Intermarium

Intermarium or "between seas" - lands stretching from the Baltic sea to the Black sea, territories also known as the Baltic-Pontic Isthmus.

Intermarium countries -

Ukraine

Belarus

Moldova

Poland

Lithuania

Latvia

Estonia

The Baltic-Pontic Isthmus: History as Burden and Mentor

The space between the Black (or Pontic) and the Baltic seas, traditionally known in European geopolitics as the Ponto-Baltic Isthmus, forms a geographic unit, but one that has hardly ever been embodied by political cohesion among its diverse nations. During most of modern history, much of this space was ruled by the Russian Empire and the USSR. The visionary theorist of the Central Europe concept, Friedrich Naumann, described this region's nations as a "community of fate," situated in the path of Russia's westward expansion, torn by it from the European civilization to which they belong, and compelled to join forces if they are to regain and secure their freedom. The Ponto-Baltic isthmus.

Yet the nations and peoples of the Ponto-Baltic Isthmus historically failed to develop that sense of community. They seldom managed to overcome religious and ethnic fragmentation, territorial disputes, social conflicts that often coincided with national ones (yielding particularly destructive consequences for Ukraine and Poland), and sheer ignorance of and isolation from one another. These factors provided major openings to Tsarist Russian and Soviet conquest. While formally unifying the region under its rule, Moscow in fact perpetuated and even fanned those internecine divisions as a method of divide-and-rule.

Historically, attempts to unify the region from within came mainly from Poland. Most of the Ponto-Baltic Isthmus formed a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included Ukraine in the late middle ages and early modern period. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Polish intellectuals and some Ukrainians influenced by them propounded the concept of Prometheanism, which envisaged liberation from Russian rule through a region-wide confederation. Between the world wars, Polish diplomacy pursued a design known as Inter-Marium ("space between the seas") seeking to secure the independence of a large part of the region under Polish leadership. These attempts foundered under the weight of historic divisions, and were followed by a new push of Soviet expansion and five more decades of Soviet control.

The collapse of the USSR has given political elites in the region an opportunity to rethink mutual relationships and to begin constructing multilateral links in the new circumstances. The national governments were, however, slow to grasp this opportunity.