The End of "East Central Europe" and the return of "Europe in-between"
ENPolitical and scholarly debates on European (meso-)regions have returned time and again over the past 100 years. The conceptualizations of Central and Eastern Europe plays a major role in the debates, which affects the Baltic Sea region and Northern Europe as well. These issues have already been addressed many times, but recently, a new development deserves our attention: the launch of the “Three Seas Initiative” in the summer of 2015 by the presidents of Poland and Croatia, comprising 12 EU member states between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas. The idea received international attention during President Trump’s visit to Warsaw in July 2017, when he addressed the members of the initiative’s second summit. Whereas the term “Three Seas” may sound rather unfamiliar to most people in Western and Northern Europe, the Polish term Trójmorze resembles a name that had already made its fortune in the short period between the World Wars as Międzymorze or Intermarium. This notion encompassed the policy of Józef Piłsudski, the state founder of the Second Polish Republic, to establish a Polish state as a leading power in the territories that had previously constituted the western fringes of Tsarist Russia and the eastern parts of the German and Habsburg Empires.
