an attempt to answer the general question on how to rebuild a sovereign Polish state and how to secure its future. The concept was innovative even if the purpose was not. The Poles alone, and Poland as a sole actor, wouldn’t be able to achieve such a goal. Poland’s enemies, especially Russia, were considered the main obstacle to independence and excessively powerful. The authors of the Intermarium strategy, Józef Piłsudski and his closest associates of the Polish Socialist Party, discovered the potential of nationalistic aspirations of other nations living within the Russian state. The idea was simple: to initiate a national revolt in a suitable moment and split Russia along national divisions. In such a way both major Polish goals would be fulfilled: independence and a secure future. Russia, if pushed from Europe and stripped of its conquest, would be annihilated as an empire and no longer pose a threat to the newly established states.

In the post-Versailles era, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski proposed to the authorities of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus to forge an Intermarium union for the survival of their states. Piłsudski risked and pushed forward an intellectual speculation on how to strengthen subjectivity and sovereignty of the “young” states in games between major powers. From the perspective of time, this speculation can hardly be defined as a real-life success.

With US President Donald Trump’s visit in Poland, the brand of the Three Seas Initiative gained international reputation. In Poland where the roots of the initiative began, the Three Seas or – as one can Latinise it, Trimarium – initiative is often confused with the historical project of Intermarium, intuitively understood by many. Not only journalists but also politicians and even public officials contribute to the confusion. Well, they are wrong.

Neither the European Union nor NATO will any time soon be able to fill the security vacuum they have left with their hesitant policies in the grey zones of Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus. Both organisations have, in the past, amply demonstrated their inadequacy as strategically thinking and geopolitically resolute actors. Against this background, some post-Soviet politicians, diplomats and intellectuals are starting to discuss alternative options to, at least partially, increase their countries’ security. The most prominent among these concepts is the creation of a so-called “Intermarium coalition”.