U.S. President Donald Trump has been visiting Europe for summits with NATO and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Yet what many forget is that last summer Trump’s first state visit to the European Union was to Poland. In the shadow of a monument to the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, he gave an unusual refined speech, which Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians could watch live via their state TV networks. They did so massively.
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump said. “On both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles,” he continued, speaking next to the monument of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, CNBC reported. The speech was of an unusually high rhetorical level and contrasted sharply with Trump’s usual reckless style. This must have come from the pen of Steve Bannon, analysts concluded. The former head strategist of the White House is a well-known adherent to the ‘alternative right’ conviction that Europe is falling prey to multiculturalism, advancing Islamism and globalization.
That story, packed in oratorical craftsmanship, was exactly the right sound in the right place. From all over the country, buses with Trump fans came to take part in a ‘patriotic picnic’ in honor of the presidential visit. “Trump! Trump! Trump!,” the frenzied crowd chanted in Warsaw.
Just before his speech, Trump had attended a conference of the Three Seas Initiative, a new economic alliance of the countries between the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Seas. What did the American president do on a summit of that unknown covenant? Was this the birth of a new geopolitical player in Europe? Historians soon established the link with the Intermarium, a Polish plan from the twenties and thirties to establish a strong Central European federation between fascist Germany and the communist Soviet Union. Certainly now that Poland and Hungary are at odds with the European Commission about the relocation of refugees and the breakdown of the rule of law, possible block formation is being watched with suspicion. According to Professor Andrzej Zybertowicz, advisor of the Polish president, the Three Seas Initiative can become a backbone of a new Central European Union if the EU collapses under the migration or Euro crisis.
The Three Seas Initiative is closely related to two major infrastructure projects in the region: a north-south highway “Via Carpathia” and liquefied natural gas infrastructure, with ocean terminals in Poland and Croatia and a connecting pipeline. Up to now, all major motorways in the region have traveled to the West, to Germany. The route of the Via Carpathia, construction of which has already started in Poland, starts in Lithuania and then goes straight down through the east of Poland, continues through Hungary, Romania (a fork in the south may continue eastwards through Romania to the Black Sea port town of Constanța) and Bulgaria and ends at the port of Thessaloniki in northern Greece.
The third Three Seas Initiative Summit will be held in Bucharest in September. The Via Carpathia will not be ready yet – completion of the Polish stretch of the highway is foreseen for 2023 – but both Poland and Romania continue to be at odds with Brussels over rule of law infringements and the refusal of the Visegrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) to accept refugees continues to prevent the EU from developing a coherent and consistent migration and refugee policy. Perhaps a Central European Union may not be that far off in the future.
