Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania have signed an agreement intensifying cross-border cooperation in Southeast Europe.
The jewel in the crown of the Memorandum seems to be the Black Sea-Aegean Corridor Platform (BACP).
The Black Sea Corridor – Aegean Sea Corridor will have multimodal connections within the TEN-T network structured along three axes and will include inland waterways, railways, roads, ports, airports, multimodal terminals, bridges, and urban nodes as part of the core, extended, and comprehensive TEN-T networks.
One includes the western axis, on the route Athens – Thessaloniki – Promachonas (in Greece) – Kulata – Sofia (Bulgaria) – Vidin/Calafat – Craiova – Bucharest (Romania).
The central axis includes a corridor on the route Thessaloniki/Alexandroupoli – Ormenio (Greece) – Svilengrad – Ruse (Bulgaria) – Giurgiu – Bucharest – Siret (Romania-border with Ukraine) – Ungheni (on the border between Romania and the Republic of Moldova).
The third axis includes an eastern orientation and involves the route Alexandroupoli – Ormenio (Greece) – Svilengrad – Stara Zagora – Burgas/Varna (Bulgaria) – Constanta (Romania).
“Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania are committed to taking a decisive step in strengthening the most strategic north-south corridor in Southeast Europe. By deepening cooperation, we are strengthening connectivity for citizens and businesses and enhancing Europe’s security, competitiveness, and resilience in the Aegean, Black Sea, and Danube regions. The European Commission will be with them every step of the way,” said Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, Apostolos Tzitzikostas.
The goal? Uninterrupted logistics flow. Smooth bureaucratic sailing is not a characteristic typically associated with the Balkans, who do not have a history of delivering on their European highway projects.
However, things might change with the involvement of the EU, thought funds are national and European alike, which does not make it impossible for evildoers to do away with a piece of the pie.
If we have not seen the area reach its potential since the fall of the Iron Curtain or its gradulaly joining the rest of Europe, it is not unreasonable to assume that a general lack of incentive (coming hand-in-hand with corruption and incompetence) is to blame for the fact that this has not happened until this point.
But now, with Europe preparing itself for the chilling and unfortunate possibility of war, the project might actually be completed if we see it first and foremost as a highway that connects the two important military bases: Alexandroupoli in Greece and Mihail Kogălniceanu in Romania.
The fact that the project has been repeatedly requested by the United States and NATO alike suggest that motives go beyond regional trade — which in any case would highly streamline local infrastructure, as Black Sea countries could avoid the busy Bosphorus Straits (and Turkey) and acces the Mediterranean directly.
